by Stephen Orr
‘Fuck off.’
And with that she formed a fist an inch above his face.
‘Alright, calm down,’ he said. ‘I only stopped to say hello.’
‘Piss off.’
She stood up and he jumped to his feet. He picked up his bike and rode off across the park, looking back at us. Janice returned to our hide, her face full of fury. ‘Air-conditioners,’ she muttered. Then she stared across at the old man. ‘Just look at him.’ She spat on her hand and presented it to us. ‘We mention this to no one.’ In turn we all spat on our hands and shook hers. When we turned back the old man and woman had gone inside. ‘There’s always tomorrow,’ Janice whispered, crawling out of our hide.
We left the stomach for the local tabbies. Anna carried the empty lemonade bottle, which we took to the Acorn deli for the refund, and Janice used her own money to buy replacements.
When I arrived home it was still on between Mum and Dad. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, skimming a few lines and then grumbling a few words. ‘Listen to this: “A man was electrocuted in a Glandore nursing home after urinating on a Christmas tree. After the lights shorted he picked them up – ”’ He looked at Mum as she dried the dishes. ‘D’you hear this?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘“ – and received a fatal shock.” Bloody idiot.’
‘He was probably demented.’
‘Think they would’ve packed it up by now.’
‘What?’
‘The Christmas tree.’
Mum sneered. ‘Not everyone’s as efficient as you.’
She did have a point. Every Boxing Day morning Dad was there with a fruit crate, removing the tinsels and decorations from the tree, urging me to do the same, as I asked, ‘Why so soon?’
‘Because Christmas is over.’
As I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You don’t like Christmas, do you, Dad?’
‘It’s only one day. People try and draw it out.’
Christmas Day, Grandma Page and Pop going their hardest as lamb and pork cooked in an oven only slightly warmer than our kitchen. Presents distributed. Grandma giving me something practical like socks or a singlet, and Nan and Pop giving me comics. Grandma looking at Pop as if to say, ‘That’s all well and good, but he can’t wear Superman to school.’
‘Anyway, it’s not about Christ any more,’ Dad would say, not that he actually cared. ‘Why celebrate something you don’t . . .’ Thinking. Stumped. But destined to go on putting a joint in the oven on the morning of every December the 25th for the rest of his life, to wear a stupid hat and pop bonbons that don’t pop, eventually giving up on everyone and retiring to the backyard with a beer – meeting Bill behind the pittosporum to share the same complaints.
‘Why don’t you get ready?’ Dad said to Mum, without looking up.
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘I’ve asked Kazz.’
Mum folded her tea towel over the lip of the sink and said, ‘I wish you’d ask me about these things.’
Dad just shrugged.
‘Where you going?’ I asked.
‘The Grange Hotel.’
‘Can I come?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘The Housemans are looking after you.’
I stopped, sensing there was something bigger at stake. Mum walked from the kitchen without saying a word. Dad’s eyes followed her. I listened as she went into their room and opened the wardrobe, took out a dress and changed into it; as foundation and powder were applied and lipstick drawn on with a steady hand; as fake pearls were clipped on; as she came out to the kitchen and Dad whistled and she ignored him again; as she went into the bathroom and rinsed her mouth and then half-shut the door for a piss.
The Housemans came bearing chutney and bagpipes. Dad put on a jacket but refused to have a shave on a day off. They were quickly gone, Dad crunching the gears of our Vanguard as he turned into Robert Street and disappeared in a cloud of carbon monoxide.
Ron Houseman was soon drinking Dad’s beer and reading his paper. ‘Eh, listen to this: “A man was electrocuted in a Glandore nursing home . . .”’
‘I don’t need a babysitter,’ I said, staring down at a bowl of re-warmed goulash.
‘You do,’ Ron replied, without looking up. ‘What if your house burnt down?’
I didn’t reply and he looked at me. ‘Or what if you had a thief, a crook, a murderer?’ He tried to frighten me with a demented expression. ‘Come here, young thing, are those gold fillings in your mouth?’
‘Janice reckons Himmler lives down Cedar Street. He killed six million.’
‘You might be next.’
‘I can look after myself.’
He returned to the paper. ‘You might think you can.’
‘I can.’
‘Eat yer stew.’
‘It’s cold.’
‘So?’
I gave in to the inevitable and started eating as Kazz set up her camera in our kitchen; she screwed it onto a tripod and then went around closing doors and pulling down blinds until it was almost dark.
‘I can’t read,’ Ron complained.
‘Wait a minute.’
Flash.
‘Did you get anything?’ I asked.
‘Never know. This house has quite a history.’
Ron shook his head and laughed. ‘Never got so much as a mouse.’
‘I have so.’
Ron looked at me and rolled his eyes. ‘Science,’ he said, pointing to himself. ‘Superstition,’ and he pointed to his wife.
Love and light. Ron just didn’t understand. Kazz had explained it all in her latest leaflet.
Over the last ten years I have opened my mind and my heart, and have had many psychic experiences and spirit contact through my development. You may have experienced something yourself but don’t talk about it for fear of being laughed at. I will listen to you if others will not. Spirits communicate to me through a camera . . .
Kazz sat down beside me and took a pile of papers out of her camera bag. ‘Look,’ she said, showing me a photo.
Ron finished reading the paper, closed it and folded it in half. Then he sat back with his arms crossed, grinning, watching his wife.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing . . . continue.’
The photo showed the Housemans’ main bedroom. There was a queen-size bed, a tallboy with a cracked mirror on top, and a wardrobe without a door, revealing Ron’s suits and tunics. ‘What do you see?’ Kazz asked.
I shrugged. She pointed to her side of the bed. ‘You can see a glow . . . here, the shape of a head, a small body.’
Ron moved over, looked at the photo and pointed to the window. ‘Late afternoon. See the shadows on the floor? And here, across the bedspread.’ He looked at his wife. ‘Go on then, you may as well finish.’
Kazz touched my arm and continued. ‘A small girl lived in our house at the turn of the century. Years ago, when we were laying carpet, we found a letter under the old lino.’
She took a yellowing letter from her pile. It had been folded so much it had nearly broken into small squares. She opened it out and started reading the large, childish cursive.
My dear Mamma,
I am waiting for your return. I hope you feel better. I think my room is tidier than it used to be. I am glad Janey is well. Someone came for the dog. Janey says he is quite proud of it and his wife takes it to bed with her. The little brown one has gone to Mrs Davies and she says it is a sharp little thing. I have kiss’d Jack but Michael would not let me.
Goodbye Mamma,
I remain your affectionate child, Marion
Ron put his hands behind his head and stretched out his whole body. ‘From that we’ve deduced, Marion caught cholera, was quarantined in our room and died in bed.’
Kazz shook her head. ‘I never said that.’
Ron glanced at his watch. ‘Cripes. “State trooper.” Come on, Henry.’
&nb
sp; For once I got to eat in the lounge room. The beans were stone cold by the time our television warmed up and Mr Houseman and I watched Rod Cameron track down a stolen Stradivarius that looked more like Bill Riley’s ukulele. Kazz took more photos down the hallway and in our rooms. At one point Ron looked at me and said, ‘Don’t tell your parents what she’s been up to.’
‘I won’t,’ I smiled, licking my bowl.
When I woke up the night was cold. Kazz had put me to bed, waiting in the hall until I’d changed into my pyjamas, coming in and covering me with a light cotton sheet as she explained ‘presence’. How she’d never been able to believe in a god, but how she knew people had spirit; how she knew, deep down, that this vapour, this electricity, didn’t die with our bodies, that it must linger, mostly invisible. Then Ron came into my room with his bagpipe drone. He took requests: hymns, Perry Como, TV themes and ads – even Louie the Fly with grace notes. And that’s when I must have fallen asleep.
The night smelt of coal smoke. I could hear my hair dragging against the pillow case, the putt of metal blinds against the window frame, a possum on the roof, a distant factory siren wailing for three am, and a slow, persistent knocking. I got out of bed and walked slowly, step by step, across my room, down the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. I looked through the keyhole and saw Mum’s arm clutching the bed-head as it moved and knocked against the wall. Muffled voices. And then Mum sitting up with her back to me, her body moving rhythmically, musically, like a snake held down by a rubber boot.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight. A few months earlier I’d found a small pile of magazines in the woodshed. They were in an old ammunition box, secured with a lock that hadn’t been pushed all the way shut. I took one of the magazines into my rabbit hutch, got out my exercise book and traced the outline of one of the ladies. I added folds in the skin, cracks and crevices, nipples and plenty of hair. Then I returned the magazine. When I looked in the ammunition box a few days later the magazines were gone. As were the tracings in my exercise book.
Well, if that was sex, I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. So what, a boob and a bit of pubic hair? I might have been quiet but I knew how the world worked. The jury was out on ghosts but some things were indisputable. Like Kazz sunbathing in the raw in her backyard when Ron was at work. Once I got Janice over and showed her. Of course, Janice couldn’t resist it, putting her fingers to her mouth and letting out a wolf-whistle as we ran for our lives.
Sex, it seemed, was everywhere. Mr Thompson, our grade three teacher, was removed from school when (I later found out) several girls complained that he walked around the class with a stiffy in his pants. Who knows if it was true? Maybe he just got a job somewhere else, but I know what I’d rather believe. I could just imagine our parents discussing it as they waited for us at the school gate. ‘Maybe it’s a medical condition.’
None of this bothered Janice. A few months after Thompson had left school we saw him in Mr Eckert’s shop. As we rode past Janice called out, ‘Hello, Stiffy,’ and we were off once again.
Back outside my parents’ room, I bowed my head. Then I moved my foot and the floorboard creaked. Slowly, carefully, I walked across the hallway and closed my door. I climbed into bed and covered my head and waited, but nothing happened.
Chapter Four
A hundred and eight before lunch. So hot that everyone had given up on everything
We drove towards the city: Dad and Bill in the front, me in the back. A bus had overheated and blocked one lane of the Chief Street underpass and cars took it in turns to speed past. The gas works was still. Men sat in the shade of high bluestone walls watching the world go by. There was enough gas. The Hindmarsh rotunda was full of blackfellas sleeping and slouching – a postie on his break sat on a bench watching them as he ate his sandwiches. Part of Port Road had been dug up but left, and sewerage pipes sat in a pile nearby absorbing their last bit of sun.
Dad pulled into the Thebarton barracks. Across the road the police greys stood motionless in the shade of almond trees. They drank water from troughs and shifted around a little, exploring the dirt with their hooves without expending much energy.
We parked our car in a deserted compound and Dad unlocked the door to an old red-brick two-storey building. He switched on some lights and we found ourselves in a reception area with a polished terrazzo floor. A root-bound aspidistra struggled in a cracked pot, its soil as dry as bi-carb soda. I’d watered it a few times but no one else ever did. Still, it was alive, which was more than most of the brown stumps and petrified ferns around the barracks were. We climbed a set of stairs to a landing and waited as Dad unlocked another door.
‘Where is everyone?’ Bill asked.
‘Who knows,’ Dad replied. ‘Drunk. Dead.’
We stepped into a dark, damp-smelling room and Dad switched on more lights. The fluoros flickered and eventually revealed a large warehouse filled with shelves extending almost to the ceiling.
‘Here it is,’ Dad said. ‘Evidence.’
Bill shook his head. ‘Bugger me.’
‘This way.’
Dad led us to a far corner of the room, where a wire-mesh fence had been installed to create a secure compound. He unlocked the gate to this area and we went inside. ‘This is for the ongoing cases,’ he explained. ‘The unsolvables.’
‘The ones who got away with it?’ Bill offered.
‘Yeah. Lots of disappearances.’ He almost smiled. ‘A funny crime, eh, stealing people; and not that hard to get away with. You’d only need half a brain and a bit of luck, if you were that way inclined.’
Bill’s brain was ticking over. ‘It’s true. How many times have I been driving through the country and seen someone walking all alone.’
‘If you were that way inclined,’ Dad repeated, fetching a small stepladder and resting it against the shelves. Then he climbed up, reached for a box and handed it down to Bill. ‘Since you’re so interested, there you go, the Somerton mystery man, or what’s left of him.’
Bill put the box on a table. Dad came over and switched on an overhead light. He opened the box and produced a life-size plaster bust of the mystery man. It showed every detail: chest hairs, rolls of fat on the throat and under the chin, the lines on his lips and the pores in his skin, each hair on his head and the folds in his ear.
‘Bugger me,’ Bill said.
Dad leaned over and kissed the man on the lips and said, ‘How are you today, old boy?’
Bill ran his hand over the man’s face. ‘Come on, you can tell us. Who are you?’
His eyes were closed and he seemed to be asleep. He looked natural, real, like he might wake at any moment and then the whole business could be sorted. But then Dad showed us his broken neck. ‘I dropped him once,’ he explained. ‘We had to glue his head back on.’
‘He was a big lad,’ Bill said, feeling his shoulders.
‘I wish I could have seen his body,’ I offered.
Dad looked at me strangely. ‘It’s not something you’d want to . . .’
See? Touch? Smell? Being dead seemed strange. To be sitting there, all of your bits, most of them still in functioning order, but to be no different from a Sunday roast. A lump of meat. All because of something as simple as a faulty valve or broken blood vessel. ‘Wake up,’ I whispered to the bust.
Dad produced a coat, a pair of brown trousers, a white shirt, a knitted jumper and a tie – all neatly folded. Bill took the jumper and held it against his chest. ‘Naphthalene,’ he said, sniffing.
‘May as well give them to the Salvos,’ Dad said.
‘Not yet,’ Bill replied, folding the jumper. ‘You gotta solve this case.’
‘Bullshit. Everybody else had a crack and couldn’t work it out. So who ends up with it? Stay in the box for all I care.’
‘But aren’t you curious?’
‘Was. Some point you gotta say enough’s enough. Stop wasting your time. Otherwise you’d go crazy.’
Bill ran his index finger down the man’s nos
e. ‘Looks a bit like a fella I used to play golf with.’
Dad took a briefcase out of the box. He opened it and removed another few shirts. ‘See, they match the one he was wearing, although all of the labels had been removed.’ Then he produced a roll of thread. ‘He used this to sew on buttons.’ A dressing gown, red felt slippers, underpants, more ties and another pair of pants with three dry-cleaning tickets in the pocket. ‘They tried every dry-cleaner in Australia, and no one recognised the stubs.’
Then he showed us a label attached to the underwear: T. Keane. ‘They thought he was a local sailor, Tommy Keane. They brought in some of his shipmates but they said it wasn’t him.’
Dad took out a stencil brush and held it in his hands. ‘We have no idea what he used this for.’ Then he shrugged and started throwing the objects back in the case. ‘One dead body.’
‘Himmler killed six million,’ I offered.
‘Exactly. Follow me.’
Dad led us over to a fridge.
‘What y’ got in there?’ Bill asked.
Dad prepared us. ‘This is something we don’t let anyone see. You gotta promise, Bill, Henry. Loose lips sink ships.’
Bill was smiling. ‘Come on then.’
Dad opened the fridge. It was packed full of longnecks and soft drinks. He gave me a Coke and opened a beer for Bill, the Somerton man and himself. Then we pulled up chairs and sat around the bust. Dad placed a beer in front of his tight-lipped offsider and said, ‘Drink up, old boy.’
We sat and drank for an hour. At one point Bill put on the dressing gown, climbed on top of the table and started singing ‘They’re All Fine Girls’. Dad laughed and then tried to pull him down. Bill had already had too much. His foot slipped on the edge of the table and he fell. The bust wobbled but Dad quickly steadied it.
‘Don’t you have another one?’ Bill asked, looking up.
‘No.’
After a while he settled down and asked, ‘How do you catch them then?’
Dad shrugged. ‘They always miss something. Their minds don’t work like a copper’s. Detectives would make the best crooks.’
Bill smiled. ‘I’m not a detective.’