Collateral Damage – by John Tully
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Barry Hall didn’t care too much for pubs but it beat sitting in front of the TV in his crummy Yarraville flat on a rainy Friday night. He was nursing a pint of Fat Yak in the lounge bar of the Railway Hotel and keeping a covert eye on who was coming in through the doors from Anderson Street. The city did nothing for him; Barry was a Tasmanian country boy who liked his space. Melbourne was vast and noisy, with trucks going past his little flat at all hours of the day and night with their headlights blazing through the faded old curtains. His flat was a dump; just a couple of rooms in an old weatherboard house with a chipboard partition in the hallway. There’d been a hole in it too, and when he saw an eye watching him through it, he glued a piece of plywood over it. The electric hotplate only worked on one side and the fridge made evil gurgling sounds and smelled of sour milk and cat food. He could hear the neighbours fighting and arguing like they were in the room with him. Every so often he’d hear the bloke belting her one and he was always yelling out ‘Barney, ya an arse!’ Barry wasn’t sure if Barney was the mongrel they kept tied up in the yard or their sad little kid. They didn’t seem to work and Barry figured most likely they sold drugs. Took them too, from the glassy look in their eyes. Soon as the money for the farm came through, Barry would find something better and report the bastards to the RSPCA and Child Protection.
He’d had a long shower but reckoned he’d need a sauna when the job was finished. The labour-hire mob had sent him down to a chemical factory in Altona where he and some dark-skinned blokes had to scrape stuff off the insides of big steel tanks. Didn’t pay to think too hard about it and the job was just for three days, tops. Before that, he had been unloading boxes of frozen mutton in a warehouse out at Sunshine. Lucky he was fit. He didn’t have a trade so he had to be satisfied with whatever he could get until something better came along. Trouble was, some of the blokes he worked with had been casual like this for twenty years: a kind of underclass who existed in a shadowy industrial underworld doing shit jobs that most people wouldn’t touch for any money. Didn’t want to end up like that.
The band was setting up its sound system. Music might take his mind off things. He was missing his mum, Florrie, a bit, but not the Old Man—it was his fault she was pushing up dandelions in the Ouse cemetery. The old bastard had been boozing as usual in the Lachlan pub while Florrie sat out in the car. When she went inside, he was legless. Barman told her to take him home. He didn’t let her drive though. Done it hundreds of times, he’d slurred, and she knew better than to argue. They’d kangaroo-hopped off up the road in their old bomb and he’d knocked the top off what the old blokes called a ‘traveller’ and guzzled the beer straight from the bottle like a brown telescope. He reckoned the old ute could practically make its own way home so she should shut her yap and let him get on with it. It was a clear moonlit night but he had driven off a sharp bend near the Victoria Valley Falls—straight through the railings and over the cliff into the water. Sad thing was Florrie was supposed to be seeing the cancer specialist down in Hobart that day, but the doctor had got sick himself and cancelled her appointment. She should have been at her sister’s in Lutana enjoying a bit of respite, eating Aunt Lily’s prize-winning lamingtons, and catching up on the gossip. Sergeant Triffitt reckoned the Old Man must have swerved to avoid a wallaby, but that was being kind. Truth was he was so pissed he couldn’t see straight. The cops had just winched the car up the bank and sent it to the wreckers. Open-and-shut case, the coroner ruled: notorious drunkard driving while disqualified with a blood alcohol reading of 0.319. Bastard should have been dead from alcohol poisoning.
‘Take it like a man, Baz,’ Uncle Terry had mumbled at the wake in the village hall, munching half-heartedly at a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich like a sad-eyed rabbit, uncomfortable in a too-tight blue suit, squinting at Barry over his beer glass. Terry had soon run out of words and drifted off for a refill and a desultory natter with his mates about wool prices or shearers’ wages. They kept glancing at Barry but he didn’t want their pity. They milled about aimlessly, all of them related to him to one degree or another and all of them with hardly two bob to rub together in the pockets of their fustian strides. If they had started mooing or baaing it wouldn’t have surprised Barry much; he reckoned they spent so long with cows and sheep they weren’t quite right in the head. Buggered if he’d end up like that, he’d thought, wondering how much he would get for the farm. It wouldn’t be a fortune. There was probably more in the tea caddy on top of the mantelpiece where Florrie hid a bit of cash from the Old Man.
“Buggered if he’d end up like that, he’d thought, wondering how much he would get for the farm. It wouldn’t be a fortune. There was probably more in the tea caddy on top of the mantelpiece where Florrie hid a bit of cash from the Old Man.”
It wasn’t surprising that the Old Man drank so much, if Barry was honest. If the farm had been a horse, you would have shot it. It was just a few acres of rough pasture sandwiched between the mountain and a creek that dried up in summer and harboured a bunch of tiger snakes that slithered into the outside dunny and scared you when you were having a shit. Give it another twenty years and the house would be a sway-backed ruin. People would drive past and wonder who had lived there. The Old Man had run a few sheep and cattle and his mum had a veggie garden behind the orchard that had been planted years before the Old Man came back from Vietnam and bought the place. Fair play to the old bastard, he’d tried to make a go of it but he had given up and spent his time boozing. Still, Barry’s mum had put her foot down when he’d tried to make Barry leave school early and he’d got his Year 12 certificate down at St Virgil’s in Hobart.
After the miserable little funeral, Barry sold the sheep to a dodgy Bothwell dealer for a few shekels. The bloke ripped him off, but he didn’t care, just wanted to get shot of the place. He gave the spare keys to old Mick Reid at the next farm, closed the gate behind him, walked to the road, stuck out his thumb and got a lift down to Hobart with a truckie. Didn’t look back and never wanted to see the place again. The real estate bloke reckoned there was a lot of interest from mainlanders wanting hobby farms and hippies hankering after the simple life. The bloke might even have believed it.
The pub was beginning to fill up, so Barry draped his jacket over the back of the chair to claim his place and queued up for another beer. Might try one of those fancy boutique brews they went on about. People were standing round drinking and shouting above the din. The band started up: Van Morrison’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’. They wouldn’t be able to give up their day jobs but they sounded a helluva lot better than Angus Porter’s Orchestra back home. Nobody else had sat at his table and he was just beginning to think that he really did stink of chemicals when a bloke came up and asked if the seats were free. Barry nodded, so the bloke sat and gave him a lopsided grin before applying himself to his beer. Kept looking at Barry over the rim. Shifty eyes and a goatee. Skull-like head and slope shoulders. Dressed like a bodgie in a black shirt and white string tie. Next thing, a woman tottered in on high heels and made a beeline for the vacant chair next to Barry. She wasn’t bad looking for someone who must have been past thirty, he reckoned.
When the band took a break, the woman turned to Barry and smiled. ‘Hey, handsome,’ she purred, producing a $20 note from her purse. ‘I’m Karen. How about getting us a drink? Get one for yourself while you’re at it.’ She pointed to the scrum at the bar and pulled a face. She had big blue eyes and he could smell her perfume. He said sure, so she said she would like a glass of the house white. It took him a while to get to the bar but eventually he came back, making sure nobody bumped into him to spill the drinks. The bodgie and the woman exchanged winks when they saw him coming.
Karen kept looking at her watch and explained that she was supposed to meet her two girlfriends in the pub but they were late. ‘Where ya from?’ she asked, taking a sip of her wine. ‘Haven’t seen you in here before.’ Barry said he was new in town, from up the country: didn’t want to give too much away too soon. The band started up again. Old Stones’ numbers like ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Satisfaction’, and Karen chucked off her heels and asked him to dance. He reckoned he was in with a chance even though he couldn’t dance to save himself. Her nose was a bit big but she was pretty enough, with her dark hair in a ponytail and her blue eyes. Big boobs too, he couldn’t help noticing as she shimmied about the dance floor keeping those eyes fixed firmly on his face. When the band stopped for another break, she led him by the hand back to the table and asked him to get more drinks in. The bodgie bloke was still there but he gulped his beer and put his denim jacket on. ‘See youse,’ he growled with a bit of a leer on his face.
Barry was well in, he reckoned. They had a couple more drinks and Karen offered to let him kiss her. She tasted of wine and cigarettes but with her perfume and all he was getting randy. This Karen was a real goer. When the band stopped and the publican flickered the lights to say it was closing time, Barry wondered what would happen next. ‘Come on,’ Karen purred, ‘Les go outside for a smoke.’ So he helped her on with her little red leather jacket like a gentleman and they stood outside with all the others milling about on the footpath. The rain had stopped and it was steamy. Some of the restaurants and cafés were still open, with pools of light falling through their windows onto the narrow street, but when Barry offered to buy her a coffee Karen demurred. ‘Nah,’ she said, with a lascivious wink, ‘You can walk me home.’
Karen’s flat was in a big yellow-brick block with an enormous peppercorn tree out the front. They had a good snog under it and jeez, she was grinding against him. Gagging for it, he reckoned. When they got inside, Barry asked if they could have a drink but she shook her head and dragged him over to the couch upholstered in a blue floral pattern. There was an enormous TV in the corner and lots of expensive stereo gear. ‘C’mere, Barry,’ she ordered, throwing off her jacket and kicking off her shoes. Things happened quickly after that. Got her bra off and her hands were running under his shirt. He had drunk a fair bit but he sobered up fast when he heard a door creak open behind him and Karen screamed that he should get off her. Barry sprang to his feet and wheeled round to see the bodgie bloke coming with a smirk on his face and a hunting knife in his hand.
‘Tryin’ to rape me wife, ya cunt,’ the bloke snarled, muttering to Karen to get on the blower to the cops.
Barry had forgotten none of his Taekwondo moves. He deflected the man’s hand and shoved his arm so hard up his back that something broke and the man squealed like a little kid. The knife went skittering across the floor but Barry grabbed it before Karen could get her hands on it and he shoved her into the kitchen and pushed a chair up against the door handle to lock her in. She squawked a bit but she knew the game was up and the bodgie was whimpering and trying to stay out of Barry’s way. Barry looked around to see what he could take.
‘Car keys,’ he ordered, snapping his fingers. The bodgie looked like he might refuse, so Barry smacked him one, but he saw them anyway, sitting on the sideboard among the fancy glasses and top-shelf bottles. He pocketed them and picked up the stereo and the most expensive-looking bottles of booze. There was at least $200 in Karen’s bag, so he took that too. He calculated there was at least half a grand in the stereo at Cash Converters, and these bozos wouldn’t dare go to the coppers about it. With the money from the sheep, it would see him through until the farm was sold and then he would see what happened next. A sudden cold rage welled up inside him, so he smashed a bit of their crockery and slippered the bodgie a bit for good measure.
The pair’s beat-up Toyota sedan was sitting dripping oil in their carport. It was a piece of crap but it’d do. He tossed the gear into the back seat, jumped in and was soon nosing into Somerville Road, scowling at the grating noise from the diff. He’d dump it up near Cruikshank Park once he got the gear home. He knew a bit about cars, did Barry, being a farm boy. He chuckled to himself. He’d fixed up the brakes of the Old Man’s truck real good: cut through just enough cable so that they’d fail, but not too soon and not so as it’d be too obvious. Pity about his mum, but it was like the Yanks said when they ‘accidentally’ bombed schools and that in Iraq — collateral damage. ▼
Image: Bill Higham, ‘On the Bothwell-Hamilton Road - Tasmania’ (cropped)
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