Yesterday's Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Well, my goodness me! What a thing to tell a child! No wonder our old world is in such a mess.’ Ellie crossed herself, her beads swishing. ‘God is up there listening to you right now, love. He hears every word we say, and if we are good, he answers our prayers too.’

  The teacher’s wife sighed. She had been good. She had been very good. She’d tried hard to believe there was a God. Now she had as little faith in prayer as the urchins who turned on Ellie with their sharp little viper tongues.

  Old Ellie Burton with her stupid long hair.

  Drowned old Jack and said I don’t care.

  He’s sunk in the river, and we boil all the water

  ’Cause our mother said that we ought ta.

  The yellow frock eased away from the bark of the gum tree, the teacher’s wife returned to the side of the road to continue on her way. One step at a time would do it. One yellow sandal placed before the other, each footfall carrying her on.

  To the crossroad, and the signpost. ‘Mallawindy: Population – ’ Population all gone. Just a series of rusting bullet holes.

  Barely did she glance at the signpost. With a wave of her hand she passed it by.

  ‘Deduct one bullet hole,’ she said. And her yellow sandals scuffed on through the pink powder dust.

  technology

  While Amy O’Rouke walked the narrow highway, Malcolm Fletcher sat before his bay window, glowering at his neighbour while listening to the thunk, thunk, thunk of a crowbar driving into hard clay. Like a heartbeat, it laboured on. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Then it rested, and Malcolm breathed easier – until it began again.

  Mad as a hatter, the fat man thought as he watched the crowbar placed to the side and a long-nosed shovel taken up. A neat, methodical worker was John Burton; he dug neat post holes, one after the other, day after day after thunking day. Sun and wind, mosquitoes and flies could not stop him. Only the lack of light forced the ex-priest away from his thunking.

  Malcolm’s two and a half hectares had been fenced by a local contractor, who had come with his boisterous tool, which in minutes corkscrewed out fine deep post holes. Noisy, but perhaps preferable to this infernal, eternal thunk.

  His house plan had been chosen from many, chosen for the two bay windows in lounge and main bedroom; then Malcolm had asked the builder to turn the internal plan around, so the lounge room became the study, and the bedroom his kitchen. They charged a small fortune to do it, but the retired headmaster was now in possession of a not so small fortune. His neat little cottage had been worth every cent he’d paid for it; he lived in those two front rooms.

  Life for Malcolm revolved around the preparation and the eating of good food, and his secret vice – writing; thus during daylight hours, the twin bay windows gave him the optimum view of the gravelled river road, and across the road to the old Burton farmhouse where Jack Burton had once ruled. Malcolm had sat at those windows for hours watching Jack’s every move – and documenting them in detail.

  But Jack was gone and the Burton house unoccupied – only his thunking son out there to stare at these days, and at night, no neighbourly light to burn. John crossed over the river to his rest, at odds with the sun – at odds with the world.

  Malcolm sighed weightily and, with effort, moved his massive bulk from the window to his typewriter where he poked with distain at a key. Inspiration was a fossil in his brain, as it had been now for months, his stimuli rotting, caught on a snag at the bottom of the river, or blown to hell by his own gun. Whatever his fate, Jack was long gone.

  On pleasant afternoons Malcolm still roamed the riverbank, forcing a passage between tall reeds and around the giant river gums. He climbed carefully over rotting timber, shone his flashlight into hollow logs, determined to find Jack’s corpse, but like the insurance investigators, he’d found nothing. An accidental dip one cold evening, while fishing for a shoe with his walking stick, had brought on a pneumonic influenza, which had done his aging lungs no good at all – and the recovered shoe had been three sizes too small, and brown into the bargain. Jack Burton had only ever worn black shoes.

  Admittedly, Malcolm thought, there would not be a lot of corpse left to find these days. Bones, yes; perhaps some of the heavier refuse would not yet have washed downstream. In Malcolm’s novels, bodies, without fail, conveniently floated to the surface three to seven days after death, depending on the water temperature. He’d looked that one up in a book. If for some reason the bodies did not float, then the bones were assuredly found on a riverbank, bleached white. Jack had not floated, and his bones had not surfaced.

  On many an afternoon Malcolm stood on the Mallawindy bridge, scanning the banks with his binoculars, while vehicles on the aged timber construction blasted him with their horns, the drivers cursing.

  The bridge had been built a hundred years ago in the horse and buggy era. Traffic being infrequent then, one-way had been enough, but time had caught up with the Mallawindy bridge. There was now a give-way sign on the forest side, which applied to all vehicles. But not to pedestrians. Malcolm Fletcher should have been reclassified twenty-odd years ago; at seventy-six, he was a bulldozer of a man, a waddling traffic jam.

  He’d never achieved his boyhood aim of six feet – missed out by an inch or three. Back in the seventies a doctor had weighed him in at twenty-six stone; he’d added a few kilograms since then. His mammoth thighs, by necessity, spread his knees, and his small feet resented their burden. Shoelaces had become an impossibility. Fighting his socks over spreading toes was a daily contest between will and belly, and changing his underpants, the battle of the bulge.

  Life had become a burden to Malcolm. One morning he’d wake and decide that the day didn’t justify the effort expended in putting on his shoes.

  He glanced at his new typewriter. The electronic bastard of a thing taunted him. He looked guiltily at the phone, left off the hook these last weeks. His publisher was haunting him for Number 10. Coll M Chef-Marlet, Malcolm’s alter-ego, had been churning out his novels since the mid eighties, but no new manuscript had been tabled in eighteen months and his publisher’s gentle hints had lately become demands. They wanted to see a rough draft. They’d settle for a brief synopsis. He couldn’t give them one; since mislaying his early work on Number 10. Coll M Chef-Marlet’s word-well had been empty – as was Malcolm’s current brandy bottle.

  He’d escaped his publishers in December, flown first class to old England, convinced by the airlines that the first class seat would contain his bulk comfortably. It had contained it, held it captive too, while he’d eaten his way across the brown continent and over the sapphire waters, beyond green islands. He’d sipped on complimentary brandy, night and day, day and night, and he’d landed beneath the sad grey skies of home, his bowels seized, his legs bloated stumps, his balloon feet laughing at the new slip-on shoes bought for this long-promised trip home.

  Two weightlifters had assisted him from the plane to an ambulance. His heart was not all that it should have been, and for three days his kidneys had threatened a shutdown. Nine days passed before he’d sighted the land of his birth; still, his flight insurance had paid for a private hospital ward, and the food served, though flavourless, had brought back memories of childhood.

  Two months in all he had spent in England, trapped there because the plane that might have delivered him out of purgatory appeared worse than existence within it. Like a raging bull Malcolm had sought the world he’d left behind almost forty years earlier. He hadn’t found it, but until he boarded another plane he couldn’t get out of the bastard of a place that he had found.

  Time and the wet grey skies eventually dulled memory of the flight in. On doctors’ advice, he’d broken the return journey in Bangkok – and barely lived to rue that day. Had he been able, he would have prostrated himself on the good earth of Sydney’s airport but, scarcely capable of hobbling, he’d hired a car instead and driven home.

  Home?

  Where did an immigrant call home? He’d spent ten th
ousand hours mourning what he’d left behind; he’d spent years visualising his homeland as it had been on the day he’d left, but slapped in the face by old England, Malcolm discovered he had no home.

  Only this house. Only his hedged sixth of a hectare with its neat little garden, his neat little English trees, his hollyhocks at the door. For days after his return to Mallawindy, he had walked his garden, renewing acquaintance with tree and shrub, a rare smile irritating his belligerent features.

  Today his face was set in more normal lines. He scowled at his bottle, accusing it for its empty state; then again he turned to the window, striving to force his mind out there to play.

  Not a word. Not the hint of a plot presented itself. Nothing to see, thus nothing to write about.

  ‘Such grand plans. Such grand plans.’

  One’s life, when one looks back on it, is filled with grand plans, he thought. He’d had grand plans for Ann, that dark-eyed mute who had spoken her first words in seven years to him. She was to have been his magnum opus. What a mind she had possessed. Wasted.

  He sighed and again prodded at his typewriter. Not the whisper of an idea; not a thing to see from his window, even with his new binoculars. Only the grey grotesque trees lining the roadway, only the wind-flattened weeds at their feet, only a gust of red dust swept up from a fallowed paddock and flung in the face of the crowbar man. Only the cows queuing for their turn in the milking sheds. Only a white chicken feather flying by. And the sky darkening into lonely night, and that slow heartbeat of crowbar.

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Late March, and the land gasping for rain that refused to come. Somewhere in Australia they were always needing rain – except when they got it. A mad land. Red and grey and flat, an ugly featureless land. But what a strange panorama from a plane’s porthole. The narrow stretch of green border, the scant rivers crawling out of the green, like Dreamtime snakes heading off towards the dead centre. Wide, incredible land of extremes, its inhabitants screaming drought for five years, then flood for the next two, freezing in Tasmania and broiling in Darwin.

  And Mallawindy. The river formed four-fifths of a circle around it, enclosing, protecting the town that had grown from water’s union with red dust. A misbegotten thing, Mallawindy, as harsh as the land that had spawned it.

  Ellie Burton’s grandfather had bought, squatted on, or stolen more than his fair share of river frontage. The Burtons’ river paddocks were green. Groups of young willow trees grew tall there, offering the cows a shady meal and shelter from the wind. Jim Watson’s land, a few kilometres out of town, was burned a uniform brown, his dams were dry and his cows eating hay.

  Malcolm had spent an hour on the bridge this morning, willing a motorboat to flush Jack’s skull from the mud, bowl it up to the bank. The river too low, familiar snags were rearing their heads. They’d find the bastard’s bones soon. Maybe then Malcolm would write Number 10, in which he planned to kill off his anti-hero.

  Ten novels had always been his aim. Ten beautifully bound books on a library shelf would look better than nine. As a lad he’d visualised that long row of books, but he’d put childhood dreams behind him and for forty-odd years had attempted to pound his love of words into juvenile heads. To a large degree he had failed. He’d returned late to writing, and gained no success at all until he’d decided to immortalise Jack Burton in print.

  His fingers poised over the keyboard, he urged them on. ‘Make a start, Coll. Only make a start. Kill him off and be done with it.’

  But how was he going to kill that conscienceless bastard? A lightning strike would give the game away. Suicide then? The fat man shook his head. Mack Curtin, or Jack Burton, was not the type to blow his own brains out. One of his women friends might be tempted to off him – with a knife. Or one of their husbands.

  ‘So make it the husband.’

  His middle finger hit the T. His electric typewriter made an entire row of Ts. He abhorred the abominable fool thing that defeated his heavy-handed, two finger, hunt-and-peck keyboard style. A bad buy. His second bad buy.

  ‘Write it off as a tax loss. That and the trip home,’ he said. ‘Thieving swines,’ he said.

  He had been introduced to the wonders of the computer two years ago when his publisher began nagging about deadlines on Number 9. Still weakened after his bout of influenza, Ann had come to his aid. She still came when he called, but these days he did not call often. She had her own . . . small problems.

  His rough manuscript she had somehow electronically scanned into David’s laptop computer, and each night for a week she’d come with the machine. Malcolm, at her side, had watched ten fingers work as a single unit, while, at his command, she’d added, deleted, moved paragraphs from one page to the next. And when it was done, she’d printed the entire manuscript out in a night, then copied the data directly from the brains of the beast onto two small disks, one of which was packed off to the publisher with the manuscript. The second she’d put in his hand. Was it possible that the entire novel was contained on a small piece of plastic? The computer appeared to be a tool too good to be true.

  A salesman had convinced him that a child could use the things, so he’d bought a large desk model; the instructions might as well have been written in Chinese; proving indubitably that the thing was indeed too good to be true.

  Ten, twenty times he’d called Ann. There were those in town who, no doubt, could have tutored him, but only Ann knew of his secret vice. Ten, twenty times she had talked him into or out of a file, or sat patiently at his side, watching him bumble.

  ‘Just treat it like an obstreperous child,’ she had advised. ‘Never fight it, or force it. It has a will of its own, and as long as you allow it to go its own way, it will do anything for you.’

  That may have been the modern method of child raising, but it was contrary to what Malcolm had found in his years of pounding information into thick heads. An elbow jab to the ribs had achieved swifter and more satisfying results with the obstreperous.

  Unable to contact her one evening after his screen had gone blue, he’d panicked, read the instruction manual, which mentioned nothing at all about not forcing it. However, when he’d given the machine an elbow jab and tossed the keyboard to the floor, it hit back. The bewildering bastard of a thing had gulped down three chapters of Number 10 and refused to regurgitate them.

  The computer now sat idle in its corner, a sheet covering the blank, gloating face, replete with his last words. He loathed the dogmatic abomination, considered tossing it, with Jack, in the river.

  ‘Aggressive bastard,’ he snarled at it now, hating it, but wanting those chapters back. They hadn’t been his best, but they had been a start. He wanted the large computer screen too, with its large text, or he wanted his antique Royal typewriter back. It had rolled over and died, like his dream of England had died. Maybe the world was trying to tell him something.

  He slid the top drawer of his desk open, and his hand touched a red, cloth-wrapped parcel. The knowledge of what it contained calmed him, but with a deep, chin-trembling sigh he closed the drawer, and his hands returned to hover over flat grey plastic keys.

  ‘Reasons for the murder. Come on, Coll, think. Think. Reason number one.’

  Husband comes home, finds Jack . . . Mack in bed with his wife.

  ‘Or perhaps allow him to blow his brains out. Finding his murdered daughter, finding Liza’s bones, buried on the family property at Narrawee, may have pushed him over the edge. That was a possible.

  ‘But not good enough. She’d been missing for twenty-odd years, and you cannot use it anyway. The son’s return; did the son kill the father then bury him? He certainly has skill enough with a crowbar to have buried him deep.’

  Fact and fiction now becoming confused, Malcolm stood, walked to his window, staring at John Burton, still out there, still thunking.

  John had arrived home that Christmas Eve, only minutes before his father had disappeared. Had he perhaps dispensed with him? An interesting theory
, but as Malcolm had been at the Burton property at the time of the disappearance, he knew it was illogical.

  ‘Forget the logic. Put logic aside.’

  So, John had done it later. Or killed him that night and buried him later.

  ‘A possibility. A definite possibility.’ The crowbar man had not only retreated from his church, but from life.

  Why?

  ‘Guilt? Obviously. So . . . so assuming he committed a mild case of patricide, where does that leave you?’

  For minutes he gazed at the crowbar man, an unworthy replacement for Jack. No spark in his eye, no fire in his belly, and no women, thus no obligatory sex scene.

  Ann had stated back in ’91 that she’d last sighted her father beside the insane structure they now called Ben’s Bridge. He’d had his gun with him. There had been several lightning strikes that evening. One may have homed in on him, fried him. It was also possible that he had fallen accidentally. Once only had Malcolm attempted the crossing of that footbridge. Three metres into it, he’d turned back. The thing had springs in it, and as the trees dried, the planks twisted and six-inch nails protruded. He, like Jack, had never learned to swim.

  He sat again and hit the B with his middle finger then looked at his row of Bs while considering the bridge as a first line.

  He hit the T. Quickly. Only three Ts this time. He selected a new line, and carefully typed in: Ttthey haad nevvver fffouuund ttthe guuun.

  Excess letters deleted, he read his words aloud. And found the sentence lacking.

  ‘Lighting struck the old shotgun – or, he aimed his shotgun at the thunderclouds, threatened by the bastard, lightning struck back. Mack was flung screaming to the river.’

  ‘Better. Certainly visual.’

  Malcolm sat forward. There was movement across the road. The grass widow Burton had come to milk her cows. She angered him. For years he’d wanted to pick Ellie Burton up by her ears and shake some sense into her. Laboriously he rose from his chair and waddled to his window, this time reaching for his binoculars as John stopped his thunking and left his crowbar upright in the post hole. Malcolm had him in his sights, clear and close up.