Queenslander

Prologue

LIONHEART, FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND

The bedroom light turned on. Nev took off the noise-cancelling headphones. Her elderly father and stepmother stood in matching pajamas in the doorway, visibly frightened. Now that the headphones were off she could hear what had woken them. Someone was in the living room smashing the furniture.

“Right,” she said, pushing herself to standing. Her knees and lower back protested. She unlocked the gun cupboard. With steady hands she bent the double-barrel over her arm, slid two shells into the shotgun’s empty chambers and locked it straight again. “Go back to bed.”

“I called the station,” her father said. “Wait until the police arrive.”

Nev frowned at her father. Big man, white beard, thick glasses, meant well.

She walked into the living room, flicked on the overhead lights. The room was trashed: bookcases down, paper snow on the ground, waxed floorboards and Persian rugs sparkling with broken glass. Movement caught her eye. A skinny kid headed for broken windows.

“Oi! Wrong house, mate.”

The teenager turned and froze. Nev expected the shaved head and the cricket bat dangling from the right hand, but she wasn’t expecting the intruder to be a girl, and wasn’t expecting her to be sober. It was hard to tell from this angle, but Nev thought she saw a round stomach protruding.

It was the eyes that got her—empty stare that held the world in it. After a certain level of exhaustion, predator and prey both have the look. The last time she saw it had been through a camera in Kigali.

Nev lowered her gun.

She watched to see if the girl’s gaze followed. It did, which was a good sign. Curiosity was the last emotion to go and the first to return.

She opened the shotgun and extracted one shell, then the other, with steady fingers, tucked them in her chest pocket, snapped the gun closed and leaned it against the wall before raising empty hands on either side of her face, hoping to appear non-threatening.

That shouldn’t be hard given her size, but she had been told on multiple occasions that she sounded bigger than she was.

Her parents peered out from behind her. Her stepmother moaned.

The intruder looked tired. Nev wondered if this was her first child or if she had more asleep somewhere in diapers and fuzzy blankets.

“What address do you think this is? We’re not into drugs. I don’t owe money except to the bank. I’m Nev.” Niv, rhymes with give. “If someone sent you here to shake me down, they think you are expendable. Whoever sent you here is trying to kill you.”

“Fuck. Sorry.”

“Mistakes happen. You can work it off.”

Work for me instead of them.

The intruder turned away to duck through shattered glass sliding doors. Nev followed her out into the loud wet oven of a summer night to a pickup that had seen better days.

Under the floodlight, the kid made the ute look small.

The kid had to be in her upper teens. It was summer now and the girl’s skin was brown, Southern Mediterranean if Nev had to guess.

In the winter the kid would still be olive, what they called a ‘wog’ here.

Dressed in a black singlet and men’s gym shorts, trying to look butch instead of like a gangly teenaged boy.

Drug addict or sleeping with one. People aren’t that different, Nev thought.

They all need a safe place to sleep and a job to do.

She had seen it too many times in too many countries. Everyone had the potential to be good or bad depending on circumstances. Kids didn’t commit crimes in a vacuum.

“Oi! Wait.” Nev pulled the wallet from her back pocket. Why she had been sleeping in jeans was a matter for contemplating another day. “How much for the bat?”

The kid looked wary. “Why?”

“Need it for all the violent crimes I’m planning,” Nev said. “Reckon I might go on a spree.”

The kid looked at her blankly, then laughed.

Gotcha.

Nev held out two bills. “I can do two hundred today and another hundred tomorrow.”

The kid got in a dented black Ford pickup. Not being willing to part with the bat was a bad sign.

“Listen. I have your number plates,” Nev said. “If you help me clean up this mess I won’t report it. You can work it off. I have sheep. Horses. There’s a shed and an air mattress if you need a safe place to crash.”

“Not a runaway,” the kid said behind headlights. “Sorry about the house. Should have guessed this was the wrong place. Thanks for keeping your lid on. I’ll pay you for repairs when I can. Didn’t mean to scare old people.”

Nev wondered if that category included her.

“They’ll survive. Tell me what’s going on.

Whatever’s hunting you out there in the dark, you don’t have to return to it tonight.

” Nev felt strange as the words left her mouth.

Other than the baby bump, the kid was too skinny.

Nev’s heart somersaulted behind her sternum, adrenaline arriving late. “Stay.”

Echoes of Rwanda in ninety-four: teens with machetes wandering the night, mosquito soup, the smell of fire and rain. She hadn’t saved anyone then.

She swallowed, hood of the truck warm beneath her palm.

“I make a mean chicken parmi.” The old tick-tick-boom feeling warned her that this was a test. It had been a minute since god gave her one of those.

They never panned out, but they were gifts while they lasted, Stradivarii in the cosmic wood splitter.

If she could convince the kid to stay, someone wouldn’t die in the soup below the horizon.

“Listen. Do that to any other house on a dirt road like this, you’d be dead.

Farmers out here have guns. What’s your name? ”

The pickup backed out, turned, and the kid was gone.

Nev crossed her arms, rubbed her jaw. What a slow-moving train-wreck of a planet that put the capacity for violence in children. She sat down, rested her headache in her hands. She needed a drink.

Nev lifted the flask from her pocket, unscrewed the lid, inhaled caramel fumes of Bundaberg rum, hesitated, then poured it onto orange clay, where it pooled, refusing to sink in. Topsoil at Upsend Downs held the Bundy the way it rejected blood, sweat, and tears—silently, as if waiting.

Her failure sat on the surface, looking back at her, as if the land was asking her to offer something better.

This land was ancient, nestled in the oldest rainforest—it knew her, and her capabilities, so it required a greater sacrifice.