Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Today the Meddler was driven more than usually by sourness. Not that the day had started badly. He was on the four pm to midnight shift this week, leaving the mornings free to take Jessica to school, and yesterday and today he'd thought it would be good to have the ferret with him, watch the kids jostle nervously, wanting to touch but fearful of sharp teeth. He'd even dared them a little. He got a kick out of it-their fear, his difference from the other parents: drones, most of them.

Then he'd gone home via the bakery, where he'd grabbed milk, escargot and the local paper, the Progress, and settled with a milky coffee on the front verandah, overlooking bracken and blackberry canes and across to the strangled peppermint gums on Five Furlong Road. Sipped his coffee and chewed his escargot-stale, probably yesterday's-and flipped through the paper, stopping to read his weekly letter, the one they called The Meddler Report, getting a little glow and rekindling his general outrage. He moved on to Tessa Kane's own weekly column, right next to his. Read a few lines and a deep shame settled in him. Nothing like it in his life before.

The bitch had seen him walking the ferret that time in Rosebud and here she was writing about it, calling him a wanker. He thought he'd got a few funny looks at the school this morning. Clearly some people had already seen the article and put two and two together.

The general mirth at his expense. The fingerpointing behind his back: wanker. Mostyn Pearce burned. 'Wanker'. 'Meddler'. His skin was superheated with embarrassment and he could scarcely breathe.

He stumbled away from the house, along the Crescent and then onto Five Furlong Road, where he walked like a zombie, burning, burning. How could he deflect or defuse the sneering? Never be seen with the ferret again, obviously. God, he'd like to sort her out, that Kane bitch. What kind of name was that? Jewish? God, what a bitch. One part of him had always wanted her to know who he was, what his real name was, this man she called the Meddler and published every week. But if he made himself known she'd recognise him as the man with the ferret, the wanker, and his weekly raging at shire ineptitude and nose-thumbing citizenry would lose all force. She'd chortle, point her finger and say, 'You're the Meddler?' and stop publishing him.

He stomped down the centre of the road feeling powerless. The dead gums formed a web of twisted grey fingers over his head. There was an old orchard on the other side of the blackberry-choked fence, the leaves yellowing. Half a kilometre ahead of him was Upper Penzance, like a gated community without the gate, smug on its hilltop. To his left was Ian Munro's place. No sign of the distressed sheep this morning. Had the RSPCA investigated? Bet they hadn't. Nobody gave a stuff about anything anymore.

He came abreast of the American-style letter box. Unbelievable. The little red flag was up. Pearce flicked it to the down position.

Just then he heard a soft motor behind him and the growl of tyres and then a brief brap of a horn. He stepped off the road into dead grass. A police van, a female cop in the passenger seat giving him the evil eye, like she thought he was up to no good just because he was walking and wasn't a cop.

Well fuck you, he thought. It might interest you to know that I'm in law enforcement myself and always have been. Kind of.

Pearce had been a physical education teacher for years, a strict disciplinarian until that business where they said he'd been too rough. Now he was a corrections officer for Ameri-Pen, the private company that had won the contract for the Westernport Detention Centre. Designed to hold five hundred detainees, there were almost eight hundred and the numbers were growing. You had four to six men in two-man cells. That was a problem, the overcrowding. You immediately thought of unnatural practices of a kind your Arab type condoned. Plus they were would-be terrorists, half of them. You saw them huddled, their dark liquid eyes watching you, their hawk noses sniffing you out. The other half were just depressed. You saw them beating their heads against brick walls, rocking and wailing on their haunches, crying inconsolably.

Well, what did they expect? They should have thought of that before they tried to enter the country illegally. Send them back to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, wherever. It was not your Middle Eastern kind of climate in this part of Australia anyway. Pearce doubted that the escapees would last long on the outside. Damp, coolish-they were used to dry heat and sandy wastes.

What Ameri-Pen did to keep them in line was remove all of the cell doors and hang dense black plastic sheeting over the windows. Everyone in bed by ten pm, and you left the cell and corridor lights on all night. You'd never want to leave them in darkness. God knows what they'd get up to. Partly because of that, partly suicide watch and partly to keep them rattled, you went around every thirty minutes during the night to pull the sheets and blankets back and shine a torch in their faces. There was a kind of satisfaction in doing that. Kind of akin to putting fear of the ferret into the kids at Jessie's school.

The ferret. Mostyn Pearce burned with shame.

So his mind returned to the matter that had had him staring thoughtfully at the bedroom ceiling last night while his wife snored softly beside him. Before going to bed he'd watched his videotape of last weekend's 'International Most Wanted' again, congratulating himself for having subscribed to pay TV, and confirmed that, yes, he did recognise that face. A grainy black-and-white shot, taken some time ago, the hair longer and thicker back then, but still recognisably the face of a man who now lived not a million miles away from here.

There was a driveway ahead of him. It wound up through a wooded slope to a fussy weatherboard house, all gables, turrets and fancy timber pointings on the dormers, the work of a Mornington architect. You saw his places all over the Peninsula, anything from gingerbread cottages to Tyrolean Cape Cods. Pearce hated them and was looking for a way to channel that into his Meddler column for the Progress.

Everything reminded him of his shame this morning, so when the elderly couple emerged from the driveway in their Audi-typical, a classy, imported kind of car, but not too over the top-and gave him a look of wonderment and consternation as they accelerated toward Waterloo, his bitterness increased tenfold. He thought he recognised that look on their stupid old faces. It was a look that said, oh dear, who is that man and why is he walking along the road by himself and what if he robs our house while we're at the shops?

So Pearce watched the Audi disappear over the first rise- the stupid old fool driving painfully slowly as he craned his neck at the rear-view mirror-and concealed himself behind a big roadside pine.

Twenty to one the old couple would fall into a heap and turn around and drive back to their house as though they'd forgotten something. They'd come back over the rise and not see him anywhere and fall further into a heap.

Sure enough, half a minute later the Audi reappeared. Pearce crouched behind the trunk of the tree, feeling bitter satisfaction deep inside himself. They'd be wondering where he'd disappeared to. They'd be clutching each other, going, oh dear, he must have gone onto our property, what shall we do?

While this was going on he heard a car behind him, coming down from Upper Penzance. That cop car again. He didn't know or care whether or not he'd been spotted. He was having fun watching the Audi-everything about its movements spelling fear and trepidation-turn in to its driveway.

And the lift to his spirits helped him to work out exactly what he was going to do about the wanted man on his videotape. It was time he profited from his vigilance. Direct action this time, no more letters to the shire. He would confront the guy, take the shotgun with him for a bit of extra leverage.