On Cringila Hill

by Noel Beddoe

  Gordon says, ‘Someone told me that Abdul was a nice boy.’

  Mr Hijazi lifts a hand, gestures, lets the hand fall back into his lap. David Lawrence takes a little nibble of a pastry, tries to catch flakes that fall from his mouth.

  ‘Nice little boy,’ Mr Hijazi says. ‘Pretends things, you know? That’s what he done when he was little, was funny, you know? He’s this, he’s that, a dog, a bird, someone he saw on television, makes us laugh. Makes his mother laugh, she was happy, you know, when he was little, make us all laugh together. He was happy, when he was little. Very happy little boy. Then he do stupid things. This is later, when he’s big. The mother not laughin’ then. I say to Abdul “Not do stupid things,” slap his head, say, “Come home, not stay out in the cars, not the whisky, not go to Sydney, Bankstown, Punchbowl, come home go to bed.”’ He shrugs. ‘Then he won’t let me slap him no more.’

  Gordon waits for him to continue. ‘Geez, these pastries are good,’ David says.

  Gordon sips some of the strong coffee. ‘How was Abdul,’ he asks, ‘when he got out?’

  ‘He skinny. All dark around his eyes. Shake all the time. Even before he got out, when he’s still in, we visit him, he skinny, shakin’. The mother see him, she cry and cry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think somethin’ bad happened to him in jail.’

  ‘Very likely. He didn’t say what?’

  ‘Nah. Never tell. And he says to me, “Daddy, I’m never goin’ back. Never goin’ back in, no matter what.” Was what he says to me when he come home.’

  ‘Did you think of sending him to Lebanon?’

  Mr Hijazi waves his hand at the humble furnishings.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘Bigger mortgage? And how’s he gonna live there? More than thirty years ago we left.’

  ‘Yes. And you’ve no idea who did this?’

  ‘Nah. Tell you this – no one from around here.’

  ‘Did he have particular friends who still live in these parts, for me to talk to?’

  ‘Jimmy. Jimmy Valeski. Was Abdul’s best friend, all growin’ up. Though Jimmy’s younger than Abdul, little bit. Not good between them, at the end, but was good friends a very long time.’

  He looks at Gordon with sudden interest.

  ‘And I never said this before to no one – here’s somethin’ new – Jimmy’s grandfather, Lupce Valeski. Anyone around here knows what happened it’s Lupce. Yeah. Talk to Lupce.’

  David Lawrence has opened his notebook and scribbles some words in it. ‘Where was Abdul going?’ Gordon says. ‘Do you know, that night he went out?’

  ‘Walkin’. Just walkin’. Said he was goin’ crazy, you know, sittin’ round here, waitin’ somethin’ happen’, nothin’ happenin’.’

  ‘Ah.’

  After a pause Mr Hijazi says, ‘You talk to Hassan?’

  ‘Hassan.’

  ‘My son. Abdul’s brother.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’m sure someone has.’

  Mr Hijazi goes to a glass-fronted buffet, comes back with a business card.

  ‘This is where he is. Maybe talk to him.’

  Gordon suspects that he hears in the voice of Mr Hijazi a certain pride, that he has a son who keeps a business card. ‘Sure,’ Gordon says. He places the card in his wallet, sits awhile with his eyebrows raised. He nods to Mrs Hijazi, who is rocking herself slowly, back and forth, while staring at the soundless television. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hijazi,’ Gordon says. ‘The pastries and coffee were very good.’

  She turns and looks at him for a while, then turns back to the picture. Mr Hijazi says, ‘She ain’t got no English.’

  ‘Ah. How long has she lived in Australia?’

  ‘Twenty-eight years.’

  The three men rise at last, emerge from the house, stand for a while on a little wooden porch at the top of the front steps.

  Below them, roadways run east and west from a central street that descends to some shops and a highway. Single-storey houses of wood and fibro crowd together on the streets down the hill. Gordon lets his eyes run over tier after tier of rooftops. Below the hill, beyond the highway, acres of steelworks stretch away, run north-eastwards to the sea. The buildings are huge, vast slopes and barns of steel painted blue-grey and orange. High brick smokestacks belch out vapour of different hues of grey. In the yards there are men moving about between buildings. They look little from such a distance. A train is arriving from the west, sliding slowly into the steelworks grounds on its own set of tracks.

  ‘Mr Hijazi,’ Gordon says, ‘how long have you been here?’

  ‘Work down there in the works? I come thirty-three years ago.’

  ‘How’d you come?’

  ‘On a boat.’

  ‘Yes, but why did you come?’

  ‘Got a job. People come to my village, gave me a job. I come out. Then, later, when I’d saved some money, I sent for my wife.’ The old man lifts his eyebrows. ‘Aussies wouldn’ do them jobs they sent for us to do, too dirty, too dangerous, pay not enough for them.’ He nods at the sky. ‘To do them jobs, you gotta breathe that air. So we come, and we done them.’

  Gordon watches matter rising in billows from the chimneys. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And what, they gave you this house?’

  The old man laughs, sincerely amused. ‘Nah! Course not. I lived in a hostel, back of Unanderra. The woman made us our food, and we ate it in a shed, out behind the house we lived in.’ He nods. ‘Good food. Italian. Paid the deposit on this house, sent for my wife.’

  ‘How many were employed down there in the steelworks when you came?’

  ‘Twenty-nine thousand.’

  ‘How many now?’

  ‘Seven thousand.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Didn’t need us. Used the machines. Sacked us.’

  ‘I see. And where are all those men now?’

  Mr Hijazi waves his hand at the little houses crowded together down the hill.

  ‘Livin’ here,’ he says. ‘In these houses now. Livin’ on benefits.’

  Gordon nods. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Anyway. Thank you. Truly, I’ll only come back and disturb the two of you again if it’s something absolutely vital.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Mr Hijazi says. ‘Where you goin’ now?’

  ‘I’m going to meet a young lady called Luz Solomona.’

  ‘Ah. Little Luz,’ says Mr Hijazi. After a moment his eyes fill with tears. ‘Look. Say this for me, will you? Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I’m real sorry, what Abdul done. Say I know she never done nothin’ wrong. Tell her I wish it all never happened.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Hijazi, you have my undertaking I’ll do that. And, truly, we’ll do our best to catch who did this to your boy.’

  ‘Ah.’ The old man shrugs. ‘Not gonna make nothin’ better. What happened is done, whyever it all was. Nothin’ to do about it all now. Except maybe Luz gets to feel better, which I hope she will.’

  Chapter Five

  Lake Avenue runs down Cringila Hill, the spine of a little skeleton of streets that head off to the right and left, cutting the hill into terraces that, years before, allowed the construction of housing. Gordon and David look around as their car descends the avenue. To the west, the terrain drops from all sides into a deep ravine that runs for a way and then rises steeply to a ridge above them. This area was too difficult to carve out streets and build houses, and stands as empty common ground. Barbed wire fencing cuts it into sections, and they see little paddocks thick with weeds, a spot where someone has used corrugated iron and wire netting to create a coop for chooks, plots where vegetables grow, fat pumpkins lying in the grass, frothy green plants in precise rows. Small ponies are munching mouthfuls of succulents. Two white-coated goats lift their heads to watch the police car pass by.

  The policemen drive beneath the bulk of the public school. Thick-b
odied women shuffle along the footpath in ankle-length dresses and slippers, black scarves wound securely around their heads and throats. They pass the mosque (a low double-brick building with an iron roof) and the wooden, green-painted progress hall. Towards the bottom of the hill there is a Halal butchery, a liquor store. At tables outside a café, middle-aged men in old woollen suit coats and snap-brimmed hats sit smoking, and drinking coffee from little cups.

  ‘I’ve had to come to Cringila,’ says David Lawrence, taking Gordon by surprise by the unbidden offering of a remark. ‘It used to be Mick Laecey came here normally, he was our man for Cringila. Then when he moved on I got some of it.’ The young man peers, frowning, at the buildings and people they pass. ‘Nothing, you know? Break and enter into the grog shop. Someone set a car on fire. Trivial stuff. Now this, somebody shot through the head on a footpath. Who’d have thought?’

  Near the bottom of the hill the car turns left into a side street and David Lawrence hunches forward to examine house numbers. He says, ‘I had to go to the high school once. There was a dead dog.’

  ‘Why would you go about a dead dog?’

  ‘School’s got sort of parapets against the bottom of a southern wall, to support the building, which creates this series of spaces all enclosed in brick except for the front. There was a big dead dog in one of those spaces. Its throat was torn out and had flesh bitten away from its body and shoulders. The principal thought someone should take a look. I guess men had wired the front of that space and put dogs in there to fight, for gambling.’

  ‘Did you put in a report?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You kidding? Nothing happened. How much time we got to worry about a dead dog?’

  ‘Right. And you say that this happens for gambling?’

  ‘Apparently. Oh, they don’t mind a punt around here, some of them. You know those chess games they have with the big pieces in malls and outside shopping centres with the old men sitting and watching? They bet big bucks on those games.’

  ‘Ah.’

  David parks, switches off the engine and opens the car door. Gordon watches him, thinking about the fact of offered conversation.

  Outside, David Lawrence nods towards two men beside a nearby station wagon. At the arrival of the detectives one man lifts to his shoulder a television camera. The second man watches them through his thick spectacles.

  ‘Who’s this, do you think?’ David Lawrence asks.

  ‘This is a young man called, let me think, Battle, Ian Battle. Desperate for a toehold in the world of television news.’

  The men from the media approach. To Battle, Gordon says, ‘So, what have we got? Rape victim involved in murder investigation?’

  ‘There’s got to be something, Detective Winter. Public interest has not yet waned.’

  ‘No?’ David Lawrence says. ‘Well, neither’s my interest in the way your car is parked. My kindest advice is that you move it on.’

  ‘And which particular laws are we breaking?’

  ‘Give me a minute. I’ll find something.’

  The Solomona home is on the low side of the street and the policemen must go down wooden stairs in the footpath to reach the front gate. The reporter and his associate return to their car. There’s the sound of it starting. The detectives pause at the fence. The house, which was once painted white, has discoloured and peeled, with the flaking exposing lengths of bleached grey wood. They hear an ominous growl. A large dog trots along the pathway towards them, teeth bared, neck hair erect. They stay at the gate, pressing it closed, watching the dog.

  Gordon says, ‘Looks like a candidate for grand champion of the dog fights.’

  ‘Beasty!’ they hear someone call, and the dog stops, turns, goes back to the verandah. Down the verandah steps comes a very large young man. The dog falls in beside him as he approaches the gate. When he’s close the detectives can see that he’s a lot taller than they are. He wears thick-soled leather boots, a buttoned-up cotton shirt with short sleeves rolled up above massive biceps. He has on faded blue canvas trousers, secured with a wide, leather belt. The belt is tight around the thickness of his belly, the top two buttons of the shirt are open over his chest. He stands before them, watching, scratching a cheek with a thumbnail, knuckles in full view. Gordon doubts he’s seen a bigger fist.

  ‘Who you?’ the young man says. ‘What you want?’

  They flash their shields. ‘We’re Detectives Winter and Lawrence,’ Gordon says. ‘We hope to speak to Ms Luz Solomona.’

  The young man watches them for a while, then returns along the path, takes the steps to the verandah two at a time, vanishes into the house. The dog squats on the path, keeping up his gaze. The young man returns, preceded by a woman who, Gordon thinks, is probably in her late twenties. Her large bare feet slap along the pathway towards them. She is very tall, broad-shouldered, erect. She wears a loose dress, which reaches to her muscular calves. Her skin is golden-brown, her eyes dark. Watching her approach, Gordon considers her to be exquisitely beautiful. On a hip she carries an infant, aged perhaps a year. He is dressed in a nappy and buttoned-up cotton shirt, and he watches the detectives gravely. He clings to the woman with one arm and holds in his free hand a crumbling biscuit.

  The woman says, ‘Who you? What you want?’

  Gordon repeats their message.

  ‘She talk and talk,’ the woman tells them. ‘Everybody write and write. There’s no more. There’s no more from her.’

  ‘You never know that,’ Gordon says, raising his eyebrows, trying to sound convincing, respectful, ingratiating. ‘We might hear something that we know is important even if Luz doesn’t think it is. I’ve seen this happen. We won’t keep her long. We’re looking at it all again, about Abdul Hijazi. We’re trying to look at it in a different way, from a different point of view. That was a bad thing, what happened to him. As a society we need to sort it out if we can. We know it’s been terrible for Luz. It could be very good for us, if we could speak with her.’

  ‘Abdul?’ the woman says, and spits a frothy dollop of saliva onto the concrete path near her feet. Then she shrugs, goes back along the pathway. At the steps she looks back and gestures with her head that they should enter the grounds of the home. With great concentration watching the dog, they pass through the gate and mount the steps into the cool gloom of the verandah.

  It is a deep verandah, with chairs made of tubular metal. The woman nods at the chairs and the detectives sit. When Luz emerges it is obvious that the two women are sisters; they are similar in figure and bearing, have the same graceful, languid way of walking. Luz frowns at them as though in irritation. Her feet are also bare but she wears a t-shirt and jeans rolled up to the swelling of her calves. She has strong, long thighs, a narrow waist, flat belly. Gordon notes the deviation on her nose and jaw line where she’s had two fractures. The two women sit down, with the sister holding the little boy on her lap. He coos and gropes at his mother’s breast. The large young man sits on the wooden steps, his feet reaching down to the path. The dog comes and, with difficulty, spreads its bulk across a single stair.

  Gordon waits silently, interested to see how Luz will react, prepared that she may be flustered, unsettled. She watches the street above the house, folds her hands across a thigh, gives Gordon an impatient look, one eye narrowed, as if thinking, ‘Well, come on, you’ve got me out here. What do you want, what news do you bring me?’

  ‘Luz.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank you for giving us your time. I’m Detective Winter. This is Detective Lawrence.’ When he gestures to David he sees that his younger colleague is staring at Luz’s chest. Gordon looks quickly at Luz and enjoys the dismissive sneer that she directs at David Lawrence, who then has the grace to blush at her reaction. Luz folds her arms across her bosom.

  David rises from his chair, leans with his hand
s on the verandah rail, looks up the street.

  ‘Luz,’ Gordon tries again. ‘Thank you for meeting with us. We won’t take too much of your time. Did we interrupt you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Some maths. Tryin’. I’m not much good at maths.’

  ‘Maths?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you’re back at school?’

  ‘Not yet. I mean to go next year. I don’t get it, about maths. I’m gettin’ ahead, before I go, if I can. Some friends gave me a book and their notes. And I was in there, tryin’ to get an idea on it.’

  David Lawrence turns from the waist. ‘In the senior school, you don’t have to study mathematics if you choose not to,’ he says.

  Gordon sees Luz slide David a second look of pure contempt, as though to say, ‘Listen, smart guy, how’d you like to leave me to choose my own subjects?’

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ Gordon says, ‘what you’re doing.’

  ‘When I’m finished my friends go through the answers, and help me.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’re good people.’

  Luz’s voice is rich and husky, its pitch is low. She speaks slowly, while subjecting Gordon to scrutiny. The baby wriggles, struggles, reaches his arms out to Luz, who gathers him onto her lap, jigs a thigh to bounce him.

  ‘Abdul …’ Gordon says, ‘that thing he did to you … I can understand you wouldn’t want to talk about it …’

  ‘I’m gonna talk about it. Why I not talk? I didn’ do nothin’ bad. I’m not shamed, what happened. I did nothin’ was wrong.’

  Luz scowls, looking up the street. Tears form in the corners of her eyes, her hand touching the baby trembles a little. The dark young man rises from where he’s sitting, goes past the dog, down the stairs and leans with his forearms resting on the top of the gate. The dog follows him, harrumphs a sigh, lies at his feet.

  ‘I’ll tell you something that confuses me, Luz,’ Gordon says. ‘Abdul was in Sydney, after he was released. He was safe, I would have thought, up there, but then he came back here and was killed. Why come back when he was safe where he was?’