Chapter 4: Interlude

It was very early Christmas Day, when I found myself locked in a police interview room, together with some junior detective, barely out of high school I thought. His shirt buttons were done up one button hole adrift, noticeable at the collar. The bastard made no attempt to hide from me that he was extremely pissed off at being called in at some ungodly hour from the comfort of his single bed, probably in a bachelor garret, to take my statement. He started out writing the statement from my slow dictation, but his mind wasn’t on it and, after several inane questions and many crossings out, I simply took the pen and pad from him and wrote out the whole bloody thing myself.

I was just finishing signing the statement, when Police Sergeant Shona poked her head around the door. This time she was smiling broadly at me rather than doing her block like she was when we met before. I wasn’t sure which was more terrifying, her menacing growl or her mischievous grin. Either I was free to go or the judge had given her fair suck to hang, draw and quarter me before leaving me out to grill on a long paddock under the outback sun, plagued by a million flies.

“We got the buggers, all bang to rights,” Shona laughed, “we found at least four different narcotics, all in pretty substantial quantities, amounts that even a commercial warehouse would baulk at stocking, and not one of them dropsticks got away. Most of them were still snoring or taking turns rooting skank sheilas in the Winnebagoes with the air con on internal recycling full blast, trying to keep the black smoke out. The swat team tells me there were more sprog stains on the bed sheets than a Jakarta polly waffle on the first Sunday morno after payday. An’ we caught that figjam Paddy Powell with his semi-hard old fella deep in underage territory with enough coke to stop even Edith Piaf’s pain stuck to his face and all over the young girl’s tits. He’ll be a homeless dero with nothing but a brass razoo to his name by the time we’re finished prosecuting his fat arse.”

“That’s good news, officer. Does that mean we’re free to—”

“Not quite, Cornwall, but I will tell you that you are one lucky bastard. We were going to throw the bloody book, and the bloody book shelves it was stored on at you, when we saw what you had in mind and started shifting those rubbers. Mike couldn’t call and stop you on the satellite phone—”

“I’d left it in the sleeper cab.”

“Right, so I had to try and get my boys in here early rising from their beds, get them fully briefed and on the road before I was ready. Your bloody tyre fire was the last thing I needed after working ten hours on the second busiest bloody shift of the year. For your future info, dawn raids are supposed to be at dawn when the perps are fast asleep, not running about putting out fires while it’s still dark.”

“I thought it would help us get away.”

“Fortunately for you, most of the drongos decided not to run once you woke them up, but to pull down all the shutters in the Winnoes and carry on with the party until the flames died down. One bloke did wake up and ran naked into the bush, which made the swat team split their sides laughing, and didn’t bother to chase him. He was a seppo more used to city life and, after picking up a thorn in the bell end of his nuddy little donger, he came back on his own to give himself up. They’re still looking for a medic with the thickest specs and the smallest set of tweezers in his kitbag to sort him. I’m going home to get my head down for a few hours, then you and Bonnie are invited to a Chrissie Cookout at my community centre, we’re throwing the shrimp on the barbie at one this arvo. A refusal to go or be one minute late is not an option, Bonnie needs this even if you don’t. Nick off down there as soon as we’ve got your John Dory signed—”

“All done.”

“Good onya. Now, there are toilet and shower facilities there, and you can even get your heads down for a couple of hours in your truck if you want. Just don’t do a Holt on us and don’t be bloody late. Remember, shrimps, roo steaks and snags, on the grills at one this arvo and we tuck in at half past.”

Bonnie was bright, and upbeat when we were pushed out the door a few minutes later, she was optimistic about her new future and saw the end of her modelling career as a positive.

“I’ve been so busy working for so long, that the idea of taking time out and not having to continue being a slave to a strictly timed schedule is going to be great. I’ve got plenty of time to think about what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

I think then she noticed how glum I was.

“Are you worried about your delivery schedule, Mark?”

“Yeah, no, not really. I reckon we’ve got just under 30 hours’ driving time from here, if we do twelve hours tomorrow and the same on Thursday, we still need to get six hours in today and then we will have to find somewhere to stay tonight, probably after dark, some 500 clicks down the road. Mind you, if we can shower and rinse out some undies at Shona’s community centre, then juice up on the way out of the city, we could park by the side of the road for one night.”

“So we could still meet your schedule?”

“Yeah, I could still deliver at six am on Friday. Legally I can drive 14 hours at a pinch in any 24 hours, so we could even lose the whole of today and still make it.”

“But you were hoping to stop and take photos along the way?”

“Yeah, I guess I was but I can come this way again in a couple of years. We could still get a few hours on the road in today, depending how long we need to be at this cookout before we can get away. If the worse happens, knowing we won’t arrive in Darwin until after 8am on Friday, I could bell the Goods In at the Darwin Sentinel on Thursday and request a delivery slot Saturday morning, or even Monday first thing. My flight is Monday arvo, so a Saturday delivery would be preferred.”

“I don’t want to upset Shona by leaving her party too early, Mark. She’s gone out of her way to get her family to sort out some spare clothes in my size, as so far the investigation team can’t find any of my stuff. I can’t see how they would recognise what was mine, anyway. And we can’t go down to the carpark ourselves because it’s a crime scene and if anyone other than the police goes rummaging around, Powell’s lawyers would have a field day if they found out and could get him off on a technicality.”

“How?”

“By saying we had the opportunity to plant evidence.”

“No, you’re right, we wouldn’t want that. Look, do you want to drive over to the community centre now? It’s Chrissie Day, I doubt if there’s much traffic around and all the blues are occupied at that bloody truck stop.”

“Wow, yes, I would love to drive your truck again.”

“If it’s quiet around there, and there’s enough room to manoeuvre, you could practice turning and reversing with the trailer. I’m working on the idea of getting a provisional licence for you from a mate in Alice.”

“Would this be a dodgy licence?”

“Nah, course not. This would be a proper licence, but I would have to be with you and awake all the time you’re driving, but it means you can do as much or as little driving as you wish while we burn up the miles.”

“You’d let me do that?” she asked, as we reached the truck and, with another flashing smile, she used her own key to unlock the door.

“Sure, we’ve some time to kill until noon, unless you want to get your head down straight away, I don’t think either of us got much sleep last night.”

“No, I am far too wound up to sleep yet. Why not have 30 minutes playing with the truck and then a couple of hours’ nap? Not much I can learn after half an hour and being tired too, and I’m well used to power napping on location shoots.”

“Bonza. Sounds a plan.” I said as we climbed in. Bonnie retrieved the ignition key, from the mug where we left it, before confidently sliding into the driver’s seat. I had to smile, she was like she was ‘to the motor born’.

Once again, I marvelled at how well her backside moved in my old trackie daks. I mean, back when I was interested in girls, I always thought of myself as a leg man, but Bonnie’s pair of buns were like an electromagnet that was permanently switched on around her, or around me. OK, I still remembered her knees from last night, so the legs were still in with a flip chance. Oh boy, was I in trouble! Wherever I looked on this sheila she was like a billabong bather to a hungry croc. Quite honestly, I should just drive the 30 hours straight to Darwin and deliver that load of paper and dump Bonnie at her Consulate on Thursday morning, if only to maintain the status quo of my sanity and not prolong the agony of my awakening sexual antennas. One of those antennas was permanently unsoft and I was sweating even though the sun had only been up for a couple of hours or so and not yet banished the cold of the night.

I sat in the shotgun seat and keyed the community centre coordinates from Shona’s post-it note into the sat nav. It was literally only five minutes’ drive away, so we could’ve made it without the sat nav using a simple left-right-left. Bonnie started the engine and reversed us straight as a die out of the blue’s station into the road, until we had enough room to turn and then she moved us off smoothly down the road, as easy as if we were in a Fiat 500 with the top down.

I was reminded about the time when I first learned to drive trucks with Uncle Pete. He taught me all I know about driving. I was only 15 then, and wasn’t even old enough to drive a ute, but my uncle had me moving the trucks of all makes, sizes and load weights around the yard and helping load them up from a tender age. When I was free after school, and during vacation time from University, I worked in the yard doing every job that needed doing. By the time I was 21 I was already a qualified and fully licensed Truckie, doing short haul mainly, with the odd long run chucked in for good measure. I grew up without a father and my mother was an alcoholic in denial, so Pete and Aunt Milly, my only other rellies, basically took me in as their own.

Back in the present, I had to admit, Bonnie was a natural driver, with a great sense of balance and spot on spacial awareness, an unusual gift in a sheila, in my experience. I guess when you’re on a catwalk in some voluminous skirt, or because you have to stare off into the middle distance pretending to be a walking weightless wet dream, you needed confidence to know exactly where your feet were treading. Falling off a catwalk was probably as easy as falling off a log.

“Beaut. Just like a pro,” I remarked on her manoeuvres, and she rewarded me with that broad smile that she was blessed with and I was cursed to witness, further upsetting my resolve and equilibrium.

The community centre had a big car park, but had a height barrier preventing trucks from entering, however, it did have a delivery bay at the back of the centre, presumably for delivery of beer barrels. It meant reversing down a narrow forty-metre concrete drive with a carefully negotiable 45 degree turn at the end. I showed Bonnie just the once how to gauge where the end of the truck was and how to control the reverse direction of the trailer while turning, and she had a total of six goes at it. The first couple were not perfect but nor were they the expected disasters either. No, once she got it right on the third go, she really got it, and she was perfect on each of three more times. She was so focused on her concentration, that her tongue poked out of her lips, and she looked too adorable to bear looking at. I felt really proud of her achievements though. This was one tough sheila who could shrug off a really bad experience and clearly do whatever she set out to do; she was a force of nature. No wonder she stood up to those deadbeats who wanted to abuse her back at that truck stop. I thought to myself, ‘Good onya, Bluey!’