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Lisa, who was English, had only been in Australia for two years. She had moved to Melbourne from Perth a few months ago and the terrain was all new to her. ‘When were you last here?’ she asked.
‘Not for some years – ten maybe. Used to come here camping with my parents, when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘It was our favourite place. You’re going to love it. Yee-hah!’
With a sudden burst of exuberance, he tramped the accelerator. The ute shot forward, making a sharp left on to the highway with a squeal of its tyres and a roar of thunder from its exhausts.
After a few minutes they passed a sign on a pole that read BARWON RIVER, then MJ slowed down and started looking to his right as they passed another saying STONEHAVEN AND POLLOCKS FORD.
After a while he braked sharply and turned right on to a sandy track. ‘I’m pretty sure this is it!’ he said.
They bounced along for five hundred yards or so. Wide open country to their right, bushes to their left and an embankment down to a river they couldn’t see. They passed a steel-girder bridge sitting on old brick buttresses to their left, then thick brush obscured the view. The track suddenly dipped sharply, then rose again on the far side. After a few minutes it widened out for some yards and ended, turning into scrub grass beyond which was dense brush.
MJ brought the ute to a halt and put on the handbrake. A cloud of dust swirled over them. ‘Welcome to paradise,’ he said.
They kissed.
Then, after some moments, they climbed out. Into total warm silence. The engine pinged. There was the scent of dried grasses in the air. A bowerbird made a sound like someone whistling yoo hoo!, then was silent. Down below them, snaking into the distance, was shimmering water and further away, beneath the fierce late-morning sun, there were bald brown hills sporting just the occasional acacia or eucalyptus tree. The silence was so intense, for a moment they felt they could be the only people on the planet.
‘God,’ Lisa said, ‘this is so beautiful.’
A fly buzzed around her face and she batted it away. Another one came and she batted that away too.
‘Good old flies,’ MJ said. ‘This is the right spot!’
‘Obviously they remember you!’ she said, as a third one landed on her forehead.
He gave her a playful punch, before arcing his hand several times in rapid succession in front of his face, giving an Aussie salute to flap away more flies that were pestering him. Then, with his arm around her, MJ steered Lisa to a gap in the brush.
‘This is where we used to launch our canoe,’ he said.
She peered down a steep, sandy slope overgrown with bracken that was a natural slipway into the river, a good thirty yards below. The water, about twenty yards wide, was as still as a millpond. A few damsel flies sat on the surface, feeding off mosquito larvae or laying eggs, and more hovered just above. Reflections of the brush on the far bank appeared in sharp focus.
‘Wow!’ she said. ‘Wowwwwwww! That is amazing.’
Then she noticed the series of white sticks planted all the way down the slipway. Each of them had precise ruled markings in black.
‘When I was a kid,’ MJ said, ‘the water level was up to here.’ He pointed at the top marker.
Lisa counted eight exposed rulers, all the way down to the water. ‘It’s dropped this much?’
‘Good old global warming,’ he replied.
Then she saw the looped hangman’s rope fixed to the overhanging branch of a tree thick as an elephant’s leg.
‘We used to jump off that!’ MJ said. ‘It was just a short drop.’
Now it was a good five yards.
He peeled off his T-shirt. ‘Coming in?’
‘Let’s put the tent up first!’
‘Shit, Lisa, we’ve got the whole day to put the tent up! I’m hot!’ He continued stripping. ‘And the flies hate the water.’
‘Tell me what the water’s like – I’ll think about it!’
‘You’re weak as piss!’
Lisa laughed. MJ stood naked, then disappeared for some moments into the undergrowth. Moments later, she saw him crawling along the overhanging branch. He reached the rope, which looked dangerously frayed, rolled over and clung to it.
‘Be careful, MJ!’ she shouted, suddenly alarmed.
Holding on with one arm, he beat his chest with the other, making a series of Tarzan whoops. Then he swung out over the river, his bare feet almost touching the surface of the water. He swung back and forward in several arcs, then he let go and dropped with a loud splash.
Lisa watched anxiously. Moments later he surfaced and tossed his head, shaking wet hair away from his face. ‘It’s beautiful! Get in here, wuss!’
He struck out, doing a couple of powerful crawl strokes, then suddenly he raised his head with a pained expression.
‘Fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘Shit! Owww! Bloody stubbed my toe on something!’
Lisa laughed.
MJ duck-dived. Moments later his head broke the surface and there was a look of panic on his face.
‘Shit, Lisa!’ he said. ‘There’s a car down here! There’s a fucking car in the river!’
23
Lorraine stared in numb disbelief. The unlit cigarette between her fingers was quite forgotten. A young, female reporter, talking urgently to the camera, seemed totally unaware that the South Tower, just a few hundred yards behind her, was collapsing.
It was dropping straight down out of the sky, disappearing inside itself, neatly, almost unbearably neatly, as if for one brief instant Lorraine was witnessing the greatest conjuring trick ever performed. The reporter talked on. Behind her, cars and people were disappearing under rubble and swirling dust. Others were ru
Oh, Jesus, doesn’t she realize?
Still unaware, the reporter continued reading off her autocue or from a feed in her ear.
LOOK BEHIND YOU! she wanted to scream at the woman.
Then finally the woman did turn. And lost the plot totally. She took a startled, stumbling step sideways, followed by another. People were ru
Lorraine, still in just her bikini bottoms, heard various shouts. The image on the screen cut to a jerky, hand-held shot of a massive slab of steel and glass and masonry crashing on to a red and white fire truck. It smashed through the ladder, then flattened the whole mid-section, as if this was a plastic toy truck a child had just stamped on.
A woman’s voice was shouting, over and over, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God.’
There were cries. Darkness for a second, then another handheld shot, a young man limping past holding a blood-drenched towel against a woman’s face, helping her along, trying to pull her faster, ahead of the cloud that was gaining on them.
Then they were in a studio news set. Lorraine watched the anchor, a man in his forties in a jacket and tie. The images she had been viewing were all up on monitors behind his head. He looked grim.
‘We’re getting reports that the South Tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed. We are also going to bring you the latest on the situation at the Pentagon in just a few moments.’
Lorraine tried to light the cigarette, but her hand was shaking too much and the lighter fell to the floor. She waited, unable to bear taking her eyes from the screen for even one second in case she missed a glimpse of Ro