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“I think I know where he is.” Her doodle was inspired by Will’s tattoo.
“I’ve had people looking for him. How could you know?”
“I’m not sure, but he told journalists he was going home. I figured home meant Shanghai, but I think he’s gone to Tara.”
“Tara!” The word came out of Peter like a detonation. “The one place, he’d know I’d never look. Why would he go to Tara? There’s nothing there. He kicked out of Tara and never looked back. He hates the place. We both do.”
“Something bad happened in Tara, didn’t it Peter?”
“We had tough childhoods, he told you that.”
“Something more.”
Peter went silent. Darcy waited.
“Will has demons in Tara.”
“Then he’s gone to face them.”
41. Blockies
“If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.” — Confucius
Even the trees looked shorter.
When Will was a kid, those gums had been giants, with big grey limbs that would crash to the ground. They could kill you, those gums, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they were just trees, not something else about this place out to get him.
Everything about Tara was like the trees on the block. Familiar but different. Reduced.
From the deck of the kit home, Will watched the creek. He’d been on the block for three weeks now and while much of that time he’d been busy getting the house sorted out, it wasn’t a good excuse for not taking five minutes to walk down there. It was out and out avoidance.
Bo had. He’d spent several afternoons pretending to fish, but Will suspected, secretly snoozing in the shade. Tomorrow Bo was taking the ute and hitting the road, his first Australian adventure solo.
He looked more at home here now, his bewilderment at meeting rural Australia and hearing its accent had been a good foil for Will’s own ambivalence about coming back. He’d been able to look at the place through Bo’s eyes when using his own got too hard.
Will sat on the deck, his hat down over his face, Pete Murray singing in his ears, and replayed that first day back in Tara.
The town had barely changed at all. There were two new cafés. One looked like it might attempt decent coffee. The pub had been renovated, the Chinese was a Thai and the bank was a grocery store. The school had a new fence and was painted yellow instead of the green of Will’s day.
The layout of the streets was the same, they were filled with the same mix of weatherboard and brick homes, some painted proud, with gardens, some worse for wear; but the suburb looked smaller, more tightly huddled together, as if for security against the vastness of the space around.
Karen Fredrick’s rented cottage was derelict. Parched to grey. Entire boards gone. Every window stone blown. From the street front you could see straight past the long gone front door down the hall to the overgrown backyard. Karen had a fiancé back then. He drove long haul trucks and wasn’t around much, until the day he lost his licence for speeding, and he and Karen moved to Brisbane. The school had needed a new history teacher and Will had needed a new outlet for his restless energy. It amazed him now to think it had taken him till Shanghai to find it.
Remembering how Karen taught him more than history in that house was a warm vision amongst the curled up and dry ones.
He’d driven through the town, crawl slow, in the rented ute with Bo in the passenger seat. It’d amused them both, this reversal, but Will had been itching to drive, and in a place where the rules were less random and they’d hardly meet another car, he could do it one-handed.
It rocked Bo’s world: the vast emptiness, the distances, the way the people on the street stared open-mouthed at them as though they were aliens piloting a rocket ship.
“Makes my village look cosmopolitan,” he’d said. “And you say no one will know you here?”
“Nope. Fifteen years ago. I might recognise some old-timers, but the town was busted even back then, the population dying off or passing through.”
Will cruised to a stop outside a little park, a couple of craggy trees, a bench to sit on.
“Back then the place was bigger. The state government had a scheme to sell land off cheap, encourage people to move out here. They thought they’d build a farming community, but the blocks were too small, and the people who bought them had no idea how to farm.”
“Why did they come?”
