I Checked Into the Last Vacancy on the Mitchell Highway. The Owner Keeps Smiling...

The road south of Dubbo had been closed behind me for an hour before I admitted I wasn't going to make the Warrumbungles by dark. A police car sat across the Mitchell Highway with its lights going, and a young constable in a hi-vis vest told me the fire was jumping the road near the turn-off and I could wait in a paddock or find a bed.

He said there was one place left on the old road that wouldn't be full. He said it like a man who'd said it forty times that afternoon.

So I found it. The Old Dubbo Road Motel sat back from the gravel with a sign missing its second D, and the sun was going down through so much dust that the whole sky had turned the colour of a bruised apricot. I pulled in slowly. Ten brick units in a row, all with the same brown door and a number screwed on crooked.

In front of them was the pool, fenced in with that green mesh you see around building sites. It was drained to the bottom. A few dead leaves had collected in the deep end, and somebody had stacked plastic sunbeds along the shallow side as if the water might be back by Thursday.

I turned the engine off and sat there with the windows down. The air coming in was hot and tasted like a barbecue somebody had forgotten about.

This was meant to be three nights of stars. I'd read that the Warrumbungles had the darkest skies in the country, which sounded like exactly what a newly divorced man with an unreasonable amount of leave owed should go and look at. Eight years of adjusting claims will do that. You spend your days listening to people explain how the shed caught fire by itself, and eventually you want to stand somewhere and look at something that isn't explaining anything.

Chloe had rolled her eyes when I told her. Then she'd said, "Send me a postcard from every stop, Dad, like a normal person who doesn't have a phone." She's fifteen. She meant it as a joke, but I'd bought the first postcard at a servo in Dubbo anyway, a giraffe from the zoo, and it was sitting on my dashboard with nothing written on it.

I hadn't known what to say. Fire closed the road, wish you were here seemed wrong on both counts.

The office was the unit on the end, with a bell on the door that didn't ring so much as cough. Behind the counter a man was doing something to a ledger with a ruler. He looked up and put the pen down square beside the book.

"You'll be wanting a room," he said.

"If you've got one. The bloke at the roadblock said you might."

"I've one."

He smiled, and it was a nice smile. He was maybe sixty, slight, with thin grey hair combed flat and a pale blue shirt that had been ironed, actually ironed, with a crease down each sleeve. In that heat, in that place, it was the most impressive thing I'd seen all day.

"Gordon Pryor. Terrible business, the fire. They say it's the dry lightning. Sixty-odd millimetres short for the year, and now this."

"Michael Hartnett," I said.

"I'll take it. Anything. Is there a floor?"

"There's a floor."

He turned and took a key off a board that had ten hooks and, as far as I could see, nine keys. The tag on this one said 7, and the seven had been traced over in biro more than once.

"Unit Seven. Cash or card, doesn't matter. We're a bit behind on the machine, so if you've got cash, I'd be grateful."

I paid him in notes. He counted them twice, gently, and put them in a tin.

"It's quiet tonight," he said.

"The others only just left, if you can believe it. Packed up this afternoon. Early, all of them. Wanted to try their luck round the back way before the smoke got any worse."

"Brave," I said.

"Or silly."

He made a small apologetic noise with his tongue. "Breakfast's not on, I'm afraid, but there's tea in the room. Kettle works. Mostly."

I said thanks, and he said not at all, and the bell coughed me out onto the gravel.

I'd meant to go straight to the car, but I stopped at the edge of the car park instead. There were four vehicles in it. A white Hilux with a roof rack, a small hatchback with a P-plate sticker peeling off the back window, a dusty silver sedan, and a campervan with curtains drawn in the back.

All four wore the same coat of red dust, the kind that settles over a week, not over an afternoon. Nobody was loading anything, and there were no keys in anybody's hand. The hatchback had a flat front tyre.

People got lifts, I told myself. You hear about it all the time. A mate with a four-wheel drive turns up, a couple gives up on their own car and takes a ride with some farmer who knows the back tracks. Gordon had said they tried their luck round the back way, and that was a perfectly normal sentence.

Only it wasn't about luck, was it? It was about cars. If they'd tried the back way, why had they left the cars?

Then I thought, you've spent eight years being paid to doubt a tidy story, Michael, and you've been in this town forty minutes and you're already doing it to a man who ironed his shirt. I didn't trust that thought much either. Doubting the doubt just left me standing in the gravel with nothing under my feet.

It was nearly dark. The cicadas had started up in the gums out the back, one at first and then all of them.

I looked back at the office. Gordon was at the window, not watching me, exactly. Just there, with the light behind him. He lifted a hand and I lifted one back, which is the most Australian thing I've ever done and I'm not proud of it.

I got my bag from the boot. I left the postcard on the dash. Unit 7 was the fourth from the end of the row, and I had to jiggle the key before the door gave. Inside it was a bed, a table with a kettle, a small wardrobe, a window with a brown curtain, and a carpet that had once been a different brown.

The air-conditioner above the bed was already running. It rattled like a tin of screws and pushed out a thin stream of air that was, as far as I could tell, the same temperature as the room.

I stood under it anyway for a minute with my eyes shut, waiting for it to do something.

It didn't.

I didn't sleep. By midnight the heat in Unit 7 hadn't dropped a degree, still sitting up near thirty, and the air-conditioner kept up its tin-of-screws racket without cooling anything. Outside, the cicadas had been going for hours. They weren't singing, whatever the tourism brochures say. They were screaming, thousands of them in the dead gums, and every so often they'd all stop at once and the silence was worse.

I lay on top of the sheet in my undies with the brown curtain shut and my phone face-up on the table. No bars. The kettle had produced one lukewarm cup of tea that tasted of the kettle.

At some point I decided I was cold. I wasn't, obviously. It was thirty degrees and I was sweating into the mattress. But the part of my brain that wants to be a normal guest in a normal motel said there'd be a spare blanket in the wardrobe, there always is, so I got up and opened it.

No blanket. A wire hanger, bent. The smell of old timber and dust. And on the back panel, at about eye height, scratches.

I got my phone and held the torch on it. Tally marks, four bars with a fifth across them, gated off in neat fives. Whoever did it had been tidy about it, which I didn't like. Some of the lines were deep and some were barely a scrape, like they'd been done with different things on different nights.

I counted the gates with my finger not quite touching the wood. Eight gates and a single bar after. Then I counted again, because that's what you do. Forty-one.

It could've been anything. Days a bloke spent here working on a job. Somebody's idea of a joke. Nights someone sat in this room waiting out a divorce, and I was hardly in a position to be superior about that.

I shut the wardrobe. Then I opened the bedside drawer, because apparently I was committed now.

A Gideon Bible would've been funnier. What was in there was half a page of paper, torn down the middle, lined like it came out of a notepad. Handwriting, fast and slanted, pressed hard enough to dent the page in places. The right side of it was gone, and the left had been wet at some point and dried, so most of the words had run into grey smears.

I held it under the torch and turned it around. Two bits were readable.

don't let him walk you

And lower down, in the corner: the son

That was it. I looked at the back of it, in case. Nothing.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a bit with it in my hand. Walk you where? Who was him? There's a version of this where it's a love letter, or a note about a dodgy tap, or a hiker's directions to a lookout. I'm good at those versions.

I've written about forty of them into claim files. Insured's account is consistent with a plausible innocent explanation.

I put it back in the drawer and shut it. I was being dramatic. I'd had a long day, a closed highway, and a man who counted my money twice, and I'd found scratches in a motel wardrobe, which I'd bet money exist in every motel in New South Wales.

Then I took the chair from the table, tipped it under the door handle, and kicked the legs in until it wouldn't shift. I stood back and looked at it. A fairly dramatic way of being undramatic, I thought, and lay back down, and listened to the cicadas until the window went grey.

At first light I pulled the chair out, a bit quietly, and opened the door onto a sky the colour of weak tea. It was already warm. The four cars sat where they'd been, under their red dust, and nobody was around. I put my bag in the boot, got in, and turned the key.

The engine turned over. It turned over and turned over, strong as anything, and didn't catch. I tried it three times. On the fourth the dash lights flickered and I gave up and sat there with my hands on the wheel, looking at the blank giraffe postcard on the dashboard.

A knuckle tapped on the driver's window.

Gordon had the same pale blue shirt on, or one just like it, with the creases ironed in. I couldn't work out how he'd crossed the gravel without me hearing it. I wound the window down.

"Trouble?" he said, with a small frown that was all sympathy.

"Won't start. Turns over, then nothing."

"Ah. Pop the bonnet, would you? Let me have a look."

He said it like a favour he was asking me.

I pulled the lever and got out. He lifted the bonnet and propped it, and the two of us stood there looking into a hot engine bay that smelled of dust and oil. He didn't touch anything. He just hummed.

"Battery," he said.

"I'd say it's your battery. These heat waves, they cook them. I've had three this month."

He shook his head. "Tell you what. Once the fire crews open the road, I'll bring the ranger across and we'll give you a jump. Can't see it being longer than a day. Two at the outside."

"Right," I said.

"Thanks."

I was looking past him, to the left of the battery, where a thick black lead ran from the coil to the distributor. Except it didn't. It ran from the coil and then it stopped, a hand's width short, and the other end hung down on its own. The cut was clean. Angled, a single stroke, the sort you'd get from a good pair of side cutters in someone who'd done it before.

No fraying. No chewing. Nothing a mouse or the heat or a battery had anything to do with.

I looked at it for about as long as it takes to read a sign.

Then I looked up, and Gordon was watching my face. Not the engine. Not the cut. My face, patient and interested, the way I watch people who've just told me the dog ate the evidence. I know exactly what that looks like from the other side of the desk.

I'd never seen it from this side.

"Hot one again," I said.

"Isn't it," said Gordon, pleasantly.

"Thirty-eight by lunch, they reckon."

"Shocking. You'd think the cicadas would give it a rest."

"They don't, I'm afraid. Not till it breaks."

He smiled. "You'll want some breakfast. I've got a bit of toast."

"That'd be great," I said.

"Thanks, Gordon."

I did a full day of being a good guest. I ate Gordon's toast, which was fine, and drank two cups of tea from the kettle that mostly worked. I told him the room was great, which it wasn't, and I stayed out of the wardrobe. By dark I had a plan that was really just a direction: out the back, across the paddock, and keep walking until I hit a fence, a road, or a house with a landline and a dog.

I lay on top of the sheet in my clothes and watched the gap under the curtain. The light from the office went off at ten past eleven. Unit 3 had been dark all day, and then Unit 5, and then all down the row, though I'm not sure anyone was in any of them.

I gave it another half hour. The cicadas didn't care what I was doing. They were as loud as ever.

I took the chair from under the handle and lifted it clear so it wouldn't scrape. The door opened without a sound, which annoyed me. I'd have preferred a squeak. A squeak would have meant someone hadn't oiled it.

Round the back there was no path, just the paddock, dry and brown and standing about knee high. It crackled with every step. I hadn't expected that. Walking through dead grass in the dark is like walking through a bag of chips. I tried putting my feet down heel first, then toes first, then gave up and went slowly.

The sky was brown instead of black, with a smeary orange moon sitting low in the dust. I could see well enough. That wasn't a comfort.

The dam was where I thought it would be, a cracked clay bowl with a few tufts of weed at the bottom. It held nothing but the smell of old mud. I went around the rim rather than across, because I could picture myself breaking an ankle in one of those cracks and lying there until someone with a pressed shirt came to help.

I'd made it maybe halfway past when something moved in the gums beyond the dam.

I stopped. It wasn't a roo. Roos bounce, and I've heard enough of them blundering about the bush to know the sound. This was a smaller, slower movement, a shape that went from one trunk to the next and stayed behind it. I dropped to a crouch, and the grass closed over my head almost to the shoulders.

My knees clicked. I held my breath for that, as if it would help.

A prowler, I thought. Somebody else stuck out here, or somebody up to no good. Which, I realised, was possibly the same person as me.

I stayed down for what felt like a long time. The shape didn't come out. I didn't go in. Eventually I shuffled left, away from the trees, keeping the dam bank between us, and headed for the far side of the paddock where a line of fence posts stood against the sky.

The fence was old wire on grey posts, with a gate that was just a loop of chain. On the other side was a farm track, and on the track was a ute.

It was parked side-on, no lights, nose pointing back toward the motel. I stood behind a post and looked at it for a bit. Dark paint, tray with a toolbox, a spotlight bar on the roof. There was no one in it that I could see. Then the sound reached me, a small, quick tick-tick-tick, metal shrinking as it cooled.

I put the back of my fingers near the bonnet, not touching. The heat came off it. It hadn't been sitting there since the afternoon. Someone had been driving it a few minutes ago, along that track, in the dark, with the lights off, and then had stopped and gone somewhere on foot.

Toward the gums, maybe. Toward me.

I backed away from the fence one step at a time. Every one sounded like somebody stepping on a cracker. My shirt was stuck to my spine. The whole walk back I kept my head down and my ears out, listening for anything behind me that wasn't just me, and I couldn't tell the difference.

That was the worst of it.

The thing I kept coming back to was the ute itself. A prowler hides his vehicle. He leaves it in a gully, behind a shed, somewhere with a bit of cover. This one was parked right out in the open, on the owner's own track, near enough to the motel to see the back of it.

It wasn't hiding from Gordon. It didn't have to. Somebody was out here every night, keeping an eye on the place, and nobody had any reason to mind.

So the paddock wasn't a way out. It was just part of the property.

I reached the back of the units with burrs in both socks and a pulse I could feel in my teeth. Unit 7's door was exactly as I'd left it. I slid in, shut it, and turned the lock, and then stood with my forehead against the wood for a moment. My hands were shaking enough that the chair rattled when I picked it up.

I jammed it under the handle and kicked the legs in, hard. Last night I'd done that and felt a bit of a goose. Tonight I checked it twice, and I didn't think about the word "dramatic" at all.

Then I sat on the bed in the dark and picked burrs out of my socks one at a time, because it was something to do with my hands.

The ice machine was bolted to the side wall of the office, under a strip of tin awning, and it was the only thing on the property that worked properly. It shuddered and dropped a load into the bin. I was standing there with the motel's one plastic bucket when a voice behind me said, "Is this also yours, this heat? Or only for me?"

He was young, maybe twenty-two, long and lanky, with sandy hair and a forehead burned the colour of ham. Shorts, a t-shirt with a beer logo, and a pair of thongs he'd obviously bought here, because nobody from Europe wears them correctly. Petr Cerny. He shook my hand with a wet one, since he'd just put ice down his shirt.

A truck driver had dropped him at the gate at one in the morning. Gordon had come out to let him in, in a pressed shirt, which Petr thought was very professional. He was headed for the Warrumbungles too, to walk up something with a name he couldn't pronounce.

"In Czech Republic, thirty degrees is on the news," he said.

"Here it's thirty degrees at night and nobody even says. You are all crazy. You are all, how you say, cooked."

"Corked," I said.

"Close enough."

He laughed like I'd said something good. We stood there passing the bucket back and forth, and I felt my shoulders come down for the first time in two days. Nothing had changed. The lead was still cut, the wardrobe still had its marks, and the ute was still out there. But somebody else was having the same bad week and complaining about it out loud, and that helped more than it should have.

I nearly told him. I had the sentence ready. What came out was, "I'd lock your door tonight."

"From who? The cicadas?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Them."

I'm still not proud of that.

Gordon found me at half past eight, walking across the gravel with a pair of jumper leads over his arm, like a man bringing flowers. He said he'd had another look at my engine after lunch and found a connection had come loose. He'd sorted it, no charge. Then he lifted the bonnet and showed me.

The lead was joined with a neat wrap of black tape, good and tight, the kind of repair you'd do if you wanted someone to stop looking at it.

"Fire crews say the old track out the back gate is clear," he said.

"Ten minutes and you're at the highway. Though I'd wait for morning myself."

"Might give it a go," I said.

"Thanks, Gordon. Really."

I said that. I thanked him. He smiled and stepped back, and I got in and turned the key.

It caught first go. The engine settled into an idle so ordinary it was almost insulting. I looked at the giraffe on the dashboard, still blank, and pulled out of the car park with Gordon standing in the middle of the gravel with the leads over his arm. He didn't wave. He watched.

The track ran past the end of the units, along the front of the drained pool, and down to the gate. I got about halfway before the headlights found the sunbeds.

Someone had dragged them off the stack and across the track, six or seven of them, jammed together on their sides. Behind them, nose to nose with my bumper if I'd kept going, sat another car. A dark sedan with no lights on and nobody in it. There was no room to go around. The fence was on one side and the pool mesh on the other.

I stopped. Then I saw Petr.

He was at the edge of the pool, off to my right, in the gap where the mesh had been pulled back. He had one arm up and was pushing the flat of his other hand down toward the ground, over and over. Kill it. So I killed the engine and the lights, and the cicadas came in over the top of everything.

I got out and left the door open.

I ran. It was maybe thirty metres, and I could hear my own breath.

"Is chain on the gate," Petr said, low and fast.

He looked relieved to see me. "And this car, I think maybe is blocked on purpose, I don't know. There's a gap by the fence at the corner, we go, we walk to the highway, okay? You are coming?"

"Yes," I said.

"Yes. Now."

"Okay. Okay, good."

Then he looked past my shoulder and said, "Ah. Hello."

Wade Pryor was standing about four metres behind me. I hadn't heard him. I hadn't met him either, but I knew him straight off from the shape, from the gums, from the way he stood. He was a big man in his twenties, six-two at least, with cropped dark hair and a work shirt buttoned to the neck in the heat.

He didn't look at me. He looked at Petr and he put one wide hand flat between Petr's shoulder blades, gently.

"Is okay?"

Petr said. "We go for a walk?"

Wade said nothing at all.

And Petr went. He actually went. He turned and let himself be steered along the edge of the pool, toward the shallow stairs, still talking, something about the gate and a chain. He glanced back at me once and shrugged, with a half-grin on his burnt face, the look of a man who's been caught out of bounds and is being very reasonable about it.

I'd followed them as far as the rail. The aluminium was still warm from the day. My hand was on it, and I couldn't get the other one to come up, and I couldn't get my mouth to make his name.

Wade took him down the first step.

Petr was still talking when they reached the bottom. I could hear him, not the words, just the up and down of it, bouncing off the tiles. The deep end was green and furred where the water had stood last, with a drift of dead leaves in the corner. Leaning against the wall down there, where it must have been left earlier, was a shovel.

Wade picked it up. Petr turned his head, saying something about the gate again, and Wade swung once.

It was a short, dull, wet sound. Not loud. I'd braced for loud, and that made it worse.

Petr went down on his knees first, then over onto his side, one thong still on. His leg moved twice and then it didn't. Wade stood over him with the shovel hanging, breathing through his nose. He didn't look up at me. He didn't look at anything.

"Easier with the fire on," someone said, right beside me.

Gordon. I hadn't heard him either. He'd come up along the rail in his pressed shirt with his hands clasped in front of him, and he was looking down into the pool the way you'd look at a fence that needed mending.

"Nobody asks questions when the road's shut. People just assume."

He sighed. "I am sorry, Michael. It's the paperwork afterwards I can't stand."

I'm told I should have said something. I didn't. My hand came off the rail and my legs did the rest.

I ran. Not toward the car, because the car was a car behind a barricade of sunbeds with the lead taped up like a get-well present. Not toward the gate. I ran for Unit 7, because it was the only door I had a key to, and the gravel was loud under my shoes and I didn't care.

Behind me Gordon didn't call out. He didn't hurry. I think that frightened me more than if he had.

I got the key in on the second go, got inside, and locked it. Then I stood in the dark with my back to the door and my chest going, and the air-conditioner rattled above the bed and gave me nothing.

The wardrobe was across the room. I didn't open it. I didn't need to.

Forty-one. Eight gates and one single bar, scratched in with different things on different nights. I'd made a list of innocent explanations for that, standing there with a phone torch, like a man arguing with his own case file. A worker counting days. A joke.

Somebody waiting out a divorce. I'd even liked that last one.

There was no prowler. The shape moving trunk to trunk in the gums was Wade, out walking the property, and the ute with the warm engine was his. Of course it was. He wasn't hiding it from Gordon. He wasn't hiding it from anyone, because there was no one out here to hide from.

He'd been checking on me. On Petr's truck driver, too, probably, the night before, watching the gate, waiting to see who got dropped.

The four dusty cars. The others only just left. They hadn't left. Nobody leaves a Hilux with a roof rack and walks the back way in a dust storm. They'd been walked, one at a time, down the shallow steps, and the cars had stayed because cars with plates and registrations are a problem, and a car in a motel car park in a fire emergency is just a car in a motel car park.

Whoever came asking would be told what I'd been told. Early. Brave. Or silly. The flat tyre on the hatchback was probably Gordon's idea of tidiness.

The shut highway was the alibi, ready made, free of charge. Every time the country burned, somebody's missing family got filed under must have got out.

I've signed off on that very file. Not murder, I mean. The assumption. Insured presumed to have vacated. It's a box you tick.

I thought about the torn page in the bedside drawer. Half a sheet, fast writing, the rest smeared into nothing. Don't let him walk you. I'd read it as directions. A plumbing note.

I'd put it back and shut the drawer like a polite guest. But whoever wrote it had been in this room, in this bed, with the air-conditioner going, and had worked out what the walk was. The son walks you. Gently, hand between your shoulder blades. And you go, because he's big and quiet and polite about it, and because the alternative is making a scene in front of strangers.

You go down the steps into the pool, and you're still being reasonable when it happens.

Petr had been reasonable. He'd shrugged at me.

I slid down the door until I was sitting on the carpet with my knees up. My hands were doing something I'd never seen them do. I held one with the other and that didn't help. Somewhere in there I realised I still had my car key in my fist, pressed so hard it had left a groove in my palm, and that it was no use to anyone.

I put it on the floor.

I told Petr to lock his door. That was my contribution. I'd said it to be nice, and he'd asked me if the cicadas were going to get him, and I'd said yeah, them.

I didn't cry. I'd have liked to. It would have used some of it up.

Outside, the gravel crunched, slow, one set of feet. It came along the row of brown doors, past Unit 3, Unit 5, and stopped somewhere short of mine. Then it turned around and went back the way it had come. No knock. He didn't need one.

I had nowhere to go, and he knew it, and tomorrow was going to be thirty-eight degrees by lunch.

I got up, found the chair, and jammed it under the handle. Kicked the legs in. Then I sat back down against the door where I could feel it if anyone leaned on it.

The cicadas carried on. Every last one of them, same as before, screaming in the dead gums, and not one of them had noticed.

The third try was the phone, and I'd saved it for last because it was the only one that didn't need me to be brave. It needed me to be tall.

Around noon Gordon went off to the laundry shed with a plastic basket, which gave me maybe ten minutes. Wade wasn't anywhere I could see. I dragged the wheelie bin from beside the ice machine to the wall, stood on its lid, got a knee onto the awning, and from there it was one long scramble up to the office roof.

The tin was already hot enough to hurt. I stayed on my fingertips and then gave up and used my palms, one at a time, like a man being taught a lesson about the sun.

Thirty-eight degrees by lunch had been right. On the roof it felt higher. The paddock was a flat brown plate to the east and the smoke sat low and yellow over the highway side. I held my phone up at arm's length and turned in a slow circle, tilting it toward the sky. The screen was black.

I pressed the button, held it, pressed it again. It had been at sixty percent in the night, and I'd had it face-up on the table, charging off the one power point in Unit 7 that worked. Now it was just a flat piece of glass that was hot to hold.

I stayed up there longer than made sense. Then I went down the back of the office, where there's a small window to the room behind the counter, and looked in with my hand shading the glass. The landline sat on the bench. Its cord ran from the handset base to the wall socket, or it had.

About a hand's length from the wall it stopped. Clean angle. Same stroke as the lead under my bonnet.

I thought about who knew where I was, and it was a short list. I'd told Chloe's mother I was going to the Warrumbungles, which was true and covered about two hundred square kilometres. I hadn't booked anything. I'd paid cash. I'd chosen this motel because a constable with a vest and a tired voice had said one place wouldn't be full.

Then I thought of the postcard on the dashboard, the giraffe, blank. I'd bought it so I'd have something to say to her from every stop. I laughed. Once, out loud, behind the office with burnt hands. It was a short flat sound and it frightened me more than the shovel had, because the shovel was something that happened to Petr, and the laugh was mine.

And I thought about the two dinners. Gordon's tea, his bit of toast, his chat about rainfall and the price of diesel, and me nodding, saying lovely, saying thanks very much. I'd been a good guest for two days. I'd even complimented the kettle. Nobody had had to trick me into anything.

I'd walked myself along, hand-in-hand with my own manners.

I dropped from the awning onto the bin lid, put the bin back where it lived, and wiped my palms on my chinos. They left two red prints on the knees.

Gordon was back on the gravel with the empty basket on his hip. "There he is," he said.

"Find somewhere cool?"

"Went for a bit of a walk," I said.

"Not sure cool was the word."

"No. No, it's a shocker."

He looked at the sky and shook his head, a man sharing a burden with a friend.

"Tea's at six, if you're keen. I've got a bit of cold chicken."

"Sounds great," I said, and I smiled.

It cost me about as much as lifting the car.

I made myself walk the long way back, past the front of the units, past the pool. The sunbeds were gone from the track. Someone had dragged them down into the deep end and stacked them there against the wall, and something blue and tarp-shaped lay under them. I kept my eyes on the mesh.

The mesh was the job. If a guest was going to wander about looking at the fence, this was where he'd do it.

So I tested the fence. I took each post in turn and gave it a shove, and frowned at it, and moved on. The post nearest the pool's corner was loose, and I made a show of that. Right beside it, bolted to the lip of the concrete where the shallow steps went in, was the old ladder.

Two curved rails, chrome gone to orange. The inner rail was held at the base by a flange with two bolts. I put my hand on the fence post to shake it and the other hand, low down, on the bolt.

It took forever. The bolts had rusted into the flange and the thread wouldn't turn, so I worked the rail itself back and forth, a hair at a time, and flakes came off like cinnamon on my fingers. Every thirty seconds I stopped and rubbed my neck and looked at the sky and said something about the heat to nobody.

Out past the units a door shut. I didn't look. The office window was across the car park, and I could feel it without turning my head. When the base finally gave, the rail tilted toward me with a small dry crack, and I pressed it back in its socket with the heel of my hand until it stood up the way it had.

If you didn't touch it you'd never know. I'd been at it, by the sun, the best part of half an hour. I told it the same story I'd told the fence post, which was that I was bored.

Then I went back to Unit 7, locked the door, and sat on the end of the bed with the curtain shut.

I'll say what I do for a living, once, so it doesn't sit there. I look at what happened and I look for the bit that doesn't fit. That was all I had, and I'd stopped trusting it a bit ago, but there was nothing else in the room. So I laid it out in my head.

Forty-one marks. Four cars. A man in a pressed shirt who apologised and counted notes twice. A son who didn't speak. Nobody had rushed in any of it.

Nobody had chased me. The cut lead had been taped, so they'd wanted me to try the track. The sunbeds had been dragged out ahead of time, so they'd known the night. Gordon hadn't raised his voice once. He had a way of doing this, and it was the same every time, because it worked every time.

And the same thing happened at the end of every one of them. Gordon stood at the rail and Wade walked. Petr wasn't the exception. The note in the drawer was about it. The pool was where each of them went, last of all, by the shallow steps, with a hand between the shoulders, and nobody in that family had ever needed to do it any other way.

That was the seam. It wasn't much. They did it the same way because it had never gone wrong, and a man who's never had to improvise is a man who'll expect you to go along.

I looked at the red prints on my knees. Then I got up and checked the chair under the handle, and kicked the legs in once more.

It was still thirty degrees at two in the morning when I took the chair out from under the handle. I hadn't slept. I'd spent the night on top of the sheet with my shoes on, listening to the cicadas and working out how many ways this could go wrong. I got to a number I didn't like and stopped counting.

Gordon's door was round the side of the office, past the ice machine. A porch light had a moth problem. I knocked twice, soft, the way you do when you're sorry to be a bother.

He opened it dressed. Pressed shirt, buttoned to the collar, hair combed flat. Two in the morning.

"Michael," he said.

"Everything all right?"

"Sorry, Gordon. It's the air conditioner. It's gone from not working to making a noise."

I rubbed my neck. "I'd not ask, but I can't sleep in it."

"No, no, you shouldn't have to."

He sounded pleased to be asked. "The breaker for that end is round by the pool. Let me get the torch."

I thought he'd say something else. He just got the torch.

We went across the concrete with the torch pointed at our feet, and Gordon talked. He said the forecast had a change coming Thursday, but it had said that last Thursday. He said the dust was worse than 'nineteen, the dry year, and the council ought to do something about the gums. He said his mother used to wet the sheets and sleep on the verandah.

I said, "Shocker," and "Is that right," in the right places. I could hear my own politeness, and for once it was useful.

My legs worked. That surprised me.

The pool mesh had its gap, pulled back neat. Past it, the ladder stood at the lip by the shallow steps, two orange rails and the stripe of moonlight between them. Gordon was a pace ahead, looking up and telling the sky about diesel. I stopped at the ladder, put my hand on the inner rail, and pulled.

It came away with a small dry crack. It was lighter than I'd thought, and curved at the top, with the broken base end jagged and sharp. I let my arm hang and held it flat against my leg.

Gordon turned. "All right?"

"Just my shoe," I said.

He smiled and waited. Then he turned back to the pool, and I saw Wade.

He was down in the deep end, by the wall where the sunbeds were stacked. He stood with the shovel held loose in one hand and his feet apart. He didn't look up at me. There was something blue under the sunbeds and I didn't look at that either. The smell had started.

"Just down the steps," Gordon said.

"Mind the leaves."

He stayed up on the rail. That was how it was done.

I went down. First step, second, third. The tiles were gritty under my shoes. Wade came up the slope toward me, unhurried, the shovel swinging a little at his thigh. Four metres, then three.

He had a way of walking that said I could take my time and so could he.

I thought of Chloe's eye-roll in the driveway. I thought, four words, I haven't even got four words.

Wade reached out his free hand for the place between my shoulders, and I let my knees go.

I dropped. Not a stumble, I just stopped holding myself up and hit the slope on both knees and one hand. The dust came up in my face with the dead leaves, dry and bitter, and I couldn't see. Wade's hand closed on air where my back had been. He was leaning forward off balance, close enough that I smelled the work shirt.

I came up under him with the rail in both hands and drove the jagged end into his thigh.

It went in. I felt it stop on something and then go on. Wade made a noise, a short grunt through his nose, the first sound I'd heard him make. His leg folded and he went down on one side, and the shovel left his hand and rang once on the tile.

I caught it. I don't remember deciding to. It was there and it was heavy and I had it, and Wade was on the slope with both hands round his leg, looking at me for the first time. His eyes were flat and dark. They weren't angry.

He looked like a man whose routine had broken.

He started to push himself up.

I swung.

I'd heard that sound once already, from the rail, with Petr. It was the same. Short, dull and wet, and quieter than I'd braced for. He stopped pushing. His boot scraped the tile and then didn't, and the dust settled back round him.

I stood there with the shovel hanging. My arms were shaking so badly the blade ticked against the slope. Breathing was hard work. I could feel my shirt torn open under one arm where I'd gone down on the rough edge.

"Michael."

Gordon was at the rail, right where he'd been standing. He hadn't moved. The torch pointed at the tiles and lit Wade's boot.

"Michael, now," he said, gentle as ever.

"Let's be reasonable. Come up, and we'll talk about this. Nobody's cross."

I looked up at him. A thin man in a pressed shirt, with his free hand held out toward me, palm up, patient.

I put the shovel down on the slope, carefully, because I didn't trust myself with it. Then I took the rail of the shallow steps in both hands and went up on my own, my knees going, until I got a leg over the edge and rolled out onto the warm concrete. I stood. Gordon was an arm's length away.

He hadn't stepped back.

"No," I said.

"I don't think I will."

Gordon looked at me, then past me at the pool, and sighed through his nose. It was the same sigh he'd given at the rail the night before, a man whose paperwork had gotten longer.

"He's my boy," he said.

Quietly, not as an accusation. He said it like he was giving me a fact for the file.

I didn't answer. I couldn't have. What I had was the one thought, and it was dull and practical: Wade's ute was somewhere, and Wade had the keys.

Gordon seemed to work out what I was thinking a half second after I did. He took a step. He's a thin man in a pressed shirt and I'm not much, but I put my hand flat in the middle of his chest and shoved, and he sat down on the concrete with the torch rolling away from him.

He didn't shout. He said "Oh," as if I'd knocked his tea over.

I went back down the steps. I'd said I wouldn't, and I did anyway. The shovel was where I'd left it. I didn't touch it. Wade was on his side with the rail still standing out of his thigh, and I knelt by him and went through his front pocket.

His trousers were warm and wet. The keys were on a ring with a bottle opener and a small padlock key, and they came out with a sound far too cheerful for the place. I didn't look at his face.

When I came up Gordon was on his feet, brushing his trousers. He'd found the torch and was pointing it at my chest, which was helpful of him.

"The road's shut, Michael," he said.

"You've nowhere to go."

"I'll manage," I said, and ran.

The ute was round the back of the laundry shed with its nose out, the way you'd park if you did the same thing every night. I got in on the second try. The door was stiff and the cab smelled of dog and diesel and a pine tree air freshener that had given up years ago.

Third key on the ring. It started first go, and I'll admit I said thank you out loud, to nobody. There was a spotlight bar on the roof, and a switch on the dash that I didn't touch.

I went round the front of the units without headlights. In the mirror Gordon was walking, not running, down the gravel, with the torch still on me. He was holding it level like he was lighting me to my car.

The sunbeds were back across the track. Four of them, dragged out that evening, I suppose, in case I did what I'd already done once. A man who plans a night properly doesn't leave the furniture to chance. Past them was the gate, a pipe gate with a chain round a post, and I had the padlock key in my fist and no intention of using it.

I put my foot down. The sunbeds went under the bullbar with a noise like a fight in a plastic factory, and one of them rode the bonnet for a while and then fell off. Then the gate, and a bang, and the chain took the rotten post with it. The ute swung wide on the gravel and I hauled it straight.

Then I was on the old track, the dust coming up behind me red in the tail-lights, and I turned the headlights on because nobody was left to hide them from.

The glow was south, a long orange smear low on the dark where the sky should have been. I drove at it. It's a stupid thing to do, drive toward a fire, but it was the only direction on that road that wasn't back, and it had the advantage of people who weren't Pryors.

I don't remember the first twenty minutes. I remember my hands on the wheel, which didn't feel like mine, and my knees bouncing against the dash. I remember driving past a mailbox made from a cut-down gas bottle and thinking it was the best thing I'd ever seen. I remember talking. I said Chloe's name a few times, and then a lot of things I won't repeat, mostly to Gordon.

The ute coughed once at some hour I can't give you. It coughed again, took a long minute to think about it, and rolled quietly to a halt in a cutting with a fence on either side. The fuel needle had been on the pin since I got in. I hadn't looked. Wade wasn't a man who let a tank go low, and I suppose he'd never planned to be driven by anyone else.

I sat for a while with the engine ticking, the same small tick as the night in the paddock. Then I took the keys out because I couldn't leave them in, got out, and started walking.

The road was long and straight and dark. The fire line was closer, and the smoke had a taste. My shirt was open under one arm and my hands had stopped shaking about the time I stopped noticing them. Somewhere around when the sky behind me went grey I got properly cold, which is a mad thing to say after those three days, but sweat dries.

The brigade truck came up from behind, slow, with its light bar turning, and I stood in the middle of the road with my hands out where they could see them. It stopped. A bloke in yellow got down, grey-faced and sooty to the eyebrows, and looked at my shirt and my knees and what was on my chinos.

"You right, mate?"

"No," I said.

"I'm not."

He gave me a bottle of water that was almost warm. I drank it and told him what I could, and he stopped looking at me like a stray and went round to the cab and got on the radio. I heard him say Old Dubbo Road. I heard him say it twice.

They took me to a servo outside Coonabarabran where the crews were filling up, and a woman behind the counter in a sun-faded Cowboys shirt gave me tea in a foam cup without asking for money. By the till there was a rack of postcards with the colours bleached out of them. I picked an emu, because the kangaroos had sold out, and I paid for it with the last two notes in my wallet.

She lent me a biro on a string.

I stood at the counter a good while with the card flat in front of me. I'd had a whole speech for the giraffe, back in the car park on the first night, and still hadn't known what to say. I knew now. It wasn't much.

Alive. Home Sunday. Sorry.