Andrew McGahan - Underground: Fast and Furious, A Blackly Comic Rollercoaster Ride

UNDERGROUND

Also by Andrew McGahan

Praise
1988
Last Drinks
The White Earth

ANDREW
McGAHAN

This is a work of fiction.

Nothing in it is meant to be taken as fact.

This edition published in 2007

First published in 2006

Copyright Andrew McGahan 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

McGahan, Andrew.

Underground.

ISBN 978 1 74175 330 1 (pbk.).

1. Terrorism - Australia - Fiction. I. Title.

A823.3

Set in 12.5/15 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Its name was Yusuf.

Probably a joke by someone in the Department of Meteorology. Or maybe thats just official policy now. A state of emergency decree from the government. If something looks big and dangerous, then find a means to link it to Islam.

Either way, it was surely the biggest cyclone to hit that part of the Queensland coast in decadesa great-granddaddy of a tropical storm. Category five. Winds gusting over two hundred and ninety k; walls of horizontal rain, like Allah himself was pissing in your face; and a storm surge that had lifted the Pacific Ocean by twenty murderous feet or more.

I was right there in the middle of it all. Six storeys up, my belly on the tiles and one arm wrapped around the balcony railing, hanging on for dear life as I peered over the edge, nearly deafened by the unearthly shriek of the wind. My face stinging. My slotted eyes agonised. The rest of me drenched. With a whisky glass clutched in my free hand, holding more sea water now than alcohol.

Below me, three years of work was being steadily destroyed. The artificial beach had been the first to go. Huge waves loomed there now, their crests torn into a brown froth that streaked ahead wildly. I couldnt even tell where the beach had been anymore. Hundreds of dump trucks had emptied thousands of tonnes of white sand down there (it cost a fortune) but now it was all just part of the raging ocean.

Even drunk and half-terrified as I was, I could appreciate the irony. Leave the mangroves alone, the environmentalists had said. Leave the dunes behind them alone. They had protested and petitioned and chained themselves to bulldozersand gone to prison for their troubles. But what did I or my investors care? We wanted a pristine beach for the punters, not mudflats. We wanted open ocean views from the rooms, not the backs of old dunes covered with scrub. So Id let the construction company loose to rip out the mangroves and level the frontage.

Three years later, the environmentalists were all long gone, no doubt locked up for good these days, but Yusuf was teaching me a lesson. The storm surge had drowned most of the resort. The beach and, behind that, the lawns and gardens and pathways that led to it. Wreckage floated everywhere. The four-acre pool was underwater, with its cabanas and bars, as were the tennis courts, the croquet pitch, and, from what I could see, a fair percentage of the championship links golf course. But what was truly awesome was that the great muddy waves were rolling clear over the lot of it, two hundred metres or more from the normal coastline, and slamming like thunder into the resorts main buildings.

Up in one of the penthouse suites, I could feel the hotel wing shake with every watery detonation, solid concrete or not. From the floors below came the sloshing din of shattered glass and broken furniture rolling about. And squinting into the storm I could see that the other buildings were faring worse. The luxury villas, off in their private gardens, were inundated up to the gutters. The restaurant/reception centre was roofless, a mass of papers and tablecloths and curtains, whipping away into the wind. And the great big block of the two-thousand-seat convention centre was crumbling with each wave, like a sandstone cliff collapsing into the sea, filmed on video over millennia and set at furious fast-forward.

Come on, I yelled at the sky. COME ON !

I was enjoying myself, actually.

In fact, the cyclone was doing me the biggest favour possible. That is, the cyclone, and an insurance policy that was a good month yet from lapsing. Because, to be frank, the Ocean Sands Green Resort was the white elephant of all white elephants. Despite all the money wed spent, despite all the work wed done, the place had never opened to the public. And it never would have, storm or no storm. World events had put paid to any hope of that. So I, managing supervisor and public face of the project, was free to cheer and sob and laugh myself sick as it dissolved away like a sandcastle.

The cyclone whooped and sobbed and laughed along too.

It was time for another drink.

I let go of the handrail and allowed the wind to drive me back through the shattered glass doors into the suite proper. I was bleeding from that glass, and from other flying debris, but none of the cuts were serious. Indeed, I felt invulnerable. And why not? God knows how much scotch Id tossed down or how many grams of dodgy cocaine Id snorted by that stage. I crawled about the room, a jumble of overturned chairs and empty bottles and filthy plates and torn bed sheets, praying there was still some alcohol surviving somewhere.

Of course, the room had been like that even before the cyclone hit. Julie and I had been living it up hard. For the resort had actually welcomed two guests before its untimely demise. Me, and my assistant publicist, Julie Favmoretwenty-eight years old, cunning as the devil, and horny as all hell. The pair of us had set ourselves up in one of the suitesindeed, the only one that had been properly fitted out, for display purposes, before financial reality sank in and construction ceased. All that time and effort deserved at least one party, Id decided.

And what a time we had, with the whole place to ourselves. Oh, Julie... I wonder where you are now? My old balls are still aching from the things you did to them. It was less than a month ago, after all. And yet you were the very last fuck of my life, it looks likely.

But Julie was long gone by the time the storm really got going. She cleared out as soon as the first warnings came. She was a sensible local lass, for all her sexual depravity, and had seen cyclones before. So I was alone. True, there was a security team on station at the main gate, but they were under strict instructions to let no one else in and, more importantly, not to disturb me. No doubt I should have hauled out of there too, but I was hardly the man to let a mere storm get in the way of a promising bender. Besides, my career was in the toilet once again and, an empty resort aside, I had absolutely nowhere else to go.