Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [21]
Beyond more souvenir shops, another liquor store, a sporting goods shop selling hunting rifles, and a peeling billboard advertising a grassless golf course, I read that the Prince Albert Hotel has vacancies.
In the gloomy bar men sit on high stools, construction workers with muddy boots and pitchers of beer. It’s only 10 a.m. The TV flickers with a rugby league match. I ask the barman about a room, and without looking at me, he says, ‘Other door.’
I go back outside to the next entrance along. An aboriginal woman is also watching TV, but a different channel, a soap opera with cardboard characters on a cardboard set. She glances from the TV and says, ‘Thirty dollars a night. No breakfast.’ I unpeel three tens from my roll. She reaches up to the keys hung on a row of hooks and plucks number 32. ‘Third floor. Lift’s broke.’
A dump, a fucking dive. This is what I think walking up the stairs with my plastic bag. But this is what I want. No comfort. I’m the barefoot monk in the snow, the firewalker on white-hot embers. No distraction from the case, the state of my life, when I’m brushing dead cockroaches from a bed sheet.
From my window, once I slide back a rickety mosquito screen, I can see a dirt yard patrolled by two mangy dogs. Beyond the mesh fence is a second-hand car dealership, or maybe a scrap yard. Looking at the hulks of cars corroding in the desert winds that sweep off these vast plains, it could be either. But somewhere in this desolation of space, beyond the glitter of cracked windscreens bouncing the relentless sun, Monique Cabanne has made her home.
The man at the tourist information booth suggests I rent a bike to get to her house. I pay $20 and leave my passport as a deposit. Just in case I ride into the desert and never return.
I raise the seat, check the map and follow the wobbly pen line drawn by the assistant. Not a hill or dale in town, and I ride easily through the quiet, glaring streets, past a man jogging, then a woman changing the wheel on a beaten-up ute.
Beyond the houses and asphalt I pedal an unsealed road, winding between small knolls of rock, many cut and drilled into subterranean homes, like burrows.
On the edge of town, before civilisation gives way to desert, dingoes and snakes, I find the house of Monique Cabanne. She lives in a rock home. Crude windows dot the walls at different heights. I kick out the bike stand, knock on the door, and reach into my top pocket.
There I have a Dictaphone. Before boarding the bus, I walked into an electrical shop to buy a device small enough to conceal on my person. Certain protocols and ethics don’t apply to police officers outside their jurisdiction. Like requiring permission to record private conversations.
‘Hello, Ms Cabanne?’
‘You must be Dr Adams. Please, please. Come in.’
‘Thank you for seeing me.’
‘No problem.’
‘At such short notice.’
‘Really. No worries. Ha, ha! You see I even speak Australian now. Have a seat.’
‘Thank you. What an amazing place. I imagined it would be cramped and dark, but all the windows really spread the light. Coober Pedy feels like the real outback. Well, whatever that is.’
‘They filmed Mad Max III here. Have you had a chance to see the Oldtimer’s Mine, the opal reefs?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘You should go to Crocodile Harry’s.’
‘Sounds ominous.’
‘No, no. It’s just one of the dugouts, a huge cave home.’
‘Maybe later.’
‘Iced tea? Beer?’
‘Tea, thanks.’
‘You haven’t been in Australia long enough. Not many Aussies take tea before beer.’
‘Well, I am working. Here at the expense of the university.’
‘The University of … ?’
‘East London. I’m a doctor of South Pacific history.’
‘So that’s the interest in the manuscript. And who found it.’
‘Yes, yes. It would be interesting to know as much as possible about the circumstances surrounding the finding.’
‘Two