Dead Point Part 9

'Excuse for a drive. I had business in Sydney.'

'Carly says you're asking about a student.'

'He would have finished about ten years ago. Robert Gregory Colburne.'

'What's it in connection with?'

'He died suddenly. No-one knows anything about his family, next of kin. I was asked to look into it.' All true.

Pengelly scratched his scalp with one finger, taking care not to disturb hair. 'Ten years,' he said. 'That's a problem.'

I waited.

'The records used to be in a demountable out the back,' he said, pointing. 'Burnt down in '94, my first year here. Couldn't save anything. Kids. Year twelves, just after the exams.'

'Anyone still on the staff from 1990?'

He pulled a face. 'Ann Pescott. That'd be about it. Been packing it in, all the senior ones.'

'Could I talk to her? It would only take a minute.'

Silence while he studied me. Then he got up and went to the door. 'Carly, ask Ann Pescott to step in for a minute, will you?'

He came back. 'Died suddenly?'

'Drugs,' I said. 'Accidental.'

'Not much accidental about drugs. I used to teach in Sydney, in the west. Kids shooting up in the toilet block. Got away first chance I could.' He looked out of the window at a sad stand of eucalypts moving in the wind. 'Can't get away from it though. Can't get away from anything, can you?'

'No, I suppose not.'

'No.' He was studying me again. 'I wanted to be a lawyer. Had the marks. My parents didn't have the money.'

I didn't have anything to say to that. There was a knock at the door and a woman in her forties came in, not confidently. I stood up.

'Ann, this is Mr Irish, a lawyer,' said Pengelly. 'It's about a kid from years ago. What was the name?'

I shook hands with Ann Pescott. She had an intelligent face, lines of disappointment, nervousness in her eyes: cared too much, waited too long.

'Robert Gregory Colburne. He started at Sydney University in 1991, so 1990 would probably...'

Her face was blank. 'No,' she said. 'Colburne, I don't remember a Colburne. But I didn't have the seniors then.' Her eyes apologised for failing me. 'Sorry.'

'He'd have been a bright student.'

'No. He didn't come through me.' She swallowed. 'Must have arrived in eleven or twelve. There were a few new kids around from Forestry around then.'

'Forestry?'

'Conservation and Forestry, whatever it was called then, changes its name every year. They sent a whole lot of people up here from Sydney. Regionalisation I think it was called. Total disaster, city people, they all hated it and then the government changed and they all went back.'

'So people around here would remember them?'

She shrugged. 'Well, yes. Some. I suppose.'

'Where should I start?'

A siren sounded, a harsh noise.

Ann Pescott's eyes went to Mr Pengelly.

'They'll probably find their own way out,' he said. 'Animals generally do when the door's open.'

'Terry Baine at the newsagents,' she said. 'He would have been around in 1990. And they know everything, the Baines.'

I thanked Mr Pengelly and Ann Pescott for their time, together and separately. He seemed sad to see me go. I understood. On my way out, I thanked Carly.

'Got a card?' she said. 'You never know. My sister might need a lawyer in Melbourne.'

'You never know.' Relationships made in Bali are not known for their durability. Six years was probably some sort of record.

I parked outside the newsagent in the main street. There wasn't a great deal going on in Walkley. A bull-barred ute rumbled by. Two men were talking outside the bank, faces and hats shaped by hands and wind and rain and gravity. A shop door opened and a child in a stroller came out, followed by a woman inside many handknitted garments. I could see only the tip of the child's nose, a tiny pink nipple.

Two customers were in the shop, browsing the rack of magazines. The man behind the counter, fat advancing, hair receding, was staring at a computer monitor, frowning, rapping keys. He saw me in his peripheral vision, didn't look around.

'Sometimes I think it's a blessing the old bloke's gone,' he said. 'Christ knows what he'da made of this c.r.a.p.'

'Terry Baine?'

He turned his head. 'Help you?'

I introduced myself.

'Melbourne.' He beamed at me. 'There the other day. For the Grand Prix. Stayed at the Regency, me and me brother, nothin but the best. Casino, you name it. Treat for the wives.'

'They like motor racing?'

'Nah. They went shoppin. Had to take the credit cards off em after the first day, mind. Outta control. So what's yer business up here?'

'I'm trying to find the family of someone who died in Melbourne recently. He finished school here.'

'Yeah? Who's that?'

'Robert Colburne.'

'Jesus,' he said. 'Robbo.'

'Remember him?'

'Oh yeah. What happened?'

'Drugs. Accidental overdose.'

Terry whistled, shook his head. 'Robbo. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.'

'Knew him well?'

'Yeah. A bit. Came in year eleven. Clever bloke, very smart. Went to uni after. Him and Janice Eller were the only ones.'

'Know his family?'

'Only Mrs Reilly.'

'A relation?'

'His auntie. She went back to England, oh, six, seven years ago. Robbo said his mum and dad split up when he was a kid, left him with someone. Then his dad got some tropical wog, PNG, I can't remember, he died. His mum didn't want to know him, she was in England, I think.'

He paused, sniffed. 'Mind you, Robbo was a bit of a bulls.h.i.tter. Bit of the poof in him, too. Arty-farty.'

'So Robbie wasn't part of the Forestry move up here?'

'Nah. Just came the same year.'

A projectile-nosed woman with a scarf tied over her narrow head came to the counter, copy of New Knitting New Knitting in hand. in hand.

'Sellin things today?' she said. 'Or just natterin?'

Terry didn't look at her, took the magazine and pa.s.sed a barcode reader over it. It appeared not to work. He sighed, jabbed at the till keyboard.

'Voted for this government, mate,' he said. 'Make no secret of it, never have. I can tell you, never again. This GST...no, don't get me goin on the subject.'

'Shockin, the price of this,' the woman said. 'You put it up every second month.'

'Don't blame me,' said Terry. 'That's the pound done that, pound and the GST. Beats me how the pound can be worth more than the dollar. I need that explained to me. That's four twenty-five change. Thank you, Mrs Lucas.'

'Profiteerin goin on, no doubt in my mind.'

He watched her go, slit-eyed. 'Old b.i.t.c.h,' he said. 's.h.i.t I have to put up with.'

'So there's no family around that you know of?'

'Nah.'

'He didn't come back here?'

'Nah. I heard he dropped out of uni, Janice Eller's mum told me that.'

I said, 'I might talk to Janice Eller. How would I do that?'

He blinked, ran a knuckle over his pink lower lip. 'Dead, mate,' he said. 'Thredbo.'

Thredbo was a one-word Australian story, a tragedy on the snowfields, a large piece of hillside coming unstuck, people dying under collapsed buildings.

'What about her family?'

'Only had a mum. She died.'

Not your most profitable expedition, this trip to Walkley. Nothing gained and nothing in prospect but an indigestible meal and a night in some sagging motel bed.

'Anyone around here who'd know anything about Robbie?'

He shook his head. 'Nah, don't think so. This girl came up here from Sydney with the Forestry, hung around Robbo. What was her name? My mate Sim had a thing for her...Sandra someone.'

'Your mate around?'

'Gone barra fishin, way up there in the Territory, lucky b.u.g.g.e.r. Should be back soon.'

I got out a card. 'I'd appreciate it if you could ask him to give me a ring.'

I got as far as Lithgow. I'd got as far as Lithgow once before, in the largely blank period after my second wife, Isabel, was murdered by a client of mine. At least I think it was Lithgow. I wasn't paying much attention in those days, only sober for as long as it took me to drive from one town to another, any town with a pub to any other town with a pub. If it was Lithgow I remembered, some kind of miners' strike was going on and, in the pub, a drunk miner accused me of being a journalist from Sydney. I didn't deny it, didn't care to, just had a fight with him.

No pub fights on this visit. I drove into the cold valley town, breathed the coal smoke from the fires, bought two stubbies of Boag and a bottle of mineral water from a drive-in bottle shop, found a place that made hamburgers and got one with the lot, except the egg. In a room at an unlovely brick-veneer motel, I drank the beer and ate my supper in front of a television set that changed channels on its own. Then, tired in many ways, I went to bed with my book, Dying High: Lies About a Climber's Life Dying High: Lies About a Climber's Life, bought on impulse months before, grabbed on my way out to get a taxi to the airport. There is something about the stupidity of climbing mountains that appeals. Perhaps it's the clinging by the fingertips to inhospitable surfaces. I could claim some experience in this area.

In the night, I was woken by the sounds of quick s.e.x close by, intimately close, centimetres away, just beyond the plasterboard wall. Startled, for a moment unsure of where I was, saddened when I remembered, I wrapped the sour foam pillow around my head, lay thinking about Robbie Colburne. Then I moved on to Cynthia and her attacker with the Saint tattoo, drifted off, listening to the trucks hissing, groaning, whining on the highway, thinking about my life, why equilibrium escaped me, why I couldn't find a steady state, chose to ask questions of strangers, lie down in beds too short, turn and turn again between cold, slithery, electric nylon sheets.

I rose just after dawn, creaks in my knees, happy to be going. I'd only had brief times in my life when I wasn't happy to be going. Sneakily, shamefully happy. Cleansed in a cramped, stained fibregla.s.s chamber, I went outside. In the coal valley, the air was freezing. White breath hung on the face of a man walking two small dogs, clung to a few pale shift-workers coughing on the first of the day. They were all I saw on my way to the steep, winding road out of the valley. There was a moment on the heights when I could look back: nothing to see, the place gone, buried in sallow, yellow dawn-mist.

On the plane home, I sat next to a middle-aged dentist from Collaroy. Shortly after take-off, and without the slightest encouragement, he told me that he was leaving his wife and two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to be with a Melbourne person he had met at a cosmetic dentistry conference in Hawaii.

'These things happen,' I said. Another man grateful to be going.

'I wasn't looking for it to happen. It just happened. Like a...like a bolt of lightning. Can you understand that?'

'Without any difficulty.' I got out my book, found my place.

'Well, you don't do something like this lightly, do you?'

'No. You wouldn't.'

The dentist leaned over, looked at me from close range. I suppose they get used to doing that, a life of looking into people's mouths. After a while, you lose the feeling of intruding.

'I feel like I'm on a personal journey,' he said. 'The road less travelled.'

I looked at him briefly, a mistake.

'Know what I mean?' he said, licked his lips.