Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Just bring the whole thing the way you’d have it.’

  ‘White, brown, Turkish?’

  Scully’s smile is broad, serene. It says, What did I just fucking say?

  ‘She’ll spit in them now,’ says Karen.

  ‘We should order you a milkshake, fatten you up a bit.’

  ‘You sure know how to talk to a girl.’

  ‘First time accused of that.’

  ‘What’s Pittsburgh like?’

  ‘Cold.’

  ‘No, really. What’s it like?’

  Scully cocks his head; her note of curiosity is quaint, remote, authentic. He puts elbows on the table, hands locked as though he’s about to conduct a one-man arm wrestle. He has not wiped the droplets of water from his spectacles or removed his ridiculous hat.

  ‘I guess you’d say it has a cracked quality. Post-industrial, like a train set God dropped when He was putting it down.’

  She tries to smile. Parts of it actually get through. ‘Lord Scully, the Blood-spatter King…Listen, regarding Yanks I appreciate the offer. But I wouldn’t have time to see it through. Bercovitch is taking it off me. Imminent.’

  ‘But you’ve advanced it.’

  ‘Not in the direction he wanted.’

  ‘So? Tough luck for Bercovitch.’

  ‘I’ve been bad, haven’t kept him in the loop.’

  ‘For valid reasons, I’m sure. What were you looking for in Gore Street at two-thirty in the morning?’

  Karen adds milk to her tea. It’s hot enough to make her gums throb, the sensation pleasant. ‘Duty allocations. Manager slips.’

  ‘Riveting.’

  ‘I was trying to catch Rex Faulkner in a lie, find evidence he was seconded to Beowulf around the same time Paspaley was primary.’

  ‘Beowulf?’

  ‘Cobblers Beach, the William Meath conviction. Was also hoping to cross-reference a stolen-car report on Koestler’s Daimler.’

  ‘Success?’

  ‘No. But failure can be a kind of success. Right?’

  Right—just not the kind you ever want to have. The food arrives and Karen starts playing with it. Scully carves and skewers a hash brown, examining it for a while on the end of his fork. ‘You’ve got two options,’ he says slowly, absorbed by the morsel. ‘Walk away—or nail it so hard the brass has no choice but to action what you give them. Bercovitch can’t suppress a stone-cold solve.’

  Karen looks past him, past the stone-cold booth to where the rain refuses to die. No, dreams should not be literal—but Karen’s are. Last night in her sleep she walked the crime scene in Illawarra, rubbed elbows with the Murmurs. The tech in the astro suit crouched and brushed away gravel, revealed the tortured face of Detective Sergeant Rawson. She came awake panting, surprisingly upset.

  ‘Judge Koestler was an interesting kettle of fish,’ says Scully. ‘The cryptogram. He played a deep game.’

  ‘He gave away his art collection, got his affairs in order. He knew they were coming to get him.’

  The scientist shudders. He doesn’t like to think about it. The man dissects bodies for a living but it’s odd what people squirm about. His mind rushes in a fugitive direction, looking for solace, for a proof that can make him feel pro-life, pro-world. ‘It glows in the dark.’

  ‘What does.’

  ‘The chess set, Kara. It’s beautiful.’

  She nods in a vacant way, attempting to picture. A downpour here means a withering dry spell in Panama, Portugal, Pittsburgh. ‘If it glows in the dark, shouldn’t the missing bit be easy to find?’

  He shudders all over again. This time his discomfort triggers a gleeful comic turn inside her, a schadenfreude that powers mad-edge laugh. Fatigue feeds mania, Scully swelling to hear it.

  ‘Behave yourself, young lady. Sit up straight and eat your bloody breakfast.’

  23

  Rawson pulls up in the horrible Pintara, kills the lights and engine. He lets the radio live because he likes the song but when it’s over he ends the current.

  He takes the letter from the seat. A scan of words like remedial reader, his slow and silent mouthing. Lake Eyre lips / should have bought some balm / can’t kiss her cheek with these. When he’s had enough he folds the paper and licks the envelope sticky.

  —

  Man hath no greater misfortune. Nor woman neither.

  Don’t ask anyone who’s been there. Worse than fire, worse than flood, worse than any famine but like it.

  A drought of mercy, of understanding. There will never come rain / it is the very worst thing that can happen.

  —

  Her house is almost the same, outlined faint behind a giant pair of larch. Siberians: all the leaves, chicken-hearted, have fallen to form a thick brown carpet on the frost-hit grass. New lawn decomposing into the previous beneath. Food is time and space / it bleeds.

  The larch have the knack of looking different in a different season. Pragmatists, shapeshifters. Grey branches interlock and they stand up staunch like men on a picket. Old men: stripped and worn, agonised, determined to weather assault because there’s no other option, no place left to go.

  Rawson sits in the car without music for the length of seven songs. He is searching for the will, divining without rods to source the no-other-option, the no-place-left-to-go.

  —

  He offered to come round, take care of the yard. She told him she preferred it wild. A phrase she used, almost lyrical—Rawson filed it for later analysis. To recollect now is strenuous, almost physical effort. Vague the path of memory, shine a light / sweep a cobweb.

  —I don’t touch the garden, not anymore. I’ve surrendered.

  —Surrendered.

  —If you leave it alone, the result is pure. Nature just decides.

  Tonight is the fourth anniversary of that conversation, that determination to file. Winter of ’89. The Bunnies were winning games left right and centre, the child was twenty-one months in the grave.

  —

  A high nocturnal wind that in Sydney precursors storm. Rawson takes the flowers from the back seat and gets out of the car. A stab of respect for the yard, its wildness, or maybe just sibling spirit. She too drives a Pintara.

  The Incremental rings the doorbell. Braces. He knows she will look older / her days are worth triple. She answers with a small surprised smile that is kind, eloquent, I thought you would come but I never take it for granted.

  ‘Come in, Michael. It’s lovely to see you.’

  —

  She turns thirteen today, but she doesn’t.

  ‘Beautiful,’ says the lady, putting them in water. He wonders if she means it. Rawson finds flowers vaguely pleasant but has no eye, no sense, requires the vulgar markers of size and price. Other flowers line on the dining table, next to the girl’s picture. White azaleas will be from the grandmother. Aged care, fixed budget, Forever In Our Hearts. She is not a grandmother anymore.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘That’d be lovely. I mean, if you’re having one.’

  The stipulation is polite but superfluous: Gwen is addicted. She puts out her best set and four kinds of biscuit and moves to fill the kettle, Rawson noting again the nasty limp on her left-hand side.

  Bad fall / shattered hip. When God deserts you, He deserts you completely.

  —

  The second bunch is from the school. Natives. In Loving Memory. Nice that they send flowers on the birthday, not the other day they might choose. Perhaps it is policy.

  ‘Had a good chat with Ian today,’ she says across her shoulder. A pair of tortoiseshell cats are making an entrance, the first brushing his leg and going the figure eight. Rawson watches its caper from tropospheric height, happy again to reflect that she has company. ‘He said to say hello.’

  ‘That’s good of him,’ says the Ship, thinking of a bull-like man he had only ever seen in a destroyed state. ‘How’s he going.’

  ‘Pretty good. I mean, today is hard.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘B
ut he likes it up there. Caloundra suits.’

  A solid bloke, that Ian—I do not wonder that the third set of flowers are from him. And Gwendolin don’t feel bad that your marriage fell to pieces. As a dedicated police of twenty-something years, the sagely Incremental can tell you that the parents of a murdered child routinely dissolve like wedding cakes left out in the rain. Yes-yes, the husband frequently moves interstate and marries someone else. ‘Nice enough part of the world,’ he sniffs in a take-it-or-leave-it voice. He in fact imagines Sunshine Coast to be paradise. ‘Bit glitzy for me. A bit false.’

  ‘No, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,’ agrees Gwen, handing him his cup of tea. The disparity in their mass is profound, Gwen a bird-like woman with short hair and a face that nature decided to line, to groove with an intricate awl. The labour amounts to art-like enterprise, a blueprint of anti-cathedral in the plane behind her eyes. Rawson is obscurely sensitive to its terrible majesty and cowers before it / stares into his tea.

  ‘Well, come on then. How are your gorgeous girls?’

  ‘Good,’ he winces. ‘Youngest doesn’t like school. Eldest loves it.’

  ‘Sasha hates school? Oh dear. But they often do for a while. She’ll grow out of it.’

  Bobby Cobra nods and stares out the porthole, the kitchen window that permits no view. A big stretch of state forest over the back and the singing of frogs. Rain is soon. It hurts him that she remembers their names. ‘You still at the childcare?’

  ‘They’re cutting back hours,’ she says, yes-but-no. ‘Mind you, three days a week is probably as much as I can handle. I might stand for election at the bowls club.’

  Right, yes, the bowls club. Three years older than you but she looks like late middle age. You’re a mongrel to think it but it’s hard to believe she was in childbearing shape as recently as thirteen bloody years ago. Oh Christ forgive you / Christ slit your throat. Now she is to stand for the committee of the bowls club but when you met this lady she was in her prime with long glossy hair / you’d have given her the once-over. For the love of God and all his saints what is wrong with you.

  ‘Cutbacks,’ he says, sounding grim. ‘Never the resources you need till there’s an election round the corner.’

  ‘I’m just an aide.’

  ‘Don’t say that, I’m sure you’re amazing with those kids.’

  ‘I hope so. People wonder how I can do it, look at me like I’m about to go mad.’

  ‘Stuff people.’

  ‘No—they’re onto something. I still wake up and think someone is going to realise the mistake. I’ll get a knock on the door, some nice man from government. Sorry for the blue, Mrs Dance. Here’s your kid back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  You think about the bloke who found her. Warwick Penbernethy his name was. I’m sure Gwen remembers that better than you.

  Warwick was a merchant banker / no rhyming slang intended. Just a normal bloke with a dog, a wife. He got up early and thought I’ll walk the bitch. You know—the dog. A beautiful crisp morning down at Cobblers and he does something good for the bloody dog.

  But then it won’t come back and he’s whistling and he needs to get back but the dog is howling like a mad bloody ape so he goes and takes a squiz.

  Gwen is holding the delicate cup with delicate hands, blowing on the surface, mesmerised by the brew. Infinite worlds bound within those molecules of tea, planets with their own suns, their own cops-and-robber atrocities. ‘Do you still enjoy the job?’

  Enjoy the job. Jesus, happy Anzac Day / have a nice divorce. ‘I’ve left,’ he tells her, the announcement more abrupt than he intends; Gwen’s face landslides with concern. ‘I’m still working out plans, but yeah—I’m leaving.’

  You went to see him. Penbernethy. It was nineteen months ago / an itch you had to scratch. You woke one night and had a feeling like he wasn’t okay so you went around, copped his wife on the doorstep. She goes, ‘He walked out on us months ago. We think he’s in Canada / we don’t know where the hell he is.’ You asked what happened and she ground her jaw, said, ‘Nervous bloody breakdown, all the post-traumatic stress. No one gave him any help after he found that little girl. No one came to check he was okay.’

  ‘You’re responsible for those Kingstons, Michael. I’m not supposed to eat them.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a fiend for the Kingstons, Gwen.’

  And the awful thing is that you were thankful. You were glad that Warwick Penbernethy was not okay because it made it okay that you were not okay.

  And you were not okay.

  ‘Will you travel?’

  Rawson nods without conviction, takes a biscuit from the plate and ushers in a post-Kingston world. A world of middling Monte Carlos and Shortbread Creams / Sasha calls them pedals. ‘Overseas. I’ve been tying up some loose ends and…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s surprising how few there are to tie. Funny how little your life amounts to.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true for everybody.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘But it’s strange to see you so…fatalistic.’

  ‘I seem different.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because I’m not a policeman anymore.’

  You had the PTS yourself. That high-pitched noise a violin makes before it breaks a string, that was you old boy—all through ’88 you were that wire just waiting to go, perpetually in a rage and most especially with the people you most adored. Why must it always work like that? You did not understand what was afoot and so you hit the medicine / strange ironic name for it. You liked a drink as much as the next handsome Sagittarius but you’d never used it to get through the day. You tried to tell somebody at work, a woman who was good to you, and she said, ‘You’ve worked bad cases before, Bobby—why is this one different?’ You’d been asking the same question but it wasn’t until you heard it from Deanna’s darling lips that your fingers gripped an answer.

  Not that you could tell her / that would have been cruel. D was in love with you, thought you might leave Heather, but you must always be grateful she wondered.

  The girls / the girls. You were a gold star fucken murder police but you did not grasp how altogether they had changed the skin you live in. Perhaps if they’d been closer in time—their birth, Sophie’s death—you might have been quicker on the uptake, but five years is a long bloody time / a life turns retrograde in fifteen seconds.

  ‘You’ll always be a policeman, Michael.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll go back. They don’t have many natural detectives like you.’

  He smiles sadly / it’s a nice thing to hear. Once upon a time it was truth. They do have natural detectives like me, Gwendolin. It’s just that I’m no longer one of them.

  ‘I feel like a sherry,’ announces Gwen, both palms on the table. ‘What would you say to that?’

  ‘I would say you ripper.’

  He carries his tea into the lounge and Gwen at the sideboard gets hold of a decanter. She pours out twice and hands him one. They did this three years ago, and then two. But not last year / he thought the tradition dead.

  ‘To her,’ says Gwen, raising her glass.

  ‘To her.’

  It dries on their palate and Gwen asks about the other Beowulfs. Rawson says what he knows, offering status reports in a voice bereft of feeling. One is well, one is dead, one has retired, one is scattered to the wind…Rawson is diligent not to look at Sophie’s photo on the table, the photo they presented to the media / to the world. The third bouquet is not from Ian.

  ‘What the hell.’

  The writing tiny, spidery, Rawson appalled by the name. He can remember the shape of her in the gallery, a sad little crone who listened to all that was said with inscrutable expression, the prosecutor branding her wretched son a vile abductor, a defiler of children. Even then she was ancient / My Thoughts Are With You.

  Rawson grim, white-lipped. ‘I didn’t know she did that, sent you flowers.’

  ‘Oh yes, every year
. She’s clockwork is Mrs Meath.’

  ‘I’ll have it stopped.’

  ‘It’s alright, Michael. It causes me no pain.’

  ‘Does it not? The sight of that name?’

  Gwen looks beyond the curtain. Meath has been dead ten months. He was in ragged shape when he went inside / he too did triple-time. ‘What causes me pain,’ she says, ‘is that he never admitted to it, never offered remorse. I might be wrong, but maybe that would change something. As for his name, it means nothing. His face? Nothing. But I do feel sorry for the mother. I’m sure she did her best, and now she has to live with the knowledge of what he was. I sometimes think her cross must be heavier than mine.’

  ‘How could that be.’

  ‘Because the world was on my side. I’m not saying that amounts to much, because it doesn’t. But to be despised like she was despised…Would you take another sherry?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘I still go to the counsellor, you know. He’s very good and the government pays, which I appreciate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He says that I should ask you not to visit anymore.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That must sound very unkind.’

  ‘No, Gwendolin. It sounds about right.’

  Rawson takes the new sherry and now he does look at Sophie. ‘When I found out her name—when Paspaley told me—I was heartbroken. I knew if someone had given her a name like that then she must have been loved.’

  They approach the limit of open crying and stop, taught by experience to remain on the near side of that river. When he speaks he is hoarse, far away. ‘Piece talks.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you remember a pair of lads who got lost in the bush? West Australia, they went out to be jackaroos.’

  ‘Yes. I think I do.’

  ‘Just boys they were, sixteen/seventeen. They got picked on and bastardised, sent off and separated in the middle of nowhere with no clue what they were getting into.’

  ‘And they ran away. Didn’t they.’

  Rawson dips his head. ‘Hijacked a piece of crap four-by-four you wouldn’t trust to get you to the shops and back. Into the Great Sandy Desert with no map and stuff-all water. Thirst. One stopped and shot himself. The other went two clicks up the road and scrawled a message, carved it in the paint.’