Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘Trudy,’ Tessa called, which didn’t mean that the call was for her, only that whoever was on the line didn’t speak Greek.

  Trudy walked downstairs to take the call.

  She’d been thinking hospital, thinking temp work, and that call was from St Vincent’s hospital. Nicholas Papadimopolous had been taken there by ambulance for scans but was ready now to be picked up.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was involved in an accident. The scans reveal no injury.’

  ‘Can you put him in a taxi for me, please? I’m here alone with two small boys and his unwell mother,’ Trudy said.

  Nick wouldn’t like it. He would have enjoyed the drama of a frantic wife, mother and sons battling peak-hour traffic to run to his side. Three years ago, Trudy would have run to his side. She’d had her quota of drama today. Tessa had a leakage problem and refused to use the pads her daughters bought for her.

  Paying for a taxi from the city to Croydon could be dramatic. Nick wouldn’t have the money. She looked at Tessa, aware she stockpiled cash in her bedroom.

  ‘Nick had a minor accident. He’s coming home in a taxi. He’ll need money to pay the driver,’ she said, in Greek.

  More drama, lots of drama, before Tessa went to her room and returned with a fifty-dollar note. She didn’t hand it to Trudy but placed it on the table beside her phone, then picked up the phone to make a call, squeezing what drama she could from her Nicky’s minor accident.

  Trudy climbed the stairs, listening to one side of a conversation. She’d spent enough time in Greece to have a good working knowledge of the language. It was Tonia, the eldest daughter, and according to Tessa, Tonia’s husband’s fault that Nicky had the accident. Tonia was the wife of the taxi owner. She hung up when her mother started screeching blame down the line.

  There was still Demi, Cia and Angie to call. They never hung up. Tessa was dialling one of them when a crash from above, followed by a bellow, had Trudy running to her boys.

  Jamey was on the floor between the twin beds, Ricky attempting to lift a small bedside chest of drawers off his brother. Trudy lifted it and checked for injury.

  ‘You’re not hurt,’ she said.

  The chest used to hold a top-heavy lamp. She’d got rid of it the day she’d moved in. She’d need to get rid of those drawers too. ‘I’ve told you not to climb on things.’

  ‘It just falled over,’ Ricky said.

  ‘Because you opened its drawers and climbed on them,’ she said. ‘Find a video and I’ll play it for you. Daddy is going to be late.’

  They looked down towards the boogieman on the phone at the foot of the stairs, then in unison, shook their heads.

  ‘In Mummy and Daddy’s room,’ she said. Nick had turned the largest of the upstairs bedrooms into his den, a wide bed, desk, laptop, television and video–CD player, conveniently positioned. It wasn’t accustomed to playing Thomas the Tank Engine but accepted it. She settled the boys on the bed to watch the busy trains, then sat with them, not watching trains but looking down through a window that offered a view of a neighbour’s backyard, their clothesline, their back door. She’d been familiar with the elderly mother and daughter and their two fluffy white dogs before introducing herself and the boys over the back fence.

  They were a Mrs and Miss Morrison, and the daughter’s name was Margaret. The instant she’d heard that name, she’d wondered if she’d been sent by fate to this house, to this court.

  Way back, maybe a year before she’d gone overseas, she’d temped at the Frankston hospital where, on one slow night, she’d glanced through old hospital records, seeking the record of her birth. Only one premature baby had been delivered by caesarean section that day, and to nineteen-year-old Miss Margaret Morrison –

  Her mind was far away when Tessa screeched up the stairs. Her poor injured Nicky was home, her baby boy.

  ‘You stay here wiff us here, Mummy,’ Jamey said when she stood.

  ‘Finish watching your show.’

  ‘It nearly is finish now,’ he replied. He’d know. He and his brother had first watched that video at eighteen months.

  Nick was standing at the open door, with the taxi driver, unwilling to let his passenger get away before he paid for his ride.

  ‘You look healthy enough,’ Trudy greeted him.

  ‘I hurt my back,’ he said. ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘How much have you got?’ Maybe not the right thing to say to a man with an injured back.

  ‘Fifteen. I need eighty-two.’

  She made up the difference with Tessa’s fifty and her own twenty.

  ‘Keep the change,’ she said to the driver, then closed the door.

  THE BREAKING

  Jenny didn’t notice that Jim’s electric buggy was missing until after she found his note. He’d ridden out to the Monk property, where the new owner, a city chap, was building a house. According to Harry, the builders were setting it on the site of the old Monk mansion. They’d spoken about it yesterday, and about Monk’s cellar.

  The leftovers of a chicken casserole heating in the oven, potatoes bubbling on the stove, Jenny walked to the window to peer through greenery to the road Jim would have taken. No sign of him. His note said he’d be home by five. It was close to six now. They were still on daylight saving time and there was plenty of light left in the day. He’d probably lost track of the time. She was reaching for his note when the refrigerator hiccupped, shuddered and died.

  ‘You know what I’m planning, you old bugger,’ she said. She’d used her dressmaking tape to measure the fridge recess, and unless that tape had been shrunken by the years, the fridge–freezer would fit. She hadn’t ordered it. She wanted to discuss it with Jim before making that call. Too late now to call. On Thursdays, the shop closed its doors before six.

  She checked the power plug, thinking she may have disturbed it with her measuring. She hadn’t. Then she tried the light switch – and not a flicker from the fluorescent tubes.

  ‘Damn and blast electricity companies to hell,’ she said. There’d been too many blackouts lately. Most didn’t last long but were annoying. She stood, watching those fluorescent tubes, hopeful of a fast fix. It didn’t happen, and still cursing electricity companies, she read Jim’s note again.

  Dear Jen, Gone out to have a look at Monk’s place. I believe I have enough battery power to get there and back. If not, you’ll know where to find me. Jim XX.

  ‘I told you we’d drive out there tomorrow, you impatient bugger of a man,’ she said, then turned the note over to see what was printed on the other side.

  Nothing. He’d used a clean sheet of paper.

  ‘Why?’

  Her heart knew why. It started racing. For years they’d been writing each other notes on the reverse side of Juliana Conti’s draft printouts. They had a pile of used pages on the bottom shelf of the pantry and a larger pile in the library. They used the blank sides for scoring card games, writing shopping lists, as scribble paper for the twins, and when done with them, they’d burn them. Juliana Conti was their secret.

  When Jim had picked up his pen today, he’d been aware that what he was about to write wouldn’t be burnt.

  She was out the door, mobile in one hand, car keys in the other. She was down the ramp, unlocking her car and climbing into it, reversing too fast out the way she’d driven in, praying she was a madwoman and knowing she wasn’t, knowing that something had been going on in his head since Mary Grogan’s funeral. He hadn’t gone to it for Mary Grogan but to hear Jenny sing, and that night he’d told her she could sing Ave Maria at his funeral.

  A right turn into Hooper Street, right again into Three Pines Road, then on down to the bridge, and no sign of him.

  No sign of him on the road out to Monk’s big old gates, and those gates closed and padlocked. They stopped her car. They didn’t stop her. She walked down to where the curved brickwork ended and a wire fence began, where she spread the wires and climbed between them.

 
The creek cut in close to the road at this point. She found his old grey cardigan a few steps back from where a high bank fell away to deep water.

  *

  Eight-fifty, Hooper’s corner a pit of darkness when the lights of two vehicles turned into the driveway. For the last hour Jenny had been sitting on her front steps, and Lila, psychic as all dogs are, hadn’t left her side since she’d returned to the house. The beam of her torch identified a police car but not the two uniformed men who stepped from it. Harry Hall parked his old ute on the lawn. Her torch lit his face for an instant. It looked grim, so she turned off the light, needing to hide a while longer in the dark.

  The dark doesn’t silence voices. ‘He’s gone, Jen,’ Harry said.

  Of course he’d gone. She’d known that the second she’d turned his note over and seen its blank side, though until she’d seen that cardigan lying in the dust, she’d clung to hope. Nothing inside her now. She was a skin stretched over a black gulch of waste. She’d tried so hard to be enough for him since Trudy and the boys had gone. She hadn’t been enough.

  ‘Can we go inside, Mrs Hooper?’ one of the officers said.

  Whether there is a word in you or not, you have to reply to a direct question. ‘No lights,’ she said.

  There could have been. She had half a packet of candles in her kitchen drawer, had half a dozen pre-used candles in a plastic bag, could have had light in every room. Didn’t want light. Wanted the dark to swallow her, to swallow the last seven hours of this day, or for this day never to have happened.

  They spoke their words in the dark, just police words, the necessary feeding of information to the newly bereaved. She’d heard it all before on television. They sounded like second-rate actors in a road-safety commercial.

  ‘It appears that he may have been reaching for his fallen cardigan and lost control of his vehicle –’

  Very conveniently lost control of it, nice and close to that high bank too. He’d known that land well.

  Stay back from that edge, Jen. The clay is unstable there.

  And he wouldn’t have needed a cardigan today. The temperature had edged up to the mid-thirties. A deep thinker, her Jim, he’d put a lot of thought into his last ride, had put thought into which cardigan might best serve his purpose. That old grey thing was pure wool and heavy enough not to blow away. A forward-thinking chap, her Jim, a problem solver. He’d solve problems before they’d become problems. She’d spent half her life telling him that he’d built mountains out of molehills for the pure pleasure of sweating while climbing them.

  No more problems for him to solve. In one easy movement, he’d solved the lot – and abandoned her alone on the desert island of old age.

  ‘He was pinned underwater by his vehicle.’

  Stop calling it a vehicle, she thought. It was his gopher. The twins used to call it Papa’s go far. It had gone as far as Jim had needed to go this last year – over to the newsagents to get his daily papers, around to the post office to buy stamps. If he needed to go further, she’d drive him.

  She’d nagged him to go a lot further before his hips crippled him. She’d wanted to fly to Greece for Trudy’s wedding. He’d posted the happy couple a cheque. Born in this bloody town, raised in it, lived most of his life in it, now he’d be buried in its dirt.

  She should have been howling. That’s what wives did in road-safety commercials, howled, or collapsed, or both. But she could see Jim’s mind ticking over while he’d planned his afternoon. Kids had been lost in that creek for days. A camper drowned at Christmas time and his body hadn’t been found for five days. Jim solved that problem with a worn-out cardigan – worn out at the elbows with his leaning on them. She’d darned them twice. She’d been a perfectionist darner. Her work would now be on show in Willama’s police station evidence room – and if those officers knew what she was thinking, they’d have her committed.

  ‘Would he have any reason to ride out there today, Mrs Hooper?’

  She knew a few reasons. She’d been itemising reasons since sitting down on the steps. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘The house they’re building,’ Harry said. ‘We talked about where they were putting it. His father owned that land years ago.’

  A lifetime ago. When Jenny had been seventeen and Jim twenty-one, when Monk’s old mansion had been standing. It had a huge cellar beneath it. Jimmy was conceived in that cellar.

  ‘Perhaps we should go indoors, Mrs Hooper?’

  Mozzies biting? she thought. She wasn’t feeling their bites. She wasn’t feeling anything. There was nothing inside her to feel with. Lila was aware of the mozzies. She snapped her teeth at their buzzing but didn’t move from Jenny’s side.

  ‘Have you phoned the girls, Jen?’ Harry asked. No space on the steps for him. He’d perched on the edge of the veranda. Old praying mantis Harry, all skinny arms and legs and oversized head – or overgrowth of hair on his head. He’d never liked wasting money in a barber’s shop.

  She hadn’t phoned Trudy since she’d left. Their parting hadn’t been amicable. Jim had phoned her. This morning he’d written to her. He’d left the envelope on the hallstand, a cheque enclosed – his apology perhaps for being a stubborn old man. Jenny had felt the paperclip when she’d picked up the envelope to post it. He’d always used paperclips to hold cheques.

  It was still in her handbag too. She’d forgotten about it. By the time she’d dropped Alice off at the hospital, she’d been rushing to get to her hair appointment. Then the bank had held her up for half an hour while she’d waited for someone capable of hitting the right computer keys to roll over an investment she’d been rolling over for years. Then the refrigerator, then the supermarket, and then Alice to be picked up.

  ‘Do you have your daughters’ numbers handy, Mrs Hooper?’

  She had Georgie’s. Like its owner, Georgie’s phone number had remained unchanged by the years. She reeled it off. Trudy’s number was keyed into her mobile, and where it might be located was anybody’s guess. In the car maybe. Beside the creek where she’d dialled triple zero.

  And what was the hurry anyway? Jim would still be dead in the morning.

  Dead. Gone. Passed away. Demised. Lost, but mainly gone . . .

  ‘Trudy Papadimopolous,’ Harry said. ‘She lives with her mother-in-law in Croydon. Their number should be easy enough to find.’

  Their name wasn’t easy enough to write. The constable couldn’t spell it. The twins couldn’t say it. They could say Hooper.

  They wouldn’t remember their Papa Hooper. They were barely three years old.

  Did you think about that, you fool of a man? Did you think about me, about anything other than marking the spot for your searchers? she thought. Better for Trudy if I don’t mention that old cardigan. Better for Katie too. She loved her Papa, and would believe in an accidental drowning. Jim had never been a swimmer. He’d told Katie once that his mother hadn’t allowed him near water deeper than what was in his bathtub; that his father had attempted to teach him to swim by tossing him into the middle of the creek one day. The loss of one foot and half of his shin in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp had given him a good reason to stay out of the water.

  ‘Your husband had relatives, Mrs Hooper?’

  ‘Two sisters. Both dead,’ she said.

  He had a son in England. Give them Jimmy’s name, she thought. She didn’t know his phone number but could give them a possible address. He might send a condolence card, she thought, then shook her head, shook Jimmy away and found a name for them.

  ‘He had a cousin in Balwyn. Ian Hooper,’ she said. ‘He was alive a couple of years ago.’

  ‘I believe you have a note, Mrs Hooper.’

  She had a note addressed to her but written for them, and she sighed and pushed herself to her feet, knowing she had to get this over with, had to get them gone. She sighed again, then took her first step up and into what comes later.

  There was no later. There were the raw edges of nothing. She led the way into the house with her to
rch, led them through the entrance hall into a passage and through to the kitchen. They followed her. Lila followed them.

  By torchlight she found that bag of used candles. Harry, never without a box of matches in his pocket, without the makings of a cigarette with his matches, lit the first candle then looked for a place to stand it. No candlesticks in Jenny’s kitchen but a cupboard full of jars, big ones and small. Glass jars had been a precious commodity once. Old habits don’t die easily. She opened a cupboard packed full of jars and chose half a dozen of the smallest – the Vegemite, mustard, crushed ginger jars – and while the police officers waited, she dribbled melted wax into one after the other, then stood candle stubs upright in hot wax.

  A soft, kind light, that of flickering candle flames, though never good to read by. She read Jim’s note one final time by candlelight then handed it to an officer to become evidence of accidental death.

  My clever Jim.

  He would have left her a personal note somewhere, written on the back of a Juliana page, to be read then burnt. He would have hidden it in one of her favourite books, or under her pillow. Somewhere in this house she’d find his last letter.

  He’d left one inside a bankbook the morning they’d packed up their room in Sydney, before he’d gone off to war; hid it in a bankbook then buried the book down the bottom of her case. She hadn’t found it for months. Still had it. Still had every letter he’d written to her during the war. He used to write beautiful letters – when he’d been an undamaged boy.

  Six stubs of candle flickering, the short and the tall. Grouped together, they looked like the candles in a Catholic church. She moved the two tallest to the table where at twelve-thirty today, Jim had been sitting, a mug of tea in one hand, a slice of fruitcake in the other. She’d kissed his wiry white hair, told him she’d be back by four-thirty. ‘Be careful,’ she’d said, and she’d gone on her way. He would have finished his cake, written his note – notes – found his cardigan and gone.

  Trudy’s fault for leaving and taking those boys. And my fault, she thought. She’d let him edit a draft of We’ll Meet Again. It wasn’t their story but it was set during their young years, and in some places she knew she’d cut too close to the bone. He’d used his red pen liberally on the first eighteen pages, then put the pen down to read.