Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

  Still, he looked for hoof prints, glad there was nobody to laugh at him for doing so. He shaded his eyes and squinted at a dark object, half covered in sand, then began to walk towards it. He should have been wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes, but he never thought of things like that.

  It was a woman’s coat, black, or at least it had been. Chris started to shake the sand out, then gave up. He stood with his back to the wind, and asked himself if it was possible that whoever had stolen Riza had been wearing such a garment, at the same time telling himself not to be a fool. The coat had been exposed, out in the weather, for months. Anthea wrinkled her nose when Chris walked into the station with the coat. She listened to his account of finding it, wondering what role she’d be expected to play in tracking down the owner. If it had been left up to her, she would have thrown the filthy garment in the bin.

  But she took another look as Chris was folding the coat into a plastic bag. It would once have been expensive.

  Anthea surprised herself by holding out her hand for Chris to stop, while she looked for a label. It was faded but legible, and carried the name of a fashionable designer. She became aware that Chris was letting her take her time, and that he seemed quite comfortable waiting in silence.

  She turned the label over, then took the coat to the window, the better to read the name on the other side.

  ‘Margaret Benton. Isn’t that the woman who went missing up along the Murray?’

  Chris stared at his assistant, then gave a brief nod. He checked the label for himself, then rang Swan Hill police station.

  They made tea together and took it out to the back veranda. The air between them felt lighter than it had since Anthea had come to Queenscliff.

  An hour later the phone rang. It was Swan Hill ringing back, asking for the coat.

  Chris hung up. His temples were throbbing and his face was flushed. For some reason, he didn’t want Anthea to see this, but he knew she had.

  Anthea went over to the window and stared out at the lavender and rose bushes.

  ‘What about that camel?’ she asked, swinging round to face her boss. ‘Maybe he tromped all over it. Are you going to say in your report that we’re investigating the theft of a dromedary?’

  Chris caught the glitter in her eye. He laughed in spite of himself and said, ‘Jesus love us.’

  Anthea laughed too. ‘Will I ring for the courier?’

  ‘I will,’ Chris said, reaching for the phone again.

  When they’d told him they were sending him a woman, Chris had felt both pleased and nervous. It would make a change. His last junior constable, while they’d gotten along all right on the surface, underneath they’d never warmed to each other. The times they’d had a beer together after work Chris could number on the fingers of one hand.

  He wouldn’t have minded running the station solo. He knew practically everybody in the town, and they knew him. For two months of the summer, there was more than enough work for one man, most of it late at night when the drunks got belligerent. But the rest of the year, no. And Anthea had come looking for drama. He’d seen it in her eyes the minute she walked in. Both the anticipation and the almost instantaneous disappointment had been there. Trouble with the boyfriend. He’d guessed that too. Boring or not, Queenscliff was his backwater, and he wanted it to stay quiet. He wanted to go on managing the town his way.

  Yet he was conscious of a sharp tug of excitement. What if the coat turned out to be important? He thought how Anthea had lifted it to the light. It hadn’t occurred to him to turn the label over. He was aware of his assistant’s grace and neatness, the clean lines of her silhouette, holding the mucky coat in her arms. Excitement caught him, a swell beneath the wave’s head, unnoticed till it hit you hard.

  He’d forgotten all about Camilla Renfrew; he’d told her he’d be back in half an hour.

  FIVE

  Dusk found Anthea by the boat harbour, vaguely embarrassed to be seen wandering about on her own. As the senior officer, it would have been a courtesy for Chris to have invited her over for a meal. There was propriety, of course; but she was sure that Chris did not think of her as a woman. As for herself, God help her when she became that desperate. He hadn’t mentioned his address, but most likely assumed that she already knew it.

  Anthea guessed that her superior’s reserve had developed over many years, part of his armour - though it could easily have gone the other way. He could as easily have become loud, crude and aggressive, and have got away with it - a small fish in an even smaller pond. She saw Chris, at that moment, as a man who kept his own counsel, a man with private tastes and inclinations hidden behind an exterior developed to suit the job. She also sensed that there was some kind of war going on inside him, and knew it had to do with more than a black coat with the name of a missing woman underneath the label.

  The house, when she found it, surprised her by its smallness. It was built right on the street, with no front yard at all. There were no lights on, at the front at least.

  Anthea’s embarrassment left her as she continued on to the harbour, breathing in the strong smells of fish and seaweed. No one was about and she walked up and down the jetty several times, reading the names on fishing boats and watching the ebb tide, swift, green and muscular, flowing with such strength it seemed to her that it would not stop until it reached Tasmania.

  Anthea had never spent time around the Melbourne docks and regretted this now in a mild, nostalgic way, lacking precise memories in which to anchor her nostalgia. One study assignment had involved securing an area of dockland, another working with customs to track down a shipment of heroin in a container. She recalled how keen she’d been to get good marks in her first year, before she met Graeme, and how these assignments now seemed impractical and overly ambitious.

  The harbour was attractive in its way. Anthea could imagine Graeme there, with herself as guide, showing him the sights. Graeme would take an interest in the rigging of the yachts. Perhaps she should learn the names of different pieces of equipment. Could these be the kinds of facts he would expect her to pick up? Graeme would ask confident questions of the fishermen, about the ‘take’ and what was ‘running’. The conversation would put him in a good mood. They would buy the freshest whiting, which she would cook to perfection.

  Anthea paused in her wandering, having come to a halt also in this imagined scene. Would she point out Chris’s house? She’d noticed that the outside had recently been painted, and was sure that Chris would have done the job himself. She foresaw the precise way in which Graeme would turn up his nose, a delicate widening of the nostrils, and, in profile, a lifting of his chin away from what held no aesthetic interest. Through the open door of a tiny pale blue house, she glimpsed a gleaming dark wood passage. At the front was a carefully constructed arch for climbing roses, starting from a pocket-sized square of soil.

  On the whole, she did not think she would walk Graeme past Chris Blackie’s house. Enough that he would be sure to laugh at the lavender and roses, the sign with the big ER and royal crown next to the station door. Enough that it was already an occasion for behind-hand smiles that she’d chosen a career in the police force. ‘My girlfriend’s a copper.’ How often had she forced a smile in return?

  Anthea rounded a corner and came upon another section of the harbour, with huge, hangar-like buildings right on the edge of the water. Two orange boats were moored side by side, bucking against the tide. They were long-prowed, small for the task she’d seen them performing, carrying pilots in and out through the Rip, pilots whose job it was to guide container ships and ocean liners through the narrow channel.

  Anthea walked on, Graeme and his jokes forgotten. Serious work was done here, by these modest orange arrows and their crews, work without which trading in and out of Melbourne could not function. She felt glad that the headquarters was situated in Queenscliff. She wondered when, and under what circumstances, the pilot service called on the police. She thought of Chris labouring away in the station gard
en, head down and back to the ocean, a deliberate turning away. She recalled his expression when she’d mentioned her walks along the cliff top, how his reaction, a swift closing down and turning inward, had seemed a barely conscious act of self-protection. She wondered if there’d been something offensive in what she’d said, and remembered how her one question about swimming had been met with a moment’s silence, then the quiet reply that nowhere was completely safe. At the time, she’d passed this off as further evidence that he was a fussy old maid.

  Gradually, as Camilla waited, her drawing took shape and filled out. There was the paddock with the fence around it, the Moonah, seaward side, where a fat lip of dune gave shelter from the southerlies. Camilla did not attempt to draw herself, only to pencil in an arrow at the place where she’d often stood and watched.

  She drew the young camel as well as she could, sending out a silent apology for the clumsy figure; then tackled other, human ones. Her fingers worked the pencil, strove to make the lines true. She stuck her tongue out, as a child might, that useless tongue whose ordinary work was forfeit.

  Camilla decided to include all the people she’d seen at the paddock since Riza had made his home there: Julie, then Frank Erwin and his wife Cynthia; Frank’s son Jim, who’d stayed for a week with his wife and their baby; Brian Laidlaw riding past on his bike.

  Cars passed, but mostly at a distance, on the main road. Few ventured along the dirt road, for the simple reason that it led nowhere except to a walking track through the sandhills. From time to time cars did come down it, though the sign said clearly, No Through Road. They turned at the end, where there was just enough room to do so. Of course, the driver and passengers couldn’t always be seen clearly; sometimes not at all.

  Then there were kids - kids used the dirt road and the dunes in ways that adults never did. They kicked up dust with their bikes. They made cubby holes and hideaways. Four boys in high school uniform had propped their bikes against the fence one afternoon and stared at Riza as though they’d never seen a camel. They’d been back next day, whooping and laughing, kidding one another.

  Camilla completed her drawing and leant back in her chair, thinking of the dunes whose movement was governed by the wind and their own weight. As a child, she’d believed they crept forward in the night, on feet the size of football fields. She enjoyed the steep incline, wind that met her headlong, catch of moon and starlight at the tops of waves. She enjoyed walking at night. She wondered if she went that way now, in the darkness, she would hear the scream again.

  Camilla missed Riza terribly, the beauty that was in his every step. No drawing of hers could come close to expressing that. The fact that an old woman of no account, whom children taunted and adults dismissed as mad, had been able to feast each day on beauty - now that had been something. She pictured the baby fluff and softness, those legs of a sweet, comical length. She almost tore up her drawing in frustration. Where was Chris Blackie? What was keeping him?

  She decided to get out of the house, to calm herself by walking.

  It seemed important to choose the right hat.

  Camilla fetched one from the hall cupboard. She supposed it was the kind once worn for tennis, though she’d never enjoyed the game. Proficiency at sports had eluded her, like so much else. But youthful losses were vague now, and that was a blessing. The memory of missed opportunities had become so slippery that she no longer felt the need to grapple with it, to ask again whether such-and-such a skill had ever been within her grasp. Still, she stared at the old white hat with its rust-coloured brim and put it on with a sense of reliving some kind of athletic occasion.

  The phone rang. It was Simon.

  ‘Is that you, Mum?’

  Camilla wondered who else it could be, and why her son insisted on phoning when he knew she hated it.

  ‘How are you, Mum? Is everything okay?’

  Camilla nodded at the phone. She put a hand up to adjust her hat and realised with shame that she was crying.

  Simon said she shouldn’t live alone. It was not the first time he had said this. He told her he was sending her some brochures in a querulous, insistent voice.

  Camilla put the phone down, asking herself when things had begun to go wrong between herself and her son, if she could mark the point where a hostile young man had emerged from the chrysalis of childhood. She knew that Simon blamed her for his father’s death, still blamed her, with the unforgiving grief of a ten-year-old boy. And wasn’t this the point, that blame and grief had remained locked in him, unchanged? Any attempt to talk about it while he was growing up had been met with hostility.

  Alan Renfrew had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His heart had been weak, but nobody had known that until it was too late. The day before the heart attack, they’d argued. Alan had been a cold, punitive and jealous husband, and had punished her for failing to produce more sons. After eleven years of marriage, she had hated him. Simon had loved his father. Father and son had loved one another.

  Camilla shrank from the idea of selling the house she’d been born in; but perhaps she should. Perhaps she should give in.

  She jammed her hat firmly on her head and closed the door behind her. Already she felt guilty for hanging up on Simon. Nervous of giving offence, she had always shied away from the question of why Simon’s wife had left him after they’d been married for only two years. Now any matter between mother and son was best broached in writing. The failure of Simon’s marriage was a subject that remained firmly closed.

  SIX

  One photograph of Margaret Benton showed a dark-haired woman in her middle forties staring into the wind and clutching the collar of a black coat with her left hand. Wedding and engagement rings caught the light, but she wasn’t smiling, and the mood of the picture was sombre.

  Anthea stood beside Chris in the clear morning light. He felt her involuntary shiver. She’d downloaded photographs of the missing woman from the internet, and they’d pinned them up. They’d photographed the coat Chris had found before delivering it to the courier and were sure that it was the same.

  Margaret Benton had been missing for eight months. Until her disappearance, she’d lived with her husband, Jack, on an orchard on the outskirts of Swan Hill, within walking distance of the Murray.

  ‘Have you found him?’ Julie Beshervase demanded.

  ‘We’re working on it,’ Chris said mildly.

  He took out Camilla’s drawing and handed it across. Julie threw it on the floor. ‘I don’t believe this!’

  Chris picked the drawing up and pointed. ‘These boys, do you recognise them?’

  Julie made a noise in her throat that was somewhere between a growl and a sob, but she did condescend to look.

  ‘I think this one’s parents run the caravan park,’ she said.

  After Chris left, Julie rang her brother, Clive, to tell him about Riza’s disappearance. She’d left messages the day before, which he had not returned.

  ‘You’ll find him, Sis, don’t worry. He can’t have gone far.’

  Julie began to explain about the fences and the gate, how Riza wasn’t all that big. She could tell her brother was only pretending to listen. She’d cried on his shoulder too often, and this was the result - he made what to him were appropriately sympathetic noises, while his attention was elsewhere. He said the Talbots were having a good time, and that he’d had a postcard from Montpellier. He told her about a soccer match his son had starred in. When Julie felt a scream rising in her throat, she said a quick goodbye.

  When Chris spoke to Clive on the phone, he confirmed what Julie had told him, that it was friends of his who owned the house.

  ‘They must be well off.’

  Clive said he’d lent his sister the money to buy Riza and that she would pay him back when she could.

  ‘What does Julie live on?’

  The answer was a disability pension. She’d had some ‘troubles in the past’.

  ‘So your sister is in considerable debt.’


  ‘It doesn’t bother her. She’s never had much money.’

  ‘Or a proper job?’

  ‘Look, when Julie found Riza and decided to buy him, she was living in a horrible boarding house in Melbourne, with other, other - ’

  ‘Troubled young people?’

  ‘I was happy to help out.’

  Chris told himself that he could check with Centrelink, but he believed that Clive was telling the truth. He wondered if Julie had ever lifted a finger to help her brother, and surprised himself by the bitterness of this reaction.

  Still, he suggested that Julie could do with a visit. There was a short silence before Clive said that he would see about it, but he had a young family, he lived in Albury and worked long hours.

  Chris decided to wait until after school before tackling Ben McIntyre and his friends.

  He needed time to think. Normally, he’d do a bit of gardening as an aid to thought, get the old blood circulating. Now he felt embarrassed, knowing what his assistant thought of his hobby, though he disliked the word, and would not, himself, have used it. More than once she’d come across him on his hands and knees and stood there like some princess waiting for him to stand up and address her respectfully. Now he was working himself up into a lather, all because he felt self-conscious getting out his gardening gloves and trowel. And there was that untidy area up the back that he’d been meaning to get to for weeks.

  Anthea came upon Chris with his wheelbarrow full of weeds, and the sweat of a warmer than expected morning slipping along his hairline into his cotton hat.

  She’d taken photographs of Margaret Benton up and down the main street, but nobody recognised her, or admitted to it if they did. He knew he should have taken the photographs himself, but he wanted to involve his assistant, who after all had been the one to find the name.