He walked into town with his head down and his jaw clenched. He thought about going in to see Mrs. Coop but decided against it. Instead, he walked down to the Catholic church and, as he had done many times before, continued down beside it until he came to the overgrown garden of the convent. While Ham explored he went and sat down on the jetty at the bottom of it. He watched the pup appear and disappear in the bushes like a tiny jungle beast and then he pulled one of Henry’s cigarettes from his pocket and lit it with a match, inhaling as deeply as he could. He looked down at the water and watched the current spiral and eddy along the bank and round the jetty pilings. He took another draw of the cigarette and hung his head down between his knees when it began to spin. When he looked up a minute or so later Flynn was there in front of him, standing on the water, rubbing the smoke from his eyes.
“Sorry, mate,” Tom managed to say, but the wispy outline was already gone, and there was nothing in its place but light sparkling off water and an old promise ringing in his ears, loud as a church bell, unkept.
I promise you, Flynn. I promise you we’ll get home.
He sat for a long time and then wandered home, his heart like a stone inside him. He found Pop Mather sitting on the front step looking at his hands and his heart sank even further.
“What is it? Is it Flynn?”
“No. No, son. Sorry. I’m here about Henry. He got himself into a bit of bother last night. Me and Mrs. Mather have been thinking about it and we think it’d be best if you came and stayed with us for a bit. Just until Henry . . . settles himself.”
“What’d he do?”
“Had a bit too much to drink. Caused a bit of bother. Had to lock him up . . . for his own good.”
Tom nodded. Pop saw the relief flicker across his face, then something else—maybe pride—settled there. He seemed about to protest and Pop felt such a flood of affection for the boy he was taken by surprise.
“But what about—”
“What? I won’t hear a word,” he said, lifting his finger. “Not a word. I’ve already told Henry.”
Tom nodded.
“Good boy. Now, can you give me a hand with your mother?”
He liked the station house when he got there—he liked it a lot. He liked its musty, churchy smell and he liked its wooden floors and high, high ceilings. He liked the fact it was made out of bricks. The walls felt much more solid—safer—than the weatherboards of his own home and he liked the thought of his mother sleeping behind them. He continued his exploration, peering round the doors of all the open rooms and running his fingers over those of the closed, Grace’s among them. Twelve rooms in all, not counting the laundry out the back or the halls. Far too many, he thought, a little wistfully, for Pop’s small family.
The police station was joined to the station house by a length of verandah and just before the door leading to it he found a tall bookshelf crammed with books. He ran his finger along the spines until he came to a hefty dictionary. He pulled it out, sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, and opened it up in his lap. He looked up lion. A large greyish tan cat native to Africa and southern Asia. He wondered how close southern Asia was to Australia. He flicked a few pages. Lose, lost, losing: to come to be without, by some chance, and not know the whereabouts of. He sat for a long time looking at the definition and then he looked up Sonny’s word again. Whore. A prostitute, it said. He looked up prostitute. A person, especially a woman, who engages in sexual intercourse for money as a livelihood, it said. He looked up intercourse and livelihood and then he closed the book and thought about his mother and what he knew about her, then what he knew about Sonny Steele, and finally drew some kind of comfort from the comparison. He looked up one last word, one that had crept into his head earlier that day at the jetty and wouldn’t go away. The disembodiedspirit of a dead person imagined as wandering among or haunting living persons, said the book of ghost. Imagined, it said. He wondered if he’d imagined what he’d seen Sonny and Charlie doing as well. He looked down at the dictionary, closed it and put it back on the shelf. Mysteries. The world was full of them.
He was still thinking about it when he went to bed that night. Grace had said barely a word to him all evening and that troubled him as well. He didn’t want to stay in the station house if she didn’t want him there, no matter how much he liked it.
Around midnight, when he finally fell asleep, he dreamt the dream again. The figure without a face stepped out of the trees and came for him. He ran and ran and ran—until he wondered how he could possibly keep on going.
16
Gibson eased out of the car and rubbed at his neck. It was very early. More rain had fallen during the night and pools had formed where it had rilled off the mill’s roof. He bent and drank and then he walked over to a tree to piss. On the slope below a small mob of grey kangaroos moved through the trees and nibbled at the grass there. He was so close he could hear the soft thud of their hind legs and tails against the ground, the sound of their cropping teeth, but then his piss slapped against a leaf and their grey heads all went up as one and they bounded away down the hill and disappeared into the mist at the bottom of it.
Later that morning when he saw the sign to Laurence he remembered Pop telling him about Adam Carney. He stopped and got directions and in a few minutes he pulled up outside the nursing home.
The nursing home was dim and quiet inside and he couldn’t hear anything for a time except the subdued chatter of nurses coming from somewhere out of sight, but then the moans and calls of the old people began to seep through closed doors and move along bare corridors to where he stood. He looked around. The place was much the same as the home his mother was in and a wave of guilt suddenly rose up and threatened to wash him away. He steeled himself and stepped forward and by the time he reached the nurses’ desk he’d regained enough of his composure to show them his police identification and ask the whereabouts of one Adam Carney. One of the younger nurses offered to show him where he was and he followed her down a long hall and into a far wing and muttered clumsy answers to her loaded questions.
The nurse left him by a door and after she had gone he opened it. He heard cursing in a rasping, fluttering voice, hanging in the air like broken birdsong, and then a gust of fetid air, loaded with the smell of age, sickness and shit, came rushing out. He screwed up his nose and peered in, the room slowly emerging from the gloom. An empty bed and another with a wizened old man upon it. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him and walked forward to the bed. The old man, his eyes closed, looked as if he had been lying there for years. His skin was pale and paper-thin—his life barely contained within it—and the veins at his temples were a deep ocean blue. His emaciated arms had bandages attached to them and the ends of the bandages were tied to the bars at the side of the bed.
“Mr. Carney? Adam Carney?” he said, softly. Nothing.
“Adam Carney,” he said, a little louder, but still the man made no sign he’d heard.
Gibson waited. He was wondering what he should do when the old man recommenced his cursing. When he stopped soon afterwards he seemed to sense some other presence in the room.
“Father . . . Adam? Can you hear me?”
The old man’s lids flickered open and he looked up at Gibson with eyes childlike and unfocused. Gibson saw him for a moment as his mother once had, as a baby in a tiny cot, put down at evening to sleep, his whole life ahead of him, and a little constellation of hopes and promises turning above his head that were wholly unrelated—and as distant as Saturn—to this fate.
He’d been summoned to similar bedsides before, like an odd priest for the unbelieving. As a representative of society’s laws he’d heard final confessions—some old sin or misdeed that was better off forgotten—or final appeals for recognition of an old offence. Sometimes he’d just been an ear to bend, a source of sympathy and vindication. Maybe some had hoped that in their last hours, even in their state of least grace, a corporeal judge might stride in, berobed, ancient, find in their fav
our, promise justice, anodyne, consolation, but all they’d got was him, a tired man in a cheap suit.
Adam Carney seemed to require nothing of him. His flickering eyes closed again and his hollow chest rose and fell as if he were sleeping. Gibson pulled up a dusty chair from underneath the window and sat down by his side. There was nothing on the stainless-steel chest of drawers beside the bed but a plastic pitcher of water and a stopped clock. He put his hand on the handle of the top drawer and pulled. Inside, among the socks and underwear, he found an old pair of spectacles and a wristwatch with a yellow, battered face. The second drawer held nothing but spare pairs of pyjamas, but in the third was a squat wooden box adorned with the faded logo of some long-defunct oil company. He lifted it out and set it upon his lap and lifted the lid. Inside, amongst the various papers and odds and ends, was a dismantled Brownie Hawkeye, its delicate black innards filled with dust and old spiders’ webs. By its side was a stack of prints nearly three inches high, and the rubber band which held them gave up the ghost as he removed it. He held the first print up to the light and then the second and then he let out a soft whistle. In amongst the old pictures of starched and straight-laced church folk there were many of Darcy Steele. They’d been taken by trees, in clearings, on creekbanks. There was a series taken in an old wooden church with what looked like a white sheet wrapped round her. One of them was blurred, the side of the girl’s face as pale, as diaphanous, as her makeshift garments. At the bottom of the pile were a number of her swimming in a creek, her wet dress hitched up round her waist, smiling and laughing. Then there were others similar to one of those he’d found in her hands—an unfocused shape surrounded by foliage—but they shed no more light on what the shape might be.
He looked down at Adam Carney. He put his hand on his shoulder and shook it—gently at first—then much more vigorously. The old preacher made a gurgling sound and then his chest, covered in grey hair and the barnacles of the aged, rose up, shook, subsided. His eyelids flickered again and his mouth began to fashion a word. Gibson waited, a little breathless himself, for it to come.
“Water,” he rasped, finally.
Gibson lifted down the pitcher and looked around for a glass. There were none so he lowered the pitcher to the old man’s face and proceeded to pour a thin stream of water down between his dry lips. His head sank back down into his stained pillow after he’d swallowed, but then, after a few minutes had passed, his eyes reopened and he looked up.
“Father Adam?”
The man’s lip trembled. “Yes?” he began, in a weak, quavering voice. “Are you a true man, possessing a soul . . . or another unclean spirit . . . come to torment me?”
“I’m a man,” said Gibson. “Not a spirit.”
“Not one of His angels come to collect me?”
“No. Not an angel. My name’s Gibson. I’m a detective. I want to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“Darcy Steele. These pictures you took of her . . .”
The old preacher’s forehead rippled and he nodded slightly. He closed his eyes and seemed to take an age to open them again.
“Yes, Darcy. I saw in her . . . something long gone from the world, from . . .” His voice trailed away.
“In the stillness . . . in her eyes . . . there I saw God . . . saw His face . . . His plan . . . the way it was in Eden . . . when the world was very young.”
“You tried to . . . capture that? With a camera?”
Carney didn’t answer, but his breath began to wheeze in and out of his lungs as if the question had disturbed him. Gibson knew he didn’t have much time. He held up one of the pictures with the blurred subject.
“And these . . . what are they? What are they of?”
Carney strained to see the photograph, then slumped back.
“It would not permit itself to be photographed . . . always around her . . . an angel . . . a protector . . . a devourer of time . . . God Himself . . . I don’t know.”
“You gave one of these to Darcy?”
“She came to me . . . wanted proof that all I’d taught her was true. That there was more to the world beyond what can be seen. This is all I had.”
“But what is it?”
The old man wheezed again and a wet cough rattled out of his chest, then another, and another. When the coughing subsided Gibson fancied he saw a faint smile ghost across Carney’s face.
“You know,” he began again, his voice little more than a whisper, “I found her one morning in a peach crate . . . by a creek . . . where I’d camped after a revival. Far to the west it was. That day as fine a day as there has ever been . . . her eyes the same colour as it. Such an angel. I carried her all the way back to the Rock . . . but she never cried . . . not once. I brought her to Fay. Fay took her. A good woman to raise her.”
Another fit of coughing took hold of the old man. Gibson leant forward.
“I’ll get a nurse.”
“No. No. He’ll be along directly.”
“Who?”
“The Almighty.”
“Oh. Right.”
“And what about you, son? I see something on your heart. Something you must confess.”
“No. There’s nothing.”
“Yes. I see it in your face. Clearly.”
“No,” said Gibson again, shaking his head emphatically. “Nothing.”
The old man’s eyes grew wet and his lips began to quiver. He raised his finger and his mouth trembled—an old prophet about to append words to the world it could not do without. Gibson waited but no words came and the old man drifted back to where he’d been before he’d disturbed him. The years, the seasons, the sun, wind and rain, all the words he’d ever spoken, seemed engraved in his face, plain to see. He didn’t have long to live. Gibson’s heart fluttered a little and he felt the sudden need to get out of there lest he be caught in the wake of whatever spirit came to claim him.
As he passed the nurses’ station on the way out a sister came and stepped into his path.
“What’s this all about then?” she asked him.
“What’s what all about then?”
“Don’t be cheeky. Why is Mr. Carney so interesting all of a sudden? You’re the second visitor he’s had lately.”
“The second? When was the first?”
“About a month ago.”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, a real scruffy type. I almost didn’t let him in, but he said Mr. Carney had saved his soul, so I thought it would be all right.”
Gibson reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph of Billy and Darcy.
“Is this him? Is this the man who was here?”
The nurse peered at the photo for a few long seconds, but then she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “He was much older.”
As he drove he wondered who it could have been. Maybe Smith, maybe Horace Flood—maybe neither of them. He went over and over what Carney had said to him, glancing every so often at the photographs now spread across the seat beside him as he did. It was easy enough to believe what he’d said about Darcy’s origins but the sheer strangeness of the photos and the explanation given for them seemed to cast doubt on everything. The photographs were proof of something, that was for sure, but of what he couldn’t quite tell. He tried to remember the name of the town where Pop had said Horace Flood had moved to after the drowning and when he had it he pulled out his notebook and rested it against the steering wheel and wrote it down, his hand shaking ever so slightly.
When he reached Angel Rock he parked in the main street and headed up to the station. Pop, on his way out somewhere, was just locking the door behind him.
“You smell like a bushfire and you look like a dog’s breakfast,” Pop said when he saw him.
“Thanks,” said Gibson.
“Did you find him?”
“Yeah, I found him.”
“You did? Well? Did you ask him about the boys?�
�
“Yeah, I did. He never saw them.”
Pop sighed and nodded. “What about Darcy then? Did he say anything about her? Shed any light?”
“Ah, no, but he was . . . pretty shaken up when I told him. The poor bastard.”
Pop nodded.
“Anyway, how . . . ah . . . how’d the funeral go?”
“Yeah, fine. Expected to see you there.”
Gibson said nothing. Pop slipped his keys into his pocket and cleared his throat.
“Listen, Gibson, if you’re going to be here a few more days . . .”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find somewhere else.”
“Let me finish. It’s just that Grace needs to settle, get back into a routine. If she sees you around . . .”
“Say no more.”
“Good. Thanks, Gibson. I appreciate it. I’ve got an idea about where you could stay, if you’re interested.”
“Fire away.”
“The convent down behind the church there is empty. There’s a kitchen, everything else you’d need. Why don’t you go down and have a look. I’ll talk to Father Tuckey if you’re interested. How’s that sound?”
“Sweet. Sounds good.”
“All right.”
Pop had already passed him on the path when Gibson blurted out his question. “Listen,” he said, “you know a man named Smith?”
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