Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

  Anthea knocked and, behind the sound of her fist on wood, thought she heard a cough. When no one answered, she found a narrow path that led around the side. A vegetable garden at the back, clearly long established, took up all the available space. She noted a large and flourishing variety of herbs and heard the cough again, louder this time.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone the doctor?’

  Chris shook his head, incapable of words.

  His bedroom was barely wide enough for a single bed, and the cottage, Anthea had noticed as she stepped inside, had only four rooms, or five counting a bathroom which had obviously been added later.

  Anthea phoned the medical centre and made an appointment. She found a carton of juice in the fridge and made Chris drink some. He shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t eat.

  The kitchen caught the rising sun, and Anthea caught it too, feeling it red and golden on her arms. Chris lay with his eyes closed while she bustled about. She knew her presence in his bedroom would have embarrassed him dreadfully if he hadn’t been too sick for embarrassment.

  She checked his landline phone, then his mobile for texts and voicemail. There was one from Frank Erwin saying he’d remembered something. Frank’s voice trailed off in the way of people who dislike leaving messages.

  Anthea wondered if she should drive Chris to Geelong hospital, and not waste time with the medical centre, but the hospital was half an hour away. What if he collapsed in the car? She checked her watch. They’d go to the centre early.

  It was an effort for Chris to keep his eyes open, and he stumbled as Anthea helped him to her car.

  A doctor saw him almost straight away. Anthea wondered how she’d manage if Chris had to go to hospital; but she couldn’t nurse him and work at the same time. She felt an irrational anger with her boss for being so alone. How dare he have no friends! Surely there had to be someone, a neighbour or an old acquaintance.

  The doctor came out and told Anthea that Chris had glandular fever. He wrote a prescription for antibiotics and strong painkillers.

  When she asked about the hospital, he grimaced and said, ‘We’ll see.’

  They spoke about practical details. Anthea was to ring if there was any change for the worse. She wondered if there was something she’d done to make the doctor short-tempered with her, then noticed the dark shadows under his eyes, the blank-faced patients lining the walls. His attitude implied that she should be grateful for his curtly offered information, and do or say nothing that would waste his time.

  Chris had fallen asleep and didn’t wake even when he was moved on a stretcher from the medical centre’s minibus to his bedroom. The stretcher had to be tilted because the cottage’s hallway was so narrow. Chris lay in the middle of it, wrapped in a green cotton blanket, his face swollen, child-like, vulnerable.

  When the paramedics left, Anthea did what she’d been wanting to do. She opened all the doors and windows and let the wind blow through the cottage. The wind felt clean, hard and indifferent, and the sun was strong and hard as well. She breathed in southerly air unused to being interrupted by a landmass. In the power it gave her, the animal exhilaration, she ceased worrying about how she was going to cope.

  When her phone rang, she pulled it out of her pocket and answered without thinking. It was Julie. Frank Erwin had complained about her hanging round his dam. What had Anthea done about those camel prints? And the next lot of rent was due. She didn’t know whether to pay it or not. She wanted to pay, because that meant she believed Riza would come back. But she didn’t know!

  Anthea responded as calmly as she could. She didn’t mention Chris’s illness, guessing that Julie, rather than backing off in reaction to the news, would be inclined to add it to her list of burdens. Nor did she apologise for the lack of a result concerning the hoof prints.

  ‘Did Frank want anything else?’

  ‘Beyond harassing me, you mean? I haven’t been hanging round his stupid dam. I just went to see if there were any fresh prints. When I told him that, he laughed at me! Well, he’ll be laughing out the other side of his face if I discover that he’s been hiding Riza all this time!’

  ‘Are you okay, Julie?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking not fucking okay!’

  Anthea sighed, staring at her phone. Probably all Frank wanted was to complain about Julie trespassing, but she’d have to call him back.

  Frank Erwin did want to complain. Anthea listened in silence and let him get it off his chest. Julie Beshervase was a bludger, a no-hoper. He should have seen that from the start and not let himself get tangled up with her and her camel. He’d thought he was doing her a favour. The rent he charged was laughable. Anthea could have interrupted to ask who else would have paid him for the use of his paddock, but she didn’t.

  As for hiding Riza, then letting the animal out to drink at the dam, well, Frank said, that was past a joke. Assuming he had, for whatever mad reason, stolen the beast, why would he risk it being seen like that?

  Anthea murmured that yes, it was a bit far-fetched.

  The farmer carried on in the same vein for a few more minutes, ending with a warning that he wasn’t going to tolerate Julie or anybody else trespassing on his land.

  When Anthea asked who else had been trespassing, there was silence on Frank’s end.

  ‘Well?’

  Frank cleared his throat, then said, ‘I did see someone by the dam one night.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘That boss of yours annoyed me. Too big for his boots. People sometimes use the paddock as a short cut. They wander along the beach too far, then think they’ll cut back to the road through my place. Usually day-trippers in the summer. It’s irritating, but I never make a fuss.’

  Frank paused, so Anthea could thank him for this consideration, which she did.

  ‘That’s probably who it was. And that’s the only time I saw him, coming round by the dam.’

  A man?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Did you say anything? Call out?’

  ‘I was right up near the top of the hill. I did call out hello, but he didn’t answer. He probably didn’t hear me. I watched till he got to the fence on the other side, and climbed through to the road.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Now you’re testing me.’

  ‘It might be important.’

  A noise in the background that sounded like a heavy object being dropped was followed by a bellow, whether of pain or fury it was hard to tell.

  ‘I have to go,’ Frank said.

  ‘Please answer my question first. Could it have been the - ’

  ‘It was round Christmas,’ Frank said, and hung up.

  Chris slept on. Anthea wondered if she’d have to stay the night, and who to ask for help. She decided on a neighbour, and told her story to an elderly woman who answered promptly when she knocked next door. The woman looked rather grim, but didn’t waste time making Anthea repeat things, or asking silly questions. When Anthea said she needed to call by the station, the neighbour offered to look in on Chris in half an hour.

  Anthea didn’t know what to expect, entering the station as temporary officer in charge. She checked the phone for messages. There was only one, a complaint about a speeding fine. She’d met the complainant, a multiple offender whose idea of fun was to hoon up and down the main street from midnight until two in the morning.

  She realised that she was hungry. There was some ageing avocado dip in the fridge and some biscuits in a tin. She ate them washed down with water from the tap, reading from the file on Chris’s desk, pausing every now and then to brush crumbs from the paper.

  Anthea stared at a photo of Jack Benton. Chris had shown it to Camilla and Julie, as well as the four boys. Apart from Ben McIntyre, none of them had recognised him. She had no reason to suspect that Benton was the man Frank Erwin had seen, and schooled herself against jumping to conclusions. She searched for a report detailing forensic tests on Benton’s Landcruiser
. It wasn’t in the dossier Chris had put together.

  Almost without thinking, Anthea sent off a query, then blushed at her audacity. She pictured Chris asleep in his room, telling herself that she had to be strong and competent in his absence, giving way to a righteous, noble feeling, a feeling of unexpected confidence that she could make decisions and act on them.

  There was a lot to be done in an hour. She planned to call in on Frank, talk to him in person. He could show her where he’d seen the man. Re-visiting the spot might jog his memory.

  ‘Where’s Blackie?’ was Frank’s first question. There was a trick to his voice, as though the village grapevine had already reached him, but he wanted to hear what Anthea would say.

  Anthea kept her account of Chris’s illness to a minimum, stating simply that he had a fever.

  ‘I heard it was glandular fever.’ Frank watched for Anthea’s nod, then continued, ‘Highly contagious, that. They call it the kissing disease. You need to wash everything he touches.’

  Anthea thanked Frank for his advice. They were walking quite quickly and had almost reached the brow of the hill on the farmhouse side. She wondered at the ease with which the farmer assumed she’d be doing Chris’s washing and who, exactly, he’d been talking to. She guessed that, if she fished for this information, he’d withhold it, and that withholding it would give him pleasure.

  Perhaps Frank disliked young women out to make careers for themselves. On the other hand, it might be more the case that his back was still up about the horse trailer.

  ‘Was there a full moon the night you saw the man?’ she asked.

  ‘Funny you should say that. As a matter of fact, there was.’

  They crested the hill and began their descent. Anthea lifted her eyes to the dunes covered with Moonah and tea-tree, cutting Frank’s property off from a view of the sea.

  ‘It was about here I saw him. There.’ Frank pointed to where a path followed the contour of the hill, then wound along the right side of the dam.

  ‘Did it look to you like he knew where he was going?’

  ‘Hard to say. He was going the right way to link up with the road.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see anybody else.’

  ‘Perhaps someone was waiting in a car.’

  ‘I didn’t see a car, or hear one.’ Frank shrugged, the expression on his face difficult to read.

  ‘When you called out, what did he do then?’

  ‘Kept going.’

  Mentally, Anthea measured the line the trespasser would have taken if, as Frank said, he’d decided to take a shortcut from the beach to the main road.

  They turned around and began retracing their steps. Frank broke the silence to say, ‘You know what happened to his father, don’t you?’

  Anthea said nothing, but looked at Frank inquiringly.

  ‘Eric Blackie drowned trying to save a pilot who fell off a ladder.’

  ‘Drowned?’ Anthea heard the echo of her voice bouncing off the hill.

  Satisfied by the reaction he’d produced, Frank told the story of the storm, the hazards of climbing rope ladders even in calm weather. With carefully timed pauses, he worked up to the fall, Eric the crewman watching from below as his master fell, then jumping in after him.

  ‘They both drowned. The pilot’s body washed up at Point Nepean. Chris’s Dad was never found.’

  ‘Do they still do that?’

  ‘Do what? Oh, you mean the ladder. Tried all sorts of things, including helicopters. Come back to the ladders. Ten to one, you’re looking out across the channel, there’s a pilot boat - ’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And just out past the heads there’s some poor bugger swarming up a ladder like a monkey. Every twenty minutes on a busy day.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why do they need pilots? Know how narrow that channel is? Know how big those container ships are? They need ‘em all right.’

  ‘Why do they do it?’

  ‘Honour. Prestige. They’re all master mariners. Skippered their own ships for years. Navigational certificates as long as your arm. And I’m sure the money’s nice as well.’

  But not for the crew, thought Anthea. No honour and prestige for them.

  ‘I suppose pilots work with the same crew for years,’ she said.

  ‘Some do. The ship, it was a Swedish one, let down lifeboats straight away, of course. And the pilot’s driver - he stayed out there searching on his own all night. At first light they brought helicopters and the Coastguard. I felt sorry for the driver. The boats only carry one crewman and a driver. Three on board, that’s all. The driver quit his job.’

  And Chris’s father?’

  ‘“The sea took him”, his widow used to say. You’d bump into her in the street and she’d come out with it. Couldn’t get her to say anything else. Went funny in the head.’

  ‘Where was Chris?’

  ‘When his father drowned? In Melbourne. He came back here to be with his Mum. I don’t think he meant to stay. But then his Mum got sick.’

  They were almost at the farmhouse. Frank asked Anthea, in a voice that was unexpectedly gentle, if she’d be all right.

  She was about to react with a brisk, ‘I’ll be fine’, except that Frank’s voice might have come from a different person, not one who always seemed to be enjoying a private joke at her expense.

  ‘Why don’t you come in for a cuppa?’

  ‘Okay then.’ Anthea smiled. ‘A quick one. Thanks.’

  A kettle was on the stove, steam coming out the top. Knowing nothing about farmhouses except for the little she had read in children’s books, Anthea supposed that a kettle might always be ready on the stove in a farmhouse kitchen.

  Frank asked how she took her tea, and she told him, ‘White. No sugar,’ thanking him again and sighing, wanting suddenly, with a kind of desperation, to go home to her flat and shut the door. What if Chris would resent her staying in his house? He hadn’t asked her to. He might bitterly resent it.

  ‘Might as well make yourself comfortable if you’ve got to stay there overnight,’ Frank said with neutral practicality. ‘We’ve got a mattress you can have. Easy enough to pop it in the ute and drive it over. How about we do that once you’ve had your cuppa?’

  Anthea’s flat looked strange to her, like a place she’d never lived in. She found herself moving from room to room with her eyes down, almost as though she was an intruder, as though she might surprise the real tenant, who might reply with a cry of ‘Halt!’

  She shook her head and told herself not to be stupid. While Frank waited in the ute, she hurriedly packed an overnight bag with pyjamas and a change of underwear, a clean shirt to put on under her uniform. She threw in a towel, toothbrush and paste, her phone charger. Chris had good coffee and plenty of breakfast food, but he was nearly out of milk. She took hers out of the fridge and put it in a plastic bag, after a moment’s hesitation adding a tub of yoghurt as well.

  Chris’s neighbour had left a note on the kitchen bench saying that he hadn’t woken. Frank helped Anthea carry the mattress into what she assumed had been Chris’s mother’s room, now empty of furniture. After Frank left, Anthea stood at the window, feeling the cool air on her face. The room had recently been vacuumed and dusted. In the linoleum were marks where a bed and chest of drawers had been.

  Anthea walked quietly down the corridor to where Chris was sleeping. She bent over and touched his hand, which was hot and dry. She managed to take his temperature without waking him, or perhaps he was so sunk in unconsciousness that it would take a great deal more than a small plastic tube under his tongue to make him wake up. His temperature was 39. She thought of getting Frank back, or asking for the neighbour’s help to drive Chris to the hospital. If she mistrusted the doctor’s judgement, that’s what she ought to do.

  But what if they spent hours waiting in casualty, and the only result was that Chris was sent home again? A few weeks ago a woman had miscarried in the emergency room
toilets. She’d been waiting for three hours to see a doctor. It had made the headlines, of course; but Anthea doubted that the publicity had resulted in more beds, or staff. Chris was probably better off staying where he was. Though a world of doubt might hang on that ‘probably’, it was where she decided to leave him.

  The kitchen was clean and well stocked, the stove and fridge relatively new. Anthea took a tin of tomatoes from a cupboard, found spaghetti in a jar, olives and chilli sauce and parmesan cheese in the fridge. She made what had been one of her and Graeme’s favourite scratch meals, thrown together in ten minutes. It gave her a small start to realise that these meals had always been cooked at her flat, that she’d been the one with ingredients on hand. When they’d met at Graeme’s place after work, they’d gone out to eat. But those times at her flat had been good times. They’d laughed over their bubbling sauce, and salted water bubbling, ready for the pasta.

  To say that Graeme had broken up with her - not that she’d actually said the words to a living soul - would give their separation a formality she shrank from accepting. On the one hand, Graeme might prefer to disappear without any more words being exchanged between them; but, on the other, he might be deliberately leaving his options open, leaving open a crack which he could push wider if and when he chose, confident that she would be waiting.

  When had Graeme started to withdraw? Had it been when she moved to Queenscliff, or weeks earlier, when she received her appointment? Anthea remembered one evening, a dinner - there’d been others present, eight or six - she couldn’t remember the number now, or any of their faces. Dinner at a restaurant, with Graeme playing host. It hadn’t been the time for any kind of personal discussion, but it had suddenly dawned on Graeme, the result of a chance remark made by one of the others, that Anthea was about to graduate, and that meant she would be working out of a police station. She couldn’t imagine what he had been thinking - that her training had been undertaken somehow for its own sake, a hobby, or a way of passing time?