Riverslake

by T. A. G. Hungerford

  “Don’t kid yourself.” Before he realized it, Randolph repeated what Spain had said to him. “There’s no change.”

  “What do you mean, no change?” Murdoch looked at him questioningly and tossed off the dregs of the wine in his glass.

  “No change,” Randolph said. “It’ll always be Riverslake.”

  “You’re stung,” Murdoch said flatly, “you’re on the skids. You want to give it away when you start raving after a quiet night like we had tonight!” He put his glass down on the table. “You know what you can do with that. I’m off!”

  “Thanks for the drink,” Randolph said mockingly.

  Murdoch thumbed him from the doorway and was gone. Randolph looked round the room. It had emptied of sound with Murdoch’s going, and every dint and scratch on the white-painted walls showed dark and deep under the harsh glare of the unshaded light. He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his shoes, kicking them off on the mat to dull their clatter.

  Kerry wasn’t very perturbed when I told him I was going tonight, he thought. Why the hell should he be? Ships that pass in the night!

  He slipped his socks and trousers off and crawled in between the covers of the creaking bed. A man should be like Kerry—he knows what he wants. One set of words and one set of ideas and one road to travel, none of this blasted “Look-before-you-leap-but-he-who-hesitates-is-lost” business! Good God, all I’ve got to do is to make up my mind!

  As he reached up to turn off the light Randolph looked round the room. No grease-marks, no pin-ups, no holes in the caneite. Nothing. It would be the same when he left it as when he came into it, except for the paint he had slapped on the walls. Even Bellairs would leave some mark to show that he had been around!

  With a click, he plunged the room into darkness.

  Outside, the night washed round Murdoch in a cool, rising tide. As he walked between the shapeless bulk of the huts to his own room, the heels of his shoes clicked loudly in the stillness. He was thinking of what Randolph had said about the girl Marika.

  At the dance, he had not taken her outside—but try to tell anyone that! It was what they expected. If you could cotton on to her, she was fair game. But not her. She was a nice girl. He grinned.

  Get off yourself. You would have been in it if she would have. Only she wouldn’t come outside!

  The girl’s wide green eyes and her pale, almost transparent skin were in the air before him, the silken roll of her pale-gold hair on her slender neck, the silken mounds of her small breasts and her thin, pathetic shoulders. He felt that he could have crushed them, if he had got his arms round them, as he might crush a figure of tinfoil.

  “Jesus!” he breathed aloud, between clenched teeth. He balled the fist of one hand in the palm of the other as he walked, thinking about her. What he had not told Randolph was that she had promised to go to the pictures with him, again, on Friday, two nights away.

  Just ahead of him, he could see the faint glow of the boilers behind the kitchen. The dark blob showing indistinctly against it would be the Dummy, who practically lived in the boiler-room, day and night, sitting on his box and staring into the flames of the furnace. Murdoch swerved out of his path to have a few words with him.

  He was crouched on a low deal box a few feet away from the open door of the furnace. The red light threw his beak nose into glowing prominence and sank his deep eyes into twin pools of shadow. His thin back was bowed, and the cat Tiger was curled in his meagre lap, purring steadily, kneading his worn trousers with gently unsheathed claws.

  The Dummy looked up as Murdoch stepped into the shed, his slit of a mouth stretching across teeth that gleamed in the pomegranate glow.

  “Hullo, Dummy,” Murdoch said loudly, placing one hand on the hunchback’s shoulder and stooping close to his good ear. “You look bloody happy!”

  The Dummy’s grin expanded. His long hands, quitting the shining red fur of the cat’s back, flicked out towards the fire, twining in a washing motion, then swiftly in the direction of the door, through which the night seeped, cool and calm and silent. They came to rest expressively on the cat in his lap, stroking and fondling. His long lips worked spasmodically, his eyebrows jigged up and down, and he wriggled his shoulders in a childlike expression of happiness.

  “I’m happy, all right,” it all said, as plainly as words. “The fire’s warm, the night’s beautiful and I’ve got my Tiger. I’m happy, all right!”

  Murdoch patted the man’s shoulder and dropped his hand to the cat’s warm back. It’s claws, unsheathed and sunk gently into the cloth over the Dummy’s thigh, were instantly still, each little curved talon gleaming in the light from the furnace. It turned its head slowly and regarded Murdoch obliquely from its golden, black-slitted eyes.

  “Tiger, you lovely bastard!” he said gently, and the Dummy chuckled with delight. Praise for his pet was praise for him. As they looked down at the ginger cat, a second cat, thin and black and a female, flowed gingerly round the edge of the door, and walked across to Murdoch. It looked up at him a moment, and then began to twine between his legs, mewling softly.

  “Poor old Millie!” He stooped to pat her thin sides. Now that she had had her kittens, she seemed to sag like an old black handbag. “Isn’t Ziggie keeping the tucker up to you?”

  He stopped rubbing her back and held his hand out to the glow of the furnace.

  “Gosh! She’s hurt!” he exclaimed. “Blood!”

  He knelt beside the cat and ran his hand gingerly over her back again. She continued to purr contentedly. He looked at her belly and examined her legs. There was no sign of a wound. He held his hand out again, but there was a tinge of horror in his glance as he looked at it.

  “That’s not her blood—there’s something screwy here!”

  The hunchback had not stirred from his box. His small black eyes fled from the cat on the floor to Murdoch’s extended hand, and back again. His own hand never ceased to stroke the cat in his lap.

  “Dummy!” Murdoch spoke sharply. “Torch?”

  He pantomimed the flashing of a torch around the walls, and the hunchback nodded to a nail behind his head. Murdoch reached up and grabbed it, and without further explanation, wheeled and raced out of the shed.

  He knew that Zigfeld had put the cat and her kittens in a box in an angle of a disused store-house that stood back from the main road through the camp, deeply shrouded in well-grown gum-trees. That was where she spent most of her time, and it was reasonable to expect that she would have picked up the bloodstains there, or thereabouts. As he raced through the silent camp, a thousand conjectures flashed across his mind, but they all ended up in the same conclusion—some poor beggar had been done over.

  He ran in amongst the trees round the store, stopped and switched on the torch. Almost immediately, as though it were a thin yellow wand that he extended for the purpose, it came to rest on a crumpled form that slumped against the bole of one of the trees. Murdoch propped for a moment, frozen by horror at the other end of the thin beam. Then he darted forward and knelt beside the man on the ground.

  “Johnny!” he muttered. “Oh, Christ, who did this?”

  Novikowsky turned his head slightly to the source of the sound. He could not see who had spoken, because both of his eyes were sunken in mounds of blue flesh, swollen and streaked with blood. Neither could he answer, for his mouth was a ruin of shattered teeth and crushed and split lips. Murdoch had knocked around long enough to know that a boot had caused that. He whipped off his coat and folded it on the ground for a pillow.

  “Come on, fella,” he said softly, taking the Pole by the shoulders. “Lie on this while I go and get some help.” He began to move Novikowsky, but stopped, shaken, when a thin, weak scream of pure unbearable agony trickled through the Pole’s broken lips.

  Murdoch’s face set in a deadly immobility. Broken ribs, that would be, and by the sound of it, sticking into the poor d
evil’s lungs. Whoever had slippered Novikowsky knew the business backwards. The gross features and lumbering body of Bellairs loomed across Murdoch’s mind. He stood up and stared down at the figure at his feet.

  “I’ll get the Bastard,” he muttered, talking to himself rather than to Novikowsky. “I’ll get Carmichael—he’ll know what to do.”

  Two little black lumps walked unsteadily into the beam of the torch, stiff-legged, with wire-thin tails extended upwards. Two of Millie’s kittens. He looked at them, fascinated, as they tottered across the uneven ground to where Novikowsky slumped against the tree. One of them put out a paw, tentatively, and touched the Pole’s bloody hand. It edged closer, sniffed it, and then licked it avidly.

  “Jesus Christ!” Murdoch swore, revolted. Wheeling round almost in panic, he raced through the camp towards the manager’s cottage.

  Chapter Ten

  Hughie Mancin opened his eyes reluctantly and blinked at the hot sunshine that struggled through the draggled curtain that hung across his small window. He rolled over in his tumbled bed and groaned, passing his parched tongue over his lips, trying to prise loose the spittle caked hard in the corners. He sat up and sent a thousand tiny picks tapping inside his agonized head.

  “Oh, God,” he breathed, passing a shaking hand across his forehead. “Never again. A man’s a donkey. Never again!”

  He studied his palm, wet with a film of dirty sweat, and then looked down at his thin white legs. They trailed below him like something detached. He put out his hand uncertainly and touched them; when he tried to throw them over the side of the bed, he could not move them. He sagged back against his pillow and reached for a cigarette from the small table beside his bed. It was submerged in a trash-heap of tin-openers, butts, letters, corks and bottletops; when finally he uncovered a cigarette and lit it he inhaled deeply only once and dropped it into the fruit-tin he used as a slop bucket. It hissed and went out.

  He could only vaguely remember the start of the party on the previous night, and he had no idea when it finished. He remembered that Paramor and Condamine had come in and brought wine with them, and that then some others from the kitchen, then a couple of blow-ins from the Causeway, with loud-mouthed women. The Bastard came in at about eleven o’clock and told them to soft-pedal the noise—he remembered that. The Bastard. He remembered the Balt in the room next-door banging on the wall a number of times, the cheeky hooer, and he remembered laughing uproariously at what Condamine had shouted in reply. He remembered being sick, and crying, and lying down. But nothing else. And now the room and the bed stank and he stank, and there was another day to be faced in the kitchen.

  With a gasp and a grimace of pain he stood up, clutched his burning head and staggered over to the wardrobe. In his overcoat pocket, he knew, he had hidden a bottle of wine before the others came in, the night before. If they had not swiped it—no, it was still there. He ripped the tinfoil off, tore the cork out and tilted his head back, draining half the bottle in greedy swallows. He lowered it, gasped and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. The start of another day.

  When he walked into the kitchen ten minutes later Randolph and Murdoch were standing by the cutting bench, sunk in a deadly silence. Randolph was cutting the meat for the goulash and Murdoch toyed with a knife, idly slicing the hard yellow fat into cubes and making a pattern with them. He and Randolph had been talking about Novikowsky, who after spending two nights and a day in hospital had not regained consciousness. It was a gloomy topic, and Murdoch was thankful for the appearance of somebody who would change it.

  “For God’s sake,” he whispered, “be on Hughie—he’s still rotten!” Randolph looked up sombrely. There was no animation in his voice, and no glint of interest or humour in his words. “They had a party in his room last night.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, all the greasies and some of the urgers from the Causeway. I wasn’t asked—I’m not very worried about it, but I’m about as popular as a pansy at a prostitutes picnic.”

  “Over Stefan, the other day?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Poor old Stefan,” Murdoch muttered, and they lapsed again into silence.

  Mancin walked over to them, unsteadily. “Where’s the chef, Kerry?” he demanded, his tongue tripping over the words. “He been in, yet?”

  Murdoch shook his head.

  “Ziggy?”

  “He’s around, somewhere.”

  “Struth, I’m crook.” Mancin rubbed his stomach, tenderly. “In the comics—something I ate, yesterday.”

  “Ate!” Murdoch echoed him derisively, and pointed to the stove. “The tea’s there—whack a powder into it, you look as if you could do with a kick.”

  “I got all the kick I need,” Mancin mumbled, pouring the strong black brew into his grimy mug. His blue hands shook and his bloodless eyelids fluttered up and down over his bleary eyes. “The old dog for the hard road,” he said with weak vindictiveness, giving himself courage to face the day, “and the pup for the bloody pavement. I been cooking for too long for you young blokes. I know.”

  “Yeah—I know too,” Slim Charlesworth interrupted from the other side of the range. He had just come down from the mess, where he had been plating the meat for lunch. “I know that you’ll be on the hard road if the Bastard catches you doddering round the kitchen like a sick moll. He’d tramp you like a shot. Why don’t you go back to bed and have a sickie?”

  “I never been crook in me life, you cheeky young cow!” Mancin snorted weakly and weaved solemnly away from them, slopping tea across the concrete floor as he went. He stared at the sink, where Novikowsky had been replaced by Radinski, who usually worked in the mess. “Where’s Johnny?” he demanded. “Bloody Balts get more days off’n I do!”

  “He’s stung, all right,” Charlesworth observed. “Felix was there all day yesterday, too, but old Uncle don’t remember it. Ziggy or Verity won’t tramp him, but he’s gone a million if the Bastard lamps him.”

  “You call the tune,” Randolph said grimly, “and you pay the piper.”

  He thought suddenly of Novikowsky—he had called a tune when he stuck his knife into Bellairs, and he certainly had paid the piper. But then, so had Bellairs called a tune when he stole Novikowsky’s money, so where did it start? And where in the name of God would it finish?

  “Still, you can’t be too hard———” Charlesworth said.

  “He knows the score, and he knows what’s likely to happen if he gets tanked.”

  “Poor old cow,” Murdoch said. “His wife and both of his kids got burned to death when his house went up. That’s what they reckon; they reckon that’s what sent him onto the slops in the first place. He was standing on the front lawn, and heard ’em screaming.”

  “Bad luck, all right,” Randolph said, but felt nothing. He was tired of other people’s troubles. He turned to Charlesworth. “How did you go last night, Slim?”

  “Good.” Charlesworth had gone the previous evening to arrange the letting of one of Linda Spain’s rooms. “They’ve got a nice place, haven’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a nice bloke, too. I reckon we were dead lucky to get in there.”

  “Yeah, dead lucky,” Murdoch remarked.

  “It won’t be for long. Bet’s got the promise of half a joint down at Narrabundah inside a fortnight, from one of her cobbers.”

  “That’ll be good.” Murdoch stole a sideways look at Randolph. “How did Mrs Spain strike you?”

  “She’s a hard case,” Charlesworth said, laughing reminiscently. “I didn’t get much time to talk with her at the dance, but we had a real heart to heart, last night. She reckons she’s a gipsy, or something.”

  “A gipsy?” Murdoch echoed, with ill-concealed delight.

  “Yeah, of all things! We’re sitting in the lounge after we put Bet’s case in the room and she says to Mr Spain, go ou
t and make a cup of coffee for us. He goes out, and Bet goes into the room for something, and she says to me that she thinks she’s a gipsy. I say, why, and she says, because she likes music and dancing and colours. She is dark, too. You know, maybe there’s something in what she says.”

  “Nuts! If she’s a gipsy, I’m Billy McKell,” Murdoch said flatly. “Music and dancing and colours, eh? And this?” He leaned over towards Charlesworth with what he meant to be a seductive leer.

  “And what?” Charlesworth regarded him stonily. “What’s biting you—you’re acting like a flaming poofter!”

  “Never mind,” Murdoch said. He grinned at Randolph. “A warning mightn’t have gone astray, eh?”

  “Dip your eye!” Randolph told him absently. He was thinking of what Spain had told him on the veranda. Poor beggar—would there ever be a last one? Or perhaps it was just a line of Linda’s. Girls had them, and sometimes they didn’t mean a thing. And why are you making excuses for her? his thoughts demanded. Because you don’t like the thought of Charlesworth moving in too? If it’s a line with her, you fell for it all right!

  “Oh, God!” Charlesworth cried suddenly. “The snags!”

  Before he went up to the mess to plate the meat, he had put a tray of the breakfast sausages into the oven and had forgotten them. Looking over to the range, they could see a thin blue smoke coming from the oven door.

  “You’d better move, Slim,” Murdoch advised him laconically.

  Charlesworth darted across and flung wide the doors of the oven. A cloud of acrid fumes belched into the kitchen. Zigfeld and Warner, the only other cooks in the kitchen, looked up, shook their heads at him, and resumed their work without a word. Charlesworth laughed, short and hard.

  “Pull your flaming heads in!” he cried in answer to their unspoken criticism. He raised the blackened tray above his head and bore it in solemn fashion to the garbage cans. A grin spread across his face. “On the banks of the Ganges,” he warbled in a falsetto voice. “Bloody burned widows for breakfast—who’ll be in a backup?”