Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  She goes and Cranna sinks back into his chair. His heart is racing and sweat has beaded on his brow. She’s actually threatened him! He shakes his head in wonder and a smile creeps across his lips. She is so magnificent! So defiant, so fearless; so confident in what she knows and what she believes she knows. As her mother was; right to the end.

  In another time, Cranna would feel a compulsion now to head for the airport and the Moth. So easy there, in the cockpit, to deal with this need for mastery. To force the little ship’s nose this way and that; to rip every ounce of strength from her engine; to face her skywards and push her on and on, daring her to break apart around him.

  He would die there happily before he’d let up. Because compliance is everything. Not compliance that’s given casually, off-handedly or with the caveat of a threat. It’s little more than a courtesy that way – which is hardly different from a dismissal – which amounts to contempt. No! Real compliance . . . the kind that satisfies . . . comes when the one complying realises that no other option exists. None but the one he’s chosen. If that requires a demonstration, then so much the better. First comes mastery: then comes compliance.

  He thinks of Bridie’s last words: May God help you.

  Smiling, he says aloud, to the empty room, “He helps those who help themselves, Bridie! Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  And, still smiling, he reaches for the telephone.

  * * *

  I lasted only a few minutes by the bakery van before the lure of the crowd became too great and I wandered off amongst the tents and caravans. It was like some newly conceived community festival was being trialled. People were talking, sprawling, crocheting, eating, studying engines, playing cricket – the smell of cooking was everywhere. It had a sort of, ‘Looking-Out-For-Our-Own’ Festival feel about it. The schools, I thought, must be half-empty! And how many businesses had simply failed to open?

  Heaps of people spoke to me, offering encouraging words to pass on to Bridie, remembrances to pass on to the Reverend and plenty of laughing comments about ‘The Space Thing’ which, though few had seen it, everyone had heard about. Morrow’s near-death experience with it, and Asael’s resurrections of both Garlic and Bridie had already become the common property of Sugar Tonians. I had the feeling that, if the government truly was coming for it, they’d meet more than just Asael’s opposition.

  It was interesting how my heart skipped just a little and my feet decided to follow suit when I saw Dale and his mother in front of their tent. He was sitting on the ground, poking listlessly at a fire. His back was to me, but it was unmistakably his large and bullish back. His mother, a heavy, big-boned, sweet-natured woman, was perched on the edge of a folding chair that looked like it was ready to fold its last at any moment. She was leaning forward, elbows on knees and chin in hands, listening carefully to whatever he was saying. It looked very much like a ‘deep and meaningful’ was in progress, but I bowled on up to them anyhow.

  “G’day Missus Sutton. How’s the camping?”

  “Oh, hello dear! We were just talking about you! Here, Dale, fetch a chair for our company would you, love!”

  “No need,” I said, plunking myself down on the ground next to Dale who gave me a look that I could only describe as hopeful nervousness.

  “I hope he hasn’t been telling you that I beat him up, Mrs Sutton. I know for a fact that he got those black eyes from stumbling over a kitten in the main street!”

  “Did he really? And here I was hoping they were wounds gained from fighting the forces of evil!”

  “Ha ha to both of you,” he said. “You should form a comedy team. Ma and the Kid. You’d be huge . . . somewhere way out west, maybe.”

  I would have asked what they’d really been saying about me, but I didn’t get the chance.

  “So,” she said with her characteristic directness, “we saw you over by the Mayor’s caravan, Ruthie. How are they going at solving our little town’s crime wave? Poor Masher! He’s fine for bumping heads together of a Saturday night, you know, but I’m not certain he’s entirely up to actual investigations!”

  “I really don’t know, Mrs S. It’s all so complicated. Stuff from way in the past – unresolved stuff, you know? All mixed up with stuff happening now! It’s really . . . I guess it’s kind of hopeless at this stage.”

  I was thinking of Bridie’s decision. She was the only one who could sort of release us. She knew, at long last, who was at the heart of Sugar Town’s terrible secrets . . . and she’d decided to keep that information to herself. For Asael’s sake. And it registered with me for the first time, with a jolt of guilt, that she and I were now two out of possibly only three or four people who knew how easily it could all be solved and how impossible it was that it ever would be.

  “Now listen to me, love,” Mrs Sutton said, pointing a long, strong finger at me. “I know your sweet mother would have told you this if she’d been here, but she’s not so I’m going to take her place for a minute. Hopelessness is a soggy cracker, Ruthie. You don’t want it in your kitchen. It’ll attract mould and it’ll never have a use. You throw that hopelessness straight in the bin, right now! And be clear on this! There isn’t a soul in Sugar Town that doesn’t know of the terrible thing that happened to your sister years ago. And your brother! Your dear innocent brother! You mark my words! The whole of Sugar Town will be flushed down the river and out into the Coral Sea before anyone here allows further harm to come to anyone because of what happened back then. Do you take my meaning?”

  “Yes I do, Mrs S! Thank you. Yes I do.”

  Which’ll mean, I thought to myself, that you lot could be camping out for the rest of your lives. Unless someone, somehow, figures out how to make it clear to whoever was responsible for the Night of Mayhem that, even though people like Bessie and Isak may pop up from time to time with accusations, the secret is safe. In fact, the only person who could make that clear was . . . !

  I know my mouth fell open at that point because Dale put his big fist under my chin and gently pushed it closed.

  “She’s a jaw-dropper all right,” he said, nodding toward his mother. “But we try not to let ourselves become fly-traps over it.”

  “No, no! You don’t understand!”

  I was on my feet in an instant. A block of ice had suddenly materialised between my shoulder blades. What if Bridie hadn’t gone to the bakery? What if she’d gone to visit someone? Someone she thought she could warn off? Someone who had cold-bloodedly slashed Rosemary’s hamstrings and left her to die in the street! Someone who had shifted Bessie’s gas tanks in anticipation of causing an explosion!

  I was on my feet but I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I needed Kevin.

  I set off at a run, heading for the van. By the time I pulled up against it, my need for action had been sated but I still didn’t know what should follow. Several of the returned Showies, who were still lolling on the ground, despite their stated intention to leave, turned lazy looks on me. I leaned there, panting, trying to think.

  Settle yourself, Ruthie! Kevin will come, of course he will! But where should we look? At the bakery first, but if she isn’t there?

  I thought about Dabney’s story – Alf Caletti and Johnathon Cranna were the only actual names I could think of. But they were both so unlikely! For one thing, Johnathon and Bridie had spent days in the hospital, only rooms apart! Surely, if she had anything to say to him, she’d have said it there! And Alf! Big, quiet, compliant Alf! Even if she wanted to speak to him, which was an incredibly distant likelihood, how would she (or we) find him? He could be anywhere on the vast acreages of his farm!

  All this before the dust had settled around my feet. I looked up. Dorrie was moving toward me from the ambulance, a concerned look on her face. And Dale, having loped after me, had slowed to a careful walk for the last few steps. The muscles in his arms quivered expectantly.

  “Ruthie! What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Before I could answer, the door of Hoggitt’
s caravan opened and Kevin came out. He came out slowly, his phone pressed to his ear, his brow deeply furrowed. It was obvious that whatever he was hearing was troubling him and somehow the block of ice between my shoulders slammed frozen tendrils down into my legs. I felt Dale’s arm slip under mine and around my back. Just one arm. It was easily enough to keep me upright.

  “Steady on,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

  * * *

  The cane whistles and whacks, splattering the brown bit of gore that’s been returned to Arnold via stick and keys. And for Arnold, the cane seems not to stop there but to slice down through the meat of his hand, pulverising nerves, muscles and blood vessels into a shrieking agony of bruised jelly. Three strokes on each hand.

  By the end of the ordeal, his eyes swim like salmon in rivulets of tears and a wail of pain leaps against the back of his throat, like a frog in a bottle. At a point, he fears he might vomit over O’Toole’s shoes. But the hands stay out until the count ends and he can slide them under his arms, remembering too late the globules of shit which are now lodged like reprimands in the armpits of his shirt.

  When release finally comes, he stumbles to his seat and sits like a statue, knowing nothing but the need to remain upright in O’Toole’s presence. Further inanities of accusation and threat flow from O’Toole, over both Arnold and the rest of the class, but they’re wasted on Crabpot – lost in the tidal surge of his blood. And when at last O’Toole is gone, he slowly lowers his head onto his arms, allowing his teeth to unlock and his aching tube of a throat to deliver itself of an absolutely, totally silent and undetectable scream.

  Pain and humiliation. Humiliation and pain, and a sort of thrombosis of disbelief – enough to clog anyone’s sense of a fair and just progress through life. The class finishes in irreconcilable discomfort for all. The teacher, trapped by authoritarian complicity, can say nothing. The other students, trapped by the magnetism that the infliction of pain holds, can only relive the terror in their own minds, again and again, with themselves as victims. Even O’Toole, for whom it has merely been a job, is trapped – by his unshakable resolve to build hard men, as well as by his level of compassion, which is as thin and useless as an oil slick on mud.

  Only one knows the truth of what has transpired. Fourth seat back, second row. In the thin, dark bowel of his desk you can find the detritus of at least a week’s gatherings: empty lolly wrappers, burnt matches, a half-eaten ginger snap, a crumpled bit of paper with a sketch of a bum and the words, ‘this is yore face, Crabpot the faggot’.

  Scratched into the inner metallic surface or painted prominently with white liquid paper, you could find, if you cared to look, the psychological oozings that have squeezed out of the various occupants of that seat: ‘I wuz here’, ‘O’Toole sux’, ‘I hate school’, ‘Molly is 4 me’. A mild and anonymous catharsis, a communion of simple souls who ride the spinning world without care or conscience. These are not the things that Crabpot Boyd knows.

  With tears in his eyes, a vile odour in his armpits and humiliation draped over him like a flag, these are the things he knows; the things that O’Toole and Pettigrew have taught him. One: sometimes you stuff up, without even trying. Two: you can’t get away with it, because the laws are strict and because you have to own up to who and what you are. Three: it would be much nicer to be the one who frightens, rather than the one who’s frightened. And four: somebody, some day, will have to have the legs to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong. We gotta fix this.’

  In some vague way, he’s come to a belief, as well. The belief is that Mister Pettigrew might well be the one who has those legs.

  In the droning heat of a North Queensland summer, when the northerlies sweat the land into a near coma of exhaustion, people really expect little in the way of action. But events, as Pettigrew has intimated, have their ways of occurring and accumulating in spite of expectations, and frustration springs from the heat like mushrooms from manure.