Free Lost Girls by Graham Wilson Page A

it would have blown away.
    Oh well, he
supposed he should do the right thing and pick it up before it
ended up in some dugong or turtle’s guts. He had seen on TV how
they mixed up plastic bags and jelly fish and then their guts got
all blocked up and they died. It was bad not to care for the land
and sea by leaving rubbish.
    He lifted it
up. It was surprisingly heavy. He looked inside. It had a pair of
shoes, woman sandals, and there was something else at the bottom,
sort of dark and stripy. He put in his hand and the thing jolted
him, like an electric shock. He pulled back his hand like he had
been bitten.
    God, I hope
it’s not a snake sheltering there which fanged me.
    His heart
skipped a beat, he felt panicked, stupid fucker that he was for
putting his hand into something like that without looking better.
It was one of the first lessons of being a blackfella –always look
proper good before you poke around in holes in the ground or other
places you can’t see properly.
    He looked at
his hand, no sign of punctures, Calm down old fella , he said
to himself, your imagination is getting the better of
you.
    He set the bag
back on the ground and picked up a forky stick. One by one he
lifted the sandals out of the way with this, setting them on the
ground alongside the bag. He looked into the bag again with the
torch.
    As he did he
said, “Oh Fuck”. He had seen this object before, Alan had showed it
to him when he had first found it. It was that bloody crocodile
totem, the Baru one from those Yolgnu tribes, the one that had
belonged to the man of the head. He had felt freaked by it when he
was last shown it, knowing it had crocodile spirit magic inside it.
It was not his totem and, as an initiated man of another tribe, it
was dangerous for him to touch it. No wonder it had bitten him. It
was its way of saying “hands off”.
    He looked again
at the sandals. They looked sort of familiar. The sort of thing a
young balanda woman would wear; someone like Sandy or her red
haired friend, Anne.
    The thought
struck him. These had not arrived here by accident. Someone had
brought them and left them here. It screamed out to him of the
missing girl, Susan. The one Alan was searching for, the one some
people said had run away, and others said had returned to Crocodile
Man. He had not paid all the rubbish in the papers much mind, but
he knew it was tearing up Alan and Sandy the way she had vanished.
They were blaming themselves, as were the other friends.
    There was that
sighting of her getting into the white Toyota. Maybe she had come
out here with a fisherman who had offered her a lift. Maybe, maybe;
too many maybes.
    Well he did not
know much about police stuff, but last time he had taken something
away and, while he did not really get into trouble, he knew it
could have been a problem if Alan was not his friend.
    So today he
would do the right thing. He would leave this stuff right where he
had found it. He would drive back to Darwin. He knew where Alan
lived and he had his private telephone number. He would call him
from the Bark Hut; it would only be about ten pm when he got there.
If he could not get onto him he would drive right up to his house
and bang on the door until he woke him up.
    On second
thoughts, he would skip the Bark Hut, he might as well go home and
sleep in his own warm bed, nothing would happen until the morning.
But he would at least let Alan know tonight. Then in the morning he
could come back and show them what he had found. He was sure it was
important though he had no idea what it meant.
     
     
     

Chapter
1 2 - The New Billabong
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    Alan was sound
asleep when he felt Sandy shaking him. He did not know what time it
was but it seemed like the middle of the night.
    Sandy said,
“Someone has been ringing our bell and banging on the door in the
street. I don’t know who or what it is but they are very
determined. So you had better come down with me to see who it
is.”
    Alan pulled on
a pair of