Yesterday's Dust

by Joy Dettman

  She waved to Benjie. He waved back.

  That half-smile, his grey suit; from this distance he looked more like her old dad than ever. ‘The living image,’ she said, and mind-travelled back to her own wedding day. Back to sitting at the bridal table with Jack.

  Three months pregnant she had been, and she hadn’t been able to look at food, or look at anyone, anything. They’d gone to Albury for their honeymoon. Poor Jack. It hadn’t been much of a honeymoon for him.

  ‘A terrible time for you, dear. You are being very brave.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Finding your husband like they did,’ Aunty Someone-or-other said, and Ellie jumped, almost knocked her plate onto the floor, but Mary, the mother-in-law, caught it.

  ‘It must be dreadful for you and your family, at this time.’

  Ellie was still shaking her head when another aunt overrode the first. ‘At least the sun came out for a few minutes, Mrs Burton. August can be a bad month for weddings.’

  ‘I don’t know why they didn’t put it off for a few months.’ A long silence followed that comment.

  ‘The girls did a wonderful job with the food, didn’t they, dear?’

  ‘They certainly did. It all looks a picture.’

  ‘Will you have a prawn?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘A glass of wine?’

  ‘No thank you. Do you think I could get a cup of tea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind one myself. Mary Ruth, could you be a love and tell the girls to round up a cuppa for me and Mrs Burton? My word, but didn’t your Annie do a beautiful job with the dress. You’d never guess she was – ’

  ‘Annie is very clever with her hands. How she finds the time, I don’t know.’

  ‘She’s expecting too. It will be nice for the two of them to – ’

  ‘Could you pass me the cream puffs, please,’ she said.

  She didn’t have to know anything she didn’t want to know. And wouldn’t know. Not today. She turned to Johnny, to Bessy, to the priest who had performed the service, sweating on the speeches now, wanting the speeches. Once these people got started they’d probably keep going all night and she’d be able to sit back and relax, not try to find the right thing to say. And she could take her shoes off.

  forgive us our trespasses

  As Bronwyn’s wedding day wore on into night John’s tolerance wore thin. He had cousin Mickey on one side, Bessy opposite, and Annie on his right. Malcolm Fletcher and Father Fogarty were warring verbally between cooling, or lubricating, their vocal cords with red wine. Mickey had been hitting the beer since he’d sat down. Bessy was giving the white wine a nudge and Bronwyn had supplied two bottles of stout for Granny Bourke, who was becoming louder by the glass.

  ‘So how many is that now?’ Gran asked.

  ‘The last.’ Ann had been patient with the old dame but patience, like tolerance, wore thin.

  The table of misfits laughed, except for Malcolm and Father Fogarty.

  ‘Terrible about your first one,’ Granny said.

  Ann ignored her. She turned away, pouring an inch of wine into her glass then offering the bottle to John. He took it, emptied it. A juvenile Smith waiter replaced it immediately.

  The doctor at the Daree hospital had given John a packet of strong painkillers. Not to be taken with alcohol. It was on the packet. He’d held off taking them, but as he toasted the bride and groom he tossed two pills down with the wine. Then he toasted the bridesmaids and the bride’s mother. He toasted Granny’s snore, and the glass she managed to hold on to without spilling a drop, then toasted her blessed exit to the back seat of Mickey’s car, and he doubly toasted the non-return of his raucous cousin.

  He did a lot of toasting, toasted the body they’d found near Daree and his was the only glass raised. As he drained it his eyes strayed towards his mother, noting the paleness of her skin and the occasional sheen of perspiration on her brow; he also noted the colour of her hair against the jade green. She looked more like the old Ellie tonight. Up close, the lines of Mallawindy suns were visible, but tonight, beneath candlelight, they had been smoothed out. She looked young again.

  And the shade of her jacket. It, or the wine, had brought back memories of a jade-green frock she’d worn when he was five or six. Worn it to a fancy dress party at the shire hall. He’d been dressed as a pirate, with a black patch over his eye and a rag parrot, complete with glued-on rooster feathers. Ellie had made it and pinned it to the shoulder of his costume. He’d won first prize. One pound. He could still feel the envelope in his hand, still remember dancing with his mother, then later, watching her glide around the floor with other partners.

  And watching the door, waiting for –

  The girls had badgered Ellie into doing her hair up in the old double plait she somehow wound like a two-tier crown around her head. It framed her face, balancing it and bringing back its own memories. She’d always worn her hair in the double plait when he was young. Just him and Ben and time to believe that things might get better in those days.

  Bron or Ann had pinned a scrap of fabric and a tiny cluster of jade roses behind the plait. Yesterday Ellie had been determined to wear her black hat, but she’d settled for the flowers, or been browbeaten by her daughters into accepting them.

  The girls dressed her, re-creating her for special occasions, as if trying to make her fit the image of a mother they held within, an image they forced her to assume for a day or an hour.

  As that bastard had.

  Dead.

  Her fading eyes looked green again tonight. Someone had done her make-up, plastered it on, covering sun and age spots, darkening her brows, highlighting her eyes. Interesting what an artist could do with a good canvas, he thought. Ellie was such a canvas. She had a high brow and wide eyes. A tall, slim blonde once, the years may have stolen an inch from her height but she was still slim enough, and the high heels she wore tonight more than compensated for that lost inch.

  Because he hadn’t seen his mother’s gradual aging, he could remember the beauty she had been, and he could see it tonight. He could see a lot tonight. This wasn’t Ellie of the faded dresses and the shrunken sweaters she wore in the cow yard. This was the one his father had created with the frocks he’d brought home from his trips. He’d dressed her in those early years. He’d bought the jade-green frock, he’d bought the shoes and sheer stockings and the golden earrings.

  I’ve got nowhere to wear them, Jack. We could have used that money. . .

  Jack had given up on Ellie. He’d continued to bring home his parcels from Narrawee – pretty dresses, fancy shoes – but all for Liza. Everything had been for Liza.

  Johnny refilled his glass. Ann looked at him, then to where he was looking.

  ‘She still scrubs up well, doesn’t she?’ she said.

  ‘Little dabs of powder, little puffs of paint, make a girl’s complexion, something that it ain’t,’ he said.

  ‘Bron did her make-up. I told her we should go into the makeover business.’

  Silence again. They shared many silences. Johnny had given this sister life, and his love, perhaps attempting to balance the love his father had lavished on Liza. For a while it had been them against the world. When he’d heard that the skeletal remains of Liza had been found, he’d come running back for little Annie, unaware of what he’d find when he got there. He’d found a woman, determined, and strong, a woman with a husband.

  He’d gone home that Christmas Eve convinced that one way or another he was going to rid Mallawindy of Jack Burton. Since the day he’d found Sam’s burned bones at the old Aboriginal burial grounds out at Dead Man’s Lane, he’d known why his father had spent half of his life at Narrawee; he had played two roles, his own and his twin brother’s.

  John knew that he should have gone to the police back then, but a boy’s loyalty is strong, and frequently misplaced. To protect Ellie, he’d kept his silence. Hadn’t wanted to break her childish heart. Maybe he’d been lying to himself. Maybe he’d n
ever had guts enough to go to the police.

  Cowardly little bastard.

  That Christmas Eve his father had been the one who ran, but John had known where he would be found. There were things he’d had to do in the city, so he drove the hire car there, then continued on to Narrawee where he’d found the white stone mansion unoccupied. For two nights he’d slept in his hire car, waiting for his father to arrive.

  As a youth John had once spent a day sharpening the old wood axe, convinced he could split his father’s head wide with it as easily as he might split a small block of wood. He had honed the worn blade of his mother’s carving knife to razor sharpness one evening, convinced that he could cut out his father’s heart and feed it to the pigs. In Narrawee he’d had neither knife nor axe, but his bare hands would find a way to rip that bastard apart.

  Jack Burton had not shown his face, nor had May, so John had returned his hire car and caught the bus to Warran and to Ann. She had taken his case and placed it in the spare room, so pleased to see him, eager to spend time with him.

  It was after David had gone to bed that he’d broached the subject of his father. ‘I know he’s not at Narrawee, Annie, but he’s somewhere. Find May, and we find him. We’ve got him.’

  ‘They’re at the flat in Toorak. I drove him there that night,’ she’d said. And his world crashed, and out of the wreckage came anger, raw and red and aimed at his sister.

  ‘You drove him down there?’

  ‘I thought you would have guessed.’

  ‘That night? That’s where you disappeared to?’ She had nodded, held a finger to her lips. ‘In God’s name, why, Annie?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but I did it.’

  ‘He’s going to pay.’

  ‘And what do we gain? More months with reporters hanging around our doors. Him in jail, or back in Mallawindy when the cops don’t believe you. Forget him.’

  ‘They’ll believe us. Have you still got Sam’s ring?’

  ‘It was Sam’s ring. Sam is wearing it again. Let it end. For me, for David, for all of us, let it end here.’

  ‘I want justice, Annie.’

  ‘Don’t confuse justice with revenge. They’re different, Johnny.’

  ‘Call it what you will, I want it.’

  ‘And what does Mum do when you expose her puppet master?’

  He hadn’t been thinking of Ellie. Hadn’t wanted to think of her, but the words woke a place in him that had been sleeping. He had no memory of what he’d said next, but when he was done, she’d smiled, shaken her head.

  ‘And I thought priests were big on forgiveness of sins. Forgive him his trespasses. He’s Sam – and a better Sam than the original. Forget him and get on with your own life.’

  ‘What life? I haven’t got a life to get on with. I just tossed it in. He’s it now.’

  ‘Then take your gun to town, Johnny. He’ll be at Liza’s inquest. Shoot him as he leaves the court and spread us all over page one again, then spend the rest of your life in a cage.’

  ‘I’ve spent my whole bloody life caged.’

  How did it happen? He didn’t know, but too suddenly their voices had been raised against each other and she’d closed the door, closed David’s bedroom door.

  ‘Please keep your voice down, and remember, you’re not the only victim here. I have to go down to that inquest. Do you think I want that? Do you think I want those cameras on me again?’

  ‘I just realised I don’t know you, Annie. I don’t know what you want any more.’

  ‘I want to run. Every fibre in my body wants to get me into my car and just drive me to some place where I can wake up free, go to bed free. But I can’t run. I’m pregnant, so I’m stuck here, just like you are, and I have to go on, just like you do.’

  ‘You’ll . . . you’ll sit in a room with him at the inquest, and you’ll lie for him?’

  ‘I started it, so I have to finish it. It’s just the old fairytale, about a gardener and a motorbike. It’s just another Snow White and the seven dwarfs.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I don’t understand me either, but it’s not important.’

  ‘It’s important to me, Annie.’

  ‘Your priorities are twisted. All I know, Johnny, is . . . is the day you came home, my world was ending. Mandy was dead and I wanted to die and then I opened the door and you were there. When I needed you, you came back to me.’ Her hands covering her face, she’d looked at him from behind the fan of her fingers. ‘Why are we fighting?’

  ‘Over a mongrel dog that doesn’t deserve to live.’

  ‘And that’s the reason I went to Mallawindy that night. I knew I had to get there before you – get him away from you.’

  ‘You should have let me rip the bastard apart.’

  She had reached out a hand to him. ‘The only place inside me that isn’t a numb ache these days is the little place I saved for you. I searched for you forever.’

  He hadn’t taken her hand. ‘It’s not me you’ll be lying for at the inquest.’

  ‘It’s not for him! None of it is for him! Driving him to Toorak wasn’t for him. It was making an end to it, that’s all. It was giving you an out, giving Mum her missing Prince Charming. All I have to do now is get Liza home, get her buried, get her name on that bloody tombstone, then I’ve done enough, Johnny. Then it will be over.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he’d said.

  ‘Maybe if you’d stuck around instead of running, you might have found out. Maybe I would have found out a lot sooner too.’

  He’d had no answer for that. He’d walked to the spare room and picked up his bag. She’d followed him to the back door.

  ‘Don’t go. Not like this. Sit down and talk to me.’

  ‘I can’t stay here.’

  ‘I did what I had to do, and you have to help me to keep doing it – wipe him and May and Narrawee from my brain. I have to if David and I . . . if this baby is to have a chance.’

  ‘And what about Mum? I’m supposed to lie to her?’

  ‘What about Mum? It’s always about Mum, and I don’t know her. I don’t know what I feel for her any more, or if I feel anything.’ She had looked at the door, at the walls. ‘This house used to be full of Mandy. You should have known her, Johnny. This house belonged to her. Toys all over the floor, little giggles from beneath the table, little dresses in the laundry. She’s gone.’ Her fingers raked the hair from her face, her eyes travelling the floors, the walls.

  ‘I can’t look at Mum these days without feeling anger. She used to say to me that Mandy was Liza reborn. Every time she saw her. She’s Liza all over, love, she’d say. Every time. And maybe she was like her too, but I wouldn’t see it.

  ‘But I saw it when she died. She looked like Liza when she died. Little red playsuit, blood on her golden curls. And . . . and do you know what Mum said to me, Johnny? I’m so sorry to hear of your loss, love. No kiss, no hug, no bloody nothing. I’m so sorry to hear of your loss, love. She lost about as much sleep over Mandy’s death as she did over my life. So don’t ever try to use Mum as a cheap weapon to bludgeon me with.’

  ‘What happened to the little girl I left on the road?’

  ‘You left her on the road, and life happened to her, and death happened, and years of searching for you happened. I didn’t care what I might find either, just as long as I found you, knew you were alive, safe. I didn’t expect to find a fifteen-year-old boy. I wouldn’t have cared if you’d sold cars, ran a brothel, yet you expected to come back here and find poor little dumb Annie still waiting for you.’

  ‘It’s all gone. All changed,’ he’d said. ‘Hating that bastard is all that’s left from back then. Everything else is lost. If I let him get away with what he’s done I’ve got no reason to wake up in the morning. Can’t you see that?’

  She had walked to the sink, filled the jug and set it to boil. ‘Have a cup of coffee with me. Sit down and let’s start again.’

  ‘Come to the police with me. That’s all
I want from you.’

  ‘Look at me, Johnny. Inside I’m still that little kid and she’s standing here still screaming out to you. For God’s sake, listen to her!’

  ‘Help me to put him away and I’ll listen. He killed Liza. He killed his brother. He’s a murderer, Annie.’

  She had sighed then, swiped at the tears now trickling. ‘Liza took a blow aimed at her rapist who was using her as a shield. Dad didn’t want to hurt Liza. He loved her. The day Mandy died I understood what he has had to live with. He loved Liza.’ The jug had boiled, boiled, turned itself off. ‘Maybe a priest can’t understand that sort of love, that sort of loss. You’ve probably buried little kids in the cold bloody earth and watched the mothers cry, blessed them and told them that their child was in a better place. What better place than safe in her parents’ arms, Johnny? I watched Dad dying the day Liza died. I can still hear him crying.’

  ‘He’s not crying now. He’s down there playing the toff, having a ball. He’s got everything he always wanted. He’s got that mansion, that property, and May.’

  ‘And he has to look at that rose garden, that cellar every time he steps outside the door, and he has to do it stone-cold sober. May won’t let him drink.’

  He had laughed then. ‘So he’ll come back.’

  ‘If he sets one foot in Mallawindy, I tell it as it was. He and May know it.’

  ‘I can’t live like this. I can’t lie to Mum and Ben for the rest of my life. I can’t do it, Annie.’

  ‘Then find a way to do it. I have. I hide in this house all day, and at night I sleep in Mandy’s bed.’

  He’d left then. He’d walked away from her into the night. Six years on, their conversations were brief and polite.

  ‘How’s your foot?’ she said.

  ‘Better by the minute.’

  Just words. He kept up his end. He found enough words, cold, guarded things, each one censored, checked before it was spoken. That’s how he lived these days. Hiding self. Hiding knowledge. Losing self. No black suit and dog collar to hide him, or give him identity. No longer Father Burton, so who was he?