Taking Tom Murray Home

by Tim Slee

  ‘Dorotea’s isn’t as bad as that,’ Mum says. ‘It didn’t kick in until they were about seven or eight, so they were old enough to learn how to deal with it.’ She squeezes out some more balm onto my palm, massages it in. ‘There’s this village in Sweden, it’s called Dorotea. My family came from there, way back. About four out of a hundred people in the village get this thing, so it’s called Dorotea’s analgesia. There’s a gene therapy that might be able to fix it and we’re saving for the twins to get it. Or we were.’

  ‘I don’t want gene therapy. I don’t want to feel pain,’ I tell them. ‘I don’t want to be able to hurt.’

  ‘Hurting is how we protect ourselves, Jack,’ Mum says, like always.

  ‘How do you all cope?’ Deb asks.

  Mum gives me this face, but Deb doesn’t see it. The face she gives whenever anyone asks that question. But she answers anyway as she softly rubs my hand. ‘You need routines. Need to check them every day, couple of times a day. For cuts or bruises and the like. No such thing as just a fever because it could be a sign of something they can’t feel, like a broken bone or burst appendix, so we get that checked every time. We just have to be careful.’ Mum sighs. ‘Really careful. But these two,’ she shakes her head.

  ‘Hey, don’t put me in with him!’ Jenny says. ‘I’m not the one with the cooked crab claw.’

  ‘I made you this,’ Geraldine from the Geelong Advertiser says. It’s later now and there’s a big bonfire going and people sitting around in a circle drinking beer and port and coffee and tea. Maybe thirty are left, that’s all. The local people mostly went home after Coach Don got up and said his poem over Dad’s coffin. He made like he didn’t want to and they were all forcing him, cheering, ‘Hob-Nail Boots! Hob-Nail Boots!’ But you could see he didn’t mind the attention at all and he gave it an extra big boost at the end there when he got to the boots bit.

  Me and Jenny are sitting playing travel Uno with dice, but we’re missing one, so it kind of sucks. I look up. Geraldine is holding a big white wooden cross.

  ‘I thought it might be nice if we made a little prayer everywhere we stop,’ she said. ‘For your dad. Would you like that?’

  Jenny is looking at her with her untrusty eyes, but I say, ‘Yeah.’ I look at Jenny. ‘We should, right?’

  Geraldine hands Jenny the cross. ‘Only if you want to.’

  ‘Mum should join us,’ Jenny says, taking the cross. ‘She’d like that.’

  ‘Yeah of course,’ Geraldine agrees.

  ‘And Mr Alberti, he’d want to,’ I say.

  ‘Anyone could join,’ Geraldine says. ‘It’s up to you. You could make it a tradition every day. Something you started.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mum,’ I say. ‘Like, now?’

  ‘No, not in the dark,’ Geraldine says. ‘And people are tired. Tomorrow morning, up on the highway before you start off?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jenny agrees. ‘That’d be good.’

  We take the cross and go over the other side of the fire where Mum is half dozing, half listening to some of the others talking. ‘What have you two got there?’ she asks.

  ‘A cross, like we had in Port Fairy,’ Jenny says. ‘We want to plant it out on the road tomorrow, for Dad.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mum says.

  ‘We write #BURN on it and say a Hail Mary,’ I tell her. ‘Geraldine taught us. You could join.’

  ‘Geraldine?’ Mum says and raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, I guess.’

  ‘Anyone who wants to can join,’ Jenny says. ‘Before we start the day. It can be a tradition.’

  ‘A tradition, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, we started it yesterday,’ I tell her.

  She reaches out her arms and grabs us both and pulls us to her. ‘You two. You two little ratniks.’

  She’s not letting go, so I pull away. ‘I’m going to ask Deb and Ben.’

  ‘Who?’ Mum asks. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The greenies,’ Jenny says, like Dad would have said it, rolling her eyes.

  ‘They’re saving the planet,’ I say. ‘And they’re on our side.’

  ‘I’m going to invite the cops,’ Jenny says.

  ‘They’d never join in,’ I tell her.

  ‘Sergeant Karsi would,’ she says. ‘And maybe some others.’ She leans back and remembers something she meant to tell Mum. ‘Hey, my Facebook page has a hundred followers!’

  ‘Your what, luv?’ Mum asks.

  ‘My Facebook page,’ Jenny groans. ‘There’s people I don’t even know sharing it. And I got six sign-ups on GoFundMe.’

  Mum shakes her head, looks at me. ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’

  ‘Don’t even try,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to find Ben.’

  But Ben and Deb’s campsite is empty, they aren’t sitting around the fire. I check their tent, and they’re not in there either. I thought maybe they might be listening to a radio or something but no. Then I notice their car is gone.

  There isn’t much else happening and the fire is dying down so Mum rounds us up and sends us off to have a shower and do our teeth and we bed down under the milk cart again.

  Under Dad.

  Or not.

  I sleep through it. So does Jenny. I mean we were really knackered after the last couple of days and the thing with the bank in Port Fairy so I reckon a bomb could have gone off right over our heads we wouldn’t have heard it.

  You can’t even see there’s any special problem when we wake up. There are some people having breakfast and they’ve started the bonfire up again. Maybe there are a few more police, but it’s hard to tell, I haven’t been counting. I rub my eyes and look through the gum trees to where the sun is coming up. I don’t have a watch, but Jenny has one on her phone. She’s still lying in her swag, so I kick it. ‘Hey, what’s the time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Shut up, I’m sleeping.’

  Now a police wagon pulls into the campground and four more police get out and there’s definitely more than there were the night before.

  ‘You want to get up,’ I tell her. ‘Something’s happening.’

  She crawls out of her bag and knocks her head on the bottom of the milk cart. I look for Mum. She usually has her swag at the end near our feet but it’s already folded up, ready to throw in the milk cart. So are Coach Don’s and Mr Garrett’s. Mrs Alberti sees we’re up and comes running over. She’s in her nightie, with her bare skinny arms flapping as she runs. It’s a bit scary, like watching a plucked chicken charge you full speed.

  ‘Kids!’ she says. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘What’s OK?’ Jenny asks.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She hasn’t been arrested,’ Mrs Alberti says.

  ‘She’s been arrested?’ I ask.

  ‘She hasn’t been,’ Mrs Alberti says. ‘She’s just at the Warrnambool station, helping with inquiries.’

  ‘About the bank in Port Fairy?’ Jenny asks.

  ‘Or the one in Yardley?’ I ask.

  ‘No, about the supermarket,’ Mrs Alberti says. And she tells how the police were watching the people camping on the showground last night and they had a man on the gate checking on people coming in and out and they had a police car parked outside the bank just in case and how about 4 a.m. someone firebombed the supermarket.

  And Jenny is all, well how do we get into town, and we should go to the police station too and tell them it isn’t Mum, she was here. And I’m thinking how Deb and Ben’s tent was empty last night.

  Mrs Alberti doesn’t let us go anywhere and the police aren’t letting anyone on the campground leave and people are starting to get angry. It’s one thing to join a funeral procession and spend a night around a bonfire, it’s another thing to be penned up on the showground and not allowed to go home to your farms. But the Warrnambool police or the Geelong police or whoever they are, are ice cold, no one is going nowhere. Geraldine is taking lots of photos of angry farmers and police and interviewing
people, but about what, I don’t know – there’s less action than a junior footy match.

  So apart from standing around watching angry people yell at the police, there isn’t much happening and Darren and I just start a kick-to-kick with some other kids and Jenny goes to get Danny Boy some feed and water and clean up his poops.

  Finally Mum and Coach Don and Mr Garrett get driven back into the showground by Karsi in his police car and we run over.

  ‘Mum?’ Jenny asks, grabbing Mum and burying her head in her jumper. ‘We thought . . .’

  ‘Don’t you two worry about me,’ Mum says, holding Jen with one arm and reaching for my hand with the other. ‘Geelong has put Karsi in charge, at least until we get to Colac. Let me look at that.’ She unwraps the bandage, which is a bit dirty now from the football game, and she prods a bit at the blisters with her fingers.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she sighs. ‘I think you were lucky this time. Go get the medical kit, I want to dress it again.’ She sounds annoyed.

  ‘Are you mad?’ I ask her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, Jack.’ She gives me a big hug, ‘I’m not mad at you. It’s the police and all this fuss, every single time we stop somewhere. It’s not you at all.’

  I go and get the medical kit and she washes my hand with antiseptic and then starts rubbing cream into it again. ‘You know, your dad and me decided a long time ago there was no sense wrapping you in cotton wool. You have to live the life God gave you on your own terms. Sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard way.’ She takes me by the shoulders. ‘If I get mad it’s because you didn’t check yourself, or Jenny. Or if you didn’t tell me about something like this. OK? I’m never going to get mad if you tell me.’

  ‘You did once,’ I remind her.

  ‘Testing each other by sticking pins in yourselves . . .’

  ‘Acupuncture pins!’ I say. ‘They’re made for –’

  She turns me around and pushes me off. ‘Breakfast, now.’

  Karsi goes and tells the other police to start letting people go and people virtually race back to their cars. Cars start streaming out of the showground and most turn left and head back to Portland and Port Fairy and Yardley where they came from. Only a few pull onto the road and wait for us. Ben and Deb’s ute is one of them, I can see that though.

  ‘That’s them all gone,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Whiff of trouble and they evaporate.’

  ‘People will come and go as they please,’ Mum says and then sees us. ‘Hello, ratniks. Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘Were you arrested?’ I ask. ‘Mrs Alberti said –’

  ‘No, I wasn’t arrested,’ Mum says.

  ‘I said you weren’t,’ Mrs Alberti tells her. ‘But they hear the word arrested, that’s all they can think of. What did they want then?’

  ‘They wanted to put Tom’s coffin in the back of a paddy wagon and drive it straight to Melbourne,’ Mr Garrett said. ‘But Dawny held her ground. You should have seen her.’

  ‘Karsi was great too,’ Coach Don says. ‘The Warrnambool police were all for calling in the Health Department to force us to hand over the coffin, claiming it’s a health risk and Karsi was like, I already got advice on the cadaver situation, we can talk about that in private and he disappears with them and whatever he says, it shuts them up.’

  ‘What’s a cadaver?’ Jenny asks.

  ‘It’s a –’ I go to answer but Mum talks over the top of me.

  ‘It’s like a coffin, luv,’ Mum says. ‘That’s all. They wanted to take your dad off the milk cart and stop the procession.’

  ‘Because of the supermarket?’ I ask.

  ‘And the banks,’ Mum says. ‘One of the police taped Don’s recital of the Henry Lawson poem last night and they were trying to say it was an incitement to riot.’

  Coach Don smiles. ‘Maybe it was, a hundred years ago.’

  ‘We’re going to need to lawyer up,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Karsi won’t be able to hold them much longer. Some bully of a cop is going to step in and throw us all in the clanger and freight Tom off to Melbourne. We need legal.’

  Geraldine has been standing up against her car, watching and listening and she says, ‘He’s right. But I wouldn’t worry too much. Herald Sun is going to run the story today and they’re talking syndication. They’ll pay for a good lawyer for you, if you agree to go exclusive.’

  Mum and the others look at her but Coach Don seems like the only one knows what she means.

  ‘With you,’ he asks. ‘I’m guessing.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Geraldine says, moving into the circle. ‘Or they can send someone else. Will probably want to anyway. Can’t let a little girl from Geelong hog the story, can they?’

  ‘What’s it mean, exclusive?’ Mr Garrett asks.

  ‘Means we don’t talk to any other papers, just the Advertiser,’ Don says.

  ‘Just the Sun,’ Geraldine says. ‘Through me. It’ll go national though. Geelong, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth. Your husband dead, two banks and a supermarket burned down.’

  ‘That Port Fairy bank didn’t even catch properly on fire,’ I say to Jenny and she shrugs.

  Geraldine goes on, ‘The horse and cart, the coffin in the back, police trying to shut you down. It’s going to go ballistic, you know that? But you go exclusive, we can control it.’

  Coach Don narrows his eyes. ‘Exclusive print,’ he says. ‘Not television, and not radio.’

  ‘Print and digital then,’ Geraldine says back at him. ‘Without digital we can forget talking them into giving us a lawyer.’

  ‘Give us a minute,’ Coach Don says, and the grown-ups get into a huddle. After a few minutes they break up. ‘All right,’ Coach Don says. ‘When it comes to newspapers and news websites we’ll only talk to you. But television and radio are still open slather. And we want to hear from a lawyer today and there’ll be no nonsense with signing away rights or drawing up contracts, you got that? It’s our word and yours.’

  Geraldine reaches out her hand and they shake. ‘Deal,’ she says. Then she squats and says to Jenny and me, ‘Now, didn’t you two say something about planting a cross out on the highway this morning?’

  There are about ten people out there on the road on top of the mob of us from the milk cart, Aunty Ell, Darren, Mr and Mrs Alberti and Geraldine with her camera and Detective Sergeant Karsi. There’s four other cops but they don’t join in. Jenny, me and Darren bang the cross in by the highway where the road exits from the showground and we all kneel.

  ‘Now what?’ Mum says to me.

  I cross myself like Geraldine showed us. ‘Hail Mary full of grace . . .’

  And that feeling starts crawling up out of my chest again, out of nowhere. So I concentrate on the words and I say them as loud as I can and Jenny is looking at me like, why are you yelling? but it works, and the words drown it out and push it back down where it came from.

  Mum stands up, ruffles my hair. ‘Pretty enthusiastic praying there, mate. You’ll be dragging us all off to church next.

  We get onto the main street and we can see the fire engines still cleaning up from the supermarket fire. Police have put up tape. Our procession is moving at a crawl and the cars aren’t many but they all have their headlights on, and Karsi is still out front in his car and there’s another police car behind.

  People out on the street stop. There’s some waving, but most just stare. Maybe they heard about the fire, maybe they heard about us, maybe even they made the connection. But it seems supermarkets aren’t something they get riled up about because no one is shaking their fist at us like Mrs Alberti warned they might.

  If anyone gets angry looks it’s probably Ben and Deb in their beat-up ute which is painted pink and green and has their sign Multinationals Killing Dairy Farmers stuck to the back gate.

  ‘What’s a multinational?’ I ask Mum.

  ‘Companies you find all over the world,’ she says. ‘Like burger places.’

  ‘Are burger places killing farmers?’ I ask her. That would
suck, if we also had to hate the burger places. I love burgers.

  ‘Burger places are probably a bad example,’ she says. ‘I think they get their beef here in Australia. No, it’s like the companies that make drugs. They make their medicines in America, sell them here and pay virtually nothing in tax.’

  ‘So the banks and supermarkets are multinationals?’

  ‘No, actually I think they’re Australian. It’s complicated . . .’

  ‘Hijacking our bloody protest,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Bloody greenies.’

  ‘It’s not a protest,’ Mum reminds him. ‘It’s a funeral.’

  ‘Hijacking our bloody funeral,’ Mr Garrett grumps and shakes the reins. ‘Come up, Danny!’

  We settle in for the long trek to Colac. Mr Garrett reckons we should break it into two bits. Get to Cobden today, stay at the recreation ground.

  ‘No supermarkets, no banks,’ he points out to Coach Don.

  ‘There’s a wotsit, an independent.’

  ‘No one going to torch him,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Bet he’s not doing cheap milk.’

  ‘Get someone to go on ahead and check?’ Coach Don suggests. ‘We don’t want this to hurt the little people.’

  ‘Probably a good idea,’ Mr Garrett agrees.

  I reach over and thump Jen’s leg and point down the back of the milk cart behind Dad’s coffin and we crawl down there where no one can hear us.

  ‘There’s some stuff you should know,’ I say. ‘I’m starting to think you were right.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she asks.

  I make that noise with the back of my throat I know she hates. ‘Like,’ I tell her, ‘did you know the bank manager and Dad once both went out with Mum?’

  ‘What? No. What?’

  ‘Pop told me. So obviously he’d do anything she asks. Right?’

  ‘No. You’re making that up.’

  ‘Ask her.’

  ‘Oh yeah sure. Hey, Mum, did you know the bank manager before he was bank manager?’

  ‘True anyway. And before he was a bank manager, when he was at uni, he used to be a roo shooter in his holiday breaks.’