Prohibited Zone (18 page)

‘Anyway,' she said, ‘Mum thinks I should do what normal lawyers do: work the system. Fuck that. Entire civilisations have withered while lawyers worked the legal system. Mum doesn't realise that while she's been working the system it's been eating her soul.'

Baz joined us, sitting down on Kara's side of the table. I said it was about time I bought a drink, so I took their orders and wandered off to the bar. When I came back, he and Kara were laughing together. Baz took his drink from me and looked at Kara. We were both looking at her. She took his arm.

‘Baz says that if we need any help, he'll be around,' she said, looking at him.

‘Good, that lets me off.' I was still holding her drink but she made no move to take it. I felt simultaneously foolish and annoyed. Maybe I wanted her to take
my
arm. I pushed the drink at her across the table and she took it without thanking me. For some reason Scotty and Ray were wrestling. Scotty had Ray in a headlock and was rubbing the back of his head vigorously with his fist, grinning.

‘Go on, say it,' he said. Ray struggled to free himself. Phil watched, also grinning.

‘Say it!' said Scotty again.

‘No,' said Ray, a little strangled.

‘Let him go,' called Kara, but they took no notice. Ray tried to walk Scotty towards the wall, maybe with the idea of smashing him into it, but it caused them both to lose balance and they crashed to the floor. A couple of stools were overturned and other patrons looked at them curiously. Phil laughed and looked around to see if anyone else was finding it funny. Ray emerged, free of the headlock, reddened, dazed and angry. He retrieved his glass of water and gulped some of it down. Scotty took a bit longer to stand up, but he was still grinning in Ray's direction.

‘Can't say it, can you? It's only a word, for fuck's sake.'

Phil was holding out his hand and Scotty reluctantly handed him a ten-dollar note.

‘I told you he wouldn't say it,' Phil said as he stowed the money in his hip pocket.

Scotty came past us on his way to the bar, his face flushed and his spiked hair bent off-centre.

‘I just wanted him to say “cunt”,' he said, ‘but he wouldn't do it. You'd think that would be the easiest thing in the world for a doctor but he's such a prude. Don't know how someone like that could even
be
a doctor.'

The evening didn't improve. By ten I was done and by ten-thirty I had remembered my date with Lucy. I suggested to Kara that I drop her at Luke's place and she seemed happy to come, saying that tomorrow would be busy. She did a long round of goodbyes, spending particular time with Ray, giving him a hug and talking softly with him. Then she was ready to go.

‘I'm in town for a couple more days,' Baz said to me as I headed for the exit. ‘Give me a call if you need help or just feel like a drink.'

Outside, the air was cool and a katabatic breeze was toying with the eucalypts that stood guard over the Ark. Clouds were drifting across the moonlit sky. A man in dark clothes stood with his back to us, urinating against the Ark wall. I felt like doing the same thing. A youth who had apparently lost the use of his legs was being helped into a car by two mates. A couple of cars squealed tyres as they took off from a nearby set of traffic lights and somewhere in the depths of suburbia a dog barked, but otherwise the city had taken its valium for the night.

The undercover car park in which I'd stowed Luke's car was still about half full as we walked in along the exit lane. A late-model Falcon had pulled out of a parking bay and was heading out. We stopped to let it pass. I heard footsteps behind me.

‘Steve West?' The voice sounded hoarse.

‘Yeah?'

As I started to turn to see who it was I heard Kara give a muted cry, and then for a while I ceased to take a conscious interest in the world.

15

I
WOKE IN A VERY DARK
, very confined space. I could hear a humming noise and after a while I figured it was the sound of tyres on the road and that I was in the boot of a car. I couldn't move my hands – which were twisted behind me – or even feel them much, and my legs seemed stuck together. My feet were numb. My face felt puckered and I couldn't open my eyes or mouth. It dawned on me that I was tied up, and that my mouth and eyes had been taped. And, for some reason, that a four-inch nail had been hammered into my temple. My nose rested against something soft; after some tentative nuzzling I concluded that it was human, possibly a backside, almost certainly female.

I tried without success to keep my mind off my severe discomfort. It was very hot and the space was so cramped I could hardly breathe, let alone scratch myself – even if my hands had been free – or check out the four-inch nail. For all I knew it could've been a nine-inch nail. Straining at whatever it was that bound my hands didn't help; the more I did the more I realised I couldn't move and the more I sweated and the less control I had of my mind. I tried to relax and imagine myself somewhere more pleasant – which was just about anywhere else. It didn't work. Despite the heat I felt something icy prick me at the base of my skull; it was at once freezing and white-hot. My scalp started to fizz, and I thought vaguely that it might be my hair turning grey or falling out. The icy heat started to spread down my spine; it was the creep of blind, helpless, sphincter-busting panic. I couldn't move, I couldn't see, I could scarcely breathe. I was lost in the great dark of the universe, immobilised inside something about the size of a coffin, a body next to me with which I could not communicate, with my hands tied behind my back, with itches I could not scratch, no light, no measure of time, no hope. I might've gone mad during that little car ride, but just then the body next to me shifted. It wasn't by much, a few millimetres, but it was enough. It stirred again; we were nestled closely together and I felt points of contact on my face, chest and knees. I moved in response, and before long we had a rhythm of gentle little nudges going. Partial circulation returned to my extremities. Partial sanity returned to my mind.

The car in which we were travelling had reached a reasonable speed and the engine was straining as we headed up a long, steady grade. At one point the pitch of the road noise changed, as if we were inside a tunnel. And then I knew where we were, because Adelaide only had one car tunnel, the Heysen Tunnel on the South Eastern Freeway. This freeway wound its way through the southern part of the Adelaide Hills; it was the main exit from the city towards Melbourne, about a thousand kilometres to the east. The Arkaba was not far from the north-western end of the freeway, so I probably hadn't been unconscious for long.

We left the tunnel and continued up the grade. Then the timbre of the engine changed as we topped the lip of the escarpment at Crafers and the road levelled out. I knew the freeway reasonably well; I had once worked at a zinc mine near Strathalbyn on the other side of the Hills and had taken the freeway to work each day. I listed the exits in my head – soon after Crafers was Stirling, followed four or five kilometres along by Bridgewater and then Hahndorf another five clicks beyond that. Mount Barker was five past there and it was twenty-five more to Callington. I started counting to myself to try to keep track of time and had reached two hundred and fifty-six when the car slowed and we took what I assumed was an exit ramp to the left; I figured it was Bridgewater. We slowed almost to a halt and then took a ninety-degree turn to the left and another almost immediately right.

I thought about committing the route to memory so that maybe I could find our destination again later – if there was a later. But the car was turning left and right at great frequency and after about the fifth turn I forgot what the first one had been and in the end I gave it up as a lost cause.

The car was being driven very badly and the movement was nauseating. Then we did what seemed to be a three-point turn, followed by more fierce twisting and turning. We came to a temporary standstill on a slope and then did a hill start and took a turn to the right. Then more lefts and rights that felt like curves in the same road. Eventually the car slowed again and turned right, moving slowly for a count of thirty-three on a loose, bumpy surface. Then we slowed even more and turned right again, crawled for a few seconds, and stopped.

There was the sound of car doors opening and a lightening in the weight of the car. Two car doors slammed and footsteps crunched away from us over gravel. Silence. I started counting again to take my mind off the immediate future, which, as far as I could see, was unpromising. At a count of five hundred and twenty-three I heard footsteps crunching back towards us. A car door opened and the boot lid popped; someone had pressed the release button inside the cabin. More crunching footsteps and the boot lid was lifted. A set of hands grabbed me under the armpits, another set took my feet and I was lifted out and carried a few dozen paces. A door opened and the sound made by the footsteps changed as the surface underneath turned into something harder. The place smelled like an old folks' home, musty and dispirited. I was dumped on the ground. Rough hands searched and emptied my pockets. Someone kicked me in the side and I groaned.

‘Seems to be awake,' said a voice. Then departing pairs of footsteps, a door closing, and silence. A little while later the door opened again and something I guessed was Kara was dumped on the floor to the sound of a muted feminine grunt. Then the footsteps receded again and the door closed.

Nothing happened after that for quite some time. My discomfort had not been eased by the change in location, although at least the floor, which I reckoned was concrete, was cool. The air felt cooler, too, as it always does in the Hills. On the other hand, my stomach was still twisting and turning and my head still felt like it had been pierced from temple to temple. The good news was that I hardly noticed the pain in my feet. My hands, still bound behind my back, came in contact with a small stone, and I passed the time using it to gouge ‘fuck you' into the floor. Next to me, I could hear the other body breathing.

After a time the door opened and I was grabbed under the arms and dropped onto a chair and the tape covering my eyes and mouth was ripped off. The sudden shot of pain, on top of all the other pain, almost made me black out. The world wobbled. I heaved forward and vomited, violently. Through the pain haze I saw a pair of lace-up black boots backtrack, but not quickly enough.

‘You prick,' said the figure.

I began to feel better. I sat up and took in the scene. We were in a small, bare room lit only by a spotlight directed into my eyes. I could make out two dark figures. One was staring at his vomit-spattered boots; the other was pulling tape off my fellow abductee, Kara, who was seated in a nearby chair. She cried out as the tape came away from her mouth. Her hands had already been taped to the back of the chair behind her. For a moment she looked like a child, a frightened innocent with no comprehension of what was happening. Then, as if with quick-drying cement, her face set in a hard impenetrable mask.

‘What the fuck is this?' I demanded. The two abductors appeared to be male and, by the shape of their silhouettes, were wearing balaclavas. The vomit-spattered one stepped towards me and punched me in the mouth, hard enough to make me topple sideways off the chair. I lay where I was, tasting the blood. I checked my teeth with my tongue; a couple were loose. He wiped his boots on my jeans, restored the chair to an upright position and dragged me back onto it. He was wearing a set of dark blue overalls and thin leather gloves. His balaclava was black, with holes cut out for the eyes. With the light behind him I could only see two black spaces where his humanity was meant to be.

‘Anything more to say, big guy?' he asked.

‘Yeah. Fuck off.' He stepped forward and punched me again. It must have been a softer blow because I didn't fall off the chair this time and there were still only two loose teeth when I checked. I could feel blood or vomit or a mixture of both drizzling down my chin and throat.

‘I'm taking it easy on you,' he said. ‘Since I want you to be able to talk.' He had an accent I couldn't quite place, sort of South African, but not quite. It stirred a memory in me, but it was so vague it promptly got lost again and didn't resurface for more than forty-eight hours, by which time it didn't really matter. Under the accent the voice was low and husky and did nothing to dispel the idea that its owner was enjoying his work. He sat on a chair next to his hooded mate and was silent for a minute.

‘You guys are fucked,' he said in his peculiar accent. ‘No one knows where you are and no one gives a toss, especially about you, West.'

He stuck his hand into his overalls and pulled out a pistol. It was squat and black and its barrel grinned at me with an evil little curl of the lip. He leant forward and held it close to my eyes, close enough for me to read the words ‘Pietro Beretta Gardone V.T. Made in Italy' stamped on its side. There was a knob switched to reveal a red dot, which I guessed meant the safety catch was off. He played the pistol across my cheek, almost caressing me with it, and then checked to see whether the barrel would fit up my nostril. It wouldn't, mainly because of the front sight. Then he let me look down the barrel. It was as black as oblivion.