Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  We all looked at her, not understanding the light in her eyes.

  “ ‘Old men shall dream dreams!’ It’s Isak! And ‘young men shall see visions’! Asael sees visions! Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird?”

  I glanced at the others whose blank expressions told me she was definitely out on her own limb with that one.

  * * *

  The conversation did turn, however, to where the Reverend might be and, again, to how he could be contacted. I remembered the description he’d once sent: up the Fly River . . . Victor Emmanuel Range . . . barge to Kiunga . . . dug-out canoes. None of it seemed very promising. And since finding him was not really my idea, I didn’t much care. As far as I could see, he was as lost as any dead person.

  “You know, I blame myself a bit for some things!” Kevin said at one point. He wandered to the window as he talked, and gazed down into the darkening street. “I mean, I never really tried with him. No common ground . . . nothing we could share, you know? Maybe I could’ve . . . if he’d felt more supported . . . !”

  “Yeah,” said Frieda. “Same. We didn’t make him go, Kev’. But then again, we didn’t make him stay either.”

  “Okay,” I said at last, stating what I thought must have become obvious to us all, “all we’re doing here is getting even more morbid and depressed! He’s gone! The past is gone. The only reason we’re giving any of this any airtime is that, like Frieda said, Bridie needs help. So-o-o, I’m thinking all of it just needs to go back in its box! I might have my head up my bum on some issues, but at least I can do that! Me ‘n’ Asael will look after Bridie.”

  “Well!” sighed Frieda. “Out o’ the mouths o’ babes! But listen! Can I just say, Ruth, that it’ll never be just you ‘n’ Asael. Whatever things it might seem like Sugar Town failed to do in the past, I know we never failed to support you McFarlane kids! And I can promise you, for sure, we’re not going to stop now!”

  Kevin, still at the window, said softly, “Of course, of course. I’m sure that goes for me and Thea as well, Ru’!”

  Some germ of a thought had drawn Amalthea away from the table by this time. She’d fetched the half-eaten page she’d rescued from Rosemary – the one in Bridie’s hand-writing – and was comparing it to something in the Reverend’s early 1999 sermons – the ones he’d written himself. When Kevin spoke, though, her head snapped up. She gave him a level look and, like a cold day in June, snapped, “You don’t speak for me, Kevin.”

  “Eh? Oh! No! Of course not! Sorry! I only meant . . . !”

  “I know what you meant. And you know what I meant. I speak with my own voice, thanks. And my voice says ‘no’!”

  “No?”

  There followed one of those embarrassingly long moments of silence when no one dares to speak because, suddenly, what they thought was going on turns out to have been something altogether different. Brows were furrowed and furtive glances exchanged all around. Then, bravely, Kevin decided to try her again.

  “It’s only that I thought, if Ru’ wanted . . . !”

  She turned her back on him.

  “Ruth? I’m telling you! No!”

  “No?”

  “No! You can’t give up! Listen! Out in the cane, your mother tried to tell us that Isak was the key! But he’s not! You are! Because if you put this injustice down . . . and it is an injustice . . . then the evil will go on winning! All the new hurt that drove Bridie to that bottle of pills? Whatever confusion Asael has yet to take out of it? It’ll be for nothing! And someone – maybe someone – will walk away free! You don’t want that, Ruth. Not any of it! You’re too honest a person for that!”

  She was so certain! So vehement! I looked over her shoulder to Kevin who was scratching his head as he studied her back. He caught my eye and shrugged.

  “I never thought of it that way,” he concluded. “But . . . realistically . . . what can we do? We’re at a dead end!”

  I looked to Frieda who wagged her head in exasperation. “You’ve already said it: the past is gone! If there was a way to go back and see it again . . . of course, we’d do that! But there isn’t! It’s all history. Bridie and Asael are all that matter now!”

  We all fell quiet again, hopelessly scanning idea-bins that we’d already confirmed were as empty as rubber tyres. And during that process, Kevin leaned toward Amalthea to mock-whisper, “Sorry.”

  She softened then, bumping him gently with her shoulder before deciding to put her arms around him. The Cat’ three hug, again.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too. All this talk of fathers, whisking off like they haven’t a care! It’s not the way fathers should be, is it?”

  He shook his head absently and she leaned away to look into his eyes.

  “So listen! Somewhere down the track, Kev’, you and I need to talk. Seriously!”

  He laughed, but she held on, shaking him like a child. “You promise me! Right now! Or Rosemary and I are walking out on this project and taking with us the one and only, lonely little possibility that might keep us moving toward justice – rather than just consolation!”

  Rosemary bleated, Frieda and I exchanged questioning looks and Kevin stared at Amalthea, a sound of surprise caught in his throat. I think, at that moment, he almost recognised a connection. Something in her tone or her choice of words – perhaps her sudden need – might’ve had a puzzling familiarity. He put his dark hands against the coffee-milk of her cheeks and held her face, searching it as though he might recognise a mote swimming in her eye.

  “Amalthea!” he said softly. “Amalthea Byerson.”

  And she immediately, self-consciously, lowered her eyes, cutting him off from whatever she might unwittingly reveal. With an effort, he released her, letting his hands fall back to his sides. But neither stepped back. They stood, inches from one another, not touching, she with her head bowed, looking toward his shoes, he looking into and beyond the dark auburn of her hair. He shook his head in confusion.

  “I . . . did we know each other in one of your previous lives, Thea? Because sometimes, I swear . . .!”

  She smiled, touched him fleetingly and moved away to Rosemary. She squatted to nuzzle and murmur at the goat’s ears while Kevin turned in a bewildered circle. You could see the glimmer in his eye, his mind like a hound, chasing a hare through a vast field of long grass. Glimpsing. Glimpsing. And then it was gone.

  Frieda, her arms folded beneath her breasts, shook her head in new understanding. “Well I’ll be!” she murmured. And then to him: “Hey Kev’! You ever hear the story ’bout the baker who couldn’t recognise two peas in a pod?”

  She looked at me and winked and it occurred to me that Kevin was probably the only one in the room who had no inkling of the connection between himself and Amalthea. Then Frieda clapped her hands in her best CWA come-to-order manner.

  “Okay! Impasse! I move we see what sort of eats a baker keeps in his fridge! And while that’s happening, I’m open to hearing this ‘lonely little idea’ that the outsider claims to have! Who’s with me?”

  * * *

  It was actually a pair of ideas. They were little more than tokens but, as Amalthea’d said, they were enough to give us some momentum. The first part of it involved me dragging out the lists she and I had made at her house: Sources of Info’, Findings, Questions and Strategies.

  “We have to stop starting over again every five minutes,” she told us. “I say we work from Ruthie’s list. Update it, see what new strategies we can devise. And go from there. If that’s okay with Ruth.”

  It was, and that’s what we started to do.

  * * *

  It was surprising, how much of it had changed in a day. Isak was upgraded from ‘Questionable’ source to ‘Worth Listening to’ source. ‘Terrible Deeds’ was replaced with ‘Rape / Murder’. And the ‘unidentified blow-through’ was given a name – Les Crampton.

  In the ‘Questions’ category, at Amalthea’s insistence, we added two.

  “First off, complaints
must have been lodged. ‘S that right, Frieda? It wasn’t a secret that some kind of assault had happened?”

  Frieda shook her head. “They took Bridie to the hospital! In Sugar Town, hospital doings are about as secret as sunsets!”

  “Right! So the question is, why did Cranna claim in the hospital that nothing had been done to Bridie when common knowledge said otherwise?”

  No one had an answer.

  “And second, Sergeant Morrow! Isak says – and I gather this isn’t news to anyone in this room, right? – Isak says he confessed to Les’s murder! But Morrow let him off! I mean, you let one person off for murder, what’s to stop you letting someone else off for the rape? With dead Les Crampton the perfect scapegoat!”

  That argument made sense to me, but . . .

  “All right! All right! Open minds, is all I’m saying! Anyhow, my real point is, now that the Sarge has the Reverend’s sermon notes, if he wants to keep a shred of credibility, he’ll have to go back through the original records! I think we should get on his case and stay there!”

  “Ah!” said Frieda in a nice-try-but-no-cigar kind of tone. “About the police records!” We waited, knowing it wouldn’t be good news. “There was a fire – small fire – at the station – eight, ten years ago. Straight after it all happened! All Masher’s hand-written notes! I mean, he may have tried to resurrect them but . . . well, when the ‘official’ report is that nothing much has happened, you wouldn’t go to much trouble, would you?”

  Blank faces; eyes blinking vacantly.

  “You’re joking!” said Thea.

  Frieda’s shrug was eloquent, palms up, illustrating her innocence.

  “I didn’t say he lit the fire, don’t get me wrong! He’s a cranky old bully-boy sometimes, but Sugar Town’s his town and there’s no silly-buggers about him! That’s why we’ve lobbied to keep him here.” She raised her voice and hurried indignantly on, stifling Amalthea’s imminent outburst. “You do what you want! I’m just saying! He gets a lot of trust here!”

  I couldn’t help but picture the Sarge as I last saw him, peering coldly down on us from the study window. Insisting that I vacate my house. I thought of him prowling through the rooms and the cupboards and the drawers – picking things up, wondering what they meant to Bridie or me or Asael. On the question of the Sarge’s trustworthiness, I was squarely on Amalthea’s side. But on the question of what could be done, I was a little on Frieda’s.

  “Okay! Okay! So no records! And no change. We didn’t have a plan and we still don’t have a plan!”

  “Yeah we do!” insisted Amalthea.

  That plan (maybe Amalthea’d become the key, now I think about it) called for her and I to sneak back to my house to grab the 1997 and 1998 sermons. The 1999 album had given us little, but she was certain that those two years would be essential reading.

  “We just have to hope the Sarge was wobbly enough from his Queenie contact to have put off taking them away. We grab ‘em, we go through ‘em tonight and we have ‘em back in place before daylight. At the very least we’ll know what he should be seeing – if he’s doing his job properly!”

  Truth to tell, I thought it was a feeble idea. To my mind, the only person revealed in those sermon notes was the Reverend. And my enthusiasm for him was at an all-time ebb.

  * * *

  Nevertheless, as we waited for the sun to finish its tropically short job of setting, we each of us filled our time with fretting over our various concerns. Mine was Asael. He wouldn’t be lonely, I knew; not with Dana and the other nurses watching over him. But, despite his new-found courage-in-the-face-of-everything attitude, I was sure he’d be increasingly terrified for Bridie. I decided that I’d help retrieve the ’97 and ’98 sermons, but I’d leave the reading of them to the others. Instead, I’d slip away to check on him; maybe stay with him at the hospital, ready for whatever happened when they woke Bridie on the following day.

  * * *

  Asael has tried to stay awake but the distant click and mumble of hospital business has lulled and numbed him. Nurses have come and gone to check on Bridie, but she hasn’t moved; her stillness has defeated him.

  He stirs in his sleep, dreaming again of his mother, who said goodbye before he had a chance to say hello. He sees her, not as she was found by early morning prawners, hanging by her neck from a branch in the mangrove swamps. In this dream, she is not contorted or crab-nibbled as he imagines she must have been in reality. In this dream, she stands on bare, whole, lovely feet, supported by the water, and the rope is merely an accessory, loosely draped about her long, delicate neck.

  She smiles on him and says, ‘You were never to blame, lovely boy. It’s time now. Find your strength, now.” In the dream, Asael feels his heart drive up into his throat and he cries out, “Where is it, mum? Where is it?”

  * * *

  Amalthea’s concern, judging by her chat with Kevin, was for Isak and Garlic and Queenie, all left unsupervised at her house. What if the old man had found a gun and gone off to shoot Doctor Dabney, as he’d threatened? What if Garlic had collapsed and died again? What if Queenie . . . well, who knew what Queenie might be capable of?

  And Frieda’s concerns were anybody’s guess. She stalked about the flat, ricocheting from room to room, picking at her palms, shaking her head and adjusting things on shelves. On one of her several trips through the kitchen, she raised a finger, tapped the air and seemed about to speak. We all turned to her but she didn’t get a word out because, as though her gesture had been a signal, two mobile phones began banging away in the flat and, out in the street, a siren began to wail.

  Frieda groped one phone out of her bag and, plugging her other ear with her air-tapping finger, strode off into Kevin’s bedroom. Kevin snatched up the second phone and fled into the stairwell. Amalthea, Rosemary and I scrambled to the window.

  The siren was coming from the fire station, only fifty metres further up the street, and already the big doors were opening. Within minutes, local volunteers were converging and the pump truck was edging out onto the apron. A dozen men, still fumbling with their safety gear, clambered aboard and, with barely a pause, the truck curled away into the street.

  “Gotta go,” growled Frieda, coming back into the room. “That was Franz. The Mayor’s disappeared! He was at the pub all afternoon but he left a couple of hours ago and hasn’t made it home! The bloody man! If he hasn’t already drowned in a ditch, I’m going to throttle him!”

  “We have to go too,” said Kevin to Amalthea and me. “That was Dana Goodrich! Something’s happened at the hospital! It seems Bridie’s defied Dabney’s medications and gone ahead and woken up!”

  We all snatched up what we needed and scurried out onto the back landing, two women, a baker, a goat and me. Through the million tiny leaves of the Poinciana, over the shoulder of the church’s roof, three streets away, the glow rose to meet us. It was our house – Bridie’s and mine and Asael’s. Even over the siren’s wail, we could hear the suck and whoop of the flames.

  Chapter 17 – Fires Kindled

  Funny how things can be both ordinary and awesome at the same time. I knew that house so well that I’d stopped noticing it. And yet here it was, wearing an enormous helmet of fire that whipped and howled at treetop level, flinging sparks and gobbets, high into the night sky. The window of the Reverend’s study, where Sergeant Morrow had stood only a few hours earlier – where once the Reverend had leaned, conjuring brimstone to fling down on his parishioners – was full of flames.

  As we raced up the footpath, the fire lashed a pair of liquid fingers out through the open door, instantly igniting the stair rails and the outer wall. The volunteers were doing their best, fountaining water over the roof, but the fire simply drank it up, spewing it back as jets of steam into the night sky. Turning the Reverend’s sermons into a rain of charcoal and ash. The roar of it was so blood-curdling it was easy to imagine the building as a living thing, screaming out in the midst of dying, and I knew straight away that
nothing would survive – not the house, not its contents – nothing of the home in which my family had grown and flourished and then failed.

  Even my tears, as I stood with Kevin and Amalthea and Rosemary on the footpath across the road – even them, it took fresh from my cheeks, dissolving them into air.

  A crowd, naturally, had gathered and, although Frieda’d come with us, putting off her concerns for the mayor, I was vaguely aware of her prowlng the edges of that crowd, speaking on her mobile phone. Until, out of nowhere, Franz was there with her.

  Amalthea, when I looked for her, had turned her back on the fire and was scanning the faces of the watchers. They looked past her with their hands in their pockets or folded prayerfully beneath their chins, their heads tilted back, their eyes full of reflected flame.

  “Will this set you free?” I heard her shout at them.

  If anyone had an answer for her, I couldn’t hear it.

  * * *

  At the fire truck, a small knot of volunteers has gathered, like upright turtles in their mud-yellow fire-proofs. Three or four men in a half circle, attending to some organisational detail – some trick of valves and pressure gauges. Something in the solid, shoulder to shoulder wall of them, some furtiveness in their glances, captures Amalthea’s attention. She squints through the dancing light as the men begin to move, shuffling in many-legged unison toward the shadows at the back of the truck. When one staggers, feet entangled, she catches a glimpse of un-uniformed men at the centre. One has a policeman’s cap, askew and falling to the ground. And the other, flailing weakly, is firmly locked in the grip of many hands.

  The gap in the circle is not closed quickly enough to dam up Amalthea’s outrage. She pushes toward them, chin out-thrust, Rosemary trotting supportively behind. What she’s capable of, she doesn’t know, but she may be prepared to beat her way through that shield of men, to see who is concealed within. One of the firemen spies her, detaches himself from the circle and turns to confront her.

  “Amalthea,” the man says flatly, as though informing her of her name. It’s Alf Caletti, her landlord, and he blocks both her way and her view.

  “What’s happening, Alf? Who’s that?”