Quota by Jock Serong

two inches off the surface of the thing. I was so scared I was shaking, I couldn’t suck a decent breath outta the air. Then this other kid, he produces a ruler from his bag, and the minute he took it out I was thinking, no, don’t, but I didn’t say a thing because the whole trip out there, it was like a dare, you know? Who’s the toughest. So he taps it on the hull of the bomb before we could stop him. It just made this little tink , and in that instant my heart stopped and I thought I was going to be torn into scraps of shredded meat, the bits all sandy, and they’d never quite find all of me. The seagulls’d be fighting over the little bloody shreds o’ me. Tink . I ran for me life, didn’t stop running till I got home. I was so frightened I told my parents everything and I got a hell of a beating for it but I didn’t even care, I was so glad to be away from the thing.
    â€˜Anyway that was that. But thing is, the fear in the town got to a point that they actually stopped the men from Melbourne, when they got to us. Wouldn’t let ’em out there to do their work because they were so afraid they’d accidentally detonate it and take us all out. The mine was a couple of miles out of town, for godsake, but they wouldn’t see reason. These men must’ve been dumbfounded—they’d driven all the way out here, probably expected a pretty fond reception, coming to eliminate the menace, so to speak. But no, not this lot.’
    â€˜I don’t get that at all,’ said Charlie. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
    â€˜No, it sounds ridiculous to you because you’re seeing it from the outside. Look at it their way: first the storm, then the mine, then this crew turns up, city people, wanting to fix the problem.’
    â€˜Well the locals were hardly going to fix it, were they?’
    â€˜Doesn’t matter. They’d take…well, paralysis—doin nothing—over some risky intervention from up the highway. The problem was theirs , and they weren’t going to cop outsiders pushing a solution on them.’ He leaned forward. ‘Sound familiar at all?’
    Charlie didn’t respond.
    â€˜So they ignored em at first, wouldn’t put em up or sell em a drink. Rudeness, just like you’re gettin. Bomb fellers wouldn’t leave, the Atchesons parked a tractor across the beach access down there, someone else messed with the army truck. Stupid, juvenile stuff—just harassment really—so they had to work at night, under big lights…
    â€˜Only took them about half an hour in the end, though. I saw it on the back of the truck in the main street. Just a harmless ball of rusty iron after all that. Heavy thing, mind you. They had it lashed down to the bed of the truck to stop it rolling around, which only made it look more like some beast they’d had to subdue. The locals wouldn’t even look at it, wouldn’t acknowledge the army blokes. They just wanted to see it gone. They wanted the army blokes gone and they wanted the mine gone. It affected people around here very badly.’
    His tone had softened as he spoke, and now he fell silent.
    â€˜Why the hell are you telling me this?’ asked Charlie after a little while.
    â€˜Because you don’t understand what you’re dealing with here. There’s a deep core to this place. There is in any small town. People in close confinement. Sure, there’s plenty of the outside world here now, but a part of this community is still looking out through their venetians at people like you. They associate you with bad things. Taking a spanner to their mine. Everyone knows those boys, the ones who done it, and Paddy’s brother, the dead one. Everyone feels like they’re on trial.’
    He snorted and waved vaguely at the interior of the pub. ‘Everyone needs a Murchison, one way or another. So they want you to start up your truck and