by Stephen Orr
‘Yes?’
‘Did he talk to her much?’
‘No.’
And what I should’ve said, but couldn’t: he only met her after, after what happened, and then it was like he was sending a message to me, If you blab, then others might suffer, innocent people, people close to you, but then I thought, No, it wasn’t him that took them . . .
‘Did you ever think it was strange that he liked to be around children?’ Dad continued.
‘There were grown ups.’
‘Coming and going. The thing is, sometimes people that come across as harmless – ’
‘You know what it’s like,’ I interrupted, only half-aware of what I was saying, ‘when you’re watching someone do something like sewing, or playing chess, moving the pieces around slowly. I thought that’s why he liked to watch me.’ And then I stopped.
‘Doing what?’ Dad asked.
‘Sorting. He’d just sit there and stare at me and I’d think, You can go do your work, I’m okay now. And then, once . . .’
A moment later I’d told him. I don’t know how, with a whisper, or shaky breath, with my hands clenched or pressed flat against my legs, but I’d told him. And then he was sitting with his head bowed, whispering, ‘Christ.’
‘Dad?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t know.’
His face had changed. His mouth was open and I could see his teeth, deep yellow against the gums. He’d shaved but he’d missed a spot on his throat. He had a few long nasal hairs that trembled as he breathed and his eyes were bloodshot, the white bits a sort of boiled-egg grey. Then his mouth slowly closed, his teeth came together and his face fell flat and serious. He stood up without saying a word, walked from my room and almost ran out the front door. I pulled a pair of pants on over my pyjamas and tore off my top. I found a T-shirt I’d been wearing for four days and put it on inside out. No time for shoes. I was out the door and across the yard in seconds flat.
‘Where are you going?’ Mum called out from the kitchen.
‘Playground. Need any milk?’
‘Yes, here’s the money.’
But I was already gone. When I caught up with Dad he was halfway along Elizabeth Street. He was wearing his suit pants and a white shirt and Mum’s pink slippers. Ted, setting up fruit in crates outside his shop, waved and said hello but Dad walked straight past him. I went up to Ted and we watched as Dad went into Doctor Gunn’s clinic.
‘What’s up?’ Ted asked.
I shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
We waited for a couple of minutes or so and eventually Ted went back to polishing apples with his apron and laying them in diagonal lines on fluffed-up pink paper. ‘Any news?’ he asked.
‘People looking everywhere,’ I said.
‘Think they could use me?’
‘Perhaps.’
The doors to the clinic flew open. There was a crack as one of the glass panels shattered.
‘Cripes,’ Ted said. ‘What’s going on?’
Dad pushed Doctor Gunn through the door. ‘Sit down,’ he screamed, and the doctor sat down on the footpath. Dad took his handcuffs from his pocket and clamped the doctor’s left hand. Then he noticed a bike rack. ‘Move,’ he shouted, and the doctor dragged himself across the pavement. Dad clamped the other cuff to the rack and went back inside the shop. A few moments later books came flying out through the door. They fell open and thumped on the ground, their spines cracking. After a few minutes of this there was a small pile of them beside the doctor.
Doctor Gunn looked up and saw us. Ted lifted his arms as if to say, What’s all this about?, as I slipped back inside his shop and watched through the window.
Then Dad re-emerged with a life-sized skeleton on a stand. He pushed it and it rolled a few feet, fell over the gutter and broke into its component pieces as it hit the ground. A car slowed to see what was happening. Dad stepped out of the shop and raised his voice to the driver. ‘It’s okay. Police. This man is a child molester.’ He raised his voice. ‘A child molester.’ Then he knelt and screamed the same thing into the doctor’s face.
The car drove on and Ted Bilston, embarrassed, came into the shop and stood beside me. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘You oughta see what he did to me,’ I said, looking up at him, no longer ashamed.
‘You?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dirty old bastard.’
‘I fought him off.’
‘Good on yer.’
People gathered on the footpath to watch the drama unfold: shoppers with string bags full of yesterday’s bread, kids who had come over from the playground, John Cox and Joe Skurray and Don Eckert, smiling, pleased to see his taxes at work for once.
Dad re-emerged from the shop with a roll of sticky tape and piece of paper covered with big block letters scrawled in Indian ink: Be Advised. Keep a Safe Distance. This is the shop of a baby buggerer. Police have been advised and will arrive shortly. He taped the notice over the opening times on Doctor Gunn’s window.
Doctor Gunn – the man I’d trusted and admired and shared jokes with, the man who’d spoken to me through books – saw me through Ted Bilston’s window. He closed his eyes and bowed his head and Dad, using his left index finger, raised it again. ‘There something you wanna tell me?’ he asked the doctor.
Doctor Gunn didn’t reply.
‘What about the Rileys?’
He almost smiled. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’
‘You think I’m kidding?’ Dad shouted.
‘You oughta be careful.’
Dad took him by the collar of his freshly ironed shirt. ‘You watch how you speak to me.’
‘Go easy, Bob,’ Joe Skurray called from across the street.
‘Leave it to me, Joe,’ Dad replied.
‘He was there all morning,’ Joe insisted.
‘Yes, I said hello, around lunchtime,’ John Cox concurred.
Dad released his hold. He looked at the doctor for a moment and then took a step back. Then he took his handcuff keys from his pocket and crossed the road to give them to Don Eckert. ‘There,’ he said, handing them over, ‘if you could do me a favour. Release him at four o’ clock. No earlier. No later.’
‘But what about the police?’
Dad smiled. ‘What about me?’
As we walked home Dad looked at me and asked, ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I smiled, feeling a heavy weight lifting.
‘Do you think we should tell Mum?’
I shrugged. ‘She’d just . . .’
‘Exactly.’
‘What are we gonna do with him?’
‘I wasn’t sure. You decide. You’ve got till four.’
‘A day on the footpath should just about do it.’
‘I would imagine.’
He put his arm around my shoulder as we passed the Acorn Deli, looking back at the traffic jam we’d created. We turned into Thomas Street and saw Bill and Bert standing on the footpath beside the Melack Motel. Bill was wearing nothing but a thick woollen dressing gown. He was talking with his hands, like Con did when he got frustrated. ‘You’re not the most sensitive man, are you, Bert?’ he said, loud enough to be heard by a man walking past with a wheelbarrow full of lemons.
Bert was wearing a linen suit and a Panama hat, like he’d just been to a polo match. He was leaning against the wheel-well of his car, its engine crackling and cooling in the morning sun. ‘Listen,’ he replied, holding up a pile of papers, ‘we’ve got sixty-eight calls to follow up. I gotta start somewhere.’
‘Since the telecast?’ Dad asked, approaching Bert.
‘Yes.’
‘Anything?’
‘You gotta be kidding.’ He handed the pile to Dad. ‘We start now, might be finished by 1980. Meanwhile . . .’
‘Never know,’ Dad replied, scanning the phone logs.
Bill turned to face him, his arms crossed, his tasselled cord almost touching the ground. ‘Your mate reckons I took my own kids.’
>
‘I never said that,’ Bert replied, turning to Dad. ‘Look at the entry on the bottom.’
Dad read aloud. ‘“A woman from Salisbury, refusing to give her name, claims to have seen a man driving three kids along North Road at approximately 13.30 hours.”’ Dad stopped and looked at Bert. ‘So what, the postie saw them at three?’
Bert shrugged. ‘Saw them, or someone else?’
Dad shook his head. ‘Bert.’
‘Read,’ Bert said, tapping the sheets.
‘“The woman accurately described the children. She said the man was in his late forties, and had dark hair. Car believed to be white Austin.”’
Bill shook his head and almost laughed. ‘Well that’s me.’
Dad looked at Bert. ‘Come on, that’s enough, he was in Snowtown.’
Bert took Dad’s arm and pulled him aside. ‘Listen, Bob,’ he whispered, ‘I don’t wanna have this out again, I’m just tryin’ – ’
‘Bert, think . . . who rang the Snowtown pub?’
Bert stopped, closed his eyes and his whole face tightened.
‘You’re the one writing everything down,’ Dad continued. ‘Look in your book.’ He tapped the notebook in Bert’s pocket. ‘Who did you speak to?’
‘The manager.’
‘Well?’
Bert took the sheets from Dad, licked his pencil and scribbled out the first entry. ‘Still, there’s plenty more to check,’ he said.
Dad looked at him. ‘And?’
Bert looked at Bill. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
Bill tightened the cord around his waist. ‘It’s a bit rugged, isn’t it?’
‘I know. It was just this bit here at the end: “Caller thought the plate may have started with SVX”, and what with yours being SXX . . .’
Dad looked at Bill. ‘Christ, you don’t think someone’s playing silly buggers? Someone who’s seen your car?’
Bill was confused. ‘No.’ He pulled his gown tight over his chest. ‘You don’t think it’d be . . .’ He stopped, suddenly sensing my presence beside a rose bush shedding crisp, brown petals.
‘Doubt it,’ Dad replied. ‘Either way, you don’t look like the criminal type, Bill.’ And he tried to laugh.
Bert looked at the Austin in the drive. He noticed how it had been freshly washed, and polished, even the licence plate. He remembered the voice of the manager of the Snowtown pub. ‘Yes, Detective, I’ll pass the message on.’
Which was how Bill knew to come home, obviously.
We all went into the Rileys’ for morning tea. As Mum and Liz watched the kettle boil, Dad read from the log of calls. ‘“Woman claims to have seen three children wandering beside the Torrens on the morning of the twenty-eighth. Couldn’t describe them except for “two girls and a boy”. Operator heard someone laughing in background.”’
He put a line through the entry. ‘This is the problem, Liz,’ he said, watching her spoon tea into a pot with a broken bakelite handle. ‘But we’ll check them all.’
‘It’s alright,’ Liz replied, quietly. ‘We understand, don’t we, Bill?’
Bill sat with his arms crossed. ‘Yeah.’
‘“Man at Glenelg East claims to have seen black car parked on banks of Patawalonga at two in the morning, twenty-seventh January. Sounded credible.”’
Dad looked up and met Bill’s eyes. ‘Someone got lucky,’ he smiled.
Bill tried to return the smile, and then looked at Bert. Bert tightened his gold tiepin, looked around the room and said, ‘I’ve arranged with Jim. They’re gonna open the lock at two.’
I watched a boy in a distant paddock walking barefoot along a furrow, dropping in seed potatoes and covering them in dirt with his foot. The boy stopped and looked at me, took more potatoes from a bag on his shoulder and kept walking.
I turned to Dad. ‘What’s he planting?’ I asked.
Dad shrugged. ‘Magic beans.’
Bill, standing alone in the shade of a young peppercorn, almost jumped when a whistle sounded and the steel doors of the lock started to move apart. Water rushed through the opening, carrying mud and paper and a doll’s head. Dad and Bert and a group of about thirty cadets from the academy, all pulling on their waders, watched with blank expressions, as if they were in the middle of an algebra class. Liz and Mum, both standing with their arms crossed on the banks of the Patawalonga, studied the swirls and muddy gulps and bubbles of methane escaping the silt. Liz was afraid of what she might see, and what she might not. Mum, I think, could sense this. She put her arm around Liz’s shoulders and they stood in the summer sun casting long shadows like a pair of Easter Island statues.
The Patawalonga is a long lake that runs parallel to the beach just north of Glenelg. It isn’t somewhere you’d swim. Most of the stormwater from Adelaide’s western suburbs drains into it. The Pat is pissed in, full of rubbish, tyres and car bodies, still and hot and grey in the middle of summer. It looks like an abandoned septic and smells like a mangrove. It’s only tolerated because it’s there, and always has been, and no one’s had enough will or money to move it. But the Pat is a sort of spiritual place. It’s where things go when they’re no longer wanted: a bag of drowned kittens, rolls of Cyclone wire, and foetuses. It’s a liquid-brown hell, clogged with algae and mud. But strangely enough, the council mows the lawns and maintains barbecue and picnic areas along its banks. People go with baskets full of cheese sandwiches and sit and admire the closest thing they can find to nature. Children wade in its shallows and old men fish for cadmium-heavy gropers and whiting.
Dad tightened his waders and turned to the old man standing beside him. ‘What sort of car was it?’ he asked.
The man shrugged. ‘Black one.’
‘A Ford, Holden?’
‘No idea.’
‘And who did you see?’
‘Saw a man, about your height. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘He was talkin’ to someone in the car.’
The upper banks of the Pat were staring to emerge. Dad saw an old bike, a tricycle, and a fender with ‘Dodge’ still visible.
‘People usually park here at night?’ Dad asked.
‘Kids, havin’ a root. But this fella, he was walkin’ around the car, lookin’ down into the water, like he had somethin’ on his mind. That’s what made me think . . .’
Liz took a step towards the lake. The grass, growing on sand full of cigarette butts, was brown except for a few spots of green where buried pipes had rusted and released water in a sort of budget Rotorua. Pieces of smashed bitumen were strewn around the Kyle Ryan Memorial carpark. ‘To think it would come to this,’ Liz said to Mum.
Mum was trying her best to sound sympathetic. ‘It’s hard to know, isn’t it?’
Liz looked across the lake to where a pair of photographers stood ready. ‘Piss off,’ she whispered. She waved her hands at them as if to shoo them away. Then she said, ‘Gavin had a tricycle like that one.’
‘Where is it?’ Mum asked.
Liz stopped to think. ‘Good question. Maybe we gave it to someone . . . or have we still got it? Maybe it’s in the shed. You’d never know. You can’t get anything in there. Why we need a thousand pillow cases . . . Janice had it, and Anna. And we never once oiled it, or fixed a tyre.’
Liz could remember Anna, riding the trike along the banks of the Pat, her knees folded up and the tyres almost flat. ‘Get off, Anna, you’re gonna break it. You’re much too big.’
Gavin ran up beside his sister, held the bike and screamed that it was his. ‘You’ve got your own!’ he yelled.
‘I like this one.’
‘Anna, get off your brother’s bike.’
A police car drove onto the grass in the reserve beside the lake. Jim Clarke got out and came over to Dad and Bert. ‘They’ve taken the caravan back to Thebarton,’ he said.
‘Already?’ Dad asked.
‘There’s nothing else at Semaphore.’
Dad looked out across t
he shrinking body of water. ‘How they going with that list?’
‘They’ve phoned them all,’ Jim replied. ‘Reckon there’s a dozen or so worth visiting.’
Liz stepped forward and pointed to a piece of clothing that had become visible in the mud. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
Everyone, including the cadets, moved towards the edge of the lake. The photographers, who’d been joined by a few journalists wearing suit tops and footy shorts and sandshoes, moved closer, straining to see the object in the mud.
‘It’s a jumper,’ Bill muttered.
‘Anna, what was she wearing?’ Liz asked Mum, but before anyone could answer, Bill was wading into the lake. Soon his feet had sunk up to his ankles, then his shins and knees, as he moved towards the jumper.
Liz could see Anna everywhere – helping plant potatoes on the hill, walking across the lock gates, sitting on their shed roof with her arms outstretched, summoning the spirit of Superman and jumping, falling with a heavy thud and rolling, sitting up, covered in grass. She could see her jumper hanging loosely on her shoulders – she could see pulled threads and the beetroot-stained neckline, and she could hear Anna saying, ‘No, I won’t take it off.’
‘I’m not taking you out like that.’
‘Good.’
‘Can’t you take some pride in your appearance?’
‘No.’ She wiped her nose along the length of her jumper.
Bill waded in further. He reached the jumper and lifted it from the mud. It dripped and sagged but he managed to hold it high in the air. ‘It’s a, what do you call it?’ he asked.
‘A polo-neck jumper,’ Jim replied, looking at Liz. ‘Did any of them have one?’
Liz stopped to think. ‘No, I don’t think so. No . . .’
Half an hour later the Pat was empty. A few small pools of water remained in the low parts of the lake. There was all sorts of rubbish, but it was brown, hard and angular, and impossible to distinguish.
Dad looked at Bert and Jim, as if to say, Well, there you go, another lame duck.
‘They could’ve sunk into that,’ Jim replied, reading his thoughts. ‘That’s slush in the middle.’
‘Come on then,’ Bert said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
An instructor from the academy barked orders at the cadets. They formed a straight line along the edge of the lake. When they were in position they waited, slowly sinking, breathing a vapour of methane, carbon dioxide and hot donuts from the esplanade kiosk. Dad and Bert climbed down to join them. The instructor blew a whistle and the line moved off. Each man carried a long bamboo stick to prod the mud. If he hit something he’d reach into the sludge and pull out a brick or part of an old washing basket. Some of the cadets sank down to their crotch, and friends on either side would have to hold them under the shoulders to pull them out, and they would be pushed down too. There was a sucking and slurping as they pulled their feet from the mud. After a few minutes they would have to stop and rest and then they’d sink again. The line went from straight to chaotic as each man maintained his own pace. Occasionally the instructor would blow his whistle and stop them until they were lined up again. And through all of this, Jim, Mum and Liz waited patiently.
