The Dead Path Read online

  Nicholas got inside and twisted the car alive.

  T he bones of a city don’t change. Perhaps its skin grows tight or flaccid as suburbs grow fashionable or become declasse; crow’s feet spread from pockets-new streets, new arteries into fresh corpulence. But the skeleton of its founding roads, the blood of its river, the skull of the low mountain that looms over it with its thorny crown of television towers like its own blinking Calvary… these things hadn’t changed.

  It was nearly eleven. Nicholas drove the almost empty streets, amazed to be moving so swiftly and surely: a tardy San Juan Capistrano swallow in a white Hyundai. He had become so conditioned to the London crush that to see inner-city streets this quiet made him shiver and wonder if everyone else knew some secret apocalypse was about to occur; some rapture to which he wasn’t privy.

  In the seventeen years since he’d last seen it, Coronation Drive had grown an extra couple of lanes and tidal-flow traffic signals. But as he glanced across the wide, black waters of the river, the doppelganger lights of factories and apartments winking on its wind-worried surface were so familiar that he could have been a child again, in the backseat of his mother’s Falcon, little Suzette snoring lightly beside him, tucked inside a pile of brightly colored sample bags from the Royal National Show.

  Parallel with the river drive ran the train line, its pylons winking into occasional view between new glass office towers and nineteenth-century townhouses resurrected as boutique law firms and restaurants. As he passed them, he said aloud the names of the railway stations, the same he’d rattled through each day returning from art college, each one closer to home and a hurried meal followed by hours in the garage riveting together a chair from coffee cans or weaving a fabric wall from speaker wire-ambitious, excited, even then dreaming of designing in London.

  But London had proved nothing to be excited about. At the end of the eighties, it had seemed an endless expanse of dour faces pinched above colorful wide-shouldered jackets; a loud and falsely jolly bustle on a hurtling train heading nowhere in particular. No gyms back then, but a pub every twenty meters. The endless set-backs. The bad bosses. The worse bosses. The dull twist of panic every time you looked in your wallet to pay for a shitty Marks amp; Spencer’s sandwich and wondered how the fuck you were going to meet next week’s scandalous rent. Too many Australians. No sunshine. No work.

  But he was nothing if not creative. He found a niche and jumped for it like a street musician at a dollar bill. A friend of a friend told him about a small team looking to cash in on the love for all things Eire and build “authentic” Irish pubs across the southwest.

  He rode to their sawdusty workshop in Streatham; after a coffee mug interview, a squint at his resume, and a test of his handshake, he got the job of decorating the pubs’ interiors. It sounded easy. But it took less than an hour strolling through London’s Davies Street antique shops to realize that if he bought his knickknacks in the city, he had the budget to dress perhaps one shelf. It was motoring through little villages in the Midlands, Bedfordshire, and Sussex that Nicholas discovered he had charmed luck sniffing out old curios, furniture, and bric-a-brac. He’d leave London in a hire van on a Monday and potter without a plan, letting the front wheels find their own way onto increasingly narrow roads flanked by drystone walls and watched by edgy sheep and unblinking blackbirds. For the first few months of this unlikely treasure hunting, Nicholas actively appraised the buildings in the villages to calculate which would be most likely to house an elderly soul ready to part with old junk. But experience taught him not to think; simply to let the solid feeling of surety in his midriff tell him which barn, which leaning Tudor, which locked presbytery would yield the rusty lamps, the worn shillelaghs, the dry-wattled accordions, and the beaten valises that London paid a fortune for. Without fail, he was guided to homes where owners, daughters, new tenants, disgruntled landlords, weary widows, and forgetful widowers divested themselves of odds and sods they were happy to see the arse-end of.

  He would return to London on a Friday, poorly shaved, with a sore back and bowels clogged by the stodge of fry-up breakfasts, in a van filled with crap that cost perhaps three hundred quid yet was worth twenty times that to his employers and customers. He became Nicholas Close, Master of Old Shit. Need some tattered books, a rusty shotgun, and decrepit fishing gear with a distinctly Gaelic twist? Call Nicholas Close. He’s shameless, mildly charming, and he’ll find it cheap. Oh, and did you hear? He used to be a designer or something.

  London had finally, shyly, revealed her lucrative teat. One job alone had paid the deposit on the flat. And that contract had led to a permanent consultancy with a firm that opened Irish pubs in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and Santiago. Nicholas had been charged with the dubious task of vivifying new spaces with objects whose original owners were long dead. It was tolerable and various, and the travel was good. He intended to get back to design next month, next financial year, after Christmas.

  He met and married Cate. The mortgage had been reduced at a good clip. But the amusing collectibles, the money, the diminishing loan statements, everything, lost its value the instant he walked into the flat in his wet and scraped motorcycle jacket and found why Cate hadn’t answered his call.

  You killed her.

  “Shh,” he told himself.

  Because you just had to take the bike.

  “Shut up.”

  There, said the voice in his head, arguing with yourself. The slippery slope to madness. No wonder you couldn’t keep a job.

  No. Not true. He was never fired. He quit.

  And why was that?

  Because the old shit he sought for a living tended to be found in old places. And the older the place, the more chance it had of being…

  He didn’t want to think the word.

  Go on. Say it. It doesn’t bite. Not anymore.

  “Haunted,” he whispered.

  The word hung in the air like despair in a dying man’s bedroom. It was still hanging, as if it were itself a ghost, when Nicholas sucked it back in with a gasp.

  T ime had frozen here.

  While his mind had dragged through the thorny brambles of his last few months in London, his hands had steered him by dormant habit six kilometers out from the glass spires of the city and into the quiet Brisbane suburb of his childhood.

  Tallong.

  For his first eighteen years this had been his home suburb. Earth had first been broken here not twenty years after the city was founded in the mid-1800s. Then the rolling hills of Tallong had been cleared of dense native forest, dotted with farmhouses, and infected with Friesian cows and sheep. But the town became a city, and as it breathed in and its chest pushed out, the paddocks of Tallong were striped with gravel streets. Distinctive clapboard homes with one window glinting from under a high gable and a cheeky wink for a side veranda began to spread along the new roads-avenues with names occasionally Aboriginal but mostly Anglo, as breezy as open sulkies and jauntily optimistic as the residents who built there. Pennyworth Street. Wool Street. Harts Avenue. Princess Street.

  Tramlines were laid. Gas lines went in. Bitumen covered the gravel. Tramlines were ripped up. Telephone poles were sunk between yawning jacarandas and festive red-frosted bottlebrush.

  In the sixties, when memories of the privations of war and rationing had lost their sting, the wood and iron houses were viewed with eyes now brought to a critical sharpness by the sight of rockets streaking skyward from Kennedy and Baikonur and Woomera. Some houses were torn down and replaced with monolithic hulks of pale brick and yellow glass. Septic tanks were drained and sealed. Sewer lines were dug in. The suburb grew green and fat and settled, a contented dame lounging by a slow loop of river; the fat queen of a well-made hive. Her only wildness was a wide corner of untouched native forest at her edge. Two square kilometers of rippling hillocks thick with trees, ripe for razing and selling and sprinkling with a thousand new houses.

  It was the sight of the woods that made Nicholas suck in his breath and step o
n the brake. They were still there.

  He stared out the side window. He was on Carmichael Road, the street he’d walked almost every day to and from school until he was ten. And later, as a teenager, he had no choice but to pass these woods in the bus on his way to high school, then on foot on his way to the train station and college.

  Seventeen years he’d been gone. In that time, the value of the houses here must have tripled. Yet this huge tract of densely wooded land sat at the edge of the suburb, unassailed. The moon was up now, furbishing the pelt of the treetops silver. The forest’s bulk glowered below, black as shadowed eyes under a severe brow, watching…

  He opened the door and stepped into the crisp night air. He walked across the crackling grass of the no-man’s-land between Carmichael Road and the dark-toothed edge of the woods.

  How could they still be here? Some developer should have snapped up the huge block, cleared it, slashed it, veined it with new streets with bromidic names like Spinnaker Court and Mahogany Place, and salted it thickly with pastel-rendered McMansions. Yet here they were, extant and untouched. Was it Crown land, fiercely guarded by some cleverly written covenant? Maybe a park was planned? Perhaps the developers were just waiting till house prices boomed again?

  Nicholas’s feet crunched on gravel, and he stopped.

  He stood on the same path he used to take home from school. A path on which he’d found something small and disturbing, something silently awful and strange and offensive…

  His nostrils flared and his heart-as if having heard its own starter’s pistol-began thudding in his chest. The memory of a hot November day a quarter-century ago reached out of the woods, put its sly hands inside him, and knotted his stomach. He’d been ten. He was with his best friend, Tristram. Running. Terrified. Chased. Soon after, Tristram was dead.

  Apart from the silvery whisper of the chill air in the leaves, the night was silent.

  Nicholas realized he was avoiding looking at the tree line. He dragged his eyes from the bright crowns of the trees down to the dark trunks. They stood like a row of black teeth, endlessly huge, stretching left and right into the night. The maw of some undersea thing, some behemoth, sentient and unquiet. Waking as it scented prey.

  Something’s coming.

  The woods were alive. His heart hammered behind his sternum. Something inside the trees had sensed him, tasted him on the cold air. Recognized him.

  It was coming.

  Go! he yelled in his head. Run!

  But his body was frozen. His feet would not move. His fingers hung cold as icicles. His eyes were locked on the darkly grinning trees, waiting for them to open and for whatever they held to reach from their damp innards and take him and consume him and leave him slit and empty and drained as Tristram’s little body had been so many years ago. And part of him welcomed that fate.

  Nicholas flinched. A raindrop hit his scalp. Another, his cheek. And another. His head, as if released from some dark spell, jerked upward.

  The sky, clear and starry at the airport, was now an eyelid half-closed; clouds as black and inscrutable as the woods before him had consumed the sky to its zenith and were marching further overhead, already dropping their ordnance of cold, heavy drops.

  A whisper of white flickered at the corner of his eye. He turned, catching a glimpse. Something small and pale flickered away between the dark trunks, as if devoured by the trees.

  His galloping heart was shaking his whole body. He again told himself to turn; this time his body listened, and he put his back to the biding woods and strode through the matchstick grass to his car.

  It took all his willpower not to run.

  R ain rioted on the tin roof.

  Nicholas watched his mother pour steaming water into a teapot, glumly mesmerized by the billowing clouds of steam. The sight of her making tea was so familiar that it could have been transposed, with just a little loosening around the edges, from two decades ago. The kitchen had been freshened with new benchtops and a stainless-steel fridge, and his mother was the same, maybe a bit heavier and just a little shorter. Seventeen years, and nothing had changed. The thought made him tired.

  “Your sister is coming up from Sydney tomorrow.”

  Katharine Close’s voice had a singsong matter-of-factness that suggested schoolteacher or marriage counsellor. In the early seventies, she had been a weather girl at a local television station-a shapely lodestone for the discussion of meteorological events in service station garages and on fairways. Katharine had just been offered the upward move to reading the six o’clock news when she fell pregnant with Nicholas. Motherhood then separation then widowhood conspired to pretty well put a bullet behind the ear of her fledgling television career. She raised her two children alone. When they were both old enough for school, she cleaned houses until she had squirreled away enough to buy herself a kiln and wheel. Then she sheeted up a small studio between the stumps under the house and taught herself the secrets of clay and flux and glaze. She paid for her habit by selling her pots and platters at farmers’ markets and teaching a handful of students when the mood took her. On the kitchen dresser, Nicholas saw berthed a small armada of perhaps twenty teapots.

  Katharine handed him a steaming cup.

  “Suzette’s coming up,” he said. “Why?”

  “I have no idea. To see her brother?”

  “I only just arrived.”

  His mother tapped her spoon sharply on her cup. “Yes. Selfish bitch.”

  They drank in silence awhile. Above the surf-like rataplan on the roof, Nicholas could hear the house ticking around them as it cooled. He felt his mother’s eyes crawling over his face.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  “Cheers, Mum.”

  In his memories, his mother’s hair was perpetually chestnut, worn tight as a fiercely guarded nest. Now it was gray and loose.

  He took a biscuit from a plate, scrutinized it, and put it back. Katharine tutted and whisked it up, then dunked it in her tea. It was a gesture Nicholas remembered from a frugal childhood-nothing wasted. Nothing, except time. Even after his father died, some two or three years after he left them, Nicholas never saw Katharine with another man.

  “Seeing anyone?” he asked.

  She scowled at him over the rim of her cup. “I see lots of people. None worth talking to.”

  “Having a thing with the clay man? Dalliances with horny kiln repairmen?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll get a reputation.”

  “As what? A cranky old dyke?”

  Nicholas shrugged.

  “Grand.”

  They ate and drank in silence.

  “You know they offered me five hundred thousand for the house?”

  “Who?”

  “People.” She waved the word away. “Not bad, though, for an old girl.”

  “Not bad,” he agreed.

  Rain gurgled in the downpipe outside, a visceral rush of cold water in dark places. He thought about mentioning the Carmichael Road woods, asking his mother how they could still be there, asking if she thought, too, that they lurked with the menace of a group of shadowed men on an otherwise empty street, men whose silhouettes were drawn taut with latent trouble. But he felt foolish trying to catch the words, and so let them swim away into the ocean-like patter outside.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make Cate’s funeral.” Katharine said it boldly, but the silence that followed bled the words dry.

  Nicholas ran his tongue around his teeth, as if hunting for a civil thing to say that might be caught there.

  “No airline would have carried you, you were sick as a dog,” he said finally. “She liked you.”

  Katharine smiled. It bloomed and died on her lips. “Poor man.”

  He looked up. She was watching him carefully, wearing the same owlish look he knew from thirty years ago, when he was five and thinking of raiding the biscuit jar. A look that warned him against doing something he might regret.

  “It was an accident, Cate
’s death. You do know that, Nicky.”

  Nicholas drained his tea, stood, and kissed the top of his mother’s head. She looked old.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  K atharine dried Nicholas’s teacup and put it quietly back on the shelf. Well, she thought, the day has come. He’s here at last. She flicked the kettle on and sat as it started to sigh.

  It had been three weeks since Nicholas rang to say he was leaving England and coming home. Every day since, she’d wondered how she’d feel when he arrived. And every day she’d been forced to admit she was dreading his return. Then she saw him as he stepped from the car-a thin, long-legged man with a shock of dirty blond hair-and her heart had leapt like a pebble on water. Donald! Then she chastized herself. Donald had been dead thirty years. But, by God, Nicholas looked just like his father.

  She’d watched him step through the shadows cast by the yellow streetlight, saw how unwell he looked. Like that painting by Sargent of Robert Louis Stevenson. Thin-limbed and long and pale. Harried into long strides by silent things in dark corners. Bright-eyed with something that could be fever or genius or madness. When the doorbell rang, she’d had to fight the temptation to turn off the lights, burrow into a corner, and pretend she wasn’t home. Why? Why did she want to avoid her own son?

  Because he’s bad luck.

  She’d fairly slapped herself for thinking that, and threw open the door and threw her arms around him before they’d both realized a nod and a kiss would do.

  The electric kettle rumbled discontentedly and switched itself off. Katharine popped a teabag into her cup and drowned it in scalding water.

  Bad luck. Just like Donald.

  She snorted, angry with herself, and sat.

  Nonsense. She was unsettled because her boy was coming home after such a long time, and he’d want to be part of a life that she’d made very comfortable without him. Suzette in Sydney, Nicholas in London, a phone call each week, and that was fine. Her life was hers, and her children were loved well from a distance. A visit every six months from Suze and the kids. A flight to London every second year to see Nicky and Cate…