Oceana Fine by Tom Flood

Author:Tom Flood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-13T02:04:13+00:00

Lie Of The Land 2

The road that led through Mazzone’s amazing front gates—a series of iron flourishes surrounding the name wrought along the lines of an upturned V—mazzone—was wide and layered with fine blue metal. As his van ground to a halt outside the brick porticoes, a stone flew into the windscreen making a tiny pit in the laminated surface. A small boy in shorts stared defiantly at him for a minute, then flitted from sight round the projecting corner of the house. He rang the bell five times before giving up and wondering if he should try the back.

An odd fenced-off area rose to one side of the house front. It looked a bit like a family plot except the fence, scalloped salmon brick with low lace inserts, was too new. He scrambled up the hard-baked slope. A swimming-pool. There was something shocking about the pale blue cavity, the colourless water that wrinkled outwards from some invisible disturbance, the wide concrete aggregate paving. It was like a trick. Like a piece of the sky framed. No trees, no bushes. Not a hint of green to be seen. Depthless.

As he turned to go back down, a shadow appeared above the opposite rise—half a man—and regarded him silently.

‘Oh. Hullo,’ he called, feeling, under that dark stare, like a child caught stealing fruit. ‘Perhaps you could help me. I was looking for a Mr Mazzone.’ The figure remained motionless, leaning into the slope. He went on. ‘I was told he might be able to help me. A young couple, amateur prospectors, around this way three weeks ago. Small van—Mazda. You wouldn’t have seen them, would you?’

The man suddenly strode forward over a scallop and around the patch of blue. He had on a dusty checked shirt, black shorts and a pair of worn workboots. He was tall, though not as tall as Finder. Standing on the raised pavement, leaning forward over the fence, his moustache—powdered with pale grain dust—was at the level of the other man’s forehead. In a quiet husky accent and with a forward butt of head and shoulders, he said, ‘Go see Cleaver. At the mine.’

‘So you have no fixed address, sir,’ the policeman pointed out. It sounded like an accusation, coming so bluntly from that uniform. He hadn’t thought of it since he had driven the anxious stretch from Kalgoorlie to Southern Cross. Before that, meandering the length of the Murray River system and coasting across the desert towards his rendezvous with his daughter and her husband, the smooth bevelled edges of his life had kept him awake long after he had unclipped the Laminex table and set up the platform bunk. He found his body still rebelled against the confined space but it was better than the expanse of empty sheet that a double bed offered. He had allowed himself too much time.

That evening he found a good spot on the south side of the road where it came over the last shoulder. From here he could

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