She’d put the phone down, her heart slamming.
TWO DAYS later the fire was still burning up into the north, while she sat on a box of brochures in the sweet inky air of the printery for her own farewell party, drinking cheap champagne from plastic cups with the other journalist, the ad sales girl, the printers and compositors. And the morning after that she put a suitcase and three cardboard boxes of belongings into the back seat of her green Gemini and drove along Monarch Street, past the shops and the RSL Club, past the swimming pool, the petrol depot, the skating rink.
On an impulse that day, she had turned in at the short gravel road to the river’s swimming hole at the outskirts of town and had gone to stand for a last time at the river’s edge, watching the brown water churn. As she turned finally to leave, she noticed, jammed between the rocks at her feet, the half-rotted carcass of a bird, its grey feathers matted and wormy.
She had got back into her car and driven away, back out to the highway, and when she came to the 100 km sign she reached down and turned up her radio, and she could feel the smoky air of Rundle leaving her lungs and her clean future rising up. And relief escaped from her in a long, cool breath.
And if occasionally over the years it has come to her that there might have been something in the rear-vision mirror that night—that the swipe might have been a car, a human movement—she has made the thought dissolve, become only the carcass of a rotted bird back in the past, years and years ago, when she was someone else.
But now she is standing on the hot white concrete of the Rundle hospital car park, and this recognition, this memory finally cannot dissolve, and she is not someone else. She is standing outside the room where her father lies dying, and Stephen’s Subaru pulls into the entrance from the main road and the sunlight is very bright, and her heart is hitting and hitting in her chest.
But first Tony is walking down the white path towards her, and he sees her face, and he’s grinning in a broad new way, this man who found the corpse, who said, it’s because of you, and he says, ‘You remember now, don’t ya.’
‘Yes.’
She can’t breathe, she can’t speak but she doesn’t need to; they both know it: his hand over hers on the fire hose, the juddering of a flatbed truck, this same waiting breath near her ear—they both know that she let a man burn and said nothing, and that he has reeled her back through the years to peel away her disguise. Here in her childhood home he alone knows who she is, and he has brought her here to face herself.
She might be sick. She bends over, staring at the soft curve of the gutter. Breathe. The dread of his hand gripping her arm. Then his voice, loudly: ‘She’s a bit crook I think,’ and she lifts her head and Stephen is walking across the concrete, tossing the car keys from hand to hand.
He cocks his head to look into her face. ‘Are you?’
She inhales, forces breath in, out again, shakes her head. But she walks, fast, towards Stephen’s ute and she opens the door and lowers herself in, shuts the glass between herself and Tony.
Stephen is a few paces behind her. He gets in, and looks at her for a second before he starts the vehicle and reverses it out from the parking spot. As they drive away Tony stands watching, hand raised in a serene little wave. ‘Seeya, Mandy,’ he mouths at her.
She watches the buildings, the town, slide by. Stephen is talking but she cannot hear him. She has entered another, unprotected country and she cannot ever go back. She is in the country with a man curled into a ball inside a car, aflame.
‘What’s the matter?’ Stephen is saying again. His tone says drama queen.
‘I know who he is,’ she says. Her voice thin as water. ‘There was a fire. When I was on the paper.’
‘Huh,’ Stephen says. He looks past her and turns the wheel to enter the traffic on Monarch Street. ‘He said something about that. Said you’d remember.’
She wants to look at Stephen, to say I am terrified, but she can only stare at the dashboard while the shops and the people of this town glide by, and in her head there is nothing but smoke and chemical burning, and a shrieking flame of a man, and behind it all is Tony, waiting to show her who she is. We’re the same.
‘Fucking vermin,’ Stephen says with sudden force as the car jerks to a stop.
Mandy looks up. They have pulled into the driveway at home, and Stephen is watching an Indian mynah shooting around the backyard, watching its deft sorties from the fence to the garden bed, back to the fence, then the stone birdbath. Trilling its wings, looking out of its yellow-ringed eye.
Mandy leans down to the floor to gather up her bag. Her body feels stiff and old. ‘It’s only a bird,’ she hears herself murmur.
‘Vermin,’ says her brother again, as he waits for Mandy to climb out of the car and slam her door, and then he reverses back down the drive, swings out into the road and drives off. She stands in the driveway with her handbag dangling from her wrist, watching the mynah. It flips down to the front verandah and walks in its jerky little stride along the cement. It walks up and down the top step outside the front door. It looks around, distracted by a noise, then turns back to its business and begins walking again, up and down, up and down.
Waiting and walking, stopping and watching, waiting to get in.
TONY WALKS back in through the loading dock, hands in his pockets, jiggling his keys. She’s remembered now. He feels his chest filling with it. He knew she could not forget.
More than twenty years, and he’s followed her on the television around the world, ever since, and it all started here, and how could she forget. She had been standing at the edge of the paddock like a schoolgirl. He’d yelled at her so she climbed up on the back of the flatbed and he watched her from the corner of his eye, how scared she was, holding the hose out too low in front of her like a dog’s leash.
He’d felt bad for yelling at her then. So he’d put his hand over hers to show her how to lift the hose, and she was jumpy and silent, and he’d decided to look out for her. Had stood between her and the perviest of the blokes, and as the truck jolted over the tussocks he’d pushed her camera case to the front so it didn’t slide about, had told the driver when to stop so she could get a good picture. He made sure she was all right, got something to eat when they did. He didn’t hassle her or anything, just watched her from a little distance, for the rest of the night, until he saw her get in her car and drive off. He’d watched the tail-lights of her car getting smaller like the coals of the grass fire, while the others were watching the ridge, and he saw, way in the distance, that she didn’t keep going on the main road but turned off onto Menindee.
He slept in the truck, and next morning when they could see how the fire had gone everywhere, when all the country was just smouldering black, he took the Menindee Road back into town. No reason, just making sure.
And then when he rounded the bend and saw it, the smudged skeleton of the car down the embankment through the tree trunks, his guts lurched like he’d never felt. He stopped on the road, and his feet crunched over that black stubble in the smoking sunlit morning, towards the melted car. He can’t remember holding his breath, leaning in, careful not to touch the blistered black metal. He cannot remember the noise of his own bawling breaths going out of him, Oh no, oh no, nor putting out his hands to feather in the air around that human shape, his sobs and gasps floating with the smoke, up among the burned stalks of the trees. But he remembers the curled nubs of the hands, the foetal angles of the legs. He cannot ever forget the bubbled black skin, as if a bandaged infant of a woman had been dipped in tar and left to burn, shrieking and alone.
And when the cops said later it was a man, he wept with relief. He had saved her. By seeing what she saw, by it not being her. He knew this was stupid, but also that it was the truth, and when her voice came on the phone that day he was unsurprised, and he didn’t have to say I saved you. He had saved her, and it was impossible to forget what they both had seen, even with the years and years, and now that he’d found her staring at him in the ca
r park he knew that she did not forget, and that at last she recognises that they are the same.
MARGARET HAS to go and see Bid Grogan about swapping her turn for the flowers at Mass, and her children are to meet her at the RSL Club.
‘It’s called Ciphers,’ she says again before leaving, liking the sound of the word.
At six, Cathy says, ‘Why don’t we walk? Then Mum can drive us home.’
The four of them speak little as they walk in the warm evening. Near the fire station the air grows electric with cicada noise. The drone of a car approaches; as the black hatchback passes them the rich, melodramatic tones of a local FM radio announcer’s voice—music from the SIXties, SEVENties— booms briefly out.
Mandy walks ahead with her arms folded, biting the inside of her cheek. She has not spoken to any of them about what she knows can only sound ludicrous, the dread that is seeping, soaking slowly and surely, through her whole being.
Chris hurries to keep pace with her. At the corner he touches her arm, making her wait for the others, almost half a block behind them. They both stand staring across the road, unseeing. A shopping trolley, far from home, angles into the gutter.
Chris says, ‘Are you okay?’
Mandy cannot reply, expressionless, still looking at the road, still biting her lip. She shrugs. ‘Are you?’ she says then.
When she finally looks at him she sees that his eyes are wet.
‘Not really,’ he breathes. They can hear Cathy and Stephen coming up behind them. Mandy takes Chris’s arm and tucks it beneath hers, holding his hand to the warmth of her side.
The others are almost alongside them now, and Chris withdraws his hand and whips it to his face, flicking his tears away, and starts walking again.
At the corner of Massie Street, Stephen yells out in sudden glee. ‘Hey!’
They turn to see him grinning at a shop sign: INERTIA HEALTHCARE. The sign is painted with curly text, and another advertises Reiki—Tarot—Health Foods. They chortle. Cathy says, ‘Do you think we should tell them?’
‘Nup,’ says Chris.
They walk again, four abreast now.
‘Didn’t that used to be the barber?’ asks Mandy.
‘The one that sold ammo!’ Stephen says.
‘With the bullets right near the kids’ chair!’ cries Cathy. ‘And the shotguns!’
They explain to Chris how it is true, that the barber used to sell ammunition, how there were rifles and shotguns on the walls, how the window was painted with a barber’s pole wreathed in a garland of guns.
‘Bet Hair-on-Hamilton doesn’t sell ammo,’ says Stephen.
They walk on, in the blue evening. Mandy has hold of Chris’s arm beneath hers again now, skin to skin. As they walk she recalls that their father had a rifle in the house when they were young. None of them knew it was there until one ordinary afternoon when Geoff lifted the rifle down from a high shelf in the hallway cupboard, disassembled it, and took it away. Margaret was out, and the children stood around the kitchen table, thrilled and silent, while their father opened the long wooden box and removed the rifle. He turned dark bits of metal and broke open the gun. Astonishingly he did not speak a word while he carried out this task, which was hot with danger. There were no warnings, no lessons on how the machinery worked. The children—even little Cathy—knew somehow not to break this spell by speaking, or fidgeting. They stood holding their breath. He took the pieces of the gun and ran a grubby cloth over each of them before putting the pieces back into the box. Then he snapped it shut, carried it out of the house to the car, and drove away.
The children had watched the car drive off and then dispersed. They said nothing more about it, not even to each other. Until dinner, when they were eating strawberries and cream, and Stephen said, ‘Hey Dad, wheredya take that gun?’
Margaret had inhaled audibly, but kept on eating. Their father cleared his throat and said, ‘I took it to the police station and had it destroyed.’
There was a moment of silence, and then Margaret had said quietly, ‘We don’t want it.’ And the moment passed. But years later, when Mandy worked on the paper, she learned from an In Memoriam that it was around this time that Rowan Young, the fifteen-year-old son of Geoff’s friend Doug, went to a vacant block near his house and shot himself in the head.
They walk along the main street in the falling dusk. Some boys are playing with a football on the pavement outside the club, calling to one another. Mandy wonders if Stephen ever knew about Rowan Young. She thinks about all the things that are never gotten around to, in a family. And she wants to tell him, suddenly, about the gun, about Rowan, and about the frightened, unutterable love that fathers have for sons. Maybe even, somehow, to begin trying to explain what she could not in the car today—Tony, the fire, the unnameable fear spreading through her. But when she catches his eye he only looks away again. And when they reach the club he strides ahead of them all, through the group of boys and up the steps.
Margaret is sitting alone at a long table under the track lighting of the restaurant’s vast room. Looping blue neon letters fixed to a far wall spell out Ciphers. There are curved blond-wood dividers separating the barn of a room into several areas, and each divider is topped with a curved wave of frosted glass. There are only a few occupied tables, the pairs and quartets of diners seated far from one another. The tables are vaguely surfboard-shaped in outline, and there are turquoise paper serviettes. It is the sort of generic décor that might belong to a small-town coastal resort, but Rundle is a long way from the sea.
As they sit down and a waitress hands out the padded vinyl menus, Mandy watches the four boys kicking the football to one another outside on the street, beyond the tinted window. The boys are enjoying the mild nuisance of their game to passers-by, the ball’s unpredictable bouncing, their lurching to catch it, the space their bodies take up. One boy kicks the ball spinning low across the ground to another, and it bounces sideways, just missing a middle-aged woman hurrying towards the steps. The catcher leaps but he has to drop and scuttle in front of the woman, batting the ball away from her step just in time, making her lose her stride. The other boys smirk and lean away with their hands in their pockets, as he calls Sorry! to the woman. She has stopped and narrowed her eyes in annoyance, is saying something to the boy. He stands listening to her with the ball held low in his hands while his friends snicker behind the woman. When she has gone, the boy grins widely and shouts to his friends, running to grab one by the arm and punch his shoulder, hard.
Margaret and the others are reading the plastic-coated menus. Mandy looks down the list. She stops herself from remarking on the spelling.
‘It’s supposed to be very good,’ Margaret says. ‘The chef is new. From Sydney.’
There is Thai Beef Salad, Oysters Natural or Kilpatrick, Steak with Pepper or Diane or Mushroom Sauce, Filet Mignon, Tuscan Lamb, Bangers and Mash, Beer Battered Fish.
Mandy reads down the list, then mutters in contempt, ‘Jesus.’
‘What?’ asks Cathy, scanning the menu.
Mandy reads it aloud. ‘Adriatic Salad: Cajun prawns, sweet potato, snow peas and lime mayonnaise.’
Margaret says, ‘Mmm, that sounds nice.’
‘Sounds disgusting,’ mutters Cathy beneath her breath. ‘And where are they getting prawns?’
But Margaret hears, and looks at her hotly. ‘We have a man who comes every week. Fresh seafood.’
Mandy takes a swig of wine from the too-small glass. ‘It’s ignorant, is what it is.’
Stephen has been looking on from the end of the table, amused. ‘Why?’
‘Because they don’t even know what it means,’ says Mandy.
‘It means a salad made out of prawns, sweet potato, snow peas and mayonnaise,’ says Stephen. He’s leaning back in his chair, the menu open in his hands like a prayer book. Cathy looks at her own menu, trying not to smile. Margaret is confused, looking from the menu to her children and back again.
Mandy looks away, rolling her
eyes. She leans down to rummage in her handbag.
‘What? What’s the matter?’ says Margaret. But as soon as she’s said it she changes her mind about wanting to know. ‘I’m having the Tuscan Lamb,’ she says, closing the menu. This mystifying, looming quarrel will be ended. She frowns at Stephen and Cathy.
Cathy begins, helpfully, to explain. ‘ “Cajun” means Southern American. Louisiana.’
‘Oh,’ Margaret says, nonplussed. She shakes her head briskly, as if to see off a fly. Then she sees Mandy’s hand emerge from her bag with a packet of cigarettes. ‘You can’t smoke in here, Mandy,’ she says, an anxious note in her voice.
‘And the Adriatic, obviously, isn’t anywhere near Louisiana,’ says Mandy, unfurling the clear wrapper from the cigarettes.
‘So who cares,’ says Stephen.
Mandy stops unwrapping and stares at him. ‘I care.’
Stephen is enjoying the predictability of this moment. But he says, widening his eyes as if surprised, ‘And why’s that, Mandy?’
She knows she’s being ridiculed. She has a sudden surge of adrenaline, of spite. She leans forward, looking Stephen in the eye: ‘Because it’s ignorant. It’s just some exotic name they made up. Why don’t they just call it prawns and whatever? Why do they have to make up some pretentious thing they don’t even understand?’
‘Maybe they like the sound of it,’ Stephen says.
‘Maybe the chef is called Adriana,’ says Cathy, smirking.
Mandy’s hand goes back to her cigarette packet. Margaret cannot stop watching the cigarettes, except to look swiftly about the room to see if anyone else is noticing what Mandy is about to do. Suddenly a large figure looms at her side.
The Children Page 16