After the Flood, page 1
First published 2022 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
Fremantle Press Inc. trading as Fremantle Press
PO Box 158, North Fremantle, Western Australia 6159
www.fremantlepress.com.au
Copyright © Dave Warner, 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover images Jordan Cantelo, jordancantelo.com; focusphotoart at iStock, istockphoto.com.
Cover design Nada Backovic, nadabackovic.com.
ISBN 9781760991012 (paperback)
ISBN 9781760991029 (ebook)
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
Fremantle Press respectfully acknowledges the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation as the traditional owners and custodians of the land where we work in Walyalup.
For Anne Tyler and Don & Meg Williams
PROLOGUE
Mariana County, Brazil
It would be pork tonight he was pretty sure. When they spoke earlier, before she finished her shift, Gabrielly wouldn’t tell him, having some fun, teasing it out, but it was Thursday so he figured pork. He liked the way she cooked it. In fact, her mother cooked it even better but he wouldn’t tell his girlfriend that. Back in Australia his family had never eaten much pork – lamb and chicken was more the go.
‘Are they our people?’ From the porch of the hut where his office was located, he could see a cluster of hi-vis vests down at the wall of the tailings dam.
‘No. Engineering bring them in.’
His assistant Victor leant his forearms on the railing and blew a stream of smoke into the thick, warm air. The sky was pale blue today but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t rain. It rained at the drop of a hat here, heavy, like somebody had tipped a bucket of nuts and bolts out of the sky. He’d not worked Far North Queensland but he’d had stints in the Kimberley and the Pilbara back home and he’d seen a cyclone or two but that was more sheeting rain. ‘Slovakia,’ he thought to himself. They ate a lot of pork in Slovakia. He’d gone there late ’90s after he’d been retrenched in Kalgoorlie. Jobs were thin on the ground, especially for HR in the mining industry and he’d been lucky to snare a job at all. It had been brutally cold. He couldn’t do that again. Well of course he wouldn’t anyway, not with Gabrielly. He’d never leave her. As soon as they were married, he would see about getting her back to Australia, some place with this kind of climate, up north. He now liked humidity, had come to see it as a balm. There was no rush though. He wouldn’t want to uproot Gabrielly from the village, her family, her friends. But in six months there would be another family member to consider. Better his kid was born in Australia. Somebody had said that you can’t fly when more than five months pregnant or something, so, there wasn’t oodles of time. They would need to organise things. Well, he would need to organise things. Gabrielly was worried about her family, her mother in particular. Her father worked at one of the local farms and before Gabrielly’s job, his pay had barely supported the family. Gabrielly had two younger brothers still at school. Her wages had improved the family’s life dramatically. Her father had not taken him up on his offer of a job at the site. Mainly by sign language he’d explained to ‘Paulo’ as they called him here, that he had worked his whole life on farms. He’d poked himself in the chest, jutted his chin as if to say, that’s who I am and I’m not changing now. It was a man-to-man discussion, no women around, but later Gabrielly had confirmed he’d got it right.
‘He’s worked his whole life, digging, harvesting vegetables and helping with livestock. The machinery at the plant is a different world to him. He doesn’t fit there.’
So, unable to help the family in that way, ‘Paulo’ had assisted by buying the boys shoes and clothes. He also made sure he always brought some sought-after delicacy to the house.
It was funny how your life could turn so quickly. He’d begun to think he would never find that special partner. You hit forty-one, still single, barely had a girlfriend your entire life and you’re in an industry with ninety percent men. You don’t rate your chances of finding somebody. He could have still been playing cards with the other loners, thinking wistfully about girls he almost dated back in his uni days. Instead, he’d taken the punt and decided to risk egg on his face. Truly he didn’t give himself much of a chance, big-boned, and let’s face it, pudgy, while she was slim with the most beautiful brown eyes. They had flashed at him when he’d confirmed her for the cleaning job, so happy, like he’d tossed in a car as a bonus. That’s the first indelible impression she had made upon him. You had to be careful these days too, especially in HR. There were a lot more women in the industry than when he’d started but still only a handful, so personally he’d never been in this situation before, where you actually fancied an employee. But he knew guys from his uni class who had gone into retailing and insurance and had risked getting themselves into hot water because they’d asked a fellow employee out on a date. It was unfair and stupid really. Where were you supposed to meet anyone if you weren’t a social kind of person? In the end he’d decided he didn’t have that much to lose. It was Brazil, middle of nowhere and he was the highest ranked HR employee.
And he was lonely.
And she seemed to like him, smiled at him when their paths crossed and so he’d asked her out to lunch one weekend and she’d said yes. Then everything had fallen into place. And tonight, they’d be having pork for dinner – bet on it.
Something, a shout or some other sound, drew his gaze past the smoking Victor and back across the sloping valley to the tailings dam whose wall was built in an S shape. Did he imagine it or did it just move? No, something was up, the men were scattering, shouting now, running back up the slope towards the offices. And then the dam wall just dissolved and red sludge began to pour out like lava and slide down the mountain. His brain calculated in that scintilla of a second it was his future happiness pouring out of that broken dam, his blood, his plasma, the life of Gabrielly. His insides were hollowed out as if readying his body to be embalmed in grief. Everything was slow motion, unreal. He turned and dashed back into the office. Even as he shouted that the dam had burst, he was realising that there was no phone to connect with the village. His eyes lit on the two-way.
‘Martha, Martha are you there? Over.’ Martha was in the motor-pool five hundred metres down.
Her crackly voice came on the line. ‘This is Martha. Over.’
He blurted out what had happened. Luckily, she was already on her little motorbike. It wasn’t necessary to tell her to ride for the village and raise the alarm, she took that initiative the instant she knew but all she had was a small bike on the dirt backroads that led to the village. The fall from the dam into the valley was steep and it would move as rapidly as a crocodile after an unwary bird. He stood there shaking. As the level of the watery brown fluid in the dam rapidly dropped, his fears raced to this throat.
It was hours before he could get to what was left of the village, and then only because he was able to hitchhike on one of the company choppers. The dirt roads one usually accessed the village from had all been washed away. Martha had been forced to pull up about two kilometres short on the main road that was high enough to become a virtual bank of the new brown, muddy river. The fall from the tailings dam, down the mountain to the valley was steep and the goo had moved with surprising rapidity. He prayed that Gabrielly would be spared but when he heard the early reports from those flying over the scene he had thrown up in the basin, his legs trembling, his jaw quivering. All but a gram of hope had been crushed. Then came news that many villagers had got to higher ground or to upper floors and roofs of houses that had survived, and he had dared hope.
But as the helicopter made that first pass over what was left of the village, he felt both despair and bile rising. The houses looked like shavings on top of a chocolate mousse. Some dwellings had gone entirely, many more were nothing but a façade, their walls dissolved back into the clay whence they had been extracted and baked. Where the little grocery and supermarket had stood was a mud flat. Gabrielly would always be in there, gaily chatting with other locals. Cars were strewn around, mostly pushed to the perimeter of the village, nothing of them visible below the windscreen.
Rescuers in fluoro vests and gumboots were wading through the shallower areas. He caught a glimpse of one person, so covered in mud he could not tell if it was a man or woman, their arm around the neck of the rescuer guiding them out. Where the helicopter was landing on higher ground, a makeshift triage had been set up. Other helicopters were arriving or evacuating the injured. It was like a Vietnam movie. Villagers stood aimlessly, soaked, muddy, some clean as one of his freshly laundered shirts Gabrielly would insist on doing for him, but all with haunted faces so they looked more like a painting than real life. Right as the chopper put down, he spied Gabrielly’s mother clinging to one of her neighbours for comfort. For an instant relief flared.
Yet there was no sign of her. He swivelled and pivoted.
‘Gabrielly!’ he yelled through the open hatch but of course it was drowned by the noise of the blades. He was still yelling it as he charged out of the stationary helicopter but he didn’t realise that. How could he experience anything in the present when his life was now do
1 THE KIMBERLEY
Wednesday 10 November 2021
‘Look at this lot. Guarantee you they’re all on a government handout.’
Shepherd shut the door of the paddy wagon with extra force and pulled his belt up higher like he meant business, which he guessed he probably did. His promotion to detective sergeant did not reflect any shortening of the traditional gap between Shepherd’s actions and his thoughts. Uniform constable Nat Restoff followed in his wake. Already Shepherd was missing the car air-conditioning. The earth was dry, hard as a London mailbox and almost as red. So far this spring, the rain had fallen in thimbles. Each year your body had to get used to the wheezing humidity all over again. There were less than twenty protesters, chanting with placards, vegans out to make you feel guilty for enjoying a steak. Well, they were going to be disappointed. Not much in life made Josh Shepherd feel guilty. Potentially the biggest problem here was the abattoir workers. Corralled behind their supervisor, a few of them were brandishing boning knives at the protesters. The supervisor was trying to calm them but threats and swearing were breaking ranks.
‘Go and suck on your ice, you deadshits,’ one of them yelled at the protesters.
The cameraman immediately swung towards the hothead.
This job could have been left to the uniforms in Shepherd’s not-so-humble opinion. It did not need anybody from the detective squad but Clement had told him that Scott Risely, the boss, wanted a detective presence. A month or so back somebody had torched the cars of the night-shift workers but no progress had been made on the case. Jo di Rivi and Graeme Earle had run that one, maybe that was why? Now that di Rivi was a detective you couldn’t turn around without bumping into her. She was getting all the good jobs. ‘It’s terrific to have a woman’s perspective’ and all that crap. She and Earle had flown up to Halls Creek on some mining site break-in. Cushy. Most of the day you spent in the plane there and back with a few questions at the crime scene and a free lunch in between. They’d probably strike out there just like they did at the abattoir.
But this job did have its compensations like the fact this was going to be on local TV. Never hurt to have your mug flashed around the place. Even better, the reporter Amy was very, very attractive.
Whenever their paths crossed Shepherd took the opportunity to strike up a conversation. He’d heard she was single. Well so was he, and in Shepherd’s world view, a reporter on the crime beat and a newly promoted detective sergeant was just a natural fit. Amy – he wasn’t sure of her second name, it was long and complicated like a Sri Lankan leg spinner’s – had given no indication that she found him of the slightest interest but he wasn’t rushing this one, he was going slowly, slowly, not giving her a chance of a pre-emptive strike.
He’d learned that lesson.
Let them acquire a taste for Shepherd before you put them on the spot and asked them out, because once they’ve rejected you, that’s it, there could be no going back. See, if you tried a second time and got rejected again you were just a fool or a nuisance. Every time Amy covered one of his cases at the court, he would throw out a line hoping to get her to nibble, and every time she would smile politely and then move off as if she had urgent work to do. Her short yellow skirt contrasted against her dark skin. Today she was looking especially alluring.
‘Animals … Deserve … Better,’ chanted a core of protesters. Shepherd felt their eyes turning his way. He liked the attention. Placing himself somewhere equidistant between the warring factions, he planted his feet and held out his hands as if pushing down their invisible anger. He was mirroring as closely as possible what he’d seen the Roman centurion do on the Netflix show he’d been watching this week when the Roman peasants had been causing a stink.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Calm down, the lot of you.’
‘We’re calm. They’re the ones threatening us with knives,’ said one of those seventy-year-old greybeard types from underneath his akubra. Every rally had one of these: rimless glasses, short-sleeved check shirt, Pommy accent. Used to be a professor of something at some uni, odds-on. They’d always have the wife there too in a big sunhat. Yep, there she was. The rest of them looked like they’d crawled out of the same sleeping-bag at a music festival. Young, scraggy, unwashed.
‘How’d you like it if we threatened your jobs? Oh, that’s right, none of you work!’ An angry young worker, saliva flying. Shepherd would like to have seconded that but then Amy was watching and he was on camera.
‘That’s enough.’ This time he scuffed his feet, imagining Roman sandals on them. In fact, he was wearing his near-new shiny black leather shoes he’d bought to go with his promotion. He remembered this, regrettably, a fraction too late after he had already done the scuffing. Damn, a whole month and they hadn’t a mark on them till then. This increased his anger towards both parties over whom he was presiding.
‘You lot,’ he pointed his finger at the protesters, ‘have got your pictures,’ a gesture at the cameraman. ‘You’re interfering with work being this close to the shed.’
‘We’re not stopping them working.’
Hmm, a bearded layabout. Shepherd gave him his best ‘I’ve-got-your-number’ look.
‘You are an OH and S hazard.’ Shepherd had practised the words Mal Gross had drummed into him as he was climbing into the wagon. ‘If you want to protest, you can do it two hundred and fifty metres away. Over there, away from traffic.’ He pointed to a patch of sand with no protection from the blazing sun. He swivelled towards the workers behind him. ‘You lot get back to work.’
He couldn’t help throwing a glance at Amy and was impressed to see she was actually watching him with some interest.
‘We’re doing nothing wrong.’ A woman this time. Long straggly hair, singlet, tattoos, shell-necklet. Probably sold scented candles at one of the markets and declared nothing on her dole form.
‘If you don’t move, we will have to arrest you and nobody wants that, right?’
He looked at the camera. The very reasonable request of Detective Sergeant Josh Shepherd would be clear for all to see.
‘We’re not moving. If you want us over there, you’ll have to carry us.’
It was the frau of greybeard. She sounded like the Queen. Shepherd was about to lose his cool when he felt Restoff touch his elbow. He looked around. Restoff gestured that he wanted a quiet word. Shepherd moved a pace back and lowered his ear.
‘You see the kid at the back?’ Restoff kept his hands on his hips but he tried to point with his chin. Shepherd turned back to the protesters. His gaze focussed on one of them wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a sheep above some greenie slogan.
Shit.
Sitting in his office confronted by the deflating sight of a stack of unfinished reports, the void in Clement’s life was laid bare. The football season had ended and with it had gone the best way to soak up those gap minutes when you didn’t want to think about your life and its futility, or at least everything that it ought to have but didn’t. Instead of confronting those big questions you could divert your waking thoughts to football selections. He had finished runner-up in the footy tipping comp this year. Two weeks out he’d been sitting in second position and had been faced with the eternal question: should he go for broke and try and win the big prize and the accolades but maybe miss out on second? First prize was three hundred bucks but the bragging rights were immeasurable. Second prize was eighty bucks, basically your entry fee back from this year and your fee for next year. Clement wrestled with the dilemma for the whole week before playing safe. Result: overall second, eighty bucks and months of regret. And worse, now that he didn’t have that psychological polyfilla of the tipping comp the cracks had opened up like they were this minute.
Obsessing about the tipping comp is what occupies lonely single men, he reflected. That’s precisely what you are, Clement. It had been his old schoolfriend Bill Seratono who had convinced him to sign on. The first month or two of the season, he had not taken seriously. Back then he still had a life, was dating two women, not on the sly either. Dating was a polite word. He was sleeping with them, sometimes even the whole night. For Clement this was a novel experience. There had been previous times where he’d dated a flurry of women to try and forget Marilyn, his ex-wife, but not simultaneously. It wasn’t like he was trying to play the field, it just happened. He had been, to use an old-fashioned word, courting Lucinda, a divorced doctor. They’d had some dinners and canvassed sex. It was pretty well accepted they would go to his seldom-used house in Derby and enjoy a consummation weekend in the imminent future. But just days before the long-awaited event was scheduled, he got a little drunk at the Anglers and so did Melissa, a petite blonde tour guide. Bill Seratono offered to drop them both home. Clement got out at Melissa’s determined to walk the thirty minutes back to his own place. He never made it. He woke in Melissa’s bed beside a furry toy bear. She asked him if he was in a relationship and he said he was, though that was, he supposed, an exaggeration. She didn’t care. After wrangling with various options, including silence, he came clean to Lucinda, expecting her to toss away their planned lovers’ weekend like old fish heads. Instead, she gave him a long spiel about how she wasn’t falling into the same trap she had in her marriage where her husband had wanted to control her. She didn’t want to control Clement, but she needed sex. She pretty much demanded their hours of groundwork reach fruition in the cot.
