The Courier's New Bicycle (4 page)

I sleep late. Monday being my day off, I do nothing except a load of washing.

Lunchtime, I realise the light on my answerphone is blinking. It's my younger sister, Helen, asking me to meet her this afternoon at the Neighbourly Arms, a tavern in the business sector of the CBD. No ‘how have you been?' preamble and no goodbye, just a terse message and a hang-up.

It's the only contact she's initiated in five years. A handful of years before, in that first rush of fear when infertility became linked to Divine punishment and the necessity to atone, my family had scrambled to be ‘saved'. I'd declined the offer to join them. Then Helen married the enemy.

I stare at the phone, and can't suppress the tiny voice inside that whispers hope of reconciliation.

 

I arrive at Lord Place on foot. Being something of a bastion for things traditional, its various clubs and bars are popular
with the Nation Firsts, and weeknights the area is awash with political wheeler-dealers and Neighbourly Watch officials. Hypocritically, the Neighbourly Arms is the only city establishment with an exemption on Blue Laws days — the local slang term for the city's reinstated Sunday bans on alcohol, trading and fun in general. For Helen to ask me here is unkind but not surprising: it ensures she's the one on safe ground.

Located halfway down the bluestone square, the shuttered cottage exterior of the tavern makes it look like a tacky reconstruction; in fact, it's one of the oldest buildings in the city. Helen's sipping a glass of something through a straw at one of the outside tables, a wine keg with stools around it. Perched on a stool, she tugs self-consciously at the hem of her skirt.

I don't bother going to get a drink; I have a feeling this is going to be quick. I seat myself across the keg from her.

Neat as a pin in matching pastels, she eyes my sneakers, black slouch jeans and hoody, and gets an irked tilt to her mouth.

‘You look well,' she says. (An improvement on last time's ‘Get out of my life'.)

‘You too,' I lie. To me, she looks strained and pasty.

‘It's Mum and Dad's thirtieth wedding anniversary on Wednesday. Just in case you were planning to put in a surprise appearance, I'm here to say don't.'

In goes the barb.
Pierce my heart
.

She produces a card with pearly bells and glitter on
it, and hands me a pen. ‘They just want to know you're alive.'

I'm seeing in tunnel vision, the pen a long way away. My hand reaches out and does the writing:
Much love on your special day, Salisbury.
It hands back the pen.

This is what leaving home at sixteen and coming out as a gender transgressive did to my family relations. At first, my parents hoped for contrition and atonement; then, when they abandoned their Presbyterian traditions for the Saviour Nation church, they wanted me to have my ‘difference' baptised out of me.

Helen puts the card in its envelope and slips it into her handbag, then manoeuvres delicately off her keg stool.

‘So that's it for another five years?' I ask.

She doesn't answer. Her eyes drift from mine to the tavern entrance. I follow her gaze, and see someone standing there watching us. Her NF politician husband, Michael, shoehorned into power by his Saviour Nation flock.

My sister always knew the kind of life she wanted was marrying and making lots of babies in suburban bliss. When the pandemic hit, she was just seventeen — and facing the prospect of premature ovarian failure and infertility. A year later, she took up with Michael Bannister, the prayer leader of the local church, and two of her three desires were quickly granted. But without the hoped-for babies, I can't help wondering if suburbia became more a prison for her than a paradise.

Michael turns to a companion, suited and heavyset in the shadows behind him, and speaks briefly. As the other
disappears inside, he detaches from the doorjamb and walks over. His perusal of me is expressionless.

‘You done?' he asks Helen.

‘Yes,' she says to a spot on the pavement, and he steers her away with a proprietary arm.

I can't shout. I can't cry. In Lord Place no one makes a scene — no one who doesn't want to be noticed, that is. I feel glances from the neighbouring kegs. I pull up my hoody and leave in the opposite direction.

More than anything right now — more than family reconciliation or my sister's love — I want Inez's arms wrapped tight around me.

 

The Animal Protection Vigilantes never meet in the same spot twice. This week it's a Salvation Army hall in Carlton, a suburb away from where I live. Nation First tolerates the Salvos because they shelter those in the community the NFs have no compassion for. How the Salvos cope with their massively increased workload, I don't know.

Inez and I go there together in her ute. It's a throwback to halcyon days: a lovingly restored anvil-grey FC Holden that she got from her dad. The car was the thing he did to ease the boredom and disappointment of retrenchment, but he never got to enjoy the fruits of his labour, being one of those taken early by the flu. Inez, thumbing her nose at the purists, had the engine converted in compliance with the city's strict new emission laws, and drives it in his memory.

She parks under a big elm a couple of streets from the hall. A block out, we don our prayer shawls and walk with carefully measured steps, as if already soliciting favours from our ungenerous Maker.

The APV is how Inez and I met. She joined our cell when she moved here from Sydney. For me it was lust at first sight, but she took a while to warm to me, and we worked together for nearly a year before the pilot light even went on for her.

The seven of us gather in the shuttered kitchen area at the back of the hall, more than the usual level of tension in the air. We're coming to the pointy end of an operation we've been planning for many weeks. This rescue is one of our most ambitious, and only countenanced because another APV cell contacted us to ask for our help. Three months ago, they were approached by a disaffected employee at Greengate Farm, fifty kilometres northeast of the city in the Yarra Valley. To all intents and purposes it's a dairy — there are cows, and it produces milk — but the employee gave up its dirty little secret. Deep inside its rambling set of buildings, where the dairy workers aren't allowed, is a series of connecting internal yards: a farm within a farm, for horses only.

Of course, all the workers there know about it, but need their jobs more than they need to rock a cruel and illegal boat. Our informant, Lars, a security guard, felt the same way — until he saw something he wasn't meant to on a CCTV screen. Something he couldn't forget. Something
nobody should do to any creature. He handed the farm's details to the other cell and offered to stay on to help with the raid. It was too big for that group to manage alone, so they appealed to us.

‘What's the latest?' Brigid asks.

The prayer shawl discarded, her shoulders look tense in her sleeveless top, her hands shoved defensively in her jean pockets. She's been against trusting a third party from the start. I must say I can't blame her — it adds an extra layer of worry none of us wants. But it's thanks to Lars that Inez has come prepared today.

We gather round as she unfolds a map-sized sheet of the farm's layout and spreads it across a benchtop. A technician with Southern Electric by day, Inez is relied on by the group for her expertise in disarming things like CCTV and alarms. She earned her stripes back when she worked as a systems analyst for Defence intelligence, fighting computer hackers. Now she's joined their ranks.

‘Look and memorise, folks,' she says. ‘This is our route in and out.'

I watch her strong brown fingers trace the lines and shapes and think of where else they've been recently — then force my attention back to what she's saying.

‘The latest batch of stuff from Lars has this week's entry codes and passwords, plus the digital surveillance footage I requested,' she tells us. ‘The footage I'll loop and doctor for time and date. When I hack in, that's what'll feed to the surveillance monitors. We'll be invisible to the cameras.'

While we have every reason to trust Inez's hacking expertise, the interior of the farm where the horses are kept is run on a semi-automated system, and it's made everyone jittery, especially Brigid.

‘What if the system comes back online while we're still in there and triggers a lockdown?' she asks.

‘I've a special patch for that kind of fail-safe. It won't happen,' Inez replies. She looks at the rest of us. ‘An hour before we arrive, I'll start running the pirate program. By the time we get there, the “ghost” machine will have insinuated itself into the farm's computer system. I'll be able to control all the security functions from my palm computer.' She glances reassuringly at Brigid. ‘One key press will disable the movement sensors and automated alarms; the next will swap the CCTV with the dummy substitute; the last will spring the doors. And then, my friends, we'll be in like Flynn.'

My pulse does a little flip. I love her when she talks dirty.

She gets out a set of photos next, and we study the grainy shots, hurriedly snapped: our route through the dairy to the internal yards, and the exit where the other cell will be waiting for us with the horse trucks.

‘Lars has risked a lot giving us all this,' she reminds us. ‘We need to move fast.'

Lydia, beside me, nods vigorously. The rest of us scrutinise the layout, trying to feel confident. Only Nagid seems relaxed. A newcomer to our group but seasoned campaigner with Greenpeace, he's seen all kinds of direct action.

‘Anything more to know about the caretaker?' he asks.

Inez shakes her head.

We've learnt from Lars that the farm's owners have become complacent, thinking themselves safely connected to the powers that be, and reduced the security detail on the overnight shifts to a grand total of one. The only other person onsite at night is the caretaker, Russ Stefanovic, in a cottage half a kilometre from the dairy. On Friday evenings he goes to the pub for his weekly binge session.

I look around the group. ‘Lars is doing the Friday shift this week. We give the thumbs up to the other cell and the job's on.'

‘Say again about the security cameras?' Brigid presses Inez.

‘They'll be effectively blind while the monitors in the security office are streaming doctored video. Anybody watching will see only a loop of old, uneventful footage. No one — not even Lars — will be able to tell there's been a swap-over from their system to the ghost. He'll stay put in the monitoring room and do none of his usual yard checks or perimeter inspections. Once the horses are loaded, I'll beep him to get out of there.' She pauses. ‘Our usual onscreen greeting will come up at the 5 am change of shift.'

It's become customary for each APV cell to leave its calling card after a raid: a message claiming responsibility, framed by a picture of happy horses galloping in a grassy paddock. It's just one small satisfaction in an ocean of injustice. The farm owners can fume all they want, but they
can't make public the rustling or their outrage. Well-connected they may be, what they're doing is still illegal and they could be charged under the Unnatural Practices Act.

‘Do you think we can manage twenty-one horses?'

Brigid asks the question for all of us. Greengate isn't the largest of the hormone farms, but has more horses than we've ever tackled in one go.

‘Absolutely,' says Inez, refolding schematics.

‘Then let's do it!' Lydia thumps the table and we all jump.

Lydia's our token extremist, her fearlessness having saved and risked us in almost equal measure. Lately, she's made us more than the usual amount of nervous, and reeling in her enthusiasm has fallen to me. Inez tells me it's because I'm the only one who knows which wires to snip to defuse her. I'd hate to disillusion anyone by confessing that I guess.

I start to say something cautionary, but Brigid beats me to it rather less tactfully.

‘Let's not lose our heads and smash anything on this job,' she says to the bench, and Lydia looks suitably shamefaced.

The rescue before last, our extremist impulsively trashed a piece of equipment containing something volatile in the farm's laboratory, the fumes from it dense enough to trigger the optical fire sensor and set off the sprinkler system. Luckily, Inez had already disabled the fire alarm; but we all got a soaking. Far worse, the concrete surfaces turned slippery and we only just got ourselves and the terrified horses out unscathed. It was not one of our finest moments. In fact, it was the closest we'd all come to a one-way trip to
an NF detention facility, and even Lydia realises she stepped way over the line that night.

Despite that, the rescue turned out a win, the animals placed in the care of a Mount Macedon horse sanctuary. Unfortunately, even a win feels like a pyrrhic victory these days. The level of demand is so high that when one hormone farm drops out of production, the others just collect its business.

‘Shall we move on?' Max, our resident vet, breaks the uncomfortable silence.

Inez's answers have satisfied Brigid for now, and the rest of us are keen to focus again on the job ahead. None of us wants to rehash the mistakes of the past. I push aside a niggling anxiety about Brigid and Lydia being able to work effectively together, and look enquiringly at James.

‘All set,' he says, and grins.

At eight o'clock on Friday, when Russ Stefanovic makes his usual pilgrimage to the pub ten kilometres away, James will be there, a larrikin companion, ready to ply the man with beers and Rohypnol. Meanwhile, three large animal transports modified to take seven horses each will roll up to Greengate Farm. Once we get the horses in their variously weakened states unstrapped from the equipment and out of the stalls, it will be over to the members of the other cell to transport them to the sanctuary. There is, however, one crucial APV member we haven't yet confirmed.