Saving Billie Read online

  Time was when I followed politics and listened to what the players had to say to see who made the most sense. Now, it all sounded scripted and rehearsed and came out no better than white noise. Both sides made wild promises about what they’d do with our taxes; the side that lost wouldn’t have to honour them and the side that won would find ways to renege. I’d voted left all my life, and this time I was considering trying something witty as an informal vote—that’s if I was free on the Saturday.

  It’s fifty kilometres south-west from Sydney to Campbell-town and a few more north of that to Liston. I made the drive through light traffic on a warm Saturday morning. On a non-holiday weekend, with the football season finished and no other major sporting events on, the traffic is local in all directions and I made good time. It wasn’t an area I was very familiar with. The web search had told me there were 150 000 people in Campbelltown and the number was going up all the time. I knew that some of those people went south over the escarpment down to the Illawarra coast for their holidays and that many of them had never been to Sydney. There were pockets of affluence and stretches of poverty, ‘aspirational’ voters and battlers, a university and the ‘legend of Fisher’s ghost’—the story from colonial days of the ghost of a murdered man named Fisher manifesting itself and pointing the way to where the body had been deposited. That led to the murderer who was convicted and necked. It was about time I got better acquainted with the place.

  I drove the Hume Highway to St Andrews and worked my way to Liston via secondary roads. There was still a lot of open land around Glenfield and the Ingleburn military establishment, but all the area to the south was filling up fast.

  At first glance, Liston didn’t look too bad. For one thing the land rose and fell so that the dreary flatness that characterises a lot of the outer suburbs didn’t apply. As Terri had said, there was a big open parkland and recreational space in the centre of the area and although the schools featured mainly demountable buildings, that isn’t uncommon from Bermagui to Byron Bay. I drove around for a while to get the feel of the place and some of the realities became clear. The houses were clustered close together and their construction had been made with economy chiefly in mind. The early settlers knew how to build for this climate— overhanging eaves, wide verandahs. But such things are expensive and Liston’s planners had cut shade and outdoor living area to the bone.

  A good many of the residents had tried their best by planting trees and contriving add-ons of one kind or another but the trees mostly hadn’t flourished, and the addons had been pressed into service as carports and storage areas. There were unroadworthy cars gathering weeds in a good many of the minuscule front yards and some examples of that distinctive feature of disadvantage—broken furniture left out in the open.

  The picture wasn’t altogether grim though. Some of the closely packed houses had small but well-tended gardens and what looked to my ignorant eye to be vegetable and herb plots. I drove the perimeter and noted the signs of a major up-market development named ‘Shetland Hills’ taking shape to the west of Liston. A major road separated the development from Liston and all the residents of Shetland Hills would be able to see of their neighbours were faded colourbond fences. A few towering Shetland structures were up already and I drove back to the centre of Liston with a new perspective. A lot of the houses looked okay, but how many people lived in them?

  The bus shelters were heavily graffitied and a good few of the graffitists were hanging about—loose clothes, big sneakers, caps reversed. Many of them had dark faces and some had the big, bulky Polynesian build. There were a lot of young children in the streets and a lot of women pushing prams. Another sign of disadvantage—almost half of the women and children were fat.

  Nobody paid me much attention as I wandered around: too occupied with their own concerns. I strolled across some scruffy parkland to a low brick building where there seemed to be some activity and sound. As I got closer I could hear the singing. It had that tuneful, plaintive note I’d heard in Fiji and New Caledonia in my few Pacific sojourns.

  I went as close as I could without intruding and saw that the hall inside was packed with Islanders, men, women and children, being led in song by one of their own. Unlike them, he was wearing smart clothes that didn’t conceal that he was enormously fat. Sweat glistened on his bald head, and when he raised his arms I could see dark patches. At this rate his suit was going to need dry-cleaning after every singsong.

  When you hear the singing in the islands, you seem to be able to catch the sound of the sea on the reef and the wind in the palm trees. Not here. All the cadences were of the Pacific, but the words were from a militant Christian hymn, promising salvation for the faithful and misery for sinners. It reminded me of the Methodist Sunday school my father had vainly tried to make me attend. I went once, and every time thereafter nicked off to the beach and spent the collection plate money on lollies.

  The commercial hub of Liston was a long, low-slung building on the edge of the open space fronted by a car park that wouldn’t have held fifty cars. I parked and walked down steps to the building that resembled an extra long and wide Nissan hut partitioned to form shops. There was a liquor outlet at the east end but it was shut and heavily padlocked. A sign warned that alcohol was not permitted to be consumed on the premises or in the adjacent area. At the other end was a health centre where about twenty people were congregated. I could hear coughing and babies crying.

  The shopping precinct boasted a takeaway food shop, a video store, a newsagent, a supermarket and a couple of small shops that looked like Pacific island trade stores with goods piled up and hanging as if there was no real expectation of them being sold. I could smell cooking going on at the back of one of these shops. None of the shops were doing much business. There was a lot of litter and a carpet of cigarette butts on the cement surrounds.

  The community protection office was next to the supermarket. The window was covered with notices— appointment times for a JP, Crime Stoppers and Neighbourhood Watch stickers, advertisements for alternative medicines, whacko therapies of different kinds and religious attractions. The glass in the window was clean and the area in front of the office had recently been thoroughly swept. Looking through the open door I saw two desks with people behind them and someone on a chair in front of each. There were a few more people in the room waiting their turn. I went in and leaned against the wall. There were noticeboards carrying flyers for community meetings, garage sales and work wanted. On one board three familiar documents jumped out at me—the standard police notice with a photograph of a missing person. Two females, one male, ages from twelve to fifteen. The notices weren’t new.

  Both people behind the desk were Islanders, a woman and a man. The man fitted the description of John Manuma that Terri Boxall had given me. He was talking in a low voice to another Islander. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but it didn’t matter because he wasn’t speaking English. The woman was dealing with a white woman and they appeared to be discussing the advisability or otherwise of an AVO. Of the three other people waiting in the room, two were dark; I made it an even split. With my olive skin darkened by the sun, my nose flattened by boxing and professional hazards and my scarred eyebrows, I’d often been taken for Aboriginal. Not by Kooris, though.

  The woman became free after dealing with three clients quickly, and beckoned to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But if that’s Mr Manuma I have business specifically with him.’

  The big man glanced up quickly but went on with what he was saying.

  ‘Okay,’ the woman said and waved a man who’d come in after me forward.

  Raised voices and the sound of a scuffle brought Manuma to his feet. He was a giant, over 200 centimetres and heavy in the upper body and legs. He strode through the door and I moved after him to watch. Two men, one white, one black, were shouting abuse at each other while a dark woman with two clinging children stood by looking anxious. A white woman was egging the black man on.


  ‘Fuckin’ do ’im, Archie,’ she yelled. ‘Fuckin’ cunt.’

  Archie lurched forward, clearly not sober, and threw a punch the other man easily avoided. Manuma shouted something and an Islander woman emerged from one of the shops, clapped her hand over the white woman’s mouth and wrestled her away. Manuma grabbed both men by their long hair, lifted them from the ground and brought their heads together. It’s not something you see very often, if ever. The effect on both of being treated so contemptuously was more shocking than painful. The fight went out of them and they stumbled away in different directions.

  It surprised me that no crowd had gathered. Evidently such conflicts were a common occurrence and Manuma’s summary justice not unusual. Nevertheless, the incident prompted a feeling of tension and I noticed that the outnumbered whites waiting outside at the medical centre moved slightly away from the dark people.

  Manuma returned to his seat and to his discussion with his client as if nothing had happened. When he was free he nodded at me and I took a seat. ‘John Manuma,’ he said without offering to shake hands. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?’

  6

  Terri Boxall phoned me about you.’ .

  Now we shook hands. As well as being taller than Terri had said, he had considerably more than a hundred kilos with it. He wasn’t particularly friendly and his big, broad face wore a sceptical look as I gave him a version of the story.

  ‘Lot of people out here, brother. Lot of coming and going.’

  I read off the address where Lou had talked to Billie Marchant. I’d driven past it—indistinguishable from dozens of others, perhaps a bit more rundown looking than most. ‘D’you know the people there now?’

  He shook his massive head. ‘Nothing comes to mind.’

  ‘Terri said she thought you’d be helpful.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have said that without me hearing your story first.’

  ‘You’ve heard it now.’

  ‘Yes, and I reckon it’s a lot of nothing. I don’t think there’s anything here for you, Mr Hardy.’

  He gave me a hard stare, then looked over my head at whoever was next in line. Not hard for him to do; sitting down, he was bigger than me in every way. His hands, on the paper-strewn desk, were the colour of teak and the size of shovel blades. He oozed impatience and aggression, and the combination lifted me out of the chair as if a hook had taken me by the collar and swung me aside. It was a new experience—being dismissed with a curiously strong element of indifference. I left the room struggling to maintain dignity.

  I learned long ago not to expect things always to turn out well, but a knock-back of this intensity took me by surprise. I wandered out into the sunshine and stumped up the steps to the car park. I hadn’t replaced my sunglasses and was slow to adjust to the bright light and was almost run down by a cruising police car. I stepped back just in time and swore. An Islander woman standing nearby gave me a dirty look. All in all, it wasn’t a good start to my work in Liston.

  I went back down to the shopping area and took another look at the liquor store. Still closed. I went into one of the all-purpose shops where three immense Polynesian women were sitting chatting while cooking something on a portable stove.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘can you tell me when the bottle shop opens?’

  ‘Closed,’ one woman said.

  ‘I know, but when will it be open?’

  ‘Closed for good.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged and they went on talking as if the subject was of no interest. What they were cooking smelled delicious, but the shop sold vegetables, clothes, shoes and other things that meant health regulations forbade food preparation. They didn’t look concerned and it seemed that Liston was in some ways a law unto itself.

  I left the shop and a man approached me with a smile on his face, the first smile I’d seen there. Tall, he was Aboriginal, built on a much smaller scale than the Islanders. In his late teens at a guess, and to judge from his clothes—a threadbare T-shirt, dirty jeans and thongs—not doing too well.

  ‘Think I can help you, brother,’ he said.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I was in the office when you was talking to Johnny. I know who lives there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At that address you said. And I know the woman you was talking about. I mean, I seen her.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded his head and his ill-kept dreads bounced. I looked closely at him. Despite the signs of poverty, he didn’t appear to be mentally adrift, drunk or drug-damaged. His eyes were clear and his body was lean but not withered.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You are?’

  ‘Tommy.’

  ‘My name’s Cliff Hardy. You heard what I’m here for. What’re you suggesting, Tommy?’

  He smiled again and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal gesture. ‘You want to talk to the chick, I can help.’

  ‘Chick?’

  ‘Girl, whatever. Lives there with her kids.’

  ‘Can you get me inside the house?’

  ‘I reckon, yeah.’

  ‘And about the woman?’

  ‘What about the money, brother?’

  ‘Is there an ATM around here?’

  ‘Newsagent got one.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  I drew out five hundred dollars. No telling how useful Tommy might be, or his rates. I bought a diet coke and changed one of the fifties so I’d have smaller chips to play with. Tommy was standing more or less where I’d left him.

  ‘Gotta smoke?’

  I handed him a twenty. ‘Get yourself some and I’ll see you by the blue Falcon in the car park. The dirty one with the dings.’

  He grinned, took the money and loped away. I popped the can and took a drink. Things were looking up, maybe. Tommy returned with a cigarette in his mouth and another tucked behind his ear. I stuffed the can into an overflowing bin. We got into the car and drove to the address I’d looked at before. It was one of the more hard-bitten of the houses with no attempt made in the garden, a mattress leaking stuffing on the front porch and a broken swing rusting in the side yard. Lou had described the room where she’d interviewed Billie and the furniture, including the drawer where she’d seen the photograph. I pulled up two doors away.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ I said. ‘I want to go in and look at a particular piece of furniture and ask about this woman I’m trying to locate.’

  Tommy blew smoke. ‘Got you.’

  ‘Fifty for you, a hundred for whoever’s there.’

  ‘Hey, why?’

  ‘I’m invading their home. You’re just a go-between.’

  He thought about it as he finished his cigarette. He lit the one from behind his ear from the butt, then dropped the butt through the car window. ‘Okay. Stay here and I’ll see what gives.’

  He slipped out, slammed the door, and crossed the street, stepped through the open gate and went up the path to the door of the house. I kept my eye on him as I got out and went around to put my foot on the smouldering butt. I leaned against the car and was grateful for the sunglasses because the sun was high and bright and my battered eye still hurt a bit. The door to the house opened and a woman stood there. She had a baby on her hip and a toddler peeked around her legs at the caller. Tommy started talking and offered her a cigarette. She took it and he lit her up, still talking. He jerked his thumb back at me. She moved slightly to get a better view, shrugged and nodded. Tommy crooked a finger at me.

  I went up the path and Tommy gave me one of his winning smiles, swivelling a little to include the woman in it. ‘This is Coralie, Cliff, my man. Says you have to excuse the mess in the house.’

  I nodded. The toddler scuttled away and the infant on Coralie’s hip sucked on its dummy. Coralie was in her twenties, pale and freckled with greasy, mousy-blonde hair. Her heavy breasts had leaked, leaving stains on her faded Panthers sweatshirt. The finger she used to flick her hair away from her eyes was heavi
ly nicotine-stained, but she blew smoke away from the baby. She pressed herself against the doorway to let me through. The smell hit me like a grenade—fried food, sweat, tobacco smoke and despair.

  Coralie pushed past me on her way to the back of the place. ‘That fuckin’ money’s in my hand in ten fuckin’ minutes, Tommy, or I’m putting the men on you.’

  ‘No worries,’ Tommy said. ‘Make it snappy, Cliff.’

  I was more than willing. Lou had said she talked to Billie in the front bedroom to the right of the passage. I went there and found it contained a double bed, a built-in wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The room was like an op-shop sorting area with clothes and bedding and plastic bags strewn about. I pushed through the detritus and slid open the middle drawer in the chest. It came easily and I emptied the contents on the bed and turned it over. A polaroid photograph was cellotaped to the underside and I eased it free.

  ‘Hey,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s worth a bonus. How about the fifty?’

  After a quick look at it, I put the photograph in my shirt pocket. I picked the stuff up and restored it to the drawer. Slid it home. I gave Tommy his fifty.

  ‘How long’s she been here?’

  He shrugged. ‘Coupla weeks.’

  ‘How many kids has she got?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘No bloke?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Get her back.’

  He went down the hall and after a few minutes returned with Coralie, minus baby, in tow, both of them with fresh cigarettes going.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I gave her four fifties, making sure Tommy saw them. ‘Good luck.’

  Her dull, defeated eyes barely blinked as she took the money. She stood crookedly, as if perpetually ready to carry a child on her hip.

  ‘You said a hundred,’ Tommy complained as we reached the car.

  ‘She needed it. Let’s see if you can deliver.’

  ‘Best to get away from here, brother. When I said no bloke, they come and go, like.’