Refuge

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by Richard Rossiter


  She was walking into the wind and her eyes were beginning to water. Her ears hurt. When she turned around, the wind forced her into a walk that became a run. Her hair blew across her face. She couldn’t see properly and stumbled over a patch of seaweed embedded in the sand. She started to cry.

  When she returned to pick up Prue, Mrs Frawley seemed distressed. She said she couldn’t look after Prue any longer. She wasn’t feeling very well, she was sorry. ‘She’s a lovely little girl—I will miss her.’

  ‘Did something happen while I was away?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’m sorry.’

  Rose found two university students, girls, who would come to the house; they would share the job. Prue said she wanted to go next door, to see Mrs Frawley, and Anthony. Frolly and Antnee. ‘Later, you can see them later.’ But she didn’t. At the end of summer the girls told her about the police and the yard next door. Prue remembered a girl, a young woman, who used to pick her up when she fell off her bike, her knee scraped and bleeding. She must have put a bandaid on it. She had a soft chest and would read her stories.

  Forty-seven

  Clive had nightmares about what he’d done. He had buried a woman alive, her chest going up and down as the sand was thrown on top of her. Some of her clothes were removed and her body was awry. He could feel how hard it was for her to draw breath, her mouth and nose clogged up with sand, choking, then no more air could be drawn in and her breathing stopped. Her eyes and hair filled with sand. Her heart beat for just a little longer. In the dream Clive felt guilty, but knew his terrible crime would not be discovered. No one would find out, but he would have to live with it. When he woke he was still caught up in the dream, and felt panicked by what had happened, by what he had done. Then he remembered Greta, locked inside the van. For hours he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had done something far worse. He had buried a woman alive, and he didn’t know who she was.

  He walked across to the van which was a prison and unlocked the door. She was sitting there on the bench seat and staring out the window; she didn’t look his way, or say anything. He saw that her hair was in knots. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt and he noticed again the muscles in her upper arms. Some underclothes were drying on the sink. ‘I’ll take those outside,’ he said, but she did not look at him.

  There were days when he feared she might attack him, because now her hands were free most of the time. He had taken the precaution of removing from the van anything that might be used as a weapon. Her cutlery was plastic, as was the crockery. She looked like a person who had given up, her face expressionless, her blue eyes dead. No one knew she was missing from her shed, because no one knew she had returned. He could keep her for months. Years.

  The first time she said she needed a shower, he’d walked her down the hill to the bathroom; on one side of it was a toilet, on the other a wood heater with a storage system for the hot water. A Braemar. He had never seen another brand and wondered why that was, how it happened that one company had cornered the market. There were no doors on any of the little rooms of the ablution block. He unshackled her hands and she stood there, staring at him, wanting him to go.

  ‘When you’ve undressed, I’m going to take your clothes. Running naked through the bush is not a good idea. I’ll be close by.’

  She took off her clothes, wrapped a towel around herself and handed them to him. He didn’t look at her directly. ‘Now go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll call when I’m ready.’

  He walked back up the hill and then circled around through the trees to where he could see her. He watched as the soapy water ran over her breasts and down her body as she washed and rinsed her hair. She was very beautiful. When she stepped out of the shower and began to dry herself, he approached from around the side of the building.

  ‘Oh, you’ve finished already,’ he said.

  He handed over her clothes and watched as she dressed; she turned her back to him.

  Greta did not ask him to take her to the shower for the next three days. She knew he was out there, looking at her, and on the next occasion called out to him, although she couldn’t see him and he did not acknowledge her shout of abuse.

  Greta thought Clive had begun to think of her as a friend, a guest who had come to stay. Sometimes she would answer his questions, and one afternoon when he sat opposite her in the van, too close for comfort and staring at her, she could stand the silence no longer. She was frightened of him and so she started to talk. She told him how she had come to Australia, from Germany. It now seemed a very simple story.

  ‘At home, in Germany, I read Australian books, mostly novels. They fascinated me. I read Patrick White’s Voss for three days on end. I’m not a fast reader, in English. So I came here to study the country, especially the desert and mining towns. I wanted to know about the people, the white people and the black, to know how they viewed the land in which they lived. I wanted to know for myself but also for my thesis. I came back, down south, to write it up, and then I met the man you knew, Oliver. I stayed with him and wrote down what I had discovered with notes and footnotes and references so it seemed like an argument. But the important bits were what I had discovered about myself, and most of that I left out. I think it’s important to be away from the place you are writing about.’

  She stopped and he was staring at her and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She was not ready to tell him of all people—or anyone else—the other details of her departure, what had impelled her journey first to Sydney and then beyond.

  ‘Then there was a fire and later he died, but you know that. Oliver was a very good friend; there was a harmony between us. Then once again I was by myself. I lived there for a while, on his block, which, strangely, became mine. Then I moved to the shed on the coast.’

  For a while he said nothing, staring at the floor. ‘You had another friend, didn’t you—Steve?’

  ‘Why do you say this again? You’re obsessed with that awful man. He was never my friend. I’ve told you.’

  ‘I like to know about your friends, that’s all. He was my friend and we used to do things together and he told me about you. And now I don’t know where he is. Where do you think he is?’

  Greta shook her head. ‘How could I possibly know? No one knows. Not even the police—they want to talk to him about the fire. You would know better than anyone. You trusted him and he lied to you, and that’s why you attacked me, because you believed what he said. And now, worse, you’ve abducted me. It’s a terrible thing you’ve done. What are you going to do? Keep me here forever?’

  ‘Not everything—he didn’t lie about everything. He said your friend, Oliver, heard the accident from his place, and did nothing. Other people said the same thing.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me, Clive, and Oliver’s dead now. How could I be responsible for Oliver’s failure, if that’s what it was? I don’t think he ever recovered from the fire. And Hetty—to burn to death …’

  Her voice shook, and he looked away.

  And then: ‘There was Marvyn, too, wasn’t there? Another man; another one who died. An Aboriginal man. Seems I should be careful around you.’

  She looked at him. He could see the anger in her eyes, the tightness of her mouth. ‘Clive, you don’t count. You have nothing to worry about.’ She almost said that he, too, knew people close to him who had died, a wife and a child, but stopped herself.

  He jerked backwards in his seat. ‘I know who started that fire,’ he said. ‘And I’ve reported him to the police.’

  ‘What? When? Are you talking about Steve? Your friend Steve?’

  ‘Of course. I spoke to the police only last week. But they said they’d already questioned him and they didn’t have any hard evidence, unless the girl, his daughter, would talk to them. They think she was with him when the fire started.’

  ‘Well. That is news. We always thought it was him. But how did you know? And why did you decide now to do something? After all this time, and with Ste
ve who knows where?’

  ‘He told me what he’d done. He seemed pleased with himself. Proud, I suppose. He said it wasn’t just you he was after—there were others who needed to sit up and take notice. He had that look he gets and he said, “Our God is a consuming fire, and you know that, don’t you, Clive?” I said maybe I did, maybe I didn’t—and that’s when he told me that he’d been wrong about you, and the accident, but later someone else said he always knew … Anyway, I don’t want to speak about it anymore.’

  ‘But when did this happen? Is this recent information?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why do you think he told you he was wrong, or that he’d lied about me driving past the accident?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  She looked at him, fiercely. ‘Maybe because it would make you feel bad, foolish. He’d tricked you into doing something awful and wanted you to know that.’

  They sat there in silence, and then he said, ‘Do you think there could be harmony between us?’

  ‘No. How can you say such a thing?’ Disbelieving, she shook her head. But she knew why he had asked the question. She realised there were moments when she smiled at him, encouraging him, at first unconsciously, to see her as an attractive woman, as a person who might even be interested in him. She wanted to live and she would do whatever it took, even shallow flirtation. What surprised her was that her behaviour was, once again, in advance of any conscious plan. It seemed she was always playing catch-up, her reason ambling along behind her quick-as-a-flash emotion.

  Minutes passed, and then he said to her, ‘Come with me— I want to show you something.’ He released her feet and shackled her hands. He grabbed her by the arm and she was forced to follow him out of the van; they walked a little way along the track towards the gate. He stopped and pointed to the ground.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Those little cone-shaped holes in the sand.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Watch.’ He told her to kneel down, and he crouched beside her. After a couple of attempts he snared an ant in his fingertips and carefully dropped it into the hole. ‘It’s a trap,’ he said.

  She watched the ant trying to escape, to scurry up the sides, but all it succeeded in doing was to dislodge grains of sand and fall back to the bottom of the pit. After the third attempt there was a flurry of movement underneath it: tiny pincers appeared and dragged the ant down, out of sight. Then it was still, it all looked the same, as if nothing had happened, just a declivity in the sand. ‘It’s an ant lion,’ he said. ‘If the ant didn’t struggle, it wouldn’t attract attention—it would be safe if it kept still.’

  This was nothing new—she’d seen ant lions before—but she decided to humour him. ‘And stay there forever? How would it survive?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The ant lion changes into a bug with wings. A bit like a dragonfly. So it’s not always hiding underground. It can fly away, free to do what it wants.’

  ‘So long as there’s some dead ants to help it on its way?’

  ‘That’s nature, isn’t it?’

  She looked at him and nodded. ‘Do I now return to my prison, wiser than when I left?’

  In her narrow bed in the caravan Greta turned impatiently from one side to another. She pulled the sheet over her head but could not settle. There was Marvyn, too, wasn’t there. And then he was no longer. He was not the only one. Is that why she was here—some ancient payback? Is this what happened when you were not careful enough with another’s life, when you didn’t really understand what you were doing? Was this the connection Clive saw between them, one that was too frightening to contemplate? For both of them there was a past that would not leave them alone.

  Forty-eight

  ‘Prue, come away from there. I don’t want you out here. Come inside and play. Just do as I tell you.’ Her mother grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from the fence. The men were there again, digging up the backyard. They couldn’t see her crouched down behind the pickets, looking through a hole where a bit of the wood was missing.

  ‘What they’re doing is for grown-ups.’

  The screen door banged behind her as she hauled her daughter into the sunny space of the enclosed back verandah. They had been there in the yard a week ago, the girls said, and now they were back. ‘Sit here and I’ll get you some playdough. You can make things—cakes and houses and trees.’

  Prue sat in the little chair at her table, and waited. She wanted to go back outside to watch the men. She didn’t want to play. The playdough came and she messed around with it for a while.

  ‘How are you going? Are you making something interesting?’ her mother called from the kitchen.

  She couldn’t be bothered replying. She pushed at the dough, then banged it with her fist. Her mother stood in the doorway. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ She didn’t look up and banged the dough some more. ‘There’s no point sulking. There are some things you don’t understand.’

  Her mother went back into the kitchen. She was cooking something. Maybe a cake, for later. Prue stood up, quietly, and tiptoed to the back door and down the steps. She hurried to the spot and crouched down. There were more men than before, saying things she couldn’t hear properly. Words she didn’t know. ‘Careful, now,’ said one man. And the one digging put down his spade and lifted something up with his two hands. She couldn’t see what it was—all the others had crowded around. ‘Stand back,’ said the man who spoke before. And then she saw it, lying on a sheet on the ground, all covered in dirt. She knew what it was: the men had dug up a big doll, with black on it, in Mrs Frolly’s backyard. She bounced up and down on her frog legs. The doll was all dirty, with long hair. Why would the men want this? She didn’t know and walked back inside before her mother came out and was cross.

  She pushed at the playdough. It was green. She made a head and a fat tummy. Then little bits for legs and arms. She found a stick she’d used before and pushed it into the middle, making holes like her mother, Rose, had shown her. Rose was a flower and her mother. The holes were for buttons for the baby’s jacket, to keep her warm. She could hear the footsteps, click, click, click, in the kitchen. And then louder, coming to see her.

  ‘What have you made? Oh, a doll. Clever girl.’

  She pushed it all together with her two hands, then grabbed bits of it and threw it on the floor.

  ‘Hey, what’s up? That’s enough of that.’ And her mother bent down to pick up the pieces.

  From the moment the girls had told her about the police activity next door, Rose was frightened. She tried to turn off her thoughts, to ignore what they were doing in the yard. When she heard the news that confirmed her fears, from the neighbour on the other side of Mrs Frawley, she felt sick. She had let her daughter go there. More than that, she’d asked. She let her stay with that man, who people were now calling a monster—she didn’t know what to call him—all by herself, when Mrs Frawley, so helpful, wasn’t there. And then, then she’d gone to bed with him. Only the once, but what did that matter? She could have been a victim, Prue and her, both killed. Tortured. What sort of a person was she, who couldn’t tell the difference between a sadistic murderer and a normal person? She must have gone mad, or was always mad, never able to judge things as other people would. Good people, who looked after their houses and their children, who went to work, who said good day and good evening when you met them, who came home at the end of the day and helped with whatever needed to be done, who ate their dinner, listened to the news, did the dishes and said goodnight to the children if there were any, then watched television or read a book and went to bed. They were not people who made themselves attractive to women and children, did unspeakable things and then killed them. And buried them in their mother’s backyard. If she couldn’t tell the difference between someone truly good and truly evil, what did it say about her? It must mean that she, too, unknowingly, was capable of terrible things. In her was a blackness that at any time could come out. She didn’t know what to do, what to s
ay. She rang Dick to tell him some of the story.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he said. ‘Is our daughter okay? Do you think something happened to her? I think you should take her to the doctor. They know about such things—they can tell.’

  She started to cry. Why couldn’t he say her name, his own daughter?

  And then he blamed her. ‘Couldn’t you tell there was something wrong with him? I knew he wasn’t right from the very beginning.’

  She tried to ask why he hadn’t said anything, but she couldn’t get the words out.

  ‘Maybe Prue should come and live with me. Sounds like she’d be safer, better off with a close eye on her.’

  She put the phone down.

  The wind was strong in Rose’s face and blowing her hair every which way. She pulled it back and tucked it into the neck of her sweater. The ocean was noisy and restless; there was no pattern to the waves and sand, and seaweed was churned up near the shore in the dirty froth of water. She couldn’t work out why the suds weren’t a vibrant white. She didn’t think it could be pollution, but maybe it was—maybe the ocean was a giant sink for the world’s filth.

  Coming the other way, almost running with the wind, she passed a man by himself, then a woman. No children, or dogs, not today. Prue would be alright at her friend’s place, at least for a while. Then she saw a young couple, wrapped in a cloak and trying to walk together. They stumbled, and tripped, stood up, and laughed. She couldn’t see anything funny about it. Her eyes started to water with the wind; she didn’t have her sunglasses with her. Her body warmed up with the effort of walking, and when she arrived at the spot where there was a kiosk and a swimming beach, she sat down in the sand. Everywhere there were white caps in the muddy green sea. Gulls swooped and were whipped away by the wind. A tern hovered offshore, against the odds, and dived. It rose into the air with nothing in its beak. Her bottom felt damp and chilled. Soon it would be numb.

 

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