Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [20]
Bad policing.
Bad policeman.
Along with his electric guitar, a pair of jeans and a white shirt, we know Billy K vanished with the final page torn from his copy of Show Me the Sky.
If his songs, lyrics, and even conversations were not obsessed with escape, I’d mortgage my house on foul play. But he wanted to fly. I’m sure of that much. And the journal was a pair of wings, a lost manuscript discovered by a lost motorcyclist in the Australian outback. No wonder the teen star found kinship in a Fijian boy brought to England and groomed by the church, an identity manufactured by third parties.
Show Me the Sky is all I have to go on. Every other lead has been exhausted, the reported sightings and forensic tests, even the visions of deranged fans. But what kind of lead is this? The church, not surprisingly, will only acknowledge that there was a Fijian translator on the Caroline voyage to the Pacific, accompanied by a Reverend Thomas. The final entries of the journal, which Billy is, or was, most occupied with, can’t be confirmed as fiction or truth.
Therefore this will be my starting point. It’s all I have left. I missed the plane home because I don’t have a lead, not because I do. Monique Cabanne, French girlfriend of the motorcyclist who discovered the manuscript, is now settled on a homestead south of Alice Springs.
I scan the case contact list and find her number. Then, covering the tracks of a Jim Dent trail, I make the call as a Dr Adams from the University of East London. Maybe I’m paranoid, thinly disguising my identity, thinking my disappearance more important than it actually is. But I’d rather be paranoid than caught, pulled from a case I’ve lost a year of my life on.
‘Researching the manuscript,’ I lie. Ms Cabanne agrees to meet me at her home tomorrow. ‘It would be great help to the faculty,’ I enthuse.
I kid myself I have a mission, a tangible goal. I ask the cashier the best way to Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in the outback of South Australia. He directs me to the coach station, tells me it’s a town in the middle of nowhere.
I walk the wide streets with a carrier bag of clothes.
I sleep on the coach, the sleep of a dead man, dreamless and empty. When I wake just before dawn, the bus is cutting through a glowing moonscape of low, craggy hills. And looking from this tinted window to the reeling scenery, I’m a boy again, a ten-year-old on a trip to the seaside, the three of us together, my mother and Gary, my younger brother. The days before my stepfather. I used to scream if not sat by the window, head pressed to the glass, watching the trees and fields rolling past, imagining myself astride a white horse with a flowing mane. While Gary scrawled in colouring books, and mum circled names of flowers in a bumper wordsearch, I galloped across meadows and leaped over streams, raced to the tops of hills and danced across rooftops, felt the thunder of hooves in the hollow of my bones.
No wonder I made a career chasing those who’ve bolted.
The coach squeals to a halt by a gas station. And I’m glad to stand, shake off sleep. I wake with such physical longing for my mother and brother that I wonder if I close my eyes I could travel time, inhabit again that ten-year-old on a trip to the beach, unclipping the lid from a plastic lunchbox and pulling out a cheese and pickle sandwich. Before the driver called out ‘Coober Pedy’ I swear I heard my mother ask if I wanted a biscuit.
But she didn’t. And I’m here, in the middle of nowhere.
British, Dutch, and German backpackers crowd the aisle with tents and sleeping rolls. I carry a plastic bag with my one change of clothes. I want no awkward small talk with other travellers, and keep my head down as I pass a huddle turning a map looking for the youth hostel. I head in the opposite direction, go by two bottle shops, and several boutiques selling opal. Looming above the frontier town is the Big Winch, a remnant of better days digging precious stone from these dusty plains.
Temperatures reach 50 degrees in the summer, and locals