Читать книгу I'm Dying Here - Damien Broderick - Страница 6

PART 1

I was running a nice little earner called Feng Shui Solutions when my past caught up with me. I’d hung my shingle on an ornate free-standing Victorian mortgage, not mine, in Parkville—close enough to the university for academic respectability and not so close to the zoo that the lion stink annoyed the clients. The cast iron door knocker knocked. I wasn’t expecting a client so I’d left off my Knights of Bushido kimono, but I was fucked if I was going to climb out of my jeans just to open the door.

“Mr. Purdue?”

My caller had seen better days, but she’d kept herself trim. I suspected twice weekly workouts at the gym, which is as much as I can be bothered with myself these days, and twice-yearly dry-outs at the fat farm.

“At your service.”

“Sharon Lesser. I have an appointment for eight-thirty?”

I blinked. Something troubled me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then again I’ve had a few blows to the head in my time. “I believe that’s for tomorrow.” One of the drawbacks of doing your own secretarial. “But come in, Mrs. Lesser.”

“Call me Share. No, definitely this evening, yesterday was my bridge night and that’s been Thursday for two years.”

I helped her off with her fur. It was real, minimal entry wound, no exit. I hung the coat myself. The upside of doing such menial tasks is no nosy secretary, no secretarial wages either. We went into the Seminar Room, and I was pleased to see that Sharon Lesser was not intimidated by my bulk. Some women are. I don’t know, some of them say they like a bit of brawn to go with the deeply sensitive gaze and readiness to listen but plenty shy away.

A decade and a half earlier I’d have been dismissed with a curt glance: the angular Vegan-diet poet type that only rangy Vegan diet women and cooing butterballs favor. Eighteen months in a boutique prison outside Seattle had made a man of me: ten hours daily of weights work and my heaped handful of vitamins. Anyone can get heroin and blow in jail, it’s the common currency, but ste­roids and HGH are at a premium. It made me shudder, sometimes, recalling what I’d had to pay for my supply. But beefy crims are less choosy than good looking women. Supply never outstripped demand. After a year I was able to set my own terms, and when they offered me parole for the final six months I carefully beat the shit out of my original supplier and remained where I wanted to be, full gym facilities and three good fattening meals a day, with­out the fat.

Share avoided the jumbo House of Orient beanbags, settled her­self into the big Franco Cozzo faux leather armchair and regarded me with satisfaction, I was what she wanted. My clients are gull­ible fuckwits, obviously, but Vinnie would have looked this one over and muttered from the corner of his toothless mouth, “Well stocked hope chest her Mum left her.” But then Vinnie’s a seventy-five-year-old alky, and I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time.

“I’ve been reading in New Idea about this feng shui,” she said. I raised one hand, smiled with capped teeth. “That’s fong shway, Share.”

She wasn’t flustered. “Oh, is that how you say it?”

She crossed her legs. Share was on the wrong side of forty and the gym was battling the crème caramels, but I appreciated the re­sult. Something noisy happened in the street, like a pallet of bricks being dropped from the second floor. Share leaned forward and started to say something else when the front door, visible through the arch of the Seminar Room, slowly opened. The blood drained from my face, seeking refuge from terrible things. The door was triply-dead bolted with a fail-safed electronic controller, fitted into a sturdy frame. Nobody else had the key code.

The door bent open in the middle, like a soufflé folding down with a sigh when you open the oven too soon. I grabbed Sharon Lesser and shoved her under the big desk at the far end of the Seminar Room. She squealed and then I jumped across the room looking this way and that. I knew there wasn’t a gun conveniently in the sideboard, I’m not totally stupid, it was the phone I was after. Once upon a time phones stayed where they were, anchored to the wall. The door stopped buckling, caught on the bolts at top and bottom. I could see one corner of the shiny steel bulbar of a Mack truck peeking around the edge. I found my cellphone, stabbed three letters. It started ringing. I slammed the phone against my ear.

“Jesus, what? I’m busy.”

“It’s Purdue, you fuckwit,” I yelled. “What bullshit is this?” “For Christ’s sake, are you still in there? Get the fuck out right now, Purdue.”

“Bugger off, Mauricio, it’s only Thursday you cretin, I’ve got a customer with me. Client.”

“Friday, Purdue. I got carefully laid plans, mate. Ready or not.” Mauricio gunned the Mack’s motor, the door screeched and buck­led some more. The door would hold, I was sure of that. The steel frame would hold too. But the frame was set into bricks and mor­tar—bricks and mortar from the century before last.

“You’ll wake the neighbors,” I yelled into the phone.

“Do something!” Share screamed from under the desk.

A section of plaster above the door broke away from the wall and crashed into the room. The dust billowed up like farm soil in the Big El Nino Drought. Bricks cascaded down on either side of the frame. The ceiling was starting to go.

Thank Christ for the inner-city outhouse!

§

In the century before last, when the bricks and mortar now rap­idly disintegrating around us were troweled expertly into place by skilled artisans, even the elegant homes of the colony’s robber barons were a bit light on for amenities. You could have all the cut-glass chandeliers you wanted hanging from the ceilings, the crystals bending the candlelight to softly illuminate the starched collars and deep cleavages arranged around the mahogany dining table, but the privy was still out the back. And it wasn’t connected to anything as sophisticated as a sewer. When the bucket was full, the night soil carter trundled his horse and dray down the purpose built cobbled lane and did what his title demanded: carted night soil. Which means that in this more refined and sewered century, the elegant piles of Parkville all have excellent rear access. Good for a quick getaway. The real estate agents don’t make a song and dance about it, but it’s a selling point, especially for punters in my line of work.

§

My solid steel door-and-frame unit burst free of the surrounding walls with an unholy crash and shattered the jarrah floorboards of the hall. The Mack backed up a few meters and Mauricio planted his foot, the crazed fuck. The truck surged through the gap, taking out Share’s fur on the Queen Anne hall stand. The elephant’s foot umbrella tidy disappeared under a Dunlop High Rider. My rented hall was wide, wider than a Mack truck, but it narrowed once you got past the arched entrance to the Seminar Room. The truck hit the bottle-neck hard. The oak staircase to the right twisted and snapped. The repro Von Gerhard fell off the wall, glass splintering and skewering the paper. I didn’t stop to watch any more, I raced over to the desk, hauled Share out by her ankles and dragged her upright. She was screaming fit to burst, but there wasn’t much panic in her voice, it was all anger, distilled fury.

“That was fucking sable, you arsehole.”

“Not my fault,” I yelled.

“The prick in the truck! I got that fucking thing in Paris France. Champs E fucking lysees. Five hundred thousand francs. Pure al­bino sable.”

“Rabbit,” I said.

Her reply was drowned by the howl of the engine as Mauricio backed up for the coup de grâce.

“Come on, for Christ’s sake,” I yelled. “We’re outta here.”

I dragged her towards the French doors that opened onto the courtyard. Of course they were shut, locked and secured by au­tomatic solenoids. A shock wave from the coup de grâce twisted them free. I gave the central strut the boot and we were through. Clouds of dust followed us like mustard gas billowing across the Somme. Broken glass and bricks started to rain down fairly heav­ily. As we ran, a pot plant took a direct hit. Poinsettia mysteriosa, I’d never liked it.

§

I got Share into the garage and bundled her over the passenger side into the Cobra. Luckily the top was down and we didn’t have to play ladies and gents with the doors. I bounded into the driver’s seat and grabbed the remote for the roller door into the lane.

“Night soil forever,” I shouted at Share over the noise of a ma­jor collapse in the main house.

“Start the bloody car you idiot.”

I did. The turbo kicked in with a growl that would teach the Zoo’s farting lions a thing or two. But we had to wait intermi­nable seconds as the roller door slowly dragged itself off the floor. When the gap into the lane was almost high enough I gave Share her orders.

“Keep your head down,” I yelled.

Mauricio bounded into the garage, took a flying leap straight over the Cobra’s spoiler and into the luggage compartment behind the seats. I winced, thinking of the buttery leather jacket folded there.

“This is a coupe, you arsehole,” I shouted. “No room for three. And watch the jacket.”

“Drive, Purdue,” Mauricio yelled.

“Jesus Christ, he’s got a gun,” Share shouted.

“Of course he’s got a gun, nutters like him are always waving guns,” I said and put the pedal to the metal. The Cobra shot into the lane. I fishtailed it round to the north and tested the shockers on the cobbles.

“Smooth as a baby’s,” I said.

“Drive to a police station,” Share said insistently.

“Do a circuit, Purdue,” Mauricio said, gesticulating with the gun over my shoulder. “Up Sydney Road, down Victoria Street, hang a lefty onto Melville and back to Royal Parade. That’ll give the cops enough time to arrive and set up shop. Who’s the tart?”

“Sharon Lesser, meet Mauricio Cimino, my landlord.”

“G’day Sharon,” Mauricio said.

“She’s called Share,” I said. “Put the fucking heater away. And take that thing off your head. You’re making a spectacle of your­self. You ought to be ashamed.”

Mauricio did as he was told, throwing the balaclava onto the tram tracks in Royal Parade and wriggling down into the luggage compartment, pulling his overalls off in a complicated series of maneuvers that bumped the front seats. We ground to a halt at a set of lights in Sydney Road. I turned round and had a good look at Mauricio. He was wearing a cashmere business suit, striped shirt with French cuffs and expensive opal cuff-links. Beside me Share started a search for the Cobra’s door handle, but the lights changed and we were away.

“Just what are you pricks playing at?” Share asked in a tone not to be trifled with.

“Fang Shooy,” Mauricio said.

“It’s fong shway,” I said. “I keep telling you.”

“This is some sort of joke?”

“The alignment was all wrong,” Mauricio told her calmly. “Wrong ghosts kept coming down the hallway.”

“What crap is this?”

“Like Purdue says, feng shui,” he told her airily. “You’ve got to line up the hallway with the cosmic force fields, otherwise the daemons and ghouls and all those inhorse...inhorse....”

“Inauspicious,” I said.

“Yeah, all those inauspicious omens put the mockers on things.”

She nodded at him over her shoulder. “Ah. You were realigning the house. With a truck.”

“Reckon.”

“You demolished it.”

“Fuck.” Mauricio grinned, I could see him in the mirror. “I’ll have to start from scratch.”

§

For a while we drove in silence. Autumn evening was falling fast, although with the greenhouse effect it still felt like late summer. I flicked the Cobra’s lights on. A delightful shepherd’s sky hung over Tullamarine and the tram wires were etched against it like cosmic force fields. There was a lesson to be had in the wires, but I couldn’t quite put it into words. I sensed that the mood of quiet contemplation that had settled on the Cobra’s occupants required nothing as crass as speech to give it meaning.

When we rejoined Royal Parade, Share finally said, “I take it that house was heritage-listed?”

“Governor LaTrobe once kept a mistress there,” I said.

She nodded. “So the Council wouldn’t even permit you to build a dog kennel in the backyard, let alone knock the whole place down and build....” She paused, trying to imagine the atrocity we must have planned. “Fifty-seven brick venereal units.”

“Eighteen units,” Mauricio said, offended. “Top of the range. Master bedroom with en suite sauna and walk-in robes. En suites for the other two bedrooms. Studio/study with sun roof. Security entrances standard. All fittings stainless steel or owners’ choice if bought off of the plan. Which saves on stamp duty, which isn’t getting any less pricey these days, you mark my words.”

“Good Christ. Criminal vandalism!”

“Inner city resurgence. Breathing life into urban decay.”

“Decay? Parkville?” She knew her real estate, did Share, as had everyone who’d prospered in Melbourne in the days of rampant financial lunacy and negative gearing. You might get more per square meter in patrician Toorak, but Parkville was still there near the top of the chart as a den of restorers and gold chip heritage bricks & mortar.

“Structurally unsound, the way it is now.” My former landlord tutted at the public risk he’d just averted. “A menace to passers­by. Rise from the flames of destruction like a fee nix. That’s prog­ress, Share.”

We were approaching the wrecked household, but the whole street was blocked by police cars, fire trucks, television crews. More flashing lights than sequins on a stripper’s bra. A uniformed constable tried to divert us, but I brandished my driver’s license complete with bona fide address.

“I live here, officer.”

“Shit, mate,” the cop said, taking in the number. “It’s your house. Be prepared for a shock.” He waved the Cobra up onto the footpath, where we left it standing with its emergency lights flash­ing, adding its twenty cents’ worth of glitter to the festivities. We proceeded on foot. The driving license got the three of us through two lines of tape with Do Not Cross written in endless sequence. Outside the caved-in front fence and gate a detective sergeant I knew of old was talking to some guys in hard hats. He turned, recognized me.

“Who the hell are you?” Detective Rebeiro said.

“Occupier,” I said. “This is the landlord.”

“Fuckinjesus H. Christ,” Mauricio screamed, “what cunt’s done this to me fuckin property there’s a fuckin Mack parked in the hall fuckin truckies they’re all on pills you know no fuckin sleep for forty-eight we’re talking fifty-six hours straight this cunt probably started in Brisbane and got lost south of Wang and thought he was parking the family wagon in the carport in fuckin Perth these guys are so off their faces I take it the cunt’s dead?”

“There’s no one in there,” Rebeiro said.

“Fuckin truck driving itself?”

“Wonders never cease,” the cop said.

§

“You hungry?” I asked Share. A grinding noise told me the whole front of the mansion wanted to lie down for the night. Half the old places in the street had been turned into moderately upscale of­fices, used only during the day and for some occasional skulking at night, but those occupied by accountants on the rise and abortion­ists on the decline were flooded with light from open doors. Half a dozen people stood on the footpath, or nervously in doorways. “Are you mad? I couldn’t eat if I was starving.” That didn’t make much sense to me, and perhaps not even to her, because she added, “What I need’s a stiff drink. Oh, and you can write me out a check for the sable.”

She took a deep breath for some more complaint, and I liked the effect.

“You can be sure my insurers will have the matter in hand on Monday morning,” I said reassuringly. “I’d offer you a double malt, but unfortunately the drinks cabinet has half the staircase on it.” Something rumbled, and more crashings sounded inside. A pasty faced local from two doors up bared his teeth in the flash­ing blue light, unable to decide whether to go back inside his own place and hope for the best or run for his life. “Let’s retrieve Mau­ricio and get a bite to eat. I’ll stand you a drink.”

“You are mad.” She peered this way and that. “Where the hell did I leave my car?”

“Probably on the far side of the Mack.” The huge truck’s arse stuck out into the street. She stalked away. I called, “Look, calm down, okay? Stick with us, we’ll go for a drink to steady your nerves, then I’ll bring you back to your car, okay?”

Mauricio had abandoned his conversation with the cop and was now staring straight into the bright lights of a television crew. “The vicious animal that done this has to be hunted down and prosecuted to the full vigor of the law and they’d better throw away the key before the dog ruins any more priceless Australian icons like my property here. It is typical of the gutless wonders of today’s modern criminal class that he runs away from the scene of the crime and doesn’t face the music like a man.”

“Was there anyone inside, Mr. Cimino?”

“Only my tenant, and he’s a harmless Fang Suet Master who doesn’t have an enemy in the world he’s a man of peace and tran­quility it’s part of his philosophy.”

I took Share by the elbow. “Come on, we’ll leave Mauricio to it. There’s nothing for us to do here. We can come back for your car.”

For a second it looked as if Share was going to march straight up to the cop with a view to helping him with his enquiries. With bad grace, she allowed herself to be escorted back under the two strands of tape. Silently she opened the Cobra’s passenger door and slumped into the seat.

I had just bumped the car over the gutter and completed a three point turn when Mauricio slammed into the back compartment of the Cobra. “They won’t wait for daylight, they’ve got some heavy haulage tow truck coming,” he said, face theatrically black with rage in case any of the cops were watching, tone creamy with satisfaction. “You won’t be sleeping there tonight, Purdue. I hope you’ve made arrangements.”

I turned my head, muttered directly into his ear, “Shut up, for fuck’s sake.” He ferreted under the back of my seat, fished out his gun from under my leather jacket and casually disappeared it under his suit coat. “Christ,” I said with a certain bitterness, “that was thoughtful of you.”

“Well, I couldn’t very well cart the thing around in front of the cops, could I? C’mon, what are you hanging around for? I could eat a horse.”

“He could probably arrange that for you,” Share said wither­ingly. I thought, If only she knew.

The cop let me through, and I drove back into Royal Parade, headed north. “No, they still don’t serve horsemeat to humans in Melbourne,” I said. “Raw fish, yes. Anyone fancy sushi? Sashimi? With a bowl or two of hot saki? Just what you need to soothe the nerves after your house has been demolished by a raving lunatic.”

“You’re going the wrong way,” Share said. “The best Japanese is in East Melbourne, Albert Street, opposite the Fitzroy Gardens.”

“That’s wall to wall surgeons’ consulting rooms,” Mauricio said.

“They have to eat too,” she said. “The Nippon Tuck got four stars in the Age Guide.”

“I have a better idea,” I told her. The Cobra hummed up Syd­ney Road between a lumbering green tram and more four wheel drives than you could shake a yuppie at. People still buying SUVs, amazing. Something had happened to Brunswick lately. I shook my head sadly, and took a left into a bumpy alleyway between a closed-down book store and a classy new fish shop that looked like they’d style your hair while they grilled your batter-free piece of fish. “Have you ever eaten at the Alasya?” I asked Share.

“What, is that place still open? When I was a student nurse.”

“Noisy, but the food is good and Mauricio won’t be tempted to shoot anyone in such a public place.”

He punched me sharply in the back of the head for that, so it was a good thing I’d found the rear of the shop I was looking for and parked the Cobra next to a huge and moderately smelly indus­trial-grade Dumpster bin.

“We can walk from here,” I said.

§

I pulled my jacket on for form’s sake and nipped in to buy several reasonable bottles from a pub that had improved its game mark­edly since Share was a student. At the eatery, the guy carving hot spitting gyros nodded me upstairs to the private room. They serve you fast at the Alasya. Mauricio undid the top button of his pants and tucked in, shoveling flat bread into plates of pastel dips and chewing it up with black oily olives, lamb chops, sliced lamb, lamb kidney, minced lamb and some other foodstuffs derived from the sheep family. Even Share got into the spirit of the thing after a couple of glasses of rather attractive Delatite 1998 unoaked char­donnay. I stuck to red, and it stuck to me, taking away the stiffness in my neck and shoulders and with it my desire to beat Mauricio into a pulp. Most of it.

“That was a really fucking stupid thing to pull, Mauricio.”

“Purdue, you’re a loser, you know that? Can’t tell one bloody day from the next,” he confided to Share. “What kind of business­man is that?”

“I’m not a businessman, you fucking thug,” I told him with dignity. “I’m a feng shui master. I prefer to be addressed as Sensei Purdue.”

§

I stumbled a little as we went back down the alley from light­-smeared Sydney Road, so I put my arm around Share’s shoulders to make certain she was okay. Whistling, Mauricio stopped be­hind us, and I heard a zip unzip and a moment later a cascade of piss against a brick wall. It made my own bladder ache. When we turned into the loading area behind the store where Vinnie lived upstairs, someone was out cold in the driver’s seat of the Cobra.

Share touched my arm. I leaned over and shook a naked shoul­der poking out of an ancient dinner jacket with its arms torn out.

“Wha? Mumph?”

“Time to go beddy-byes, Animal.”

Share whispered, “I don’t think you should—”

Animal convulsed, and was out of the seat like a scary jack-in­-the-box doing its surprise. I looked down into a face that hadn’t seen the sun in about three years, eyes black with something so thick you’d expect the lids to stay gummed up after a single blink, and with more metal stuck through skin than you’d see in a fragged lieutenant in an Iraq tent. Sodium light from a pole high over the alley gleamed revoltingly from a mostly shaven scalp. One hand stuck out in my direction, quick as a flash, while the other beckoned demandingly. I shrugged and pulled out my wallet, placed a crisp new fifty in the outstretched hand. Share snorted, probably wondering if I’d succumbed either to a stand over job or a particularly sleazy invitation to a quickie. The banknote stayed where I put it. Before it could blow away I sighed and deposited another hundred.

“Come to tuck me in, then, daddy?” Animal said in a sulky voice. She gave Share an inscrutable glance.

Feet clattered: crazy Mauricio approached. Animal gave me a big kiss, then turned away and climbed the steps to the back of the shop.

“Hey, sweetheart darling,” Mauricio shouted. “I wish we’d known you were home, you could have eaten with us, Anna­belle.”

My daughter had the door open to Vinnie’s cave by then, and was through it, banging it shut. “Not hungry. Come on, I’ll drive you back to your car.”

§

The heavy haulage tow truck arrived. The hapless Mack had been dragged into the street and half the front of the heritage protected mansion had come with it. The roof on the top floor had caved in. I pulled up a safe distance away, and Share was off like a filly. You could have heard the shriek in Flemington.

“Motherfucker!”

Mauricio had caught a cab home to Fitzroy, so he was well out of it. Wearily, I bolted the driving wheel again and followed her past the behemoth. Reversing it out of the front of the house, they’d managed to run the back wheels up the hood of the Audi and through the windscreen.

Share was shaking, white faced, clutching herself with clenched fists. I suppose she was cold, too, without her fur. Autumn in Mel­bourne is delightful, but even with El Nino and greenhouse it can cool down shockingly fast at night. I thought of lending her my jacket, but that would have involved getting nearer than I planned just at the moment. Gingerly, I held out my cellphone.

“You could call your husband, have him pick you up?”

“He’s in K.L. this week, don’t you listen to anything?”

Oh yeah, that had been somewhere after the second bottle of red.

“Well, a cab. I’ll call you a cab, Share.” I poked around in my jacket pocket, looking from her crushed car to my dismantled home. “I haven’t even got anywhere to sleep, you should think yourself lucky, Share.”

This time the shriek woke the elephants, or maybe one just hap­pened to trumpet in sympathy. It was unearthly. She came at me with nails extended, and I had to hold her forearms or I’d have looked worse in the morning than Animal. Enraged words were pouring from her mouth. I suspected that her inner harmonies were not all they might be, not at that moment.

“I’ll see you in court, Purdue,” she sobbed, pulling herself free, stumbling away from me. “Every penny you own, and then some. I’ll have you in jail for this, you and your thuggish friend Cimino. You’ll hear from my solicitor on Monday morning. I could have you arrested for carrying weapons and, and felonious intent to scam your insurers. No, keep away from me.”

“Share, I was just going to offer you my jacket. You must be freezing.”

“Stay away.” People were peering from behind curtains. What an entertaining night this must have been for these burghers. “Let me drive you home, Share.”

“You’re drunk, you lunatic. Just piss off.”

I sighed heavily. We looked at each in silence for a while. Finally, I said, “So I suppose a fuck’s completely out of the question?”

It took a couple of moments. I suspected the top of her head was about to blow off, but then, thank god, she started to laugh. She leaned against a lamp post, and I smiled back at her as the makeup ran down her cheeks.

“Oh Jesus,” she said, then. “Okay. Drive me to Balwyn, Purdue, then we’ll see.”

§

And that was it for me. I slept like a bloated pig.

Breakfast at Share’s was basic: black coffee and some sort of rusk. The rusk was only a marginal improvement on the prover­bial branding iron, and the coffee did little to soothe the hang-over—I’m a hair-of-the-dog man, myself. I said so to Share, who looked terrible. She seemed unreasonably upset, but then Sharon Lesser was evidently a woman living on the far edge of the edge.

“We drank the dog last night, Purdue. Hair and all.”

The empty vodka bottle abandoned on the kitchen floor seemed

to bear this out. I took a pull of the coffee. It tasted like tin. “Okay, Purdue,” she said from the other side of the kitchen table, visibly pulling herself together, “about the consultation.” “The consultation.” I wanted to lay my head down on the table. “You seem a bit slow,” Share said. “The words are a bit slow coming.”

“My reactions are always a trifle torpid in the morning,” I said. “I’m not a morning person.” My dreams had been black and curdled. I’d half woken needing a piss, convinced I’d heard

Mauricio’s Mack truck slamming through a wall. No, that had been earlier. My house was gone, as planned, but sooner than planned. Oh Christ, the stupid fuck could have killed me. And I didn’t know where Share’s bathroom was, so I’d rolled over and gone again into the murky dark.

“Be that as it may, there’s still the matter of the consultation. I’m your client. I came to see you last night, remember? You know, you were running this feng shui Consulting outfit. You had a really nice office suite in the downstairs part of this really nice heritage listed gaff in really really nice Parkville. Is it all coming back to you? Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“Now?” I said in dull amazement. “You want a feng shui con­sultation at this hour in the morning?”

“Stop fart-arsing around, Mr. Purdue. Do your stuff.”

“If you insist, Share.” I squared my shoulders despite the pain. “What needs to be understood about feng shui is that the words mean ‘wind’ and ‘water’. These two primal elements represent the space between heaven and Earth. In this space, which is our dwelling place, the mighty force known as ‘chi’ eddies and swirls with all the wild grace of wind and water. But for all its grace and power, water can grow stagnant, it can become trapped....”

“It can become putrid, can’t it, Purdue? Fouled with pollutants, dead rats, old condoms, plastic bottles, oil slicks, cryptospiridium, e. coli by the bucket load....”

“You seem to have grasped the concept admirably,” I said. The tinny coffee was all gone, and the chi with it, leaving something foul and brackish in the bottom of the cup. I reached for the pot and poured some more, shuddering slightly. “It is the feng shui consultant’s job to identify those malformed spaces where the mighty force of chi is trapped like the stagnant water to which we have alluded....” I trailed off. I was too old for this sort of thing, I decided. This time yesterday I’d thought of myself as a young fel­low in the prime of life. Bang. Bang. And the house came tumbling down.

“What about Yin and Yang, Purdue?”

“I was coming to that, Share. The concepts Yin and Yang are very important to the practice of feng shui. They are the light and the dark in constant opposition. You don’t have any orange juice, do you? I hesitate to say so, but your coffee is appalling. Mineral water would do at a pinch. I’m a bit dehydrated.”

“Plenty of water in the tap. You’ve got to balance the buggers, haven’t you?”

“What buggers?”

“The Yin and Yang, you’re not brain-damaged by any chance?” I stood, made water flow into a tall glass. Chi sparkled in a beam of sunlight, or it might have been a film of detergent.

“It is indeed necessary to achieve a harmonious accommodation between the forces of Yin and the forces of Yang—”

“—in order to enhance not only one’s physical surroundings but also one’s life, career and interpersonal relationships...that’s right, isn’t it, Purdue?”

“You appear to know almost as much as I do, Share. I see you’ve had occasion to consult a feng shui master before.”

“I’ve read the same bloody website, Purdue.”

“The role of the internet in spreading the good word about feng shui cannot be overestimated. However, a word of warning: full mastery of the insights of this ancient art can be obtained only by many years of study and contemplation at the feet of an enlight­ened master. The temptation to use a little learning gleaned from the internet—”

“Without paying huge amounts to a charlatan like you.”

“—should be avoided at all costs.”

“Sugar, Purdue. Can you tell me something about its Yin and Yang?”

I was getting whiplash. Maybe I’d nodded off for a couple of seconds, the way you do when you are majorly jetlagged, but I hadn’t been out of the country for years. “What?”

“That white stuff, the sort you don’t snort up your nose. You put it in tea.”

I shook my head sadly. I suspected her tea would be as awful as her coffee. “Feng shui has little to say about sugar, Share. Tea in China is traditionally drunk without the addition of either milk or sugar.”

“But the average race horse in Australia is no respecter of tradi­tion and takes its sugar neat.”

Oh. Oh fuck. I felt sicker, all of a sudden. “Just what is this all about, Mrs. Lesser?” Had we or hadn’t we? I honesty couldn’t re­member. Our clothes had been all over the bedroom floor. But I’m notoriously untidy when I’m pissed, it didn’t necessarily signify a night of wild passionate screwing.

“I think you are a man of parts, Purdue. I think it is possible to consult you about a lot more things than this feng shui crap. Or do I mean horseshit?”

“I think it might be a good idea if you said what was on your mind, Share.”

“The stewards were very interested in Canned Fish.”

Yes, correct weight. For about half a minute I just looked at Share and she returned my gaze. She was a good looking woman, all things considered, although she looked terribly strained. Just how far had I managed to get with her? Were we known unto each other? We’d certainly woken up in the same bed. I couldn’t remember a fucking thing, literally. Dreams of my house falling about my ears, that was all.

“Canned Fish,” Share said, just in case I’d missed it.

“It’s a bit early in the morning for canned fish, darling. Kippers, perhaps.”

“No it’s not.”

“Well you tell me,” I said. “Just what do you know about Canned Fish?”

“That the nag suddenly developed a massive turn of speed in the 3.30 at Flemo a couple of years back. A few very select punters did rather well out of it. Your good self included.”

“Jesus, this is history, Share. We’re talking about a bygone era.”

“We’re talking about pet food. About three quarters of a tonne of pet food.”

“Poor old Canned,” I said. “He broke a leg a year later. He was a little battler, but there was nothing we could do. The bullet was a kindness.”

“Cut the crap. About the 3.30 at Flemo. Before the nag got turned into Cat-O-Meat.”

“Just who are you, Share?”

“I’m someone who wants to know about tanking a horse up with sugar. That’s what you used, isn’t it? Just sugar. Nothing detectable by sophisticated methodology. No fancy drugs, no ste­roids, no growth hormones. Just the old CSR table sugar.” CSR was Colonial Sugar Refinery, the Australian byword for white sugar since my parents’ childhoods, and their parents. I wondered for a moment if the company had changed its name to Postcolo­nial. “The poor animal went hyperactive, it had to run like stink to burn up the sugar.”

I looked out the large window at the large grassy back garden. Tall native trees blocked out the neighbors. “All horses like sugar lumps,” I said. “You want to hold your hand very flat, though. Just let the lump sit on the palm of your hand. Don’t curl your fingers or you’ll get nipped.”

She regarded me with scorn. “My understanding is that the horse had half a sack of sugar in it. I don’t think it ate that off some guy’s hand.”

“All right,” I said. Her hair was wild and uncombed, a look I approved of, and I still couldn’t remember, but it would have been a good idea. “I’ll tell you. You get a jug and you put some water in it. Then you put some sugar in the water and stir it with a stick.”

“And the horse drinks it?”

“No. You get a plastic tube, a funnel and the bottom half of a hypodermic. You connect them all up and jam the hypodermic into a vein in the nag’s neck. Blood spurts out through the needle and into the tube, so you’ve got to raise the tube to a height greater than the animal’s heart can pump the blood.” The roof of my mouth felt dry, all the wine and vodka presumably. “Are you sure you don’t want to take notes? I could help you draw a diagram.”

“I think I can remember all this, Purdue.”

“So you need a chair. It’s very important to have the chair ready before you start. Otherwise blood goes everywhere. You stand on the chair and hold the tube with the funnel above your head with one hand and pour the sugar solution from the jug with the other. Gravity does the rest. The solution pushes the blood back into the horse and then trickles in after it.”

“Shit, really, you just pour the stuff straight into the blood­stream, no digestion necessary.”

“That’s about right,” I said. “You want to know this why?” “We might have forgotten the chair.” She got to her feet, stepped into the pantry, came out with a half-height aluminum stepladder she lifted easily in one hand. “I assume this’d do the trick.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You and me, Mr. Purdue. After I’ve made a phone call or two to line up the equipment, we’re going for a little drive into the country.”

“No need to be formal, Share,” I said. “Call me Tom.”

§

I blame my name for leading me into a life of crime. What I told Share was true, as far as it went, but it didn’t go all the way, not by a long chalk. My mad parents were flower children years before Rupert Murdoch and his yellow press mates ever heard of the term. With a handful of their arty mates, they raised us kids in a pile of dirty mud brick mansions and hovels out Eltham way, miles north of Melbourne, still the edge of the scrub when I was a boy. Other artist colonies had the same idea, but my mob was the weirdest of the lot. From the beginning none of the men had shaved, and none of the women either, and this had started before Women’s Lib or third stage feminism had ever been heard of. These hirsute seekers after truth wove their own cloth, milked their own scrawny goats, and taught us in a kind of Steiner curriculum designed by Martin Kundalini Richardson, king of the loonies, a sort of unsuccessful mix of L. Ron Hubbard, George Adamski and ancient aboriginal myths as interpreted on the back of a Corn Flakes’ packet.

You wouldn’t credit the extent of the brain-damaging crap they shoveled down our gullets. Transforming into bandicoots by the light of the full moon. A tunnel reached from the depths of Ayers Rock to the lair of the Hidden Masters in Tibet. “Ayers Rock” is what we whites used to call Uluru, that big slab of red stone in the middle of the Australian continent that the aborigines revere. The navel of the universe, we were taught. Joe Bannister and I used to snigger and wonder if the arse of the world would fall off if you got a really big fucking Phillips head and unscrewed it. That earned us gentle reprimands and extra hours churning up the slurry for the mud bricks. I didn’t mind that one bit, although it could get cold sloshing in the wet; it was better than learning the sixteen portals of the reptile mutants who secretly ran the world. The Queen of England and the rest of the royal family were among their number. In fact, they and certain other leading Jewish dynas­ties were the world’s leading reptile invaders. I swallowed it all until I was about fourteen, when I was already a bad kid, and then one day I woke up and looked around me at the real world and started shaking my head. I suppose I can’t complain; it gave me a rich line of bullshit for my future careers.

None of this is what turned me to crime, not directly. That happened when I was twelve and three badly dressed State educa­tion department heavies, one male and two females, visited our classroom and sent in a report that eventually reached the Min­ister. “Damned jackbooted busybodies!” thundered Kundalini Richardson, but it was too late, we were pinched. I spent the next six years at Eltham High, going through culture shock roughly equivalent to a Stone Age Papuan being hijacked and put to work for Amway.

“Children, we have three new students joining us for class to­day. Stand up, boys. I’ll ask you each to tell us your name, then sit down and open your geography book at page 121, the Principal Imports of Peru. You there, son.”

I jumped up breezily, grinned around at the class. The other kids had been nervous, scared even. I’m the extroverted type, I knew I was in for heaps of fun.

“Recherché,” I said loudly.

Ears pricked up. A ripple of manic joy passed across the class­room, but I was too dumb to understand what it was that had happened.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m Recherché,” I said, “and this here is my cousin Con, that’s short for Contrapuntal, and this bloke’s—”

The ripple had became a haze of muttering. Some residue of survival instinct made me stumble into silence. The teacher was a burly youth with hair parted firmly on the left, some hapless bonded victim of the Education Department fated by his contract to penal servitude in the sticks, or near enough. He stepped for­ward and his fists clenched.

“Are you taking the piss, son? You having a lend of me?”

I blinked at him. “Eh?”

“I asked for your name. Just tell us your name.” He consulted a list. “If he’s Con, you’d be Tom, is that right?”

Triumphant glances were being exchanged across the rows of desks, and a soggy spitball hit me behind the ear. I flinched, rubbed at it, stared around. A fat kid with boils stared at me with hatred. I looked back at the teacher.

“My name is Recherché Doubting Thomas Purdue,” I said care­fully. “Sometimes Outsiders just call me Tom....” But the room was in uproar. That set the tone for the next few years. One day I’m going to borrow Mauricio’s gun and drive out to Eltham and blow fucking Martin Kundalini Richardson’s noble Alzheimerish head right off his fucking shoulders.

Share stowed the step ladder in the back of the Cobra, which somehow I’d parked in the brick carport at the side without smashing it. The ladder didn’t fold up as neatly as Mauricio. It stuck straight into the air like some mediaeval torture rack. There was no way we could carry the thing and put the canopy up. I didn’t really feel like uncocooned driving. But there again, maybe the wind in my face would be good for the hangover. Share looked at me with undisguised mistrust.

“Sure you are up to driving?”

“No,” I said.

“Give me the keys.”

I handed them over meekly.

§

For a while Share drove in silence. She was heading East. I fum­bled in the glove box and found a pair of shades and put them on. They cut down the glare a bit, but did nothing for the headache. I decided to take my mind off my condition with some polite con­versation.

“So what line of work are you in, Share,” I said. Jesus, I must have quizzed her on all this last night over ten kinds of lamb.

“Christ, Tom, you’ve got a memory like a sieve. Alzheimer’s already? Or did they smack you around the head a bit too much in prison?”

Fuck, she knew that as well. “Disgraceful, I know. I put it down to the vodka.”

She shot me a tired look, reconciled to my inadequacies. “In­vestment advice. Risk assessment. Risk management. Financial services. Import/export. That sort of thing.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said, and my eyes drifted away to the passing street life.

“Somebody’s got to do it.”

“Big firm?”

“Big enough. Just me.”

“A one woman outfit?”

“Exactly.”

“Saving on the secretarial side of things. I do it myself.”

“Christ no, I’ve got secretaries. Two of them.”

“A three woman outfit, then.”

“I don’t think Wozza and Muttonhead would like to hear that.”

“Wozza?” I said. “Wozza O’Toole? Muttonhead Lamb?” “Those are my men.”

“They’re your secretaries?”

“You got problems with that?”

“I...um...I had occasion to meet Mr. O’Toole once.”

“Yeah, he told me: Remand yard, Pentridge, 1993.”

Pentridge. Good god, that brought back memories, and a hun­dred years of scuttlebutt traded by old crims. The great gray ter­rible walls, topped with barbed wire, guard towers with guns at each corner. Jika-Jika, the dreadful hell hole for the worst of men. Gardens where bodies were buried in shallow graves, they said. The place had been closed for years. And now some hungry bas­tards had reopened it as a district of expensive homes. A veritable walled and gated community, Pentridge Village, not five miles from Vinnie’s shop. Lovely view of the Coburg Lake, now they’d removed the razor wire. Fuck, nothing was beyond parody in this day and age.

“Why are you smiling? Fond memories of your cell in Pentridge?”

“No. Thinking of Wozza as a secretary, that’d make anyone smile. Bloke couldn’t write his name. Couldn’t add two and two.”

Share shrugged. “The education system had totally failed him. He was a lost cause from day one at kindergarten.”

“So, how come...?”

“You’ve got to do something inside, you should know that. Might as well do a bit of Adult Literacy. Get yourself a cushy bil­let in the prison library, read a few books. Matriculate. Enroll in a TAFE. Get yourself a degree. It impresses the bejesus out of the parole board.”

“A degree? Wozza?”

“Bachelor of Information Technology.”

“Fuck me, all I did in Seattle was lift weights.”

“Wozza won’t talk down to you, Tom. He’s an egalitarian sort—wears his distinction lightly.”

“What about Muttonhead?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me

Muttonhead is now a doctor of semiotics.”

“No, Mutton’s more your action type.”

“Standover man?” Mutt was about three feet tall.

“Don’t be unkind. Somebody’s got to hold the ladder.”

“What ladder?”

“The one behind your head.”

“Mutton’s going to be at the track?”

“Wozza too. We do these sorts of things as a team.”

“Look,” I said. “Just what sort of ham-hocked nag do you have on the card?”

Share Lesser gave me a bland look. “Who’s talking about horses?”

“I thought we were going to some country race meeting.”

“After a fashion, but it’s private. And the sheikh’s not interested in horses.”

“What sheikh?”

“Abdul bin Sahal al Din.”

I was getting fed up. “I think you’d better explain things, Share. This is starting to look like false pretenses. This is starting to look like kidnapping, and in my own car at that.”

“All will be revealed, Tom. And I wouldn’t fuss about the car after what your oaf did to mine last night.”

I looked sideways at Share. She was driving with considerable aplomb—that’s the only word to describe it. If there was an opening in the traffic, she’d switched lanes and taken advantage almost before the guy in the other lane blinked. Quite often the guy in the other lane registered his displeasure with his horn. Share ignored them all. I did too. I decided against pursuing the matter of the race meeting. Just go with the flow. Even if the flow took us straight into the dubious company of Wozza O’Toole and Muttonhead Lamb.

Share was right. I’d met Wozza and Mutton years ago in Pen­tridge. We’d all been on remand. Me on a charge of grievous bodily harm against my father-in-law, and the other two on a bog-stan­dard bank hold-up: stockings, sawn-offs, plastic shopping bag for the contents of the till, hotwired getaway car and a wheelman who drove straight through a set of red lights and was sideswiped by a mob of hoons in a lowered Customline. The hoons piled out of the wreck brimming with righteous road rage, and were settling to the task of beating the shit out of Wozza, Mutton and the hapless wheelman when they discovered the plastic bag. By the time the cops arrived the hoons had done a runner with the proceeds, leav­ing the other three to begin their life behind bars with nothing in the kitty. I’d hired a Queen’s Counsel by the name of Muldoon who charged like a tax collector and drank with the vice squad. Despite my prior record in the USA, the case against me proved very argu­able, the terrible strain of the circumstances, your honor, and the police evidence curiously muted. I left court a free man without a stain on my character and never saw my in-laws again. Wozza and co. were on legal aid. They got eight years each with remissions.

§

Share was pointing the Cobra straight at the Dandenongs. I knew of no race course in this direction, but I said nothing. The traffic thinned. As the Cobra picked up speed, the wind began to howl in the rungs of the ladder. Civilized discourse was now impossible anyway. The Cobra comes into its own on a hill climb and Share exercised it to its full potential on the roads that dipped and twisted through the greenery of the Dandenongs. By the time she suddenly left the road, shot down an unmarked track between towering rows of mountain ash and swung round onto a gravel drive in front of a mansion, I had no idea where we were. Share didn’t stop but continued past the mansion and over a cattle grid. Finally she ground to a halt outside a row of fake half-timber stables, painted black and white like a Christmas card.

“Where are we?”

“Shangri-La,” she said.

“I can believe it.”

We left the car and entered the stables. They were gloomy and empty of horseflesh. The only inhabitants were two guys in over­alls sitting on a feed bin drinking tea from a thermos. Well, it might have been tea.

“Purdue, you old bastard. Long time no see, fella!”

“G’day, Wozza,” I said.

“Looking fit, Purdue, me old mate, looking bloody fit.”

“Not that fit,” I said.

“You could go a few rounds these days, don’t tell me you couldn’t.”

Wozza bounded from the feed bin and playfully danced up to me, sparring with his fists. His fingers still carried prison tats. Written across the knuckles of both hands was a crude invitation to sex—one letter per knuckle. I hadn’t run across the guy for years, but he hadn’t changed much, you still wouldn’t trust him as far as you could kick him. I sidestepped Wozza and made my way to the feed bin. Mutton, on the other hand, had changed. Someone had cut or bitten his nose off.

“G’day, Mutton,” I said, extending my hand and trying to look at his face without surprise. He was a shrimp of a man, hardly bigger than a twelve year old, too small to be a jockey which had been the disappointment of his life.

Mutton shook my hand without leaving the feed bin. His greet­ing was indistinct. The nose job hadn’t done much for his diction. I turned back to Wozza.

“Share tells me you’re into Information Technology these days.”

“It’s the future,” Wozza said. “Information is power. Simple as that.”

“I wouldn’t mind a bit of information about what we’re doing here,” I said. “Pleasant though these surroundings are, and how­ever delightful the company.”

“We’re expediting things,” Share said. “Speeding them up.” “What things?”

“Come and take a squizz, Purdue, me old china,” Wozza said. “Come and take a decko.”

Wozza and Share turned and walked out of the stables, I fol­lowed and behind me I could hear Muttonhead lumbering his way off the feed bin. We followed a well-worn track through the forest for a few hundred meters. The track ended at a gate and beyond the gate was a small paddock. It was well hidden, entirely sur­rounded by trees. With a slight shock I realized that the field was completely free of marijuana plants. Something moved against the trees at the other end of the field. I leaned against the gate and studied the shape, the slightly rocking motion of the dappled pale brown against the grays and green of the forest.

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“Ship of the desert,” Wozza said.

§

I stared in disbelief at the animal. It’s not the sort of thing you ex­pect to stumble over in a Victorian paddock, not outside a circus. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if it had been an elephant. “We’re not going to try and dope that thing,” I said.

“Nile Fever,” Share said. “She’s fast, but could be faster.” “Why the buggeration do you want a fast camel?”

“They race them in Saudi and the United Arab Emirates,” Share said. “It’s big time. Very big money indeed.”

“Forgive the observation,” I said, “but we are not in Saudi. Saudi is a very long way from here. So too was Dubai last time I consulted my atlas.”

“Jeez, I hope your passport’s up to date,” Wozza said. “Hasn’t been impounded by the police or nothing.”

“Get knotted,” I said.

“Just kidding,” Wozza said.

I looked at Mutton’s face. “Don’t tell me the camel bit your schnozz off?”

The Mutt expressed disappointment in me. “Nile’s as gentle as a baby!”

“The sheikh is dropping in for a road test at eleven o’clock,”

Share said. “By then we want Nile Fever at her tip top best.”

“In the pink of condition,” Wozza said. “The mistress of the track. Nile Fever, Queen of the Desert. Export quality DNA.”

“You want the animal full of sugar,” I said.

“Right in one,” Share said. “Correct weight.”

Behind me Muttonhead said something I didn’t catch, but Wozza said, “Yeah, right, Mutton, no worries.”

“This sheikh guy is buying Australian camels with a view to rac­ing them in the Middle East?” I said. How would you get them out of the country? Not the sort of thing you could smuggle in your underpants. DNA, Woz had said. Did they want the sperm? Ova, I corrected myself. Could you get viable, transportable ova out of a camel? Or even fertilized embryos?

“Best in the world,” Wozza was saying with every evidence of national pride. “Free of disease. Guaranteed syphilis-free, which is hard to find anywhere else. Go like the clappers. Your average OPEC billionaire pays top dollar. But the beast’s gotta perform. No three legged numbers in Jeddah, mate.”

I looked at my companions in prospective crime and didn’t especially relish the odds. I was beginning to regard Share as lethal. It seemed prudent to show willing. “What you’ve got to understand,” I said with all the authority I could muster, “is that the beast—be it horse, camel or anteater—starts to metabolize the sugar as soon as it’s...er...supplied. It can’t store it, not even in its hump. If that animal over there is to be up to speed at eleven o’clock, we shouldn’t give it anything until half past ten at the earliest. Quarter-to would be better still.”

And, I thought, let’s hope the fucking sheikh arrives sooner than expected.

§

Prime racing bloodstock can be skittish, nervy before the jump. You can almost see the adrenaline seething in their arteries, which stand out pulsing on their necks like living ropes. Canned Fish, though, had been tranquil; doping the poor bugger presented few difficulties. The gelding usually took a relaxed view of the sport of kings. He was phlegmatic to fault. That’s what made an injec­tion of pure sugar work on him like a charm, like Seven League Boots.

Camels, they looked likely to be a different story again.

I regarded Nile Fever with a blend of disapproval and sheer fright. The old Canned Fish had been fourteen hands high. This evil-eyed brute was twenty at the shoulder, taller than the top of my head, and her single camelhair coat-colored hump rose over me like a low hill of hairy sand. It wasn’t that big, the hump. I’d always imagined them looking like mountain tops. She met my eye with a rolling, yellowish orb of her own, and her lips peeled back. Teeth like slabs of rock. Coral-red palate that reminded me of one of the gaudier caskets in Ben Crosby’s undertakers’ showroom in Sydney Road. Breath like an open sewer. I coughed, and started taking in the rank air through my mouth instead.

Someone’s going to have to climb up a ladder, I told myself, and whack a bag of Colonial Sugar Refinery’s finest into this brute. Not me, I swore. Nile Fever shuffled on her great padded feet, banging me with one roughly callused knee. The vow was pointless. I knew better, of course. Muggins would get stuck with the job. Again.

“Is it Indian or African?” I asked. Two big fat toes per hoof, spread out in the grass. Not the sort of hoof you could nail an iron shoe to.

“That’s elephants,” Wozza told me in a scornful tone. “What’s happened to you, Tombo, ’roids ruined your brain?”

“She’s an Arabian camel,” Share told me, looking up with sat­isfaction at the beast, “bred from the finest feral herds of desert Australia.”

“A brumby!”

“You could put it that way. Hybrid vigor, Darwin at his best. Trounce those effete Saudi dancers.”

Maybe so. It was a good selling line, anyway. I reached up and patted the animal’s back.

“Don’t mares have a decent sized hump?”

“Cow,” Wozza said. “It’s ‘cow’, not ‘mare’.”

“Fuck,” I said, “whatever. I don’t want to marry it. I don’t even want to buy it.”

“Just give her some sugar,” Mutton said with a snigger. “Arabic or Bactrian,” Share shared with me.

“Eh?” But it came back to me instantly, then, from Eltham high school, along with a blast of memory, stale banana skins in the hot playground sun, dried white bread sandwiches with Vegemite from the tuck shop, milk that had gone off. “Yeah, right. One hump or two.”

“As the actress said to the bishop,” Mutton said.

“Nile Fever is a young ’un”, Share told me, ignoring him point­edly. “Look at these lean legs, what a beauty. We’re keeping her on a strict diet, you wouldn’t want her overweight.”

I’d heard that camels hissed and spat, but apart from the evil eye Nile Fever was behaving herself like a lady of breeding. I looked at my watch. Getting on for 10:30, the moment of truth.

“Time to saddle up,” Wozza told his mate, checking his own watch.

“Right you are.” We led the camel back to the stables, took her in under cover. This wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted some keen-eyed passer-by to witness. Skipping happily like a kid, Muttonhead disappeared into a side room while I dragged the ladder over from the Cobra. He emerged after a while with the strangest apparatus I’d ever seen outside a bondage brothel, two X-shaped pieces of beautifully grained timber connected by bars. He’d changed out of overalls into somewhat tatty silks in pink and gold, and wore yellow-tinted goggles and what Animal would have called a skid lid in place of the traditional jockey’s cap. Without his nose, he looked like some kind of alien from a horse-drawn UFO.

“Come on, sweetie,” he called up to the beast, “come to pop­pa.” Strike me pink, the brute lowered herself groaning to her knees, joints flung out sideways like a hairy Transformer toy half­way between robot and Humvee, or maybe a collapsed K-Mart sun chair. Mutt strapped the harness in place, one X in front of the small hump, the other behind. Now I saw that he had a comfort­ably padded seat at the back, right over Nile’s tail. He gentled the animal with soft words, patting her nose, then ran a thin thread through the nostril peg. He settled himself in the saddle.

“Good Christ,” I said, “is that all you’ve got in the way of reins?”

“It’s the wrists,” he assured me. “A horse, you can pull him up with a jerk. This little beaut, she reads a man’s mind.”

“Just as well,” I said. “That thread would snap the moment you put any pressure on it.”

“No need to. Nile Fever and me, we’re like that.” He raised a hand with two ugly thick-knuckled fingers crossed.

“Let’s get a move on,” Share said, taking charge. “They’ll be here any minute. Can we run the sugar in while she’s down on her knees like this?”

Safer than teetering on the top of a kitchen ladder, I thought, but Wozza was shaking his head.

“Break a leg if she took fright,” he said. He gave me a hard look. “Wouldn’t want another Canned Fish on our hands, and before the race has even been run.”

I said nothing, I was sick of explaining that it hadn’t been my fault. Wozza brought the ladder over. The animal groaned and bawled to its feet at Mutton’s instruction, shuffling suspiciously as it saw me dig into the bag Woz had supplied.

“What you do,” I told Wozza, “is—”

“Not me, mate, I’m scared of heights.”

I looked at Share, holding out the instruments of acceleration.

“In these clothes?” She was pulling a beautifully patterned silk scarf over her head. “Get real, Purdue. I have to talk turkey with the Sheikh.”

It just seemed easier, suddenly, to get it over and done with. Without another word I mixed the sugar in a bowl with a couple of liters of warm water from the thermos Wozza handed me, poured it into a glass drip container that might have been stolen from a hospital ward.

“Hold her steady, for fuck’s sake, Muttonhead,” I said.

“Apples,” he said, and crooned to the beast. I thought I heard him saying something like Ata Allah. God Almighty, the world’s gone mad when old Mutt starts babbling in Arabic. I wondered if he’d converted to Islam. Surely not, there had to be some sort of limit.

I climbed the ladder cautiously, clung to the rough fur, feeling for the arteries in the neck. Nile Fever didn’t feel feverish, she felt cool. She swung her head to inspect me, nearly knocking me off the steps. Little ears that seemed to be lined with fur. Made sense, keeps the blowing sand out. Big doe eyes, with sexy lashes. I caught myself gazing into them. Something—Oh. Double sets of eyelashes in each eye, thick and curly as a supermodel’s. Who would have thought. I gave her a wink, and sank the needle deep into her neck.

Nile Fever flinched but then settled down chewing the cud. At least I think that’s what she was doing. I didn’t enquire. I stood on the ladder and poured the dissolved sugar into the funnel. In truth, pouring sugar into an animal can become a bit tedious, a bit boring. The solution goes in slowly through the hypodermic and you’ve got to keep topping the level up in the tube. Your arms get tired. In hospitals they have those steel pole things with hooks for the plastic bag: drip stands I think they’re called. Nurses have better things to do than play at being human skyhooks. I tried to distract myself by inventing a snappy one liner about it being harder to get sugar through the eye of the needle than a camel into heaven. The formula escaped me and anyway I didn’t think Mut­ton had the necessary cultural referents.

I said to Share, “You sure this sheikh snoozer knows the way here?”

“Doubt it,” she said.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “What if he gets lost?”

“His chauffeur will know the way. You don’t think he drives himself, do you?”

“Buggered if I know,” I said. “What sort of ride has he got?” “I don’t know. A Roller, something like that.”

I could feel the sugar starting to take effect. I took the needle out, disconnected it from the plastic tubing. You wouldn’t want a needle-stick injury from a camel, God knows what you might contract.

“Get rid of this, would you, Woz?” He took the bloody needle from me, left me the tubing, and with his usual furtive manner emp­tied the needle into a small plastic bottle, which he wrapped up in a sheet torn from his newspaper. Worried about infection himself, fair enough. He went over to the camel. Mutton leaned down in the saddle, and they put their heads together and murmured. Mutt placed something carefully in one pocket, maybe a rabbit’s foot for luck. I noticed then that Nile’s cud chewing was becoming more determined, a trifle manic, the tempo was increasing.

“Come on, gentlemen, enough farting about.”

We walked her back to the paddock. She was starting to shift her weight around on her feet as she swayed beside us. Keen for a canter.

The air began to vibrate like a sewing machine on speed.

§

The chopper came in low over the trees. You’d think the pilot was doing an evade the way he swung the crate around, tilting it. I looked for the police markings—sorry to disappoint, officers, no funny plants growing here, just a routine veterinary procedure on an ordinary, everyday camel. But the chopper was a private ma­chine and it was about to land.

“The fucking sheikh,” Share shouted above the noise. The downdraft from the landing chopper hurled dust and grass and all manner of crap at us. Nile Fever took off like a shot, Mutton clinging on for dear life. The animal wanted out, but it was a gal­loper not a jumper, it wasn’t going to attempt the fence, although the brute slammed against it once or twice, knocking a post free of the ground and leaving a bright red streak of blood from the small open wound in its neck. Within a minute it had done a complete circuit of the paddock, rolling and bucking like a ship at sea. As the noise from the chopper abated I could hear Mutton yelling at the beast. His precise words were unclear, but their intent wasn’t: Mutton was trying to rein the beast in with no reins at his disposal other than foul words. Plainly, the single string had snapped in­stantly. Nothing connected the rider to the animal’s head. Mutton was a steerage passenger on a ship of fools of the desert.