by Tim Slee
I like the first licks of ice cream, when you get the Milo powder and ice cream together. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. I reach over and push down on his arm until it goes white. ‘I feel that,’ I tell him. ‘But if you used a needle and pushed it in, it would feel the same. What did you get?’
He looks down at his cone. ‘Natural vanilla.’
‘Boring.’
‘And . . . you don’t get sad either?’
‘Sure I do,’ I tell him, going for my last chocolate icecream lick. ‘I’ll be sad at the funeral. But then you wake up the next day, right, and there’s jobs to be done.’
He looks at me a little funny. ‘It’s okay to be upset, Jack,’ he tells me.
I’m trying to tell him but he isn’t getting it. ‘Yeah, but I don’t do crying. Don’t sweat either. So I get hot really easy. Like fevers, so I have to stay inside on hot days. Mum takes us to the cinema in Portland if it’s a real hot one.’
‘I guess that’s a mixed blessing,’ he says. ‘Not crying.’
‘Mum says to be glad as long as it lasts, because there will be plenty of time for tears,’ I tell him. ‘That’s what she says anyway. Can I try yours?’ I point at his ice cream, where there’s still a half with Maxwell’s Special Dip he hasn’t licked yet.
He hands it over. I try to taste the little specks, but apart from it’s a bit more creamy and soft, it seems just like normal vanilla to me and you can’t taste much through Maxwell’s Special Dip anyway.
‘Why I wanted to talk to you,’ he says, taking back his ice cream, ‘I want to know if you heard anything else your mum and your dad might have talked about, apart from what you told Constable Suarez.’
‘OK.’ This is good, like proper police stuff at last.
‘Like, did they talk about their money problems?’
I lean forward. ‘Sure, lots of times. They weren’t like, secret about it.’
‘OK. You told Constable Suarez they had a fight.’
I shake my head. ‘Not a fight, Mum just told Dad he should care more about what would happen to us after.’
He reaches out, stops me licking my ice cream, ‘After what?’
‘After the fire I guess,’ I tell him. ‘After burning down the house.’
‘That’s it, that’s all you heard them say about it?’ Karsi asks.
‘Sure. I mean, he’d been talking about it forever. Jenny was like, he’ll never do it, and I was totally convinced he would, even before we did the walk-around the night before, laying out the petrol cans. You want to hear about that?’
He picks out a napkin, dabs his mouth. ‘I know about that. No other fights, no discussions about anything else, anything strange, didn’t make sense at the time sort of thing?’
‘Like what?’
He looks at his ice cream and I get the feeling he’s trying to make it look like it’s not really an important question he’s asking and you can tell it really is. ‘Well, like, I don’t know, other things your dad might have planned?’ He lifts the cone and takes a bite. ‘Not the fire?’
I think about it. Burn the farm down, shoot the herd. Except he didn’t shoot the cows. I told all that to Constable Maria. ‘No. Well he did say once he’d like to blow up the bank. They had a fight about that too. Your cone is dripping.’
Karsi is pretty quiet on the walk back. He tells me he thinks I should keep it between him and me, what I heard Dad say about the bank. Let him follow up on it. I tell him I can ask around, see if he said it to anyone else, but he says no, I should let the police do the police work, OK?
We go back to the Turnbolts’ after that and me and Jenny swap stories but hers are boring and she’s acting depressed, but she’s just mostly annoyed she didn’t get ice cream.
We swap beds and I get the spare bed and she has to sleep on the dog sofa. In the morning we kick a soccer ball around and we try to find our marbles but they’re in a box somewhere so we make a circle in the dirt out the back and get some little rocks and we each get a big rock and make this game where you have to use the big rocks to smash the little rocks out of the circle and I’m so winning but then Jenny smashes her big rock into a little one that flies back and cuts her shin and we have to go inside and tell Mum so she can put disinfectant on it because that’s how we could die.
The Turnbolts and Mum are sitting at their kitchen table and Karsi is there. Jenny looks at me like, did you know he was here? and I look back like, no, he must have just arrived. They stop talking while Mum goes out to the bathroom and comes back with cotton pads and some stuff the Turnbolts had in their bathroom cabinet. It’s not like the stuff we have at home. Had.
They’re all watching like it’s some sort of TV documentary.
‘Brave kid,’ Mr Turnbolt says. ‘That’s a nasty cut.’
Jenny looks at him like, whatever.
Mum finishes up and puts a little bandaid on it. ‘Don’t pick that off,’ she says. She sits back at the table and pulls Jenny to her side. Seriously? She’s so dumb she cuts her leg, but she gets a hug like it’s some sort of reward. I go to the Turnbolts’ fridge, see if they have any Coke.
‘So . . . I put in my report,’ Karsi is saying.
‘And . . .’ Mum asks.
‘Natural causes,’ he says.
Mrs Turnbolt sighs and puts her hand up to her chest. ‘Oh good. That’s good, Dawn. For the life insurance. They don’t pay out for suicide.’
‘Might not pay out anyway,’ Mr Turnbolt says. ‘You don’t have to notify the coroner?’
‘Not for a death by natural causes,’ Karsi says. ‘It’s simpler this way, things can settle down quicker.’
‘Dying in a house fire is natural causes now?’ Mr Turnbolt asks.
‘Doc Watson will sign that he had a heart attack, before the fire took hold . . .’ Karsi looks down and then back up at Mum. ‘He was already dead when the roof caved. Sorry, Dawn.’
‘Just say it,’ Mum says. She’s got that same voice on she uses when Dad comes home after losing money on the horses. Kind of dead, kind of dangerous.
‘It looks like he ignited the petrol in the front room . . .’
‘Parlour,’ Mum says.
‘Parlour, and then maybe one of the other rooms. We figure the flames got ahead of him, or the smoke did. Probably he was running for the back door but the fire got there before him, and his heart gave out as he reached the laundry.’
‘Well then,’ Mum says. ‘So now we know.’ She sounds funny.
‘It would have been instantaneous,’ Karsi is saying. ‘He wouldn’t have felt the fire.’
‘That’s a blessing, I guess,’ Mum says.
‘Oh Dawn,’ Mrs Turnbolt says.
‘What do you want me to say, Catherine?’ Mum asks her. ‘Oh the poor man? It’s good he didn’t suffer?’ She stands up and pushes Jenny down in the seat where she was sitting. She looks at Karsi. ‘Have you released his body? Can we bury him now?’
‘Body’s at the hospital in Portland,’ Karsi says, shrinking into himself a bit. ‘Funeral home can pick it up any time.’
‘Good,’ Mum says, then she looks at Jenny and me. ‘You two. I haven’t seen you doing your checks today. Off you go.’
And Jenny looks at me like, I’ll do myself, thanks, and I spend the next ten minutes in the bathroom standing on the bath on one leg so I can see my back in the Turnbolts’ little wall mirror and thinking that I need binoculars if this is going to work and agreeing with myself she’s being a real dick lately.
Dad has been . . . had been helping me do my checks lately, with Jenny acting funny. We were doing the routine one night and I asked him what does that saying mean, no pain, no gain?
He had this wavy black hair that was always in his eyes and he’d push it out of the way with fingers that looked like he’d just dipped them in diesel. ‘Means you want something, you have to work for it,’ he said.
‘OK. I thought it was more literal,’ I told him.
‘Literal?’ he snorted and shook his head
. ‘Professor Jack.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
He patted my back and handed me my shirt, and told me there are different types of pain. And he said, don’t you worry, you live long enough, you’re going to feel it all. He said there’s the pain when you get something you don’t want. Might be simple, like a kick in the head. That’s the easiest to deal with, because mostly it’s your pride gets hurt. Or maybe you get sick and maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, like cancer. There’s saying goodbye to a friend or girlfriend, like if you’re moving to a new city, or you’re just over them or they’re over you.
That there, that’s the pain of losing something. Life, love, security, friendship.
The worst, he said, is the pain of losing someone. That’s the worst pain of all. Not money, though that hurt too, when you were suffering for the want of it.
It’s losing people. One day they’re there, you’re having a laugh, the next day, gone. Car accident, farm accident, heart attack.
And that really hurts. That’s real pain and one day you’ll feel it, he said.
I can see Mum’s feeling it, and Jenny. I’m feeling it too, but maybe it’s my analgesia, maybe because mine is a bit worse than Jenny’s, but it’s like I can build a dam against it. I think about how Dad is dead, and I feel this heat rising in my gut, up through my chest and into my throat. Heat like you want to punch something, throw a ball through a window, catch a chicken and choke it. But when I feel that, I can take a breath and push it back down, right back down into my gut, and I can just tell myself it’s nothing and forget it and distract myself.
It’s a power I never knew I had until he died.
Danny Boy
You should have seen the mayhem as we were leaving town a couple of days later. First, we had to get Dad’s coffin on the milk cart. Mr Garrett wanted to do that out at his place but Mum said, no, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to go for max publicity. We’ll do it in the main street or nowhere.
‘Max publicity,’ Mr Garrett grumbled. ‘With the Portland bloody Observer.’
I look over at the reporter from the Observer who was also there when Dad burned the house down, and he’s hopping around like a grasshopper, clicking away with his camera as Mr Alberti and Mr Turnbolt and Mr Garrett and Coach Don lift the coffin onto the milk cart right in the middle of town. Sergeant Karsi has given up trying to talk Mum out of it and he’s got three cars up from Portland for ‘traffic control’. Jenny and me painted the signs on the side of the milk cart. Jenny likes hers (My Dad Died For Your Milk) but I like mine (Your Low Milk Prices Killed My Dad) after Mum said if we’re going to Do This, it has to Have Impact. So I said to her maybe I should paint my face with red paint and she said no, that would be going to too far, luv.
When we were painting the signs last night, I was singing this rap song I was trying to memorise the words for and Jenny lost it and I said, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘Nuthin.’
Then she said, ‘Dad’s dead, you know that, right? He’s not just gone to Melbourne or interstate. He’s not coming back one day. He’s dead. D. E. A. D.’
‘I know, Jenny,’ I said. ‘I’m not stupid. I know he’s dead.’
‘Yeah, but you act like it’s nothing.’
I felt that heat boiling up from my guts. ‘Someone has to be strong!’ I told her. ‘We can’t all go around sniffing and moaning!’
She laughed. ‘Oh, you’re being strong? That’s what you’re doing?’
I picked up a paint brush, felt like slapping her face with it, but I just took a big breath instead, pushed it back down. ‘Forget it, all right?’
‘You want to see strong, Jack?’ she said, her chin sticking out. ‘I’ll show you strong.’
I knew that look. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it. Please, Jen.’
‘Stop me,’ she said. She reached over and took one of the nails we were using to fix the signs to poles so we could hang them on the milk cart. I could have wrestled it off her I guess, but she just would have done it when I wasn’t looking.
She took the nail and pushed it into the back of her hand, between the bones. She didn’t hit any veins I could see, but there was a lot of blood came out suddenly. She turned away. ‘You do it.’
‘No. It isn’t sterile!’
‘I know and I don’t care. Here, I hate blood,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘So you have to.’
The blood was dripping down her hand into the dirt between her legs.
‘It never works,’ I told her. ‘You won’t cry.’
‘I nearly did once,’ she said, sounding angry again. ‘Just stop talking and do it.’
I grabbed the nail and jerked it back and forth, so she could at least feel it moving. It was pretty gross, because I think it hit a bone. She wanted it to hurt, to make herself cry. It was pointless, but try telling her that. After a couple of tries, I stopped and she took her hand back and looked at it.
And she wasn’t crying, she was just angrier than before. She pulled out the nail and looked up at the sky and she screamed and threw the nail away and stomped off to the bathroom. When she came back out she was holding a handkerchief against her hand and Mum saw it and came running over and looked at her and looked at me and said, ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing!’ I told her. Then I realised with her hand bleeding like that, we were both going down anyway. ‘I was hammering a nail and she was holding the sheet and she slipped and it went in her hand.’
‘You drove a nail in her hand?’
‘It was an accident!’ I told her.
‘It was,’ Jenny said, looking at me like thank you.
‘Oh for goodness . . .’ Mum said and took Jenny off to the toilet. When she came back she just walked up to me, held my shoulders and put her forehead against mine for a second. It’s a thing she does. Us against the universe, always.
When they came back, we had to get the talk about injuries. And how it was lucky we both had our tetanus shots a few months back. How it was life or death, septicaemia. How we should just paint the signs, leave someone else to fix them to the poles.
After our lecture, Jenny sat down next to me again. Flexed her fingers.
‘Feel better now?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah.’
‘I mean, your purple fit.’
‘Yeah, drop it.’
‘You should try a different spot,’ I told her. ‘Maybe your leg.’ I pointed to the soft part of my thigh. ‘Like here?’
She looked at her hand. ‘That one time I nearly cried . . . that was my hand.’
‘The other hand,’ I told her.
She looked at both hands. ‘No. Really?’
‘Yeah, that was your left hand that time. You did your right hand this time,’ I pointed out.
‘Damn, seriously?’
‘Yeah. Come on,’ I tell her. ‘We got to get this done.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, and stopped obsessing about her hand. ‘What are you writing?’
‘We need a hashtag,’ I told her, trying to get the brush right. Painting on sheets isn’t easy. ‘Everything needs a hashtag these days. I just thought . . .’
‘Hashtag,’ she said, looking at what I wrote. ‘Hashtag BURN?’
I looked at it. I thought it looked cool. ‘Yeah. It’s pretty simple; like our house burned down and the bank burned down.’
‘That’s cool,’ she said. So we put that in the corner of the signs. #BURN.
Karsi got the extra cars up from Portland after the thing with the bank. There’s a cop parked outside the burned-out bank (like someone is going to firebomb it twice?) and another two cars in the street where the hearse is pulled up and they’re dragging the coffin out the back of the hearse and putting it into the milk cart.
Danny Boy is up front, and even though I thought maybe he wouldn’t look as big because I’ve probably grown up a bit since last time I saw him, he does. He’s all excited and blowing air out his nostrils like a he’s
a steam train with a mane.
‘That horse isn’t even going to make it to Tyrendarra,’ Karsi is saying to Mr Garrett.
‘Don’t you worry about Danny,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Probably outlive you, the amount you fret.’
‘Someone’s got to fret,’ Karsi says. ‘Lunatics, the lot of you.’ He goes over to Mum. ‘I’ll escort you part of the way,’ he tells her. ‘Highway Patrol from Geelong will meet you somewhere up the road; until then it will just be me, with some help from Port Fairy and Warrnambool.’ He looks up the road. ‘They’re not loving this. When did you say the funeral service is?’
‘Seven days,’ Mum says. ‘Sunday mid-morning. Best timeslot they had and quickest we can get there, according to Garrett.’
Karsi looks at the men lifting the coffin and carrying it toward the milk cart. ‘I’m going to get questions from the Health Department.’
‘And you know how to answer them,’ Mum says. ‘You know it’s all legal.’
Then old Mr Alberti’s legs go and the coffin tilts over and Mr Turnbolt yells, ‘Shit! Grab his corner someone!’ And Karsi dives in and he grabs Mr Alberti’s corner of Dad’s coffin and together they heave it into the milk cart and the reporter from the Portland Observer gets a photo of Karsi helping load Dad’s coffin inside the milk cart.
The reporter’s a tall skinny guy, all elbows and cheekbones, and he crouches down next to me as he’s changing batteries and he says, ‘That’s going to go bloody viral, that is. That was a bloody beauty.’
‘You said that out at our house,’ I remind him.
‘Yeah, but this time I mean it,’ he says. ‘Totally freaking viral. That was like the flag at Iwo Jima,’ he says and shows me on his camera. ‘See?’
‘What’s the flag at Iwo Jima?’ I ask him.
‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘Trust me, it was like that.’
I go to Mum and tell her and she says, ‘That’s good, luv,’ like she doesn’t believe him either.
The rest of the morning is boring. We try to get a tent onto the milk cart but there’s no way to secure it so they just put a tarp over Dad. People are bringing us food and water and loading that on, and the guy from Home Hardware gives us real swags, the ones with the hoods like little tents, and a camp stove and gas bottle. People bring camping gear and chairs and stuff, tons more than we can manage, so they set up a flea market in the street and sell the stuff we can’t use, to give the money to Mum. And Mr Garrett gives Coach Don lessons in how to hitch the milk cart and how to drive Danny Boy, so they can share the driving.
