“Oh.”
“Gibson,” said Erskine.
“Yeah?”
“Come in here. I want to talk to you.”
Gibson sighed, but followed Erskine into his office. Erskine shut the door behind them.
“I want to go up there,” said Gibson, hoping to throw him by getting in first. His head was pounding from the night before and his stomach had only just settled down.
“Where?”
“Angel Rock.”
“What for?”
“I . . . I just . . . I just need to go and have a look.”
“Have a look? Sounds like you need a holiday, Matthew, that’s what it sounds like.”
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
“What if I said you couldn’t do either?”
Gibson shrugged. “I’m ready to quit. Right now. I’ll walk out.”
“All right, don’t get hasty with me.”
“I’ve just . . . had enough . . . for a while at least.”
“Yeah? This girl got something to do with it?”
Gibson shifted in his seat. “Maybe.”
“Cut and dried, isn’t it? Opened her veins, Swain said. Door was locked.”
Gibson flinched. Erskine’s expression suddenly changed and he leant forward in his chair a touch and his look softened.
“Sorry, son. Sometimes I forget. You can tell me . . . this something to do with Frances?”
Gibson looked away and gave no answer.
“I can see it is,” said Erskine, nodding. “But you’ve had suicides before, why’s this one . . . ?”
Gibson shrugged.
“You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Erskine sighed and leant back in his chair.
“You’d really quit if I said no?”
“Yep.”
Erskine nodded. “Well, I suppose we should let the parents know, put ’em out of their misery. Ring the copper up there before you go, all right?”
Gibson nodded and unclenched his jaw. It felt like a huge weight had been removed from atop him.
“Yep,” he said. “Will do.”
Erskine leant further back in his chair and linked his fingers together behind his head.
“Kids that age, Matty, who knows why they do anything. My girls gave me a few heart attacks, I tell you.”
“Maybe that’s what I’d like to find out—if it was something . . . within her, or something else. I mean, she was only a kid, Bill, you know? Even younger than Frances.”
Erskine nodded. “But kids sometimes . . . go to extremes,” he said. “They can’t see past what’s directly in front of ’em. Can’t see a better way out.”
“No.”
“And you can’t go back and change that, or change what she did, any more than you can go back and change—”
“No,” said Gibson, cutting him off. “I know.”
Swain gave him a filthy look as he came out of Erskine’s office but Gibson ignored it and asked him a question.
“Did you find anyone who saw her?”
“Nup, nobody except the old bird in the milk bar up the street. She bought some things there a couple of days ago. Old bird said she was barefoot, looked a little lost, but seemed happy enough. Only saw her the once, though.”
Gibson nodded, and then he left. Outside, he looked up at the sky for what seemed like the first time in months. It was clear, a pretty blue, and the air felt fresh and mercifully free of the floating grime which seemed to settle on everything. He felt like he’d taken one foot out of the land of the dead and put it in the land of the living. He set off down the street whistling, making the tune up as he went along, thinking of all the things he needed to do.
He took a good look at his face in the mirror when he got home.
“Thirty-seven years old,” he muttered.
He’d probably, he had to admit, always been unremarkable to look at. Dark eyes, sometimes green, sometimes slate-grey, a clump of greying, unkempt hair. Not strikingly handsome but not strikingly ugly, tall, but not outstandingly so, and pale, very pale, as if he’d been ill for a long time. He wasn’t a pretty sight; even his whiskers were coming out white now, and his teeth were an unpleasant shade of yellow. He shook his head. It was, he reckoned to himself, with a bit of work, a face just about good enough for a new start, a second chance.
He cleaned himself up and made himself something to eat and then drove to the nursing home. His mother was asleep when he put his head through the gap in the curtains circling her bed. Her mouth was open and her head was propped up on two or three pillows. Her hair looked as though it had been washed and brushed and her lips were coloured with bright red lipstick and her cheeks were rouged. He went and found a nurse and brought her over to the bed, his hand on her elbow as if he had her in custody.
“What’s this about?” he asked, pointing.
The woman looked tiredly at his mother and gave a faint smile.
“A woman from the boutique down the road comes in sometimes, does their hair, puts on a bit of make-up. She quite enjoyed herself.”
The nurse shook his mother’s arm. He nearly stopped her but his mother only opened her eyes for a moment and then closed them again.
“You must be her son.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t see much of you.”
“No, well, what’s the point? She doesn’t even recognise me any more.”
“But you know who she is.”
Gibson blinked. “Yeah. I suppose I do.”
The nurse pulled up the sheets and straightened the blanket.
“She enjoyed it, you say?”
“Yes. She looked at herself in the mirror and oohed and aahed.”
The nurse smiled at him and left when he nodded. Maybe she wasn’t seeing what he was, but then she did not know his mother as anything other than the bag of bones she was now.
He sat down by the bed and stared at her, wondering—not for the first time—what she really knew of his sister’s fate and what she’d never told him—and now never would. It was all so long ago and it was far too late but the thought began to gnaw at him and he wondered how he could ever stop it. Whatever she knew was lost forever in a dark and ruined mansion of remembrance and recollection. He pictured his sister wandering through it, a stub of candle lighting her way. He would never find out more about her and she would never be able to tell him herself. He bent over and kissed his mother’s creased old forehead.
“Goodbye, Mum,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
In the evening, after he’d made his preparations, he climbed up onto the roof of his house and sat looking out across the city. Although he loved it, it sometimes seemed to him a city with too many lost souls, too many bad pennies, too many unhappy ghosts.
Over by the wharves arc lamps lit up the masts and upper works of merchant ships. He caught a glimpse of the South Steyne slapping through the chop and then a great nimbus of cloud swung around the moon and snuffed out its light. Pleasure boats, jaunty with strings of bunting and lights, passed by beetle-like in the new blackness. He could almost hear the chinking of the revellers’ glasses as they toasted their cleverness and good fortune. He wondered if they would be quite so merry if they could see themselves from where he sat: almost inconsequential there between the empty shimmering jet above and the parlous substance sliding by just beneath their well-shod feet.
He decided to wait till morning to leave but he couldn’t sleep no matter what he did or didn’t do. Just after midnight he gave up. He locked the house, checked again where Angel Rock was on the map, and then set off through the quiet, empty streets. He thought about Darcy Steele as he drove and he became determined to press on through the night, to stay dreamless, to decide in the small hours, when his spirit, his resolve, was weakest, whether he really wanted to continue with the assignment he’d embarked upon, or make the promise to himself—to Darcy, and Frances—that he was considering.
&nbs
p; As he left Sydney behind and drove north through the night he sometimes sensed a fluttering just behind his shoulder, always quicker than his eye as he turned his head. He thought at first it was the girl again, somehow conjured from her bed by his tired mind and given wings, but then, in the middle of the long night and a wide stretch, he stopped by the side of the road, the stars in full bloom overhead, and he knew that it was no more than his own death shadowing him, the black negative to his blood’s red.
9
Tom climbed up behind the two big Canadian saws at the front of the sawmill and began to fill the butcher’s two hessian bags with sawdust. Just like the Magic Pudding, no matter how much he took away from the heap it never seemed to diminish. He remembered how he used to read the story to Flynn and the pain bit into him anew and he cursed it as if it were a dog that wouldn’t do what it was told and then he sat down in the sawdust and sucked in some deep breaths.
He and Henry had barely said a word to each other since the night he’d been found. Henry had to go back to work shortly after and soon he was spending more and more of each day out in the bush. When he’d been able Tom went with Pop up into the hills, searching for any trace of Flynn, trying to remember what had happened. Pop said it was the bang on his head that had knocked it out of him. Tom sensed it was hopeless, but he also sensed that Pop was helping him despite the fact that it was, and for reasons he didn’t quite understand. Then, one day, Pop had taken off his hat and wiped his brow, looked at Tom, and Tom had known what the look meant. They stopped searching and went home.
Then he’d begun to dream—sporadically at first and then nearly every night—about the time he’d been gone. All he could remember of the dreams at first was the darkness in them, occasionally a flickering yellow light, but then he was able to recall the presence of something crouching in the darkness, something with teeth—man or beast, he couldn’t tell—waiting, watching. He told Pop about the dreams— only Pop—and even though it helped it didn’t make them stop. Then some people began to whisper that he knew more about his brother’s disappearance than he was telling; that he was hiding some terrible secret, some terrible act of foolishness on his part that had caused Flynn’s death. They said there was something very peculiar about it all, and even though Pop rounded on a few people in the street and pinned their ears back the talk did not stop altogether.
Until both tyres punctured he spent his days riding his bike along the long, straight roads of the valley floor and sometimes, sweating and straining, up into the hills west of the crossroads. He’d stop and look back down at the town, slapping the dust off his clothes, but he never saw anything to fill him with hope. He began to spend more and more time sitting in the long grass of the riverbank across from his house, peering into the water, a slight and unmoving figure beneath the hovering summer insects.
Christmas had come and gone. A church service had been held for Flynn a couple of Sundays before, but for Tom all the words had run together and made little sense. It hadn’t done his mother much good either. Although she’d recovered a little after his return she’d worsened a good deal afterwards, as if getting him back wasn’t quite enough. After a few failed attempts at returning to work she’d taken to her darkened bedroom, sleeping well into the mornings and then past lunch time as well. A nun from the church in Laurence had to come and feed her with a spoon for a whole week.
He picked himself up out of the sawdust and bent back to his task. As he shovelled he remembered, suddenly and vividly, the way his mother blew him and Flynn kisses at bedtime, the one time he’d watched her stand there in the dark as though waiting, or listening, the air warm and still, the sound of a storm rumbling far away, the wind picking up as it closed in, the flicker of lightning. She was the sweetness in his life, the balance to the severity of Henry, and there was something very wrong with her that he was powerless to alter. He realised then that it had been Flynn who had kept them all together. The thought stopped him in his tracks, made his mouth dry up, made him feel sick, and then a brown grasshopper, like the first drop from a grim storm, crashed to the ground near him and clambered off across the sawmill floor. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and suddenly the mill seemed an altogether more eerie place. He tied string around the last bag’s neck and left.
He dragged the bags behind him as he’d always done. It was a long haul along the mill road and he kept his head down, the sweat soon beginning to run off him. He noticed some sort of commotion in the showground but he did not stop to watch. He crossed over the river on the ferry, then walked up the main street and stared in through the glass of the butchery window at the remains of the cattle and sheep and pigs, all laid low, all sectioned with band saws and razor-edged knives, all sitting now in little fields of their own, fenced off from each other with strips of green plastic grass. The butcher jumped when he came out from the back and saw Tom peering in.
“Tom!” he said, when he went inside.
“I’ve got your sawdust, Mr. Riley,” Tom said.
“So you have, Tom. So I see. Didn’t . . . ah . . . really expect you to . . . ah—”
“You don’t want it?”
“No, no. I want it. If you want to continue on as before . . . ,” the butcher said, feeling awkward, “. . . that’s fine with me.”
“I do.”
Mr. Riley nodded and then he took the bags out the back and Tom waited by the register for his money.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Mr. Riley, when he returned. “Chappie from the circus was over this morning. He wants meat for his animals, but he also asked me about sawdust. Seems to me you could fill as many bags as you wanted and he’d take ’em.”
He fished coins out of the till and handed them to Tom.
“You could go ask him. Mr. Newman his name was.”
“All right. I might. Thanks.”
“All right, Tom. Take . . . take care now.”
“I will.”
Tom wandered over to the park and looked across at the showground. There were rundown trucks and banged-up caravans, and a dozen or so men had begun erecting a patched and dirty-looking big top. He watched them for a little while and then he went over on the ferry and slipped in unnoticed between the serried ranks of vehicles.
He watched the men as they drove in long steel pegs with sledgehammers, then used an elephant to hoist long wooden poles to the vertical. Threadbare red, blue and green pennants were strung in zigzags over a lane of coconut shies and laughing clowns. For the first time in weeks his attention was held long enough for Flynn and his dreams to retreat from his thoughts and as the tent took shape he headed round to where there were trucks parked, eager to see more. Some of the trucks had cages behind the cabs instead of trays, and canvas covers—decorated with fading pictures of clowns and lions and trapeze artists—hung down over the cages to shade the animals inside. He wandered along through the trucks until he came to a cage containing a scurfy chimpanzee sucking hard on a cigarette. The chimp looked at him without any curiosity and then flicked the butt of the cigarette out onto the grass. Tom walked on until a rank, musty smell assaulted his nose. He stopped and looked about for what it might be. He walked to the end of the structure he was standing alongside and peered round its corner. At first all he could see was a stretch of steel mesh. Then, in behind it, vertical bars—like trees— appeared from the gloom. He moved forward, gradually, but still saw nothing in the blackness. He’d come to the conclusion that the cage was empty when one of its occupants suddenly came forward, paced to and fro, then retreated. Tom gasped.
“Wow,” he whispered.
He stood stock-still and waited for the lioness to reappear. Soon she emerged from the back of the cage and paced along the bars as before. As his eyes adjusted he spotted another two lions asleep on straw bedding: another lioness, and a male with a threadbare mane twitching his tail at flies.
He was staring hard into the gloom to see if there were any more when the lioness came to the bars again, then stopped and looke
d out at him. Tom held his breath and returned her gaze, almost unable to look away. She held him there, taking in everything that he was, and in the depths of her sad, tawny eyes he saw much about her as well, and then something of himself. He let out his breath as she looked away from him and lifted her head to catch what little breeze there was, her nostrils flaring. She closed her eyes, held whatever it was she had found for a moment or two, then turned and returned to her pacing, her measuring of sadness, her melancholy.
Tom, his heart thudding, wondered what she had found drifting in the airy currents. The cage faced the east. Had she smelt the salt of the ocean, or something much nearer?
“Look out, kid!”
Tom, startled, jumped back to dodge two thick-armed men carrying a long pole between them.
“Um, where can I find Mr. Newman, please?” he asked the trailing one, when he’d remembered his purpose for being there. The worker jabbed with his thumb. Tom saw a short, very round old man wearing dungarees and a fancy Stetson. He walked over to him, sawdust his business, but his head brimming still with the lion’s electric gaze.
After he’d spoken to Newman he went back across the river to borrow more bags off Mr. Riley. Grace Mather was at the far end of the main street when he turned into it and he couldn’t help feeling a little nervous as she approached, remembering how pretty and grown-up she’d looked in her dress the night he’d come home. He put his head down, half-expecting her to not be there when he looked up again. When he did she was much closer and she was looking straight at him.
“Hi,” she said, when they were abreast of each other.
“Hi,” said Tom. “Ah, how’re you going?”
“All right. What about you?”
He shrugged. “I’m supposed to feel better soon. That’s what everyone keeps saying.”
“Adults always say that,” said Grace, flicking the hair out of her eyes.
Tom nodded.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting some bags off Mr. Riley.”
She looked up the street and down before nodding. Tom didn’t take his eyes off her face.
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