22. Dirty hands

Quint needed a new thinking place. And some serious thinking time. The world was always strange and sometimes hard to sort out, but lately it was impossible. If the sun rose in the west and set in the east it would be easier to understand.

He’d have to think about this.

First things first. He wriggled back under the fence, ignoring the shouts and noise. He’d left things behind, he was sure of it, but he wasn’t going back to retrieve his trowel, not if people were trying to kill him for it.

He hurt, too. Somehow he’d collected a smear of blood on his hand, and he wasn’t sure where it came from. Something caught on the wire and tore as he pulled free. Quint fumed inside. This was not a good day.

He limped across Constitution Avenue, back home to his familiar boxy flatblock. At least here everything was in order. His key fit the front door, there was a hook for his jacket, his beanie, space for his shoes.

Shoe. He only had one. Somewhere out there lay the other one. What good was half a pair of shoes? Good comfortable shoes. Shoe.

If Quint was the swearing type, he’d be saying a few rude words now. But if Quint was the swearing type, most of the words of his life would be rude, and people would step around him on the street.

Quint set down his bag. He’d look through that later, but for now he had to find out where he was leaking blood from. Somewhere on his head, most likely, because it wasn’t gushing out of anywhere visible. Unless it was on his back. Quint suffered badly from his back. There were parts he couldn’t reach, and they itched.

The face in Quint’s bathroom mirror was scratched. He looked like someone people would walk around on the street now. Hair full of mud and rotten oak leaves, eyes full of emotion, cheek covered in dried blood. Hands dirty and fingernails badly needing a scrub.

He tended himself as best he could, but there were parts of him that a shower and a bandaid wouldn’t cover. There was a vacancy on the shoe rack and a hole in the laundry tool rack.

And a fence around his thinking place.

He made himself a special coffee in the moka pot, doused the lights in his bedroom, and stood at the window sipping his coffee, looking out over the site. He turned on the camera, set it for night exposures and attempted to gain some control, to record the moments. People with torches, shouts and commands, a car pulling up. Police and flashing lights next, no doubt.

Quint was rather proud of his ability to take photographs at night. Some embarrassing first attempts of dark blurred shapes had become either dark or blurred and then, when he had mastered extremes of exposure and aperture, photographs of some particular beauty. The final touch had been setting a two second timer delay, so the vibration of his finger on the shutter release died away before the exposure began.

Quint remained still until the shutter clicked to signal the end of each exposure. Even with a tripod, the weight of his body shifting on the creaking wooden floor could blur a time exposure slightly.

Zoom photographs needed even greater care. When a car paused for the gate to open, Quint zoomed in, and hardly dared breathe. The gate area was well-lit, but at extreme optical zoom just a breath of wind through the open window could spoil a shot.

More magic could be performed in the computer after uploading the images from the camera chip. Just click on the “Autocorrect” control, and dim images became visible. Nothing much could be done to fix unfocussed or blurred shots, however.

After a while, the lights and the noise died down. Other vehicles and people showed up, but even Quint lost interest after a while. He took one last careful panorama and went back downstairs.

His bag of treasures, carefully laid out on the kitchen bench, hardly deserved the description. One piece of gold: a dollar coin dated 1988. Like the copper penny, this had the monarch on the obverse and kangaroos on the reverse. Quintessentially Australian, though how much relevance the British queen had to the modern Australian culture was a matter for debate.

A doll. Clothes long gone, but a china head on a wooden frame had survived life under the ground. Vanished threads had held the toy together, but when Quint laid the pieces out, a hand and leg were missing. Nevertheless, she smiled bravely up at him, blue eyes twinkling over red cheeks.

Some pieces of glass and china. A handful of small bones. Some larger pieces of bone, curved too sharply to come from any human. A kangaroo maybe, or a sheep.

And that was it. There had certainly been more to be found if he’d had more time, but Quint ruled a mental line under his thinking place. The grove was gone, the stones scattered, the place guarded by killers. No more.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay