by Joy Dettman
A bare sprinkling of males squatted on their haunches in the shade of the garage, talking drought, talking bushfire and keeping an eye on the youthful members of the congregation, who had gathered beneath the café’s veranda. Small children whinged at their mother’s skirts and those too old to whinge, ground ants into the gravel with the heels of their Sunday shoes or chased grasshoppers – just an ordinary Sunday morning in Molliston.
‘Dulcie, you put your hat back on before you get sunstroke.’
‘Norman! If you keep tormenting that dog he’ll bite your hand off.’
‘Wilma, I told you not to climb on that car.’
The heat was still tolerable, though by noon it would be boiling the eggs as they came out of the hens’ backsides. Socialising would continue, Sunday being visiting day in Molliston. Front rooms and arbours, kitchens and Mary Murphy’s front veranda would see a lot of through traffic before the sun went down tonight.
Mike Murphy, spruced up for church in his Sunday duds, stood at the screen door watching the town traffic, not eager for the church bell to ring. His mother was the town seamstress, so most of his clothes were home-made. She’d sewn him this rig for Christmas; it had pants that might have been long enough when she’d cut them, but weren’t long enough now. A bloke looked a prize drongo in half-mast trousers.
The Murphys’ veranda was cool, even with the sun on it. Grapevines shaded it during the summer months, and umpteen wheat bags, unpicked and hand-stitched into heavy blinds, hung from rafter to floor on the inside of the fly-wire. When wet down they cooled this veranda by degrees. During the worst of summer, Mary’s sewing machine lived out here – as did most of the Murphys and half of their neighbours.
The bank on the right side was tall, but not as tall as the post office on the left. Mary Murphy spent her winters cursing both buildings for stealing her sunlight, but in summer she blessed them. They took the brunt of the heat and much of the glare.
Miss Jessie spent a lot of time on that air-conditioned veranda, evading her big sister, and as most news came to Molliston via the post office, it didn’t take long to make its way those few steps and into her neighbour’s receptive ears. She’d been in and out fast this morning. Mike hadn’t heard much more than his mother’s ohs and ahs.
‘Michael, are you here somewhere?’ Mary yelled from within the house.
‘I’m here,’ Mike moaned.
‘Then you stay here, my lad. Any sign of his car yet?’
‘No.’
‘Did you wet down those bags like I told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right then. If he’s not here in five minutes, we’ll pop in and see old Gran before church.’
‘Do I have to go there?’ She didn’t reply to that one. He knew the answer.
The women were in a huddle beneath the tree, mouths going ten to the dozen, hats nodding. He stepped out into the sun, the better to hear, and the screen door slammed behind him.
‘Don’t you go running off anywhere, Michael.’
‘Dressed like this? I look like a poofta,’ he added, but quietly.
Mrs O’Brien’s gig pulled in and Billy jumped down, joining Mike at the Murphys’ gate.
‘Sarah reckons the Hunters did an operation on one of the Johnson twins last night and she had a baby. Did Irene tell you anything?’
‘She’s not home yet.’
‘Sarah reckons Irene helped with the operating.’
Irene should have been home. When she worked nights, she was usually asleep by seven. Mike turned to the house, wondering why his mother wasn’t out, adding and gathering information in that huddle.
Then Kurt Reichenberg rode in, bypassing the gossips and dismounting in front of the police station. He leant his bike against a veranda post and walked to Thompson’s office door.
‘Did the constable leave?’ Mary called out to Mike from behind the screen door.
‘No. Was that ambulance called for old Joe Reichenberg, Ma?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Was it for one of the Johnson twins?’ Billy asked.
‘Who?’
‘Billy reckons his sister helped operate on one of the Johnson twins last night.’ Mike didn’t mention the baby. Thirteen year old boys weren’t expected to talk about those things.
‘One of the Johnsons?’ Mary looked at the post office. Jessie hadn’t mentioned that. ‘Have you got a clean handkerchief in your pocket, Michael?’
‘What for? I haven’t got a cold.’
‘Come in here and get one now, and wet that hair down – or flatten it with a bit of your brother’s grease, then we’ll pop over and see Gran.’
‘They all said they’d kill me if I pinched their hair grease again.’
‘Do as I say, and stop your arguing with me. And it wouldn’t kill you to put your new coat on either.’
‘It would come pretty close, Ma.’
dust fairies
For most of his life, first with his father, then with others, Kurt had weighed his every action, his every response, knowing it was safer to sidestep a difficult situation than race headlong into it. All morning Rachael had been on his mind, and since breakfast he’d been waiting for the constable to knock on their door. He hadn’t come.
He couldn’t work, had been ready to murder his brother and father, bury the fools in that bloody dam and shovel the earth back in, so fifteen minutes ago he’d left them arguing and walked away. He wanted news of Rachael, and wanted to be rid of his bloodstained shirt before his mother saw it, so he’d brought it here, stuffed into a brown paper bag.
The doors were locked, but there was a key in one, so, as a fading sign suggested, he knocked, then entered into the dark chaos of Tom’s vestibule. A door on the left led to the office, near as dark as the vestibule – except for a slim shaft of light where the sun had found a rip in the brown blind shielding the glazed section of the office door.
For a moment Kurt stood transfixed by the memory of a child staring at a slim golden path where specks of dust danced. His mother called those sunlit specks dust fairies. It was on that first day his father had come to the police station, brought his family here, Kurt and Christian’s hands held safe in Elsa’s own large hands. Bad men had been knocking at their door, bad things had been said at school and then they had to go to the policeman and perhaps he would take Kurt and his family away as they had taken Mr Buehler and Mr Schultz away in the night and locked them up.
Elsa had calmed his fears with her stories. ‘Watch the dust fairies,’ she’d whispered, pointing to silver and gold flecks dancing on that sunlit path. ‘They play here, unafraid of the lawman, Liebling, and you must not be afraid of him.’
He’d believed her. He had believed then in God and goblins and in dancing fairies.
His eyes made their slow adjustments and found a desk cluttered with papers, a disarray of books, newspapers, and dust, dust everywhere. He could smell it, and the closed odour of neglect. No window was ever opened in this room, no curtain washed and hung to smell sweet, only the brown blinds attempting to block any light entering through the glass quarter of the front door, an identical brown blind shielding a southern window. A brown room this one, everything was brown and heavy with unmatched timber. The walls were timber-panelled to shoulder height, and above the panelling brown paint peeled where the ceiling sagged and broke away from the wall. A bare board floor, a heavy wooden counter splitting the room, two chairs on the other side of the counter. Nothing on this side. On this side, you stood and awaited the constable’s pleasure. An unhappy room, designed to dispirit those who waited.
Kurt looked at a tray holding two upturned tumblers and a jug of water, a scrap of beaded net keeping the water safe from flies – or dust. Kurt’s mouth was dry, as it had been since morning. He poured a little, drank it. Stale, like everything else in this room.
On the business side of the office, to the left of the desk was a door that would lead outside to the lock-up; the last thing a guilty ma
n might see as he was dragged through it was a framed photograph of King George, hung in the space above the door. Like enlarged postage stamps printed by the thousands, these framed photographs hung on dusty hooks in the town hall, schoolroom and post office, and had been hanging gathering dust since Kurt could remember. He knew this one well; every week during the war his father had come to this place to swear allegiance to that postage stamp.
Leaning on the counter, he waited for service, as though he was in the grocer’s shop. No smiling Mr Nolan to greet him, to scoop sugar into a brown paper bag, climb his ladder for the packets of tea. No constable either, but a bell on the counter, as at the grocer’s, with the same sign beneath it: Ring for attendance. Kurt picked it up and was rewarded by a healthy ‘ding’ before he could silence the clapper. No one came. He was wasting his time, and he’d left those warring fools in the bottom paddock. It wasn’t good for them to be alone together; the horses would suffer for the stupidity of two pig-headed men who spent their lives pretending they did not understand the other’s language.
He shrugged, released the clapper and allowed the bell to ring two, three, four times, the sound magnified in the silence. No door opened, no footsteps approached. Again he shrugged, then walked to the office door, lifting the brown blind to expose a frosted glass panel set into the top quarter: POLICE STATION, it said in large reversed capitals, left unfrosted, each letter a small oasis of clarity.
If he placed his eye to the L he could see Merton Road. He looked through the top of the T, saw the women beneath the tree. They appeared to be staring back at him, perhaps waiting to see if he would come out or be flung into the lock-up. For an instant he smiled, but perhaps that was not such a good joke this morning.
Behind him the residence door suddenly ground against the floor boards. He swung around expecting to greet the constable, allowing the blind to fall back into place. The dust fairies were back, joined by many more dancers, then through that beam of light came a nightgown-clad gargoyle to frighten the dust fairies away.
She gave him goosebumps, made cold shivers run up his spine. He moved from the door, not wishing to be cornered by this woman – as he had been one day in the grocer’s shop. He had not understood her madness then, and had allowed himself to become trapped. She’d come close enough to paw at him, and he’d pushed her, only so he might escape, but she’d fallen against piled boxes, had sat down amid the boxes, screaming at him as she ripped open the bodice of her frock to display her shrivelled breasts.
Several others had seen the awful sight of her before his mother and Mrs Murphy were able to grasp and cover her while Mr Nolan ran for the constable.
‘Geisterkrank,’ Elsa had whispered. ‘Nicht mit Irren streiten.’
‘I didn’t know she was insane, Mutti, and I didn’t argue, only evaded her.’
Today he knew. Today he was ready for the constable’s woman.
‘Ronnie.’ She muttered the same name she’d used in the grocer’s. Difficult to understand her wet toothless spluttering but he understood that name. Perhaps she mistook him for someone else.
‘Good morning, Mrs Thompson,’ he said, noticing the odour that had entered the room with her. ‘I am waiting for the constable.’
‘Home . . . come home…’ Stretching the words, jaws compressing them, compressing her face into a caricature of a gargoyle, and repeating those words and that name.
‘I am Kurt, Mrs Thompson, Kurt Reichenberg.’ He stepped into the vestibule, his eyes never leaving her.
She looked reptilian, her hands clasped, her elbows flapping like a featherless parrot’s wings. Then, with great speed and coordination, she snatched up a tumbler and threw it, not at him, but at the wall behind the constable’s desk. It shattered, spraying shards wide. As the second glass followed the first, Kurt headed for the door and escape. To hell with the constable and his crazy woman. Mrs Hunter might have news of Rachael. But the hag came after him, her mutter growing in pitch, much of it unintelligible.
‘I am sure you are right, Mrs Thompson, but I am not who you think I am.’ Why reply? And why in God’s name had the constable brought her home from the madhouse?
He opened the front door a crack, breathed clean air. But if he went out to the street, she’d follow him, and perhaps bare her breasts again. This he did not want to witness. Should he call for Mrs Murphy? Or perhaps he ought to pick up one of those cricket bats and put that poor crazy being out of her misery.
‘Your husband,’ he said, closing the door. ‘Your husband is coming, Mrs Thompson.’ God let him be coming soon. ‘The constable is coming now.’
That stilled her feet, cut her mutterings short and turned her to the residence door. ‘The constable will be back shortly,’ she said, and clearly enough, though with as much expression as a parrot. Birdlike, this woman, grey skin stretched taut over her cheekbones and brow, thin, withered neck, the flesh of her arms sagging. ‘The constable will be back shortly.’
‘Yes. He is coming now. Please return to what you were doing.’
‘The constable will be back shortly.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and she turned, reached for him. He placed his hands on her shoulder, easing her through the residence door and closing it behind her, leaning against it while sucking on musty air, tasting her in the air, and breathing it out quickly.
‘Shit.’ Ridiculous, this fear that could make his heart thump, thump, thump so hard, beat in his ears, choke his throat. She was still there. He could hear her muttering and perhaps now she was cursing the Germans.
A dry tongue attempting to moisten dry lips, he barricaded the door. He was not afraid of the snakes and the great goannas of the bush, not afraid of the bull, or of his father, but this wretched wraith of a woman –
What if the constable walked in and found him barricading that door? Go. Get out of this place. Go over to the hospital.
He had to know. He could think of nothing but Rachael. Couldn’t work, couldn’t stand out in that heat, translating his father’s demands, editing Christian’s replies, all the while thinking of Rachael’s blood on his shirt, thinking of the doctor who had not even bandaged her wound, who had lit a cigarette.
Silence from behind the residence door. For another minute he waited before creeping back to the office. Hard to creep in heavy boots on creaking floorboards, but creep he did, back to the office’s front door where again he lifted the blind and placed his eye to the clear glass at the top of the T.
The gossips were still gathering, like a flock of foolish sheep, milling and bleating, waiting for the old Gott Ziege to lead them all to slaughter.
escape artists
‘If you average church out at one hour a week, that’s fifty-two hours each year, Billy. Multiply that by ten, then divide by twenty-four…’
The priest still hadn’t arrived. Mike Murphy’s tie was in his pocket, his shirt sleeves rolled up, shirt tail hanging out to disguise the fact that the two top buttons of his trousers were undone, which allowed the pants to hang low enough to cover his boot tops. Billy O’Brien, five months Mike’s senior, six inches shorter and as fair as Mike was dark, squatted at his side in the post office lane, watching his mate do a long division sum in the dust, using a finger for his pencil.
‘That’s twenty-one full days of church that we’ve put up with already.’
‘How many if you multiply by thirteen and a half?’
‘You probably have to reach the age of reason before you know enough to be bored stiff.’
‘A terrible waste of good time,’ Billy O’Brien said, looking towards the church.
Having no father and too many brothers, Mike had spent most of his life escaping, which brought him into contact with others doing the same thing. Billy O’Brien had a lot to escape from – a bad-tempered father, a gossiping mother, a tribe of carping sisters and a nineteen year old brother with half a brain, two fists and big boots. For the last three years, Billy had been escaping regularly.
Mike started a bit earlie
r. Squire’s wood paddock being out of bounds, it was logical enough for a ten year old to swim over there. He’d come on mad Tige Johnson’s camp, and because Tige hadn’t told him to bugger off, he’d gone back regularly, learning a lot about trapping rabbits. Tige taught him how to set those steel-jawed traps, peel the skin off a bunny in one piece. He taught him that the Western Front wasn’t the same place as the Wild West, and also how the rich bastards were turning the workers into a herd of bleating sheep who wouldn’t even kick when the wool was stolen off their back to pull over their own bloody eyes.
Not many turned up for Tige’s funeral. They didn’t even give him a proper one. Thus, Mike learned that Father Ryan and God might praise a man for blowing a German’s brains out, but it was a mortal sin to blow his own brains out – and doing it on Squire’s front lawn no doubt made it an even greater sin. They’d stuck Tige in the back corner of the cemetery, with not even a cross to mark his grave.
Mike had set Tige’s traps in Squire’s bush paddock the night of the funeral. He’d chucked his first ‘No Trespassing’ sign in the river a year to the day afterwards. Now he trapped Squire’s paddock because it was the closest place to town where he could trap, and he chucked those signs in the river because no man had a right to own so much good trapping land, then put signs up to keep people out. And if he put them up to stop people staring at Arthur, then he was wasting his energy, because the only times Mike had seen him, he’d been wearing a hat, a scarf and a big pair of glasses with black lenses. There hadn’t been much of him to stare at. His body looked all right and he could still ride a horse fast – if it was racing beside his father’s horse.
‘That place is riddled with bunnies, Billy. I got four and a half pair out of twelve traps last night. I sold three pair, but Mum wants to cook the rest. I’m going back again tonight, though. Want to come?’
‘No, and button it up. The copper is doing something over that fence. Listen.’
