Remnants of the name were there, but like Piglet’s “Trespasser’s Will,” the original meaning was obscured.
“Got Her,” Jason read. “Got who?” which was the funniest joke he was capable of making.
A plastic basket of mottled, ugly flowers sat crookedly in the sand. Smooth stones surrounded the cross, and these confused us; were these being replaced when they washed away or covered with sand? They looked dirty somehow, sticky.
There was a jar of some thick, yellow, viscous liquid. We couldn’t think what it was.
“I told you,” I said, and no one said it was all bullshit this time.
We left it there; no one wanted to touch it. It felt bad to leave the memorial as it was, disrespectful somehow, as if death was dirty, but we couldn’t be bothered to spend a few minutes to clean it up.
A shadow fell over us, strange on a cloudless day, and I shivered. Someone spying on us? Standing over us, wishing they were part of our group?
There was no one there, and the shadow lifted. Something had passed between me and the sun, that’s all.
One of the guys picked up a stone.
He held it in his palm, then tucked it into his pocket. He wasn’t bothered by gross things. He’d been known to throw dog poo bare-handed.
—
He took the stone over to Grandpa Sheet, who examined it and nodded. He handed over a six-pack of beer.
“He asked what we saw. That’s all he wanted. And he said something about the poor boys.”
“Someone must have set it up for the boys I told you about,” I said. “The ones Jason’s dad found.”
Grandpa Sheet seemed full of life, hopping up and down the stairs like a puppy dog wanting to play.
“You see?” he called out. “Reward for the ones who go the furtherest.”
—
That night I dreamt my pubic hair was matted and massive, like seaweed.
I woke to find Jason down there, trying to get a fingerhold, his hair balled against my stomach, greasy and damp.
I pushed him off and he whined, “I thought we could give each other what comfort we could.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. I left him on the corner of my bed and went to have a shower, to wash the nightmare and him away.
—
We all sat on the veranda, eating the last of the cereal. Dry, because there was no milk and no one wanted to go buy some. Money was tight and we’d lost track of who’d spent what. I’d lost track, anyway, because I never had any money to spend.
Grandpa Sheet sat in the shadows on his veranda. I heard clinking, like glass, and he stood up and walked toward us.
“You hungry?” he said. He carried four jam jars, clink clink. “Teenagers are always hungry. It’s jam,” he said, lifting it to the light. “Blackberry jam.”
“Thanks,” one of my friends said, because Jason and I wouldn’t.
He set the jars on the veranda railing, nodded, walked away.
“Must have been a sale on jars,” one of my friends said. Because they were the same.
The same as the jar we’d seen at the memorial.
The surf was high and the day bright, so the beach filled up quickly. The others went for a swim, even though the jellyfish-warning flags were out, but I didn’t have the energy.
Instead I went to the memorial. It was tucked away in the dunes where hardly anyone went is why it lasted so long.
Someone had been there. I could see drag marks in the sand, and there were six sets of weirdly perfect footprints pressed deep next to the jar of sticky yellow liquid.
—
But I didn’t see a ghost until Grandpa Sheet died.
—
I didn’t go back for a long time after that. My life progressed, sort of, or at least I didn’t fuck it up, and there never seemed to be time to go to the beach just for the sake of it.
—
It was fifteen years later before I went again, with Mum, Dad, and my two brothers. None of us wanted to be there much, but Bernard was depressed. Gerard had found him in the shed, with a glass and a bottle of weed killer. Seriously. Weed killer. We gave him shit about that, nonstop, because weed killer? Could you be more obvious? But Gerard found him, anyway, sitting there, trying to write a suicide note but not really knowing why, thus proving me right and everyone else wrong: thinking too much.
Luckily.
So Gerard saved him and now we were all there to pretend we were kids again and the worst thing that could happen was Dad cooked dinner and made raw hamburgers.
We arrived in two cars. I’d packed wine, cheese, fancy snacks from my local gourmet store. Mum and Dad had a carload of food, stuff we’d lived on as kids. White bread, sausages, sweet cereal. Custard in cartons. They’d brought cricket gear and new table-tennis paddles because there was a table in the boatshed. It was surely ruined, but that wouldn’t matter.
Dad got the key from under the front mat and opened the front door. The place was stuffy, but open windows would let the sea breeze in and we’d soon feel relaxed and healthy. That was the plan.
—
Dinner the first night was Fancy Chicken Salty Bucko. Mum called it that, trying to pretend she wasn’t showing off. Dad was getting pissed with Jason’s dad, so Mum banned him from the barbie.
It was delicious. Mum always was a great cook.
“I picked the sage myself. There’s a gorgeous batch behind Jason’s house. I don’t think they even know it’s there.”
“Sage is good,” I said. She was making a point, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.
“If you pick twelve leaves at midnight you’ll see the ghost of your future husband,” she said. She knows I’m gay and doesn’t ban me from the house, but secretly, it seems, she thinks I just haven’t met the right man.
“Doesn’t that mean he’d be dead? You can’t have the ghost of a living person,” Bernard said, and we all got stuck into our Salty Bucko and bottles of wine and it felt okay. Mum kept squeezing Bernard, watching him, as if she couldn’t believe he was real. He’s been missing a long time, gone from us, and she’d say it’s like we have no son, as if he didn’t exist when not in our presences.
—
Dad made us pull out the table-tennis table and set it up. It wasn’t too bad. Buckled and mottled, but reasonably sturdy when you shoved the legs into the sand.
Then he knocked on Jason’s dad’s door. Gerard and I exchanged looks of relief; now he’d stop trying to make conversation with us. Bernard was already on the beach, heading for the dunes. We’d spoken of little else but the memorial, because they’d seen it, but we hadn’t been into the dunes together for years. And the dead boys. We talked about the dead boys and gave Bernard shit about the weed killer. He planned to ask Jason’s dad for the story again, because you have different ears as an adult. I don’t know what he was hoping to hear.
Gerard and I followed him, leaving Mum to fuss with the windows and the beds and to put a cuppa on.
We always left someone at the foot of the dunes, just in case. They could run for help.
This time, though, my brothers and I wanted to go in together, find the memorial that was periodically covered up.
Bernard had a hip flask of Bundy Rum, and we drank that as we plodded on.
“We used to run in this sand, don’t you remember?” Gerard said. “As if it was a footpath.”
“We were a lot lighter then. Didn’t sink to our ankles.” Bernard was skinny as a stick, far too thin. Our brief hugs made me cringe, because I could feel his bones.
“I’m as svelte as ever,” I said, “like a blade of grass,” and that set them off mocking me for a while, which was good.
“Is this thing actually here?” Gerard said. “It was, but I haven’t seen it in years.”
“Let’s give it another five minutes, then we’ll head back,” Bernard said. We weren’t going to argue.
At the moment he was living in these small increments of time. Five minutes. Half an hour. One afternoon. Th
e more increments of time that passed, the further he was from that moment when he was prepared to drink the weed killer.
What we didn’t know.
What we should have known.
Was that time goes forward to a thing as well as away from another.
We finished the run, and I made them sing stupid songs, and then Bernard said, “There it is.”
Only it wasn’t. It was a different one. White-painted wood hammered into a cross and imbedded with sea-softened glass pieces.
We stared at it for a while, chilled even though the sun burned down.
Gerard bent over, digging in the sand. He revealed a small glass jar, filled with the viscous yellow liquid I remembered so well from the other memorial.
“Did they make a new one?” Gerard said, but Bernard had already walked on and called out, “Here’s another one.”
—
The one Bernard found could have been the original but wasn’t. It was a wooden cross but not as aged; it had some weather damage, but it seemed to have been made of that “outdoor” wood, paint thick, with chains dangling off it, held in places by notches in the wood. One fine chain with a butterfly pendant, one thicker one with fake dog tags.
“We should take these back and hang them over the verandah at House Two. Freak out Jason’s dad.”
Even now he still got shit for not going to Vietnam. Every now and then, especially on Anzac Day.
We found the original memorial next, collapsed now, with few stones remaining. And we found two more, looking even older, that we thought must have been there all along, but we never walked that far.
The next memorial was built of rusted metal, with words scratched in. We couldn’t read beyond a few letters. F, and H, and T.
Bernard kept on walking. “There might be more,” he said. I hoped not each one meant that someone had died.
We wouldn’t have recognized the next one if we hadn’t seen the others. This one was a mound of stones, perfectly placed, with a surround of large rocks to keep them in place. Each letter on a different stone.
We pulled them out carefully and laid them on the sand, shifting them around until we found a word.
FURTHEREST
—
All of the memorials hosted a jar, filled with that yellow stuff.
We stayed until the sun started to dip, then headed back. Bernard didn’t want to come, but we dragged him. Night fell dark and fast at the beach and we didn’t have torches or food or anything but an empty hip flask.
Dad had the BBQ out when we got back. The boys stopped with him, drank beer, and I went inside for a shower.
Mum and Dad are getting on now, but they’re sticking to the plan. Eggs for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, BBQ for dinner, cooked by Dad, even though he can’t see in the dark well anymore and insisted on BBQing out there on the beach.
We told them what we’d seen, all those memorials.
“No names on them?”
“Nothing but the word furtherest.”
“Like Grandpa Sheet always says,” Mum said. I didn’t think she knew about all that. “Maybe he made them for his wife and son. And his parents. Who knows?”
As we talked I could hear children laughing, and someone squealing as they dipped into the water, and the pop of a champagne cork.
We all looked over at House 4. It was dark; no squatters tonight. Grandpa Sheet had died five or six months earlier. No one went to the funeral. I don’t even know if there was one. His son was long dead and there was only one grandson who wanted nothing to do with him or the house. He’d never even been.
No one shut the house up or put it on the market. The dads looked after the outside, weeding when they did their own, clearing off dead birds that periodically made it to the veranda.
No one touched the inside.
You could easily imagine him there, watching, as he always did.
“There’s usually a party of some kind going on in the house. They’re always at it. Leave a great pile of shit behind,” Jason’s dad said. He still walked for hours and actually looked better than he had in years. He made shell necklaces to guard against the evil eye and handed them out to anyone he saw. Even now, he sat with his beer, threading.
“Maybe I could move into his place for a while,” Bernard said. “Keep the squatters out.”
“Yes! You could!” Mum realized straightaway she’d been too excited but couldn’t rein it in.
“We’d have to get in and clear it out. He was house-proud, you could say that for him. He’d be turning in his grave to see the state it’s in.”
We’d gone off track. “What about the crosses? The stones?” I said, and my brothers said “yeah,” agreeing with me. The grown-ups (yeah, we were grown up now, but not like they were, not like kid-producing, home-owning, holiday house–owning adults) nodded.
“We’ll call the police tomorrow,” Mum said, and she did it, too. They never did come, though.
Not about that.
“I should get Jason to come back, give us a hand,” Jason’s dad said.
We rolled our eyes (yeah, adults).
“He’s overseas, isn’t he?” Mum said. “For his job?”
“He’s doing bloody well. They love him on the TV over there.”
He was actually a bit of a spunk now, but he was still gropy-fingered Jason to me.
“He thinks of you all as cousins. He’d love to be here.”
The veranda at House 4 sat in shadows, darker than anywhere else, I thought.
—
The dads were up early to start the big clear-out.
They wanted us to help, but I wasn’t going inside that place. It always gave me the creeps. Grandpa Sheet wasn’t someone you wanted to go near. He was so desperately lonely, so needy, it felt like he’d grab on and wouldn’t let you go.
He had been married; they said it lasted a week. Long enough to make a baby (the son who died), and we never saw the wife. Someone said she was a geologist, and one of Gerald’s jokes was “She must have had rocks in her head to marry him.”
Jason’s dad said, “I’m glad you’re all here. You anchor me. Not long before Grandpa Sheet died, I wasn’t feeling the best. I shouldn’t tell you this. But Jason says it helps to talk. I was pretty low. I was hearing voices or something, telling me what you should do.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best topic,” Mum whispered to me.
“You can’t say anything. It’ll be really awkward and embarrassing and obvious if you do, and Bernard will hate it,” I whispered back.
“I almost did it. I’d gathered rocks and rope and I was going to swim out and let the rocks drop like an anchor, you know. I was so close.”
“So what stopped you?”
“It’s stupid. But the smell of something BBQing wafted over. Sausage and onions. And I was suddenly starving and I thought, I can’t die on an empty stomach. I went home and ate, then Jason rang and I went to bed and just…forgot about it.
“The next morning I found Grandpa Sheet hanging in his boathouse. The door was banging in the wind, so I went to shut it, and there he was, hanging. I wondered if he’d taken my place. That someone had to die that night and it turned out to be him.
“It wasn’t as bad as finding the boys. Nothing could be as bad as that. But it was still a shock. So you have to ignore the voices. If they’re telling you what to do. Shut them out whatever way you can.”
“Come on, you lot, help,” Dad said.
Not even his family went near the place, so why should we? We did take drinks and snacks over to them, though.
—
Dad and Jason’s dad stayed over there for hours, making a big pile of rubbish, getting drunker by the minute. They chucked out any wrecked furniture, shouting out “Executive decision!” each time. It was actually pretty funny, and we all set up beach chairs to watch the show. Even Mum, who angled her chair so she could watch all of us, too. I couldn’t be a mother. I couldn’t cope with that level of love. Too painful.
I can’t even cope with a dog—too needy, too easily saddened.
They found mostly crap, like the embroidered wall hanging that said “The furtherest you go, the better the place.”
The dads finished in the house. “What about the boatshed?” Gerard called out, then whispered, as Dad called back, “I’ll boatshed you!”
But they did go in there, torches out because all the boatsheds were filled with years of crap that blocked the windows.
They were in there for a bit, so we turned our chairs around to watch the sea instead, and a group of teenagers down there making a bonfire, swearing as loud as they could, throwing bottles.
“Don’t throw the fuckin’ bottles,” Bernard roared. You’d have to call it a roar. That stopped them. He walked down there and pointed. Stack ’em there, he said, and we’ll clear them up in the morning. Don’t leave broken glass on the beach.
He bent to pick up some of it and the kids helped, and he was back soon, smiling to himself. I nearly cried to see it, that pure, happy smile.
I was thinking of going inside when I heard a dragging sound. I turned to see the dads coming toward us, both dragging shop mannequins.
Shop mannequins.
We gathered around as they set the mannequins back on their feet. They were taller than me, dressed in clothing from, what, the sixties? Mum said so; You had a shirt like that, she said to Dad.
“There are four more,” Jason’s dad said. “All standing there in his shed behind a stack of corrugated iron.”
The boys helped drag them all out and we stood them up on our veranda. It gave me the creeps, as if six strange men stood there, staring at us, watching us too closely.
Each was dressed differently. One had black pants and a white singlet. One had a black shirt, a white singlet, and an open orange shirt. One had brown shorts, a green polo, and a panama hat. One had gray pants and a blue shirt. One had faded pink shorts, a towel around the neck, a hat. One had white pants, a white hat, a light jacket, a blue singlet, and a towel under an arm.
The clothes were moth-eaten, dusty, stained.
Dark Screams, Volume 7 Page 5