It was the Great White.
It raised its white skull from the water and opened its jaws. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Harry was sure it was going to take Toowoomba, but it couldn’t get a proper grip and only succeeded in dragging the screaming body further into the water before having to dive again.
No arms, Harry thought, recalling a birthday with his grandmother in Åndalsnes a long, long time ago when they were doing apple bobbing, trying to grab apples with their mouths from a tub of water, and his mother had laughed so much she’d had to lie down on the sofa afterwards.
Thirty metres to go. He thought he would make it, but then the shark was back. It was so close Harry saw it roll its cold eyes, as if in ecstasy, as it triumphantly showed its double row of teeth. This time it managed to catch hold of one foot and tossed its head from side to side. Water shot up in a jet of spray, Toowoomba was flung through the air like a limbless doll and his screaming was cut short. Harry arrived.
‘You bloody monster, he’s mine!’ he wailed through tears, pointing his gun and emptying the magazine into the pool in one burst. The water was suffused with a reddish colour, similar to a red squash drink, and down below Harry saw the light of the underwater tunnel where adults and children were thronging round to see the finale, a genuine drama in all its true horror, a feast that would compete with ‘The Clown Murder’ for tabloid event of the year.
56
The Tattoo
GENE BINOCHE LOOKED and sounded exactly like what he was – a guy who had lived a rock’n’roll lifestyle to the full and didn’t intend to stop until he was at his journey’s end. And he was well on the way.
‘I guess they need a good tattooist down there too,’ Gene said, dipping the needle. ‘Satan appreciates a bit of variety when he’s torturing, don’t you think, mate?’
But the customer was plastered and his head was drooping, so he probably couldn’t comprehend Gene’s philosophical observations or feel the needle puncturing his shoulder.
At first Gene had refused to deal with this bloke who’d entered his little boutique and slurred his request in an odd sing-song accent.
Gene had answered that they didn’t tattoo people in his condition and asked him to return the following day when he’d sobered up. But the bloke had slapped 500 dollars on the table for what he reckoned was a 150-dollar job, and to tell the truth business had been a bit slack in recent months, so he took out his Ladyshave and Mennen stick deodorant and started the job. But he refused when the bloke offered him a swig from the bottle. Gene Binoche had been tattooing customers for twenty years, was proud of his work and in his opinion serious professionals didn’t drink on the job. Not whiskey at any rate.
When he’d finished he taped a bit of toilet paper over the rose tattoo. ‘Keep out of the sun and, for the first week, wash with water only. The good news is the pain will subside this evening and you can take this off tomorrow. The bad news is you’ll be back for more tattoos,’ he said and grinned. ‘They always come back.’
‘This is the only one I want,’ the bloke said and staggered out of the door.
57
Four Thousand Feet and an End
THE DOOR OPENED and the roar of the wind was deafening. Harry crouched down on his knees by the opening.
‘Are you ready?’ he heard a voice shout in his ear. ‘Pull the ripcord at four thousand feet and don’t forget to count. If you haven’t felt the chute within three seconds something’s wrong.’
Harry nodded.
‘I’m going!’ the voice yelled.
He saw the wind take hold of the black outfit worn by the little man climbing out onto the stay under the wing. The hair protruding from under his helmet flapped. Harry glanced at the altimeter on his chest. It showed a little over ten thousand feet.
‘Thanks again!’ he shouted to the pilot. The pilot turned. ‘No worries, mate! This is a lot better than taking snaps of marijuana fields!’
Harry stuck out his right foot. It felt like when he was small and they were driving up Gudbrandsdalen Valley on their way to another summer holiday in Åndalsnes, and he opened the side window and stuck out his hand to ‘fly’. He remembered the wind catching his hand when he turned the palm into it.
The wind outside the plane was extraordinary, and Harry had to force his foot forward onto the stay. He counted internally as Joseph had told him – ‘right foot, left hand, right hand, left foot’. He was standing beside Joseph. Small patches of cloud floated towards them, speeded up, surrounded them and were gone in the same second. Beneath them lay a patchwork quilt of different nuances of green, yellow and brown.