Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

7. On The Road

They were driving on the endless tangle of motorways that spanned the north-western satellite towns of Corviston. Brendan had long ceased to keep track of exactly where they were.

 According to the last sign he had seen they were 43 kilometres away from Laidlaw. Still half an hour's drive away. The train went level. You could only appreciate the flatness at the few places where the landscape was not fouled by urban sprawl or newly planted forest. But here from the vantage point of a freeway viaduct over the plains, the lay of the land was plain to see. In the distance the mountains stood sentinel on all three fronts, like the distant, mist-shrouded sides of a vast stadium. 

The exuberant autumn sun of a few days ago had been replaced by a sickly pale yellow circle. Winter was coming, slowly but surely. 

It had been an easy matter for Brendan to bring up the issue of the conference the day before, under the pretense of simply having an interest. 

Floriana was unable to attend due to a family gathering, but she had gotten him a media pass with no questions asked. Now came the question of avoiding detection at the event itself. Brendan had heard enough about these nights to have a rough idea of how they worked. The VIPs mingled with the VIPs and the riffraff mingled with the riffraff. It should be no problem to avoid anyone who could identify him, with a bit of clever footwork. 

Brendan sat silently for a moment. He wondered if this was all a massive mistake, and he was being led into a trap. He was in a car with a stranger heading the wrong way up the motorway. But that didn't really make any sense, and he felt that Adrian was being genuine. And there wasn't really any way to back out of this now, short of jumping out of the car. Something which would almost definitely get him killed or seriously injured. 

Why was he bringing up the same thing that he had brought up a few days ago? The events of the last few days seemed to catch up on him all of a sudden. He let the storm waves slowly subside as they battered the walls of his mind. That seemed to happen time and time again to him. When he had dropped out he had been numb for the first couple of days. Then the enormity of what he'd done bowled him over for six. 

 Brendan thought back to the card with the crescent moon. The faint pattern in the background that they couldn't make sense of the day before. He suddenly realised what had been bothering him all this time, the background pattern which had flummoxed him. It was the breaking of the waves. Could it have something to do with the project he had been working on before he had dropped out? His instinct told him that it had to. Halberstam had banked a lot on that particular venture. 

He suddenly felt the need to talk to someone. But not Adrian. He didn't know enough about this stuff. He would talk to him about it later, when he had had the chance to explain some of these things in greater detail. 

They passed the exit for a business estate. A jumble of billboards hove into sight on the margins, each of them advertising what appeared to be the same beige condo complex. A closer inspection revealed that all of them were slightly different shades of beige and had some mild variation of the same name rendered in florid cursive fonts. Revania, Ravenna, Revinia Heights. Finished apartments starting from $200,000. Selling fast. Don't miss out. 

Brendan cast a cursory glance over the advertisements. "Nice knowing that our forebears worked hard so we could build the world's biggest New Jersey." 

A subdivision, a whole array of the aformentioned condominiums, hove into sight on their left. "I think I can already see water damage." Brendan perused the buildings, none of which could have been over two years old. "The water damage is built in. It comes with the package." 

"You know a bit about houses, eh?" Adrian said, not taking his eyes off the road. 

"I did a course on architectural design at uni. Not really sure what it's worth, but it got me the internship, at least. Remember the first time we met? At the skatepark? That was the internship. We were there to spruik this weird guided skateboard gadgetbahn thingy that Floriana had decided was a great idea." 

Adrian laughed. "So that was why they turned on you." 

"So you live here?" Brendan changed the subject. They were entering the outskirts of Laidlaw, the largest city between Corviston and Wythaven and the unofficial capital of the amorphous urban area along the valley of the river Sewell. The half-baked subdivisions had been replaced by proper suburbs. The benign white clouds had turned a foreboding gray and now they were driving though a rainstorm, and the wipers were going at full tilt. 

"Well, my family actually lives, er, further up north," Adrian explained. Brendan assumed he meant Wythaven, and filed the information away in the filing cabinet in his brain. "I just went to school here. And the business is here."

Brendan thought of the last time he had been here, properly visited the place, not stopping for five minutes on an intercity train to Wythaven. 2005, on a school trip. They had walked around the city centre. His only clear memory of the trip was that they had eaten at a McDonald's. 

It seemed only yesterday that the year 2005 had seemed cutting edge. That was now a full fifteen years ago. He found it a little difficult to believe. 

"I-I've only ever been here once," he got out, stuttering. "I barely even remember it."

"We're not really going into the city centre," Adrian said, pulling into the right lane to get past a slow-moving semitrailer. "Not that anything has changed there in the last 20 years." 

 They passed the Laidlaw CBD, a nondescript grid of office buildings, and took the offramp into the industrial quarter to the north. 

Brendan decided to broach the subject. "So what exactly is it that you do?" 

"Me, personally? Not much," Adrian said, which was technically true. "I don't have much of a part in the business. I'm kind of like the black sheep of the family. Look. This car is way beyond my means. The only reason I'm driving it is because it belonged to my grandfather. I'm just taking care of it for the moment." 

Brendan looked around. Faceless brick and corrugated steel frontages of warehouses and factories looked out onto the street from behind sturdy steel fences. "So what does your family do?"

"Well, I guess we're in the, uh, rainwater diversion business." Adrian turned into a side street.

 "The what?"

"Also known as the business of making-" Adrian produced an umbrella from the gap between his seat and the centre console with a flourish- "these things." 

"What does this have to do with, uh, Carleton?" 

"I'll get to that in a minute." 

"Stealing umbrella technology?" Brendan looked confused. "What's there to steal? Why would they need umbrellas? For some kind of spell?"

"Well, it takes a lot to stay at the forefront of umbrella technology, you know. Lots of R&D." Adrian pulled up into the drive of a squat building with a tinted plate-glass facade. "The imported stuff is quite cheap but also quite bad quality. So we still have market share."

"Well, another company wants your umbrella technology," Brendan suggested, as the gate slowly slid open. 

"That's extremely unlikely. It's not a very... how should I say it... cutthroat industry," Adrian explained, driving into the empty carpark out the front. "We know all the other local manufacturers by name and there's no way any of them would even think of trying anything like this. The other companies are usually very supportive when we have new ideas. They're more than happy to, you know, help us and support us. Mainly because there is one other umbrella manufacturer here and it's a father-and-son operation out of a shed in Wythaven. The vast majority of our competition is either imported, or it comes on a truck from the Industrial Zone across the border."

Brendan stared at the warehouse. "So you assume that Carleton has somehow stolen it?" 

"Well, we don't assume that. We know that." "So what are they going to do with this technology that they've stolen? School-branded umbrellas or something." 

"I'm guessing it's got something to do with what they're planning to unveil," Adrian said glumly.

"What's that about?" Brendan's inner sense pricked up. "The ocean?"

"That would make sense," Adrian said, suddenly. "Using our technology for marine purposes. How do you know that?"

"There's a clue on the card," Brendan replied, somewhat cryptically. 

***