by Tim Slee
Jenny says to Mum, ‘Are these people coming all the way?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Mum. ‘They’ll want to come along for the first bit. That’s OK, right?’
‘Whatever,’ Jenny says.
Mr Turnbolt brings out his big barbecue, the one he takes to the footy matches, and starts selling sausages and steak sandwiches and after he gives all the money to Mum but I don’t know how much it is, she just sticks it in a box under the seat on the milk cart. Everyone from the whole town is there. None of them use social media so I have no idea how any of them heard about it but they are all here.
Jenny is going around saying, ‘This is totally mental, can you believe it?’
And I’m like, ‘I know, it’s crazy. This is a funeral?’
But it isn’t. I know that. The funeral will be in Melbourne and at funerals everyone wears black and people are all quiet and not all chatty like today. The pub brings a beer keg out into the street and starts pouring beers for people and I see the manager from the pub giving money to Mum too afterwards. ‘It’s not much,’ he says. ‘Maybe a feed or two.’
‘It’s something,’ she says back. ‘It’s amazing,’ she says, and she starts crying and Mrs Turnbolt gives her a hug and Mum wipes her eyes and then sees I’m watching her and she says, ‘What? Go make yourself useful; the horse feed needs loading.’ So I go off and help Mr Garrett put feed on the back of the milk cart. We have to pack it in around the coffin but Mr Garrett says we have to get it in under the tarpaulin to make sure it stays dry.
I’m under the milk cart with Jenny figuring out how the steering works when the bank man comes over to Mum. All we can see is their legs, but we can hear their voices.
‘This is for the trip,’ he says.
‘We don’t need your blood money, Gary,’ Mum says.
‘It’s not from the bank,’ he says. ‘It’s out of my own pocket. Here, take it. I grew up here too, right?’
Mum’s voice softens a bit. ‘I’m sorry about your bank. The fire.’
‘Not your problem, Dawn. It’s insured. I’m not sure though . . .’
‘Not sure about what?’
‘Just, whether they’ll reopen. This branch hasn’t turned a profit in three years. There’s talk in Melbourne they want to close it, just put in an ATM, make people go to Portland.’
‘What about you?’
‘Probably take a package. I’m thinking of taking up dairy farming.’ He gives a little laugh.
‘Ha ha. Well, there’s plenty of cheap properties around here. You oughta know.’
‘Yeah. Anyway, safe trip. I might catch you up further down the road, if that’s OK? See how you’re all doing.’
‘It’s a free country.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No, that sounded bitter,’ Mum says. ‘I’m not bitter, Gary. You’d be welcome.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Righto, all aboard!’ Mum yells out. ‘Where are the twins?’
Then comes the awesome part. The milk cart is something Mr Garrett calls a 1947 William J. Knight Bendigo Milk Wagon, and it has four big wheels with green hubcaps like on an old motor car, a seat for three people up the front, and a place to stack milk crates in the middle, or in our case a coffin put on sideways, and another seat for four up the back. Jen and me sit up on the back seat facing backward to the road so we don’t have to look at the coffin. Up front on the right, driving, is Mr Garrett; in the middle is Mum and on the left is Coach Don. He used to be a ruckman, so he’s got long legs, and he tries to put them up on the polished brass railing of the front board but Mr Garrett smacks his shins with his whip and frowns at him so he has to take his feet down again.
Danny Boy, the Clydesdale, is a bit slow on the pull so Mr Garrett has to tap him on the backside with his whip, but a few of the people in the street give a hand getting the milk cart rolling and Danny Boy gets the message and pretty soon we’re clip-clopping along and the best part, everyone in their cars makes a convoy and they put on their blinkers and the convoy stretches out about ten cars ahead and about twenty behind with Karsi out front with his flashing light on, and one of the other cars behind. Once we’re rolling, the other police car takes off back to Portland.
The reporter from the Observer is driving up and down the convoy in his car, leaning out the window taking photos.
‘Viral!’ he calls out to me and winks as he passes for the last time and then heads off back to Portland nearly as fast as the cops.
‘Is he going to do that all the way to Melbourne?’ Jenny asks. She almost has to shout, the sound of Danny Boy’s hooves on the road is so loud.
‘Doubt it, luv,’ Mum says. ‘He’ll probably turn back once we get to the coast road.’
‘Karsi wanted us to go back roads all the way to Melbourne,’ Mr Garrett says.
‘Did he just?’ Coach Don sounds annoyed.
‘Asked which route we’d be taking. I told him Warrnambool, Apollo Bay, Lorne, Geelong, then up. He said we should cut straight across from Warrnambool, go through Colac. Big dairy towns, he said. More sympathy. Less traffic.’
‘Sympathy my arse,’ Coach Don says. ‘He’s worried about your horse backing up traffic on the Princes Highway.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘But he’s right that we’d pick up a bit of momentum going through Colac – whole town would be with us.’
‘You want to go Princes Highway from there though,’ Coach Don says. ‘You want traffic backing up behind you. You want people writing letters, calling talk shows, complaining about that bloody eejit on his horse and cart.’
‘Her horse and cart,’ Mum says. ‘If the talk shows want to talk to the right bloody eejit.’
‘They will,’ says Coach Don. ‘I guarantee you that.’
Tyrendarra
About half the people in their cars turn back when we get to the highway, but the rest stay with us all the way to Tyrendarra. It’s all pretty mad; we still have a police escort all the way to the reserve. Some people toot their horns at us and Coach Don says we should put a sign on the back of the milk cart saying, Honk if you support dairy farmers, but Mr Garrett says that would drive his horse bonkers. At Tyrendarra we all pull onto the reserve and the party starts over. People have food in their cars and barbecues and eskies and everyone pulls into a circle on the oval with their car lights shining in.
‘You can’t all bloody camp here,’ Karsi says. ‘And I’ll do anyone who tries to drive under the influence, you can trust me on that.’
But he sends the other police car back to Portland and he pulls up a chair and he has a beer. Him and Coach Don both played footy together in the Geelong Reserves, then he came back and played for Yardley Lions, Dad said. So he’s got a soft spot for Yardley, you can see that.
Jenny comes over and shows Mum her phone. ‘Look, I set up a Facebook account for us,’ she says.
‘That’s nice, luv,’ Mum says.
‘You know, so people can follow us.’
‘Show me,’ I say, grabbing her phone off her. She chases me around the cars but I’m thumbing through the photos and I stop up where Mum can’t hear us. ‘You can’t put those pictures on there,’ I tell her. ‘Mum will go mental.’
‘Mum doesn’t even have a Facebook page,’ Jenny says, grabbing her phone back.
‘Yeah, but those are pictures of our house burning,’ I tell her. ‘Dad is in there somewhere.’
‘Is he?’ she asks. ‘You know that, do ya?’
I look at her like she’s really lost it. ‘Yeah, I do. Dad’s dead.’
‘Is he? You’ve seen the body, have you?’
I point over to the milk cart, which Mr Garrett unhitched. There’s lights on the side that run off a battery and you can see the coffin under the tarp, the top and the bottom sticking out over the sides of the milk cart. ‘Duh,’ I tell her. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘And how do you know he’s in there?’ she says, and runs off.
She thinks I’m thick. I’m no
t falling for that.
Really? Nah.
I get my first taste of sleeping rough, and I don’t like it much. Even though I’m dead tired and it isn’t even raining, I can’t sleep. Jenny is sleeping, after about a half-hour of her stupid fake sniffing. The grown-ups are still off talking somewhere. Mr Garrett, Mum, Coach Don, Detective Sergeant Karsi and Mr Alberti. I can hear them arguing about something. Mum told Jenny and me to put our swags under the milk cart so we wouldn’t get soaked in dew in the morning. We’ve been camping plenty of times but always in our tent. Once we loaned Aunty Batt’s caravan.
That was a great trip. We went all the way down to Cape Otway, this campground where they had an outdoor cinema. Which sounds more than it was, because really it was just a big sheet stretched between two gum trees and a DVD player with a projector, but we’d never seen a movie outside before. And me and Jenny went around at night playing Koala Spotto with this kid called Dean and he started a fight with this old man who told us to pipe down and take our torches somewhere else and when Dean gave him a mouthful he tried to take my torch off me and Jen was like, you touch my brother one more time and I’ll kick you in the bum with my steel-toed boots, you old pedo. And Mum heard her yelling and she came over and she made us say sorry to the old man but Jen showed me she had her fingers crossed and I crossed mine too so it didn’t count. And that night when we did our checks in our tent, maybe that was the first time Mum wasn’t doing it with us, and neither of us could sleep because we had this buzz in our heads like we could take on the whole world.
Sleeping under the milk cart is a bit like the times I slept outside our house on hot nights, on a La-Z-Boy, with just a mosquito net over me and looking up at the stars. But now is just like back in Cape Otway; my thoughts are racing cars zinging around in my head and so it’s like sleeping at a race track.
Dad is dead. Really dead, right? Or what? It’s true, I never saw his body.
I forgot to ask how long is it to Melbourne from here. A day, a week? What?
Should I tell Mum I think it’s totally creepy to sleep under the milk cart, which means we’re sleeping under Dad’s coffin? Unless he isn’t actually in there. Which maybe explains why she thinks it’s OK for us to sleep under it.
What does someone’s body look like anyway, after a roof falls on them and they’re left in a burning house?
What if Dad did it on purpose and it was a suicide? A kid told me once suicides don’t go to heaven. But if you kill yourself by accident, is that the same? And if Dad isn’t in heaven, where is he?
Another thought strikes me. Are horses like dogs and we have to pick up the poop all the way to Melbourne? And do we have enough bags for that? Because Danny Boy does monster poops.
I guess I must have fallen off to sleep because next morning Jenny wakes me. Well, I’m already awake from the sound of the magpies, but trying to stay as still and warm as I can as long as I can, almost like I’m still sleeping. ‘Hey, stupid,’ she says. ‘Come and help me find power for my phone.’ I hadn’t thought of that. My phone is in my bag and I pull it out. It’s dead, but it’s always dead these days, stupid battery.
I’m still dressed from last night so I pull on my shoes and me and her run over to the sportsground clubrooms but they’re locked. We kick around a bit in case there’s a power outlet on the outside of the building but there isn’t, then Jenny sees there’s an electric barbecue next to a playground and we look there and on the side of the barbecue is a power outlet and it works. She checks her Facebook.
‘I’ve got seven followers!’ she says. ‘For the new account.’
‘You’ve got seven friends,’ I tell her. ‘Big deal. Check the Observer site.’
‘Why?’
‘See are there any photos from yesterday on their website, that reporter was there.’
‘OK.’
‘Show me.’
‘Stop grabbing, it takes forever to load. Whoa.’
‘Whoa what?’ I ask her, and she shows me the Observer’s page and there’s pictures from yesterday and the reporter was right. One of the big photos is the one of Karsi helping push Dad’s coffin onto the milk cart and the caption says, Portland police help load the body of dead Yardley dairy farmer, Tom Murray, into the protest wagon. It’s got about three hundred likes already and it’s only six o’clock in the morning.
‘Wow, he said it would go viral,’ I tell Jenny. ‘Three hundred likes!’
‘Three hundred likes isn’t viral, dummy,’ she says. ‘Three hundred thousand, that’s viral.’
‘I know,’ I tell her, annoyed she thinks she’s the only one knows anything. ‘But three hundred is pretty good. You never got three hundred for any of your dumb photos.’
‘I’m going to share it,’ she says. ‘On Facebook.’
‘To your seven friends?’
‘Shut up. It’s a start.’ Shows me at the top of her screen where the profile photo says #BURN over a picture of our house.
‘Cool hashtag,’ I say. ‘Wonder who thought of that.’
She writes, Sergeant Karsi helping to load my dad into the milk cart as we leave Yardley. Next stop . . . Then she asks, ‘Hey, where is our next stop?’
‘Mum said Port Fairy, if we don’t mess about,’ I tell her. So she writes, Next stop Port Fairy. If you want to support dairy farmers, like or share!
‘That’s so uncool,’ I tell her. ‘You don’t ask people to like your Facebook page. Who does that? Desperate.’
‘It’s a protest, thicko,’ she says. ‘Not my personal Facebook. People always ask you to like protests. Go get me some breakfast, I need to stay here so my phone can charge.’
Breakfast is porridge with a handful of raisins, cooked on Mr Garrett’s camp stove. Looking around I see most of the other cars must have gone back to Yardley last night. Mr Alberti looks like he slept in his car, and Pop must still be sleeping in his because I can see his skinny legs and feet in dirty socks propped up against the window on the back seat.
‘Where’s Sergeant Karsi?’ I ask Mum.
‘He went back to Portland last night,’ she says. ‘He had to talk to some detectives from Geelong about the bank fire. Here, take this bowl to your sister and while you’re over there, the two of you have a wash.’ She throws me a towel.
‘Is he coming to escort us again today?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘He’s got better things to do than bother with us, I’d expect.’ She’s got a cup of instant coffee and she looks like she didn’t sleep much but she looks about ten years younger than usual. Her hair is messy and it’s hanging round her shoulders and across her forehead and she hasn’t got her lippy on (that’s what she calls lipstick) but her cheeks are all red and her eyes are fired up and she’s looking like she Means Business. I give her a hug.
‘What was that for?’ she asks.
‘Nuthin.’
‘You still got to have a wash,’ she says, pushing me away. ‘You pong.’
But then Karsi arrives in his car. He doesn’t have lights flashing or anything and he drives over nice and slow, like he doesn’t want to wake anyone. He gets out of the car and reaches back in and comes out with a tray with some steaming coffees in paper cups and one falls off the tray and onto the ground.
‘Shit,’ he says and kicks the cup under his car. He walks over and puts them up on the front seat of the milk cart. ‘Those are for you,’ he says. ‘But now I’m one short . . .’
Mr Garrett sniffs and takes one. ‘You bring sugar?’ he asks.
‘No I didn’t bring bloody sugar,’ Karsi says.
‘What, no blueberry muffins either?’ Mum asks, a little smile in her voice.
‘No bloody blueberry muffins. Nice and chilly last night, was it? You still going through with this?’
‘Hell yes,’ Coach Don says, coming up on the conversation from somewhere behind the milk cart. ‘Aren’t you, Dawn?’
‘Yeah,’ says Mum. ‘Yeah I am.’
‘We are,’ Mr Garrett says.
>
‘I thought so,’ Karsi says. ‘So, I got instructions last night, from the regional commander.’
‘Ooooh, the regional commander,’ Mum says. ‘What did the commander say?’
‘You want it verbatim or do you want the child-friendly version?’
Mum looks at me. ‘Give us the child-friendly verbatim version.’
‘Is he awake yet?’ Karsi asks, nodding over at Pop’s car.
‘Don’t think so,’ Mr Garrett says.
‘Good,’ Karsi says, and helps himself to the last coffee. ‘The regional commander,’ he says, ‘said to me I should follow you dick– fools until you are out of the shire and I should radio ahead to Port Fairy and warn them you’re coming and then I should leave you to your f– freaking . . . fate and get back to my freaking real job.’ He sips his coffee. ‘And I’m to tell you, you all have to make yourselves available, if Geelong CIB wants to talk to any of you about that bank fire.’
‘That’s not so bad,’ Mum smiles.
‘He also said,’ Karsi continues, ‘if I get my freaking face in the bloody newspaper again assisting a protest action I’ll be doing traffic the rest of my life.’
‘Could have been worse,’ Coach Don says. ‘You were preventing an incident. Imagine if the coffin had broken open. Could have been a riot.’
‘I pointed that out. Didn’t help,’ Karsi says. ‘So when is this show going to hit the road?’
Just then five cars full of people from Yardley pull off the road and into the reserve. Yesterday it was twenty, but today it’s five. I’m looking to see if there are more, but it doesn’t look like it.
‘Gang’s all here,’ Karsi says dryly. ‘This candle will blow out before you even hit Geelong.’