They backed the car up, making sure no one was paying much attention, and dumped the suitcases in, dragging cardboard and industrial waste over the top of it all. When they got back home, the bed was nothing more than a scorched mark on the grass with ash and blackened, twisted metal springs atop it. They decided to leave that as it was. Worry about it later. Maddy ordered a new double bed online, to be delivered. Their mother’s room would soon look like she’d gone away for a while, expecting to come back. It could stay like that indefinitely.
They went back inside and made more drinks.
“The house is ours now,” Zack said, lifting his glass in a toast.
“To the future,” Maddy said. Her hands still shook.
“Dad’s been acting really weird ever since we got back,” Josh said on Monday after school.
“Weird how?” Zack asked.
“Dunno. Just not his normal self, you know? He doesn’t look well, either. He’s so pale.”
“Maybe he’s sick?”
“He goes out a lot at night. Mum’s really upset about it.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. You want to come over to mine instead? My mum’s gone to see her cousins in Bega.”
Maddy was high from some good weed Dylan had. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. She might stay with him for a while yet. She was enjoying her walk home in the moonlight, the cool air of approaching autumn invigorating. The streets were quiet. After midnight, The Gulp seemed to slip into a coma. A poster on a telegraph pole caught her eye, photocopied black and white with a picture of a straggly-haired young man. Have you seen Daniel? in bold letters across the top. She turned up Tanning Street past the post office and made her way up the shallow hill, then down the other side. She paused as she came by the playground on the opposite side of the street behind the beach. A figure stood just past the park, staring out to sea. They were motionless. Uncannily so.
Maddy frowned, recognising Jack Parsons. As she watched, someone else came wandering up and stood beside him. Wendy Callow. They didn’t speak, didn’t even acknowledge each other. Just stood there. A moment later, Mr Brady joined them. Maddy walked on, slowly, watching from the corner of her eye, glad of the street and the park between them. The three just stood there, staring at the ocean.
When she reached a patch of deep shade under a fig tree, Maddy paused again. There should be one more. Sure enough, after a moment more, a woman walked slowly across the grass past the play equipment and joined the others. Stephanie Belcher, Maddy presumed. The social worker.
When Belcher reached the group, they all turned as one and walked back across the park and onto Tanning Street. Lurking in the shadows, Maddy watched them head towards the harbour. They walked out of sight, never having said a word to each other.
Part of Maddy wanted to follow, see what they did, but she didn’t dare. Her role in all this, whatever it was, had ended. She hoped the promise to leave her and Zack alone would be kept.
The Band Plays On
Blind Eye Moon were playing and Patrick had no idea if they were any good. The Monkton Tavern was packed for the Friday night gig, and so many locals had said to check them out it seemed like a necessary part of the trip. Backpacking was all about immersion in the local culture, after all. In Thailand they’d gone trekking into the jungles of the north and visited the Karen hill people. In Malaysia they’d developed a taste for hawker street food. In Darwin they’d been mesmerised by the vast splendour of Kakadu and were keen to learn about the local folks who showed them around there. It was all so far removed from Dublin. Leaving for a one-year trip around the world had been the best decision of his twenty-four-year life. Ciara had needed to cajole and badger him about it for months, sure. He was a creature of habit and took some convincing, but she had been right. He’d told her so and would tell her again. That they travelled so well together was also good evidence a life together would be long and fruitful. But he needed to wait until they got home to Ireland to put that to her. A proposal on the trip would fundamentally change the nature of what they were doing.
Torsten and Simone came back from the bar, carrying beers. The brother and sister had turned out to be excellent travelling companions, the four of them sharing the costs and the driving of a small camper van. It was a little cramped inside, but not too bad. To take a break from the confines they planned to book into a motel for a couple of nights in Monkton. Warm showers, comfortable beds, and other home comforts every few days made the whole thing more bearable. They were backpacking, but not slumming it.
Having driven from Darwin, down through Alice Springs to Adelaide and then along the coast to Melbourne on their own, Patrick and Ciara had welcomed the team up with the German siblings, for financial reasons if nothing else. Two weeks road tripping along the coast from Melbourne to Sydney together was proving to be good fun.
“Took so long to get drinks!” Torsten said, sitting down and sliding a beer across. “They’re four or five deep at the bar.”
“Lucky we got a table,” Patrick said.
Ciara returned from the bathroom, took her seat. The four of them raised their glasses and clinked them together.
“I talked to a girl in the bathroom who said Blind Eye Moon are the best band in the world,” Ciara said with a laugh.
“So good we’ve never heard of them before,” Patrick said.
“Maybe big only in Australia?” Simone asked. Her accent was strong, her English not as good as Torsten, who spoke almost fluently.
“Maybe,” Ciara said. “But we’ve been here two months already and never heard of them before. We’ve been catching as many local acts as possible. Honestly, I think they’re something of a local phenomenon with a bit of a cult following. Lots of folks here seem really into them. You see all the t-shirts?”
Patrick nodded, gestured with his glass. “Yeah, look at this place. It’s big enough, and heaving, but there can only be, what? Five hundred people, tops? If they were as big as all that, they wouldn’t still be playing pub gigs in small towns, would they?”
The Monkton Tavern was a long building with a high A-frame roof and slate floor. Patrick had begun to recognise a few features of Australian architecture and knew this was a little different to anything he’d seen before. It was old, built down near Monkton harbour, in the oldest part of the town, so it had to be colonial. Regardless, it was a good space with a long bar and a raised stage at the far end with an impressive looking PA stack and light array. For a small town, it seemed the Monkton Tavern was a hub for entertainment. They’d got there early, hence the luck with a table, and were already a few beers deep. The booze buzz was settling in, the crowds were reminding him of Dublin’s busier nightspots, and Patrick thought they were in for a good night. At least, they would be if the band were half as good as their numerous groupies seemed to think they were.
“Yo, Monkton!”
The crowd roared and surged forward, the space around the tables opening as people thickened towards the stage. Patrick hopped up, stood on his chair for a better look.