Garry Disher grew up on his parents’ wheat and wool farm in South Australia. After gaining graduate and post-graduate degrees from universities in Adelaide and Melbourne, he travelled extensively, living and working in the United Kingdom, Europe, Israel and Africa.

In 1978 Garry was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University in California. It was here that he wrote his first collection of short stories. On his return to Australia, he taught creative writing part-time for several years, to supplement his writing income.

Since 1988, Garry has written full-time and has published over forty highly praised books for both children and adults, including The Bamboo Flute (winner of the 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers and listed among the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly in the United States), The Divine Wind (winner of the 1999 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and short-listed for the CBC Book of the Year Award for Older Readers), and From Your Friend, Louis Deane and Moondyne Kate (CBC Notable Books in 2000 and 2002 respectively). Garry’s publications include crime novels, short story collections and children’s and adult fiction.

For Imogen and Olivia

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

This edition published in Australia and New Zealand
by Hachette Australia Pty Limited
Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000
www.hachettechildrens.com.au

Copyright © Garry Disher 2001

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be stored or reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available
from the National Library of Australia.

978 0 7336 1587 0
978 0 7344 1406 9 (ebook edition)

Cover design and digital imaging by Ellie Exarchos

Contents

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright

{ One }

{ Two }

{ Three }

{ Four }

{ Five }

{ Six }

{ Seven }

{ Eight }

{ Nine }

{ Ten }

{ Eleven }

{ Twelve }

{ Thirteen }

{ Fourteen }

{ Fifteen }

{ Sixteen }

{ Seventeen }

{ Eighteen }

{ Nineteen }

{ Twenty }

{ Twenty-one }

{ Twenty-two }

{ Twenty-three }

{ Twenty-four }

{ Twenty-five }

{ Acknowledgments }

Books from Garry Disher

{ one }

Nathanael Whistler, ‘Nat’ for short, wasn’t doing anything wrong, just hanging around Canongate Mall with the others, Dal, Renny, Jess and Laura who were Goths, a couple of others, when the cops appeared and told him to turn out his pockets.

There were wrong things he could have been doing. He could have been playing truant from school that day, but wasn’t; he could have been snatching handbags or laptops, but the thought never entered his head. He could have been shoplifting, smoking, begging, hassling elderly citizens or taunting people because of the colour of their skin, but Nat wasn’t doing any of those things. Nat was simply hanging around the Mall with his friends.

Let’s say you’re a shopkeeper, there’s a bunch of kids outside your shop. Look at their hair: long, short, shorn, shaped, shapeless, multi-coloured. Look at their clothes: baggy pants, high-tops, Chicago Bears T-shirts, baseball caps, a couple of girls in Goth outfits. Look at their manner: they’re scaring people away, probably dealing drugs.

Quick, call the police.

Nat watched the divvy van pull up at the 1860s horse trough and hitching rail that had once gathered rust inside the now bankrupt Pioneer Village tourist centre before it was relocated to the entrance of the Mall. He saw two police officers get out, a man and a woman, saw them weaving through the crowd, and said to the others, ‘It’s Elliot.’

The others melted away. They’d been hassled before and were sick of it. On any other day, Nat might have disappeared, too, but today he thought: I’m not doing anything wrong here. I don’t have to explain myself. I’m tired of being pushed around.

So he stood his ground and watched them come. Constable Elliot was overweight, a born swaggerer and bully. Nat hadn’t encountered the other constable before. He saw her glancing around sharply for trouble, but when she rested her gaze on him her expression was a kindly, patient one, as though she wouldn’t rush in but listen first.

Unlike Elliot, who planted himself before Nat, legs spread, hands on hips. But one thing negated the aggressive stance: the short walk up the Mall had puffed the man out. Beads of perspiration stood out like blisters on his overheated skin.

‘If it isn’t my old friend Nat,’ Elliot said.

‘If it isn’t my old friend Craig.’

‘Don’t get smart,’ Elliot said. He indicated the woman beside him. ‘This is Jenny York, Constable York to you. Okay, pal, turn out your pockets.’

‘I’m not your pal,’ Nat said.

He’d never spoken like this to a policeman before. It gave him a feeling of liberation. Suddenly all of his senses were alive: he could see his reflections like small, sharp snapshots in Constable Elliot’s eyes, hear and feel techno music pulsing from Jeans Inc., smell freshly brewed coffee, almost taste the apple in the teeth of some passing kid.

It didn’t last. He was crowded against a plate-glass window by Elliot, and his shades and baseball cap were whipped off by Jenny York. He saw her glancing keenly at his face, and found himself saying, ‘You can stop staring, my eyes are clear, I don’t do drugs.’

With a small grin she let him go, but Elliot said, ‘Ah, but do you sell them? Turn out your pockets, sunshine.’

Nat glanced around for somewhere to put his things. There—an empty table under an umbrella outside the bistro. He emptied his pockets one by one: house key, a few coins, Hang Ten wallet containing five dollars and a phone card, and finally a wad of clean tissues.

Elliot sniffed. ‘Now your schoolbag.’

A blue vinyl gym bag, to be precise. Nat tipped its contents onto the table: pens, calculator, an old museli bar, scuffed plastic lunchbox, battered folders, loose sheets of paper, books from the library.

Elliot looked disappointed. ‘Is that all? No baggies, no pill bottles, no X-rated videos for sale to your scummy mates?’ He glanced around. ‘How about your scooter?’ he said, and grabbed and shook it, listening for suspicious scrapes and rattles inside the hollow frame. ‘Damn.’

Nat folded his arms and stared past them at the passing parade along Canongate Mall, people in a hurry to get somewhere or stopping to windowshop or gawk at the kid in trouble.

Elliot snapped open Nat’s lunchbox. A ball of clingwrap and half a sandwich crust fell out.

‘I’m finished with the sandwich,’ Nat told him. ‘You can have the rest of it.’

‘Oh, smart guy. You’ve got a bit of an attitude, haven’t you, Nat?’

‘No.’

‘No, sir.’

‘No, sir.’

‘What are you hanging around for?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing. Well, I don’t believe you. What is it? Drugs? Shoplifting? Purse-snatching?’

‘Not me.’

‘What’s with the scooter? Don’t you know they’re banned from the Mall?’

‘For your information, I always get off and wheel it,’ Nat said.

‘Oh, a model citizen.’

Meanwhile Constable York was lifting up and putting down the books and folders. She paused when she came to a cheaply printed brochure: ‘Beautiful Canongate,’ she read. ‘What’s this for?’

Nat hesitated. Her tone was kind, as though to apologise for her bull-in-a-china-shop colleague. ‘School project,’ he muttered. ‘Local history.’

‘No shortage of history around here, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘But this—’ waving the booklet at Nat ‘—is just a tourist brochure. It’s not going to be much good to you, is it?’

Nat was about to say, ‘But all the useful books have been checked out of the library,’ when Elliot snapped his fingers impatiently.

‘Leave it. We’re wasting our time here.’

Nat began to repack his bag. After a moment, York helped him.

‘I said leave it,’ Elliot said.

She ignored him. ‘What’s your surname, Nat?’

‘Whistler,’ Nat muttered, knowing what would happen next.

And it did. Elliot began whistling comically, looking pleased with himself, as though he’d made an original contribution to the jokes that Nat had been hearing about his surname all his life.

‘Give me a break, Craig,’ he said.

Elliot thrust his beer-fed belly up against Nat and snarled, ‘Don’t get smart with me, pal. You smell wrong to me, I don’t know in what way yet, but one day I’ll get you for it.’

‘You mean you’ll push and shove until I do something you can get me for,’ Nat retorted.

‘You little—’

This time it was Jenny York’s turn to say, ‘Leave it.’ Tugging at Elliot’s sleeve, she glanced at Nat and said, ‘Move along, kid, for your own good,’ then steered Elliot back down the Mall to the divvy van.

A moment later it wheeled away with a brief tyre squeal, leaving Nat standing there, burning inside with all of the things that were wrong in his life.