The Build Up Read online

  Phillip Gwynne is the author of acclaimed bestsellers Deadly, Unna and Nukkin Ya and the AFI-winning screenwriter of Australian Rules.

  ‘Up There, Cazaly’ (Mike Brady)

  Copyright © Remix Publishing Pty Limited/Origin Network Pty Ltd

  Lyrics produced with permission of Albert Music.

  First published 2008 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Phillip Gwynne 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Gwynne, Phillip.

  The build up / Phillip Gwynne.

  A823.3

  Paperback format: 9781405038492

  EPUB format: 9781743286517

  Typeset in 13/16 pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  For Eliza, who else?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the author

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks go to Ducks – without you there wouldn’t be much of a book, my publisher Tom Gilliatt for his faith, my agent Margaret Connolly for her sagacity, Jamie Grant for his edit (no cavalry arrival was ever as timely) and my learned friend Jeremy Kirk for the lawyerly advice.

  Chapter 1

  4th October 2006

  Jimmy casts and he’s thirteen again, king of Tathra wharf. Standing in his spot, Jimbo’s spot they call it, nobody else game enough to get up there, standing high on the south pylon, below him the other fishermen, a carpet of hats, a thicket of rods. He pulls up fish after fish after fish – salmon, bonita, mackerel, all clean and flapping as he flicks them onto the deck. None of the others catching a thing, glaring at him like he’s got voodoo or something.

  ‘What’s your fucking secret, kid?’ Costa the fat Greek finally asks, pride stuck in his throat, like bad kebab.

  Jimmy smiles – home is shit, school not much better, but here on Tathra wharf he’s king.

  ‘It’s all in the wrist, Costa,’ he says, grinning like the cat who drank the dairy dry. ‘All in the wrist.’

  Forty years later and still it’s all in the wrist, Costa. All in the wrist.

  The Nilsmaster lure spins blue and white as it arcs slowly through the thick air, towards the other side of the billabong, where the slender paperbarks and spiky-headed pandanus come right down, crowding at the water’s edge like cattle to a dam in a drought. Getting off the gear wasn’t just about getting off the gear, it was going back to the everyday stuff – a shower every morning, eating breakfast again, and fishing. Jesus, none of the other blokes have caught the fish he’s caught.

  ‘The Barramundi Kid,’ Barry called him the other day.

  And he’d had this feeling, which took him a while to recognise: junkies and pride don’t have much to do with each other.

  Yesterday, though, Barry had just about bitten his head off.

  ‘Lay off the fishing for a while, Jimmy,’ he’d said. ‘Keep away from that fucking billabong.’

  He’d come, though, sneaking away when nobody was looking. He knew a big barra for tea tonight would change Barry’s mind. A big barra’d change anybody’s mind.

  The lure kisses water and Jimmy smiles – it’s exactly where he wanted it to be, just near where the toppled tree, its trunk smooth and white as sand, angles into the water. He lets the lure sink, then starts to retrieve – three winds and a tweak of the rod tip, three winds and a tweak. The lure stops, the line draws taut and for a second he thinks he’s on, but Jimmy’s caught too many fish in his time to not know that this isn’t one. The line is snagged. He tries all the old tricks, moving around the edge of the billabong to work the angles, but all he manages to do is tangle the line around the tree. It’s tough on lures, this country, and you’ve got to expect to lose a few. This is Jimmy’s last Nilsmaster, though. He’s got a few of those trendy treble-hooked squidgies, but Jimmy prefers it old school. So he shucks off his T-shirt, his shorts, down to his Y-fronts, his torso, his legs, so spindly, so white, mottled with bruising. He steps into the water, the mud squelching between his toes, water lapping his narrow calves.

  He thinks about what that blackfella had said. ‘A big old boss croc, him name called Sweetheart.’

  Jimmy isn’t sure, though. That blackfella hadn’t stopped smiling, and he knows blackfellas love to wind up whitefellas, especially southerners like him. He’s been fishing here for a month and hasn’t seen any sign of a croc. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, though. That’s one thing Jimmy learnt in Vietnam – just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. He scans the perimeter. Nothing. He pushes off, breast-stroking, pushing the lily fronds away from his face. Finds his rhythm, spreading the water with his hands.

  Again he’s thirteen and king of Tathra wharf. Him and his mates wouldn’t think twice about jumping off and swimming to the shore. Jesus, how far had that been? A mile? Probably more. When was the last time he’d gone to the beach? He can’t even remember. It’s the old things, that’s what he has to get right. Fishing. Swimming. Nothing too drastic, just the old things, the simple things.

  He reaches the tree, feels for the line. Finding it he pulls. The line gives and then gives no more. A branch, thinks Jimmy, a branch that bends as he pulls. He could pull harder but the line is only five kilo, and he doesn’t want to break it – there’d be no chance of finding the lure then.

  Again Jimmy scans the area. He has this feeling he’s often had here – that somebody, or something, is watching him. He breathes in deep, filling his lungs, and dives, his eyes open. The water is surprisingly clear, the tree trunk disappears into the depths. He follows the line down, his gunked-up lungs burning – all those cigarettes, all that fucking dope – but keeps going. Another big kick. He pulls at the line and it floats up. An anemone, he thinks. A tangle of tentacles. But he knows that can’t be right, this is fresh, not salt, water. It’s hair. Then a face. Hollow eyes. A lipless grimace. Her body naked. And in her, up her, a white-handled knife.

  Chapter 2

  27th September

  Detective Dusty Buchanon of the NT Police Force wouldn’t admit it – a true Top Ender never complained about the Build Up, it came with the territory – but this year she was finding it tough going. Last night she’d hardly slept at all. Naked on her bed, limbs as far away from each other as possible, cruciform beneath a ceiling-high eiderdown of heavy wet air, she watched the ceiling fan as it slowly whirred, admiring its dumb perseverance if not its effectiveness.

  Dusty loved her high-set house, loved its wooden floors and shuttered windows, its wide verandahs, its corrugated iron roof. And when her colleagues complained about their astronomical power bills, she felt so smug, so eco-righteous. Lately, however, she’d been thinking that an air conditioner wouldn’t be such a bad investment. She had the
pool, of course, and three times last night she’d traipsed downstairs for a refreshing plunge, but as she sat on the back verandah, a sarong knotted above her breasts, eating half a papaya anointed with a squeeze of lime for breakfast, her eyes were drawn towards an advertisement for a Fujitsu in yesterday’s Northern Territory News. The machine itself looked fine, quite stylish actually, and the price was reasonable, but what concerned Dusty was the former Australian cricket team captain standing next to it. She just couldn’t see herself buying anything from somebody as gormless as that.

  She returned to an article that had earlier piqued her interest. A group of thirty or so Vietnam veterans, described as ‘disaffected’, were lobbying the territory government to be given ownership to a block of land they’d been camping on during the Dry for the last few years. It’d become a sort of retreat, ‘a place of healing’, according to spokesman Barry O’Loughlin.

  The accompanying photo showed an older man, greying at the temples, standing, incongruously, in front of one of the Territory’s iconic termite mounds.

  This one was particularly large, making Barry O’Loughlin look particularly small and ineffectual. Wouldn’t want to have him as my spokesman, thought Dusty, as she scooped out more of the papaya flesh.

  At thirty-three, Dusty was too young to have any memory of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. She’d learned little about it at school, but, there again, most of her school years had been spent doing endless laps of a fifty-metre pool or sitting at her desk, half-asleep, recovering from doing endless laps of a fifty-metre pool. What she did know about Vietnam had been gleaned from Hollywood movies: Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Born on the Fourth of July. As far as movies went, they were pretty good, but Dusty doubted somehow that historical accuracy had been a major concern during their making. She read the article with interest – conscription, Agent Orange, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Poor bastards – it seemed only fair that the government should give them a bit of dirt in the middle of nowhere as compensation. Of course, it was never going to be that straightforward. Some blackfella mob reckoned that they had first dibs, that they’d put in a land claim years ago. But you could say that about almost any part of Australia. Parks and Wildlife were also keen, due to the ‘unique nature of the termite mounds found there’. And if that wasn’t enough, Rio Tinto, the mining company, were adamant that they had an exploration lease on the land. Again, you could say that about almost any part of Australia. Dusty’s money was on Rio Tinto. Australia may once have ridden on the sheep’s back, but now it preferred to dig bits of itself up and put them onto large ships and send them overseas. As for the sheep’s back, that was now served medium-rare with a glass of Coonawarra shiraz. Still, as Dusty scraped out the last of the papaya, she wished Barry O’Loughlin and his disaffected vets all the best; it seemed to her that they’d been to hell and back in a Hyundai.

  Dusty tossed the skin over the rail and into the garden. Though ‘garden’, with its connotation of neatness and order, was not the right word to describe what was going on down there. James had been the gardener, or, as he’d put it, using his famous lawyer’s wit, ‘a master of the secateurs’, and when he’d left taking both his wit and his secateurs with him Dusty had let the garden go. It hadn’t taken long for it to turn feral – Darwin may have been hacked out of the wilderness, but the wilderness was constantly fighting back, reclaiming its territory.

  Amongst the plants that Dusty recognised – the frangipani, the bougainvillea, the Carpentaria palms – was other flora of less certain pedigree.

  ‘Weeds’, perhaps, but Dusty had decided that was just a term of convenience, a marketing ploy to con people into buying exorbitantly priced weed killers. All plants were welcome in her backyard, irrespective of class, colour or weediness.

  After four months of the Dry the garden was looking tired, its glossy leaves dulled by a layer of dust. Dusty knew from experience, however, that it would be instantly revived when the Wet broke, when the monsoonal rains arrived. Whether the same would happen to her remained to be seen.

  Checking her watch, a ten-buck Taiwanese special, Dusty contemplated whether to go for a run before work, whether an hour was enough time for a decent workout. Her two dogs, or ‘dawgs’ as she liked to call them, Smith and Wesson, were giving her definite c’mon-let’s-go looks from their respective positions next to the table and on the Bali seat. Both medium-sized dogs were bitsers. Smithie had a lot of pitbull in her, Wessie not much, and that was as much as Dusty knew about their ancestry. Never a pretty dog, Smithie had got even uglier lately when one of her eyes had become infected and turned milky. She was also getting on now, showing signs of arthritis, and wasn’t as alert as she’d once been. Last year Dusty had acquired Wessie. In her open house, backing onto parklands, in her profession, a good watchdog wasn’t such a bad idea.

  From within Dusty’s bedroom came the sound of her mobile ringing, playing ‘I Shot The Sheriff’. Fontana had installed it, his idea of a joke.

  She rushed into the house and answered it without looking at the caller’s name – at this hour it had to be work.

  ‘Detective Buchanon here.’

  ‘Frances?’

  Dusty had been Dusty since she was eight years old and in Grade 5 at West Adelaide Primary School. She’d come into the classroom dishevelled after her usual lunchtime wrestle with pooey-pants Tommy Papadopoulos. ‘Frances, you really are dusty,’ the teacher had said, and that’d been her name ever since. Only one person still persisted in calling her Frances.

  ‘Mum, do you know what time it is?’

  Not an unreasonable question, but her mother ignored it. ‘Guess what?’ she asked, in that annoying way she had – why didn’t she just come straight out and tell her the obviously pressing news instead of indulging in these infantile guessing games?

  ‘Another interesting homicide?’ queried Dusty.

  If there was one thing guaranteed to annoy her mother it was to remind her that genteel Adelaide, the self-proclaimed City of Churches, had a long history of bizarre and unusually cruel murders.

  Again Celia chose to ignore her daughter.

  ‘Nat is pregnant, again.’

  Nat was the youngest of Dusty’s three stepsisters, the daughters of her mother’s third husband, Phil. They took it in turns getting pregnant, like some sort of relay race, the fecundity baton being passed from one to the other.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Well, you could be a little more excited.’

  ‘I hardly know her!’

  When Dusty had left Adelaide Celia had still been on husband number two, the ineffectual Daryl. Phil had only arrived on the scene about six years ago.

  ‘She’s still your sister.’

  ‘Stepsister.’

  ‘Frances!’

  ‘OK, Mum, here we go. Wow, that’s really great. I’m so very happy for her.’

  ‘That wasn’t too hard, was it now?’

  Sarcasm, any form of irony really, was wasted on Celia.

  ‘And have you had any thoughts in that direction, yourself?’

  ‘I really have to get to work.’

  ‘You’re not getting any younger, you know.’

  ‘Time’s arrow is a concept I’m familiar with, Mum.’

  ‘Well, have you thought about Richard’s offer?’

  Richard was Dusty’s property-developing, Porsche-driving, secretary-shagging younger brother. Actually, Dusty wasn’t sure about the secretary-shagging, wasn’t even sure if he had a secretary to shag, and as for the Porsche, well maybe his car wasn’t technically an example of Germanic engineering excellence, but it did have two doors, no roof and was, according to Richard himself, a chick-magnet. He was most definitely a property developer, though, frequently ringing her with news of his latest sure-fire scheme. His offer? That she quit the Force, come back to Adelaide and he’d help her set up a business – a coffee shop, or a newsagency, or what about a pet shop? She loved animals. Always had. A pet shop would be ideal.

  ‘I have thought about it and I’m not interested.’

  ‘I don’t want to sound pushy, darling. But, you know, all I want is the best for you. I just don’t think you’re going to find Mr Right up there. Mr Really Big Beer Gut, maybe. Or Mr Rough As Bags. But not Mr Right. Mr Right doesn’t live in places like Darwin.’

  For some reason – perversity was Dusty’s guess – Celia insisted on pronouncing Darwin with the stress on the last syllable. Dar-win.