Port Vila Blues

Eighteen

Wyatt walked down through the mall, heading back to Battery Point. He glanced about him as he went, automatically looking for the face, the gait, the conjunction of person, place and body language that would tell him he’d been found. But the little downtown streets were benign in the sun, so he went on half-alert and did what he sometimes liked doing, visited the place as if for the first time.

He noticed the school-leavers in the mall, kicking their heels and shifting place constantly but never going anywhere. They had nowhere to go. There were no jobs for them. Wyatt looked beyond them to the pedestrian traffic. No Asian or Indian faces; no blacks, no Pacific Islanders. It was a mono-featured city.

He saw plenty of young men wearing beards, jeans, walking boots and red, green and blue check shirts, and guessed that they had a four-wheel-drive or a utility parked nearby. And there was another kind of male, stamped with old money and long breeding. They walked tall along the streets, braying and impervious, fathers and sons with straight backs, costly English tweeds and an air of entitlement radiating from them. They would have been out of place and out of joint anywhere but on the streets of Hobart.

But, more than anything, the city breathed wholesomeness and conviction. Perhaps that was the central factor- everyone here knew their place, except the kids in the mall.

He kept walking. The dental clinic was in a lane off Elizabeth Street. He was five minutes early and was kept waiting for twenty. At eleven o’clock he walked out with a new filling in his jaw.

That afternoon he was on a bus to Devonport, and by evening he was on the overnight car ferry to Melbourne. He slept badly: a bunk bed in a steel tomb below the waterline; young men, intoxicated to desperation point, stumbling in from the discotheque; all the unknowns ahead of him.

At dawn he showered, got dressed and climbed the stairs to an upper deck. He ate breakfast in a dining room in which the carpet, curtains and fittings were the colour of the vomit that streaked the iron steps outside. Toast and coffee, as bad as any he’d ever had. After that he stood in the open air, choosing a point near the bow where he could watch the ferry’s progress toward the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay. He could see land on either side: hills, flat country, white beaches and a couple of fishing towns. Then a lighthouse and the ferry was pitching through The Rip.

Wyatt remained on deck, breathing the cool air, as the ferry skirted the Bellarine Peninsula and cut up the centre of the bay. A year ago he’d travelled these waters alone in a stolen motorboat. Having shot a man who’d sold him out, he’d been on the run. He usually was, in those days.

The ferry berthed at 8.30 a.m. and Wyatt filed off with the passengers. As usual, he swept the docks, looking for men standing featureless and still in the background. There were men like that in every port in the world, waiting to nab someone in particular or simply watching to see who was new in town, intelligence they might later tie in to a robbery or a killing.

There was no one, but Wyatt had altered his appearance again anyway, this time with a wad of chewing gum in his cheek, a baseball cap on his head and a football-club scarf trailing from his neck. Not that Wyatt knew or cared about football. Everything about football was collective, and Wyatt had never joined or wanted to join or feel part of the herd-a trait that had kept him free and more or less unknown, unreachable and uncorrupted for all of his life.

He caught a taxi. Thirty minutes later he was at the Budget car rental place in the centre of the city, mapping out a route to the little town of Emerald in the hills.