Taking Tom Murray Home

by Tim Slee

  The manager is a little round guy with stains on his shirt, which isn’t buttoned up at the top even though he’s wearing a tie, because his neck is too big for the shirt. He has a big smile but I don’t see what’s funny. The Highway Patrol police are smiling too, so whatever he thinks is funny, they think is funny too.

  All I know is he’s saying we can’t take the horse on the ferry unless it’s in a horse float. He doesn’t even look at the lawyer’s phone. ‘Company policy, sorry. No uncontained livestock on the ferry.’

  Mr Garrett is reading something written on a poster on the wall of the office. ‘Says here you allow pets,’ he says.

  ‘On a leash,’ the man says. ‘And a draught horse is not a bloody pet. It’s livestock.’

  ‘You really do want to read this,’ Alasdair is saying, pointing at his phone.

  The manager crosses his arms. ‘Why don’t you read it for me?’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Um. Section 8b, amendment 137, 1974 . . . Here we are: “Any person who, being the owner, driver, guard or conductor of a public vehicle for the conveyance of passengers who wilfully delays without lawful reason any passenger . . .”’

  ‘How about No Horses Allowed Unless in A Float, there’s your lawful reason,’ one of the Highway Patrol cops calls and they laugh. There’s two of them, a man and a lady cop, who’ve been with us since Colac. Karsi is standing up the back with his arms crossed but he’s not saying anything.

  ‘No, that’s a company policy, not a law,’ Alasdair says and keeps going. ‘“. . . wilfully delays without lawful reason any passenger shall be guilty of an offence.”’

  ‘You going to arrest me?’ the manager asks the police, who just keep smiling.

  ‘Actually, I can arrest you,’ Alasdair says.

  The manager looks at him, going a bit red, ‘You?’

  ‘Absolutely. Section 458 of the Crimes Act, my friend. I have just as much power to arrest you as the boys in blue over there.’

  The police shuffle a bit, but they don’t argue with him.

  ‘I have to call head office about this,’ the manager says.

  ‘Of course, before you do, though, you might want to read this too,’ the lawyer says, starting to hand him the phone, but then deciding against it. ‘Or I could just read it for you. I’ll do that, shall I? Here, Federal Transport Compliance and Miscellaneous Act, 1983. You’ll like this. A girl tried to get on the ferry to Tassie with her Shetland pony and they wouldn’t let her. The horse got injured as they tried to turn it around and so the case went to court. Turns out the definition of passenger conveyance in the Act hasn’t been updated since 1842 and it includes,’ he shows the manager, ‘it includes “passengers conveyed on horses, donkeys, camels and oxen” so the ferry company was forced to pay out damages and allow the girl and her horse on the ferry next time, as long as she rode it on.’

  ‘No, really?’ Coach Don says. ‘Camels?’

  ‘And oxen. She had to clean up her own mess,’ the lawyer says. ‘But yeah.’

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ the manager says, spreading his legs and leaning forward. ‘We’re fully booked.’

  ‘Booked?’ Mum asks. ‘But we called and –’

  ‘Fully booked, sorry,’ the man says, spreading his hands. ‘Wish we could help.’

  Mr Alberti has been hovering up the back of the group but he leans in. ‘Fully booked, one o’clock on a Thursday afternoon during school term?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ the man says. He turns around and picks up a piece of paper. ‘Twenty cars and one . . . passenger conveyance? I can get you on next . . . um . . . Monday 6 a.m.’

  ‘Monday,’ Mr Alberti says with a growl.

  ‘Earliest,’ the man says, smiling again.

  ‘What about just one vehicle?’ Coach Don says. ‘The horse and cart.’

  ‘Ah well, one vehicle . . . oversize?’

  ‘Oversize?’

  ‘Longer than five metres?’

  ‘It’s eight metres,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Horse and cart.’

  ‘That’s eighty-eight dollars, not including passengers,’ the man says, like he’s hoping we don’t have the money. ‘Eleven dollars a metre.’

  ‘All right,’ Coach Don says. ‘Book it on.’

  ‘Can’t, sorry, oversize vehicle spaces are even more tight, let me see . . . Tuesday 10 a.m.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Coach Don says, stepping closer to the man.

  The Highway Patrol policeman steps forward, ‘Let’s all just calm down, all right?’

  The manager steps behind the policeman and the female cop says maybe everyone should go out and get some fresh air and think about things, and people look at Mum and she says, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that. Come on, people.’

  I’m talking to the female cop whose name is Natalie. I want to know how you get to be a cop, like do you go to university or what. She’s nearly as cool as Deb.

  ‘Are you for or against us?’ I ask her.

  ‘The police don’t take sides,’ she says. ‘But my parents were farmers.’

  Karsi is walking past as she says it and he winks at me. ‘Thought I smelled a funny smell.’ He goes to talk to the other cop.

  She sticks her tongue out at him.

  ‘Being a cop is more fun than farming, I bet,’ I tell her.

  ‘It’s not all fun, but yeah, it’s different. And it’s police officer, by the way. Not cop.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She leans toward me so no one else can hear. ‘What your mum is doing is awesome,’ Natalie says. ‘Really. She has some guts.’

  ‘Thanks. Can I see that stick, the one on your belt?’

  We’re standing outside the ferry building, which is this big creamy-painted place with green roofs. Inside, all the grown-ups are arguing about what we should do, like maybe Mum could get just the coffin on the ferry but then what’s she going to do from the other side? Jenny and me are like, yeah, but what about us? So they pushed us out. Jenny is hopping along the rocks of the breakwater. She loves hopping on rocks and if Mum saw her she’d freak and yell at her to get off before she breaks a leg but the whole reason she’s doing it is because Mum isn’t watching. Natalie puts her hand on her baton, like she’s going to take it off and show me, then she looks past me, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got an idea. Hey, excuse me, can I have a word?’ she calls out as a big truckie who’s just pulled up in his cattle truck goes to walk past her and into the café.

  He looks like she’s caught him doing something. ‘Uh, yeah?’

  ‘Your truck’s empty, right?’ Natalie says, walking past him and toward the cattle truck. It’s big and it’s got bars and slats down the sides but you can see it’s empty and you can smell it’s empty too.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he asks. Now he really looks nervous. ‘You need to see the papers, or . . .’

  ‘No, how wide is it?’

  ‘Standard single,’ he says, ‘4.3 by 2.5.’

  ‘And how long?’

  ‘The whole rig or just the trailer?’

  ‘Trailer,’ she says, peering through the back gate.

  ‘12.5, why?’

  She walks around to the wheels at the back. ‘How long since you had the tyres checked?’

  ‘Oh come on,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to pick up a load in Boneo and get back before dark. The tyres are fine, but if youse waste my time checking them . . .’

  She gives him a look. ‘At this stage, I’m just asking. You booked on the next ferry?’

  ‘One o’clock, yeah.’

  ‘Good. I might have a favour to ask.’

  Geraldine walks up to her with phone held out in front of her ready to record but Natalie puts up her hand. ‘Not happening,’ is all she says. ‘But get ready with your camera.’

  The truckie’s name is Dave. ‘The whole thing, horse and cart and . . . all?’ he’s asking.

  ‘How wide is your milk cart?’ Natalie asks. Everyone looks at Mr Garrett.

  ‘Two metres, wheel to wheel,’ he says.


  ‘Half a metre to spare,’ Natalie points out.

  Her partner isn’t looking so sure but he knows Sergeant Karsi and he’s waiting for him to say something now that he’s worked out what Natalie’s idea is.

  ‘Sounds like an option,’ Karsi says. ‘You know any law against putting a horse-drawn cart inside a cattle truck? With the horse? Coz I don’t.’

  ‘Well I do,’ the manager says from behind the police. ‘It’s an unsafe load is what it is.’

  ‘Shut it, you,’ Natalie says. I’m thinking I totally want to be a police officer when I finish school.

  ‘And how am I supposed to charge for that?’ the manager whines. ‘A vehicle inside a vehicle?’

  ‘I said shut it,’ Natalie says. She turns to Mr Garrett and the truckie. ‘You have forty minutes to get that horse and cart loaded on that semitrailer in a manner that poses no risk to public safety or to the horse.’

  ‘What about the rest of us?’ Mr Alberti asks, but the manager has run outside after the others, still arguing about something.

  Jen and Mum have gone into the café to get some ice creams but I wanted to stay and watch the horse get loaded. Danny Boy is not real thrilled about walking up the ramp into the cattle truck, but Mr Garrett puts bigger blinkers around his eyes and after about three goes gets him up into the truck and puts a feedbag around his nose. They tie up some hay bales and a couple of spare tyres from people’s cars to the insides of the cattle truck so he can’t turn around and he can’t hurt himself.

  ‘First time he’s been on a boat,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘First time for a lot of things.’

  The men are working out whether to shove the milk cart up into the truck with the coffin on or take it out and put it in afterwards. Natalie and her partner are standing by their car having a bit of an argument, so I slide over to listen.

  ‘We were supposed to deal with the problem,’ he’s saying.

  ‘We are dealing with it,’ Natalie says. ‘Five minutes past one, they’re on that ferry and there is no problem any more.’

  ‘For us,’ he says. ‘You’re just passing it on to Melbourne.’

  ‘Tell me you want to work out what to do with a two-tonne horse and cart, twenty cockies in their utes, two cars full of journalists and a dead man in a coffin. There’s a reason the inspector isn’t here,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t want anything to do with this, so he handballed it to you and you were dumb enough to say yes sir, thank you sir.’

  He drops his hat up on the hot roof of their police car and runs his hands through his hair. ‘That Searoads Ferry manager is going to call up Geelong, tell them your good idea. How he was just doing what we asked him, trying to hold them up, and you cut the grass from under him.’

  ‘You’re the ranking officer on the ground here.’

  ‘We need a story.’

  ‘Tell ’em that lawyer scared the crap out of us and we had no way of checking he wasn’t right. He threatened a citizen’s arrest of the Searoads manager, the media would have loved that, so we intervened to get the protesters onto the ferry and out of Geelong.’

  He looks at her. ‘I guess that’ll fly.’

  ‘You guess.’

  ‘I guess it’ll have to.’

  ‘So, you go call it in while I go to see how many of these cars we can get on the next ferry.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’ he asks, looking at the car park which is starting to fill with a few more cars in nice neat lines but doesn’t look totally packed to me.

  She has a great smile and she looks down at me. ‘I’m willing to bet the ferry isn’t fully booked, but just in case, me and my offsider Jack here are going to go around to the other cars and tell them there’s an emergency situation and would they mind waiting for the next ferry instead, aren’t we, mate?’

  The ferry is this amazing big white catamaran with bright blue and green decks and yellow traffic stripes and the truck with Danny Boy and the milk cart and the coffin goes on first and then all the cars behind it and we get ten of the cars from our convoy with us because there were some people who said they couldn’t afford to miss the ferry and Natalie didn’t want to argue with them in case they made a fuss, but there were five who said no worries, they could wait. So Mr Alberti and Deb and Ben and Geraldine and Alasdair and the reporter from Portland and Sergeant Karsi and Mr Garrett and Coach Don and Aunty Ell and Darren and two cars full of Wathaurong people and a couple of others who joined in Geelong, we all make it on board.

  There’s hardly time for a packet of chips before we’re unloading at the other side and Dave the truckie is pretty keen to get on his way so he pulls up as soon as he can once he’s off the ferry and everyone jumps out of their cars and begins pulling the milk cart out of the truck and this big crowd comes out of the Hotel Sorrento where we’re stopped and the milk cart gets a bit stuck, but then they free it and the crowd gives a big cheer but they give an even bigger cheer when they see Danny Boy backing out of the truck and down the ramp and he tosses his head and his mane like he’s loving it.

  Geraldine is loving it; she’s got pictures of the horse with the big stone pub in the background and the hotel guests standing there cheering with their glasses raised.

  ‘Hold him, will you,’ Mr Garrett says to me. ‘I have to check him for knocks.’ He starts running his hands down Danny Boy’s legs and lifting his feet and Danny Boy is tossing his head but I’ve learned how to hold his rein tight so he can’t carry on too much. ‘Good on you,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Let’s get the harness on him before he starts doing somersaults for the crowd.’

  The guests from the pub are standing on a big grassy area that looks over the car park and Jenny says, come on, grab a bucket, and we go running up there and tell them who we are and ask if they want to help with the cost of the funeral and they’re all happy to throw something in the bucket. As we walk back down to the milk cart, Jenny is looking in. ‘About twenty bucks, I reckon,’ she says.

  ‘That’s pretty good, right?’ I tell her.

  ‘I just checked my GoFundMe page,’ she says, and looks around so no one can hear.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s gone mental.’

  Mental? I’m thinking, OK, it was at thirty thousand, so maybe now it’s double . . .

  ‘One hundred thousand plus three thousand dollars,’ she says.

  ‘You mean a hundred and three thousand.’

  ‘Whatever. I bet we could rebuild the house for that. I bet we could pay off the bank.’

  ‘Did you tell Mum?’

  ‘She doesn’t believe it’s real money,’ Jenny says. ‘She thinks it’s like a school walkathon or something where people say they’ll pay you twenty cents a kilometre and then they never pay up. She doesn’t get the idea of PayPal.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money, Jen, you have to –’

  ‘What are you two nattering on about?’ Mum says, creeping up on us. OK, so she probably doesn’t actually creep up on us, probably she just sees us talking and walks over, but she scares the pants off me appearing like that.

  ‘Just counting,’ Jenny says, holding up the bucket and looking at me with her death stare.

  ‘Yeah, we got twenty bucks,’ I say. ‘Maybe more even.’

  Mum looks in the bucket. ‘I’d say you got nearly fifty,’ she says. ‘Well done, you two, go give it to Coach Don eh, he can put it in the kitty.’

  Then there’s another cheer from the grassy verge by the pub and it’s the Melbourne Highway Patrol arriving. They’re not as friendly as Natalie.

  Coach Don wants to push on a bit and see if we can get to Mornington, which he says we have to if we want to get to Carlton by Sunday.

  Mr Garrett isn’t happy though because he says Danny Boy is high as a kite after the trip inside the truck inside the ferry and he doesn’t want him to have another turn and it’ll soon be five o’clock, shouldn’t they pull up stumps and consider themselves lucky to be in Sorrento? Sorrento to Melbourne, they can do it in a day with a reall
y early start.

  ‘Rec reserve is just down the road, isn’t it?’ Karsi asks one of the local police and he says yeah, and Mum says, ‘I think we all need a bit of a breather, don’t we? We’re nearly there now.’

  ‘What are you saying, Garrett?’ Mr Alberti asks. ‘Sorrento to the CBD in one hop? I did it in five hours on a bike when I was younger, and that was with a headwind. But is it doable in a day by horse?’

  ‘Danny will get us there,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Saturday night or Sunday morning, we’ll see how he goes. But tonight he needs to rest.’

  ‘Are we going to Federation Square when we get there?’ Jenny pipes up. ‘I thought the whole point was Mum would give a speech in Federation Square.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea?’ Mum asked her.

  ‘Coach Don said something about Federation Square back in Yardley . . .’

  Mum looks thoughtful. ‘We’d need a permit, wouldn’t we?’ she says.

  ‘No, actually not,’ Alasdair says. ‘You’ll be lucky to get any sort of crowd, and permits are really only needed if you think it’s going to be a huge crowd and you want police to organise crowd control – or if they insist, which they really can’t.’ He shrugs, ‘Freedom of political expression.’

  ‘Really? I thought there’d be all sorts of rules,’ Coach Don said.

  ‘I’ll check with Fed Square management,’ he says. ‘But as long as you’re not erecting fences or trying to plug into power, pretty much anyone can stop up anywhere on public land and hold a gathering.’

  ‘Bet they hand out parking tickets though,’ Mr Alberti grumbles. ‘Bloody bombers never miss a trick.’

  ‘You can bet on that,’ Alasdair says.

  ‘I’ll get on to some people,’ Karsi says. ‘It’ll be better we let them know exactly what we’re planning, even if we don’t need a permit. Might want a couple of extra cars for the escort.’

  ‘What about tonight?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Rec reserve, straight up the road about two hundred metres,’ Deb says. ‘We just went up and checked it out. There’s some people finishing cricket training and they said there’s a number we can call. Police can probably get them to open up the clubhouse so we can make some food and take showers, like usual, eh?’