Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

  The walk had made her warm. Though frightened of showing herself at the paddock in the daytime, she understood that night brought its own form of courage - fugitive, stealthy and reliable. As the days had passed since Riza’s disappearance, she’d gone about her simple routines, shopping and preparing food, all the time feeling as though she was on a cliff edge that at any moment might give way.

  Her thoughts returned to the woman with the white face, who, in her haste, a stranger to the area, could have walked clean off the path. Perhaps she had; but then, of course, her body would have been found on the rocks below.

  Camilla had seen the news, and knew Margaret Benton’s body had been found. She might not be able to talk, but she still had a working brain. Who had been after her? Who had made her scream?

  On the path to Riza’s paddock, Camilla had sniffed the air, as though she might smell whoever had taken him away. She’d tripped and fallen over a heaving root, mouth open on a wordless cry.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was Monday morning, the start of a new week, and the footpath outside Queenscliff police station rang to the heavy tread of a tall, self-confident man - not yet middle-aged, but no longer young. Anthea realised that he was deliberately walking in the middle of the path, had no intention of stepping aside for her, and that her uniform confirmed him in his determination to provoke.

  From his appearance, it could be Simon Renfrew. If Camilla’s son was on his way towards a confrontation, he’d be disappointed. Chris had just left for Geelong. Simon might be twice Anthea’s size, but she’d been trained to deal with big men on the lookout for a fight.

  When he was three or four paces away, she asked politely, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Miss.’

  The path widened immediately in front of the station’s gate, and the man passed without either of them having to move aside, but he did what he could to maintain the insult, refusing eye contact, not slackening his pace.

  Anthea decided to keep going, hearing behind her the sounds of impatient knocking. She did not think he would come after her, not in the echo of that Miss, delivered with such scorn. No, it would be more his way to pace, provided that he had the time, or to ring and leave a rude message on the answering machine.

  She wondered what Simon would make of the lavender and rose beds, and recalled her first impressions of the house as a fairytale confection. Now she’d grown used to it, it did not seem so strange to her that the garden of a police station should be tended well, and by its senior officer.

  She was too curious not to risk turning around, and saw that she’d perhaps misjudged the man. He was striding along the footpath in the opposite direction. The glance he threw over his shoulder held the contempt of a few moments before, mixed with a troubling animal appraisal.

  Anthea walked over to the park and her favourite bench. The black lighthouse rose above her. Who would have thought to make a lighthouse black? They were meant to be beacons, to stand out in the night. And in fact there was one like that, a proper normal white one, just around the headland. Close up, the pillar became dark blocks of bluestone, the same as the oldest houses in the street. Still, its presence was menacing, ornate, matched by a dark grey water tower and the walls of the old fort.

  A container ship, directly in front, revealed spaces between the containers that made them look like a giant’s chimney stacks. Anthea wondered what it was about Camilla Renfrew’s son that reminded her of Graeme.

  She remembered holding Margaret Benton’s coat up to the light and how, for a few moments, the office, the whole building, had sprung into a different kind of life.

  Common sense should have told her that police work would mostly be routine. Common sense told her that the Swan Hill police were investigating Margaret Benton’s murder, in the town where she’d lived, where her body had been found. Why should they bother to keep two constables at the opposite end of the state informed?

  To hell with common sense, thought Anthea. Time for that when she was forty. Someone from the CIU ought to be in Queenscliff, asking questions, following up leads. In their absence, she and Chris would just have to do the best they could.

  Anthea went back inside and made a list of all the people she knew who might have seen Margaret Benton in the township, people who had not come forward, but whose memories might only need a nudge. The first of Camilla’s speech therapy sessions, undertaken on that Monday morning, left her throat so sore it felt as though scalding liquid was being continually poured down it. She had decided to be stoic; but the painkillers she was given seemed hardly to make a dent.

  Simon had insisted on the treatment. It seemed to Camilla that her son and the speech therapist were conspiring to make her stay in hospital as miserable as possible. She turned her face to the wall and contemplated the notion that her son wished her dead. Could it be that ever since Alan had died, Simon had wished for her to follow her husband, that, in his boy’s imagination, with his boy’s ideas of shame and honour, he’d conceived of this conclusion as the only right one? Never mind the question of who would bring him up.

  Alan had read Simon war stories from an early age. One of their disagreements had been about this; she’d considered that their son had been too young. The stories had given him nightmares, which Alan had said were good for him to face up to and overcome. If Alan had lived, Simon might have learnt to judge him in return for all the judgments Alan handed down. Instead, the father’s virtues became fixed in the son’s fierce mind. Camilla did not think that anything would happen now to change that. Simon felt no need to change. She was left with the fear that he wanted her to die.

  It was after Alan’s death, Camilla reflected, that she had gone wrong, living first of all in shock, and then, as the shock lessened, in blessed relief. Simon had misunderstood, but his misunderstanding had not been complete. He’d known that his mother despised his father, and from this to the next step - believing that she’d been responsible for his death - had been a small one for a grieving ten-year-old.

  Camilla cupped her cheek in one hand, staring at a brown spot on the wall. Her strength was going; soon she would have none left. It was ridiculous the way this realisation brought relief. She felt that she could face the therapy sessions with something approaching equanimity if she knew that they would soon be coming to an end. Simon wanted what was best for her, he said. She contemplated the enormity of that, and her resolve foundered once again.

  Camilla would give limbs in order to get her voice back, so that she could cry out against the cruelty of that ‘best’. A non-believer, she nevertheless prayed that desperation would work when all other means had failed. The irony, if it ever happened this way, would escape her son entirely.

  In Simon’s world, obstacles existed to be overcome. He was fearful of any kind of ambivalence or contradiction. Had she taught him that? But how could she be blamed for a person grasping with a claw-like grip at the letter of a lesson, while totally ignoring its spirit? In Simon’s view, since doctors had found no physiological basis for his mother’s loss of speech, she could and should be made to speak again. Sometimes, Camilla wanted to tell Simon, obstacles existed for a different reason. Wasn’t there an alternative viewpoint, equally as valid, that said the origins of her affliction were destined to remain in shadow, and that this lack of explanation ought to be respected?

  Camilla shook her head, refusing food, scornfully regarding the painkillers that didn’t do their job, passionately wishing that she could give up on her treatment. She hadn’t slept, but at least the night had allowed a dulling and a fading of the day’s troubles, chief of which was a new theory of the therapist’s, which returned in all its ghastly detail now.

  The gist of the new theory was that Camilla’s loss of speech had been caused by a virus she’d contracted five years earlier. The therapist had made Camilla go right back through her childhood and youth, listing all her illnesses. Camilla recalled the Ah-ha! look on the therapist’s face when she’d come to
this particular virus.

  Camilla had noticed a difficulty in pronouncing certain words a few weeks after she’d recovered from it, a thickened slurring of her tongue, a verbal stumbling which had deteriorated, at first gradually, then more rapidly, into her present state. To Simon, Camilla in herself, the person who was his mother, had become a repository for disease. She’d seen this in his face when he’d appeared in the doorway of the ward, taking in at one glance the bed, her trussed-up leg, then moving to her mouth.

  Nurse Pemberton pursed her lips, but forbore expressing in words her disapproval of the untouched meal. ‘Here’s a visitor for you, Mrs Renfrew,’ she said.

  Camilla turned towards the door. What could have brought Simon back?

  But it was Chris Blackie, pausing in the doorway as though uncertain of his welcome.

  Chris said hello and sat down on a chair next to the bed. He asked Camilla if there was anything she needed, then, with a glance at the nurse’s departing back, took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket.

  Camilla recognised the drawing she’d done for Anthea the day before. Chris spread it flat between them on the bed, while Camilla eyed it warily, as though it might move of it own accord.

  As Chris began to point and question, Camilla forced herself to concentrate and to write as clearly as she could. Chris held her notebook for her when he saw how her right hand shook. She had thought about it during the night, in between worrying about Simon and the therapy. It was possible she’d seen the woman in the street, wearing other clothes, but she didn’t think she had.

  When Chris showed her a photograph of Jack Benton, she shook her head. There was nothing special about that face and no, she didn’t recognise it. He could have been up by the lighthouse, but she’d heard no second pair of footsteps, and certainly he hadn’t appeared out of the fog. Did she think the woman had been running away from someone? It was a possibility. She couldn’t say for sure.

  Chris had looked up the meteorological records, but he wanted Camilla’s confirmation. December 30 had been foggy. Camilla nodded yes.

  ‘Have you ever ridden a camel, Mrs Renfrew?’

  Camilla jerked her head up and made a sign for Chris to repeat what he’d said.

  She smiled then, wishing she had coloured pencils, to draw the sunrise in the background. She wished that her soft black pencil might take on colour as a gift. She recalled with absolute clarity that early morning on the beach, the tide running out, the glitter and the feeling that it was here at last, the culmination of all those weeks of waiting for her birthday treat.

  Camilla picked up her notebook and drew that long-ago camel for this patient policeman who’d managed at last to ask the right question. A female, with wide, careful feet - how she’d turned her head and stared, once the small girl was settled on her back, before the driver’s command, sharp as a slap, resulted in that first incredible lunge forward.

  There had been forbearance in the camel’s expression; also the mild surprise of, well, this one’s a lightweight. Oblique sunlight had emphasised the planes of her face, thick jowls and lips, eyes half covered by sweeping lashes whose single glance had said so much.

  Camilla drew the camel facing forward, towards the rocks at the eastern end of a beach whose every detail she recalled. She drew herself as a stick child, proudly upright. She swayed backwards and forwards in her hospital bed and filled in the remainder of the picture quickly - her father and mother, riding either side of her, the other people who’d booked for the tour.

  She handed the sketch to Chris, who studied it, then asked softly, ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Broome’, Camilla wrote at the bottom, adding the month and year.

  ‘Broome?’

  She nodded, turned over the sheet and wrote, ‘My father was working there. It was my eighth birthday.’

  Chris smiled at the picture of the small girl on the hump, imagining how long before dawn she would have been awake and ready. He wondered what the Indian Ocean looked like, never having been further west than Adelaide.

  There was something odd about the child’s expression, then Chris realised that she didn’t have one. Her eyes looked down, though her straight-backed little body was all anticipation.

  Camilla put a hand to her throat, wishing Chris had the power to take her away, out of the clutches of the speech therapist, some place where even her son would not be able to reach her. What would happen if she committed some awful crime and had to be locked up? There would be a ward in the jail for the criminally insane. Her leg could be held in traction until the bones knitted, if they ever did. Nobody would badger her to get her voice box working. The authorities would label and then, if she was lucky, ignore her.

  But she would never see the beach once she was officially classified as mad, never watch that film of water shine before it dried, that space between the tides. She saw the camel’s large foot, with its pneumatic lift, perfectly designed for sand, two feet down on one side, then two on the other; and herself a small and lofty girl, who’d waited confidently for her treat, who’d had no concept, then, of promises that turned out to be false. How protected she’d been! How could she have failed to divine even a hint of the future that would one day be hers?

  ‘I don’t feel well. I’m sorry,’ Camilla wrote on a clean page of her notebook.

  Chris nodded and said he’d come back later. Camilla made a gesture of regret and apology.

  After he’d left, she lay still, staring out the window, and thought how Riza would have loved the beach, loved to feel the sand between his toes. It was his birthright, and he’d been so close. She went red, remembering what a hash she’d made of it when she’d tried to indicate this once to Julie Beshervase.

  The beach was less than three hundred metres away from his paddock, and Riza was as good as gold. He would have allowed Julie to lead him there and back. And she, Camilla, would have had the joy of watching the lovely creature plant his feet on sand. Recognition would have been there.

  Camilla put her hand to her throat again, and gently massaged it. Pain kept her awake and made her aware of exactly where she was. But in her mind’s eye, she saw Riza turn his head as though he smelt his own mother, trotting towards her on soundless feet. She patted him, and held her face close to his, smelling his grassy breath. Living in this memory, Camilla felt the tide’s pull, and the moon’s in the same direction, impossible to resist, and the wet sand splashed by a shore break beginning to gather strength. It was time to walk your camel, before the tide came in.

  When the orderly came to wheel her to the speech pathology room, Camilla pretended to be asleep. She heard the orderly whispering to the nurse and clenched her fists, contemplating the logistics of a hunger strike. Surely she was too old to be force fed. But then she recalled her son and the speech therapist, heads side by side above her, the thin, straight indignation of their mouths, the awful tubes that would carry the unwanted food. No, the punishment that reared up in the face of any further protest was worse than what she currently endured. She must just last the weeks until she was allowed to go home.

  Chris decided to buy himself a coffee in one of the small streets near the hospital.

  He took out Camilla’s drawings and looked at them, one by one. He knew that Ben was holding out on him, as was Ian Lawrey. Either of them could have taken the camel; or another boy whom Ben and Ian were protecting.

  Chris’s coffee was put in front of him and he drank it quickly. He liked his coffee hot and this one was barely warm. It didn’t matter. The small café was quiet, somewhere to think without being interrupted.

  He had no doubt that the scream Camilla had heard had been made by Margaret Benton. He would write another report. Surely this time it would not be ignored.

  Margaret Benton might have dropped her coat in the sandhills, or left it somewhere else, which meant somebody besides herself had taken it there. It had been a good coat, expensive. Chris was inclined to think that, if a stranger had found it, then he or she wou
ld have kept, or sold it.

  He’d been back to look and there’d been nothing else where he’d found the coat, no signs of a disturbance. He’d dug around to make sure that nothing had been buried there.

  Chris spoke to the school principal, and obtained permission to question Ben during school hours. The principal offered the use of his office. When Chris said he wanted to speak to the boy alone, the principal frowned, but did not object. He left the office door open and Chris knew that he wasn’t far away.

  ‘When you found out that Margaret Benton had been murdered, you got scared. I don’t blame you. Especially when she’d been staying at your van park. But I need to find out where she and her husband went after they left, and I think you know something that can help me.’

  Ben’s face had gone pale again. The dark hairs on his upper lip stood out strangely, as though he was both too young to have grown them, and too old to have left them unshaven.

  ‘Rasch - ’ he began, then bit his bottom lip.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Rasch said he’d seen this old witchy sort of woman on the cliff path.’

  ‘When did Raschid see the woman?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A cough from next door reminded Chris that he could be interrupted any moment.

  Chris returned to the dare and how it had been carried out, asking questions until he had the sequence of events reasonably clear.

  When Zorba’s bet to ride Riza had been interrupted, the four boys had left the paddock; but they’d been keyed up, too excited to separate and go home. They’d gone back to Zorba’s, whose older brother, Theo, had been down from his farm. Zorba had taken a packet of Theo’s cigarettes and they’d smoked them on the beach.

  ‘Who took the camel, Ben?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could it have been Zorba?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘It’s time to tell the truth.’