by Joy Dettman
She had watched him make this bubble pipe. He’d hollowed out the gumnut and cut a hole for the reed stem with his pocket knife, then he’d filled the gumnut bowl with softened soap. Bubbles unlimited. Just add river water. Huge bubbles, purple and blue and gold, shaken from that pipe to fly away.
He’d taken her everywhere with him – to town when he delivered the eggs, to the forest when he’d set his rabbit traps, to the sand dunes when he’d gone there with Malcolm Fletcher’s son. Johnny had been her teacher, his blackboard the dust, his chalk a twig scratching in the dust, and his hands, signing, talking hands. She’d had no one else to give her love to, so she’d loved him. But he’d come back to her a paper cut-out, his well-known features pasted over with a stranger’s expressions.
At least he’d been real on the night of the wedding. Not so pleasant, but real, and very, very familiar.
She yawned, stretched her limbs. Maybe the wine was hitting some spot.
‘Perhaps there comes a time when we all have to submit to our own genetic code, Little Annie, like it or not,’ she said, and she forced down half a glass of sour wine.
grievous intent
Johnny Burton’s week had been long, and it was only half over. Last evening emotionally draining, a migraine had threatened all morning, then hit hard mid-afternoon. At the moment it was taking precedence over his aching foot. He was supposed to keep the foot up, stay off it; he’d spent most of the day on it. Immobility led to thinking, the one thing that stopped his thinking was a book, but his aching head refused him this escape.
No more painkillers left in his packet. He’d swallowed too many in the last few days. No post holes to dig by torchlight, no seven-kilometre hikes through the forest. No peace at the mud brick house, so at seven-thirty he picked up his crutches and limped across Ben’s bridge to the old house. It offered him silence and solitude in which to nurse his headache.
Much of the furniture had been left behind when Ellie had moved in with Ben six years ago. The battered old table was still in the kitchen with the old sideboard and the worn-out chairs, but the lounge room was empty, its unworn suite now cluttering Ben’s tiny lounge room.
He had a choice of three sagging beds, one in the boys’ room and two in the girls’. Those rooms had been wallpapered in some forgotten era. It was aged and brown now; one day he’d strip the wallpaper – but not tonight. The front bedroom was empty, apart from an old wardrobe. Ellie had taken her dressing table with her, and her bed, near new, expensive. Jack Burton had liked his comfort.
John often spent the night in the old house. He had accumulated a small stock of supplies in the bruised refrigerator; he had tea bags and coffee on the sideboard, sugar in a jam jar on the table. He lit the old wood stove, and within minutes it was throwing out its heat and the old black kettle began to sing its way to boiling. Same old black kettle, same old dented lid, same old battered frypan on the hob; it would still fry an egg. No one bothered him here, no one talked at him, forced him to find and make replies. No television choking him with canned laughter while Ellie sat blindly staring at it.
He leaned on the kitchen table, his eyes scanning the unlined walls. Scarred. He glanced at the cupboards with their red-checked gingham doors. The wooden doors of his youth had long been kicked in. Ellie had replaced them with fabric supported on elastic. Elastic stretched. Fabric gave.
A pot of tea made, he looked in the fridge for his bread. No butter but plenty of bacon grease. He smiled, remembering fried bread. After the nausea of a migraine passed, his stomach always demanded food, so he broke an egg onto a flat plate, beat it with a fork then dipped his stale bread in it. The bacon grease sizzling, he placed the egg-soaked slices in the pan and stood over it, cooking supper. French toast, topped with plum jam; they’d eaten it often when he was a kid. No money then, only a few cows, but Ellie had always produced a tasty meal.
He was eating the last crust when he heard the car pull into the yard and he wasn’t fast enough on his feet to kill the lights. They came then, the long and the short detectives, approaching the kitchen from opposite directions. One to the eastern door, one to the northern.
‘The doors are open,’ he called.
Seated close to the stove he didn’t rise when they entered. They sat each end of the table, and they watched his every move and he watched the kettle, full of huffing, puffing steam, like his visitors.
He heard but didn’t listen, until the smaller one said, ‘Your father, did he own a handgun, Mr Burton?’
John picked up a crust, chewed it, then brushed crumbs from the sleeve of his navy windcheater, his eyes following the navy blue down to green drill working trousers, to his one muddy shoe and to his plaster foot, protected tonight by a thick sock and a plastic bag and his soiled hospital-issue cotton shoe. He stared at it.
‘I have no idea what he had or didn’t have.’
‘If you could tell us your movements on the night in question, Mr Burton.’
John pressed his fingertips to both temples. ‘My movements on that night were well documented when the shotgun was found.’
‘We would appreciate your cooperation.’
He looked from one face to the other, and he smiled. ‘I don’t envy you your job. Wouldn’t get to watch much television, I take it. And the boredom, the abject boredom of repetition. How many times do you cover the same ground?’
‘As many times as is necessary to get to the truth, Mr Burton.’
‘But the truth does not alter with each telling, sir. Truth remains the only constant. I can repeat my truth for you, but it will add little to your knowledge and considerably to my headache. Not a migraine sufferer, are you?’
‘No, thankfully, Mr Burton. Now, you arrived home after your father and sister left the house that night.’
‘I did.’
‘You did not speak to your father that evening?’
‘As I did not see him, I was unable to speak to him. You appear to believe that he died the night I returned to Mallawindy.’
‘At this time we believe the body has been there for between five and ten years.’
‘So, working on the assumption that he died that night makes me a convenient suspect.’
They did not deny his words. His head back, he looked at the smoke-blackened rafters while blood hammered in his temples and beat behind his eyes, then he stood, stumbled, leaning heavily on the wall as he walked to the stove where he picked up the old iron poker, weighing it in his hand. Bent, aged thing, black, he opened the firebox and with the poker stirred the coals, added more wood from the hearth before closing the firebox with that old lift and slam action, unchanged in thirty years.
The silence was new, and too complete. Not a cow in the distance. Not a dog barking across the river. They were waiting for his confession. It was a long time since he’d made his last confession.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
As the smaller man stood, John turned to him, offering the old poker, pushing it at him. ‘I used this on him one night. Knocked him out. Swung it like a golf club and got him over the right ear. Flattened him. He fell there, right at your feet.’
The monotonous computer voice of justice began, and John listened, a smile growing until the rendition ended.
‘I was a few months shy of sixteen at the time and had planned my father’s murder in great detail. I was an imaginative youth. The plan was to wait until he was seated. He should be seated. He was so much bigger, heavier than me. I was then to pick up this poker and use it to crush his diseased brain, smash it to pulp. The plan that year was to load him into my mother’s laundry copper and boil him up for pig food. Pigs aren’t particular. They’ll eat anything. I was then to rake up his bones and pulverise them, toss them into the river. However . . . however, my mother would not allow it at the time.’ Again he pushed the poker towards the smaller man. ‘But do take it. Please. My intent to do grievous bodily harm is etched deep into its metal.’
The detective took the poke
r as he stared at the madman who stood before him, smiling, massaging his temples.
‘There is a wrongness about this business, Mr Burton.’
‘The wrongness you perceive, sir, is perhaps my total lack of interest in the whereabouts of a rabid dog who should have been put down thirty years ago. As stated before, I have not sighted him in thirty years, and should I happen to sight him in the next thirty, he may yet end up as pig slops. Arrest me for an unrealised dream, if you wish.’
They had no reply. Their suspect was limping by them, collecting his crutches from beside the old wireless where his father’s gun had once lived. He leaned on the padded armrests as he spoke again. ‘I suggest you speak to May Burton, his sister-in-law. She knew my father well.’
‘His sister-in-law. Your sister, Mrs Taylor, mentioned a flat in Toorak.’
John lifted his head, turned to face the west. ‘My sister, Mrs Taylor. Well, I suggest that you contact the flat in Toorak. I can state for a fact that my father was with May Burton in early ’91. If she denies it, she lies.’
They made way for him as he swung by them and out onto the dark verandah, but they followed him.
He turned, leaned again on one crutch and looked down at his plaster foot swinging there. ‘One more suggestion, if I may. Ask her for the name of her husband’s dentist. It could prove . . . interesting.
‘Can you enlarge on that, Mr Burton?’
John ignored the question. He made his clumsy way along the verandah, down two steps, and away into the night.
‘We will need to speak to you again.’
From the dark John replied, ‘Never fear, I will be here. I can’t run at the moment and have nowhere to run to – should I feel the urge. Have a nice evening and turn the light out when you leave. Good night.’
where is the butter
‘Sour vinegar,’ Ann commented, draining the last of the red wine into her glass, drinking it down as medicine. ‘And fly spray,’ she added, her mind straying south to Mallawindy, to the eternal fly spray, to the flies by day and the mosquitoes by night and the frogs along the river who had feasted on flies and mosquitoes doused in fly spray.
And she thought of the one now limping towards the river, his crutches sinking in the mud. For a fleeting instant their minds connected.
‘What happens if they charge us with his murder?’
Johnny Burton halted his progress, his eyes turned towards the west, and he saw her at the kitchen sink, a glass in her hand.
Ann placed the glass down and turned her face to Mallawindy, seeing him in silhouette against Ben’s bridge.
Then the line was cut and two minds wandered away down separate roads.
‘Innocent people are charged, jailed. Look at . . . look at . . .’ No example presented itself, so her mind flitted away to her briefcase. A flitting mind now. Better. Much better.
‘You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, Annie. Sooner or later, you get found out. But Mum will think it was my briefcase she saw. She didn’t see me take it from the wardrobe. Saw me in the room, that’s all. David believed me when I said I got bogged.’
She had been bogged out near the ten-mile. Bogged to the axles that night. Her father had dragged small logs from the forest to place beneath her wheels, and he’d pushed the car, pushed it while the wheels slid and skidded, his desire to get away lending him strength that night.
A cramp stilled her thinking. She felt her stomach, her palm searching the lumps, the bumps there.
Little Annie Burton, elective mute for seven years. How had she got to this day, this night? How had little Annie Burton become the wife of David Taylor, the bank manager? How had she become friend and neighbour of Dee and Peter Williams? How had poor little Annie Burton become mother of three raucous boys, president of the kindergarten committee?
‘How did it happen, Annie?’ she said. Again the baby kicked. ‘Mother of almost four.’
More dirty napkins come September and she’d barely started introducing Tristan to the potty. It would be another boy – he’d looked the same on the scan, but as usual she’d told Peter Williams she didn’t want to know the sex. Didn’t want it to be a girl, that’s why. Didn’t want to carry it, live these last months not wanting it, not wanting its little dresses to replace the memory of Mandy’s little dresses.
The wine had gone directly to her head, opening up old pathways she usually blocked with red road signs. Wrong way. Go back. All the road signs were down, the pathways open. She let the tears roll. No one to see her. Boys sleeping. David trying to locate his missing money. And why shouldn’t she cry for precious, perfect Mandy? While she had lived, each day had been a wondrous thing. Life had reached forward into ten thousand perfect tomorrows. But she was gone. And now her cat was gone. And all of little Annie’s poems, written over another lifetime, were gone. All of those yesterdays, used up, worn out.
Boy Johnny gone.
Little Annie gone.
Jack Burton gone.
She sniffed, hiccupped. Everything was gone, including the fly spray wine. Didn’t like red wine, even the best of it, and this bottle hadn’t been much good when David had opened it last night. He knew what wine did to her. It made her giggle, made her forget; it wasn’t working tonight.
There was a dribble in the glass. Ruby red. ‘A pretty wine.’ She smelt it, sipped it, then wiped at her eyes with her sleeve.
Blood red were his spurs in the golden morn, wine red was his claret coat.
Blood red. Mandy’s blood that murderous day. She had picked her up at the bottom of the steps, ready to kiss a little hurt better. Just grazed, blood on her hair. She hadn’t known that the hurt had gone much deeper. Maybe she shouldn’t have picked her up. Should have left her there, called Dee, called the ambulance. Maybe it was her fault that Mandy had died.
Gone. Just like that. One second laughing in the hot sun, chasing the cat, then . . . then gone.
Her palms wiped at her face, and her fingers ran through her hair. Still damp. She glanced at the heater, walked to it and turned it high, then she closed the heavy drapes and walked out to the back door. Cold and dark outside but no more rain. Stars trying to get out. Cold, wet earth and the night wind moaning in the wires, slapping at walls. A mournful sound. A door bang-banging somewhere. Probably the garden shed. She must have left it open when she’d gone in to get the pick and shovel.
Poor Tiddy in the mud in its plastic garbage bag.
She walked out to the yard where she slammed the shed door then continued up to the gate, flinging it wide for David, wanting him home, wanting to talk about something other than videos and bubble pipes and potties. He shouldn’t be too much longer. She opened the garage door too, willing him home, and she stood a moment watching the road, the wind whipping her damp hair, tying it in knots.
No David.
There was a small door at the rear of the garage, giving access to a wine cellar David had dug into the clay beneath the house. No light in there but she knew where he kept his white wines. She chose the nearest bottle then climbed the spiral staircase to the family room.
No time to wipe the dust away, she eased the cork out, poured a glass, brimful. It went down fast, washing away the aftertaste of vinegar and fly spray. It wasn’t bad either, not sweet, but not too dry. David liked wine and she didn’t mind the taste of this one. ‘Definitely fruity,’ she said, half filling her glass before looking at the label. It was probably one of his good wines. Not that her palate could tell good wine from the not so good. Its main purpose was to follow the red wine straight to her head, straight to where she needed it to go tonight. A little wine might open up old pathways but a lot of wine would smooth out the old potholes with fuzzy pink dust.
‘Will the world ever get back to semi-normal, Annie?’ she asked.
Little Annie never replied these days. She’d taken off that Christmas Eve, left her shell to calcify or blow away.
‘I didn’t blow away, did I, because I refuse to blow away. I’ll get through this too – one way or another – plenty more wine down there.’
Will Johnny get through it?
‘I wasted years of my life waiting for him to come home, spent years searching for him, and now he’s here and he’s a stranger. Siblings who don’t grow together have only blood to hold them, and what’s blood, little Annie? It’s spillable, that’s what it is. And stop waving your wine around or you’ll spill it too, and stop talking to yourself or the boys will hear you.’
She sipped again, mind-travelling to Johnny and to Mallawindy as she spoke on to Annie or her wine. Happy medicine. It hadn’t made Johnny happy at the wedding but Ben said it had made him sing all the way home that night.
‘I wonder if he’s still singing?’
She looked at the telephone and thought to ring him, invite him down for a drink. She could be stuck here alone until midnight.
‘I was once, Annie, and the computers had only misplaced a thousand or two that night.’
Then just like that, the glass was down and the phone was up and she pressed number one for Ben.
Four rings only, then, ‘G’day,’ Ben said.
‘Head loony returning your call from Bedlam, Mr Burton,’ she said. ‘All is now quiet in ward ten. How is your ward . . . or is it wards?’
‘Quiet.’
They spoke a while of inconsequential things, but that was what friends did, they spoke of nothing that became something, and when they’d filled ten minutes with the boys and the shop and Malcolm’s lost licence, she said to him, ‘Is Mum okay?’
‘Better,’ he said, which meant Ellie was listening in. No gain in pursuing that subject.
‘How’s Johnny?’
‘He’s got a headache, which is pretty much normal.’
‘Ask him if he’d like to come down for a drink.’
‘I think he’s had enough driving for a few days. Tried to drive my ute yesterday but didn’t get far. God knows how he got it home. The clutch is heavy as lead.’
