Taking Tom Murray Home

by Tim Slee

  ‘Your old man was always a bit of a firebug, did you know that?’ he asks. ‘There was this time he was knee-high to a grasshopper, maybe five years old, he was seeing if chicken feathers would burn and when they didn’t he put a little kerosene on them and, poof, the feathers went up in a flash and took his eyebrows with them so he went in to his parents, all soot and tears and trying to explain what the hell had happened, and they said to him, hey mate, that’s OK, the important thing is that you came to us and told us what happened. Honesty beats stupidity every time, they said. Should never have said that. Next thing you know, their damn hay shed is on fire and he goes running in, looking pleased as the cat that got the cream, saying how he accidentally set the hay shed on fire and expecting praise for the telling of it. They gave him a damn belting, I tell you. That cured his honesty problem.’

  I can’t imagine Dad being five. He was always this tough, wiry grown-up with cracked hands and a big laugh, as long as I could remember.

  Pop eyes me through his smoke. ‘So it’s just the ladies and you now, eh?’ He pulls a bit of tobacco off his lip, which is the gross thing about people who roll their own smokes. ‘Someone’s got to tell you this, might as well be me. Your mum’s a tough cookie, no doubt of that. Only woman in Victoria who coulda tamed your dad. But she’s going to need you more than ever now, with your dad gone.’ He leans forward, elbows on his knees. ‘Women need their men to be strong, Jack. There’s going to be crying and wailing and they’re going to make you feel like it’s the end of the world, mate. But you need to be the one who keeps people going when they fall in a heap, all right?’

  I nod and he reaches out and pats my shoulder.

  ‘I seen a lot of death,’ he says, looking out over the brown grass and dry paddocks. ‘You can mourn all you like, have your funerals and your wakes, but then you get up the next day, and the day after that, and there’s still work to be done. And people like you and me, we just get on with it.’

  The police station in Portland is a big cream and grey concrete place, set back from the street behind dead trees and brown grass, and as we jump out of the car the wind comes up and blows a whole lot of dried-up leaves off the street and into the air and me and Jenny shelter under the porch so we don’t get whipped by the leaves and sticks while we’re waiting for Mum and Coach Don.

  The guy at the reception desk has a big smiling face with a fat moustache and I recognise him from coming to our school to give a talk about farms and guns. He calls Senior Sergeant Karsi who comes and gets us and puts us in a small room with water in plastic cups.

  ‘We’ll talk with Dawn first,’ Karsi says. ‘Then each one of you separately, including the twins.’

  ‘I won’t be with them?’ Mum asks, sounding worried.

  ‘Shouldn’t they be accompanied?’ Coach Don asks. He sounds worried too.

  ‘These aren’t criminal interviews,’ Karsi says. ‘You’re all here of your own accord, no one is charged with anything yet. And this is not about the bank fire, let’s get that clear. That’s a problem for CIB in Geelong. Today is about helping us decide whether to notify the coroner.’

  Mum looks at us. ‘Is that all right with you two?’ She’s pulling on her earlobe again.

  ‘Will it be you we talk to?’ Jenny asks Karsi.

  ‘I’ll be speaking with your mum and Don. So it will be someone from our youth services unit,’ he says. It’s Jenny’s question, but he says to Mum, ‘They’re good with juveniles.’ Karsi looks around the table at us all. ‘OK, if that’s all the questions, we can get started. We’ll speak with you first, Dawn, the rest of you can . . . well, you can wait here.’ He looks around at the bare walls of the room, ‘Or look, Don, why don’t you take the kids next door to the arts centre? They have this creativity room . . .’

  ‘You want to go to the arts centre?’ Don asks, like it isn’t his idea of a good time.

  ‘Not really,’ Jenny says.

  ‘For sure!’ I tell him. Sit in this boring room with a cup of tap water for who knows how long? No thanks.

  ‘OK, mister, you comfortable there?’ the police lady asks. She came and got Don and me after we’d only been at the arts centre a few minutes. She’s really pretty, with black hair pulled back into a ponytail and big dark eyebrows and brown eyes. ‘I’m really sorry. It was terrible, what happened to your dad,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ I say. I don’t know where to put my hands. She has hers folded on the table, so I do that with mine too. She has a pen and pad in front of her, plus this form I filled out when I came in. ‘Are you going to record this?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, let’s just chat first,’ she says. ‘There’s a camera up there in the corner,’ she says, pointing to the ceiling where a little black dome sits. ‘For now I’ll just make some notes, OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Now, I’m going to ask you a lot of questions and you might think some of them are dumb, or strange, but I just want you to answer with the truth, all right?’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ I say.

  ‘My name is Leading Senior Constable Suarez,’ she says, smiling. ‘Or you can call me Maria, whatever you like.’

  ‘OK.’

  She takes up her pencil and looks at her pad where some stuff is already written. ‘OK. Tell me about you, young man. How old are you?’

  ‘Thirteen and a bit. It’s on that form . . .’

  ‘Thanks, just checking. And you go to Yardley Secondary?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Play soccer?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What position?’

  ‘On the wing usually, or up front if Toby is away.’

  ‘Toby?’

  ‘He’s our best goal scorer but he’s lazy and doesn’t turn up half the time. I’m faster than him, but he’s a better shot.’

  I’m thinking, OK, she warned me there would be dumb questions, but I’m waiting for her to get to the ones about my dad. On TV they go straight into the hard stuff, they don’t go soft like she is. ‘Don’t you want to ask about Dad?’

  She smiles. ‘Yeah, sure. Tell me about your dad.’

  ‘Like, how he died?’

  ‘No, I mean, what sort of person was he?’

  ‘Oh, OK. He was a pretty normal dad, I guess.’

  ‘He was a dairy farmer?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Always been a farmer?

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. Well, he was in the army for a few years but then his father died and left him the farm about the time he married Mum. So that was before I was born.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘He also volunteers with the SES, when there’s emergencies,’ I tell her. ‘Like floods and fires. Or, he did.’ It’s unreal, talking about him in the past.

  ‘So, a pretty active guy?’

  ‘I guess. Not so many floods lately.’

  ‘Was he religious?’ she asks.

  ‘Like church religion?’

  ‘Is there another kind?’ she asks, frowning.

  ‘He always used to say Geelong Cats were his religion.’

  She laughs, a little one.

  ‘He played a few games in their reserves. Then he got a heart problem. He says . . . he said . . . at the start of every footy season, he said he should have his heart checked, maybe he could make a comeback. I used to think he was serious. I bet he could have.’ She’s nodding, but she’s not writing anything down. ‘Are you going to ask some police questions?’ I ask her.

  She tilts her head and looks at me kind of sideways. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like did he have any enemies and did he have a death wish and who maybe would have wanted him dead and if it wasn’t Gary from the bank who once went out with my mother who would it be then and can I remember if there was anything dangerous in the house and did I see him go around putting petrol cans all over the house yesterday, which I did, and did I hear him say anything unusual yesterday and did him and Mum ever have big fights. Kind of thing.’

  She looks
at me, mouth kind of hanging open.

  ‘Because they never did. They only had little ones,’ I tell her. ‘About money, mostly.’

  I think I should maybe tell her more, but it feels like it’s Mum’s business, not mine. She used to sit up nights. Doing the banking, is what she called it. She had an old computer we bought second-hand from the school, and all these red and blue folders divided into quarters of a year. We’d do our night routine and then if we came out to the toilet or for some water, we’d see her at her computer desk, these piles of folders next to her and stacks of bills. Or you’d be lying there trying to sleep and the printer would be clacking away. You knew they were headed for an argument if she had one of her folders on the dinner table when we got home from school. They weren’t stand-up fights. Just like two tired people hitting each other with pillows, without the laughing. Wet pillows.

  She agrees with me that we can’t rule out Gary as a suspect because maybe he was jealous of Dad once and it was his bank where we owed money. But she knows Gary and she thinks he’s not the killing type. And the bank has already got the farm, or nearly anyway, so that’s not his motive. The thing she is most interested in is what Dad did the day before he burned down the house.

  I tell her we went around the place putting cans of petrol in every room the night before he set the house on fire. I was following him around. Mum had gone to the Turnbolts’ by then, with Jenny. But I bugged him about it and he let me come with him. Mum said she was too tired to argue.

  Constable Maria asks what we talked about and I tell her I asked him wasn’t it dangerous to leave the petrol cans out overnight and he laughed. He said he was leaving the caps on the cans for now, but when he came back in the morning he would just open them up and kick them over. He said a lot of people thought petrol cans would explode like bombs, but they don’t. He learned that in the army. They just smoke until they get real hot, and then they go whoosh, but it takes a long time. It was easier to kick them over and let the petrol spread but you had to be sure you were well clear before you lit a flame or made a spark or the fumes would . . .

  I guess they did.

  Mum and Coach Don were in with Karsi a lot longer than me and Jenny were in with Constable Maria. While we were waiting we checked our stories to see if she got asked the same questions, which basically she did, except Jenny didn’t see any of what I saw when I was walking around the house with Dad getting it ready to burn. Plus she didn’t hear the conversation from the night before that, because she was asleep and I was up getting a glass of water so Dad and Mum didn’t know I was listening.

  I didn’t think about it as a special conversation at the time, so I didn’t tell Constable Maria.

  Mum had said, ‘What if someone gets hurt?’

  ‘You’ll all be over at Turnbolts’,’ Dad said. ‘Somebody who?’

  ‘I don’t know, the CFA? Won’t a fire truck come?’

  ‘Not if we don’t call it,’ he said. ‘And even if someone else does, house will be half gone by the time they get here. But it’s a good point, I’ll call McKenzie, let him in on it. We can trust him.’

  They were quiet, then Dad said, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t nothing me, Dawn Murray.’

  ‘The twins, is all,’ she sighed. ‘What it will do to them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They’ll be destroyed by this.’

  ‘No, don’t say that.’

  ‘I’m not changing my mind, don’t worry. Or do worry. Worry about them.’

  ‘I do worry about them,’ he said, sounding annoyed.

  ‘Then worry more. Worry about them more than you ever did in your life because if you go through with this, it’s going to set them on their heels, at least for a while. Especially Jenny.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A long while.’

  ‘OK, Dawn. I know.’

  ‘Do you? The counsellor said she does things to herself because she’s trying to get our attention and she’s thirteen and she’s going through everything that every thirteen-year-old girl goes through and on top of it you pile her analgesia and then the fact we’re bloody broke and arguing all the time and now this . . .’

  ‘What do you want me to say? We’re doing this, right?’ And he looked at her and she nodded and he reached out and grabbed her and pulled her to him and she buried her head in his shoulder and I went back to bed.

  There are some things you don’t tell the police, I know that. Like how it made sense they were worried more about Jenny than me. Because there was only one of us who was cutting themselves with a box cutter and pushing nails in their skin and it wasn’t me.

  ‘OK, Jack,’ Karsi says. He’s asked can he go for a little walk with me, just around the block. Maybe down to Maxwell’s, get an ice cream. Mum looks at him like, what? but then she just nods. Outside it’s sunny and warm. I remember this street from when Mum once backed into someone else’s car and she went and turned herself in to the police. But they let her off and we went and bought summer clothes for Jenny and me. We had more money then. And the trees were green, not dead and brown like now. Karsi points down the street, ‘Let’s just walk.’

  He’s quiet. I’m thinking maybe it’s a police technique, waiting for me to say something stupid, so I stay quiet too.

  ‘Constable Suarez said you walked around the house with your dad the night before the fire?’ he finally asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. I’m not sure what I can get in trouble for now, but I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have said all that to Constable Maria. That she got me, with the nice cop routine. I’m so dumb.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jack,’ he says. ‘I’m just . . .’ He leans up against a fence, holding on above the dead hedges. He’s rubbing his eyes like he’s choking up, but he’s not sobbing or anything. If he’s crying, he’s crying like I reckon Pop would cry. Dry tears.

  He straightens up and takes a big breath. I pat him on the back.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I tell him. ‘It sucks.’

  He laughs a bit shakily, ‘We went to school together, did you know that? Me and your dad.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘My family came here after the Second World War, my gramps started a building company.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I hear birds singing. I think, funny there are still birds when there are no leaves. But I guess it’s easier to build nests when everything is just sticks and twigs and grass.

  ‘Your dad worked for us when he was like, seventeen or something,’ he says. ‘Holiday job. We had that whole summer together. He taught me how to chug a beer.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looks like he wants cheering up so I smile at him.

  He looks at me. ‘You don’t seem too . . . you’re OK?’

  ‘You can’t really see when I’m upset,’ I tell him, kicking at a rock, looking down at my boots. They used to be shiny but they’re not so shiny any more and the toes pinch. Mum said I could get Jenny’s blue sneakers that have the metal toecaps. She’s a size ahead of me, which is kind of weird considering she was only born like ten minutes earlier. ‘And Mum makes us wear these stupid things,’ I tell him, stopping and wagging a foot, ‘with the gloves, so we don’t hurt ourselves.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. He starts walking again. ‘What’s the name for it?’

  ‘Analgesia,’ I tell him. ‘It runs in Mum’s family but she doesn’t have it.’

  ‘You don’t feel pain, right?’

  ‘Don’t cry, don’t sweat, don’t feel no pain,’ I tell him, like I’ve said a million times. ‘You want to pinch me?’

  He stops and looks down at me. ‘What? No.’

  I keep walking. ‘Kids do, when I tell them. They don’t believe me. In fifth grade Tommy Barstow pinched my arm really hard and then when I didn’t react, he punched me in the head.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ he says.

  ‘He said, “Now you’re going to feel it.” But I didn’t.’

  ‘You know people ar
en’t allowed to do things like that, even children.’

  ‘It’s OK. We got him back,’ I tell him. ‘People forget there are two of us. They usually don’t try it a second time.’

  He smiles. ‘And you’re both . . . Jenny doesn’t feel pain either?’

  ‘A bit more, in her insides. Like, she can feel her periods. Or says she can. But I feel a bit more than her in the feet and hands. Once she broke her foot jumping off Goat Rock and didn’t even know.’

  ‘Ouch. I guess you have to be careful,’ he says and points over the street to Maxwell’s. ‘You good with ice cream?’

  ‘Yes please. We’re pretty careful. We check each other all over, twice a day. For cuts and bruises and things. When we were little Mum used to check us both, and then we would check her just for the practice, but now we do it ourselves, lunchtime and every night before bed. I do Jenny and she does me.’

  I don’t tell him everything though. Like how Jenny has got herself two mirrors now, a big one and a small handheld one, and she made us take those to the Turnbolts’. How she’s gotten all funny about me checking her lately and I can only check her if Mum is watching, and how she tells me I should start checking myself, like she is.

  ‘You’re going to have to one day,’ she said last week. ‘You might as well start.’

  Which is stupid because how are you supposed to check that you don’t have a cut on the back of your head? Or between your shoulder blades? And why should I check myself when she’s right there, doing nothing?

  ‘Do you mind me asking about it?’ Karsi asks. There’s hardly any traffic today, because it’s after September holidays. A few people on the street. Everyone says hi to Karsi or gives him a little wave. I feel like people are staring at me, but I know that’s my imagination. He holds the door open and I go inside and it’s cool and it smells like pies and bread and coffee.

  ‘No. Everyone asks.’

  I get a sugar cone with a single scoop of chocolate with Maxwell’s Special Dip, which is just Milo powder but they say it’s special Milo powder, so I don’t know, maybe it is.

  ‘Your skin is just numb?’ he asks, sitting down on a chair opposite. The chairs aren’t very comfortable but at Christmas they put big fake Santa hats over them which makes them softer.