The Worm King Read online

  ‘Max Shubert from Penfolds, he start to make the Grange in 1955. Always from the same shiraz grape with minimo of cabernet sauvignon.’ Francesco raised his thumb and forefinger together in an O-shape and the “sauvignon” rolled from his throat like sludge draining out a pipe.

  ‘This bottle, she cost you more than a thousand dollar if you buy at auction. Just for the one bottle. One bottle!’ He shook his head and prodded the air with a single hairy index finger, unable to believe the words coming out his own mouth, then poured two glasses. The glasses were unusual bowl-shaped tumblers, without a stem, although they balanced nicely on the street map.

  Winston woofed back a third of his tumbler in one healthy swallow. It certainly had a warm, moreish taste. Thick and . . . almost like an extra-fine steak, minced up and magically transformed into some fruity, beefy health drink. He’d listened to wine knobs before at the restaurant tables lining the streets of Darlinghurst and Oxford St, dishing out terms like “luscious” and “passionfruity overtones”. “My, what a cheeky drop!” the tossers would say. But this really was luscious. The word seemed made for it. He slapped back another third, this time with considerably more gusto.

  Fucking luscious alright. ‘What did the guy get for it, who traded it to you?’

  ‘Water.’

  ‘You guys drive a hard bargain. Was it a lot of water?’

  ‘We hold him under for a while, so more than he need I think.’

  Winston’s hand froze midway to his mouth.

  Francesco laughed. ‘No, we give him good deal. I joke with you. We look after him.’ He topped up both their glasses.

  A flash of light in the rearview mirror signaled another vehicle approaching. Francesco turned off the torch. The surrounding blackness absorbed noise like a sea fog and the sound reached them only moments before the car pulled up. They watched in the mirror as its engine spluttered off then a door creaked open and a second later, slammed shut. A shadow slunk past, pausing briefly at Winston’s window before gliding on. He assumed they were going to speak to the hotel staff on the gate. The vehicles headlights remained on but the Ford’s interior was so fogged up Winston could barely see a thing. He leant forward and stretched out to rub a section of window but just then the headlights went off and everything outside disappeared.

  Francesco turned the torch back on. ‘You are suspicious man,’ he said raining down spittle. They were on bottle number three, a 1967, and Francesco spat a lot when he talked. Winston held up his hand defensively. ‘See! I am right already, always with the guard.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, it’s because you keep bloody spit—’

  ‘You suspicious of me, because you think I like your little friend? Is right?’ The Italian laughed boisterously. ‘I squash her! You no worry about that.’

  Winston felt distinctly relieved, and took another long slurp.

  Francesco wound the corkscrew down on the fourth bottle. A crisp, damp pop announced its birth. Winston was seeing the councilor in a new light: albeit a groggy, hazy one. ‘This year, the 1974, was much bad weather. The La Niña come. Crops stunted. But we try, as example of not so perfect Grange, and so we know all of the spectrum. Then you can say you are Vino Professoro.’ He winked and kissed his fingertips.

  ‘I’m already an expert on stunted thank you.’

  Francesco’s smile faded. ‘So, you have this from . . . from when you born?’

  ‘No. I used to be really tall. Just shrunk recently.’

  ‘Wha—? . . . Ha! Is good you can laugh on this!’

  ‘Strangely enough, I don’t usually laugh about it. Must be this Grange. The technical name for it’s achrondroplasia. It’s a type of dwarfism that effects one in twenty-five thousand, so is kind of like winning the lottery but in reverse. You end up with arms and legs much shorter than normal compared with your trunk and head, and a few other side effects, like having a nose that flattens at the bridge, and trident hand.’ Winston held up his stubby fingers. ‘But apart from that, everything’s sweet.’

  Yeah, sweet. That’d been John the Hat’s prognosis when Winston first met him four years ago, on a rainy afternoon in a pub across the road from Rose Hill racetrack. ‘Sweet! Closer to the ground after a big night on the turps. That’ll save you some bruises!’ The Hat certainly had a unique talent for looking on the bright side of life. Winston idly wondered if John, Lord Brown and the Māori girl were enjoying luxury such as this: lazing back outside a five-star hotel, walloping down Grange. The Hat was right though, it all depends how you look at it and sometimes life is sweet indeed.

  Knock! Knock! Knock! Astrid belted her knuckles against the door. Winston groggily came to and wound down his window. She was angry as buggery. ‘The idiots kept me waiting in a room for three hours! They reckon Dick’s there, but they’re still trying to track him down. Anyway, I’ve given them a good rarking up and they said you could wait in there too. At least it’s a room.’ She stood on tiptoes and leant slightly inside the cab, sniffing the air and frowning at the six empty bottles lined up on the dashboard. ‘You got your own party in here, I see.’ He felt like a naughty schoolboy.

  They spilt out, Francesco carrying the crate and singing while Winston held the glasses, stumbling, and trying to chip in with the chorus.

  ‘Sῖ mi chiamano Mimῖ . . .

  The men on the gate waved them through without a problem. Francesco stopped singing and Winston could now see the tents were rough-looking affairs, plonked around what must’ve been the hotels front garden. A veranda ran across the face of the building and the main entrance lay a fraction to the right of centre. Eight or ten men were standing on the veranda: three Asians; a coffee-skinned man with a goatee, head-towel and long white pyjamas; one Negro and at least four Europeans in dark business suits. Francesco slurred a greeting but they all deliberately looked away except the Negro, who smiled. The door was held open for them by an expressionless doorman and the concierge at the front desk didn’t say a word as they staggered past, obediently following Astrid.

  Down the corridor, then a left, a right, up some stairs, another corridor running at forty-five degrees to the last, and Winston realized he was completely lost. He looked back to get his bearings and noticed a porter following. When they turned into a narrower, dimly lit hallway the porter ducked ahead and ushered them to their room.

  It was spartan and dirty, not having been cleaned for two weeks so mucky grim covered the bed, table, TV and single chair. On the positive side was a fully functioning overhead light. Winston placed the two glasses he’d miraculously carried without breaking on the TV, then scrambled onto the bed holding his palms up towards the lightshade. They wouldn’t even need a telly, this one little light would be enough entertainment after nearly a month in the dark.

  ‘This is a different room,’ said Astrid.

  The porter leant against the doorframe, watching. ‘The lights are on for four hours a day in these rooms. You got about an hour left.’ He continued to hang there, assessing them, or maybe waiting for a tip although that was never going to happen because Winston didn’t have a cent on him. Another ten uncomfortable seconds passed before he finally closed the door and disappeared. Francesco sat on the bed and pulled a blanket from the crate at his feet. He must’ve stuffed it in to stop the bottles clinking around, and offered it to Astrid because she was holding her arms to her chest, shivering. She shook her head, instead walking to the door and turning the handle.

  ‘It’s locked. Hey, this is locked! I’m sure the last room wasn’t because I went out to look for someone. Why would they do that?’

  Chapter Twenty

  Dubbo

  The roar came again: an incredibly deep, rolling, spine-tingling sound ripping through the cold night air of Dubbo. ‘That was a fucken lion,’ whispered the Hat. The gunfire stopped. Others had heard the beast too.

  The lions were feeding in the suburbs of Dubbo.

  Leroy’s van had been stolen on the southern fringe of town then it’d been a
two-hour slog in the dark attempting to reach the northern side where they hoped to somehow get another ride. Āmiria had a strikeable camping flint which when given a quick sharp scrape provided a flash of light allowing them to see about a meter ahead at a time. She also had a compass. Both tools were gifts from Astrid’s dad before they left and the four burly men who’d tossed them from the van fortunately hadn’t searched her (because she’d been pretending to cry) as they did to Lord Brown and the Hat.

  ‘Keep together!’ she called, for the hundredth time.

  A large fire was visible in the distance where Lord Brown guessed the centre of town might be and they’d decided to give this a wide berth. He was the only one of the three who’d been through Dubbo before.

  ‘Keep together, I said!’ The Hat led the dog on a rope and this had become tangled around a letterbox. Another shot rang out, and a millisecond later the ugly whine of a bullet, meaning it was close. Āmiria recognized the sound as a large calibre round, certainly not a .22. Maybe a 308 or a 30-06. It didn’t have the explosive boom of a 45. Her uncle Monty used a Marlin lever-action 45 on big boars sometimes so she knew what they were like. Most of the time he used his knife, although once she’d watched him kill a sow with a pair of scissors.

  ‘In here! Quickly!’ cried a stranger’s voice to their left. A torch beam flashed briefly, coming from a doorway at the end of a short path running off the street. Āmiria saw a woman’s face, down low in the open door, beckoning them. ‘Inside, quick! Quick!’

  The kitchen lay at the back of the house and had a single window although this was blocked out by a large navy-blue bedspread tacked across it. A candle burnt on the table and the woman who’d brought the trio inside looked gaunt in the flickering light. Her grey hair was tied in a severe bun and Āmiria thought she might be slightly older than her dad but nowhere near as old as Lord Brown. A scrawny boy of about eighteen sat on the formica bench next to the sink, watching them warily.

  ‘I’m Zelda. That’s David.’ The boy nodded nervously. Āmiria, Lord Brown and the Hat introduced themselves. ‘David came from out there, like you. We’re not related.’

  ‘Are we near the north side of town?’ asked Lord Brown. ‘We’re trying to get back on the Newall Highway, towards Gunnedah and Tamworth.’

  ‘You’re well off track. This is Cobbora Rd, near the university. You have to cut back further west to get to the highway, and you can’t go that way now even if you wanted to.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Āmiria.

  ‘There’s a gang of aborigines on the northern side of town who’re not letting people through.’

  ‘We can’t go back the other way,’ said the Hat. ‘Those ratbags nicked our van. They weren’t abo’s though.’

  ‘That’s right, they would’ve. A man I run into at the supermarket told me there’s a group of farmers come in and set up some kind of roadblock on the southern side, and they’re taking whatever they can from anyone.’

  Zelda had to make another trip to the supermarket. David was left “in charge” of the candle and he’d snuffed it out, as Zelda instructed, two minutes after she’d left. Somebody’s chair scraped but Āmiria couldn’t tell whose. Maybe David scampering back to the bench. Lord Brown could’ve had the same thought because suddenly he asked where the supermarket was located.

  ‘It’s just down the road.’ The shaky voice came from the other side of the table so he hadn’t gone after all. ‘In the first few days when there was lots of rain, people tried to carry out boxes which got wet and broke open and the cans ended up spilt everywhere. Zelda says there’s less left now because more have twigged onto it. Lots of them don’t have labels so you can’t tell what you’re eating till you get them open.’

  Āmiria wondered how that would be, foraging around on your hands and knees outside the supermarket in the pitch dark, searching for cans. ‘That wasn’t a lion we heard earlier was it?’

  ‘Yes. Zelda thinks there’s four of them. A male and three females. They’re from Dubbo zoo which is only a few kilometers from here. Someone must’ve let them out, rather than let’em starve she reckons. It’s the biggest zoo outside of Sydney,’ he added helpfully, as though they might be thinking of popping in for a visit. ‘There are heaps of open spaces and it’s more like a wilderness park than a zoo, I guess is what they call it.’

  Lord Brown clicked his tongue and Āmiria heard him smack his hand against something, probably his grubby other hand or equally filthy thigh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I should have seen it. Arghhhh! Could kick myself now, if my legs weren’t so tired. The Zoo! Of course! The lions would’ve been waiting for this. Praying for it. Watching the sky every night when they’d normally be out hunting, and thinking to themselves where is it? They’d have the memory of it: long distant and so faint and passed down through so many generations that now it’s probably just a feeling to them.’

  His voice dropped and he continued in an uneasy tone, like he’d caught David’s nervous-willies. ‘This town’s sunk into a spiraling, primeval feast. The aborigines verses the redneck farmers verses the lions.’

  ‘Gosh, that’s cheered us all up,’ said the Hat.

  There was a noise out in the hallway. ‘Zelda?’ called David nervously.

  WEATHER BADGE DIARY

  Mr Snow has taken us around to meet everyone in the hotel but our parents aren’t here.

  Sometimes there are funny noises outside our room. Krystal thinks it’s rain dripping through the roof but it doesn’t really sound like that.

  The lights don’t come on very often and when they do, we never know when they’ll—

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bad Bob

  I want to be remembered as a simple man.

  A simple man, yet a . . . cruel,

  and insane man.

  Dick looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw. A tie? No, it’d be too formal and didn’t stress the “scientist” angle adequately. He re-hung the green and yellow striped silk Hermes that’d been laid out on the French oak dressing table.

  Dick was waiting for Bob.

  He swept a hand across the top of his head to brush a single, flyaway strand back into place, barely touching the offending hair but the motion felt good. The blue cotton shirt he’d selected didn’t need a tie anyway, it had a pearl button-down collar and was perfectly complimented by gold cufflinks inset with turquoise opal. The matching charcoal jacket and trousers blended very agreeably too. These were 80% merino wool and 20% polyester so even if the need arose to go outside, he’d stay warm. The tan belt was Queensland crocodile and the polished Italian brogues picked up the rooms reflection like a mirror. For those game enough to venture close, they might pick up a hint of Yves St. Laurent Ocean around his neck, and his face, should anyone dare touch it, had been softened with Clarins Q10 moisturizing crème.

  Bob the tool. Bad Bob.

  Dick took a sip of his dry martini, made according to the regimental spec’s laid out by James Bond in Cassino Royale: 3 parts Gordons, 1 vodka, ½ measure of Lillet Blanc and a dash of Angostura bitters, shaken through ice and wrapped around a large, juicy slice of lemon.

  A plate of English watercrackers and small ceramic tub of duck liver pate sat on the coffee table but he didn’t have any more because he’d already flossed and small pieces were apt to get lodged in one’s teeth. Next to the crackers lay an open copy of the Canberra Yellow Pages. Several pages had been torn from the pharmacy listings and Bob was currently occupied with these.

  He pulled back the rooms curtain and looked into the internal courtyard of the Hyatt. Black as the ace of spades and absolutely nothing to see. It certainly wasn’t the best room in the establishment, but anything in this place is better than being out there.

  Out there . . . watching.

  A merry tune flashed through his head, a little ditty he’d composed himself called Blunt Stick, about his friend Bob.

  Bob’s big night out.

  He found Blunt
Stick to be an excellent vocalization exercise immediately before going on air. It arose after he was out watching one muggy, summer evening five years ago when he first spied Bob, in a seedy backstreet off Kings Cross, battering a prostitute to death with a baseball bat. Laying into her like there was no tomorrow. Go you good thing! Out of sheer curiosity, Dick followed Bob all the way back to his flat in Bankstown, and the next day, let him know that someone knew. That’s right, knew all about it. But if Bob did a small favor for Dick, not only would he overlook Bob’s transgression re lá bat, money could change hands. A relationship had formed. Then, as was inevitable, a year ago Bob got himself arrested because festering, septic, brutal rage like that isn’t easily bottled. After considerable effort, Dick had tracked Bob down in the vicinity of Goulburn goal six days ago.

  He rechecked the mirror, stretching his neck and moving his head slightly to view it from a number of angles. Still good. There were powerful people to impress and he had to be perfect. They’ll all want to know what will happen with the weather. He’s the man! Powerful, powerful people. Dick ran through a few more whispered lines of Blunt Stick:

  I gotta blunt stick

  an a friend o’mine,

  with a handful of cash

  an a gun loaded up jus’ fine

  Big man; Big stick

  His name is Bad Bob

  an he’s crazier’n shit,

  if you see him you’ll know who it is

  cos he ain’t got no lips.

  Mad Bob; Lip Stick

  We’re going down town

  gonna go to the pound,

  get us a dog

  point’im around.

  Run Dog; Red Stick.

  The time had come to set Bob in motion.

  In these troubled days, or nights, one had to have something to sell. You didn’t need much, just a crack of an opportunity. One, single chink in somebody’s armor and you’ll find your highest bidder. The rest will fall straight into place. Right now the armor is wafer-thin everywhere. Sheng sulked in the room next door, looking after the twins. Dick sat at his table, going through the bag Bob brought back. A knock sounded on the door and he knew immediately it was Bob. It hadn’t been the soft rat-a-tat-tat of the hotel staff or Sheng’s tappity-tap, it was a series of uneven knocks of varying loudness. Dick wondered if this pattern was a trait of all criminal psychopaths, and he tried to remember what his own knock sounded like. At first it eluded him, and then a pleasing realization dawned: I’m not the sort of person who even knocks on doors, I have doors opened for me.