by Stephen Orr
Because he wasn’t important enough, he supposed. In the railways scheme of things.
As I walked home beside Dad (as Diogenes 34 pulled and choked himself for no good reason), I said, ‘Fancy doing that to Con,’ and Dad replied, ‘Welcome to the world, Detective Page.’
Chapter Nine
‘The really interesting one,’ Liz explained to the reporter, ‘is Bob, next door.’
‘Bob Page?’ the young girl asked, crossing her legs and resting her notepad on her left knee.
‘Yes. He knows all the details . . . hundreds of leads. You should talk to him.’
‘Maybe I will. But what about you, how are you coping?’
Liz looked at the words scribbled across the top of the girl’s pad – Days of Despair – and guessed the article was already written. She just had to fill in the details: the empty rooms, descriptions of loneliness, husband and wife sitting comforting each other (or was there something else? Were they arguing? Had Bill changed?)
‘I’m coping,’ Liz explained. ‘I keep busy. I’ve just been made manager of soft fabrics.’
‘At John Martin’s?’
‘Yes.’
And then she was off, explaining, the cards and small presents in her locker, the smiles and rubbed shoulders, and the public, who all knew who she was, the feel of fresh muslin and the smell of brown wrapping paper. A world of yet-to-be-made things, paper patterns, balls of wool, rolls of fabric to make dresses and frocks, jackets and cardigans with camel-bone buttons.
The reporter scribbled some notes in shorthand. Liz could imagine what: The suffering continues . . . twelve months of torture, of daily anguish. Verbs, adjectives and nouns that had ceased to mean anything anymore. Now it was just the grind – burnt toast, another gas bill, a bad egg put aside to return to Don Eckert.
‘And what about your husband?’ the girl asked.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s back at work?’
‘Yes.’
‘I read somewhere that he doesn’t work much.’
Liz looked surprised. ‘He works when he can, when he feels up to it.’
‘What, he’s depressed?’
Liz shook her head. ‘No. He still spends time looking.’
‘For the kids?’
‘Yes.’
‘But didn’t the police say . . .?’ She trailed off, tapping her pencil on her pad.
Liz noticed the six o’clock news starting. She could faintly hear drums and trumpets setting the mood, climaxing and then dying as the newsreader, Bill Taylor, dressed in a sombre black jacket and pencil-thin tie, started reading. A string of words flashed up behind him: Twelve months to the day, followed by the photo of the kids with their arum lilies.
‘What do you think when you see that?’ the girl asked.
Liz went quiet. ‘Last night I dreamt I heard a knock at the back door,’ she whispered. ‘It was the children. They said, “Hello, Mum”, and I said, “Where have you been?” They were standing in the back lobby of the house. I cried and felt them all over.’
Silence. The reporter had no idea what to say. So she waited, holding her pencil against her pad. Soon there was another story, footage of Menzies and the Queen. Liz turned to the girl and smiled. ‘Janice could come through that door any moment. And she’d tell me where she’s been and what she’s been up to. And then she’d say, “I can’t believe so many people made a fuss.”’
‘Do you think she ever will?’
Liz sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think anymore.’ She turned back and Janice was standing in the hallway. She didn’t speak. She just stuck her tongue out at the reporter and Liz almost smiled.
‘You had a clairvoyant?’ the reporter asked.
‘Yes, it seemed worthwhile at the time. Kazz, our neighbour, even had a go.’
‘How’s that?’
‘She has these pictures of people she reckons used to live in her house. There’s one of a fella choppin’ wood in her backyard. And another one of a boy crying in her laundry. I can’t see anyone, but she reckons. So she said to me, Let’s take some photos. No, no, I said, but she insisted. So she sets up her tripod and starts snappin’ away.’
New-age neighbour scours house for spirits . . .
‘What’s your neighbour’s name?’
‘Kazz Houseman, although maybe you shouldn’t put that in.’
‘Don’t worry, no names.’
Kazz Houseman, the Rileys’ neighbour, set up her ‘ghost sensitive’ camera and photographed every inch of the house.
‘We sat there for an hour,’ Liz said. ‘But I didn’t see or hear anything. Still, maybe they were there, and I didn’t have Kazz’s sense of . . . whatever. But I suppose it was just another dead end. Silly, really, when so many people have done so much searching.’
‘Understandable,’ the reporter replied. ‘After so much, you’d clutch at anything, wouldn’t you?’
Liz said what she was expected to. ‘Yes, you’d clutch at anything.’
‘And what about you and Bill, what are you doing for the anniversary today?’
Liz looked confused. ‘Anniversary?’
Croydon was quiet. Outside and inside. It was the hot, golden hush of summer, of dead rye grass and magazines left on the back porch, blowing open in a breeze of lawn clippings, mettwurst and freshly baked fruit buns.
‘A memorial of some type?’ the reporter asked.
Liz turned to her. ‘No. There are better ways to remember.’
‘How?’
But if she didn’t know, Liz couldn’t tell her. She stood up, took a cheque from her apron pocket and placed it beside the girl. ‘I think that’s enough,’ she said.
But the reporter realised she’d never get two thousand words out of that. ‘Maybe you’ll go to church?’ she asked. ‘And light a candle?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘The photographer’s coming in twenty minutes.’
Liz turned to go but stopped. ‘If you want to write something,’ she said, ‘write that Bill and me are very happy, despite everything. Say that we support each other, and say that Bill still makes me laugh. Mention how he used to be in vaudeville, and how he once had the world at his feet. Like me, I could’ve studied piano in London.’
And say how, she thought, despite everything, things have turned out okay. How, at the end of the day, it’s not about the stuff you’ll miss out on, but the stuff you had. And say how that goes on forever, for every man, woman, dog and cockroach that’s ever drawn breath.
‘See,’ Liz explained, finally, watching a lost scarf blow along Thomas Street, ‘it’s not over. It’s never over.’
It was still summer. As far as Bill was concerned, it would always be summer. He was sitting on a bench overlooking the Semaphore esplanade, watching families with beach bags and inner tubes, picnic baskets and plastic buckets and spades, wearing sombreros and monochrome bathers, struggling across the hot concrete and cracked pavers towards the beach.
In the distance, beyond the kiosk and samphire and the high dunes that blew stinging, hot sand into his face, the beach was full. As it had been at exactly this time twelve months before. As his three children (and he watched them now) trudged across the esplanade, past the beach shower and along the path that led to the beach. There was a track for a miniature steam train that ran along the esplanade to Fort Largs, but that hadn’t run for years.
Semaphore. Just as it had always been, seagulls swarming the dead grass in search of a chip.
Bill adjusted the clipboard on his knee. As another family walked past he added four more strokes to his tally. Then he added up again, putting a running total down the side of the page: 680. At the top he’d written, Australia Day, 1961 – started counting 9 am. It had only been an hour and a half, and yet, enough time to fill a major metropolitan beach with wax-white bodies, cracked surfboards, sun shelters and cricket games that attracted dozens of fielders. Enough time to fill an empty space with bus drivers, greengrocers and Engl
ish teachers. And three kids, by themselves, setting down their bag, stripping off and running into the water. Screaming, splashing, jumping up and down in a gentle swell. As sunbathers looked up, squinted, and drifted back into a dream-state. As an eight-year-old from Brompton asked his dad if he could go play with Gavin. As an ice-cream seller nearly got knocked over by Anna running back for her towel.
Bill squeezed his pen and wrote on the bottom of the page: 680 people. Someone must have seen something!!! They must have!!
Then he looked up and counted again: a group of seven, six, three, five . . . maths leading him towards an understanding that was really just more confusion.
It wasn’t the first time he’d sat here. Luckily his new patch included Semaphore. It started at West Beach and stretched all the way along the coast to Largs Bay, and inland to Rosewater and Cheltenham. There were dozens of pubs, hotels and cafeterias in this area, and he’d visited them all. But instead of going back again and again, as he knew he needed to to build up a customer base, he’d slowly given up. He’d sat in his car and looked at his list of clients and thought, Maybe tomorrow, or the next day. Instead, he’d loosened his tie and taken off his jacket and gone and sat on a beach, or in a coffee shop, or under a pine tree in a reserve. He’d thought of his kids, and cried, and felt happy and sad in almost equal measure. And in time he’d started bringing his ukulele along, starting up as he sat on the banks of the refilled Patawalonga, as an old Scot in dungarees stopped to sing a few verses with him.
But on this Australia Day he sat in thongs and shorts and singlet, counting: seven, three, five . . . all of it proof that what had happened couldn’t possibly have happened.
He looked up and saw a familiar figure standing beside him, licking ice-cream from a cone that had broken in his hands. ‘Kevin,’ Bill said.
Kevin Johns looked surprised. ‘Bill.’ He sat down on the bench but it was a moment before he thought of something to say. ‘I was gonna go fishin’.’
‘Where?’ Bill asked.
Kevin was looking at Bill’s clipboard. ‘What you got there?’
‘It’s a headcount,’ Bill replied. ‘I’ve been going since nine.’
‘Why?’
Bill looked out across the esplanade. ‘Just to be sure,’ he managed. ‘What do you reckon, was it hotter or cooler that Australia Day?’
Although he already knew.
Kevin tried to remember. ‘It was a hot day, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, so there could’ve been even more people?’ He checked the tally. Someone must have seen something, he read, looking up at the crowd. ‘You’d think, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unless it didn’t happen here.’
‘Unless . . .’
Bill turned to face him. ‘Where’s Mariel?’
‘Friend’s place.’
‘And you came down to . . . fish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t know you fished.’
‘The jetty’s full. I like it quiet. So people don’t see what you’re doing wrong.’
Bill stared ahead, oblivious. ‘Nice spot, eh?’
‘Yes,’ Kevin replied, relaxing. ‘How’s work?’ he asked.
Bill shrugged. ‘I gotta get back on top of it. They changed my turf, that’s what’s buggered me up, Kev. I had hundreds of customers. But no, they don’t want a country sales rep. So I gotta start again.’
‘And what about Liz?’
But Bill was counting, and adding up. ‘I suppose,’ he said, after a pause, ‘you just don’t notice, eh? There are so many people that you don’t notice. You just switch off, and worry about yerself. I suppose that’s what happened.’
Kevin didn’t reply.
‘That’s the world we live in, eh, Kev? Anonymous. Like bloody Bombay or somethin’.’
‘Perhaps, if it’s family and neighbours,’ Kevin consoled. ‘But when you got that many.’ He tapped the clipboard.
‘So there’s no point, is there?’ Bill asked.
Kevin shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’
Bill took the piece of paper from the clipboard and folded it five times. Then he threw it into the bin beside him. ‘I’d be more help at home,’ he said.
‘Perhaps.’
He stood up. ‘Look after yerself, Kev.’
And then he walked across the esplanade, over the cigarette butts and ice-cream spoons, under the shade of a wattle tree, and through the rows of hot cars. He opened his Austin and got in, smelling factory-fresh cotton as he searched for his keys. He could hear Janice, sitting beside him. Dad, you oughta see how burnt Gavin is. He dropped his clutch and drove off down Semaphore Road, as Gavin complained how it was Janice who left the zinc cream at home. The streets of Croydon are a web, a lattice-work of bitumen, of double-fronted cottages and gentlemen’s bungalows, of rampant lantana growing over fences, covering gas boxes and rose bushes and snaking up verandah posts and the legs of rusted benches. Croydon is a weave – threads of lives knitted together like one of Mum’s aborted jumpers (still sitting in her old cupboard, its arms unfinished and unattached).
And there’s me again – Australia Day, 1961, walking with Diogenes 34 towards the playground, past magpies looking angry in the shade of a gum tree and an old woman in her petticoat brushing flaking paint from bricks. There’s me, leaving behind a house full of raised voices, and no voices, silence, for days on end, until Dad said something and Mum told him to fuck off.
I could hear the signal bells ringing and turned the corner to see the boom gates lowering – slowly, in a measured, mechanical sort of way. I saw Con, still in his SAR vest, standing beside the lights and bells. A car raced through the crossing and he opened his notebook and scribbled down its licence number. I approached him and said, ‘Hi, Con, what are you doing?’
‘One day there’ll be a bad accident,’ he replied. ‘Mark my words.’
And with that he showed me his list of the morning’s gate runners. ‘Every time they drop,’ he explained, pointing to a sign that said, Stop On Red Signal.
And what he didn’t say, This didn’t happen when I was running things. People used to pay attention. You held up your hand and they stopped. You closed the gate and they waited. They talked to you. They gave you a dozen eggs and told you you’d left your sprinkler on at home.
He counted the licence numbers and said, ‘Sixty-two. Why would so many people do it? I trained them well, didn’t I?’
‘What do you do with the numbers?’ I asked, pulling Diogenes 34 away from a fresh caramel turd.
‘I send them in to my old boss.’
‘And then what?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe they issue fines.’
I looked across to where Con’s gatehouse once stood, now just a bare, rectangular outline of dirt. There were weeds where he used to sit on a stool in the sun, and a brand-new signal box, clunking away, where he’d stand watching the crows in the plane trees as he waited for trains to leave his station.
The boom gates opened and there was quiet. A car moved off before the lights had stopped flashing and Con took his number too.
‘Silly old bugger,’ the driver shouted, but Con didn’t care. He knelt down and rubbed Diogenes 34’s back and the dog responded with a whimper. Then he stood up, pointed to my train-spotting tree and said, ‘You’re out of a job too.’
I smiled. ‘It was fun.’
‘It was,’ he replied. ‘It was.’ He sat on a pile of sleepers that smelt of diesel, and asked, ‘How are things at home?’
I sat next to him. ‘The same.’ Diogenes 34 sat at my feet, watching the cars go past.
‘You wanna sleep over tonight?’ he asked.
‘Na, it’s Dad’s day off.’ There was silence for a few moments, and then I said, ‘I overheard them talking.’
Con looked at me but didn’t say anything.
‘They were arguing and Dad said, “What do you think people are saying?” He said, “What do you think Henry hears from the kids at school?”’
&n
bsp; ‘What?’ she’d asked, lying in bed, refusing to look up, as Dad clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘Why don’t you tell me, Detective.’
‘They say, “Your Mum, she’s . . .”’
‘What?’
‘“She’s not normal.”’
‘And that’s all that worries you – what people think?’
‘Yes.’
I looked up at Con. ‘Then she said, “If that’s the case, I’ll go.”’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dad had replied. ‘Just get up, get moving.’
‘Where to?’
‘Just get off your fat arse.’
Silence.
‘I’ll leave you, Bob . . .’
‘And Henry?’
‘I’ll wait till he’s old enough.’
‘Why wait? What good are you doing here?’
‘I’ll go.’
‘Good riddance.’
I looked at the ground. ‘Then I heard her packing, and Dad telling her not to be stupid. She went out the front door with her suitcase and Dad went after her. She screamed, and he told her to be quiet. People were watching. Anyway, somehow he got her back inside and she locked herself in her room.’
Con nodded his head. ‘She’s ill. Think of it that way.’
‘I can’t anymore. I just think about Dad.’
Con was thinking about me, and how I was the one left alone when Dad had to go off to work.
‘You know,’ I continued, looking up, ‘I used to pray to God that Mum and Dad would never die. But, I’d say to God, if you have to take one, make it Mum.’
Con shrugged. ‘Things change, eh?’
‘Maybe I should’ve asked God to take Dad,’ I mused.
‘But what’s the good of that?’ Con replied. ‘God needs your Dad to look after your Mum.’
‘But it doesn’t work like that, does it?’ I asked.
‘Of course it does. That’s how me and Rosa have got through. Together. It’s the only way.’
‘But what’s God got to do with it?’
‘Ah, that you’re gonna have to work out for yourself. He does show himself in time. Our tree starts flowering every year on Alex’s birthday.’
