Falk said good-bye to a still-teary Sandra and followed Whitlam through to a cozy home office. He could hear the muffled sound of a cartoon playing from somewhere down the hall. The office had a far more masculine feel than what he’d seen of the rest of the house, with furniture that was battered but well loved. Along the walls ran floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with sports books.
“You’ve got half a library in here,” Falk said, scanning the contents of the shelves, which ranged from cricket to harness racing, biographies to almanacs. “You’re obviously a fan.”
Whitlam bowed his head in mock disgrace. “My postgrad was in modern history, but to be honest, all my research focused on sports history. Racing, boxing, origins of match fixing, et cetera. So all the fun stuff. But I like to think I still know my way around your standard dusty and faded document.”
Falk smiled. “I have to admit, I hadn’t pegged you as the dusty document type,” he said.
“A common mistake, but I can mine those archives with the best of them. Speaking of which…” He pulled a large envelope out of the desk drawer and handed it to Falk. “I thought you might find this interesting.”
Falk opened it and pulled out a photocopy of a black-and-white team photo. Young men from Kiewarra’s 1948 first XI cricket side had donned their best whites and lined up for the camera. Their tiny faces were washed out and fuzzy, but sure enough, there, seated middle of the first row, Falk saw a familiar face. His grandfather. Falk felt a lift in his chest as he saw the name typed neatly in the team list below: Captain: Falk, J.
“This is fantastic. Where did you find it?”
“Library. Thanks to my tightly honed archiving skills.” Whitlam grinned. “I’ve been doing a bit of research on Kiewarra’s sporting history. For my own interest really, and I came across that. Thought you’d like it.”
“It’s great. Thank you.”
“Keep it. It’s only a copy. I can show you where to find the original one day if you want. There’ll probably be other photos from around the same time. He might be in more of them.”
“Thanks, Scott, really. What a great find.”
Whitlam leaned against the desk. He pulled one of the crumpled anti-Falk fliers out of his back pocket and screwed it up. He chucked it at the bin. It went straight in.
“I’m sorry about Sandra,” Whitlam said. “She wasn’t finding it easy to adjust to life here, anyway. The idea of a relaxing country escape hasn’t quite worked out like either of us thought. And this terrible business with the Hadlers has made everything worse. We thought we were moving here to get away from anything like that. Feels like a frying pan–fire scenario.”
“What happened to the Hadlers is so rare, though,” Falk said.
“I know, but—” Whitlam glanced at the door. The hallway outside was empty. He lowered his voice. “She’s hypersensitive to any kind of violence. Keep it to yourself, but I was mugged back in Melbourne, and it ended—well, badly.”
He looked again at the door but, having started, seemed to need to unburden himself. “I’d been at a mate’s fortieth in Footscray and took a shortcut through an alley to the station, you know, like everyone does. But this time these four blokes were there. Still kids really, but they had knives. They blocked the way, and me and this other man—I didn’t know him, just some other poor bastard taking a shortcut—we were stuck. They did the whole routine, demanded wallets and phones, but somewhere it went wrong.
“They got spooked, lashed out. I was beaten up, kicked, fractured ribs, the works. But the other guy took a knife to the guts, bled out all over the asphalt.” Whitlam swallowed. “I had to leave him there to go and find help because the bastards had stolen my phone. By the time I got back the ambulance had arrived, but it was too late. Paramedics said he was already dead.”
Whitlam looked down and fiddled with a paper clip for a long moment. He shook his head as though to clear the thought.
“Anyway, so there was that, and then this. So you see why Sandra’s not happy.” He gave a weak smile. “But you could probably say the same about almost anyone in town right now.”
Falk tried to think of a single exception. He couldn’t.
22
Back in his room, Falk stood at the window and stared down at the empty main street below. Whitlam had driven him back to the pub and given him a friendly wave in full view of passersby. Falk had watched him go, then walked around to the parking lot to check if his paintwork looked as bad as he remembered. It was worse. The words scratched into the car had shone in the fading light, and for good measure someone had shoved a handful of the Falk fliers under the windshield wiper.
He’d slipped up the pub stairs unnoticed and spent the rest of the evening lying on his bed and going through the last of the Hadlers’ files. His eyes were stinging. It was late, but he could still feel his nerves tingling from Sandra Whitlam’s bottomless cup of coffee. Outside his window, he watched a lone car cruise by with its lights on and a possum the size of a small cat scuttle along a power line, her baby on her back. Then the street was quiet again. Country quiet.
That’s partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought. The quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle; a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing wholesome glow when it was weighed up from the back of a traffic jam or while crammed into a garden-less apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh, clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat homegrown veggies and learn the value of an honest day’s work.
On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.
Soon, they’d discover that the veggies didn’t grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.
Falk didn’t blame the Whitlams. He’d seen it many times before when he was a kid. Arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing. I didn’t know it was like this.