Draw the Brisbane Line (25 page)

Jenny stared down at the ugly bed and desperately wanted to lie down on it. Every part of her was in some unpleasant flavour of pain, and all she wanted to do was get off her feet and sleep it all away

But she couldn’t.

Kirsty was still stuck out in traffic on the burning highway, and the thick fuckers in the helicopter wouldn’t go to her when they were already in the air. She wanted to scream when she thought they might have flown right over the top of Kirsty and Doyle. She wanted to storm the cabin and force them down, and she might have done that if Banksia hadn’t been there to hold her back.  The wild blonde adventurer had pressed her mouth right up against Jenny’s ear, almost engulfing it, and said, ‘We’ll get her. Don’t worry, we’ll get her.’

The chopper touched down in the middle of an open exhibition space in the RNA showgrounds. Two more Blackhawks crouched beside it under piercingly-bright floodlights, and Jenny, Banksia and Tait all bent low as they jogged away from the beating blades. Al kept himself military-straight, unperturbed by the giant blender over his head. Soldiers guarding the small fleet of aircraft with automatic rifles nodded to them as they moved through a tunnel between two stands of seats. Jenny had mistaken them for regular army in their camouflage gear until she noticed a maroon badge sewn over the breast of one of the uniforms, a straight-edged map of Queensland. Al led them out of the showgrounds and a short way down the road to an old hotel, the Brisbane Manor. He might have been speaking, but all Jenny could hear was the aural residue of the Blackhawk’s blade-slapping. They were flanked on both sides by conspicuously-armed soldiers as they made the short journey, and Jenny couldn’t understand what threat they were possibly being shielded from — until, through a gap in the men, she saw the familiar scramble of a television news crew, cameras and bright lights and an immaculately-presented female reporter trying to move quickly without disturbing her hair.  Yvette Winterson, the grand dame of Australian television.  Flashes began firing from cameras, illuminating the early morning darkness of the street. Jenny might have been freaked out if she wasn’t so accustomed to the experience. She heard Winterson calling her name, but she kept her face aimed at the moving feet in front of her.

Al said his people were all staying in the hotel — it was certainly busy enough, uniformed men moving through the hallways and coming in and out of rooms which were more dorm than suite. Jenny, Banksia and Tait were all given their own rooms.  The first thing Jenny did when she closed the door behind her was strip off her clothes and take a shower. Despite the warmth in the room and the humidity hanging in the air like an invisible hot fog, she cranked the shower up as hot as she could tolerate. The fixtures were old but the pressure was strong, and as the scalding spray reopened small scratches and cuts on her arms and on her legs, she welcomed the multitude of stings and nips which crackled over her body like electricity. It woke her up, and she watched the dirt wash off her body like paint, and swirl down the drain. She ran her hand over her naked belly, feeling the swell of the new life inside her. The casual observer wouldn’t see enough to reveal her condition, but in a few weeks those camera-wielding pricks outside would begin to realise there was more than loose clothing behind Jennifer Lucas’s altered appearance — and when that happened, her relationship with Dave wouldn’t just come under the spotlight. It would be seared, sand-blasted, pulled apart and reassembled as something so far from reality as to be almost alien. They were already put up on such a high pedestal, the golden couple … if they slipped off, the fall would surely kill them.

Dave. Where was he? Somewhere further south, on the road with a killer.  She missed having him close to her, and just speaking to him briefly on the phone reminded her what she’d been missing out on during their stupid bloody fight: him.  His voice.  His warmth.  His capacity for both understanding and completely missing the point at the same time.

For instance: the fight.  The big one.  In Dave’s mind, it was no doubt all about what would be best for their child, and that Jenny was disproportionately concerned with the continued climb of her Hollywood star.  Such a moron.  Her career would stay its course regardless of where they "based" themselves and their family.  No, her concern was the child.  It was
all
about the child.  If he’d just spend ten minutes listening to her, listening to his own brother, without letting the clouds of Aussie-Aussie-Aussie propaganda obscure his world view, he might catch a glimpse of the ugly truth that Australia was not the same place it was when he was a child.

She had to admit though, she did overreact a touch.  She’d hoped the threat of walking out might have been the bucket of ice-water to snap him out of his stance, but he surprised her by not budging.  This is something she hadn’t learnt about him, but a characteristic Tom had confirmed after she’d passed the point of no return: Dave Holden did not like to be backed into a corner.  If he ever found himself there, he would fight.

And oh, how they’d
fought
.  Dave held off saying anything too irrevocable, too damaging.  But Jenny, well … she always had a tendency to go high-drama in confrontational situations.  She called him a moron, she called him weak, she called him Australia’s willing bitch, and then she packed up her things and left.

Though had she really left? She’d cleared out her clothes and some mementos from the city apartment they shared, and went straight to the holiday apartment they shared.  It was the adult equivalent of running away from home to the tree-house in the back garden.  She just hoped Dave understood that.

A knock at the bathroom door shook her out of her glum reverie.  She just managed to get her hands and arms across her privates and shout out ‘Naked here!’ when Banksia’s poked her head around the corner.

‘Wow, you really are in the family way, aren’t you?’ Banksia said.  Her voice effortlessly cut through the loud hiss of the shower as she examined Jenny’s naked body.  ‘Your figure looks almost …
normal
.’

‘I locked the door!’ Jenny said.  ‘I locked the door!’

‘So did I,’ Banksia said.  ‘We have interconnecting rooms.  No lock on that door.’

‘Can you give me a minute?’

‘Sorry love, this is just a quickie.  I wanted to let you know that Tait and I are popping out for a minute.  We’ve found a motorcycle to borrow, we’re going to nip over to his uncle’s place to see if he’s still around.’

‘Oh.  OK.’

‘He’s just over near Paddington, we shouldn’t be long.  Thought a bike might make it easier to negotiate the traffic.  It’s pretty thick in parts, and only seems to be getting worse.’

‘Will you … Will Tait be back?’

‘Oh, sure.  He won’t take off without saying goodbye to you.  And I assume you don’t want him coming in right now.  Or do you?’ She wiggled her eyebrows and gave Jenny a wink broad enough to crush a beer can.

‘I like my men with some hair on their chest,’ she said with a grin.  ‘Out with you!’ She pointed at the door with a flourish, giving Banksia an eyeful of her bare breasts in the process.

Banksia smiled, raised an imaginary camera and said, ‘Click!’ She ducked out of the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

Jenny dressed in some clothes she borrowed from Banksia.  For novelty value, she chose one of the Outback Warrior outfits, khaki shirt and matching shorts.  Even with the slight swell of her belly, she still had to pop a virgin notch on the belt, pressing down on the tight leather hard enough to make her thumb hurt.  She pulled her hair back in the same pony tail Banksia liked to wear, looked at herself in the large bamboo-frame mirror in the bedroom and said, ‘Crikey! Look at the size of that croc!’

Uncanny, she thought, if you shut your eyes and stuck your fingers in your ears.

She stepped out into the hallway and was nearly knocked down by a couple of men in QTA uniforms.  Both were very grim, very focused.  They merely nodded at her, and one of them said, ‘Pardon.’ It was the least recognition she’d received in years.  They continued on their way down the hall, almost marching in step and not saying a word.  From somewhere up further she could smell bacon frying, and her stomach started to pull her along before her feet started moving, nearly tripping her up.  She fell in behind the two QTA soldiers, almost subconsciously keeping an escapable distance between them as she kept an eye on the pistols holstered on their hips.

The overhead lights were bright, almost clinical, but they failed to penetrate the dank cross-hatched carpet.  She wasn’t sure if it was purple, maroon, blue or brown.  It probably started life as a much brighter shade, but decades of wear had cooked it down to an unidentifiable dark tint, the kind of colour you’d see as a child if you tried to combine all the tubes in your paint set at once.  Down the middle it was almost black.  Old paintings and photos crowded the wood-panelled walls in mahogany frames, many of them probably of a similar vintage to the building itself.

Aromas of fried eggs and toast and coffee — sweet Jesus, coffee — mingled with the scent of bacon and triggered sharp contractions in Jenny’s stomach.  She followed the soldiers out onto the hotel’s veranda restaurant.  A dozen café tables heaved with men in khaki, scraping bread rolls over plates wet with sticky yolks and ketchup.  Some chewed on sticks of crispy overcooked bacon, and Jenny suddenly wanted nothing more from the world than one of those black and red rashers.

A woman in a blue apron moved between the tables with a pot of coffee in each hand.  The dark whirlpools encircling her eyes threatened to swallow the whites entirely.  A rectangular badge pinned to her shirt read
Mab
.  As she moved past her, Jenny asked, ‘Is there anywhere in particular I can sit?’

Mab didn’t even bother trying to raise a smile from her weary cheeks.  ‘Wherever you can, love.  I’ll be around with more food in a couple of minutes.’

‘Coffee!’ someone behind her called out, and she moved off in the direction of the voice without blinking.  She was on autopilot. Jenny wondered if she was properly awake.

She ran her gaze over the eating space, looking for a spare seat at a table where she might be able to nab some eggs and bacon on Mab’s next pass, then maybe even some coffee. 
I’d sit next to the Devil himself for some of that fry-up
, she thought.  Then her eyes landed on the only spare seat in the place.  In the centre of the space, Al and Jim sat at a table crowded with plates and cups, with an empty chair between them.  Al saw her spot them, and gestured to the seat with a tired smile.

She
wanted
to see Al, she needed to press her case for her sister’s rescue … but Jim?  She could do without having to go anywhere near that nasty little man.  One thing working in Hollywood had prepared her for, though, was sitting next to nasty little men and pretending she liked them.

She squeezed between a couple of tables and slipped into the spare seat.  Al was finishing off his meal, skewering a lump of gooey egg onto a piece of bacon and quickly lifting it to his mouth before any of it could drip back to the plate.  Jim dipped a plain piece of white toast into a cup of black coffee.

She nodded to the two men.  ‘Al,’ she said.  ‘Jim.’

Al called her Jenny, Jim called her Miss Lucas.

‘Thought you might sleep in for a bit,’ Al said.  ‘At least until the sun came up.’

‘Can’t sleep,’ she lied.  ‘Not with my sister and my nephew stranded out on the highway.’

Al frowned.  ‘We couldn’t just set down, you understand that don’t you?  You might think we’re a gang of bogans with guns and toys, but we do follow protocols very closely.  After collecting you and Banksia and Tait, we had to return back here.  If we hadn’t, a series of responses would have been initiated, which would have, frankly, wasted a lot of people’s time.’

‘Oh,
well
,’ Jenny said.  ‘I wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s
time
, would I?  Look at selfish me, worried about the lives of my sister and her son when there’s a risk I could be inconveniencing dozens.’

‘It’s not all about fucking you, is it?’ Jim shouted, bashing his fist down hard enough on the table to make the small cup holding the sugar sachets to tip over and spill its load.

The resulting silence in the breakfast area didn’t happen in an instant.  It spread gradually from the centre of the disturbance outward, like a ripple in a pond disturbed by a thrown rock.

‘I’m not worried about
me
,’ Jenny said in a low voice, enunciating each word sharply enough to cut skin.  ‘I’m worried about my
sister
and my
nephew
.  Weren’t you listening?’

Al held out a finger to Jim in an attempt to cut off his reply.  It didn’t work.

‘I
was
listening, missy,’ Jim said.  His only concession to Al’s gesturing was to drop from shouting to merely speaking loudly.  ‘I heard what you said. 
My
sister. 
My
nephew.  From where I’m sitting, all I hear is me, me, me.  Do you have any idea how many Queenslanders have been displaced by this chaos?  How many people are currently stranded between somewhere and nowhere with no food or fuel?  Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.  And for every hundred people there are one or two bad eggs, and those bad eggs are all coming together, combining.  Do you know why, Jenny?’