Free Thunder Road by Ted Dawe Page A

pooh-ah.
    ‘Extraordinary! Pooh-ah! How dare they!’ Devon exclaimed in mock outrage.
    ‘A challenge for you, Devon. If you get them out, the house is yours until I get the go-ahead from the council.’
    He paused, then fired off a challenge. ‘Show me what you’re made of.’
    ‘Consider it done, m’lord.’
    We all walked out onto the deck, as if the view wasn’t powerful enough from the lounge.
    ‘So you’ve teamed up with this rapscallion have you, Trace? I assume he is passing on his vision of how it all bolts together?’
    I sensed that he was being a bit sarcastic so I looked to Devon for guidance. He was rolling a joint and grinning to himself.
    ‘Has Devon told you much about me?’
    ‘Only that you’re the role model for what a rich person should be like.’
    Wes laughed through clenched teeth, a scary, hissing noise. Like an old reptile.
    ‘Yes, I’ve made and lost fortunes. Money has long since ceased to be a source of enjoyment. I haven’t physically touched money for years. I don’t know whether I ever will again …
dirty
stuff, money … and yet everything I do revolves around it. It is everything.’ He paused, trying to locate the next pithy phrase. ‘Yet then again, it is nothing. Like this house, this land we stand on. So much money just for the right to sleep here. There is no
meaning
in any of this.’
    Silence. We all stared at the distant lights. He turned to me,his face a smooth mask.
    ‘What is it that you fear, Trace?’
    I thought for a while. ‘Lots of things. Big dogs, broken glass in long grass, losing my eyesight….’
    ‘Do you know what I fear?’
    I shook my head. He continued to stare at me, his blank eyes drinking everything in.
    ‘I fear nothing. I used to fear death, but I had a stroke a few years back and while I was on the operating table, I got a glimpse of the other side.’
    He accepted a joint from Devon and took a leisurely toke. ‘I was travelling down a tunnel towards some cool, green place. All I can remember is that I didn’t want to come back. I wanted to be swallowed up in it.’ He paused, remembering. ‘But I was dragged back, by the surgeons at Green Lane Hospital. They were so pleased with themselves. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t pleased too.’
    ‘So after this you had no fear of death?’ I asked.
    He nodded and passed me the joint.
    ‘Everything has its price. Fear of death is a primal fear. When I lost that, I also lost the meaning with which death imbues life. It’s just a card game to me now.’
    Out by the gloom of Rangitoto, I could see the red and blue lights of small boats moving slowly in the channel.
    Wes turned to Devon. ‘Are you happy now, my boy?’
    ‘Yeah. I’m ecstatic,’ Devon snapped back.
    ‘Ecstasy,’ Wes said wistfully. ‘The height of happiness. The Mount Olympus of personal pleasure.’
    He smiled and looked at Devon and me. ‘Ecstasy to you, Devon, may be just a little pill which lets you go on and on, but real ecstasy, that’s something different. I have an image ofecstasy and it goes back to the time when I was about your age. Confident like you, certain I had the world by the balls. It’s never gone away, not in fifty years.’
    Devon fired me a ‘here we go again’ look. Wes closed in on me. ‘In my memory there is this simpleton. This idiot. He could be nine, he could be twenty-nine. They have a sort of immortality , simple people: a fake one. This idiot is standing on a gate at the top of a hill, and he’s waving a flag. Waving a flag in the sun…. When I looked at this boy’s face, in it I saw a happiness I could never reach. I saw rapture. This kid was just a lightning rod for pleasure. Sucking it down from the ether. It made me sad. What a price for ecstasy.’
    ‘Wes, dope can do that man. OK, you see it as a crutch,’ Devon chipped in. ‘I see it as a ladder….’
    ‘It’s just a weak substitute. This fellow was on another planet.’
    ‘It’s a vehicle,’ said Devon.