Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  * * *

  It was almost five-thirty when we arrived at the house and it was immediately obvious that Asael was in a state. It emerged that, shortly after I’d left and before they’d gotten organised to go out to Queenie, they’d had visitors. News had spread that Isak Nucifora, having been rescued by Amalthea Byerson, Asael and me, had given up a rant about alien life in the cane and a group of drunken boys had shown up demanding to know its whereabouts. The most vocal of the group had been Darryl Sutton.

  Amalthea had done her best to put them off the scent. ‘We didn’t find Isak in the cane,’ she told them. ‘We found him in the yard. What fool would be out in the cane at night?’ As for alien life, the old man had been drunk and delirious! Just as anyone who knew him would have sense enough to expect.

  ‘So there’s no alien?’

  ‘Oh, probably there’re heaps of them! But not in this neighbourhood, boys.’

  ‘Why you got the kid here, Amalthea? That scrawny sister o’ his here as well?’

  That was Dale who, Amalthea said, had developed two pleasantly colourful black eyes, apparently due to the tap I’d given him on the nose at the marshalling yard. The other boys had laughed when he asked about me and warned him off going a second round. Dale, she said, had gone stony quiet under their teasing.

  ‘No,’ she’d told them, ‘Ruth’s not here. Asael’s just a friend who’s come to help with the pyre. But the job’s too big for us, I’m afraid. You boys could do it in five minutes, I expect, but it turns out it’s beyond us!

  ‘What pyre? What’s a pyre?’

  So she’d told them of Garlic’s death and the need for a funeral pyre. They’d wanted to see the corpse and she’d shown them.

  “You want us to burn him?”

  “No, I don’t want you to burn him. I want you to take some of that old timber from under the Poinciana and make a stack in the back yard. Sergeant Morrow has asked me to hold off, at least until tomorrow. In case the fire gets away into the cane. He wants to be sure the volunteer Firies are sober enough to respond.”

  They’d launched themselves at the task and made a stack twice the size of what she needed.

  “You sure we can’t burn him now?”

  “Only if you want to face down Sergeant Morrow about it. He was pretty clear on what he expected.”

  “So Morrow’s actually been here?”

  I could picture them standing in her yard, panting, adrenaline pumping, licking their lips, looking her up and down.

  “Yep. Big investigation into the lolly-drop crash! Seems like Johnathon Cranna might be thinking about legal action against whoever burned his airplane!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. So I was a suspect, see? Because Garlic here was the only casualty! But now I’m eliminated from the list of suspects because I was here, with Asael and Ruthie, rescuing old Isak from my yard! But it’s okay, the sergeant said, because he’s got other, much more likely suspects on his list. I wonder who they’d be, eh?”

  * * *

  I was hugely entertained by the story, thinking of Dale in particular, with his blackened eyes and his troll-ish bulk, being tricked into carrying heavy timbers around. I imagined he and all of them were quite sober by the time they left. It meant, of course, that Asael hadn’t gotten to see Queenie but he was much more concerned about that than I was. I’d only agreed to go to shut him up. And Bridie was just happy to have him in her protective custody again. She looked in his eyes and felt his arms as though she hadn’t seen him for a month. As we said goodbye, he leaned against her, the back of his head between her breasts, seeming very small and distant.

  * * *

  Asael’s chat on the walk home was mostly about Amalthea’s plan to burn Garlic, a plan that appalled him entirely. Bridie and I both tried to tell him that it was a normal way to deal with dead bodies and Bridie assured him that souls didn’t linger, that bodies were only temporary vessels and all that, but it didn’t seem to reassure him. I finally got him laughing when I made him tell us again about Dale’s black eyes.

  Through the whole rest of that evening, Bridie was only nominally with us, drifting away frequently into her own thoughts. I hadn’t brought up the subject of Bessie again, even though I was thoroughly convinced she must be at the bakery with Kevin. I was at odds wth myself. Perhaps it would be better for Bridie if Bessie melted quietly back into the life of the Great Bandini. Maybe I could write her a letter in a month or so, care of the show, explaining Bridie’s fragility and asking for the secret to be sent to me alone.

  We all went off to bed early. When I went into Bridie’s room to say goodnight, I saw that she’d opened the bottle of relaxants prescribed for her by Doctor Dabney. Her body was full and long under the sheet, but her face was that of a small, sad child.

  I sat on the edge of her bed and said, “Migraine?”

  “Coming on, I think.”

  There’s some vague statistical connection, it seems, between the type of epilepsy that Asael has and a family history of migraines. She gets the migraines, he gets the hallucinations. All I get is cranky spells.

  “Have I congratulated you yet, for being elected Queen?”

  Her lips, and only her lips, smiled faintly.

  “You deserved it,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, you deserve it every year.”

  “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” she sighed. “John.”

  “John Cranna?”

  “Saint John. Chapter three, verse eight. The wind bloweth where it listeth. And you can’t tell whither it comes or whither it goes.”

  “Right!” I picked up the bottle of pills. “I’ll put these in the bathroom for you, shall I? Have you taken anything else?”

  She moved her head weakly. I turned out her light and kissed her on the forehead. Just lightly because, apparently, even a kiss can sting when you have a migraine.

  * * *

  The tap on my shoulder came just before eleven. I flicked back the sheet for him and he crawled in. For the next half hour, it was constant wiggling, snuffling, poking me with his knees until I flared up, fully awake at last.

  “Okay, what?”

  “We didn’t get back to see Queenie.”

  “Asael, it’s just a bit of space ju . . .!” And I thought, what’s the point? We’ve been through this. “No, you’re right. We didn’t get back to see Queenie.”

  “There might be more!”

  “More what? More Queenies?”

  “More messages. And Isak said she was scared!”

  I put my pillow over my head. I’d have thrown him out, but I didn’t want to risk disturbing Bridie. I pictured her lying in her bed, just before I’d turned out her light and ‘scared’ was exactly the word to describe the expression on her face. The impending migraine, I told myself. She’d be fine. She always was. And the only way I could think of to settle Asael was to tell him we’d try to get back to Queenie the next day, just to check for messages.

  Chapter 10 - By Moonlight

  Isak looks up from the embankment where he’s been sitting, face in hands, for a period of time that seems both too long and too short. The sky glows like freshly oiled leather, and the moon tumbles toward the horizon. The air is warm and cushiony with dew. He thinks how pleasant it would be just to lie back, just to breathe away the rest of the night. And maybe the following day as well.

  Instead, he forces himself to focus on the broad, shallow channel that crosses before him. It’s carpeted with roughly mown grass and bisected by a motionless ribbon of water. Off to his left, a small grey heron dozes on one leg. A wall of sugar cane looms darkly behind him.

  He’s not confused about this place. He knows he’s on the side of a drainage channel that cuts through cane paddocks not more than a thousand yards from Hospital Street in Sugar Town. That’s where he’s come from.

  He looks down at the hospital gown he still wears. He’s turned it so the opening is at the front, like a kimono, and it hangs open on him, reve
aling the two fabric pads that remain glued to the shaved patches beside his nipples. The alligator clips. He’d made certain he was on his feet, ready to go, before he disconnected them. In case there was a monitor. In case the machine would alert someone. When they’d left him on his own, they’d underestimated both him and his determination. People always did, these days.

  Isak’s mind remains fuzzy, a remnant of the drugs pumped into him while he clung like a baby possum to the edge of awareness. How many hours ago was that? How much could have happened, could have gotten away on him, while he lay uselessly in that hospital bed?

  “Fuckin’ schmucks,” he mutters aloud, pushing himself to his feet.

  Time past may have been wasted, he tells himself, but that’s no reason to get bogged down here. As he rises, the gown flies open, catching at his knees, sliding under his feet and exposing his bare body.

  “”Fuckin’ rag,” he exclaims.

  He considers throwing it aside. Bare arsed could hardly be more inconvenient than this flapping monstrosity. But then again, it could make a handy tourniquet if he gets snake-bitten. He decides to keep it. Meantime, the sight of his penis reminds him of the pressure in his bladder. He manages a dribble and a squirt, but the tubes close up on him, leaving most of the load dammed up inside.

  “Fuckin’ thing!” he rants.

  The body he looks down on always surprises and dismays him – the bunion-ridden feet, the knees that no longer straighten, the pecker that hangs, limp as a drowned man. It’s all so old. It’s not what he ever bargained for and it makes him angry, which somehow seems to help clear his mind. Anger, at least, is still a friend.

  “Fuckin’ eh!” he shouts, goading himself to action. In the channel, the grey heron turns its flat eye and sees a bent old man in a long white robe, flapping his arms as he shuffles away down the channel.

  * * *

  Midnight has come and gone. Under the pyramidal roof of Amalthea Byerson’s house, the chronic dust of a farming community hangs in the early morning air, like a held breath. Motes, on their tiny, boat-like keels, have drifted aimlessly, weightlessly, all through the night until, at last, the air has stilled and left them becalmed, a vast miniature armada in the rarest of doldrums. With approaching dawn, the light changes and a trapped dragonfly, having drowsed the hours away on a lampshade, flexes its cellophane wings, producing an eddy – a slightest of anticipatory vibrations. The motes tremble and swing on that tiny vibration, like ships at anchor sensing the turning of the tide. They are born for journeying. To stop is to risk the long fall through the air into the cracks of the universe, from which there is no escape.

  Oblivious to their plight, the dragonfly lets go its grip on the lampshade, rises, hovers and turns its bullet head toward the pearly glow that outlines the window. Its passage amongst the motes, as incidental as a goat’s cough on a distant mountain, is sufficient to set the near ones in motion and soon they’re all tumbling and rolling once again on the ever-renewing, ever-conflicting currents of their ocean. Confidently, fiercely, the dragonfly launches itself against the impossibly hard radiance of the glass. In a short while, the sun will rise, the motes will journey on and the fly will subside in despair onto the dry, burning plain of the window sill.

  On a square of living room carpet, surrounded by drooping, lifeless flowers and the burnt out remnants of candles, lies Garlic, the murdered goat. Garlic dreams that he is dead and unable to draw a breath – unable even to open an eye to glimpse the source of that buzzing flight in the air above him. On the floor next to him dozes his erstwhile companion, Rosemary, legs rigidly outstretched, patches of her hide twitching at imagined flies.

  In the bedroom, moonlight creeps down the wall to touch Amalthea Byerson’s back as she sleeps, face down in her bed, the pillow drawn over her head. She dreams that a warm, delicious cloud is caressing her. When, in her dream, she twists to look at it, she sees it is not a cloud at all. It’s Kevin Truck, the baker, resting his cheek between her shoulder blades, behind her heart. His presence both puzzles and delights her. She smells him, cinnamon-sweet and inviting as fresh bread. Under the pillow she smiles; under the sheet, her toes curl appreciatively. Except for the dream, she is alone in the room.

  Chapter 11 – Finding Queenie – (Sunday)

  Six o’clock Sunday morning; the sun, I was certain, hadn’t fully cleared the horizon. But there he was, up, dressed, tapping me on the shoulder, thrusting a bowl of corn flakes at me.

  “Come on, Ruthie. You promised.”

  “Ohhh! Why Asa’? Why, why, why?”

  “Those boys . . . they’ll go back and they’ll find her! We have to hide her!”

  “Hide her? How can we hide her? How could we even move her? Did you see the size of her?” I was glad no one else was there to hear me referring to The Thing as ‘her’.

  “And even if we could move her – it – we can’t just take it! Somebody official will be coming for it! Today or tomorrow, for sure! The Air Force, maybe. The police. Sergeant Morrow’ll kill us if we interfere with it, As’! Be sensible!”

  “But you promised!”

  “I didn’t promise to steal it! Or to hide it! Only to go see it . . . for messages!” I felt entirely moronic saying that, as though saying it was the equivalent of believing it might happen. Still and all, if the Grand Gourd could be a conduit for messages, why not a random piece of space junk? I threw the sheet off.

  “Just remember, that’s all I promised! You understand?”

  He pushed the breakfast cereal at me. “I got our bikes out already. I’ll wait in the kitchen.”

  * * *

  And so we went. Men were up on the farms at that hour, of course, and women too, tending their animals and machinery, galumphing about in their boots and sucking in great lungs-full of air. Probably they liked that time of day. I didn’t. So as we pedalled through town, I refused to respond to any of his endless chatter.

  I’d checked on Bridie and she’d been sleeping soundly, with the curtains pulled and the room nearly blacked out. If the migraine was on her, she could sleep ‘til noon, by which time, I promised myself, we’d be back – message or no message.

  Through the half kilometre length of Main Street, the town seemed unnaturally quiet and empty. We passed Johnathon’s Grand Central Hotel and I thought of his rooms in there, empty and waiting for him. I enjoyed a bit of a fantasy about going in and looking through his stuff. What would a man’s residence look like? What would he have chosen to put out on view, for company, and what would he have hidden away, as private treasures? And that thought led me to our snooping at Amalthea’s – her memory book with its poems, its mentions of ‘Philippa’ and its mysterious photos of Kevin Truck when he was little more than a scrawny teenager like me.

  We passed the entrance to the showground and I thought of Arturo, the Great Bandini, waiting there for Bessie. Had she come back? Had they moved on in the night? Perhaps we should check, on the way home. Meantime, smoke was rising from the mill stacks and the wreckage of the Moth had been cleared away. Even the smashed hopper had been removed. The town, it seemed, was returning to normal.

  On Amalthea’s nameless road, the flowering Poinciana spread its branches far out over her shambling little house; the one in which Gramma G had come up against someone intent on ending her life. The doors and windows were still closed against night insects and slithering vermin, so we pedalled on past. On the headland, a wallaby froze momentarily to watch us come on and the slanting shadows revealed the path of wilted grass from our last visit. It ended in a wide, trampled area and there, up against the wall of cane, we dropped our bicycles.

  Suddenly I was very nervous. Maybe I hadn’t thought this through carefully enough! I mean, checking for messages was just stupid! Hoping to save it from discovery by Dale Sutton and his incendiary friends made fractionally more sense (though our tire marks through the long grass made a joke of that!) But really, what I should have been thinking of was the odds on The Thing actually
being dangerous! Or of Asael having some kind of unpredictable reaction to it!

  “Did you take your medication, As’?”

  He didn’t answer. I’d have pressed him but I could tell he was concentrating, straining to hear. And if there was anything to hear, I needed to know! I turned in my own listening circle, but the morning was quiet! A butcher bird somewhere far off. And in another direction, crows. Faintly, an engine, out on the highway. Asael had turned his attention to the ground, searching I supposed for that vibration he’d felt before, coming up through his feet, like the beat of a dog’s tail against a metal bucket in a distant room.

  “Anything?” I asked softly and he shook his head. “Not yet!”

  The faintest of smiles edged its way onto his lips and, without further hesitation, he slid away between the stalks.

  * * *

  The Thing was exactly as we’d last seen it, but somehow more so in the daylight than it had been at night – if that makes any sense. The space it was in seemed smaller, its shape was squatter and its pewter-colour was greyer, lacking the internal glow. And though I hadn’t thought of it as moving the first time we saw it, it seemed somehow stiller. Asael approached it with a positive sense of glee. After a first glance, I was more interested in the surroundings – particularly the long channel of smashed and twisted cane, marking the path where it had hit, bounced and rolled finally to a stop. There was a mound of dirt but The Thing was several metres away from it. How had that happened? When had that happened? Had it been like that the other night or had it moved since then? I couldn’t remember.

  “So,” I nervously said to Asael, “what about now? Do you hear anything? See anything?”

  He was right up to it, staring into it, almost touching it with his nose. He didn’t answer.

  “It looks like some kind of a thing off a rocket!” I said, hoping to impose some common sense on the proceedings. “Maybe something the Chinese tried to send up. You know? Like those mini-subs’s they used during the war? Only a mini-rocket? Do you think there could be a Chinaman inside it?”

  Oddly, the possibility that something could be in it hadn’t occurred to me before I said that. The thought wasn’t comforting.