Time's Long Ruin

by Stephen Orr

  Tea was a pile of chops a mile high. Dry potato salad and stale bread. All of us sitting around a card table with a broken leg sucking cold, black meat from the bone, shooing the ducks and not mentioning the empty seat.

  ‘That’s a nice beach,’ Dad said. ‘Man was smart he’d buy a shack down there.’

  Janice sat up. ‘Yeah. Could we, Dad?’

  ‘You got the money?’ he asked her.

  ‘Shack’s not dear.’

  ‘Not if you’re Sidney Kidman. Do I look like Sidney Kidman?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, maybe when I retire.’

  ‘Christ,’ Dad smiled. ‘That’s a way off yet.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  ‘We could go in together,’ Liz suggested.

  ‘It’s an idea,’ Dad half-sang, in the same way going to the moon or curing cancer were ideas.

  And then more silence, as everyone thought about Mum, sitting on the beach in front of our new shack, talking to herself, singing nursery rhymes. Maybe Dad was wondering what it would mean to him, if she was ill, if things got worse. His mouth was open and his eyes were distant. Bill spoke but Dad didn’t hear him. Until a duck, licking crumbs from his foot, brought him around.

  ‘Bob,’ Bill was saying.

  Dad looked up. ‘Eh?’

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe we could do the sideshows tomorrow?’

  Dad tried to smile. ‘Good idea.’ His eyes settled back on the ground. There was a long pause and then Bill said, ‘Eh, Bob, maybe it’d be better if you went home?’

  ‘No. Henry’s having fun, aren’t you, Henry?’

  I smiled. Then I shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘He could stay with us,’ Bill offered. ‘We could bring him home.’

  Dad stared at me. ‘We should do the sideshows,’ he said.

  I shrugged.

  A balding man in his fifties, shaped like a bowling pin and dressed in a pair of overalls with the arms cut out, appeared beside our van holding a piece of paper. ‘Who’s Bob Page?’ he asked.

  Dad looked up and the man threw the piece of paper in his lap. ‘Message. I’m not the PMG. I got a park to run.’

  Bill sat up. ‘How’s about you deal with these ducks then? One of them just attacked my son. You wanna be careful, you could end up in court.’

  ‘And you could end up with my fist, smart arse.’ The man walked off.

  ‘Good to see he’s found his vocation,’ Bill whispered.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ the voice echoed.

  Dad looked at the message. ‘It’s from Ellen’s dad. She’s gone to their place.’

  ‘Least she’s okay,’ Bill sighed.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I looked at Dad. ‘I can stay here. I’m alright.’

  He sat holding the paper tightly, shaking, thinking. ‘How about I give you some money, Bill?’

  Bill stood up. ‘Just clean out your van, Detective. Henry can move in with us. I’ll go see if Happy’s got a bus time-table.’

  And that’s how our whole tribe ended up standing barefoot in the main street of Goolwa at eleven o’ clock that night. Waving as Dad boarded a bus and disappeared into a light mist of rain.

  Late the following afternoon we headed home. Holidays were alright for a while but then they became boring: monkey bars that weren’t so high any more, bike trails that weren’t so long, that didn’t resemble the Amazon any more, hot chips that weren’t so hot and salty, and new friends that weren’t so interesting. Goolwa would be there next year, and by then it would be exciting again. The putt-putt would grow in our minds and become the Royal Adelaide, the pool would grow bigger and colder and deeper, and Horseshoe Bay would regain its man-eating rips.

  The road hugged and then dropped between hills pockmarked with granite. A two-foot high stone wall was all that protected us from sheer vertical drops into valleys full of gum trees and brown snakes. We could see where cars had gone over and the wall been repaired. Bill didn’t always keep his eye on the road. Still, no one seemed particularly worried. Sometimes the car would slow and almost stop on a steep hill and we’d hold our breath, as if it might lessen the load. And every time we’d just make it.

  I sat next to Janice. She wasn’t saying much. She held a bag of frozen peas over a large bruise on her arm, from where she’d been punched on the Dodgem cars.

  We’d been waiting at the front of the line. When the gate opened we all ran for a car. Of course, I wasn’t quick enough. I was just lifting my leg to sit in a car when a short, redheaded boy with freckles and pale skin jumped in. I stepped out. But Janice wasn’t having any of that. She got out of her car, came over to the boy and said, ‘Get out, he had it first.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘He can’t run.’

  ‘So what?’

  She knew he couldn’t be reasoned with. ‘Get out, now.’

  Liz called from the gate. ‘Janice, Henry can wait.’

  Janice was fuming. The boy was small and mean – no good to anyone. She grabbed his arm and started pulling him out of the car. He held onto the steering wheel and Janice fell back. She stood up, jumped onto the bonnet and tried again. He was older than he looked. He stood up and took a swing at her. She swung at him and collected the side of his face. The ride operator came over and grabbed them both by the shoulder and led them out.

  I didn’t know what to do. A choice of two cars. So I climbed in and waited for the power to come on. I drove around and around, banging into Gavin and Anna, looking at Janice and feeling guilty.

  ‘You’ve gotta stop doing that,’ Bill said, as we drove home. ‘You’ll end up at McNally’s.’

  ‘What’s McNally’s?’ Anna asked.

  ‘It’s a little prison, for little criminals.’

  ‘How was I a criminal?’ Janice blurted out. ‘He was the one that took Henry’s car.’

  ‘Unfortunately, there’s no law against rudeness,’ Bill replied. ‘But there are laws against hitting people.

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Life’s not fair. Look at him, he was feral, where were the parents? He’ll end up in Yatala. Whereas you . . .’

  Anna smiled at her sister. ‘You’ll end up at McNally’s.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Janice!’ her parents barked in unison.

  We entered the city, travelling down a wide, empty arterial known as South Road. As we cruised downhill towards a distant Croydon, Bill pointed out his customers – who bought what and how many, whether they paid on time and if their wife was on with some other fella. At nine o’clock we pulled into the driveway of 7A Thomas Street. Dad came out to greet us. He grabbed my bag from the boot and asked, ‘Did he behave himself?’

  ‘He was fine,’ Liz explained. ‘This one here was the problem.’

  She looked at Janice. Dad lifted the bag of wet peas off her arm and asked, ‘What happened?’

  She smiled. ‘I got him better than he got me.’

  No Mum, still. Dad said she’d be home any day. ‘She’s having a holiday,’ he explained, somehow forgetting I’d seen everything.

  ‘Is she still at Nan and Pop’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we go see her?’

  Dad stopped. ‘Yes . . . soon.’

  The house was looking grim. The kitchen was littered with dishes covered in food scraps: half-eaten bowls of Weet-Bix and bits of undercooked meat mixed with cigarette butts. Clothes were strewn over the floor and the holiday washing was piled up in the laundry. There was an empty beer bottle in the shower and a half-eaten packet of Milk Arrowroots beside the bath. The toilet smelt like piss and Mum and Dad’s bed was full of crumpled newspaper where Dad had fallen asleep reading the obituaries.

  The next morning I woke to the races on the tranny. Dad never listened to the races. I could hear him turning in his paper bed, occasionally mumbling something to himself.

  I crawled to the window at the end of my bed and
looked out. It was Sunday and there was no one around. I heard a train bell and the sound of a steam engine, and if I listened carefully, Con coughing as coal smoke settled in his hair and on his face, as he waited for the 8.15 from Grange, opened the gates and waddled back towards his cabin. In front of our house a dog sniffed the stump of a perfectly good wattle the council had removed at Mr Hessian’s request. There was a bird in the leaf litter under our pittosporum and a van parked across from 7A. It had a faded sign on the side – Derek’s Carpet and Rug Cleaning – but it didn’t look like it was used any more. It was rusted and the front fender was held on with twine. A side window was cracked and the right rear-vision mirror was missing. The muffler had dropped, and seemed to be held up with wire.

  There was no one in the front of the van but there was movement in the back.

  I wondered who would be getting their carpets cleaned. Perhaps the Housemans, they had money, but Ron didn’t like to spend it, especially on something he could do himself. Carpet cleaning. Unusual, on a Sunday. Maybe it was someone visiting someone. Dad had taught me to be observant, and suspicious, so I tried to make out the van’s registration. It had Victorian plates. I fetched a pair of Dad’s old binoculars from my cupboard and tried again. Then I found a pen and scribbled the van’s registration on the white paint of my window frame.

  ‘Where is it?’ Dad asked, bursting in.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That shit your mother made you wear.’

  Dad was looking grimmer than the house. He was unshaved, wearing a singlet with sauce and coffee down the front; he smelt of body odour disguised with deodorant; he wore his shorts down around his hips, and pulled them up every minute or so; his hair was full of grease and lint, exploding across his scalp in every direction at once.

  He opened my dresser and took out a cardigan my mum had bought me last birthday. ‘This . . . you’ve never liked this. Makes you look like a pansy.’

  I shrugged and he threw it in an old grocery bag. ‘Okay, what else?’ The bag was already half full: a vest, some ties and a pair of shiny nylon pants she’d bought him, another cardigan, a jumper, potato sack undies and even some cufflinks that had been a Father’s Day present.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking at a shoebox in my bottom drawer.

  It contained a heavy leather orthopaedic shoe Mum had bought me and tried to make me wear. It was made with a curve, to try and twist my foot back into shape. The doctor had told her that it wouldn’t do any good but she wouldn’t be told. The ad in the magazine promised normal feet in six months. Dr Thyer’s Miracle Orthopaedic Shoe, Black or Brown leather, Children or Adult sizes, Made to Order, Delivery in fourteen days.

  She’d even made me wear it to school. I felt like Frankenstein, thumping around in a two-inch heel as every bone, muscle and tendon in my left foot screamed out in pain. As other kids imitated me and called me names. As, once again, I made for the safety of a locked cubicle. As my desire to be a social creature evaporated like a puddle of piss. Janice was there, as usual, standing up for me, chasing off the riff-raff, as she called them.

  Dad threw the shoe in his bag. ‘Another one of her stupid ideas,’ he said.

  He finished going through my drawers and cupboards, picking out toys and socks and undies and asking, ‘Any good?’

  As I just shrugged, confused as to why he was doing this and worrying that it wasn’t a good sign.

  I wanted to ask if this meant that she wasn’t coming back.

  ‘That’s enough for now,’ Dad said.

  I followed him out the front door and around the side of the house to the bin. He lifted the lid and threw the bag in. ‘There, that’s better,’ he said, as if he’d just found relief from a lifetime of constipation.

  I looked up at him. ‘Why?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘Why not?’ he smiled.

  Sometimes I couldn’t work people out. Did he hate her or was he just angry? Did this mean he’d finished with her, or was he just indulging in his own dramatics? Of course, you couldn’t ask, you wouldn’t get the truth anyway. Just a version of the truth, discoloured with frustration and memory. I’d already learnt that it was best to let things be. People calmed down, eventually, and then you could get back to common sense.

  ‘What about Glenelg?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay.’

  Glenelg beach, with its ice-creameries and book exchanges, pubs and fish shops selling Fresh Oshun Fish. We walked up and down Jetty Road, browsing second-hand shops full of camp ovens, sausage grinders and Wermacht badges. Dad was quiet, but he was trying to be happy. Throwing away a few clothes hadn’t done the trick (especially considering he’d decided to get them back out when we got home). Something more, or less, was needed. A confrontation or a retreat. After all, he seemed to be missing her.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Should we head home now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We stopped and waited for a city tram. ‘Can we go see Mum tonight?’ I asked.

  He looked at me and sighed. ‘Do you think we should?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We caught the tram and it rattled, slow, heavy and hot, towards the city. I watched Dad looking out of the window, thinking, stroking his chin and licking his lips.

  ‘What’s my breath like?’ he asked, breathing on me.

  I pretended to cough. ‘You haven’t even washed your teeth?’

  ‘I forgot.’

  The tram waited at the Greenhill Road intersection. I saw people standing in the shade of a peppercorn tree. Get on, I wanted to say, but maybe they were there for some other reason. I looked at a sign further up beside the track: 1st Fouling Mark. And another one, beside the tram: 2nd Fouling Mark. I pulled Dad’s sleeve and pointed to the sign and asked, ‘What’s the second fouling mark?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Something for the driver.’

  I looked at the people on our tram: pensioners with string bags full of apples and carrots; a group of young girls, still in their bathers, dressed in wet frocks; a man in a suit smoking an unlit pipe, reading a paper in some foreign language.

  I could ask them all, I thought, but none of them would know. The Second Fouling Mark. They might even see the sign every day. I could get out and ask them all, everyone under the peppercorn tree, the girl at the gate of the Methodist Ladies’ College, road-menders, shopkeepers, gardeners, and they might say: The Second Fouling Mark, isn’t that a movie?

  A song?

  A spy? Something to do with that fella at Somerton?

  Even my own dad, a detective, didn’t know, or care. The Second Fouling Mark was the atomic weight of Argon. It was the number of claws on a meerkat’s foot; it was God and Buddha and the universe; it was the unknown, and the unknowable; it was something beyond the grasp of a few people on the 4.15 from Glenelg. It was the machinations of my dad’s brain, as he sat wiping his nose with the back of his hand and staring out of the window; it was my mum, the Russian doll; it was the secret of Bill’s shed, the mystery man and everything that ever has or will exist. Con and Rosa’s healing tree. The poetry of Doctor Gunn’s hands at work.

  ‘Second fouling mark,’ Dad whispered. ‘No, dunno.’

  I looked at the driver. Only he knew. He looked back, pulled the bell-rope, met my eyes and winked. And I guessed the world kept turning in the presence of small mysteries.

  When we got home our car was in the driveway. We found Mum in the kitchen washing dishes. Dad stood staring at her. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I got a mornay on,’ she replied.

  ‘Tuna?’ I asked.

  ‘Chicken.’ She turned and looked at me. ‘You like chicken better?’

  I shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  She continued with the dishes. ‘You two are hopeless. Nearly tripped and killed myself when I came in.’

  ‘I’ll start on the bedroom,’ Dad suggested.

  ‘Good idea.’

  He returned to his room. I picked up a tea towel and helped
dry the dishes. ‘Where you been?’ I asked.

  She didn’t reply. As we stood there in silence I imagined the scene: Mum locked in her old bedroom, Pop trying to talk her around. ‘You gotta go back, Ellen,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘What about Henry?’

  Silence. Pop defiant, standing with his hands on his hips. ‘Well, if you won’t go back, me and Mum will.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Too right we will. I can cook. I could just imagine what Bob’s feeding Henry. I can. I will.’

  Pop driving her home in our car to make sure she gets there. Then him catching a train home, stopping to ask Con to keep an eye on things for him.

  Dad opened his drawer and there was his vest, his nylon pants, his cardigan and jumper and potato sack undies. All folded up and put back in their proper spot. He closed the drawer, sat on his newspaper bed and noticed his cufflinks next to the lamp. He picked them up, looked at them closely and smiled.

  Meanwhile, I hung the tea towel on the back of a chair to dry. I wanted to say something. I wanted to hold and hug and smell her.

  ‘Could you fix your room?’ she asked.

  I went to my room. She’d made my bed and left my orthopaedic shoe in its box on the cover. She’d even polished it. I sat down, picked it up and stared at my reflection. And what I saw, I think, was a mixed blessing.

  Chapter Six

  The trouble with time is that it goes, and is gone, and you’re left standing somewhere unexpected, next to someone you met in a bookshop or bus stop and married and had children with and soon won’t see again for the rest of eternity. In the end, it seems to me, time promises more than it delivers: fame, wealth, a trip to Fiji. And finally, if you survive long enough, you end up alone, minus the people you needed and nagged and shared nectarines with over the back fence – the people you smelt and argued with and envied. And there you are, standing in the rain, muttering, What was that all about? All that’s left is memory, a sort of regret, of disappointment: Mum slipping on suds on the kitchen floor and cracking her knee; Eric Hessian’s dog scratching itself hairless and red raw; the smell of gun oil as Dad cleaned his pistol; bakelite radios that never seemed to receive a sharp signal.