He looks at Detective Wentworth with eyebrows lifted in hope that this is enough. Like he’s asking, How about that? Will that do? Detective Wentworth looks back at him through a wince. Thaw’s old man can see it isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough.
So his eyes widen and light with memory. He does remember, he says, that he watched John’s Acapulco trip that Remembrance Day morning. He remembers now hitting the mute button to observe a minute’s silence at eleven o’clock out of respect for the war dead right when John had that nun bent over a burro, with her usually screaming something over and over in Spanish but now just gaping silent like an ecstatic fish while she gripped that burro’s ear and tail for balance and he remembered those poor young boys perishing at Gallipoli with that Simpson bloke doing what he could for them with a pack-animal of his own.
And if he’d watched the Acapulco trip that Remembrance Day morning it was just as likely he’d watched it that Remembrance Day evening, too. Him not being so fit as he once was and not likely to jump up and down swapping John’s various adventures in and out of the machine like he once might have. So he’d have to say that, yes, Thaw and he did watch John in Acapulco that evening, and Thaw did crash on his floor. And anyway the boy wouldn’t lie. Has a lot of his mother in him that way.
After Detective Wentworth has taken this statement from Thaw’s father the investigation starts to focus on Thaw. Detective Wentworth tells Thaw he doesn’t pass judgment on the way his father lives his life. Tells Thaw we’re probably living in an age where it’s appropriate behaviour for men to hole-up with false scenarios rerunning eternal.
But as a corroborating alibi Thaw’s father’s statement doesn’t amount to anything other than a father’s natural dissembling and natural prevarication and natural plea of Korsikov’s syndrome so as not to kill his only son’s alibi stone dead in the water. His statement is nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to agree with yours, Detective Wentworth says to Thaw. And I felt sorry for him as he told it.
Thaw doesn’t know what sort of statements the men from Craigieburn give. He doesn’t ever see them again. Parts of the black population are uprisen about them and carrying star-pickets for them. Walking along the dusty footpaths around the police station and scraping their star-pickets across the sandstone shopfronts nearby the police station and across the bars on the shopfront windows and along corrugated-iron fences around the police station, and dragging them behind them in the middle of the bitumen road as they walk past out front of the police station and shaking them against the eternally blue sky whenever the need to shake a picket and to invite the white man to have a fuckin’ good look at himself wells up in them.
Running their star-pickets across everything roundabout the police station because the four men from Craigieburn are kept in the police lock-up there for their own safekeeping in the days the investigation takes. And for the first time in a century black men can’t get arrested and thrown into that lock-up for pissing in public. Can’t get thrown in there for public drunkenness. Not for swearing at cops or for heaving that half a brick through one of the few windows left in town that hasn’t already had its half brick. Can only get their night voices in there from down the side alley across a jagged-topped corrugated-iron fence into the police yard. Their promises of ‘Fuck you, you murdering Melbourne cunts, you going to die here,’ that have the four men lighting Marlboros and drawing hard, illuminating their wet faces orange in the cell dark.
But they’re being cooperative, the four men from Craigieburn. Their statements are hanging together and getting called credible. Thaw knows this from his next interview with Detective Wentworth who tells him sit down, Oliver. Take a smoke if you want one, Oliver. Then winces right into Thaw’s eyes and tells him, Oliver, autopsy has just determined that the victim has suffered multiple infiltrations of the perpetrator’s semen, Oliver. Multiple infiltrations … in various sites. Various orifi. And examination has discovered some of the perpetrator’s hair between her teeth.
So it seems the quickest route to the truth of the matter now is to find out who belongs to this semen, Oliver. Who belongs to the hair. And to that end I’m going to ask you to give a sample of DNA. Entirely voluntary, of course. The law has no power to make you give a sample if you don’t want to. Still, it’d look pretty sus if you refused to cooperate with the forensic people when the other four suspects have already willingly given blood samples. Wouldn’t it, Oliver? Look sus?
Thaw tells him what it will look like is a burden he’ll have to bear. Because he’s not giving them his D his N or his fucking A. Because for all he knows this DNA shit is just a way for the law to make a Godly Pronouncement of guilt or innocence that no one can refute because its science is way out there beyond their understanding. So, no thanks, he’s not interested.
Detective Wentworth tells him, Okay then. Okay. On your own head be it. But if you’re innocent I hope like he’ll you’ll reconsider. For your own sake, Oliver. And for the sake of Justice here.
It’s no great surprise, Thaw says, with the smallness of the town and the smallness of police thinking, that word is soon out he’s the only one not cooperating. Is in fact hindering the investigation. No great surprise that the part of the black population that was uprisen and carrying star-pickets against the four men from Craigieburn is then uprisen and carrying star-pickets against him.
The Court House Hotel burns down on the night of November the fourteenth. Combustion is what the Arson Squad comes out and calls ‘artificially accelerated’. This means the place goes whump and window-rattles with flameburst that sits him bolt upright in his shearer’s cot, Thaw says. And he guesses a lot of black teenagers sucked a lot of petrol from a lot of old Holdens to get this result. He jumps out his window and slides down the roof into the rainwater tank and swims over to the ladder and climbs out. The whole ground floor is ablaze.
He’s alone out the front of the pub watching the fire for what he says is a not a long stretch of time or a short stretch of time but just a truly horrible stretch of time. Begging-manic under his breath for his old man to come crashing out one of those top windows and rolling across the roof and landing, even broken-armed or -legged, in the dust. But knowing all the time there isn’t enough petrol in the whole state to make whump enough to drag his old man up from where he sleeps of a night.
He’s watching the blue glow of his father’s window where Long John Holmes has run his nightly race and the TV has gone into its cobalt hiss. Watching flames inside the building go upstairs room to room, lighting up window after window in a fast dance of bright and shadow. Watching that bright dance get to his father’s window and wash over the blue glow there.
And if any of the black teenagers responsible are out in the dark watching instead of causing some memorable ruckus in town for an alibi then what they must be thinking is, Shit, what a difficult trick is this vengeance. Everything we really wanted to burn is standing out front of the fire crying, watching everything else we only burnt incidentally roar and boom and crackle and spit like He’ll itself.
The rural fire brigade men roll up in four different tankers and climb down fast out of their cabs in their sodden wool and run for hoses and start pumps and shout directions back and forward, calling each other ‘Unit One’ and ‘Unit Two’ and ‘Unit Three’ and ‘Unit Four’, whom they usually know as Barry and as Smithy and as Roger and as Gordon. Calling for a couple of minutes before they realise what they have here is what they start to call a ‘fully involved structure’ and they can only offer ‘containment’, which means only stand back and shake their heads at flame-roar and spark-rise and tin-warp and bottle-burst and listen to the screams and pleas of another generation of red heelers lost to fire and watch debris falling while they direct their water onto nearby redgums and tell each other ‘Jesus Christ, eh, Smithy,’ and ‘Fucksakes, Gordy, check it out,’ and ‘Did all we could, Rog. Did all we could,’ on and off until dawn.
The day after the fire Detective Wentworth offers Thaw
a chair in his chosen interview room in the police station and sits opposite him and stares at him. Tells him, ‘Yeah, this is how it is, I’m afraid. Only death teaches you how sad death is. Books don’t do it. And films certainly don’t do it. Only death itself does. So … now you know.’
And stares at him again.
Then gets Thaw a cup of coffee and says he knows he’s got some grieving to do for his father, and fathers are a dreadful loss, most of them. But he’s sure Thaw’s father felt no pain. Didn’t look like a man susceptible to pain really, and the best thing we can do for him now is find his killers.
And he tells Thaw he believes if they can find the man who killed Kelly Atkinson, then knowing what he does about the aboriginal race and their system of payback, the people who burnt down his pub and his father will, more than likely, own up of their own accord. Turn themselves in and pay the price. So he intends getting on with finding her killer in the hope both cases will crack together. Because what we have here, Detective Wentworth tells Thaw, is parallel investigations … running parallel.
‘So … what about that DNA test?’ he asks Thaw.
‘What about it?’ Thaw asks back.
‘Let’s get it done. Let’s start working to solve this thing.’
‘I told you,’ says Thaw, ‘it’s a tool for Godly Pronouncement. I’m not into it.’
Detective Wentworth starts walking around the room and smoothing alcohol-abuse posters and domestic-violence posters back onto the walls. Then he sits on the table next to where Thaw is propped on his elbows and bends down into his face and puts an actual arm across his shoulders and says, ‘Now listen, Oliver. Let’s assume the right thing here. Let’s assume you’re innocent. Because people are already making the other assumption. You’ve got to get this cleared up and behind you. You can’t afford to have this thing hanging over you … this dreadful stain on you. How’re you ever going to start a long-term relationship with a woman with this hanging over you? How could you ever settle down and get married with this scaring all your prospective wives away’ You’ve got to consider how serious your refusal is for your future, Oliver.’
Thaw just shrugs and holds his palms up and says, ‘You show me an example of monogamy in nature that isn’t as pin-headed as the swan and I’ll fuck some woman for longer than a week. ’Til then long-term relationships aren’t a priority.’
Detective Wentworth goes into a wince deep enough to be haemorrhoid-inspired. And right there, Thaw says, is where the police stop trying to work on his reason and his morality and start thinking about working on his person direct. With phone books and batons and various other dog-beating devices to get DNA flying off him in all directions.
Part 4
11
Hollow Stick
BBK isn’t sure what to do next. An unpaid water bill is a fine tool for coercion, as a rule. A fine truth to wave in a tenant’s face. But it leads, in the end, to that same old point where you’ve waved your unpaid bill and stamped your feet and told your tenant ‘This simply isn’t good enough’ so many times you can’t wave and stamp and tell any more without looking hollow and powerless and just a waver and just a stamper and just a chronicler of things that simply aren’t good enough. The point where you have to act.
And shutting off an old woman’s water in the middle of a hot, dry land sounds even worse than eviction. Sounds like torture. Sounds like inhumanity. Sounds like an act that might scuff up a company’s exquisitely manicured corporate image, if it were to get into print. So an unpaid water bill turns out to be a moral truth with no more muscle behind it than any of the other half-dozen or so moral truths they’re wielding and she’s ignoring by sticking them to her fridge with little fruit-shaped magnets as if they’re everyday business to which she’ll attend … some day. She sticks this one to the fridge with a little pineapple.
When the phone lines go down, they get her a mobile phone. They get me one as well, even though I already have a phone. They pay our phone bills, and all her friends’ phone bills, as long as we’ll just ring her a couple of times a week and chat with her. They’re not telling us what to say. Just asking us to keep in touch. They’re hoping we might convince her how happy the rest of the world is. Might convince her there’s another life out here.
So now she’s got new voices coming at her from the outside world. New voices to add to what’s coming in through the bakelite radio where the Reverend Quincy Roberts is promising all the strings are being pulled by a Higher-Being, and that dream interpreter in Sydney is promising all the strings are being pulled by a Higher-Self. Now there’s me ringing up out of the blue, like I haven’t for all those years, from the beach at Lorne, asking, ‘How you going?’ But not much wanting to know.
‘Is that you?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. It’s me.’
‘I’m good, Jack. All right, anyway. My water’s got decidedly brackish. I think they’re angry with me. I think they’re adding salt. Which is more or less what the Romans did to the Carthaginians, I seem to remember. But apart from that I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Where are you ringing from?’
‘Lorne. I’m on the beach,’ I tell her.
‘I’ve never liked the beach,’ she tells me straightaway.
‘Well, it’s a beautiful day here.’
‘It’s never not a beautiful day wherever you people are when one of you ring me on this thing … surprise, surprise,’ she says. ‘Always beautiful.’
‘Yeah. Well … it’s summer.’
‘Do they have a church in Lorne?’
‘Yeah. What’s that noise?’ There’s a drone coming from the phone, wavering slowly then thrusting sharp then wavering slowly again.
‘That’s didgeridoo music,’ she says. ‘They play it on a stereo out of the caravan out front at me whenever they’re not playing tape recordings from the old gang. That’s the other thing they do now. They’ve got rid of that horrible pipsqueak with the megaphone. They have tape recordings now … from the Slees and the Factors and the Leitchs and the Smiths and the Kezsigs and the Brownlows, and from a lot of others too from all points of the compass. They play them over and over out there from their vans. It was quite wonderful to hear them the first time. Took me back to better days. Their familiar voices. And the second time. That did, too. But they never let up. They play them all day long. And it’s boiled down to just gibberish now.’
‘Jesus,’ I tell her.
‘How many churches?’ she asks.
‘In Lorne?’
‘Yes. How many churches do they have there?’
‘Just the one.’
‘What sort?’ she asks.
‘Weatherboard,’ I tell her. There’s a long silence.
‘Denomination. What denomination?’ she explains.
‘I know what you mean. It’s a church. I don’t know what sort.’
‘Do they fill it on Sundays?’
‘I wouldn’t know. They lift the roof with hymns, so there must be a few of them in there.’
They sing loud?’ she asks in awe. ‘We sang loud, too. But sweetly. Not trying to outdo each other. Just caught up in Jesus’ love.’ She hums a few bars of some nearly recognisable hymn. I hold the phone out to Jean’s ear where she’s lying on her towel sunbaking. She opens her eyes and blinks through a spray of blonde hair and mumbles, ‘What’s that?’
‘I would like to be part of a congregation again,’ my mother says. Jean wrinkles her nose and slaps me on my bare thigh and closes her eyes again.
The sea is flattened out with statewide days of perfect weather. ‘Any cyclones come through there yet?’ I ask.
‘I’ve had some cloud, but no rain yet. I’m praying it’ll hold off, seeing as how Charles is camped in the river and they won’t let him up out of there onto their lease to camp anywhere else,’ she says. ‘He’s such a nice fellow. He helps me with the gardening some days. Especially with the watering, which is heavy work for me now since my hoses all upped and disappeared. I do hope their salt isn’t doing
harm to my roses. Rain’d brighten things up just lovely in the garden, I must say.’
‘Rain’s always nice,’ I tell her. ‘Well, I’ve got to run. I’m pretty busy here. I’ll ring again soon. See you.’
‘God bless you,’ she offers. Which is an offer I didn’t expect. I lie back on my towel.
‘They’re playing didgeridoos at her,’ I tell Jean and Thaw and Thaw’s new feral girlfriend called Brio, whom he’s fished out of an Otways woodchip protest camp and whose dreadlocks may not be quite long enough and matted enough to save the planet by lack of shampoo in the ecosystem but are long enough and matted enough to make her no possibility of being a cop and so are long and matted enough for him to wield his libido at her. ‘Your old dear’s into the didg?’ Brio asks. ‘Fantastic.’
Jean mumbles ‘Fuck’ into the sand.
‘They’ve sacked the guy on the megaphone,’ I tell her. ‘They’ve got her friends to make tape recordings. They’re playing those at her instead. The personal touch.’
Thaw’s lying propped on his elbows in the sand between Jean and Brio. Jean is brown from being young enough to sunbake wildly never believing death is a personal option. Brio is pallid and delicate as a spider from the rainforest floor. She has little fish tattooed on her buttocks.
Thaw’s reading a story out loud. It’s about a wicked sax player who became a wicked pilot and dropped bombs all over the Vietnamese and came home and couldn’t play the sax any more to save himself. He’s reading it slowly, doing the American accents. Laying down the book every now and then and asking us, ‘What about this? Eh?’ and raising his eyebrows fast twice like a Marx brother. Then taking it up again and trying to make us cry with his voice and abusing us when we don’t. Calling us deaf to great literature. And throwing sprays of hot sand across our backs to make sure we’re awake to hear it all and to make sure we’re alive to it all.
Silences Long Gone Page 16
