Time's Long Ruin

by Stephen Orr

  Rosa, still in her dress, wearing her shoes, was asleep beside me. She’d spread out during the night and I’d ended up squeezed between her and the wall. I turned my head to look at her and followed the fine red veins across her nose, noticing a moustache of grey down, and studied her coffee-stained teeth. Her skin was olive and her cheeks were flecked with sunspots the colour of our TV cabinet. Her mouth started tasting the air. She sniffed and the tip of her nose quivered. I watched and almost smiled as she nearly sneezed.

  The light reflected bright, white midsummer off my venetian blinds. Shafts of dust tore the room into shards. I lifted my head to see someone riding along Thomas Street, slowing and ringing his bell. Then I heard the Rileys’ door open and close.

  I crawled to the end of my bed and looked out of the window. Bill, still in his singlet and suit pants, stood in the middle of his front lawn and looked across at Rosa’s house. He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. Then he stepped towards his front fence and looked up and down the street. I was almost expecting him to call for them: Kids, teatime! He looked again, and again, and stared down towards the railway station.

  A tank engine slowed into Croydon and a car braked. Con was already at work. I later found out that he’d slept on the Rileys’ lounge. He’d risen early and pulled on his canvas pants and gone and stood in the hallway. He’d looked into the master bedroom and seen Liz asleep. Bill was beside her, lying awake. ‘Con?’ he’d said.

  ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll come back,’ Con whispered.

  Bill had just turned over. His eyes were red; he was yawning and had the start of a headache. Liz had been up during the night, crying, walking around, and they’d argued. Why did you let them go? What were you thinking? This is entirely your fault. Raised voices. A depth of despair in Liz’s eyes. Until Dad took Bill and Mum went to lie on the bed with Liz, returning to the kitchen to call the doctor, waiting, holding Liz’s arm for the injection, drifting off into a half-sleep next to Liz.

  Back in his front yard I saw Bill open his letterbox and look inside. Nothing. He used his fingers to feel inside. Then he stared at the white, flaking paint and the birdshit.

  ‘I woulda noticed,’ Bert said, emerging from his car, parked with two wheels up on the gutter. ‘Anyway, they’d be more likely to ring.’

  Bill slammed the letterbox shut. ‘You sleep in there?’

  ‘I’ve spent many a night in that car, Bill. The Melack Motel.’ He sat on the edge of the seat with his feet dangling out. He dropped his shoes onto the nature strip and slipped his feet into them. As he tied up his shoelaces he asked, ‘You okay?’

  There was no reply. Just a what-do-you-think look.

  ‘We’ll find ’em today,’ Bert suggested.

  ‘Someone’s taken ’em,’ Bill said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course they have. They’re probably dead by now.’

  Bert stood up and tucked in his shirt. ‘Bill, this is Adelaide.’

  ‘So what? You don’t think there are . . .?’ He trailed off. Then he walked back to the house, the dead lawn crunching under his feet. He sat on the porch and Bert followed him.

  Then, I imagine, the rest might have continued like this.

  ‘Be honest with me, Bert,’ Bill continued. ‘Bob won’t be . . . he can’t, I suppose. What are the options?’

  ‘The options?’

  ‘What else might have happened?’

  Bert sat next to him. ‘Well, from my experience, I wouldn’t think they’re lost. It’s not the Simpson Desert, eh? They might have run away, but they didn’t, did they?’

  Bill was calm. ‘No, honest, the kids are happy. They get a tellin’ off sometimes, but no more than any other kid.’

  ‘I don’t think they drowned. Someone would have seen, we would have found the gear. Unless their stuff was stolen, but what’s the chance of that?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘Janice wouldn’t have let them go out that far anyway.’

  ‘Someone might have taken them, for money – or other things.’

  Bill stretched back on the hot concrete of his porch. He closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. ‘Other things?’

  ‘Someone who can’t have kids. That’s happened. Or to sell them . . . or . . .’

  Bill turned on his side, as though he wanted to fall asleep on the porch. Then he started to gasp for breath. He stood up and walked around to the back of his house.

  Dad, who had been listening from the hallway, came outside and sat next to Bert. ‘You could’ve slept at our place.’

  ‘The Melack Motel,’ Bert smiled, indicating the car.

  ‘Jim Clarke just called. He’s heading up the search today. He said they found another two witnesses. A couple from Broken Hill. They were at the beach at lunch, and left and came back after tea. Saw all the coppers and asked what was going on. They reckon they saw the kids leaving the beach with a man. Said he had dark hair, but they couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Definitely our kids?’

  ‘Jim reckons so.’

  Eric Hessian appeared on the footpath. He was wearing a suit and holding a newspaper. ‘This is terrible news,’ he said. ‘How’s Liz and Bill?’

  ‘What do you reckon, Eric?’ Dad asked.

  ‘They’re terribly nice kids, but you’re gonna find ’em, eh, Bob?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Dad and Bert watched as Eric crossed the road, opened his gate and walked down his driveway. A minute later he reappeared carrying a small concrete statue of the Virgin. He hugged it, struggling to carry it. He closed his gate and crossed the road. Then he came into the Rileys’ yard and placed the waist-high statue in the middle of the lawn, dusting down his jacket and taking a deep breath. ‘There,’ he said, ‘it needs a paint, but it might do some good.’

  Bert looked at him slyly. ‘How’s that?’

  Eric tapped the side of his nose. ‘Each to his own,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be wailing hymns; it’s the little things help people, times like this.’ He winked. ‘You understand?’

  Dad wasn’t so sure. ‘Eric, I don’t think that will help. We want to keep things low-key.’

  ‘It can’t hurt.’

  ‘No, it reminds me of a graveyard. Listen, put it under my hibiscus for now, eh?’

  Eric shrugged. ‘You know best.’ He struggled to pick up the statue again. ‘They’re just lost, aren’t they, Bob?’

  ‘I hope so, Eric.’

  A moment later Eric appeared in front of my window. He dropped the statue, looked up and said, ‘Henry, you nearly gave me a heart attack.’

  ‘Hi, Mister Hessian.’

  ‘They’re gonna find ’em today, Henry.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘They probably got on a wrong train. I bet they’re up at Belair.’

  ‘Of course, Belair. I’ll leave my Virgin here, eh?’

  ‘That’s fine, Mister Hessian.’

  And he was off, waving to Dad and Bert and scurrying away to open his shop on time.

  ‘Stupid old bastard,’ Dad whispered.

  Bert smiled. ‘He hasn’t got them locked up in his shed?’

  Dad almost laughed.

  Rosa woke, and sat up on the edge of my bed. She looked at me and smiled, ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m okay. I suppose it’s Liz and Bill we’ve got to think about.’

  ‘Good boy,’ she smiled, pulling my head onto her shoulder.

  We ate breakfast and walked around to the Acorn deli. Mr Batten obviously hadn’t read the Advertiser yet. He gave me a sherbet stick and asked if I was looking forward to going back to school and I told him I couldn’t wait. Then we stepped outside and searched the crisp, warm black and white pages. We found Janice, Gavin and Anna on the bottom of page seven, standing in their backyard holding their stolen flowers, grinning in grey shades that transformed their ordinary shoes, shirts and socks into relics, artefacts, clues, evidence. They had become news. All at once my best friends were famous. There was nothing low-ke
y about it any more. Our day-old dream had become a solid set of facts. Now the amazement and pity could begin. Now people could say, Oh those poor parents. But why did they let them go by themselves?

  ‘Page seven,’ Rosa growled. ‘People might miss it. It should’ve been on the front page.’

  And what she meant was, before Eisenhower and Kruschev; before famine and corpses floating in the Yangtzee; before a family of five dead in a prang; and Morris Minors on hire-purchase; before Pepsodent and rupture worries; and Robert Mitchum looking troubled and mysterious.

  ‘They’ll find them now,’ I said. ‘Everyone will be looking.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rosa replied, hurrying me along. ‘Your dad is very clever. He knows how to find people.’

  There they were, still smiling at me, as I walked along. Janice standing at my window, smelling of Zambuck; Gavin sitting on the gutter, refusing to field; Anna filling her bottles of lemonade. I could still see them, and hear them. They were annoying and funny and helpful and a pain to babysit. But they were my friends, and I was starting to miss them.

  Rosa and I went to the Rileys’ where things were no better. Mum, Dad, Bert, Liz and Bill were sitting in the lounge room. Mum had just mixed some powder in water for Liz but she just sat there staring at it. ‘I’ve gotta get out, I’ve gotta look for them.’

  ‘You’ve gotta stay here,’ Bill replied. ‘What if they come home?’

  She looked at him and then buried her face in the fabric of the lounge suite.

  I entered behind Rosa. Dad stood up, held my head against his stomach, and I heard it gurgle. He took the newspaper.

  ‘Page seven,’ I said.

  ‘Seven?’ Bill whispered.

  ‘People will see it,’ Dad consoled. ‘We were lucky we could get it in today.’ He sat beside Bill, opened the paper and flattened it out on the coffee table. They both studied it. After a while Bill looked up at Liz.

  ‘What?’ she barked.

  Bill didn’t reply.

  ‘Come on,’ Dad said. ‘We’ve been over this.’

  Liz started crying. ‘Sonja sounded like she was going to die.’

  ‘She’s always about to die,’ Bill replied.

  Liz looked at Ellen. ‘I hope she reads that,’ she said, indicating the paper. ‘I hope she reads it and realises.’

  ‘So what?’ Bill said. ‘How does that help anything?’

  ‘It helps . . . how I feel,’ Liz managed.

  ‘A lot worse than me, obviously.’ He shook his head and kept reading. ‘“There were several sightings of the children at the beach, the earliest at eleven, the latest some time after one. The eldest, Janice, is described – ”’

  ‘Stop it,’ Liz cried, standing and running from the room. Mum went after her, nodding her head at Bill.

  ‘What?’ he asked, waiting a few moments and then standing up. ‘Come on, Bob, we’ve gotta get down to Semaphore.’

  Dad tightened his tie and looked at Rosa. ‘You alright here for a while?’

  ‘Go,’ she replied, shooing him off. ‘Find them.’

  After Dad, Bert and Bill were gone I helped Rosa gather cups of cold tea and bowls of mostly uneaten cereal from the coffee table. As Rosa ran the hot water we watched from the window as Mum and Liz sat in the woodshed, crying.

  ‘This is the worst day ever,’ Rosa said, repeating it again and again as a sort of improvised Hail Mary.

  And this, from what Dad told me years later, is how I imagine the morning unfolded.

  Dad drove on the inside lane, hugging the curve, way above the limit. They started spotting patrol cars almost straight away, several parked on the Port Road median strip, a wide, weedy stretch of land between three lanes of traffic going in and out of the city. They could see police checking bins and looking under shrubs, poking sticks into thick hedges and peering into locked-up sport sheds.

  ‘What’s the good of that?’ Bill asked.

  ‘We work from the most to the least obvious,’ Dad explained. ‘If someone did pick them up, they might have come this way. They might have . . .’

  Bill shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have gone to Snowtown.’

  ‘It’s your job,’ Dad said.

  ‘Never sell a thing to those fuckin’ hicks. Waste of time. I should’ve known.’ He looked at Bert. ‘It was gonna be my last trip.’

  Bert didn’t know what to say. ‘People don’t like to spend money these days.’

  ‘You’re tellin’ me. Some of those restaurants look like . . .’ Then he remembered why he was in a police car. ‘Shit.’ He noticed a patrol car parked in front of several industrial waste bins. ‘They’re kept locked, aren’t they?’ he asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Dad replied.

  ‘Shed full of linen. So what? There was no point sellin’ it. No point doing anything.’

  And what he meant was, falling in love, getting married, having children, getting up at night to feed them, changing nappies and sitting listening to them read, mispronouncing the same word a hundred times before they finally remembered it. Selling linen. Drinking beer. For what?

  ‘No more linen,’ he whispered. He saw his kids sitting in the bath, splashing water up the walls and singing. He was rubbing shampoo into their hair. Slowly. Carefully. Rinsing it over and over so their scalps wouldn’t itch.

  ‘That’s why you do it,’ he said, watching a pair of coppers shining a torch into a storm-water drain.

  ‘What?’ Dad asked.

  ‘You’re just lucky Henry didn’t go.’

  Dad didn’t reply. He was more than grateful; he was ready to start believing in God, to take off his clothes and run naked down Rundle Street, shouting, ‘Praise the Lord!’

  If there were four of them, Dad thought, things might have been different. But he was thankful he hadn’t had to test that out.

  ‘So,’ Dad continued, veering left onto Old Port Road, smelling the sea and watching another patrol driving through a paddock littered with piles of rubble, ‘you can’t think of anyone you might have told, Bill?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That your kids were going to the beach?’

  ‘No. How was I to know what they were doing?’

  Dad sped up. ‘Of course.’

  Bill turned and looked at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I haven’t heard a word from that girl for weeks.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothin’. She was all wind. She never told no one nothin’.’

  Dad looked at him. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Bill looked back at the road. ‘Believe me, that’s all blown over.’

  ‘Just the same,’ Dad said, ‘maybe I could get her name and number.’

  Bert handed Bill his notebook and pencil. Bill took a moment and then said, ‘As long as you’re . . . discreet,’ and then put the notebook on his knee and scribbled.

  Dad talked quietly. ‘Don’t worry, Bill. This friend of yours, he won’t even know we’ve checked.’

  Dad mounted the kerb and parked on the esplanade. Bill got out first. He slammed his door and leaned against the car. As he stared out across the dead grass, covered with dozens of fat, pop-eyed seagulls, he said, ‘Impossible.’

  Dad came around and stood next to him. ‘If that’s where they were, then we’ll find them.’

  Although it was another warm day, there were fewer people on the beach. Life had recommenced. People had thrown sandy bathers and wet towels into the wash basket and laid out their tunics and aprons. Suits had been pulled on over sunburn. Buckets and spades had been returned to toy boxes and watches had been refastened over strips of white skin. Now there were just a few mums with kids at the end of their holidays. A few old couples waded through the shallows with their pants rolled up. There were other kids, in groups and pairs and alone, sent to the beach by parents who hadn’t read the paper, or had and didn’t believe lightning struck the same place twice. Police cadets and junior constables, in unifo
rm shirts and their own bathers and shorts, still combed the foreshore.

  And there were others, organised by the police into search groups: Country Fire volunteers in their shorts, singlets and helmets (to let people know who they were); the local Rotary, searching front yards and nature strips of the first few streets back from the beach; the Lions; Freemasons; even the Semaphore and Largs Bay Scouts and Cubs (in full uniform). Mums and dads, uncles, aunts, anyone – maybe not in an organised way, but looking behind toilet blocks and hedges that had already been searched five times.

  ‘Christ,’ Bill mumbled, looking at them all. ‘I never guessed. I thought it was just a couple of your mob, Bob.’

  ‘We didn’t ask anyone.’

  They were approached by a journalist, a heavily sunburnt Scot in his sixties, from The News. ‘G’day, Bob, Bert,’ he said. ‘What am I gonna say today?’

  Dad smiled. ‘Jesus, John, since when did you start asking?’

  ‘Listen, I’m getting hot. Who do you reckon’s got these kiddies?’

  ‘This is Bill Riley,’ Dad said, touching him on the shoulder.

  ‘G’day, Bill.’ The reporter shook his hand. ‘Listen, I’ve been doin’ these rounds for years, these things always turn out.’

  ‘Here,’ Bill replied, producing another photo of his kids from his pocket. ‘Print this one. A different photo might help.’

  ‘You want to make a comment?’ the reporter asked, taking the photo.

  ‘You can say, both me and Liz love our kids. We’re determined to find them.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  A photographer came up beside them. The reporter introduced him to Bill and said, ‘Something simple, to go with your words?’

  ‘No,’ Dad replied. ‘The photo of the kids would be more helpful.’

  The old Scot almost grinned at Dad. ‘Looking for anyone in particular?’

  ‘No. We’ve gotta get on with it. Can you do any better than page seven this time?’

  ‘That’s not my job.’

  Dad took Bill by the arm and led him towards a caravan, a police mobile command that had been set up beside the esplanade clock. Bert followed them and the reporter followed him, asking, ‘One other thing: what about this fella in the blue bathers?’