Kingdom of the Strong

I am sinking.

All around me the press and swell of water. Above me a shimmering surface, a radiance of dappled sun. I can’t get back up to it. I can’t hear anything but the roar inside my ears. I’m sinking. Below me I can’t see form or place, but it’s dark. I’m on my way down to the ocean floor. If I make it there, still alive, I’ll probably thud. My arms are waving, my legs are scrambling. I’m trying to find something firm, for my feet to touch, to springboard back up towards the surface, but there’s nothing, only the crush of water. Drowning is supposed to be a pleasant way to die, that’s what I’ve been told. Really? Better than falling asleep and not waking? If I open my mouth and inhale, a rush of cold water will fill my lungs and I’ll sink even faster. Will it bring bliss, that rush of cold water? I don’t think so; I think it will bring panic, an onslaught of panic, greater than the panic I’m feeling now.

Before I was sinking I was getting scared – scared that we were so far from the shore, like the old man and the sea, from the book Dad read me when I was in bed and he’d sworn off the grog, last time for sure, when I lay on the cool pillow that smelled of lemon and the breeze came in off the paddocks, fluttering the curtains, when he came in and sat on the end of my bed and said: Son, this is a great book.

My heart is being crushed. I’m not so good at science, but I think that’s what happens when you sink in water: your insides get crushed.

Why aren’t I floating? Why can’t I float to the top? Why am I sinking? It’s against the law of nature, isn’t it? I’m messed up. An aberration.

I think I can see the bottom. Will I hear a thud? Maybe not. No sounds down here. It’s really quiet. Getting darker too. I can’t make out the outline of our little fishing boat. What happened at the end of The Old Man and the Sea? Did the man die? Did he bring that fish in to land? I might have been asleep by the last page.

I hate water. Not the stuff that comes out of taps – that’s okay. I hate being in it. Oceans. Lakes. Swimming pools. Rivers. I almost drowned when I was eleven. My father, in a riotous fit of spontaneous whatever, after too many beers and my worried looks, lifted me from the floor of our rental tin boat and tossed me into the sea. I sank. In what I guess was a sudden hit of the guilts, he then jumped in after me and scooped me up, mid-sink, and carried my limp body back up to the surface. He didn’t apologise, didn’t say anything, just plonked me into the boat, started the engine and steered back in the direction of home. Since that day, some thirty-five years ago, I’ve managed to avoid bodily contact with water, aside from taking showers and baths. People scoff when I tell them this. ‘Oh but, Darian, swimming in the ocean is just the most exhilarating experience.’ That sort of thing. No, it’s not. Give me a footpath, give me concrete, give me a place where my feet are firm on the ground.

It certainly wasn’t nostalgia then that led me to a cabin on the edge of a lake, a place of hibernation where I had been for almost a month, where I would sit on the balcony staring at the expanse of charcoal-grey water; where, most days, I’d drag a small wooden boat, which came with the hire of the cabin, into the water, jump in and chug towards the middle, casting a line, spending hours unsuccessfully fishing while I stared at the mountains in the distance, whose peaks were always shrouded in layers of winter mist.

I was the only tourist in the Great Lakes district on the coast of New South Wales. I’d turned off the highway in search of a motel and got lost while driving along twisted roads that clung to the forms and shapes of the jagged mountain range that hovered over a series of interlocking lakes close to the Pacific Ocean. I’d been driving hard and fast, away from failures. Rose, a woman I loved, and The Train Rider, a killer I’d hunted, their worlds coalescing into an increasingly dark spiral I was unable to control, were both now lost to me.

Rose I had left behind in Byron Bay, a day’s drive from the lake, and The Train Rider, a man whose depraved serial killings had begun to define me, was in the wind. Would I connect with either of them again? I didn’t know. I was in the wind too.

Sitting in a wooden boat in the middle of a lake in dark winter, I was doing an awesome job of not thinking about where to go to next. Back home, on the Noosa River, up in sunny Queensland, my land of sarongs and hammocks, a life of early retirement, didn’t yet feel like an option. My house on the river – yes, more water, but I only look at it – was a brooding reminder of those failures. Not long ago Rose had moved in and her scent would still be in the walls even though she was no longer there. The Train Rider had followed me from Melbourne, had infiltrated the entire area, from Noosa to Nambour, Gympie, Tewantin, towns dotted across the hinterland and coastline; he had vanished just as I came close to finally catching him, but he had left a mark on that part of my life that wouldn’t fade anytime soon.

I had tried not to think about him, which was as successful as not noticing that daylight followed the night. The Train Rider was a monstrous killer. He’d taken, if we were to believe his horrid ex-wife, hundreds of girls in a rampage that’d lasted decades. Snatched them off trains, raped then killed them. Then stuffed them using a state-of-the-art taxidermy process. It was beyond anything I had ever seen, and the house full of his victims, naked and preserved, was like a horror movie that I couldn’t shake off. I’d failed to catch him. First in Melbourne, as a cop, then on the Sunshine Coast. I didn’t like failure. I wasn’t used to it and his survival ate at me like a decay inside my body. As far as we knew he had fled the country. The Train Rider, Kirk Thornhill, was also very wealthy and I couldn’t help but see him sitting on a beach in a resort somewhere in Asia where the policing isn’t what you’d call rigorous, rising from the sand and surf to raide another third world train, take a girl and add her to a growing tableau of reallife dolls.

I’d stay here, on the lake, until the tourists and the sun turned up; that was my plan. And after that, there was no plan. Maybe a trip to Thailand to visit some of my late father’s greatest hits in an effort to get to know him, the bars and the brothels where he spent his last couple of decades in the absence of the son he’d tossed into the sea in a drunken burst of anger a week before he closed the front door behind him, walked across the paddocks to the highway and never returned home.

I dragged my boat out of the water, up onto the sand, and hurled the anchor back into the lake. I lassoed another rope around the base of a tree on the shoreline and then began to trudge up towards my cabin. Yet again without any fish. I pulled my thick black woollen jacket tight around me. Light was fading and the chill of the night was fast developing, blowing down from the mountains.

A white Toyota Camry, late model, was parked out the front of my cabin, next to my mid-sixties bright red Studebaker. Hire car written all over it. Maybe another tourist in search of some midwinter lake activity, I thought at first. Then I saw, as I drew closer, that the front door to my cabin was wide open. I had a visitor.

‘Is that you, Darian?’ I heard from inside, as I walked towards the steps leading up to the porch.

‘Yeah, boss, it’s me,’ I said.

I stepped inside...