Free Quota by Jock Serong Page A

yard before lumbering his way up a few steps onto a deck. Their footsteps were louder on the boards. The house, barely visible against the thick sky, looked to Charlie much like the holiday houses he remembered from summer holidays of the past. Fibro. Bits of odd plumbing sticking out of the walls.
    Les rummaged in his pocket, found a key and swung the door open. Charlie was struck by the familiar waft of seagrass matting and old curtains. The bare bulb illuminated a basic living room—vinyl and checked cloth armchairs radiating from a pine coffee table with a ceramic tile surface. The curtains he’d smelled were repeating patterns of sailing boats in horrific burnt orange. There were metallic lamps screwed into the far wall. The main windows of the living room faced perversely inland, while a modest window above the kitchen sink looked over the ocean. A laminex counter divided the armchaired room from the little kitchen.
    The counter caught his attention and held it. The hypnotic arc of a hand sweeping crumbs off its surface, the wedding ring’s scouring sound as it looped across. Comfort in routine. Your brother’s gone to heaven. He’d learned a new word while the police sat around in his parents’ lounge room, drinking his parents’ coffee and writing things down.
    The cunt never even stopped , he had overheard. The hand sweeping nothing off the counter.
    Where’s Harry, you cunt ?
    He looked away, saw a framed poster tracing the history of the Leyland P76 and a pine bookcase crammed with paperbacks. Each spine had faded down slightly to a bluish tinge and bore the linear scars of having been put down open.
    â€˜You can bring your car around and park it in here in the morning,’ said Les.
    Charlie felt suddenly the completeness of his exile.
    â€˜If I turn up at the footy tomorrow, how will I pick him?’ The tacky after-effects of the beer tripped his tongue.
    â€˜Patrick? Well let’s see, eh? Tallish. Thin. He’ll be the only bloke at the footy who’s had his brother shot by the guys who own the pub. He’s the bloke who’s on first names with the local magistrate cos he’s got so much form, and he’s the one trying to feed twin eight-year-old brothers and a sister cos both his parents and his big brother are dead. So if I were you, I’d look for the guy who doesn’t look like he wants to chat.’
    Les looked around the room with a final air of assessment. ‘I’ll figure out the rate for you. S’pose the Queen pays the bill, eh?’
    Receiving no reply, he turned towards the door. ‘Have a nice stay.’
    As the door slammed behind him, Charlie slid into one of the armchairs and dropped his head into his hands.

HE BEGAN WALKING soon after the sun came up.
    He’d showered the muck off himself, but wiping his teeth with a square of toilet paper did nothing to expunge the sour taste. The bathroom cupboards had mouse shit but no aspirin. His hands were light and shaky, and he could feel the early gnawing of a gut ache he knew would plague him all day. The wind outside had slowed, and played lightly over a world washed clean and still damp in the cool air. Slamming the door behind him, he wandered up the rise of the dune and squinted at the great bowl of the ocean below.
    In the distance, out towards the horizon, it looked the way it always did when he summoned it in his mind: foreign, secretive. A blank sheet over what had gone before and what continued to occur beneath. His eyes passed over the water, anticipating some thing, some object, that would break up the conspiracy of nothingness. A fin. A breaching whale. Something floating.
    Fixing his sight on a point on the surface, he tried to picture the colossal blue cathedral of depth beneath, the first and mightiest truth that the ocean hid. Huge creatures, huge agglomerations of tiny creatures, had passed through this column of space. Silent giants and gelatinous