by Lois Murphy
We didn’t speak. There wasn’t anything we wanted to say or hear. We could only have talked of hope, which was pointless, or reality, which we weren’t ready to face. We simply sat, waiting out the night, with our eyes and minds closed.
Sean and Neil Davies were in town just after daybreak, and had found the truck abandoned on the side of McMahons Road before I’d even reached the rendezvous point. The engine had seized. The cab was unlocked, but the keys were gone. When I checked beneath the seat the gun cabinet was open and empty.
She would have headed to the nearest house to try to find sanctuary. About three kilometres away, Evans’s old place. She wouldn’t have known what I did: that the back corner window had been smashed by a branch. There would have been no shelter from the mist there.
A spasm of pain in my abdomen, like a bruising jab, almost doubled me up. I reached out to the front of the truck for support, and something on the dashboard caught my eye, pulling me in like a vacuum. The lotto ticket. She’d taken the time to check it. And she’d been right, it had been a winning ticket. On top of it was a payout slip. Division 5.
$17.55.
The house looked like a whirlwind had been through it. Every window hung open, and the doors gaped like mouths open in shock.
I couldn’t bring myself to go inside, and waited, stooped and cowardly, in the faint morning sun at the side of the porch. At the door Sean called out and waited – both a formality and an excuse to pause, prepare himself. The house remained silent.
They weren’t inside for long, but they were a decade older when they returned to the sunlight. Davies, grey-faced, moved quickly around the side of the house, out of sight.
Li was in there. But she’d managed to escape before the mist had reached her. She’d shot Blackie first.
I stay with Milly until the sleeping pills take effect, then take her keys and drive home in the ute, to shower and get clean clothes. I feel like a sleepwalker, a ghost, numb from shock and my sleepless night. I have a strange sensation of weightlessness, as if my steps aren’t connecting with the ground, instead I’m floating just above it. Drifting.
I let myself in round the back with Milly’s spare key (in Nebulah you leave spare keys with each other, not hidden outside). My keys lie in a lifeless pile on the kitchen bench, with my phone.
I do not want to pick it up; my mind is in recoil, but it’s as though its shutdown is complete and my body is acting of its own accord. I watch my fingers flip the phone open, and the screen bursts into blue life.
The missed calls are like a flurry of blows. Fourteen of them, in the space of half an hour. The last one was at 5.28. Dusk. It’s like looking at a record of her screams.
I am back at Milly’s table and already halfway through a bottle of Famous Grouse when Sean arrives a couple of hours later. I still haven’t managed to feel its effects. Sean shakes his head when I hold up the bottle.
‘Murder a cup of tea, though.’
I go through the motions while he douses his face at the sink. He slumps into a chair with the water running down his neck and wipes his hands on the knees of his pants.
‘Where’s Milly?’
‘Pills. She’ll be out for hours.’
Sean nods sadly, then reaches over for my glass. ‘I hope,’ he says, ‘I never have to live through another day like this one. Christ!’ He starts rubbing at his dripping face, his neatly trimmed hair awry.
‘It could have been worse.’
He grimaces. He’d seen what the mist had left. Thank God she’d had the gun.
‘There’s more.’ He sighs. ‘Know what we found tucked away in the bush out the back, less than fifty metres from the scene?’
‘A bloody enormous crop.’
He frowns. ‘You knew?’
‘I only found it the other day. It was new to me.’
‘And you were planning to tell me?’
‘Last night. I was about to ring you when things … went pear-shaped.’ I still can’t bring myself to let my mind open.
‘It’s Stick’s?’
‘Yep.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘He admitted it.’
‘To you?’ Sean’s incredulous.
‘He wasn’t bothered about me knowing at all. I went to see him after I found it. He said if I shopped him he’d claim I was a silent partner.’
‘When was that?’
‘This is embarrassing. Thursday.’
Sean’s gaze is level. ‘I spoke to you on Friday night.’
‘It’s what I came to see you about that day. Before I found out Tom and Gail were leaving. I’m sorry.’
He takes the mug of tea in silence. The only sound is the tapping of the dogs’ claws as they mooch about on the verandah.
‘I have to say, bad call. Withholding information. Makes you an accessory.’
‘I know.’
He sighs. ‘The drug squad are coming from Perth. We might stick with you only just found it.’
I shrug. ‘If you like.’
‘Any idea where Stick might be?’
‘He’s not at home?’
‘Car, dog and clothes gone. Looks like he shot through first thing this morning.’
‘This morning? But how could he know?’
Sean looks grim. ‘Li’s call registry.’ He waits for me to catch up, speaking gently. ‘When she couldn’t get hold of you or Milly, she called him. At seven minutes past five.’
My eyeballs feel as though they are crackling. ‘She got through to him?’
‘There’s a four-minute call to his number logged on her mobile. He doesn’t have an answering machine.’
5.07. There would still have been time. If he’d hurried, there would have been time. What had he said to her, with his crocodile mouth and hooded eyes? Did he tell her to hang in there, that he was coming? Did she wait, thinking he was on his way? When would she have realised that he was leaving her there?
Or did he just say: Forget it. You’re on your own.
There’d been time. He’d known. And he’d left her there.
I’ve never been a violent person, never. But the urge that comes over me at that moment is overwhelming, and for the first time I understand violence at its very foundation, instinctively rather than intellectually. I understand it because for the first time in my life I want to cause someone pain. I want to hurt someone, and I know I’d relish their screams.
The sense of power that comes with this desire is immense. If Stick had been within reach at that instant I would have killed him with my bare hands. Easily. And slowly.
Instead I wait for Sean to leave and then I put my head down on Milly’s kitchen table and weep.
After the build-up of jabs over the last twenty-four hours, this is my knockout blow.
It’s a funny thing about loss of control. Whether you’re succumbing to violence or to grief (or both), you have no idea, before the gates swing open, how much is being contained by them. Ten months of living in captivity, in fear; the bewildering deaths; the awful failure of my attempt at Christmas. The loss of everything: our town, our freedom, our lives. The single finger that flicks the gate’s latch can be so small – missed calls on a mobile, or the tragic mystery of a four-minute conversation.
When I give in, when everything crashes around that short, unknown phone call which could have changed everything, I find I can’t stop, can’t hold back. I weep until I retch, heaving up whiskey, followed by the bile of emptiness.
The week that follows is played in slow motion. My main memory is of silence, a sort of insulated detachment, the distortion of being underwater.
Which we are. I move my things out to Milly’s, and together we float through the days. I start drinking just after lunch, and Milly chases sleeping pills with a hefty whiskey around dusk. Neither of us can face the nights.
It doesn’t take them long to catch up with Stick: he’s picked up only a couple of days later. A family having a picnic in Geraldton called his numberplate in after Elv
is attacked their dog. He was pulled up shortly afterwards heading north out of town.
The huge haul was gone, but there was plenty of residue in the boot, not to mention his personal stash of several ounces, clumsily secreted in homemade compartments in the dashboard, easily enough on its own for a trafficking charge. There was also close to $35,000 crammed into the tyre of his spare wheel, which he tried to dismiss as a repaid debt, from someone who might as well have been called Joe Bloggs, of no fixed address. Things weren’t looking too good for Stick. He swore he had no connection with the crop by Evans’s, and tried to bargain on the trafficking charge by claiming that he’d bought the stash off Li; that it was common knowledge she stayed in Nebulah for the express purpose of cultivating cannabis. He claimed that Li had phoned him that night threatening to pin the crop on him if he didn’t risk his life to come and get her. Of course he would have saved her if he could, but his car wouldn’t start, and then it was too late. In the morning he panicked about what might be pinned on him, and took off. They were working to hit him with as many charges as they could make stick, even an added extra of social security fraud, but to prove manslaughter on the basis of an unknown phone call was beyond their expectations.
For now we have to be content with him being on remand, with no one to make bail. Apparently he’s having a bit of a rough time of it: had run into a few old associates, who were more than pleased to have the opportunity of following up on past dealings. Even a crocodile can be a small fish if the pond is heavily populated.
We hear all this from Sean, who is now having to patrol Nebulah fairly regularly in the face of the media frenzy since Li’s death. Over cups of tea on Milly’s porch he keeps us filled in, while Denham glowers by the car and keeps his distance. The forensic team has finished out at Evans’s, and the autopsy is scheduled for the next few days. The cogs have already creaked into action, and the outcome of the autopsy is a foregone conclusion: Li’s death would be found, correctly, to be suicide, a single fatal gunshot to the head. The mutilation of the corpses had occurred after death, and looked to have been caused by the claws of animals. It would be attributed to the nocturnal activities of marauding wild dogs, known to be common in the area. The local member – a straight-shooting civil servant with the community’s welfare at heart – would be outraged, and demand that resources be provided for a cull.
The media, naturally, are having a field day – drugs and a gory death, what more could they ask for? ‘Victim Shredded in Drug Crop Massacre’, screamed the Herald Sun, which insinuated that the crop had been Li’s, and that she’d been viciously murdered by territorial drug barons. They repeatedly stressed her Asian origins, as if this were proof enough in itself, and the supposed drug barons had, of course, the obligatory bikie connections.
It made me think of the pugnacious couple at Julie’s Boxing Day barbecue, how pleased they’d be at this piece of masterly ‘exclusive’ reporting. The dinner parties they’d enthrall with accounts of their argument with a loony Nebulah local, who’d claimed the town’s problems were due to ghouls. How they’d cut him to size.
We never answer the phone anymore. And word soon gets round to the ones who would intrude in person that if they venture within our fenceline, they are likely to encounter the local police when they arrive back at Woodford, who would, on an entirely routine vehicle check, find their tyres bald and their brakes dodgy, or their mufflers dubious. It could be costly.
I am beyond caring. It’s all so predictable. I just nod, slumped on the porch steps. The others drink tea and carefully avoid noticing the receding bottle beside me, the way people’s eyes rove around a physical disfigurement.
‘Li’s body will probably be due for release next week,’ Sean tells us.
Milly clears her throat. ‘We’ll need to make arrangements.’
‘If there’s anything we can do,’ Sean begins. Constable Denham, leaning by the patrol car, shifts his weight impatiently and crosses his arms. He fixes his eyes on the almost empty glass in my hand and then raises them to my face with open contempt. The arm bearing his watch gives an eloquent twitch.
‘I’ve postponed my leave,’ Sean is saying. ‘We’ll be here for the funeral.’ He squeezes my arm and stands up. ‘So, seriously, mate, if we can do anything.’ I know what he’s getting at; he had practically ordered me to bring Milly to their place, an open invitation. But Milly won’t budge and I’m living in a drunken fog, counting the days till solstice.
I stand up with him, but I’m rumpled and bleary, squinting in the sun. Milly pulls herself to her feet with the help of a cane and shuffles to the top of the steps, but doesn’t attempt to descend. Denham gives her a brief nod, scowls towards me and gets into the car. Sean reaches through the back window and pulls out a shopping bag and a small bundle.
‘I pulled rank at the post office,’ he says, ‘brought your mail.’ As he hands Milly the bundle he briefly holds her hand and she gives him a watery smile. To me he passes the shopping bag: eggs, milk, bread and a bottle of Grant’s. ‘Go easy,’ he says. I nod, but I look away. In the car Denham sits rigid, staring straight ahead.
Li, being the sort of person she was, had organised and paid for her funeral long in advance. Her solicitors in Woodford are the executors of her will. The bundle of mail contains a letter from them asking us to contact them, as they haven’t been able to reach us by phone. Our details, according to Li’s instructions, have been passed on to the funeral directors, to confirm arrangements for the ceremony. There is a letter from them as well, also requesting contact.
And there is a further letter, enclosed in the package from the solicitor. It is addressed to Li’s executors, but after reading the contents they decided it was more appropriate to forward it to us. It is our first introduction to Alice.
Outside the funeral parlour’s small chapel, a small knot of people circle nervously in the weak sunlight after a wet dawn. Sean and Rachael are there, and poor Neil Davies, who still looks haggard after the events of that morning. Sean had told me he’d insisted upon bringing his retirement forward, effective almost immediately. John and Evelyn Barry are pale; John, rigid beside his wife, looking haunted.
It is too soon for Liz to be able to cope with this; she is being looked after by her friends in Denmark. There is a small clutch of old Nebulah residents, those who were able to stay on in Woodford. They mingle unhappily, with carefully solemn countenances, like returned veterans. But it’s the young Asian girl standing on her own who catches my eye. She is a small and slender woman in her early twenties, striking in a slim-fitting dress of subdued green. She looks like a river reed. Her enormous almond eyes are candid, obviously relieved at our arrival, but her accent, when she shakes our hands, is as Australian as most of the barflys in the Woodford Arms.
Xi Dong – ‘but please call me Alice, everybody does’ – has been studying at uni in Perth for the last two years, she’d told me when I rang the number on her letter, but was born in Sydney. Her parents had followed her uncle and aunt there from Cambodia after they were granted permanent residency. It was this now elderly uncle who’d begged her to write, to ask permission for her to attend the funeral on his behalf. He was infirm, in a nursing home in Sydney, and was incapable of travelling. But he had known Li, remembered her with great emotion, and was keen for his niece to pay his respects in his absence.
He was devastated when he read in the papers of her death, she’d written. During the long, arduous journey to Australia she had shown much kindness to his wife, who suffered intensely from seasickness and a prolonged miscarriage. For many years after their safe arrival they exchanged cards and occasional meals, but when Li moved west they lost touch. He does not often speak of those years – my aunt never fully regained her health, and died not long after my parents arrived in Australia, so I never knew her, or experienced his grief at her death. But the news of Li’s death has affected him profoundly. I would not have ventured such an intrusion had it not meant so much to my uncle in his dist
ress.
Her uncle requested that we permit his niece to read a poem at the funeral, by a revered Cambodian writer who had been swept away in the first tides of the Khmer Rouge.
Alice apologises repeatedly to us now, for what she calls ‘gatecrashing’ the private ceremony, but her uncle, normally a subdued and placid man, had been adamant that the family owed Li their respects. She says this with a small, tense squeeze of her shoulders and an embarrassed smile, as if to suggest that the young have no choice when faced with the whims of the elderly.
She is evidently uncomfortable about attending the private funeral of a stranger, one that is guaranteed to attract unwanted attention and the most morbid kind of sightseers. We introduce her to people as a special friend of Li’s and she relaxes gratefully, greeting everyone with a shy, beautiful smile, so natural it doesn’t seem at all out of place at a funeral. Over her head Milly and I catch each other’s eye and smile sheepishly: we are both entranced, convinced Alice is the image of Li at a young age. We keep her close, like an honoured guest.
The service is short and painfully routine, as these things tend to be. The celebrant, who’d never even met Li, relates what little he knows of her from his sketchy notes, his words the consistency of ashes.
Alice is introduced by her Cambodian name. She stands at the side of the podium and faces the small group that has washed up on the shore at the end of Li’s life. Her address is brief; she says the piece she is to recite gave great consolation to the terrified and grief-stricken refugees who’d clustered on the ramshackle boat that would see them either saved or killed. ‘It is,’ she explains, ‘difficult to translate adequately into English.’ She recites it first in Khmer, then English.
‘Like the breeze
bearing the mountain’s song
so death is movement.
Our souls entwine
with bursting seed
and bloom towards the waiting sky.
Thus, the heels that crush
The tender growth