Time's Long Ruin

by Stephen Orr

  ‘Bill . . .’

  ‘I never should’ve trusted you. You don’t know what people are like. Even that fuckin’ . . . bitch Sonja.’

  Seeing as how it wasn’t the first time.

  It had been a hot December day, just after school had broken up, but before Christmas, when Sonja had taken Janice and Anna shopping in Rundle Street. They’d eaten a lunch of toasted sandwiches in the Myer cafeteria and then Sonja had said, ‘I need to look at some shoes. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, wait here.’

  Fifteen minutes, an hour, two hours. Eventually the girl cleaning up the lunch dishes asked them, ‘Who are you girls with?’

  ‘Our aunt. She’s looking at shoes.’

  The girl returned to the servery and talked to her boss and they both looked over at the Rileys. An hour later a pair of young constables sauntered into the cafeteria. ‘You two look lost.’

  The girls arrived home in a police car. Bill apologised, explaining, saying how it would never happen again. Then he got in his car and drove to Sonja’s. He waited with Sonja’s boyfriend until they got a call from Liz saying that Sonja was at their place. He drove home, shot into the driveway, slammed the door and stormed inside. ‘What the hell were you thinking, Sonja?’

  ‘I went back to look for them.’

  ‘Three hours later. Where were you?’

  Crying, screaming, slammed doors.

  Bill, still standing in Rosa’s front yard, grabbed the afternoon’s The News from Bert. He held it up and showed his wife the front page, the photo of their kids with arum lilies. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked her. ‘Now all of Adelaide knows. Now everyone’s saying it, What the hell were their parents thinking? Well?’

  Liz turned and ran up the path.

  ‘Well?’ Bill called, throwing the paper after her. The pages scattered, floating and settling across Rosa’s front lawn. Liz opened Rosa’s front door and went inside. Rosa stepped forward, her face red and tight as she searched for words. ‘Bill, that doesn’t help anyone.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have let them go,’ Bill repeated, pointing at the front door.

  ‘And if it had have been you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have let them go.’

  He stopped, running his hand across his glowing forehead. ‘I use my judgement,’ he whispered.

  ‘We all do, Bill.’

  Bill shook his head. He wasn’t convinced, but Rosa had the upper hand. Bert and Mum and Dad, and even the stranger, were with her. He turned and walked across the road, looking back as he entered his family home.

  ‘Nothing?’ Mum asked Dad.

  ‘Bugger all,’ he replied. ‘Apart from this fella in the blue bathers.’ He picked up the front page and started reading the article aloud.

  As he read, Liz, sitting in the front room on Rosa’s bed, listened. She barely breathed, sensing it might distort the meaning of the words. For a while, as Dad read out the man’s description, she didn’t know what to make of it. Then she saw him, tall and bronzed, standing on the beach in his brief blue bathers. ‘Jesus,’ she muttered, before slipping from the bed, collapsing onto a worn rug with a thud. Mum ran inside, and Dad slowly followed, wondering how he’d explain.

  Rosa was left alone with Bert and the stranger. Together they started picking up the pieces of paper. ‘That a stew you got on?’ Bert asked.

  ‘Would you like some?’ Rosa replied.

  He smiled. ‘Would I? Ha!’

  Bill was watching them from his lounge room. He stood silently with a beer in his hand. Now the breeze was cold and it smelt of rain. He closed the window and sat down, looking at his reflection in the grey-green television screen.

  Chapter Three

  I’ve often imagined how much Liz suffered in the first few hours and days, how she could bear to walk around the house, drink tea, talk, or even attempt to think about what might have happened to her kids.

  No one can know.

  But this, perhaps, is how it might have been.

  A slight breeze entered through Liz’s bedroom window, lifting and dropping the venetian blinds. Suddenly it was cold. The storm had rolled over the city during the night. The gum in front of the Housemans’ gave off a smell of lemon and dry wood. Jasmine and mock orange, growing wild over Con and Rosa’s fence, had drooped and dropped a summer of dead flowers. Now there were just puddles left, and refrigerated air that turned cheeks red and rubbery.

  I hope they’re not getting wet, Liz had thought, lying in bed, rocking to the rhythm of the rain, imagining Janice shielding the others with a towel. Eventually she’d fallen asleep, with a photo clutched in her hand.

  In the early morning she turned over and, seeing Bill wasn’t there, stretched her arms and legs across the bed. She pulled a rug up under her arms and drifted back to sleep.

  She had no way of knowing it was a dream. She was playing with her kids on Henley Beach. Janice and Anna were in the shallows, sitting in warm water up to their ribs. Gavin was on the white sand, gathering a menagerie of pretend animals. Liz was between them. She ventured into the water and sat beside Anna but Gavin stood up and started running towards the road, towards a shower that a few other kids had discovered. Liz got up and chased him, ‘Gavin!’ and the girls laughed. She looked back, smiled, and waved a finger at them. Then she caught Gavin and carried him back to the shore. ‘Come in the water.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  He just stared out to sea. ‘It’s too big.’

  Back at Thomas Street the breeze continued lifting and dropping the blind. Liz opened her eyes, saw the cracks in the ceiling and realised where she was. Then she closed her eyes, thinking, If I could just get back to sleep. I could brush the sand off Gavin’s feet, and help them with their ponchos, and fumble in my pocket for bus fare.

  For a moment she was back on the sand, running into the water, splashing her daughters, but then she started smelling the lemon scent and sensing the walls around her, hearing the metal-on-metal rub of the ceiling fan and the song of crickets that hadn’t said anything else since the beginning of time. After a few moments her eyes were fully open, and adjusted. Her kids were gone, again. The world was hot and cold, changeable, full of hard objects and strange faces. Music played but then stopped. Contentment gave way to slow, sharp fragments of time, full of imagined horrors.

  Among other things there was the sound of her husband’s ukulele. She listened and heard him form a phrase, and then stop. She checked the clock. It was just after seven. She looked at the picture of her kids she’d almost crushed in her hand during the night.

  Soon my eyes will close

  Soon I’ll find repose

  And in dreams you’re always near to me

  She climbed out of bed. She picked up a cardigan off the floor and draped it across her shoulders. Then she walked down the hallway, out the back door and sat next to her husband. ‘How long have you been awake?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  ‘You got to.’

  Instead of replying he just started plucking the melody he’d been singing.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she whispered.

  He stopped. ‘Rosa’s right. It could’ve been me. It could’ve happened anywhere: Goolwa, the playground.’ He looked at her. ‘I’m missin’ ’em somethin’ shockin’, Liz.’ And then he dropped his head onto her shoulder. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Liz. I just want ’em back.’

  She rested her head on his. Her mind flashed back to Henley Beach, just for a few seconds. ‘Gavin,’ she whispered.

  ‘Janice will look after him.’

  ‘And Anna, how would she cope with . . .?’

  Bill lifted his head and steadied his ukulele across his knees. ‘At least they’re lookin’ for someone, eh? Not like they’ve just disappeared.’

  ‘But what sort of person . . .?’

  Bill was about to go through the possibilities, but stopped himself. He heard the front gate open, stood up and said, ‘Who�
��s that?’

  He headed down the side of the house and Liz followed. After jumping through a clump of agapanthus he confronted a lone photographer taking a shot of a small bike posed in front of one of their rose bushes. ‘Who you with?’ Bill asked.

  The photographer extended his hand. ‘Mister Riley?’

  Bill pushed his hand away. ‘Where did you get that bike?’

  ‘It was here.’

  ‘Bullshit. Who you with?’

  The photographer shrugged. ‘We thought, a photo of your house, the yard, a few of the kids’ things. Keep the interest up, eh?’

  ‘So you can sell some bloody papers?’

  ‘No, so people keep looking.’

  Bill pointed to the bike. ‘And how’s that gonna help?’

  ‘It’s what people respond to.’

  ‘Stick to the facts. How’d you feel if it was your kids?’

  ‘I ain’t got kids.’

  Bill stormed off down the driveway, Liz following. I watched as the photographer took a small teddy bear out from under his jacket and posed it beside the bike. Then he took a few more shots from different angles. At last he picked up his props and left the Rileys’ front yard.

  From my bedroom window I stared out at Mr Hessian’s concrete Virgin, still shedding tears. She was sitting in a puddle of mud. Water had pooled everywhere in our yard. Along Thomas Street the gutters had blocked and water had flooded our cricket pitch. Janice was still there, tapping the bitumen with her bat, waiting for me to bowl. ‘Come on, Henry, one that I can hit this time.’

  I noticed a small package, done up in brown paper and string, sitting on our front porch. I stepped out into the hallway, opened the front door and went out to fetch it. Returning to my room I cut the string and peeled the wet paper from a folio-sized book. It was an old worn copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The cover and pages were damp. I leafed through and looked at pictures of the Egyptian afterlife: Osiris, Horus and Anubis, with his jackal head, busy weighing up the fate of common men recently fallen off cliffs, under carts, or succumbing to liver cancer. Under the pictures were verses describing the main players, their dilemmas, dreams and daily activities. In the middle of the book there was a small card inserted beside the scribe Ani’s instructions for letting a soul rejoin its corpse in the God’s domain. And on this card, printed in smudged black ink: Henry, a small gift. Still waiting for you to finish our library. Dr Gunn.

  I took the card, tore it up and dropped the pieces into my bin. I’d found the book sitting only a few feet from my open window – he must have seen me. A warm, uncomfortable feeling passed through my body. Had he whispered something to me? How long had he watched? Had he tried to get in?

  I closed my window and locked it. Then I sat back on my bed with the book on my knees and started looking at it more closely. The characters were drawn flat, part-human, part-animal. Dad was Yesterday and Mum was Tomorrow, Rosa was the Benu-bird and Doctor Gunn was Anubis, judging people’s souls on faulty scales. Maybe, I thought, I should give the book to Dad. He was the true law-bringer.

  But how would I explain it? ‘He’s trying to get to me.’ Dad looking surprised. ‘But it’s just a book. He has millions. A gift for helping him.’

  Then there was a dead pharaoh, lying flat on a table as priests removed his organs and placed them into canopic jars.

  It was almost as though Doctor Gunn knew what the images would mean to me. The first time we met he took me into his back room and helped me unbutton and remove my shirt, saying, ‘You’ve never heard of a massage machine?’ He laid me flat on my stomach on his table and ran a big four-fingered machine-hand up and down my back. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked, as he started removing small but significant parts of me, putting them into jars on his windowsill.

  I wonder, I thought, sitting in my room, looking at a picture of a pharaoh cradling his son, if this is how he thinks of me, somehow? I could remember him turning off the machine and starting to rub his fingers and hands over my back, squeezing on cold ointment and whispering, ‘People pay good money for this.’

  I took the book and placed it carefully beneath my mattress. Then I sat huddled on my bed, looking out of the window, wondering why he was doing this to me now. Maybe he didn’t care about the Rileys. Maybe he thought I’d already forgotten them. Maybe he knew that I was too scared to say anything.

  Dad opened my door. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied.

  He smiled and started to close the door.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you check that licence number?’

  He felt in his top pocket and pulled out the note. ‘Forgot all about it. I’ll do it today.’

  ‘Do you think it could be anything?’

  ‘If it is, you’ll be the most famous detective in Australia.’ Then he was gone – my one-dimensional god of law and order. And the verse under his portrait read, The Prophet Page cast his net over the waters of the Underworld, and when he pulled it in it was full of fish of every shape and size.

  The search continued. Later that morning we all stood on the banks of the Port River: Liz (who’d had enough of sitting at home) and Bill, me, Mum and Dad, Con and Rosa, Kevin and Mariel Johns (who told us how she’d been praying almost non-stop since the previous morning, explaining how she couldn’t just sit at home listening to the radio reports, and how she convinced her dad to drop around to the Rileys to see if there was anything they could do).

  We watched as Bert (who’d been home for a sleep and clean up) pulled up in the Melack Motel. He got out, wearing nothing but overalls, proudly displaying a chest of grey and white hair, and shook everyone’s hand. Then he unloaded nine pairs of rubber boots from his car. ‘All the right sizes,’ he said. ‘Check the soles. I even made sure they weren’t leaking.’

  We all sat down on the gravel and took off our shoes. Mum had found me some jeans and a T-shirt with a tear that I used for painting models. I pulled on the smallest pair of boots, plugged them with my jeans and felt my big toes sticking through my socks. Dad was next, springing up, looking across the river and squinting at the sun. ‘High tide’s at two,’ he said. ‘Bert, maybe you could take Bill and Liz.’

  ‘I’ll go with them,’ Mum offered, looking at Liz.

  ‘You do the west side, we’ll do the east. Start at the Jervois Bridge and work your way along. We’ll stop at the flour mill, you go as far as the yacht club.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Bert asked.

  ‘The rest has been done.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘It’s a long river, Bert. Then there’s Outer Harbour, Torrens Island, the North Arm.’ He adjusted his boots, avoiding Bill’s eyes, hoping his best mate wouldn’t ask about the miles and miles of silty banks, the storm-water outlets and slipways, the factory discharges and a hundred acres of samphire mangroves that met the sea in a knee-deep slush: a million places to dump a few small bodies. ‘Jim’s gonna arrange some boats,’ Dad said, looking at Bill. ‘They can get in close to the bank.’

  Jim Clarke had slept in the caravan, snoring through the worst of the storm, waking up and looking out across a wet, deserted esplanade. But with light came the first volunteers: the entire staff of Radio Rentals (which had closed for the day), the Grange, Largs and Semaphore cricket clubs, the Edwardstown Lions (who’d brought barbecues and sausages), a dozen teachers from Croydon Primary, John Cox and Ted Bilston and a hundred anonymous workers from Holdens who would have to knock off at two to get ready for the afternoon shift. There was a Loys truck full of soft drinks, unloading crates wherever they found volunteers along the coast, a load of towels from the Government Linen Service and even the local MP, Ewan Fisher, strapping on a coordinator’s vest and driving along the western beaches.

  Jim had been ready for them, pinning up maps of western Adelaide on a board in front of the van and drawing in who was where with a red pen that wouldn’t write on damp paper. He assigned his officers a regio
n and told them to use their initiative, making sure the radios and phones in his van (hooked up by the PMG) were always ringing or being rung. Including Dad, who’d phoned earlier that morning. ‘Listen, Jim, I’ve got half the neighbourhood here, and everyone wants to help.’

  ‘What about the Port River?’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘The Jervois Bridge. I’ll call Bert, tell him to pick up some boots on the way through.’

  I walked beside Dad as we followed the curve of the river. It was slow going. Our boots sank up to the ankles and it wasn’t long before our legs were heavy and tired and we had to stop to rest. The grey-brown mud smelt of oil and decay. It was covered with fishing line and a hundred years of rubbish: tin cans and tyres, rusted metal shapes, rims and windscreen-wipers and fence posts, old jumpers, shoes and bottles. But mostly just mud.

  Rosa and Mariel walked ahead of us and in front of them, Con and Kevin, walking with the aid of branches, stopping to look in drains and behind large boulders that were submerged at high tide.

  ‘You’re coping well,’ Dad said to me, quite casually.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ I replied, watching where I was stepping, feeling the cold mud that had come up over the top of the boot. ‘Maybe not here, but . . .’

  ‘Maybe not at all,’ Dad said.

  I was quiet for a few moments. ‘I know that too.’

  ‘You know how these things go. You’ve heard enough of what I’ve told Mum. Sometimes things happen, nasty things. And what I’m saying is . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Can you imagine how worried me and Mum would be, if it was you?’

  ‘I’d be okay.’

  Silence. Dad messed my hair. ‘Maybe you would be.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll find them.’

  Dad knew there was no more he could say. Sometimes you just had to wait for the storm to pass before you could work out where to start cleaning it up. ‘I called about that rego number,’ he said. ‘We’ll know later. You haven’t thought of anything else that might help? Anything? Someone acting strange?’

  I thought of Doctor Gunn, his jackal head growing bigger by the minute. I knew I should say something, but couldn’t. Couldn’t tell Dad what had gone on in the library, or how Doctor Gunn had seemed so interested in Janice on the afternoon of our cricket match. But I felt I’d have to say something soon. I was worried that it might be important, the very thing Dad needed to know. And what if something happened to the Rileys, and the doctor was responsible, and it turned out I could’ve helped them? Me, Constable Page, the investigating detective . . .