Her Stolen Passenger, page 5
Harp removes her shoes and drops them into a bin and steps out onto the sand. A flicker of pain appears on her face, and she wiggles her ankles until her feet have sunken below the singeing substrate. She stands and watches people as they move to join friends or into the ocean. She watches as they put their wallets and keys and jewellery in bags or shoes or under towels. After a full ten minutes of staring and pretending to smile, Harp wanders over to a collection of unguarded women’s clothes. She picks up a pair of small, flat-bottomed shoes, pulls a ring of keys from them and puts the shoes on her feet. No one watches Harp as she walks away from the beach and starts the engine of a new vehicle.
She drives for fifteen minutes before she stops at a phone to make a call, and then she turns the car around and gets onto the highway and begins to follow the signs to Sydney.
It’s two o’clock in the morning when she passes over The Sydney Harbour Bridge and sinks into the suburbs beside the harbour. She leaves the car in a loading zone and walks through the streets ignoring the drunks and the cab drivers. There are bats flying in straight lines over the heads of all the dopey and dreary humans still stumbling on the empty streets and cats watch the evening commotion from the safety of bins.
Harp leaves the sidewalk and moves down a thin and strangely well-scrubbed alley. There is no rubbish or graffiti or even broken glass at her feet as she knocks on a white door below a red light.
When the door opens, the world around Harp is highlighted and loud with music, and the scene beyond that barrier is like something from a long-forgotten civilisation. There are women everywhere, and they all seem to be missing garments. Some stand without tops, some without bottoms, but all are grinning below layers of makeup like stripped, scrubbed clowns. The walls and floors and roof are all black so that every naked curve appears to be impossibly suspended in a kind of forceful, beckoning limbo. The tables and chairs are all a very, very dark wood and the only things that shine are the beads of condensation on the glasses of the few drunken men who loiter in this peculiar funhouse.
There is a beast of a woman still holding the handle on the inside of the door with fat, pig-hands and, as her eyes pass over Harp, she releases a single curse word, then turns and runs back into the brothel.
Harp waits on the doorstep, a traveller in a foreign land.
The bouncer does not return. Instead, an older woman with crusty red eyes approaches Harp. She has with her a man so tall that his shoulders and the long-barrelled shotgun he carries are clearly visible above the craniums of every prostitute.
The mouths of each man in attendance drop open at the sight of the behemoth and they crowd together as if this soldier could hurt them more than those laughing, summoning women to whom they offer up their souls and meager fortunes.
“May Harp, a guest,” the madam says in four precise syllables with a voice as clear as a bird’s chirp. Harp nods but does not reply.
“Why are you here? A customer?”
“My daughter-”
“Angela.”
“Yes. Her son—”
“Harrison.”
There’s a pause, and the room is entirely silent as the song playing through the speakers ends before another begins.
“Yes. Harrison. He’s been kidnapped,” Harp says.
“Not by me.”
“I know. I know who did it, and I know she’s in Sydney. I’m looking for her.”
“I don’t care.”
“I brought cash.”
“You’d better come with me then.”
The two women, both queens of kingdoms that exist only in the eyes of people who know where to look, walk in silence up a winding flight of stairs and into a small office. There are a few more male faces there, and they all watch Harp, and each face sits atop a body festooned with weaponry.
Harp and the madam sit in wide, wing-backed chairs beside a wall of television monitors that all show different versions of the same filthy act.
“Give me the cash and tell me about this child abductor.”
“Her name is Taylor Wu—”
“Give me the cash.”
“I’ll give you a thousand now and another thousand when you find her.”
“Is that a joke? That’s nowhere near enough money.”
“Eve, I’m not asking—”
“You call me Miss Eve, you filthy chink-whore. In my opinion, you’ve not earned a single God damn thing,” Miss Eve says, and she leans forward in her seat, those red-crusted eyes blinking and opening like barnacle-covered clams.
Harp says, “I’m not asking you to do anything, just point me in the right direction.”
“What are you going to do with that gimpy back of yours?”
“Never mind that.”
“Oh, I mind, I mind a lot. I know that tart won’t escape with her life once you get hold of her and I don’t think you plan to move the body back to your pineapple eating, cane-toad licking state.”
Harp smiles and says, “You’re right. There will be a body.”
“A body in my city and you reckon you can buy me off with two grand?”
“Fine. How much?”
“Five grand now, nothing after. We’re not bloody kids anymore, you pay, and I work, no stuffing about.”
“Good.”
Harp sticks her fingers into a fold in her pants and withdraws a thick bundle of notes. She counts them out, then turns them upside down and counts again before passing them to the nearest guard.
“There’s ten grand there,” Harp says.
“Ten?”
“Yes. There will be a body tomorrow morning, then another after you find Wu.”
“Fine. Now get out.”
Harp exits without another word, and she walks back out into the cool and windless evening. She turns to the left and walks around the block, peeking into the windows of locked shops and through the glass panels of hotel facades. She circles the block again, and now she seems more interested in cars. She studies the vehicles resting in the tight spaces on the side of the street or parked in the secure bays behind locked fences. Finally, she stops moving at the sight of a vehicle that’s been reversed down an alleyway. It’s facing back out towards the road, and there are dumpsters lining the walls on either side of it. Harp considers the vehicle for a moment, then shuffles towards the back of it to conceal herself behind a huge steel dumpster.
She stands still and silent as if she were protecting that piece of anonymous property for a full hour. She wipes a strand of hair from her eyes, coughs and returns to silence for another two hours.
The sun is beginning to rise, and the world is being slowly brought into a fresh day as the behemoth from the brothel strides down the alley with a set of keys in his hand. He sneezes and scratches at his groin as he unlocks the vehicle. Harp stands, unseen, in the shadows. He pops the trunk of the car and lays the shotgun in a towel, and then wraps the towel back over the weapon before he closes the trunk and moves to sit behind the steering wheel.
In a single, swift and confident motion, Harp pulls her shirt off over her head, wraps her fingers in the fabric, pops the boot of the car back open, and retrieves the gun. The behemoth pokes his head out of the vehicle with a confused and audacious look on his face.
Without moving, Harp fires a single cartridge from the long barrel into the nose of her target with an eardrum-splitting bam. She returns the gun to the trunk and hobbles to the other side of the car, where there has been no eruption of gore, and she walks away without glimpsing back to the twitching fingertips of that nameless warrior.
12
WU
Wu rents a room in a house that’s connected to another house by an enormous, inner-city backyard, and there are fourteen people living in the duplex. Every single one of the other housemates is twenty, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and three of them work in the bar that has now employed Wu, ‘The Barrel’.
There are only two female occupants, other than Wu, and there are only two toilets. During the day, a handful of the young adults lie hungover or drinking on one of the many beanbags and at night, anyone who isn’t working sits and sips cheap wine with orange cordial in the communal yard. The friends constantly barbeque because they cannot all congregate in the small kitchens and the closest of comrades use the bathrooms in pairs.
A boy named Joseph has a broken leg, and he sits up with Harrison while Wu works. In return, Wu brings him the half-eaten burgers and pies that customers leave behind in the pub, which he slathers with imported American barbeque sauce and consumes by the dozens. Despite this, he is fit and muscular, and there is often a woman with a kind smile in his room or sitting by his side across from the barbeque.
Wu is there, happy and settled, for a full month before Joseph asks, “Mate, what are you still doing here?”
Joseph and Wu are in Wu’s room, and she’s sitting on the bed with Harrison while Joseph stands lop-sided, the broken leg quickly recovering.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s good that you’re here, I like it, but why? Don’t you want your own house and space for Harrison?”
“Yeah, but I can’t have that.”
“Why? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t have any money. I spend everything I make, and this place is the cheapest around.”
“That’s not true. We’re all in the same boat here, no one has much, but we all decide we like it in this house. You could move into a smaller share house or something.”
“There’s free childcare in this dormitory.”
“HA! Yeah, but I can walk now. I can come see Harrison anywhere.”
Wu smiles and says, “I just really like it here.”
Wu leaves Harrison with Joseph and steps outside to walk the short distance to The Barrel. It was a warm day, but it’s getting cold now that the sun is setting, and Wu strolls past a youth centre and an ice cream shop and another bar. She smiles at a young man smoking a cigarette, and she drops a fifty-cent piece in the hat of a blind man sitting on the side of the road, tapping drumsticks on the pavement. She arrives at The Barrel and puts on a denim apron and steps up to the taps and looks at the person sitting in front of her.
Harp grins back at Wu with a smile so pointed it looks like a beak.
Harp’s hiking stick has been laid on the counter, and the old killer lifts the thing and swings it over the beer taps in a wide, whipping arc. It smashes into Wu’s face at eye level as she stands astounded and unbelieving in the same spot she’s stood so many times before. Wu accidentally pulls two bottles of clear spirits from their resting places as she crashes to the floor and the sound of Harp’s crazed footsteps can be heard over the astonished gasps of the customers.
Pierre appears on nimble feet to stand in Harp’s way, and he valiantly reaches for the old woman. Harp spears the end of her hiking stick into the middle of Pierre’s throat, and he is on the ground, gasping, without ever actually touching his attacker.
Wu is five whole steps outside of the Barrel, and she’s running with her head back and the apron spread across the front of her like pathetic armour. She gallops past the ice-cream shop and the blind man and the smoker, and she’ll be home to Harrison in one more minute, just one more minute.
13
HARP
Harp is sprinting through the late afternoon streets, and she passes the ice cream shop, and then the blind man as the sounds of drumsticks tapping on pavement fill her ears. Her rapid legs are throwing her hips forward and Harp’s failing, unreliable spine is flicking around until a puff of smoke stings her eyes, and someone’s foot slips out to trip her. Her sprinting feet collide, and she’s airborne, quickly sailing through the early-evening breeze. Harp breaks her fall with her hands, and the skin is sheered from her palms before she’s up and running again, blood left behind in two crimson swathes.
She’s screaming in Mandarin, and the stretched faces that line the footpath are staring as they move out of her way.
Harp charges through the door behind Wu, and she stops in a front hallway of the enormous duplex. Rows and rows of doors to bedrooms and bathrooms confront the mad pursuer and not one of them gives up a clue as to their contents.
Harp begins throwing open doors on sleeping housemates and men playing Nintendo. One of the doors is locked, and Harp smashes it open to find a young woman in the shower.
Harp screams and moves in a destructive, rampant search through every room of the house. When a boy asks her what she’s doing, she slaps at him with the stick over and over and over until his fingers are red and pulsing and he limps away from the squabble.
Harp charges into the backyard, emerging from the house in a rapid flurry of thin ankles as if she has been pushed from that expansive home.
A dozen pairs of eyes are sprinkled across a massive open area, and they stare back at her in silence and not one of these pairs of eyes belongs to Wu or Harrison.
14
WU
Wu drives west through the night, and the air is so cold outside of the heated car that her window fogs up and she must wind down the window to check her blind spot as she changes lanes. The nose of the vehicle is angled to the sky as she climbs the winding, thin stretches of The Blue Mountains. The world is black, save for the moving patches of light projected by the car’s headlights. In these moving patches of light, Wu sees pale, speckled rock walls and sheets of moss like dirty, vertical carpet. Wu slowly pulls her vehicle off the road on a long, flat stretch to feed and change Harrison. The infant makes no sound as the woman tends to him and he’s asleep in seconds after he’s returned to the bassinet.
Wu’s legs are moving with short, tight steps, and she jogs on the spot for a moment, wiping the frosty exhaustion from her eyes. Her breath hangs around her head in pulses of white fog as if it were a restless spirit seeking refuge in her skull. She wanders into the bush to pull down her pants and squat, and there are flowers all around her naked arse. These bulbs of pollen are round at the base with a hundred soft tendrils pointing to the sky. They look like upturned hands with reaching fingers, and they’re so red that Wu can still see the blood colour of them in the dark. She picks one and places it on the dashboard of her car as she returns to her miserable retreat.
She sleeps in a campsite again, and she does not bother inspecting the long-drop dunny or evaluating the other travellers sharing the gravel patch. Instead of driving away, she walks the short distance to a town beyond a sign stating, ‘Katoomba’ as the sun begins to throw golden rays down on the road that brought her to this place. It seems somehow biblical in the freshness of that free and pleasant day, and Wu has not frowned since she first pressed Harrison to her chest today.
The town centre is little more than a post office and a pub and a trinket shop selling tourist knickknacks. Nothing is open so early in the day, so Wu sits at the most comfortable bench within view, and soon she sees the square face of a bus trundle up the steep hill into the town.
The vehicle halts its rumbling progression, and an old woman with grey hair takes a full twenty seconds to exit the angular machine. She steps down slowly with a look of determined concentration on her face as she watches the little blue shoes she’s wearing find the concrete. As she moves, the bus driver skips down from his throne and shifts a large suitcase from a seat onto the sidewalk. The old woman sighs and turns and waves, but the bus is already gone.
She looks down at the suitcase and nods, and her gaze scans the scene to which she has just been delivered. As soon as the woman notices Harrison, she says, “Little darling, what are you doin’ out here in the cold?”
“We came into town for something to eat, but I think it’s too early.”
The women smile at each other with identical, tight grins.
“Yes, surely. It’s just gone six,” says the new arrival.
“Six? When will the town open up?”
“Not ‘till at least eight. You might find a coffee before then. Evan Tedral runs a little bakery down the hill, and he’ll be baking.” She pauses to point back the way the bus had come. “He’s a bit of a prick though, he might not like the sight of the child, and just between you and me, I reckon he has a little bourbon with his mornin’ muesli.”
“Really? That’s no good.”
“Surely not great, but if he’s not on the squirt at daybreak, then he’s got no excuse for the bloody soggy pies he’s been sellin’.”
Wu begins to laugh, and Harrison opens his eyes to look up at the chuckling thief.
“Tell you what,” the woman begins again, “If you carry my bag, I’ll carry the child, and the pair of you can have breakfast with me.”
“Yeah? You don’t mind?”
“Nah, you’re doing me a favour, I struggle to lift my luggage. I’m Kris with a K.”
“Wu.”
Harrison looks from one face to another with his tiny blinking eyes as he’s passed to the stranger. His brow crinkles with confusion until Kris gently presses her warm forehead to his and speaks to him in soft, loving whispers. He giggles and reaches up to touch her cheek as Wu retrieves the bag.
“I’ll show you something first, before we go home. Don’t worry. It’s close,” Kris says.
The trio moves up the main street quickly, the adults fighting off the cold with rapid, short strides. The old buildings of the town are pieced together from huge white-stone blocks, and the hard rock is so plain and lonely that it seems to emit the early chill.
They walk through a wide car park to a viewing platform that’s suspended out over a gorge. Below them, the crowns of magnificent, ancient trees form a blanket over the land and birds move across this blanket, appearing as scuttling insects to the women from such a height.
“We call them the three sisters,” Kris says, nodding towards a rock formation ahead.
A long ridge extends out from the left of the platform and the trees that cover it thinly before finally disappearing altogether at the border of three massive peaks.
