Zero at the Bone by David Whish-Wilson

Author:David Whish-Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742538594
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2013-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

23

The scrub on the edge of Mount Eliza smelt of aniseed and baked dirt, the smog rising off the freeway. Swann sat on a park bench and waited for Donovan Andrews. The sun had gone behind the cenotaph and the Esplanade was cast in shadow. At the foot of the Barrack Street Jetty a crowd had gathered, dressed in colonial-era clothes. The men wore britches and the women bonnets. Somewhere amongst them was the Prince of Wales – the future King of Australia – invited to participate in the re-enactment of the first landing at Mounts Bay. Swann had seen photos of him in the morning paper, getting kissed by a beautiful model, down at the beach. Unsurprisingly, Prince Charles didn’t look like he minded.

Swann smoked a cigarette while he waited, could hardly taste it, staring at a skiff making its way through the chop towards the breakwall, canvas sail, passengers in their old-fashioned clothes. A cheer went up from the crowd on the foreshore, and then something else, booing, jeering from a megaphone. From the trees by the Supreme Court came a group of Nyungar, a couple of dozen, moving quickly across the open ground. Police met them from the riverbank and soon they were outnumbered, surrounded. One carried a flag, another a scroll. They tried to get to the Prince but were kept back, as the booing and shouting continued. The skiff reached the shore and two men dressed like soldiers carried an older man in a triangle hat through the shallows to the beach. The Union Jack fluttered at the back of the skiff, the Aboriginal flag flew in the midst of the mob, planted in the grassy bank.

The commemoration party were forced to retreat within the police cordon to where Mounts Bay had once lapped at the city, before it was filled with dirt, reclaimed for the freeway. When Swann was a child, Langley Park was an occasional airstrip and the foreshore was lined with jetties and shanty-town allotments, the river still a major source of transport down to the Fremantle port. The East Perth power station had burned a brown coal smear, heavy industries stinking up the Claisebrook Creek, sewerage outlets at Burswood turning the river green with algae. The top end of Hay and Murray streets were filled with run-down tenements, whole families to a single room, East Perth the same.

Swann turned at the sound of Andrews’ Gold Flash growling over the lawn towards the bench, where he cut the engine and kicked down the stand, hoisting off his full-visor helmet. Oblivious to the palaver on the foreshore, he slapped Swann on the shoulder, slumped onto the bench and showed his palm, smirking.

‘My info done you good, detective.’

Swann placed the bills into Donovan’s fingers, immediately secreted in his leathers.

‘Goes without saying, Don.’

‘Jesus, what happened to your face?’

‘What I wanted to speak to you about.’

‘Ah, shit. My info didn’t do you so good?’

‘Nothing to do with that, Don. Something else.’

Andrews looked around, nervous. ‘You know

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