Graceful Abaddon

Loveable Creatures (3)

Chapter Three: Mr Leathe

Approaching the town, human life announced itself in bushy yards and ugly homes, twinkling lights that rimmed the coast. They were late, having taken a wrong turn, coming to an intersection lacking signs. Both directions seemed to promise tapered tarmac, rutted dirt, dead-end hollows littered from the nightly haunts of teenagers.

Abbey wrapped her legs beneath her, staring out the window. The nervousness had gone. Instead she felt resigned; hostage to uncertain possibilities.

Mr Watson, sour from their talk, swore beneath his breath. They scanned the signs that passed beside them. Poorly illuminated, makeshift claims of optimistic capitalism. They passed the township's only education centre: Sister Fieksberg Primary School. A loose array of sad demountable classrooms. An old and leaning water tank. Across the road, a soccer field with mark-lines faded; a squalid wooden structure built for spectators to sit upon; a place for jaded country hicks to yell abuse at skinny-ankled referees. Peeling from an empty bus-stop wall, a moulding poster showed a pristine Cadillac: a black-skinned child smoked a Cuban cigarette. For some reason, Abbey struggled to imagine these backwoods kids – their simple, sheltered mentalities – being privy to such otherworldly stimuli. It contradicted what she liked to think about these people. They should be immune against the violent disillusionment of urban culture. The thought was rendered bitterer as the pang of blood-and-bone fertiliser whiffed through the car, clogging her nostrils.

Mr Watson killed the high beams. Street lights rendered them unnecessary.

"What was the place called again?"

"Um." Abbey searched her mind. "Petal Power".

She was to meet a man named Mr Leathe. The school having washed its hands of her next pupil, Mr Leathe seemed the only direct link with the Hockocks. (Bizarre and somehow ugly name, she thought. Hockock, not Leathe. There was something piggish about it). After accepting the job online, she corresponded directly with Mr Leathe – or rather his daughter. With discouragingly poor writing, Miss Leathe arranged to meet the Watsons outside Petal Power. This was the Leathes nursery, situated in the southern outskirts of town.

Drive to on the house next to tHe river. their's a sine that says petal power and the driveway take you past the house and meet me at the nurserry, Miss Leathe had written.

By "river" she obviously meant the estuary. Revealed intermittently through gaps of feral mangrove scrub, it snaked along beside them, dark and sleek and ominous. Abbey never liked mangroves. The looked weird and often smelt disgusting.

They found the Leathe house. Laid to waste beside the road, dwarfed within a sprawling thicket, one might think the place abandoned. Untamed bush fringed either side. Every window dark and bare. Scattered on the unkempt lawn: a mould-infested mattress, cardboard boxes spilling disused cables; soggy chunks of styrofoam. Board game boxes. Garden junk. A bicycle dismembered. Objects innumerable. A hoarder's wonderland.

Beside the tin letterbox, a tacky sign was nailed to a tree. Nursery 2nd Entrance.

Flicking back to high beam, Mr Watson navigated past the house, along a trail crowded on the left with leafless branches. Even this far north, the scathing claws of winter seemed to burrow deep. Behind the house the land declined to treeless paddocks. No animals marked the dead expanse. A ghostly light shone from a distant property; east along the mangrove shore, before the creeping tributary ...

"That's gotta be it".

Abbey's stomach turned. She nodded.

Mr Watson brought the car outside the sagging metal sheds that answered for the nursery. Contrary to expectation, this was no immaculate centre like the ones they knew back home. Judging by the lack of warmth - the inhospitable yard of dirt that served for parking - this was clearly not a site for couples seeking coffee and a quiet turn about the garden. More likely, Abbey thought, the place was used equivalent to a warehouse; host to the storage, preparation and experimentation behind commercial horticulture. Especially this time of night, without yet a sign of life, the grounds looked fit for murder. She could easily imagine a black sedan, a pair of thugs removing someone from the trunk, dragging them half-dead with fright into the webby innards of the building.