Furious Horses

>“Don’t look so sullen,” said Yvette. “I kill fish for a living. And whatever bait I’m using. Which is, essentially, two deaths for the price of one.” She had managed to untangle the fishing line; she looped it around her hand and placed it, in a neat circular coil, back in her lap.

I was shocked and yet calmed by her matter-of-factness. “I killed someone yesterday,” I said.

“Really.” Yvette’s face didn’t move an inch.

“Well, I didn’t kill them. They got killed because of me.”

“Why was he killed?”

I thought about this. “I had to send a rather important message. And that’s about the best way to get noticed.

“So what are you searching for that’s so important people get killed for it?”

I looked at her. “It’s not a what, it’s a whom. I’m trying to find someone very elusive.”

“Are they good at hiding?”

“Better than that,” I said, “they’re dead.”

Yvette smiled, her sunshine smile. She said, “You don’t do things by half, do you.”

That’s when I felt it, not the rosy head-wound of love—as my fizzing brain first computed— but a real warty whack on the back of my head that stunned me for a moment before pain screamed in and my indignation was replaced by a death-drop of memory and a frictionless struggle through air. Too late, cried my head, too late. The expert noises of fear were next: icicles grew shrieking in my chest and before I knew it my lungs had filled with freezing water that filled me completely until I was a shimmering aqueous thing, a deep-sea creature glimpsed in obscured camera stock in some long-forgotten documentary only shown to school children who just didn’t care because they were only waiting for the lunch bell.

>“Nice night for it,” I said out into the air, hoping secretly my words might be carried away by the wind.

“Typical,” said Yvette’s voice from the end of the pier. “The one night I dress up, and here’s everyone dressing down.”

I looked down at my T-shirt and boardshorts: my Brisbane summer specials. “I don’t always wear a suit,” I said.

“Struck me,” said Yvette, “that you’re the type of person who always wears a suit.”

“Only since I was nine,” I said, “Unless sailor suits count, in which case since eighteen months.”

Yvette laughed. I squeezed my eyes. It seemed I had become a wielder of punchlines.

“So why no tuxedo tonight?” she asked.
“I didn’t have to go out to dinner with people who liked them.”

Yvette turned around. Her eyes hit me between mine, the quick cobra-strike of intensity. “It was him up on the hill,” she said, “that you were having dinner with.”

I peered back instinctively over my shoulder, looking up at the businessman’s awfully gaudy home. “Yes,” I said. “I was having dinner with him.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Not really.”

“So why where you there?”

“Call it professional courtesy.”

“And what profession is that?”

I sighed, and sat down next to her. “If you really want to know,” I said, “you’ve got far too much time on your hands.”

“Don’t know about having too much of that,” said Yvette, “but I’m curious to know, anyway. Call it professional courtesy.”

I smiled. This was what I needed to hear, more than anything else in the world. After a deep breath, I said, cautiously, “I suppose you could say I fix things.”

Yvette looked at me quizzically. “Fixing in a home handyman sort of way, or in a Godfather sort of way?”

“Okay, scratch the fixing. I’m an investigator, really.”

“An investigator. Like a detective?”

“Yes. You could say that.”

“And what are you investigating at the moment?”

I looked out over the river, where some sort of light was travelling through the darkness. A ghostly, unattached light, the prow of a boat or an unmoored buoy. I weighed up words in my head. They were all too heavy. “Yvette, I just hope you understand I do what I do as a job, and it doesn’t reflect any great personal values on my behalf. I just happen to be very good at it.”

Yvette picked up a length of tangled fishing line from her lap and began to pick at it with her fingers. “I don’t get the preoccupation with occupations,” she said. “The way we give so much weight to what people do, as if this is the only way of working out what sort of person they are. So don’t think I’m going to judge you, Julian, for whatever it is you do to earn a living.”

“I often end up hurting people, in order to get what my employers want.”

“You kill people.”

I swallowed hard. My throat felt like a razor-wire fence. “Yes,” I said.

>As I approached the wharf, I noticed that the flowers had been changed since the previous night. Instead of yellow flowers they were a deep purple, and instead of picking one I left them where they were. I had the absurd notion that to pick one would be to ruin the effect they had on the wharf. As I walked down the pier my eyes became accustomed to the light. I scanned nervously. I couldn’t see Yvette’s telltale hat. Then I noticed her, without the hat, sitting at the edge of the pier, with a fishing rod in hand and a purple shawl around her shoulders. She had pulled her hair back and tied it into a bun, so only a few strands scribbled their way down her neck. I became too aware of my steps creaking across the wooden planks.

>My hire car came complete with sanitary crepe covers for the plastic pad that covered the floor where the pedals were. My foot swished the stupid papery thing every time I pressed the brake. Although I could see no houses, the yellow pulse of streetlights was my constant companion. In my head, it felt like I was searching for international waters, somewhere safe and isolated from everything. Then the first signs of higher civilisation: the billboards of local upcoming industry. The houses came into view soon after: row upon row of beachfront mansions and towering apartment blocks. I turned and drove the hire car into the deserted carpark of an office block, parking it in the comfortable anonymity of the building’s night shadow.

The house with Roman columns and bodyguards was across the road and down the beach. This was where I told my wife I would be investigating some shady character. The house, in fact, contained a prominent member of local business with whom I’d had some dealings in the past. He was shady, there was no doubt of that, but I would not be the one investigating him. Beyond the house with my shady friend was a wharf where Yvette Henry would be fishing. This is where I knew my breath would give way. This was a complete compromise. This was a complete mistake. My feet started walking.

>The house was at the end of a long street. The day was darkening to a dull point, and the street trailed off tiredly into a dirt road that ran down a hill. I had led my junkie friend here, making as though he was leading me, and now we stood here at the front gate of the house like two boy scouts neighbourhood fund-raising.

“This looks like number 43 to me,” I said.

The junkie—who had insisted we stop off at a milk bar for a block of Top Deck chocolate and then eaten it all in two minutes—nodded his head at me.

“What I need you to do,” I told him, “is to get into that house and get something for me.”

Even in his sugar-addled whisky-wobbled head, the junkie obviously had some modicum of dignity; he acted taken aback by my proposal, placing his fingers delicately against his chest in an approximation of gentlemanly distaste. “I’m a, tour guide,” he said. “This, is not, part of the, tour.”

I removed a bundle of tied up fifties from my pocket and held it out in front of him. “I can’t leave any trace of myself in this house,” I said. “Understand that. If I were careful, I could do it without leaving a trace, but that would take far more time than I’ve got. I know you’ve done this before, and I know you’ll do this again. There’s another payment the same size as that one when you’ve done the job. Understand?”

The junkie’s eyes bulged. He blew out his cheeks. “What do, you want me, to do?” he asked.

I looked the junkie right in the eyes. “I need you to tell me what’s in that house. I need to you to go in there, go through every room, and tell me what you see. It’s only information I’m after.”

“Information?”

“Just tell me what you see in the house. That’s all I need to know. I’d say you have about 30 minutes to complete this task. Understand?”

The junkie nodded, his eyes narrowing and focusing. I knew I had picked the right man. He disappeared nimbly around the side of the house. I checked my watch, and with nothing else to do, took a walk down the dirt road.

I walked down the hill and came out alongside a series of soccer fields. People were playing on the biggest field, twenty or thirty, mostly kids. The main game was being played by a group of African guys, stripped down to their shorts, wiry brown torsos disappearing in the day’s failing light. I noticed the dark clouds above, and as if in acknowledgement, rain began to come down in intermittent shivers. A pleasant coolness hung in the air, and I welcomed the relief from a day’s heat. The only sounds were the pleasant huffs and bustles of the soccer game. And even though I knew it was imminent, I stopped in my steps, like everyone else, when a gunshot cracked open the air.

>I moved further up the bar. “How much is a double whisky?” I asked the barman.

“I’ll be with you in a second, mate,” said the barman.

“No,” I said, “I mean, I’ll pay for this gentleman’s drink if you’ll tell me how much it is.”

The barman eyed me suspiciously. “You want to pay for this gentleman’s drink?”

The junkie hop-danced on the spot.

“And a pot of your cheapest beer for myself,” I handed the barman a fifty. “Keep the change.” I smiled at the junkie, who smiled back.

“Suit yourself,” said the barman.

I retired to a table with my new friend, whom I had already calculated a use for. My friend drank his double like it was water on a hot day. He slammed the glass down onto the table.

“Like, thanks, and, shit,” he eloquently said to me. “Dying of, thirst I, was.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied. “You looked like you could use a drink.”

“Well yeah I don’t, think I’ve had, one for a long, time.” He looked around the bar in quick, jerky movements. He had a head of full, healthy hair, which I found rather strange.

“You a local?” I asked him.

“Yeah local, yeah, I’m a, local that’s, me.”

“So you’d know your way around?”

“Sure, do sure do.”

“That’s great,” I lent forward in my seat, peering into his rimless eyes. “I’m new to this place. I’m a tourist. I just feel like I need someone to show me around the place.”

“Like, yeah, like a, guide.”

I slapped my head. “That’s exactly what I mean. A guide! My friend, you are switched on. You are really with it.”

The junkie grinned. “Switched, on.”

“Exactly.” I let some silence sway between us. “You wouldn’t be doing anything this afternoon, would you?”

The junkie considered this for a moment. I took the opportunity to take out my billfold and flip absentmindedly through my cash. “I think, I’m, free,” said the junkie eventually. “Think, I’m free.”

I rubbed my chin. “Not that I would want to impose,” I said, “but you wouldn’t be able to show me around Stone’s Corner would you? Maybe take me up to Greenslopes?” While the junkie processed this, I laid my billfold on the table. “I’d pay you, of course,” I said.

The junkie cracked his knuckles with a surprisingly quick movement. “Welcome, aboard,” he said, “the grand tour.”

>I came out of the hallway and into a proper heads-down rough-hops bar with a wonky stage at the back and a games room attached behind glass doors to my right. All the patrons were at least thirty years older than the polo shirt crowd in the front bar. I threw my beer—gilt-edged schooner and all—behind a blackened pot plant that looked like it could use a drink, and approached the bar. A proper ugly barman stood looking suspiciously at some change in his hand. His head was like an egg, buried deep in the dough of his pudgy shoulders. He grumbled under his breath.

“I don’t know where you think you are,” he said, “but this amount of money does not buy a double whisky in this country.”

I sensed a squirming presence to my right. A junkie with a camel skin vest and train-wrecks for eyes pulled at his arms like they were slumping stockings. He said, “That’s the, right change. It, is the right, change.” Slowing and speeding his sentences. My eyes snagged on the junkie’s face.

The barman—whose stocking-armed-junkie count was probably in the mid thousands—looked nonplussed. “I need the right amount of money in order to pour you a double whisky,” he said flatly, “otherwise the basis of modern economics will collapse in on itself.”

The junkie seemed to consider this for a moment. The moment stretched on. “Modern, economics is, modern,” was his eventual evaluation of the situation.

I smiled. The junkie was from a photo in one of the files I had looked at, only one day before I hopped on the plane. Sometimes God dropped the roulette ball right in your pocket.

>The pub stood at the end of a strip of retail shops that featured factory seconds and discontinued lines. It was in full weekend throng, with a blustery wind shaking large shopping bags in peoples’ hands up and down the street. I watched with interest one of many pram prangs at the entrance to an obviously popular clothing shop, as bright-faced young parents collided with other bright-faced parents trying to stretch their already stretched dollars and corral their already precious time so much that they didn’t look around corners.

The pub was more upmarket than I expected. Outside, various happy groups sat baking in the sun, soaking up beer in tall glasses and letting off familial radiation. I ventured inside, where high beech-light wooden ceilings held huge fans that swirled air around. This wasn’t what I wanted. A barman was showing off, slicing a lemon in mid-air because someone had asked for a glass of water. A table of china-doll-faced polo-shirt wearers sneered at me from underneath their indoor sunglasses. I ached for dark bars where the walls breathed smoke. I sat at the bar and ordered the most ordinary beer I recognised.

“Having a day out, chief?” asked the barman, his confident bravado belied by the finger scratches at the corners of his eyes.

I looked at him, long and hard. “Just got out,” I said.

“Out of where, buddy?” The barman cleaned a dirty glass with his elbows flying.

“Jail.”

The barman’s face fell, and the glass nearly followed. “Oh, right,” he said, before smiling nervously, caught in the customer service trap he’d set for himself. I looked away and let him move on. I cursed myself for a stupid mistake. My general dislike for pretence was not my most useful trait at times, especially not for someone who was often trying not to be noticed. I sipped at my beer, but it was in a fancy glass with gold along the top, and I began to wonder about metals poisoning. The smell of chips roused me, and my eyes followed a waitress disappearing down a sunken hallway. When she returned, the chips had been replaced by a tower of used glasses. This was better. I roused myself from the bar seat and walked down the hallway. The soft pop and warble of poker machines filled my ears, and I sensed the blue glow of pure drinking. This was much better.

>Freshly showered, I took out a street directory and looked up the address Big Red Reg had given me. Southeast, on the other side of the river that snaked surreptitiously through the city and out to the sea.

I put on my backpack and took a taxi not directly to the address, but rather to a pub nearby which, my taxi driver assured me, did a fine trade in big late breakfasts—a trade in which I am always very interested. As we drove, I rehearsed characters, like an actor might. I quizzed the taxi driver on his view of local economic progress, knowing this would give me plenty of time to think without him interrupting me. He looked at me in the rearvision mirror, his dark eyes alive.

“Well, that’s the thing,” he began, as if he had been talking to me for hours before I had climbed into his vehicle, “we’ve got the second fastest growing city in the world right here, which seems strange, but then again it could very well be right, but who knows?”

I nodded absently. He had a pleasant Greek lilt to his voice, and a habit of rubbing his neck with his flat smooth fingers.

“When I came here, it was nothing,” he continued, “a backwater, this town, so I settled cheap and now look at me, part of this great thing growing.”

“What was the fastest?” I asked him.

“What was what the fastest?”

“The fastest growing city. You said Brisbane was the second fastest. What’s the fastest?”

My taxi driver made a dismissive sound with his mouth, flapping his fingers like he was feeding chickens seed. “What of it? Some place American I don’t doubt. No offence.”

He dropped me right outside the pub and I gave him a fifty-dollar note for his troubles. When he refused my offer to keep the change, I told him it was the first donation to a fund to make his city the fastest ever.

>“So I was out there last night,” I said into the receiver. I rubbed my ankles against the expert starch of the hotel bed sheets. The sun came through the window and squiggled signatures of dust in the air. “He’s a big-wig, this guy. Thought I’d take a further look.” Back across the international static, my wife sighed.

“So this is another thing, now,” she said.

“Just a detour,” I told her. “It could be helpful, in the long run.”

“How much longer will it take?”

“It’ll only add a day or so. I promise.”

“A day or two?”

“Yeah.”

“But you hate water.”

“Gotta learn to love it some time. It’s got me surrounded.”

“Goodnight,” said my wife from her darkened slice of the earth.

After I hung up, I stared at the ceiling. I took a long cold shower, washing away not only the archaeological accumulation of sweat that had built up on my from only one morning outdoors, but a persistent image of Yvette Henry that had somehow crawled into my mind.