Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

  Chris studied the prints. He looked funny with his bum stuck out, trying not to get muddy. Anthea drank water from a bottle she had brought in order to hide her smile.

  Chris stood up, lifting his cap to scratch his head. They exchanged a glance. Anthea understood that the last thing he wanted was to tackle Frank Erwin again with so slight a piece of evidence. Frank would laugh in mockery and scorn.

  Chris photographed the prints, walking carefully around the muddy patch and recording it from different angles. ‘Pity we don’t have a dromedary here,’ he said, ‘to make the comparison.’

  ‘It’s Riza’s print!’ Julie’s voice was waspish with an undercurrent of hysteria.

  ‘Don’t go tackling Frank, now, or anybody else. Leave it up to us.’ Chris held Julie’s eyes until she nodded.

  Green shoots were everywhere. It was the impatience of the spring, brooking no excuse. Anthea thought that, when they found Riza - if they found him alive - he would have grown heaps.

  Chris recalled what he’d been like at Anthea’s age - keen to succeed, respectful of authority. What had happened to that respect? If he’d been asked two weeks ago, he would have replied that nothing had happened to it, that it was intact. He would have replied without needing to think.

  A police force depended on hierarchy. The alternative was chaos. But once Chris began to doubt the wisdom of his youthful conclusion, other doubts sprang up behind it. It was as though the failure of the CIU to respond to his reports had operated like a curtain, pulling back to reveal a gaudy and undisciplined spectacle, a show that drew him towards it, even as it alarmed him and made him afraid that all his beliefs and values, up until then, had been false.

  Chris hurried away before he lost his temper with Julie Beshervase, and the whole damned lot of them.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On her way to the caravan park, Anthea recalled how Julie’s older brother had lent her the money to buy Riza. There were questions still needing to be asked about that, but was Julie too distressed to answer them?

  The cold wind hit her and she pulled the jacket of her uniform more tightly round her chest. She realised how open and exposed the van park was on a windy day.

  Penny had two heaters going in the office and did not look pleased to see her.

  Anthea smiled and asked Penny how she was, receiving the briefest nod and ‘Fine thanks’ in reply.

  ‘I was just wondering, when the Bentons made their booking, whether they said if your park had been recommended to them by a friend or family member.’

  Penny shook her head. ‘If it was, they didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Did they say anything about where they were intending to go after they left here?’

  ‘I think Jack Benton did say something to Alex, after that ruckus over the barbecue. Alex told him he’d have to calm down and accept his ruling as park manager, or leave. And Jack said, where would he go? And Alex said that wasn’t his problem. Then Jack said something about the Ocean Road. That’s what I think anyway, but it would be better to ask Alex.’

  Penny hesitated, then went on determinedly, ‘I’d just as soon you and Chris left our Ben alone. He’s been that touchy. You can’t look at him sideways. I’m sure if he knew where that camel was he’d have said so by now.’

  Anthea couldn’t give any such assurance. Indeed, hearing Ben’s reaction made her feel sure that he was still hiding something. She knew Penny saw this suspicion in her face.

  Anthea felt like a walk before heading back to the station. She told herself she’d earnt it. The tide was out, the high point it had reached a wavering line marked with brown and green seaweed and bits of broken shells. The soil, pock-marked with white salt circles, felt spongy under her feet. She was careful not to step on the patches of dark, oozing mud. When she looked up, she saw an old man walking slowly along the shoreline. He disappeared around the curve where Swan Bay met the much larger Port Phillip Bay, with its dangerous Rip and shipping lanes carrying container after container to Melbourne.

  It was still a novel idea to her, to think of commerce in this way, passing by them constantly. It was a different way to think of Melbourne, a way that Graeme would hardly be aware of. From where she stood, the city was visible as no more than a faint pollution smudge, coloured as usual by his rejection of her. As Anthea put this firmly out of mind, another thought surfaced. If she were going to hide something - even something as big as a camel - she would choose a city to do it in.

  The station was empty. Anthea settled herself at her desk, and began looking up caravan parks along the Ocean Road.

  She was interrupted by a metallic thump, followed by angry voices and banging car doors.

  A car reversing from a parking spot had backed into an oncoming one. Each driver blamed the other. They would have stood in the street shouting till they came to blows.

  Anthea got both men inside, thought of phoning Chris, then decided she could handle the incident without him.

  She put the drivers on opposite sides of the counter to fill in their reports. When she was confident they’d settled down, she photographed the cars. A small crowd had gathered and were debating the rights and wrongs of the accident. It was obvious that the parked car should have given way; but the townsfolk, Anthea was aware, did not allow the obvious to get in the way of a good argument.

  The two men handed over their reports like schoolboys at the end of detention. Anthea told them they could move their cars. When she tried ringing Chris, she found that his phone was switched off. She sent him a text, then returned to the yellow pages.

  What if the Bentons had driven back to Swan Hill on New Years Eve? If she could prove that, then there were a couple of days at Swan Hill that did not seem to be accounted for. If the Bentons had managed to find somewhere else to stay, then that time was still a blank.

  Half an hour later, she’d made no progress at all. If Jack Benton had tried to book somewhere along the Ocean Road, would any of the park managers remember? At peak holiday time it was most unlikely.

  On her own in the quiet building, Anthea was suddenly gripped by a sharp physical memory of the night Graeme had spent in her flat overlooking Swan Bay, how her tiny bedroom had seemed to expand in order to take in the two of them; a wavering, fluid expansion of white sheets and night air and the unbelievable luxury of her lover’s skin. She had felt herself blessed in a thousand ways, as though nothing had happened to sour their relationship.

  They hadn’t talked about themselves, or Melbourne and the distance that separated them. They hadn’t talked much at all. They’d drunk the wine she had so carefully selected. They’d joked about a television program, then they’d gone to bed.

  Anthea tried to put the memory out of her mind, and couldn’t. But then, on her own in the office, staring at lists of caravan parks, she thought - we had that time. I had it. It was mine, no matter what the next day brought.

  She sighed, embarrassed by how loud her sigh sounded in the empty room, feeling the beginnings of anxiety about what Chris was up to, and why he hadn’t turned his phone back on. She tried his landline home phone, letting it ring out before hanging up.

  Anthea kept going with her systematic search of van parks, wishing again for a decisive boss, a big metropolitan station, a clear chain of command. She would be at the bottom, the youngest and least experienced member of a team; but she would be given straightforward tasks and orders; she wouldn’t feel as though she was trying to achieve something in a vacuum.

  At Apollo Bay, she had a bit of luck. Jack Benton had rung the park and the manager had told him sorry, they were fully booked. Jack, who’d introduced himself at the start of the conversation, had argued, then become abusive. The park manager had jotted down his name in case he ever rang again.

  ‘Trouble I don’t need,’ he told Anthea, who thanked him and then made a note.

  She felt pleased and decided to go for another walk. She locked the front door and headed down to the pier, breathing in the kelp that the last tid
e had deposited. There were piles big enough to live in, if you could stand the smell, make castles of, and forts, and rank, slippery hideaways.

  She thought of Margaret Benton’s body emerging from its grave. Jack’s story about his wife leaving the house to do the shopping and never returning could have been invented after she was already deep in the fertile river soil. But if she’d been killed in Queenscliff and his Landcruiser used to transport her body to Swan Hill, some evidence of this had surely remained.

  Anthea’s courses at the Academy had dinned into her just how hard it was to erase all evidence of a body from a car. Of course it was a long jump from arguing over a barbecue to murdering your wife. But Anthea was satisfied in her own mind that Margaret Benton had been trying to escape, and that her husband had prevented her.

  The white ferry was half way across the Rip, returning from Sorrento. The orange pilot boat, tiny by comparison, was on its way back too. Terns had located a shoal of fish and were diving; vertical, exact. Anthea imagined the view from under the water, from the fishes’ point of view - a calm surface, nothing out of the ordinary, then all hell breaking loose.

  She fetched her car and drove to Julie’s house, relieved to see Julie’s bike in its usual position. She realised that concern for Julie was a constant nagging presence at the back of her mind. More than once she’d imagined Julie deciding that, without Riza, there was no point in hanging on. When she knocked on the front door and there was no answer, she decided to go around the back.

  Julie was in the yard, breaking up stale bread and scattering it on the grass. She turned to look at Anthea with a small, self-conscious frown. Exhaustion had thinned her face; her body had lost its long-legged grace.

  ‘I suppose you want to come in?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘We could talk out here.’

  ‘There’s nowhere to sit down.’

  Anthea conceded the point with a nod. Inside the house, the smell didn’t seem so bad. The kitchen window was open, and the garbage bin, overflowing on Anthea’s last visit, had its lid firmly on.

  When Anthea asked Julie if her brother had set a time for paying back the loan, Julie said, her frown deepening, ‘Is that what they teach you in police school? To grow a hide as thick as a rhinoceros?’

  ‘Have you told the previous owner about Riza’s disappearance?’

  ‘I rang him. He was sympathetic, but what could he do?’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why he might want your camel back?’

  ‘I sent some photos a few weeks ago. He was happy that Riza was doing well.’

  ‘Are you sure you never saw Margaret Benton anywhere around here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nowhere round the paddock?’

  ‘I just told you!’

  Riza’s saddle was arranged across two chairs, directly in the light. Each mirror shone. The leather had been polished so that it looked wet.

  Anthea stared at the saddle, conscious of Julie to one side, a sullen rag doll after her outburst. She walked across and saw herself reflected from this angle then that, long blue legs and face foreshortened to a dot of white. She moved her arm and there it was, a line transfixed and multiplied. It seemed each mirror had a small mind of its own.

  Julie said, ‘Did you know that a camel can’t see behind itself, like a horse? I mean, a horse can’t either. In that way, a camel is just like a horse.’

  There was something menacing in Julie’s tone. Anthea felt the hairs rise on her forearms

  ‘So if someone came up behind Riza, he could have been surprised. Though camels have excellent vision otherwise, and an excellent sense of smell.’

  ‘We’ll get him back,’ Anthea said, trying to put into her voice the conviction that she did not feel.

  Anthea sat in her car and felt how reality could split, how Julie straddled a split that was growing wider. She wondered what she ought to be doing if she really believed that Julie was contemplating suicide - arrange someone to stay with her, which Julie would almost certainly refuse - invite her to stay at the flat, which she would hate?

  She could contact the relevant social services. Julie might be offered counselling. Anthea knew in advance that Julie would consider this kind of interference as a form of betrayal. Was it better for Julie to be angry with a police officer who couldn’t solve a simple crime, or be left alone to follow her own worst inclinations?

  Anthea went on sitting, trying to collect her thoughts. Her unease seemed in some odd way the fault of all those mirrors on the saddle, reflecting her back in pale ovals and blue lines without being able to convey anything of what was in between.

  On her way home, she called in to the library and took out a book on bird migration, surprising herself by feeling her spirits lift as she filled out a membership form and provided proof that she was a local resident. She sat on her balcony with the book open in front of her, reading about the orange-bellied parrots, rare and endangered, who wintered on Swan Island.

  There was quite a large section on the Bar-tailed Godwit. Their wing bones, thin as skewers, served the waders on a ten thousand kilometre journey to their nesting grounds in Siberia. Anthea learnt that the Godwits used the same migration route as half the world’s shorebirds, the Asia-Pacific Flyway, which led them over the steppes of Mongolia and Northern China to the mudflats of northeast Asia, where they rested, stocking up on worms and shellfish, before crossing the Pacific.

  It grew cold and windy, but Anthea scarcely noticed. She’d never taken an interest in birds before, and knew nothing of their feats of navigation and endurance. The golden seagrass was almost covered by the rising tide, yet the Godwits, along with stilts and dotterels that she could now identify, continued foraging along the shoreline. What an encumbrance, to be named for the creator, she thought, narrowing her eyes to watch them - a top-heavy name for such a slight, self-effacing creature. And whose ‘wit’ had it been? She’d found no reference to the origin of the name.

  The black swans stretched their long necks underwater. Anthea loved the way the tide came in here without a wave, on most days scarcely a ripple. The swans called to each other, a soft, conversant honking. She lifted her head and smelt the rich stink of dead plants composting. She wondered what building had been there, where she was now, before the block of units; whether there’d been a couple of old weatherboard cottages similar to the one next door, and whether their owners had died in order to make way for concrete, aluminium and glass.

  Anthea made herself a herb omelette and ate it on her balcony with chunks of bread, having put on a thick jumper to keep out the wind, thinking about journeys. There was the Bentons’ Christmas holiday, a modest trip from Swan Hill to Queenscliff, and her own small, unremarkable relocation, to set against the massive journey the shore waders faced each year.

  The last few paragraphs of the chapter in the library book described how the parent birds left Siberia weeks before their young, who followed the navigation routes and arrived at Swan Bay by instinct. Each year, there would be some, many perhaps, accidents along the way; birds drowning, or dying of exhaustion or starvation. It was the Godwits’ ordinariness that moved her, how nondescript they looked, with their brown and buff-coloured feathers, methodically picking their way along the tide line. What did they think of their birthplace in Siberia? Did they hold pictures of it in their minds?

  To the Godwits, the bumpy seagrass, the black mud, crusted and drying at the edges, only to be soaked again by the incoming tide, had the proportions of great mounds and bog-lands full of food. Their light feet did not sink. What was their impression as they looked up and saw humans stumbling through their territory, shaking their great feet like princes and princesses whose carriages had been unaccountably delayed? What did they think of the swans, twenty times their size and weight, who lived off the seagrass meadows all year round, who never had to travel further than their backyard to find food, or lay their eggs? Great humping creatures the swans were, effortlessly graceful.

  Af
ter her customary walk along the cliff, Anthea lay in bed thinking about Julie. She’d suffered bouts of insomnia from time to time, and knew how desperate it could make you feel. She recalled Julie crouched by the station’s back fence like some half-hidden feral animal, one that knew it had to hide, but wasn’t clever enough to do so properly. If she’d had a gun that day - if Julie had been a rabbit, she a hunter - then Julie would be dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When Chris didn’t show up for work next morning and still wasn’t answering his phone, Anthea called around to his place.

  It was a dinky house, she thought, pulling up outside it, a toy house held up off the ground by foundation blocks that looked as though the next gale would split and sunder them, bringing down the child-sized wooden structure in a heap. Yet the building had survived for a hundred and fifty years. One wall was dominated by a crumbling brick chimney, and Anthea was reminded of her neighbour’s cottage with fruit trees cleverly arranged around it. If a developer bought three of these and wanted to replace them with units, advertising first-rate water views, would anyone complain?

  Chris’s car was parked outside. The blinds at the front were drawn. The chimney looked stuck on, an afterthought, and yet would have been a central feature of the original construction. The family would have gathered round the stove to cook and keep warm, and would have slept near it as well.

  When Anthea had learnt that Chris had shared the house with his mother until her death from cancer, she’d thought that this partly explained his character. Three years was a long time to nurse somebody. She did not think that she would have the patience, and had no idea, really, how she would feel about her parents had they lived. She was still young enough to want life to grab her under the armpits, take her by the hair. She pictured the strong wind that would lift her up, scouring the small, dark cottage that had been built by a fishing family, the house where her boss had been born. She imagined the wind blowing grief away.