The Dunbar Case(37)

‘Where was this?’



‘Out near Dudley. Want to take a look?’



Twizell was driving a Nissan Patrol 4WD, the sort of vehicle you’d need, say, for going off-road and getting near enough to go climbing down into caves. I followed him south for about fifteen kilometres until he parked in a dead-end street of well-established houses several hundred metres back up a hill from the coast. He joined me and pointed to a break in the ti-tree scrub at the end of the street.



‘On foot from here,’ he said. ‘Down a pretty rough track. They don’t let people build down near the dunes any more but there were shacks and cottages there earlier on.’



I was wearing jeans and sneakers with a reasonable tread; Twizell’s footwear was something similar and we coped with the steep descent. The track was fairly overgrown but rocks had been embedded in it at strategic places and the trees growing close to it gave me something to steady myself with on the sharpest inclines.



He was right about his fitness. He handled the slope and the impediments better than me. Lizards scampered in the undergrowth and birds chirped in the trees. Traffic noise died away to be replaced by the sound of waves on the beach. The ground became more sandy and we reached a level stretch about twenty metres back from the dunes. The scrub was thick and laced with lantana.



I sucked in a deep breath and looked up as a helicopter buzzed overhead.



‘Looking for dope,’ Twizell said. ‘Spoilsports. Through here. Should’ve brought a machete.’



He pushed through the ti-tree and waist-high flowering bushes that had almost completely obliterated a track.



‘Used to be a way into here from the other direction and you could get a truck down but a landslide wiped it out. There’s the house.’



A mudbrick, timber and galvanised iron structure with a collapsed roof and gaps in the sides looked as if it was being held up by the vines that had invaded it. The native vegetation had crept up all around it but there were patches that showed where a bricked path had been and the broken-down wooden fence carried the faint suggestion of a vegetable garden. A mudbrick chimney, wrapped around by wisteria, looked the most solid part of the building.



‘Bloody great place for kids,’ Twizell said. ‘Lots of people used to come here; uncles and aunties and cousins and some we called uncle and aunty but weren’t really, you know.’



I nodded. The way it used to be. Now kids called their parents’ friends by their first names. Much better.



‘Hiding places,’ I said.



‘Go easy. This is memory lane for me, mate.’



‘When you were Johnnie.’



He laughed. ‘Yeah, they called me Johnnie B Bad. There used to be a shed and a fibro sleep-out, that was a couple of places, and there were floorboards that came up and some gaps where the gal iron had been tacked on. I’ll need some kind of tool to clear a way through all this shit.’



We fossicked around and found a broken garden fork and a length of rusty pipe that had been part of a gate. Twizell pointed the way and we slashed through the grass and bushes to a derelict shed mostly eaten away by white ants. Twizell shook his head.



‘That’s fucked.’



We worked through to the house but the floorboards had been taken up and the joists and bearers were spongy from the termites. Twizell’s neat squash gear was a mess now with smears of dirt, rips from brambles and discolourations from the smashed bushes. My jeans and shirt were in the same condition and our sneakers were muddy from the soggy patches where water had collected.



‘Last hope’s the sleep-out,’ Twizell said. ‘Over here.’



We skirted an impenetrable lantana patch and hacked our way through snarly bushes until we felt under our feet some concrete slabs covered with moss. A fibro building stood in the middle of a sandy space with sprouting razor grass.



‘Us kids used to sleep out here and get up to mischief.’



‘I can imagine.’



‘Nothin’ much—just smokes and beer and dope—sheilas later on.’



Perhaps because the area was drier, with no trees close by, the sleep-out hadn’t been as devastated by white ants. At first glance it looked almost as if it could be made liveable, but on closer inspection the window frames had rotted, the guttering sagged and sections of the iron roof were missing. The remnants of a tarpaulin fluttered.



‘Fuck, I remember now. They had a storm and lost some roof. Never got around to fixing it.’



Twizell suddenly seemed depressed by the sight and I wondered what memories he was processing. He threw away the garden fork, went around to the back of the building and crouched by a fibro hutch.