By Garry Disher
It will be done this way.
We’ll open with the city, layered and strife-laden. Above, the huge sky churns (time-elapse camera). Below, the dark waters are like an oily thing repelled. In the seeping dawn—smeared, yellowed, muttering—the city emerges, as low and sour as a resurfacing fact. This is a place of dreams and vows and love and grudges.
* * * *
And this is what they can lead to.
We slip beneath the veiled water of the harbour, leaving no gulp, no eddying trace to betray us. It is dark down here, flecked with indissolubles.
Suddenly it begins to clear. Bars of cloudy sunlight strike through the water, revealing small blue shapes, dimpled and winking. Ceramic tiles. We are in a pool, an aquarium perhaps, free of sediment, and there is an underwater gate at the rear, the vast harbour pressing upon it.
Now pull back in one long take of the camera, retreating from the water, passing through to the safe side of the plate glass, emerging into air. Sounds begin to declare themselves: the distant commotion of the city; a hooting ferry. Closer to, some brat has spilt his ice-cream; witless thonged feet clip Coke cans; a mother screeches, her nerves calamitous; speech consists of grunts and upward inflections. You know the kind of thing. If this were America the men would be wearing John Deere caps and vast women in terylene knit pants would be reaching into crisps packets. We’re among people who pay money to avoid solitude, who press shoulder to shoulder to peer through fences, glass, metal bars. (We don’t see them directly, of course, only as reflections in the aquarium glass. We are still focused on the water.)
These people are the heartland, the source, passing down our lore: If you see a shark . . .
‘You kick and yell. It scares them.’
‘No way. It attracts them.’
‘They reckon thump them on the nose.’
‘I heard gouge their eyes out.’
‘Yeah, sure, meanwhile you better start counting how many legs you got left.’
And so on and so forth.
Then the beast turns in the water, presenting that profile, that fin. Our unlearned fear. All breathe in. The beast approaches, yawns hugely across the glass, jaws open like a gash.
And it coughs, right in our faces, ejecting a hand and a hairy forearm, semen-coloured, a Rolex intact on the knobbly wrist.
One last, dreamy motion, almost like a wave goodbye.
That should grab the buggers, keep them watching.
* * * *
Now for the story.
Bistro, a word neon-green and stylish in a night-dark window. Outside there’s a rolling sea mist, but in here it’s all clatter and chatter, every table taken. Smoky glass, leather-belted chrome, a chalked menu on each wall. Prosciutto, tagliatelle, parmigiana, always mispronounced.
The din is awful.
So are the diners. This much is clear from Julia’s face, her fierce and solitary relish. She scribbles on her pad, articulates parmigiana for them, her mouth lovely, her tongue tip dipping sweet as a bird. This is no dummy.
Not that anyone notices, or cares. Flip, the pad is shut and in her pocket and Julia is riding high through the room, miserable tables falling away before her. She could run this place if she had to.
Then we see her wink and smile. It’s significant: there is a girl sitting at a corner table and we sense that she never lets Julia out of her sight. Ten, maybe twelve years old, suddenly beaming—but not before we glimpse her undefended face, pale with uncommunicable doubts and agonies. This is Amy. Julia’s daughter? Her sister? Both and neither, it seems.
Amy, overcome now, bends to the straw in her icecream soda, sending concealing black commas of hair down about her cheeks. An open book is on the table next to her elbow. Amy is able to read and watch Julia and nurse a soda for an hour or more.
* * * *
Until Julia has finished work. Amy and Julia on the esplanade, one short, one tall, passing through the sea mist. They spin around, bound ahead, clasp and shout in the spark and spit of their crazy regard for one another.
Bringing gladness to the night. An old down-at-heels fellow shifts on a bench, gathers himself—’You’ll do me, darlin’!’—and subsides again as they pass.
* * * *
‘Ame? Amy?’
Lucas has just come home. We follow him into the hall of the flat and peer as he peers into a kitchen, a sitting room, and finally with gloomy tenderness into a little bedroom, where James Dean dreams above a yellow-quilted bed. ‘Amy? You home?’
Back to the sitting room, to the sprawling couch where Lucas cannot keep still. There is nothing on TV; he takes up and puts down a CD case; he fiddles with the ring in his ear; polishes his watch glass; probes a nostril. Lucas has moody, incautious good looks that can compel both desire and withheld trust. He stands and sits. There is no daily patience or sweetness in Lucas’s life.
The telephone rings.
* * * *
The man on the other end says: ‘I seem to have heard that before.’ He pinches his trousers’ crease. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Lucas old son.’
What we have here is A. J. Cruz in the back of a prowling Cadillac, taking care of business on his car phone. His driver sniggers, turns part way around at the heavy wit.
‘Watch where you’re going! Jesus. Now, where was I? Ah yes. We were expecting you, Lucas. We waited. It’s bad manners to keep people waiting.’
Who wrote this shit?
Anyway, this is a restored 1957 Cadillac, pink, Fleetwood series, creeping along the esplanade. What the young bloods in their fuckwagons wouldn’t give for this Caddy, for the accumulation and display and satisfaction and cruel luxury it implies. Those famous plates: cruise.
A.J. Cruz has black hair glinting tight across his scalp, and black sideburns like blades. ‘You don’t understand, Lucas. I don’t intend to debate the matter,’ A.J. Cruz says.
You can see that our man is taking a sly and natural satisfaction in all this. The car, the car phone, his leg extended along the back seat. The cold emphasis of his white shirt. The dreaming folds of his drape suit. Give the wardrobe girls a great big hand.
‘You want another twenty-four hours. I see. Lucas, we seem to have a pattern here.’
* * * *
Meanwhile Lucas has heard the key in the front door. He stands, turns around, hunches over the handset, muffling his tidal promises to A. J. Cruz, just as Amy and Julia enter the room, tumbling with laughter and scarves and flushed cheeks.
* * * *
We switch to an aeroscan of the Cadillac at full throttle. It’s on the main road now, approaching an underpass. A blaze of brake lights and it’s swallowed by a tunnel.
A dreamy sweep of the car, from snout to burbling tail. What we have here is a thoughtful A. J. Cruz. He’s made all his calls, he’s going home.
When there is an eruption in the back seat. A.J. Cruz rubs his leg, curses, can’t get comfortable. His face is in a pucker of misery.
‘You okay?’ The driver, eyes curtained by mirrored black lenses night and day.
‘It’s my sciatica,’ says A. J. Cruz.
Okay, okay, it was just a thought. If you don’t think a little humour is in order at this point, something that tags and humanises the character, then we’ll bloody well take it from the top . . .
A. J. Cruz is gliding home in his celebrated car. He is in a thoughtful condition.
‘I think,’ A. J. Cruz says, that we should give our friend Lucas an opportunity of trading his way out of debt.’
The usual crap — cruel smiles, knowing looks exchanged in the rear-view mirror.
* * * *
This is interesting: Julia is not proceeding beyond the doorway. She stops there, motionless, watching Lucas. She will never admit to hope and pain, it seems. And Lucas watches her. After a while they exchange wary nods.
But it is clear that Amy lives here. She tosses aside jacket and satchel and runs toward her brother.
Then wonders if she has done the wrong thing. She hovers at the midpoint between Julia and Lucas and we hear conspicuous, undisciplined longing in her voice:
‘Look who I’ve got with me! Isn’t that lucky? Oh Lucas, say a proper hello.’
Julia is watching Lucas. ‘I won’t stay’ Oh, please, a little while,’ Amy says.
We are dismayed by her innocence.
Lucas’s face.
Julia’s face.
Amy’s face.
Then a slow smile transforms Lucas’s face. ‘How have you been?’
Draw back from Amy, who is looking from one to the other with steady, helpless, unapologetic hope and love.
* * * *
It’s a morning to soar in. A little street. Amy blissful at her brother’s side, approaching her school. Lucas—well, Lucas has plans, valorous plans, plans to lift them high and far away from all this.
‘Julia? With Julia too?’
Yes!
Linger a while on Amy, treasuring and reciting, then notice that a whispering crush of car tyres is fading in on the soundtrack and A. J. Cruz is winding down his window to say:
‘Bright and early this morning, Lucas?’
A terrible transformation of Lucas’s face.
A.J. Cruz opens the car door. ‘Heading for the school? Hop in, we’ll give you a lift.’
‘We can walk.’
A.J. Cruz says, ‘Now that would be silly, since we’ve got unfinished business to discuss. Nice kid, Lucas.’
A. J. Cruz has turned to Amy with silky and absolute attention. Amy, quiet suddenly, steps closer to Lucas.
That’s sufficient, surely. We get the message. Why do you people always want to spell things out? Cut the rest of this scene.
* * * *
Taking us to:
A sweep of the marina: gulls, wheeling, crying out; beards scratched over the first coffee of the day; little boats crisscrossing the unhurried water; a smudge of freighters on the horizon; the tuning-fork ping of sail rigging slapping yacht masts.
Locking on A. J. Cruz’s motor cruiser, low and fast and dangerous even at anchor. Boats like this slip out at night and return at dawn.
‘You do this little thing for me, Lucas, and I’ll forget about the money you owe me.’
When you’re guzzling champagne at this hour of the morning, and the man’s in a halfway decent mood, then you would have the nerve to raise doubts about the proposition he’s putting to you. Lucas says: ‘But what if he twigs we’ve ripped him off? He’ll spread the word and no-one will buy from you again.’
A.J. Cruz leans forward.
‘The bastard’s trying to move in on my patch, Lucas. He buys from me, cuts the stuff with baking powder, then sells back to my clients. Now that’s just not on.’
A.J. Cruz leans back. He smiles at Lucas. The smiles of A.J. Cruz do not bring comfort.
Well, not to most people. Lucas is impervious. His eyes gleam. He is full of schemes. He leans forward avidly. ‘What you could do, A.J., the stuff I snatch off him you could sell back to him again.’ He rocks back in his seat. ‘Double your money’
A clicking tongue and A.J. Cruz says, ‘There’s no doubting you, Lucas old son.’
* * * *
It is evening. Julia has finished work. Amy will never feel unanchored again now that Julia is back in her life. Here she is, escorted by Julia under the lights on the esplanade, their voices joyous.
When Julia stops, suddenly hard and grim. ‘What car?’
‘Oh, sort of an old big one,’ Amy says innocently. ‘Sort of pink.’
Julia knows that car.
* * * *
A repeat of that earlier tableau—Amy all flustered on the sitting room rug, Julia in the doorway, Lucas trying to look unconcerned.
‘What are you up to, Lucas?’
‘Me?’ Lucas is dressed in black and we see him pull on a black jacket. ‘Just off to help a mate move house. Legitimate. Look, make yourself at home. Won’t be long.’
Okay, Julia, this is what we should be seeing in your face at this moment: His life is messy and injurious, he is doomed to push and blunder, yet I go on offering him this self-deceiving, self-abasing, enslaving kind of love.
And you’ll say simply: ‘No thanks.’
And you’re gone.
Leaving Amy all desolate and a cold and hurtful need in Lucas.
* * * *
One last run-through, people. I don’t want any cock-ups like last night.
The Cadillac is parked in darkness, Mirrored-Lenses behind the wheel. We see Cruz’s ill-advised business rival pass by once, twice, in a nondescript Datsun. He slows, stops, waits. The Caddy’s headlights flare once and fade to blackness again. This is Datsun’s signal and he gets out and approaches the Caddy. An exchange of airline bags. We see all this from a fixed point at some distance.
Now Datsun hurries back to his car and speeds away, twisting and turning through the back streets. He slaps his hand on the dashboard. He’s done it.
And here is Lucas, newly in the employ of A.J. Cruz, ramming the Datsun with a stolen ambulance and hijacking a certain proscribed substance.
It’s over in seconds.
* * * *
We cut to a well-kept but edgy hand on a white linen tablecloth, one slender finger tapping tock, tock, tock.
It’s A.J. Cruz and he says, ‘We must be charitable. Friend Lucas might have run out of petrol, got lost, called in at home to tuck in the little one.’
Mirrored-Lenses is doubtful about that.
‘Quite right,’ Cruz says. ‘He’s ripped us off.’
He makes a brief and noteworthy telephone call.
* * * *
Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .
‘All right, all right, I’m coming.’ Then Julia pauses just inside her front door. Who is it?’
‘Me. Quick, let us in.’
It’s Lucas in a ferment and Amy all bewildered, a showy affliction on Julia’s doorstep. They slip past her, and she locks the door and extinguishes the light.
‘We need to bunk here tonight.’ Then, elatedly, ‘You won’t believe.’
But Julia is not one for a summit conference in her hallway. She puts Amy to bed, secures the house, pours a couple of drinks.
Her lovely bum against the sideboard, her arms folded. ‘Now, what won’t I believe?’
Lucas opens the Qantas bag. ‘This.’
‘Oh Lucas.’
‘Don’t you see? This is our ticket out. This will set us up. The three of us.’
* * * *
That’s what he thinks.
Cut to a man at a plain wooden table, dismantling a stubby sub-machine gun. He oils and polishes each piece with lingering attention.
There is a grey-blanketed single bed, and a rickety wardrobe is open, displaying black uniforms and camouflage jackets. The walls are cold and white. Maps of the city. A wall rack of assault rifles, night scopes, pistols, mustard-gas canisters. Creative Revenge says a poster above the table. We also see that our man subscribes to Soldier of Fortune, and it’s clear from his bookshelf that when the time comes he will draw upon certain survival skills. According to his white T-shirt, happiness is a confirmed kill. Somehow we are not surprised to see that he has a crew cut and a cricketer’s moustache. And God knows what his wristwatch is capable of.
A squeaky yawn. Here we have Rex, a pit bull, what else, at his master’s feet.
We are in the war room of Rhodric Reed.
Rhodric is glad to be in work again.
* * * *
Meanwhile Lucas has tried apology and flattery and fear and stubbornness. Julia, sharp and self-respecting, has told him to give the stuff back before it’s too late.
And now she can’t sleep. Her fine, tormented cheeks in the blue moonlight. She reaches out her hand. She pats the empty space. She blinks awake.
Cliché. We don’t need it. Why not simply start with Julia, standing resolute and sad in her kitchen doorway, witnessing Lucas hunched over her innocent pine table, applying nostril tubes to runnels of cocaine?
Says it all.
* * * *
It is the next morning. We are at the marina again.
‘This one has been opened; A.J. Cruz says.
He looks up. Julia does not reply. She merely gazes at him. Just look at that face: what we have here, folks, is a contemporary condition, the female’s massive and absolute distaste for the male.
Cruz, discomposed, looks down again at the packet of cocaine and answers his own question: ‘Young Lucas.’
‘Only a tiny amount,’ says Julia wryly. ‘He was in a bit of a state.’
Is she cracking a joke? At a time like this? Cruz stares at her. He expects flattery and fear, not this steadfastness.
‘You’re telling me Lucas knows he did a stupid thing, he apologises for it, and here is the full consignment— more or less—back again?’
Julia nods. ‘That’s what I’m saying. I’m also saying you’re to consider his debt to you cancelled, despite this little hiccup.’
‘Am I? Whatever happened to please, I wonder.’
‘You’re to leave him alone. He’s getting out of all this. We’re going away.’
‘Awesome,’ says A.J. Cruz, throwing up his hands. ‘You have a deal, babe.’
Awesome? Babe? Have we strayed onto a Hollywood set? Who wrote this crap? Try incredible, maybe. Amazing. Unreal, if you absolutely must. For babe try sweetheart.
* * * *
There is always a focal point in a good scene, illustrating the point of what is happening and making links backward and forward in time. Take an argument between lovers: we are engaged by words, gestures and heartache, but it is the claret, spilled on the carpet like a creeping dread, that fixes the scene in history.
And so it is that, when Rhodric Reed rackets out of the expressway underpass in his repellent 4WD, just car lengths behind Julia, he almost skittles a pedestrian, a doleful, daydreaming fat fellow, some old returned digger about to cross the road.
This scene says obvious things about Rhod baby, but mainly it tells us that Julia has been very unwise.
* * * *
‘You’re not serious?’
This is Lucas, marked by panic and shock and greed and recent sleep, staring open-mouthed at Julia. ‘I could’ve got a hundred grand for that stuff,’ he continues, ‘and you’re telling me you gave it back? Jesus.’
But Julia is supple and hard-edged now. She has had enough.
‘But it would have set us up,’ Lucas persists.
‘Lucas, look at me.’
We see Julia clasp his narrow, unruly head. Backlighting from the mid-morning sun in the window reveals her slender brown hands, her sun-bleached hair alight at the ends. She spells out urgent truths and love to Lucas for the last time.
* * * *
Morning recess. The kids are playing hopscotch but Amy drifts and mopes, her white socks ringing her ankles like weights.
* * * *
A.J. Cruz is reading a newspaper on his aft deck. He is utterly still. Gulls call. The sea slops and drains beneath the jetty.
Whap. Blink an eye and you’d miss A.J. Cruz snap-turn his newspaper to a new page. Gulls floating and gliding above.
* * * *
So what are we saying with these two brief scenes?
Something has been set in motion and it can’t be stopped.
* * * *
That moustache. The pale yellow aviator glasses (our man doesn’t know that these are passé). The muted sun. A hand scribbling in a notebook with a ballpoint pen.
We are biding our time with Reed in his 4WD, looking not at his reflection in the tinted windscreen but beyond it, at Julia’s little picket fence.
Reed turns his wrist. We read 10.30. He won’t move before nightfall. Besides, he likes to rest before each job.
Nothing can be retrieved now. This man is patterned, limited, bad-hearted, serious about his work. His mother should never have spelt it Rhodric’.
I’m serious. I’m trying to help you think your way into the role. It all boils down to personality formation. Think what the poor bastard had to suffer at school. What if you’d been saddled with ‘Geremie’ instead of ‘Jeremy’?
* * * *
Anyway.
It’s some hours later, mid-evening in the bistro. Julia’s last night here, maybe? See her smiles span the room, embracing Lucas and Amy at their corner table.
Lucas raises his wine glass to her. He seems altered, his eyes less knowing and elusive.
And no more disappointed home for Amy. She might reach out and touch the layers of harmony and trust in the air.
Julia slips among the clamouring tables.
When a voice growls, ‘Coffee, please, miss,’ and she turns with a smile, and our hearts clench.
Reed.
Not doing anything. Not a danger, not yet. Just sitting there.
* * * *
But the end of that scene points to the beginning of this one:
Midnight. Julia’s verandah, still and empty. A moment later a shadow materialises, crouching at the door, inserting a couple of lockpicks in the humble scratched Yale.
Reed holds the tension pick at an angle while he teases with the raking pick, turning the tumblers. He breathes out finally, stands, pushes the door inward with a latex-gloved hand.
A faint resistance, and then it’s open.
For this hit he has chosen a 9 mm automatic. Once inside the house he fastens a silencer, his back to a wall, presenting the smallest possible target. Our Reed hates working in confined spaces.
We watch him glide through the house. He is quick. He has eaten little today; there is nothing to slow his blood. Every door is tolerantly ajar and as he locates each bedroom he fires, each shot like a sleepy cough in the night.
He leaves, tossing the gun aside. Reed uses a new gun for every job. Our man’s a pro; he’s not about to be caught in possession of a gun that may tie him to a killing.
Stylishly bleak.
Roll the credits.
* * * *
The script says, the script says.
I know what the script says. But you can’t blame me. Wouldn’t you want to rework it? What’s wrong with killing them all off? It’s the sort of thing the French would do, someone like Chabrol.
My objections? One, I cannot accept your happy-ever-after with Lucas. He is tiresome, secretive, stupid, forever miserably tempted. He has to go. Two, Rhodric likes things tidy and conclusive.
But yes, I agree, there is that foreshadowing shark-arm. Whose arm? Whose wristwatch?
Okay, how about this, since you won’t accept my massacre of the innocent and I can’t accept that the script has Julia avenging Lucas, who, it turns out, is merely wounded . . .
* * * *
Reed’s contract is Lucas. Reed is a professional and never wastes shots. He has no argument with Julia, but awake she could be dangerous. So . . .
Reed materialises above Julia like a grinning demon. In a practised double motion he clamps a hand over her mouth and applies the cold gunsnout to her temple.
‘Don’t make a sound. Sit up.’
She does, and he hits the occipital bulge at the back of her head. She slumps.
Now for Lucas. Again the covered mouth, the cautionary gun: ‘Cruz wants a word. If you wake the brat I’ll kill her.’
They leave the house. Lucas feints once or twice and is smacked about the head for his pains. Reed handcuffs him to the window pillar of the 4WD and delivers him to Cruz.
We’ve seen it all before. They take the boat out, say oily things to Lucas, apply some extreme prejudice, then tumble his body into the watery depths. Where sharks lurk.
Christ, I’m bored saying it.
* * * *
Let’s try this.
Whom do we all love?
Julia.
So she can’t die.
Start as before, Reed knocking her on the head and moving around to the other side of the bed.
Will he wake Lucas? Take him to see Cruz?
Ha. Clutch at that straw if you wish. Reed puts a bullet in Lucas’s brain.
Lucas, perilous but appealing. Lucas, who had been on the edge of beginning a new life with Julia and Amy.
Loss, miscalculation, ringing pain. The room tosses with it.
Then silence and a kind of paralysis.
But we’re not finished yet. Draw back, by degrees. There. Julia is stirring into consciousness.
She knows. See her sit, then stand, avoiding that side of the bed.
What’s this? Something cold and hard beneath her slender foot. A gun, blue and lethal in the moonlight. She weighs it in her hand.
See concentration and dark judgments in her eyes.
* * * *
See her say, later:
‘I thought we might go for a little cruise.’
A.J. Cruz blinks awake on the pillow in his teak-lined cabin. He should never have given Mirrored Lenses the night off.
‘Can’t we talk about this?’
‘Yes, but not here.’
The marina from above: mooring lights, jetty lights, a shadow crossing the dark water. Then closer, a motor muttering at the waterline.
The lights are far behind now.
‘This is all I wanted to say,’ Julia says.
And linger on Cruz’s wristwatch.
* * * *
A word about endings. Get in, get out, don’t wait around. Don’t restate anything. Don’t state the obvious. Assuming that Amy doesn’t wake up, find Lucas and lose her little mind, she will now make her life with Julia and together they will retrieve happiness. Our ending is the beginning of a new story. And it doesn’t hurt to leave ripples and echoes: Reed has slipped back to his unknown room; it unsettles us to know that he lives on. Leave that detail to the imagination, however. Never introduce new material at this stage.
Break all of the above rather than direct something like this again.