Yesterday's Dust

by Joy Dettman

  Nothing was ready for a new child. They’d need Mandy’s room for this one, if Ann would give it up. Unless they put Benjamin and Matthew in together, create a greater bedlam.

  From time to time they had made tentative plans to repaint Mandy’s room, to replace her curtains, but how could they touch that sweet memorial, the white walls with their cut-out fairies pasted there? The bed with its pretty bed cover. All frills and fuss and little-girl things. Mandy’s place, not some stranger’s.

  David’s return to the hospital was unhurried. He parked the car out front and looked at the bleak morning rising out of a black night. A bad morning for a birth, and it was far too early. Still, six weeks was nothing these days. Miniature babies were born three months early, and many lived. Peter Williams knew his business. The town was lucky to have him.

  Have to go in, he thought. Stop feeling guilty and go to her.

  He’d been at her side when Mandy was born. Hours of labour, hours of pain he had not been able to ease. And then that new life’s lusty wail.

  Never would he forget the sight of her tiny crumpled face, or the sound of that bellow. And Ann. She hadn’t wanted a child so soon after their wedding – and had made it plain. Until she’d heard the wail, held the red-faced mite. An instant three-way love affair.

  Benjamin’s birth had been different. In the months after Mandy’s death, that pregnancy had become fate’s mockery. For two years they’d been trying for a second child but it had not been until after the funeral he’d learned there was to be another. How could they plan for another baby, hold another baby in their arms? How could they ever dare to love another child?

  A very different birth, Benjamin’s. An easy birth, as if the tiny boy had known he must not make a fuss with his entrance into their lives. A different wail too. A plaintive little whimper, then silence. And a different feeling when he’d first held his son.

  No instant love affair that, but love had grown as the tiny being had grown into their lives, making a place for himself. His own place. He hadn’t tried to fill the space that still bore Mandy’s name.

  Then Matthew had come along. A bigger baby, he’d taken his time arriving. He had looked a little like Mandy at birth; his wail had been a little like Mandy’s. They’d been brave enough to want him, brave enough to love again.

  Tristan the tyrant pushed his way into town two weeks early, barely waiting for the doctor to arrive. He’d taken one look at the world and decided to take it over. A born dictator from day one, frustrated by his immobility, he’d howled until he’d found his crawling legs at six months, walked at nine months, and God help everyone since.

  And now, God willing, there was to be another.

  David knew he had to go to Ann, but there was so little a man could do at this time. Just another minute to collect his thoughts, to shift his mind away from last night, of making love while that baby voice had whispered and chuckled in the wires.

  Then the winds had risen, driving her tiny voice away.

  He shivered, and the shiver travelled his spine and back again. Trees bowing low. Leaves flying, early birds up and complaining, a few cars moving now on the main road. David breathed deeply of the cold air, then he walked through the doors and down the passages towards the labour ward he had come to know quite well.

  poor bloody jack

  Thursday 14 August

  Eight hundred kilometres south the birds were also rising, as was Jack Burton. He crawled from his blankets, wearing the skin he’d been born with and nothing else, and he sat a while looking for his Bonds size 18 briefs tossed onto the floor a bare five hours ago. He found and stepped into them, and into blue jeans he’d also discarded onto the floor. He pulled on cream woollen socks and a pair of sneakers before zipping his fly and hunting for his polo-necked sweater. It was tangled up with the bedding.

  He and May had argued last night and he’d slept alone, or hadn’t slept. Too much on his mind to sleep last night. His head was a bastard and always had been. It never turned off. Only the whisky had turned it off.

  There had been a dozen or more messages on the answering machine when they’d arrived back at Narrawee yesterday. He’d listened to them. He’d known that they’d found his corpse. And he’d wanted it, wanted it for his own. May had started nagging him to return Mummy’s boy Benjie’s calls.

  ‘Let it slide,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll be in Singapore in a week.’ They spent a lot of time out of the country.

  Then a car had driven up to the front door. He’d recognised the driver and taken off like a scalded cat.

  One thing led to another after May’s visitors left. He knew that he’d tossed a tub of butter into the trolley at the supermarket and he hadn’t seen May toss it out, but she had, the determined little bitch. He liked butter and he hated bloody margarine, but all she ever bought was margarine.

  ‘It’s easier to spread, Sam, and better for you.’

  That last phone call had got her howling. She’d tried to call Ann back, and he hadn’t wanted her to call Ann back. In the end he’d ripped the cord out of its socket and pitched the bloody phone into the yard so she couldn’t call Ann back, and he’d gone to bed in the spare room. He could live without bloody telephones. Nobody called him.

  Once clothed, Jack made his way down to the kitchen where he scratched around for coffee and a bowl of cornflakes, which he ate as he walked the room, the radio speaking softly. Nothing about his death on the news, only a pair of anti-comedians, telling unfunny jokes. He told them what they could do with their humour and turned them off, had another bowl of cornflakes.

  Bloody cornflakes. He craved eggs on toast, a bit of bacon. Couldn’t have it, could he? Eggs were full of cholesterol and so was he. A cigarette taken from his packet, he lit up, inhaled. It was the best smoke of the day, that first one. Sucking scalding coffee and cigarette in turn, he stood at the window, his mind nicotine travelling.

  When he was a kid a year had been forever. Santa Claus gone home to the North Pole was damn near forgotten by the time he came back again, but in adulthood that same year took wing and flew.

  The previous six years had flown, but not this last one. Not for poor bloody Jack Burton. The minutes of 1997 plodded, its hours dragged and its days crawled by on crippled feet. What was wrong with it?

  Didn’t want to let him get away with the subterfuge. Didn’t want him declared dead. Wouldn’t allow it. This bastard of a year had slowed time to give the cops and insurance investigators a chance to find him. And now they thought they’d found him.

  Three weeks into January and 1997 had started putting the boots in. He and May had had a raging row about nothing and he’d taken off for Toorak, emptied their joint account before she could, and holed up at the flat. By March he’d drunk himself into hospital and it had frightened Christ out of him – if he’d ever been in him.

  Bloody hospital. They’d treated him like a bit of dog’s meat left too long in the sun. When they let him out May had driven him home to Narrawee, her tongue, once coated with honey, stripping the flesh from him. She’d kept it up for weeks, had worn him down to the stage where he’d got to look beneath the strips of flesh to his bare bones, and beneath his bare bones to his treacherous bloody liver.

  He was scared of dying. Not that he believed in the hereafter, but he didn’t want to find out that he’d been wrong about it either, didn’t want to find old Satan waiting for him with his red-hot pitchfork, so he’d stayed dry through April. Scared dry. He’d been dry now for five months, because May had cut him off without a bloody cent. She’d had the locks changed at the Toorak flat and she’d closed their joint account, the only one he’d been able to help himself to without her signature.

  It was for his own good, she said, the power-crazed little bitch. Like the bloody margarine. ‘It’s for your own good, Sam.’

  ‘Bloody Sam.’

  So there were days when the sun shone, when he looked out at the property and called it his own. Life looked halfway to possible o
n those days, but they were balanced by the black days, the soul-crushing dark days when he looked out at the land and saw grass and stock and he knew he didn’t own a bloody thing.

  It was May’s grass, her stock. She ran the bloody place – her and her manager. She could sign the cheques without his signature, but he couldn’t sign them without hers. That was the way it had had to be when he’d spent half of his time in Mallawindy, and that was the way it would be until he died.

  He lit a second cigarette as he left the house by the back door and made his way around to the cellar where he stood for minutes, looking down into black, feeling black. It had started yesterday when the little bitch who walked like Ellie had turned up with a bloody husband, Nick, the smartarsed bastard. What the hell did they think they were doing turning up here?

  And that phone call last night. It had brought it all back home, taken mind, if not body, back to Mallawindy.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, and he pitched his butt into the wind and turned on the cellar lights.

  They’d put in good lights a few years back, four fluorescent tubes that flooded every corner with white light.

  Birds squawking in the trees, a flock of cockatoos screeching overhead, the world was waking up to join him, so he closed the cellar door on the bloody world and walked down to the ghosts.

  Come Christmas, Ellie would collect a quarter of a million, he thought, which she’d get whether they proved the body was his or not. She was probably wishing the year away. In four and a half months she’d be a rich widow.

  ‘A bloody good catch, cold bed or not,’ he muttered as he took up a wide-necked jar, carefully unscrewing it. ‘Must be thousands in my trust accounts too, just sitting there, untouched.’ The thought of the thousands he couldn’t get his hands on made his head itch. If he could get up to Sydney, he could raid his accounts, live like a king for twelve months.

  ‘Drink myself to bloody death and take my own pitchfork with me. Get the bastard before he gets me.’

  But he couldn’t raid his accounts and he knew it. He couldn’t get his hands on Narrawee money and he couldn’t touch his own money, couldn’t even raid May’s purse these days. She used plastic. Paid for everything with her card and had the money automatically transferred from her account each month.

  ‘Bloody cards for supermarkets! Everything linked into the bloody banks, and she won’t even buy a man a tub of bloody butter.’

  The cops were probably linked to the banks by computer. They’d get him if he tried to make a withdrawal, then Ellie couldn’t claim the Daree body for Jesus, and wouldn’t get her insurance payout. Cops were smart, smarter than they’d been thirty years ago. Technology had caught up with poor bloody Jack Burton and left him high and dry.

  ‘Bone bloody dry.’

  He’d wanted a beer last night. Just one, and bugger his liver. One lousy beer wouldn’t hurt him. He’d explained to May that he could control beer. Always had been able to. It was the whisky that blew his fuse. One bottle of beer to have his own private wake for poor old Jack.

  ‘Mean dictator little bitch.’

  He took a cloth pad from the jar, squeezed it, then he dusted the surface of an old cabinet before wiping the sponge across its aged surface.

  The wood drank the shellac and before his eyes, it came to life. ‘Jesus,’ he said looking closely at the grain. ‘Jesus, look at that. It’s coming up well. Bloody beautiful timber in it. English oak. It’s got to be.’

  For an hour he worked there in silence, the sponge dipping, wiping, each coat of shellac enriching the wood. He should have been wearing gloves, but he wasn’t. He looked at his hands, stained yellow.

  ‘Murdering bloody hands.’

  His hands had always been clean in Mallawindy. He’d kept them clean, scrubbed them raw with Solvol, picked his nails clean with a sharpened match. He stood, staring at his stained hands, at his ragged nails.

  ‘What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes! Will all great Neptune’s oceans wash this blood clean from my hands? No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red,’ he quoted.

  His usually well-shaped fingernails looked like a workman’s. The high point in his life these last months had been spent in this cellar, reclaiming old furniture. Poor bloody Jack had come down to this, to working with his hands because he had nothing else to fill his days and his head. Nothing on television to watch. And May wouldn’t even buy him a cake of bloody Solvol to wash his hands clean. Not for inside. If he wanted Solvol, he had to wash his hands in the laundry with old Harry, the hired help.

  ‘A man has been driven mad by her, and by bloody hair hanging around his collar, by the bloody moustache prickling his bloody nose, and his bloody beard hiding his poor bloody face.’

  It was all his too, and all grey. Grey-headed, grey-bearded old bastard, and May had mirrors hung on every wall to keep forcing the fact home to him.

  Old. On his last legs. Satan sitting down there rubbing his hands in glee while he sharpened up his pitchfork.

  Jack had been indestructible once, thought he’d live forever, or long enough to get what he wanted out of life. All he’d ever wanted was his name on the title to Narrawee. That’s all. It wasn’t much for a man to want, but he couldn’t have it, could he? So the land was his, or Saint bloody Sam’s, the perverted long-haired bastard who stunk of perfumed liquid soap and had bloody head lice.

  Jack scratched his head, raked at it, then checked what was left of his fingernails, expecting to see head lice jumping there. He looked closer. He put Sam’s glasses on, checking out a suspect. Only shellac and sawdust.

  He knew his head was seething with lice. He itched. Itched day and night. And the little bastards had crept down to the hairs on his chest too. It itched. His back itched.

  ‘One bloody big itch.’

  He lit a cigarette and took a fast step back from the shellac, which was more methylated spirits than bug residue. This place would go up like a bonfire. Old wardrobe, old tables, antique couch, rolls of carpet, picture frames. He spent a lot of time down here with the rest of the junk May had been saving for a rainy day.

  ‘Manipulating, using, mean-minded little bitch.’ He liked the look of old frames. ‘Might start on them next,’ he muttered and ground his cigarette into the floor.

  The rain was pouring down again. He could see it thrashing the small ground level window, spattering earth onto the glass. May and her manager would be smiling.

  ‘Stuff the bloody rain,’ he yelled. ‘I hope your bloody bulls drown, die of footrot. Ah!’ he snarled and his sponge dipped and he smoothed on another coat of shellac.

  He liked wood. Liked the smell of it. Liked rubbing down worn-out surfaces to get to what was underneath. He liked the smell of shellac too, and he stared now at a two-litre can of methylated spirits, considering it as a possible pick-me-up, a possible entrance into the forgetfulness of foggy days. Fast days, those had been, racing days, their birth and death in the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  He licked his lips, ran his tongue over his teeth and laughed, thinking of the cops trying to track down those teeth. His dentist was in Collins Street, and the name on his file was Samuel, as it had been for thirty years. May had put a bit of money into his teeth in the past few years. He’d snapped one of the front ones in half, so she’d bought him two new capped front teeth for the Christmas of ’95.

  And why not? She’d put a king’s ransom into the house, and she paid old Harry, her gardener, a fortune to forest the place with flowers, make it into a showpiece. So poor bloody Jack was her showpiece too, her performing pup. So let her pay to keep his snarl intact.

  He never laid a finger on the earth. Crops refused to strike if he looked at them. Plants curled up and died if he walked by. Sullen, wet, resentful earth, it hated him, and the wet old trees whispered about him, pissed on him, and his bloody father’s ghost hooted at him when he wandered the land at night. That bastard knew he was Jack, and knew that Jack�
�s name would never be on the title.

  But when he was out, when he was in town, the property was his, and the Melbourne solicitors and accountants thought the property was his. He was the only Samuel Burton they’d seen in thirty years.

  He straightened, stretched his shoulders, his neck. The winter chill had crept into his joints this year, and winter hung on, determined to wear him down, kill him with old age. He needed heat and some of Ellie’s curried chicken soup to sweat the aches out of him. Chicken soup and a feed of her sago plum pudding, lost beneath fresh cream. A few fresh eggs fried in butter, served on thick toast, made against hot coals. And a slab of her bloody pumpkin cake with a plaster of scalded cream on top.

  She could cook, he’d say that for Ellie. She could make something out of nothing and have you asking for more. May lived on dry hash and rabbit food; his taste buds were shrivelling for lack of use, or old age had hit them as well as his liver. Nothing tasted like it used to – even the cream he sometimes smuggled into the trolley at the supermarket didn’t taste like cream.

  Almost sixty-bloody-seven. Three years away from seventy. He shook his head. He couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it; might as well be dead once you hit seventy. Maybe he should hang himself from the rafters and get it over and done with.

  He’d come face to face with his age in America that first year. It had crept out of a hotel mirror in New York and king-hit him. He hated America for that. Refused to go back there.

  He’d worn his wig and fake mo for months after he’d run from Mallawindy, and he’d kept his head low playing the role of teetotaller Saint Sam, complete with his fake halo. Knowing that Jack was hiding beneath that wig and mo had been enough to keep him sane. Sleeping each night as Jack, then putting on his Sam-face each morning had been an extension of the old role he’d played since Liza and Sam had died. He could do it, and did it well. He’d got a kick out of it back then, and if his audience didn’t applaud, they’d been convinced.

  May had applauded. They’d been happy for a while.