LOUISE

MILLIGAN
Pheasants
Nest

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 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2024

Copyright © Louise Milligan 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

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 1

COLD

Kate Delaney’s eyes snap open and the first thing she notices
is the cold. It’s a familiar cold: the sharp sting of a thousand
acupuncture needles plunging into her skin at once. She knows
that cold. Southern Highlands cold. She’s approaching the
Southern Highlands.
She’s lying on the back seat of a car. His car. Shudder. The
Guy. The Guy doesn’t get to have a name.
She looks ahead and sees his frosted blond hair glinting, his
arms at the steering wheel, snaked with veins, buffed at the gym.
His wrists and fingers tap-tap the wheel in time to the music in
manic delight. Pearl Jam.
It would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so grim. Kate loathes
Pearl Jam—nineties commercial grunge. On the car CD player, the
nasal whine of Eddie Vedder’s voice, warbling that he’s still alive.

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 LOUISE MILLIGAN

Kate Delaney is still alive but her stomach churns with the
understanding that she mightn’t be for long. She’s hundreds
of kilometres from where she started from in Melbourne that
night. If Pearl Jam is to be one of the last sounds of her thirty-
something years . . . it feels like one of those postmodern jokes
she once scoffed at over cheap shiraz.
She glances down at her stockings: black opaques, torn at the
knee, her blood like treacle in the moonlight. It hurts to move
and she’s afraid to move in case he realises she’s awake and does
something . . . else.
Instead, she stares out the window. There are the windmills
near—what was the place? Gunning. Normally busily spinning
away, but now, in the small hours of a Sunday morning, they
simply sway ominously in the gunmetal sky like a drunken KKK
crew, arms akimbo, pointed hoods flopping lazily to the side.
Soon she’ll be passing Goulburn and the Big Merino. The
thought of it draws a half-smile to her chapped lips, despite every-
thing. One particularly chilly winter she had bought a red scarf
at the shop inside the giant concrete ram, knitted from, of all
things, possum fur. It was deliciously cosy and not as unstylish
as it sounded. Nevertheless, when she wore it to Fashion Week,
Sylvia, her best and most fashion-forward friend, collapsed in
giggles on discovering its provenance. Kate felt quietly and smugly
subversive. Fuck you, fashionistas, I’m wearing possum fur. And
I got it at the Big Merino.

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 PHEASANTS NEST

Kate Delaney knows this drive so well. She has travelled from
Melbourne to Sydney countless times, and it is far from lost
on her that the part of the drive that always struck her as un-
utterably creepy is where she now finds herself. She always felt
foreboding when she drove that stretch.
There is the Belanglo State Forest to the left, where serial killer
Ivan Milat murdered and buried seven backpackers.
Not so far away, someone took to hanging stuffed animals
from trees along the side of the road. It was speculated that this
had something to do with a sinister paedophile ring, but nobody
really knew. It took years for all the animals to be removed and it
had made Kate wince every time she’d seen them, many decapi-
tated, most dirty, with synthetic, rain-matted fur.
Then there was the time she was driving along and saw a
car puttering along at maybe ten k’s an hour in the stopping
lane. She and her friends had turned back to see no one visible
at the wheel.
Kate, her then-boyfriend Michael King and their mate Steve
felt too sick to speak. They slowed down and gawped, too scared
to drive back to the Toyota to see what had happened. Suddenly,
a police car zoomed up. Told them to move on, nothing to
see here.
They discovered not half an hour later from a cop contact
of Kate’s that a guy had set out on the Barton Highway from
Canberra, dosed himself up with enough OxyContin to knock

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 LOUISE MILLIGAN

over a horse and kept driving on the Hume until he lost con-
sciousness. By the time they had seen him, he was slumped to
the side, his foot at a miraculous angle on the accelerator that
kept him at such a slow speed and didn’t veer him into oncoming
traffic. Kate, Michael and Steve spent the rest of their road trip
in silence.
The culmination of this strangely gothic drive was the
Pheasants Nest Bridge. A place name without an apostrophe.
A place name, thought Kate Delaney, bound up in a mistake.
Didn’t the nest belong to the pheasant? Kate had a horror of
missing apostrophes. Every time she saw the sign on the entrance
to the bridge, she vowed that when she returned, she would bring
a marker pen and add the punctuation herself.
But who was she kidding? Kate Delaney wouldn’t get out of
the car at Pheasants Nest. She sensed the darkness of this place,
even in the daytime. Pheasants Nest made Kate Delaney shiver.
Back in 1990, the bodies of two teenage boys had been found
inside the bridge’s huge concrete pylons. They had climbed into
the tunnel in the undercarriage of the bridge and plunged
to their deaths in the shafts.
But most of the lives that finished off at Pheasants Nest did
not end accidentally. Most of the people who ended their days
at Pheasants Nest were jumpers.
The Pheasants Nest Bridge and the surrounding bridges
that lined that stretch of the Hume were notorious for jumpers.

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If you lived near the coast in Sydney, you threw yourself from
The Gap at Watson’s Bay. But if you were a westie, particularly
an outer-westie, your jump of choice was Pheasants Nest.
And as Kate Delaney had sped past those bridges, those forests,
she’d never failed to feel overcome by the road that ran along
at the top of the gum trees and the unspoken sadness that sur-
rounded it. The ghosts clamouring for attention out of the bleak
stillness of the bush.

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 2

BAR

It now seems like days ago that Kate first noticed him across
the bar. It has really only been a matter of hours, but she’s been
unconscious for many of them. It has left her confused and hazy.
How many hours? She doesn’t know. Time seems elastic and
imprecise. It’s still quite dark, so she figures it’s only four or
five am. She isn’t sure what he’s been up to in the interim. Has
he stopped anywhere? Has he been caught on CCTV? Will they
be able to trace him? She hopes so, but doesn’t know.
He had looked at her across that bar in Northcote in a puppyish
way at first. Kate was out with a group of girlfriends—Sylvia,
Adie, Brigid and Sophie. He was there with another guy that
she was sure he would describe as his ‘wing man’. He was on
the cusp of middle age, but obviously placed a lot of pride in his

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appearance. Not particularly tall but buff in the way that only
someone who spends hours in the gym several times a week
can be.
A tattoo of a yin and yang sign on one of his biceps. Strawberry
blond hair tipped in the style of Australian cricketers. Fitted
aqua shirt made of some sort of unspeakable synthetic fibre that
strained slightly and deliberately at the buttons, tucked into pale
Levi’s that left a bit too little to the imagination.
It occurred to her later that he probably thought the shirt
matched his eyes, which were glassy slits the colour of pale sea-
water. They crinkled in the corners in what was, prima facie, an
agreeable way. But upon closer inspection, they fixed on things
a little too hard. The laugh was a little too practised—he threw
back his head as he did shots with his friend at an angle that
was somehow too acute. Slapped his mate twice on the shoulder
and winked in a way that he’d seen in a TV show. This is how
the agreeable guy acts. You know, Joey, from Friends.
Anyway, Kate didn’t quite clock all of this as he stood at the
bar and glanced repeatedly in her direction, throwing the odd
good-natured ‘What?’ her way when she found herself frustrat-
ingly unable to not look back at him, but she clocked enough to
know that this fellow was not, in any sense, her type. So, when
it was her round for drinks, she deliberately went to the other
end of the bar and turned her back to him.

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 LOUISE MILLIGAN

Kate Delaney was difficult to miss in a room. Tall, with

masses of red curly hair that she usually blow-dried into a
sixties style. Pale skin, hazel eyes. A peppering of tiny freckles
on the bridge of her nose. She liked to wear mini shift dresses
in the style of Mary Quant. Tonight’s was navy with a white
collar, with black tights to give it an edge. Huge red handbag.
Crocodile knee-high boots with blocky heels. She was not to
every man’s taste—her teeth were a little gappy, her loose-jointed
elbows somehow awkward, her knees scarred with too many
childhood scrapes—but those that did find her attractive found
her devastating. And when she walked into a room, well, there
she was. Unmissable.
And this guy did not plan on missing Kate Delaney on this
night. As she ordered the drinks, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
‘Can I buy you one of those?’ he asked, in a voice that she
instantly pitied for its nasal high pitch.
‘Nope, I’m fine thanks—just here with them-there ladies,’
she said, grinning in her sweetest way, giving him a playful, let-
us-have-our-fun wink.
‘Huh, okay.’ He looked at her, again with that fixed gaze,
set jaw. She suspected he was a tooth-grinder. Insecure but
pumped up.
She walked back to her friends and downed several
more glasses of wine. The room was getting warmer, the
girls were getting funnier. Tonight’s topic of conversation: why

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couldn’t you be the person you were with the guys who really
loved you (but who you didn’t love) all the time? Because that
was the SuperYou.
What was it about going out on a date with a guy who was nice
and smart but just not quite right, but who was clearly smitten,
that turned you immediately into the SuperYou, funnier than Tina
Fey . . . But as soon as you spent five minutes in the company of
a man you were actually into, the one-liners washed out to sea.
You became inarticulate as a bloody baboon. It was one of life’s
great tragedies. Sylvia mooted that they get together and write a
self-help book entitled Unleash the SuperYou, only they all real-
ised, shrieking and choking on their drinks, that they had no
bloody, bloody idea how to do it.
At which point Kate and Brigid decided they needed to go
to the bathroom. As she got up, Kate felt that familiar warm
rush to the head of a couple too many wines. A not altogether
unpleasant feeling, but one that signalled she should probably
think about calling it a night soon. And yet she knew that she
was kidding herself that she would leave. She reapplied red lip-
stick in the dirty, speckled mirror that was bolted on to the
wall and gave herself a shake, bursting out of the toilet door
with Brigid to her left. To her right, she heard the nasal voice.
‘Nice arse, sweetheart. I’d like to get a piece of that.’ She felt
his hand brush against it in a proprietorial way.

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Kate felt the familiar Celtic temper flood her veins. She was
five wines down (or was it six?), and she had heard this sort of
thing before. Her friends were the types to shrug and walk. Not
Kate Delaney.
At times her retorts had had great comic effect. She’d never
forget the time when, at a rave party, a sleazy guy, E’ing off his
dial, came up to her and asked her in a schmaltzy whisper, ‘If
you could have anything in the world, right this minute, what
would it be?’ And Kate Delaney had turned to this orange-hued
man and said, ‘Anything? Right now? Okay, I’d wish that you
would stop going to the solarium.’ She could practically see the
MDMA doing a triple pike and turning its effect inside out, right
there in his addled brain, right there on the spot.
He had looked like the sort of guy who fancied himself and his
prospects with women rather highly, particularly when they were
much-younger, naïve-looking girls at dance parties. Collateral
damage.
So again, on this particular September Saturday night in
Northcote, she decided to resort to comedy. To Unleash The
SuperYou. She circled behind him, pointed to his bottom and
shook her head, tut-tutting to Brigid, who was pressing her lips
together in comically anxious anticipation.
‘Saggy arse, love. So much for all those hours at the gym,’
she said, as Brigid cackled. It was true. His arse was flat. Kate

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and Brigid then bolted over to the table, grabbed Sylvia and the
other girls and their handbags and coats and shot out the door
in fits of laughter, adrenaline pumping through them like soda,
running down the street like schoolgirls in their mothers’ heels.
Kate felt catapulted back into those teenage nights when you’d
pour out half a bottle of Bacardi, fill it with coke and push
each other in shopping trolleys while listening to The Clash on
a ghetto blaster.
And that was Kate Delaney’s Big Mistake.

Kate Delaney is now trying to mentally squeeze Pearl Jam out of

her brain. Need to replace song. Choose The Stone Roses.
Although it isn’t really on, it is just in her mind, ‘I Wanna Be
Adored’ instantly makes her feel hopeful.
Even decades later, The Stone Roses are cool. She closes her
eyes and it hurts. ‘I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be adored, I wanna,
I wanna, I wanna be adored,’ she chants in her mind.
Outside, the trees are laced with night fog. Infrequent street-
lights whiz by. The car smells of the cloying pine-tree air freshener
that dangles from his rear-view mirror. Those things always
made her car sick when she was a kid. She begged her dad never
to buy them again. Whenever she’s in a taxi now and sees one,

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she’s instantly catapulted back onto windy country roads, rolling

around in the back of an unairconditioned Valiant station wagon
on a forty-degree day.
Underneath the seat, she can see a bong rolling around on
the carpet. Why is it that bong smokers always think they can
cover up the smell of dope with artificial air fresheners?
Her bones hurt. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be adored . . .
In the boot of the car, she hears her phone ringing again.
Her boyfriend, Liam. He must be out of his mind with worry.
The tapping on the steering wheel suddenly stops. In the
rear-view mirror, she sees The Guy’s eyes dart around a bit. He
turns down Pearl Jam.
‘Huh,’ he says, pulling over the car and stopping the engine.
The electronic trill of Kate’s ring tone echoes out into the still
night. ‘Huh.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ He veers into the service lane with an alarming
screech. She’s thrown forward with the force of the jolt as he comes
to a stop. She snaps her eyes shut again and tries not to breathe.
He gets out and slams the door shut and even the tough-guy
way he does that is deeply annoying.
The gravel crunches under his shoes. He whistles through
his teeth and walks around to the boot.
And Kate Delaney watches through her eyelashes as her phone,
still ringing, hurtles like a comet through the freezing night sky
and into the bushland below. Thwack.

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First thought: Did she back up her contacts?

Second thought: Will she ever need them again?
Third thought: Rookie error, loser. They’ll know her phone
came at least this far.

In Melbourne, Liam Carroll looks at his phone and wonders

what the hell is going on. Where is she?

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