Time's Long Ruin

by Stephen Orr

  Instead, my thoughts turned to Kevin Johns. I watched him trying to lift his legs, and wondered about the afternoon I’d gone to his house to tell Janice about Himmler the air-conditioner man. ‘I don’t think it’s anything,’ I said to Dad, ‘but that day we had our air-conditioner installed, when was that?’

  ‘I can’t remember, why?’

  ‘Janice had slept over at the Johns’.’

  Dad looked ahead, at Kevin Johns, dressed in football shorts, T-shirt and police boots; at his legs, white and marbled, hairless, although why anyone would shave their legs . . . at his short fat neck, joining his head to his body like an O-ring, his greying hair, shaved close up the sides of his head, fat arms poking out of his body like chicken wings, his drooping shoulders and sagging belly.

  ‘I went looking for her,’ I continued, ‘and when I went to Mariel’s house, it was just him and Janice.’

  Dad looked at me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Standing at the door. He was behind her, with his hands on her shoulders, sort of, massaging her.’

  Dad looked at Kevin again. He noticed the bandage, still on his arm, and wondered. ‘And how did Janice seem?’ he asked.

  ‘Quiet. She didn’t say much.’

  ‘Where was Mariel?’

  ‘In bed. I can’t remember.’

  Dad bent over and picked up a pair of swimming goggles. He tried the rubber strap and it broke. ‘It doesn’t sound like Janice.’

  ‘And she didn’t move. Just stood there, letting him do it. Which is funny, cos she wouldn’t let me touch her. And she hardly knows him.’

  Dad lifted his leg and it pulled out of the boot. He slipped his foot back in, grasped the boot and pulled it free. ‘What else do you know about Kevin Johns?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. Except, he coaches the basketball team.’

  ‘At school?’

  ‘Yes, they used to play Tuesday night and train on Friday.’

  ‘You watched them?’

  ‘A few times. Janice and Mariel did most of the work. The others just stood there.’

  I could remember Kevin Johns walking around the court, showing them where they should be and who they should be watching, clapping his hands and whistling when they scored, quietly waiting and watching between plays.

  ‘I know they all went to Mariel’s place a few times. For their break-up, I think.’

  ‘And Janice never said anything else about him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on.’ Dad ploughed through the mud at top speed and I followed him. Soon we’d caught up with Mariel and Rosa and Dad asked, ‘How are you managing, ladies?’

  The suck of mud was enough of an answer. The clouds were starting to break up and the sun was warming our swamp. Rosa held a handkerchief under her nose as methane and carbon dioxide bubbled up through the silt. My clothes were damp and mud had dried birdshit-white on my legs.

  Dad looked at Mariel. ‘Henry says you play basketball with Janice.’

  ‘She’s our goalie.’

  ‘And your dad is the coach?’

  ‘Sort of. He just gets us organised. He doesn’t know much about basketball.’

  ‘What I was wondering, Mariel, is if there’s anything you could tell us, anything that might help us explain . . . what I mean is, something Janice said, or did, or somewhere she was planning to go – a friend’s place?’

  Mariel pressed her tongue against her cheek as she thought. ‘You know she asked me to go?’

  ‘To the beach?’

  ‘Yes. I rode past them when they were walking to the station. She wanted me to come but I wasn’t allowed.’

  ‘Who did you ask?’

  ‘I went home and asked Dad. Then I rode back to the station to tell her.’

  ‘They were waiting for the train?’

  ‘They were just getting on.’

  ‘The Semaphore train?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We walked on silently for a few moments. Bert waved from the other side of the river and called out, ‘Anything?’

  ‘No,’ Dad shouted back.

  Bill was walking ahead by himself, Liz and Mum following a few feet behind, talking, as Bert brought up the rear. I don’t think anyone expected to find anything. What would they be doing here? There were better places to go, or be taken. Secret places. Scrub, only an hour from town, that stretched out to the horizon. A Coober Pedy mineshaft. A shack within hearing distance of the Peterborough express. But still we searched. What was the alternative? Sitting at home and thinking the same thoughts a thousand times?

  ‘How was your break-up?’ Dad asked Mariel, slyly.

  ‘We had a pyjama party,’ she replied. ‘Our team came last, but Dad said that didn’t matter. He cooked a barbecue and bought a crate of Coke. Then we stayed up watching . . .’ She clicked her fingers.

  ‘77 Sunset Strip,’ I said.

  ‘That’s it.’

  Dad trudged ahead again. He caught up with Con and Kevin and I arrived just in time to hear him ask, ‘Kev, hear you’re a half-decent basketball coach?’

  Kevin Johns smiled. ‘There’s worse, I suppose. You gotta keep ’em running, Bob.’

  ‘And Janice, she enjoys her sport?’

  He looked at Dad, unsure, and then replied, ‘Her and Mariel are the only decent players. She doesn’t hold back.’

  ‘No, that’s Janice. Gives her all, eh?’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘Her and Mariel are best friends?’

  ‘Mariel’s got lots of friends. There’s always kids in and out of our house.’

  ‘Really?’

  Kevin stopped. He didn’t know why Dad was asking so many questions. At last he said, ‘Do you think I can help you, Bob?’

  Dad shrugged. ‘No. Mariel said she hadn’t seen Janice for days before they . . . disappeared.’

  Kevin stared at him. ‘Well, like I said, she’s got lots of friends.’ He spat dirt from his mouth and wiped his lips on his sleeve. ‘It beggars belief, doesn’t it? How they could just vanish? They’ll have to turn up somewhere though, eh?’

  Dad didn’t answer. He was staring at Kevin. I watched him, and wondered what he was thinking; how he’d learnt to work people out, to pick their minds without them knowing, to set traps, to stand back and let them stumble in. And then to work out whether it was all just in his own head, or a child’s imagination, or a set of circumstances that made things look worse than they really were.

  ‘I wonder why they didn’t ask any of their friends to go with them?’ Dad asked. ‘Mariel would’ve loved to go.’

  ‘They asked me,’ I added, thinking I was helping Dad’s story.

  ‘Who knows?’ Kevin sighed.

  ‘I suppose they were in a rush,’ Dad guessed.

  ‘She was a good goalie,’ Kevin explained, looking at Dad. ‘She is.’

  ‘She is,’ Dad agreed.

  Janice had told me about their break-up. About eight girls sitting in their pyjamas on the lounge-room floor, and Kevin, hunched over the dining-room table, soldering wires onto flashlight contacts, watching them, laughing, smiling, referring to everyone as ‘love’ and making popcorn. And, I suppose, helping them with their sleeping bags, packing day clothes into their duffle bags and lending them his wife’s hair ties. Helping them to brush out knots.

  ‘Mariel did see them,’ Con said, out of the blue.

  ‘When?’ Dad asked.

  ‘She came riding up onto the platform. She talked to them as they were getting on the train.’

  ‘Well there you go.’

  Dad smiled at him. ‘Well.’ He turned around and called to Mariel. ‘You saw them when they were getting on the train?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she called. ‘I had to tell them that Dad wouldn’t let me go.’

  ‘Where?’ Kevin barked, suddenly indignant.

  ‘To Semaphore.’

  Kevin looked at Dad. ‘I can’t remember that.’ And then called back to his daughter. ‘Maybe it was your mother.’r />
  ‘It was you.’

  ‘Well, maybe my mind was on the cricket . . .’

  ‘She was the only one on the platform,’ Con added. ‘Except Doctor Gunn. He was standing out the front of his shop. He might have waved to them, or said something. But that’s not much help, is it?’

  ‘Never know,’ Dad replied. ‘I’ll talk to him. They might have said something.’

  I looked down at the mud as I walked. I could’ve sunk into it, slowly, without a word. That’s what I should do, I thought.

  ‘Did Doctor Gunn know Janice?’ Dad asked me, and suddenly I was the suspect, being out-talked and outmanoeuvred by my own father.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But not very well.’

  A glimpse of Janice’s batting style, Gavin sulking on the gutter, Anna in the outfield.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Dad added. ‘We know for a fact that they got on the Semaphore train, eh, Con?’

  ‘At 9.05.’

  ‘We need to know what happened later, don’t we, Kev?’

  Kevin tried to smile. ‘That’s the hard part, I reckon.’

  ‘Exactly. The hard part.’ Dad looked at Kevin and raised his eyebrows in a gesture that could be taken a dozen different ways. Kevin kept trudging, his head down. ‘We’re nearly at the flour mill.’

  ‘Maybe the river wasn’t a good idea,’ Dad said.

  I was silent, imagining my photo stuck to a blackboard in Jim Clarke’s caravan, with the words scribbled underneath, ‘Working with George Gunn’. With a photo of the doctor beside me. And Kevin. And the man in the blue bathers.

  On the opposite bank, which was harder, more like soil mixed with shell-grit and sprinkled with crumbled concrete from piers and demolished factories, homes and hotels, Bill continued alone, his head down, mumbling to himself. He held a length of wire that he used to pick up broken objects. He found a leather-bound book, in good condition. He knelt down and leafed through a few damp pages. There was an abstract, and graphs, and tables of figures, but nothing that could help him find his children.

  He continued.

  ‘Bill, slow down,’ Liz called.

  ‘Come on,’ he replied. ‘If we finish here, there are other places.’

  ‘Bill . . .’

  ‘It’s not a bloody picnic.’

  Bill remembered driving back to Adelaide. He was holding his steering wheel in the ten-to-two position. It was a thin, hard ring of plastic, sculpted to fit his fingers, but sweaty and slippery when it was hot. Where are they now? he was wondering. Lost, dead? He could hear Janice screaming out for him. He could see her, staring into a stranger’s eyes, trying to work out what he was thinking, or what he was about to do.

  Another twenty miles to Port Wakefield, he thought.

  ‘Bill,’ Mum called. ‘We can’t keep up with you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone,’ he replied.

  Mum looked at Liz.

  Bill loosened his tie as he drove. He was still in his suit, and hot. He felt his shirt sticking to his body and he could smell himself. He fiddled with the radio but there was no signal. Paddocks of stubble rolled on endlessly towards the sea. There were silos pinned down along service roads and old, deserted homesteads surrounded by pine trees and rusted machinery. He saw a farmer repairing a fence and a boy unloading pig rations in front of a shed. But mostly just emptiness. Emptiness that wouldn’t buy linen, no matter the discount.

  Janice, you’re a sensible girl, don’t go with anyone, he thought, as he lowered his foot on the accelerator. He could see petrol stations in the distance, morphing yellow, green and red in a heat haze of bitumen, and tennis courts overgrown with potato weed.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone to Snowtown,’ he called out to Liz and Mum, who were falling further behind.

  ‘Bill,’ Liz scolded. ‘Don’t keep saying that.’

  Where are they? he thought, as he drove into Port Wakefield.

  Back on the road, he checked his fuel gauge and pulled into a BP. Then he patiently waited for a spot to fill up, watching his temperature gauge slowly climbing into the red. He noticed an old couple waddle back to their car with ice-creams, take a few minutes to put on their seat-belts, start their car, select the gear, release the handbrake and move off at the slowest possible speed. Then they stopped and the old girl got out to check the cover on the fuel tank.

  ‘Come on,’ he mumbled, and she looked back at him. ‘Come on,’ he repeated, as she stopped to straighten her rheumatic back, eventually returning to her husband.

  ‘Bill,’ Liz called. ‘Slow down. Come here and talk to us.’

  Bill turned around. ‘Don’t you know what’s going on?

  Bert, tell her.’

  Bert stopped and waited, but didn’t say a word.

  ‘Do you know what he wanted them for?’ Bill asked his wife.

  ‘Who?’ she replied.

  ‘Bert, go on, tell her.’

  ‘We don’t know any of that,’ Bert managed.

  ‘Yes you do. Just cos you’re not saying it. Go on, be honest, we want to know.’

  ‘C’mon, Bill.’

  ‘Want me to tell you?’

  How he unzips his pants, he wanted to say. How he uses gaffer tape around their hands and feet and over their mouths. How he stops them from wriggling by lying on top of them. How he threatens them with a bread knife, its blade still streaked with butter.

  None of them moved. Our group stopped and looked across the river. Dad sighed. ‘Christ.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Rosa asked, squinting into the sun.

  ‘It’s Bill,’ Con whispered.

  ‘You lot okay?’ Dad called.

  ‘Fine,’ Bert called back.

  And Bill was off again, head down, almost hopping over the ankle-deep mud. We watched as he shot further ahead of Liz and Mum, mumbling so loud we could almost hear him across the grey-brown water.

  Back in his car, he could see the Mount Lofty Ranges on the distant horizon. He passed a paddock full of car bodies stacked four high with peas planted in plots all around them. An old man in shorts and a flannelette pyjama top was bent over weeding them. He looked up and caught Bill’s eye. Bill smiled. He didn’t mean it, but it was a reflex. The old man waved and returned to his peas. There was a fruit stall, set up in the shade of a derelict stable, and he almost pulled in for oranges that had been arranged in small pyramids on a table that was an old wardrobe door.

  Road. Sixty miles of it. Slowly falling behind him as he pushed the accelerator to the floor, as the city started to emerge in small, black, angular blocks, eventually becoming roofs and chimneys and windows. Until he was passing through a suburb of red-brick homes, factories and schools with dead or dying grass.

  ‘There’s no point looking here,’ Bill called back to the others, without turning around. ‘Just a lot of nothing.’

  Market gardens. Bordering the edge of the city. Drainage ditches and discharge pipes. Machinery sheds and fresh, brown alluvial soil.

  He pulled over and looked out across acres of white, lavender and blood-red carnations. He tried to tune his radio to the news but found nothing but Mantovani and the Flemington races.

  ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, stopping in front of the yacht club. ‘And where do we look next? The Flinders? Ayers Rock?’

  He dropped to his knees and sank a few inches into the mud. The mums rushed forward to help him, and Liz dropped to her knees beside him. She put her arm around him and cradled his head.

  ‘It’s over,’ we could almost hear him mutter, across the water.

  Liz pushed hair out of his eyes. ‘No it’s not.’

  And Mum and Bert stood beside them, trying to decide where to look.

  Later that evening, with the mud washed off and the clothesline heavy with lemon-scented overalls and shorts, I sat in my rabbit hutch with my diary on my knee. Inside didn’t seem a place for me anymore: crying and sadness heavy in the air like camphor. But outside wasn’t much either: no faces standing at the chicken wire
, silently watching me, no one rolling on the brown grass, screaming as they hurt their back on a sprinkler, no toys sitting about, no socks left under almond trees where Gavin had decided it was easier to climb barefoot. Just a quiet evening, with no fuss or fighting, like both sets of parents had always wanted.

  I sketched Janice in my diary, trying to solidify the picture in my head: big white eyes that allowed her whole pupil to be seen at once, the sun reflecting off a little bit of sweat or oil on her nose, her biting at her bottom lip (which made her frown). But it didn’t look like Janice. Just something our art teacher would turn her nose up at.

  On the next page was the story of the boy in the box. I read the last paragraph and continued writing from where I’d left off:

  He is aware of certain other children. Kids that he played with once. They are kicking a ball, just outside his van. One of them, a girl, is only a few feet away from him. Over here, she says, and thump, the ball hits the panel closest to his head. Janice, he whispers. But thats not her real name, of course. Maybe it’s Susan, or Vyerlet, or Amanda. Without knowing her name he couldnt call out. Couldnt anyway. Then it would just be him again, opening the cupboard, lifting the lid, growling.

  Dad came outside and stood on the back steps. He took a deep breath and stretched his arms out, locked his fingers together and clicked them. Then he jumped the three steps in a single go and sat down on the back lawn, cross-legged, like a monk contemplating the sunset. He took out a cigarette paper and filled it with tobacco, rolling it again and again, making it tighter and tighter. Then he licked the paper and sealed it, taking the time to look at it with amazement. He lit up, inhaled and laid back on the grass, watching Sirius wander into a velvet-blue sky.

  He closed his eyes, waiting, perhaps, for Gavin to creep up beside him and jump on his stomach. He could remember the time this had happened. ‘Christ, you oughta be careful, Gav, you could break a man’s ribs.’ We all laughed. Or perhaps he was talking to Janice, about school, about why some teachers were such pricks. Explaining, ‘Some of them probably taught me. In those days things were done differently. If we so much as whispered – ’ ‘Headley still hits people on the knuckles.’