10
As I turn at my mailbox, I see the lid partly open, suggesting that someone has left me something. I stop, open it, and see two more boxes, the same as the last two. I slam the lid shut, and sit back in the ute with my hands on my head. More boxes. More fucking boxes. Does this mean more dead people? More money? Did Grant put them in on his way back, or has someone else dropped them off? I agree with myself that I will not think about this. I put them in the back, and drive home. I leave the boxes in the laundry, and then set about organising myself for Elaine’s arrival.
When she takes a seat at my kitchen island, she looks fully repaired. But in response to a question about how she feels, she claims the wrist is still sore, and displays a support that irritates her. To me, she is back to her beautiful self, almost haughty. She sips at her wine (white), and asks me how I’ve been.
‘Messy,’ I tell her, and begin to apologise for walking out and not being around to protect her.
She dismisses my apology, and claims to know how hard the last year must have been. I lean down, and open the oven to check the vegetables in the oven. They smell like they are going to be fabulous.
‘Thanks for finding me.’ It is a lonely thing to say. She makes it sound like there is no one else in her life who would have found her.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘So did I.’ Then she corrects herself: ‘I thought I was going to be …’
I set the salad things out as a deflection. ‘Shit, I forgot to ask, is steak okay? I can whip up something else …’
‘No, steak will be great.’
I take them out of the fridge and put them on the bench. They are moist and pink, but not too pale. I am rocking it.
My confidence gets out of control, and I decide to share: ‘Someone sent me some money. A lot of money. I don’t know who.’ I don’t look at her until I’ve said the last words. Her face is serene and, if anything, a little pleased for me. I had hoped I would get a sign of something else: guilt, acknowledgement, even panic. But there is none of it. Not that I think she is responsible or involved. It’s just that I can’t help feeling she’s had something like this happen either to her or to someone she knows, and I have no idea why.
‘Cash?’
‘Yes. Folding stuff.’
‘You’re a lucky boy then, aren’t you?’ I get ‘playful’ instead of ‘panic’. There’s my intuitive skill on full display.
‘I’m not sure what to do with it. I don’t know whether to spend it or send it back to the post office.’
‘I would normally say “Spend it”, but I’ve had too many close calls with tough guys to think that anymore.’ The only thing that is odd here is the calmness of her response. She is not alarmed, surprised, or intrigued. It’s just a thing that has happened to me. I take the steaks to the barbie, which is just outside the kitchen door. They sizzle nicely when I put them on and return to my waiting guest.
‘The “tough guys” are the ones who were blackmailing Tito?’
She nods sadly. I take the veggies out, and let them sit on the oven top while I go out and turn the steaks. Elaine doesn’t offer to help, and I don’t need it.
‘He didn’t live up to his end of the bargain.’
‘No.’ She is sounding a little drunk already. Maybe she had a couple before she came, because she’s taken up drinking after everything that’s happened to her. ‘Well, actually, he told me he’d finished the six pieces they had demanded. I never saw them, but that’s what he told me before he died. And then I get these attacks and threats. I don’t know what he did with the pieces, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to find them.’
‘You could tell the police.’
‘So could you.’
‘What?’
‘About the money.’
‘The money?’ I forget for a moment that I have told her about the money. ‘Oh, yeah. So what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Keep asking around, and hope something turns up. I’m looking everywhere on the farm, in case he hid them there somewhere. Ben’s helping me out.’
‘Ben Ruder?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Really?’
She smiles at my annoyance. ‘You don’t like him?’
‘Not really, and I wouldn’t say I was the only one.’
‘He’s okay. He’s Tito’s uncle.’ She is still talking, saying, ‘He found the farm for us. Helped us out.’ But all I am hearing is ‘Tito’s uncle’.
This is really bad, and I’m not even sure why. I know I’m looking like a jealous adolescent, so I ask, ‘Tito’s pottery must have been really valuable?’ I put the rest of the salad together, and add a few sliced grapes and a little balsamic dressing.
‘Yeah. Flavour of the month, year, or whatever. There is still a lot of prestige in saying you have a piece by Tito Slade.’ She reaches a hand out towards me, and touches my forearm. I stay rigid to stop the jump. I’m sure it is only a friendly touch, a way of saying thanks for dinner and the other stuff. I head for the steaks, showing I’m too preoccupied with my responsibilities to respond to the contact.
Then we eat quietly, and she commends me on my skills. I seem to be filling her glass a lot with the red she has switched to, but I am keeping my own glass topped up, too. She tells me about growing up in the city, privileged and insulated from the kind of hardship that seems integral to the country. I tell her about my childhood, which I remember as fun on horses and bikes, and in dams and creeks. The fun-on-bikes reference makes my spine arch protectively. I tell her about helping my father, and camping with my friends. I don’t remember it as hardship.
With no lead-in, she says, ‘Did you ever find yourself in something you didn’t like, but you were so far in you couldn’t find a way out of it?’
It’s an odd question, and I stop and try to give her a thoughtful answer, but there isn’t one. Except maybe the grief at the death of my son. That’s something deep enough to suffocate you, and I’m not sure I’ve found the way out yet. But I don’t tell her that. I just say, ‘No, not really. You?’
‘Me neither.’
I ask what she means, and she tells me something vague about a friend in trouble. It sounds sort of false, so I don’t ask too many questions.
I make coffee in the plunger that hasn’t had a run for over a year, using coffee I can’t remember buying. It tastes okay. Elaine doesn’t complain. When I get up to remove the cups, she grabs my wrist, pulls me down to her, and puts her mouth on mine. It is pleasant and even arousing, but I’m still not sure I want it. She is undoing my shirt and kissing me, then opening her top and putting her arms around me. Her beauty is scary-powerful, but instead of giving in to the action, I kind of split in two. I take a seat outside myself somewhere in the air, and watch a guy (who is me), and a girl (Elaine) getting it on. They seem pretty well matched, although the girl is much more enthusiastic. You might say mad for it. There is kissing. There are clothes being removed, attended by various forms of grappling and stroking. They don’t look like they’re going to make it to the bedroom or the bed. And then I witness the man whisper, ‘Sarah,’ and it is like a hidden director has yelled, ‘Cut.’ The feverish need disappears, and both part and fall like collapsed tents, and I am back on the couch.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, although I don’t know if I am. I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t help it.
‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘I know these things take time.’ But she is getting up, putting her clothes back on briskly, as if I had walked in on her getting dressed. ‘Thanks so much for dinner.’
The emotion is forced, but I can’t think of anything to say to make it better. ‘Thanks for coming up. It was really nice.’ And then, as if I’d been involved in a different engagement, I say, ‘Perhaps we could do it again …’ Do what again? Disappoint each other?
‘Sure.’
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And she is gone, still putting together her confidence.
I get another beer and slump on the couch, unable to think what I was hoping for. My heart is still beating from her touch, from her body, but my brain is in neutral. Elaine’s car leaves, and I turn off the lights in my house, and sit in the dark. I let one small sob squeeze its way out, and then I shut it down, all of it. It was there for me, and I didn’t go through with it, so I mustn’t have wanted it. End of story.
I think of Sarah, and the stupidity of mentioning her name. She would be embarrassed for me. She would ask me not to mention her, and certainly not think of her, especially when I am with someone else. After James died, Sarah and I hardly even touched each other except for desperate supportive hugs that could have been between any two strangers. And yet, even now, when I think of sex, I think of Sarah. When I think of the female body, I think of Sarah. All this is made even more pathetic by Sarah’s new orientation. It’s pretty obvious, no matter what I feel about Elaine, that Sarah’s dominance in my imagination has to stop. I’ve got to admit that my suspicions about Elaine have not entirely disappeared, and they are an ingredient in this muddled mix. My head is a pudding. Beer is the only answer I have found for that.
In the morning, I wake with the remnants of embarrassment and an idea of asking the post office where the boxes might have come from. I can’t find a postage mark on any of them, but I’m not certain that postmarks still exist anyway. I call Cooper at the post office in Waterglen, but he can’t recall anything about the boxes. He remembers some that came from China a few weeks back, but has no knowledge of more recent deliveries. I ring the post office in Stony Creek, which is a shop as well as the sorting house for my mail run. Marg, who is some sort of distant cousin, is amused by my question. She says if I’m getting boxes that aren’t from cheap-machinery wholesalers in Asia, then she doesn’t know a thing about it. And then she laughingly suggests I must be up to something else. Maybe drug smuggling? I laugh along with her, and ask if she saw the boxes arrive on a batch of dates I supply her with, but I have the words ‘drug smuggling’ tumbling over in my head.
I had not thought about smuggling, partly because I had been blinded by the money. Perhaps Tito was smuggling something, and that’s what Buzzcut and his mates are demanding. Maybe they were putting illegal things instead of his pottery in boxes, and sending them somewhere. Or maybe he was putting illegal stuff in the pottery itself. I don’t know what this has to do with the boxes of ash. When Marg assures me she knows nothing about the recent boxes, I am left with the possibility that they are coming to me from within the closed loop of the mail run. And then she says something strange: ‘Your neighbour, Mrs Slade, she asked the same questions as you a few weeks ago. What is it with you guys and boxes?’ I laugh, and pretend there is no significance to her comment, and tell her I’ll talk to her later.
In my kitchen, I open my laptop, hope that I’ve paid my internet account, and do some research on pottery smuggling. It seems that the really expensive pottery is ancient stuff, mostly from China, and it doesn’t seem the sort of thing that Buzzcut and his mates could handle. I run through references to antique vases and the big names in modern pottery, but none of it seems to fit with a country operation. And then I hit upon a 2009 article about a cocaine smuggler who made crockery out of, or including, cocaine. I am a bloody genius. A few quick searches, and I have cracked the crockery case before the police even get close to working it out. Elaine’s husband must have been incorporating cocaine in the crockery and then selling it to drug dealers, who broke it down and sold the drug for big bucks. I have accidentally received a box of ill-gotten gains. Where this puts Elaine, I don’t know.
I phone Constable Murray, doing my best to keep the triumph out of my voice.
‘How can I help you, Mr Martin?’ She is expending as little energy on talking as possible.
‘I believe I have some information that might be helpful in solving the assault and battery on Elaine Slade.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ I let the line hang dead for a moment. She thinks I’m being a pest or trying to take the focus off myself, but the dramatic pause is in my favour.
‘I have reason to believe that a cocaine-smuggling business was being run out of the Slades’ farm.’ Boom.
‘Is that so?’ She almost yawns.
‘They were turning the cocaine into pottery, and then selling it — exporting it maybe. The box of crockery you guys found on the side of the road was Elaine Slade’s. The guys who took it from her were disappointed it was just normal old crockery.’
‘I’ll inform the detectives handling the case.’
This is not the response I had expected. I am tempted to inform her how ignorant and incompetent she must be, and that she has just passed on the tip-off of a lifetime. ‘You sound sceptical?’
‘Mr Martin, it is very difficult to get cocaine into Australia. It still gets in, though. There is huge demand. My question would be, if a drug smuggler has managed to get cocaine here at an enormous profit, why would he turn it into something else? I can see why you’d do it to get the cocaine into the country, but doing it when it is already here seems a bit unlikely.’
The logic of her statement is enough to slap me down. I don’t have a response, but she has more: ‘And, anyway, the detectives had the crockery tested for everything you can think of.’
I end the phone call quickly and politely.
I wander around the garden trying to make my brain go in a useful direction. It refuses to. Instead it notices without emotion that the garden is in transition. The deciduous trees are losing their leaves after their colourful showing on the autumn stage. It is the time for the native trees to take back the limelight. The lemon-scented gums and the pink-flowering ironbarks are in rude, leafy health that I’m sure is intended to embarrass their foreign counterparts. King parrots still race between the trees as currawongs call out their beautiful threat to every other bird in the garden. I hear and see it all, but it doesn’t register as anything more than the clatter of a life that I’m only just involved in. It could be traffic noise from a suburban street.
For some reason my mailman is sharing information about my mail. I don’t know why he would do that, and I don’t trust him. If Mrs Crowther was still my mail lady and Elaine asked her what was in my mail, I’m sure Elaine would have received a curt ‘None of your business’. The mailman is involved in what is going on, but I don’t know how. The thing is, when he is coming from the post office he has to come past Elaine’s place to get to mine. So if he has boxes, she’s going to know before me, and if she’s giving the boxes to him, she can do it without me knowing.
The only information I have is that the boxes don’t seem to have been sent from anywhere — or at least haven’t passed through the post office — which may mean they have come from a neighbour close by who hands them directly to the postie. It is mail day, and another outlandish idea takes hold: I’ll go and catch the mailman on the road and ask him for any mail he has for me. If he has boxes with him, I’ll know the sender has to be someone from closer to town than where I meet up with the mailman. That is, of course, if there are more boxes coming. If he doesn’t have any boxes for me, I won’t know if he was never going to have them, or if he is yet to pick them up.
I know he leaves Stony Creek at around eleven. If I get going now, I’ll catch him not far out of town. If he has boxes today, I’ll catch him closer to Stony Creek on the next mail day. I run across the garden to the garage, and feel the pleasure of the urgency and my decisiveness. I drive fast, unjustifiably fast, but I’m on a mission to solve a mystery and make my son proud.
At the funeral, when they took the coffin away, I could hardly stand, even though the too-small box was on its way to our garden. That was when I first really believed in James’s death. Until then I had been fighting it with everything I could fight it with. Even when we ent
ered the church for the service, I felt strong and positive because of that iron-clad denial. People must have thought I was strong, the way I smiled warmly and shook hands meaningfully. But the sight of the coffin going into the hearse, with all those weeping friends looking on, was simply too much for even the greatest barriers of delusion. Our only son, James, was dead. And I didn’t want to be me.
That makes it sound as if the loss of James is one thing only: a child gone. It is not that. It is so many things. We threw and kicked balls around in the backyard, teasing each other, making up heroic commentaries, whenever I was available. We talked about school and sport and our observations of people, and made stupid jokes that Sarah couldn’t stand, or pretended she couldn’t stand. I taught him things that my father had taught me, and sometimes he was openly bored with my teaching. I watched him closely — growing, reaching out, connecting with others, and he didn’t mind my gaze. I like to think we had given him enough love and confidence that it didn’t bother him. And he fucking well liked me. I’m sure he did. We got on. Which was the greatest surprise in my life. That’s not what my father’s generation hoped for. They wanted respect, hard work, and strength. Open dislike was accepted, as long as integrity or at least toughness prevailed. They could be proud, but friendship was so far down the list of priorities it barely made it onto the page. So the loss is not just one thing. It is so many things that I cannot name them all.
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