Headhunters

Chapter Thirteen

They had a two-hundred-mile drive to Boolanga to manage that evening. Milton changed into a clean set of clothes, packed up his bag and went back outside again. It was a hot, sticky night, and even the cicadas seemed dazed by the temperature. Matty and Harry were sitting on the ground next to the Wrangler, leaning up against the chassis. A coolbox had appeared from somewhere — Milton guessed that she had brought it with her — and they were both drinking from long-necked bottles of beer.

“Alright, sport?” Harry asked him.

“Better. Although,” he said, picking his sodden T-shirt off his skin, “this was dry when I put it on.”

“Hotter than a billy goat with a blowtorch,” he said.

Milton looked down and saw that Matilda was staring at him with an amused upturn to the side of her mouth. He took a breath. She was going to make things difficult for him again.

“You riding with us?” she asked.

He couldn’t very easily say that he would ride with the others. There was no reason for him to turn down her offer and, if he did, Harry would be suspicious. He was just going to have to manage.

“Sounds good.”

“Got your gear?”

Milton nodded down to the bag at his feet.

“That it?” Matilda said.

“That’s it.”

“John doesn’t like to be tied down,” Harry elaborated with a chuckle, seemingly oblivious to the irony in his comment. He was a simple enough kind of bloke, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but was it possible that he hadn’t noticed the way the atmosphere had changed?

“When are we off?”

“No reason to wait.”

“The others?”

Matilda pushed herself upright, turned and pointed down the track. Milton saw the clouds of dust from the wheels of the other Jeep. It was already several miles away and he hadn’t noticed it before.

“They left twenty minutes ago,” she said. “Mervyn was getting on my nerves, so I told him to do one.”

Harry got up, too. “And he did what he was told,” he said. “Who would’ve thought a big bloke like that would be scared of my little sister?”

Milton collected his bag and tossed it into the back.

Matilda came across to him and rested her hand on his arm. “Ready?”

He took a step to the side, hoping that Harry couldn’t see his awkwardness. “Whenever you are.”

The jeep had two seats up front and another two behind on the flip-up tailgate. Milton knew that Matty would drive, so he started for the back.

“Up front with me, John,” she said before he could get very far. “If I know Harry, he’ll be asleep in ten minutes. I wouldn’t mind someone to talk to. Keep me awake.”

He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t very well turn her down.

She had been right about her brother. He made some derogatory comments about her driving and then, before they were off the track and onto the road, he was quiet. Matty looked in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Milton craned his neck and looked back. Harry was asleep, his head lolling against the seat and his mouth open.

“Told you so,” she said.

“I saw him sleep in places that were a lot less comfortable than this,” Milton said.

“That right?”

“One time, he got forty winks in the back of an army Lynx while we were being shot at over Basra. I was sure we were going to get hit. He woke up like nothing had happened.”

Matty took her phone and connected it to the Jeep’s USB jack. She steered with one hand on the wheel, glancing up every so often as she used her spare hand to scroll through her music. She settled on Fleetwood Mac, and, after a moment, the opening of “The Chain” played through the speakers.

“This about your era?” she said, grinning as she rested the phone on the dash.

“Leave it out. You’re about twenty years too early.”

“What would you rather listen to?”

He leaned back in the seat and rested his boots on the dash. “The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy Mondays.”

“Who?”

He allowed himself the luxury of a smile and tried to relax a little. It was an easy and companionable silence. Good music, the warm breeze on his face. Matilda was a good driver, maintaining a fast pace as she picked the smoothest route over the pitted asphalt.

Fleetwood Mac finished and Guns N’ Roses replaced it, the gentle introduction to “November Rain.”

Milton almost thought he was going to get away with it.

“Last time,” she said.

“Matty—”

She glanced in the mirror. “He’s asleep. You know what he’s like. A bomb could go off and he wouldn’t wake. Relax.”

He tried, but couldn’t.

“Last time,” she started again, and he let her finish, “I’m sorry about the things I said to you.”

“What things?”

She looked over at him, her eyes reflecting the glow of the instruments. “I may have… questioned your manhood.”

“No need to apologise.”

“We didn’t finish the conversation.”

“We did. There’s not much more to say. Nothing is going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“It just… isn’t.”

“You don’t want it to?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So?”

“It can’t. Your brother. Come on, Matilda. You know how jealous he is. If anything went wrong…”

“Why would it?”

“Because it always does, Matty, and, when it does, he’ll kill me. He’s my friend. I don’t want to put that at risk.”

They drove on for a minute in silence again.

“That’s your final word?”

He sighed. “It has to be.”

“All right,” she said. “Fine.”

“Fine?”

“I’m not going to shout and scream about it, Milton, if that’s what you mean. I’m not going to flog a dead horse.” She turned and smiled at him — an incandescent smile that sent a quiver up his spine — and added, the smile fading a little, “Your loss.”

Milton looked up into the expanse of the night sky. There was no natural light outside the Renegade and the vast sweep of the stars looked like diamonds scattered liberally across velvet. The moon was full, casting its reflected light down onto the landscape and lending it a silvery sheen. There were hills in the near distance, and Milton heard the howl of a dingo. Another joined, and then another, a mournful wail that drifted down across the dusty plain.

It was his loss. He knew it.

“There was one thing I always wanted to ask you,” Matty said.

“Go on.”

“Why did you come here? I know you know Harry, but why did you come out here to work on the station with us?”

Milton was quiet as he considered what to tell her. “I wanted to get away from things,” he said.

“Things?”

“Oh, I don’t know — life, maybe. All the noise and the stress. I’m not best suited to it.”

“This is the drinking thing?”

He hadn’t told her about AA and his daily struggle to stay dry, but she knew that he didn’t drink and he could tell that it was something that had piqued her curiosity. Perhaps Harry had said something to her. “It’s to do with that,” he said.

“You have a problem with it?”

“Me and drink don’t make for the best combination.”

“How long have you been sober?”

“More than three years now.”

“But you know that a sheep station isn’t the smartest place to go if you want to get away from booze, right?”

“I do now.” He smiled. “But I can handle it.”

“So it’s just about that, then? The booze?”

He paused again. No, he conceded to himself. That wasn’t it. He thought about Avi Bachman and the chaos that he had brought down upon Isadora and Alexander Bartholomew in New Orleans. He thought about Ziggy Penn, abducted and nearly killed. And then he thought about the beating that he had taken at Bachman’s hands. But not just any beating: a thorough, comprehensive beating that had left him on his knees and just a few extra blows from death. Milton was not used to being bested like that, and it had shaken him. He had left Louisiana aboard a Greyhound bus to Florida, but the memory of what had happened was not so easy to leave behind. To have been beaten so easily had made him question the point of the daily struggle to stay off the drink. Why not just get drunk? What was the point in the struggle? It had made him question a fundamental part of himself. If that had been taken away so easily, was his struggle really worth the effort?

“John?”

“What?”

“There’s no other reason?”

He realised she was probing for evidence of another woman, a failed relationship, some other reason why he would do something so extraordinary as swapping what she must have imagined was a comfortable life for a summer spent up to his knees in shit and sweat and blood.

“That’s it,” he said. “I just wanted a change.”