Prologue

prologue

The bike lay on the side of the road beneath a grey oak, the handlebars at an odd jutted angle, as if it had been thrown with angry force.

It was early on a Saturday morning, the fifth day of a heatwave. More than forty bushfires continued to blaze doggedly across the state. Six regional towns had ‘evacuate now’ warnings in place but here in suburban Sydney the only danger was to asthma sufferers, who were advised to stay indoors. The smoke haze that draped the city was a malicious yellow-grey, as thick as a London fog.

The empty streets were silent apart from the subterranean roar of cicadas. People slept after restless hot nights of jangled dreams, while early risers yawned and thumb-scrolled their phone screens.

The discarded bike was shiny-new, advertised as a ‘vintage lady’s bike’: mint green, seven-speed, with a tan leather saddle and a white wicker basket. The sort of bike you were meant to imagine riding in the cool crisp air of a European mountain village, wearing a soft beret rather than a safety helmet, a baguette tucked under one arm.

Four green apples lay scattered on the dry grass beneath the tree as if they had spilled and rolled from the bike’s basket.

A family of black blowflies sat poised at different points on the bike’s silver spokes, so still they looked dead.

The car, a Holden Commodore V8, vibrated with the beat of eighties rock as it approached from the intersection, inappropriately fast in this family neighbourhood.

The brakelights flashed and the car reversed with a squeal of tyres until it was parked next to the bike. The music stopped. The driver emerged, smoking a cigarette. He was skinny, barefoot and bare-chested, wearing nothing but blue football shorts. He left the driver’s door open and tiptoed with balletic, practised grace across the already hot asphalt and onto the grass, where he hunkered down to study the bike. He caressed the bike’s punctured front tyre as if it were the limb of a wounded animal. The flies buzzed, suddenly alive and worried.

The man looked up and down the empty street, took a narrow-eyed drag of his cigarette, shrugged, and then grabbed the bike with one hand and stood. He walked to his car and laid it in his boot like a purchase, deftly popping off the front wheel with the quick-release lever to make it fit.

He got back in the car, slammed the door shut and drove off, rapping the beat to AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ on his steering wheel, pleased with himself. Yesterday had been Valentine’s Day, apparently, and he didn’t believe in that capitalist shit but he was going to give the bike to his wife and say, Happy late Valentine’s Day, babe, with an ironic wink, and that would make up for the other day and odds were he’d get lucky tonight.

He didn’t get lucky. He got very unlucky. Twenty minutes later he was dead, killed instantly in a head-on collision. A semitrailer driver from interstate didn’t see a stop sign concealed by an overgrown liquidambar. Local residents had been complaining for months about that sign. It was an accident waiting to happen, they said, and now it had happened.

The apples rotted fast in the heat.