When he threw up, the thin dribble of vomit splashing into the grave brought him to his senses. No, he had to stay calm. He had to focus. Choking back the urge to scream and keep on screaming, John threw his desperate energies into digging.
By the close of the third hour, the grave was surely deep enough: about one metre, give or take. John let the shovel fall. Blisters and raw skin lined his palms. Grabbing Lyle by the ankles, he dragged him into the hole as the disturbed flies, buzzing, kept circling and landing, circling and landing.
Fuck. The grave was too short. John would have to manipulate the body to fit.
The thought of touching it, skin on skin, gave John the dry heaves.
Finally, steeling himself, he took hold of Lyle’s head and tried to tuck the chin to the shoulder. Futile: the neck had stiffened. Rigor mortis? Already? John wrenched his hand away as if stung. Lyle’s face had changed too. It seemed as if he were clenching his jaw, pulling back his lips in a grimace to show both rows of teeth.
John fought against dizziness. Working quickly, he gripped Lyle’s feet, bent the knees and turned both legs at the hips, stuffing the legs into the hole. He shoved in the schoolbag next to the body and began shovelling dirt into the grave.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped, “Jesus, I’m so fucking sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I swear to God, I didn’t mean it…”
And he was crying again; crying like a kid, with fat tears rolling one after the other down his cheeks and his nose running with snot. He flung the dirt over the legs first, then the torso. Once the dirt reached the chest, he paused, suddenly afraid.
“Are you really dead?” he said. “Come on, mate. Are you dead?”
Kneeling down, he shook Lyle by the shoulder, pulled at both eyelids with his thumbs, pressed his fingers into the throat to find a pulse. Nothing, nothing…
Quit spooking yourself.
But when John picked up the shovelful of dirt and held it over the waxen face, the irrational feeling (fear?) that Lyle wasn’t dead after all stayed his hand. Buried alive…wasn’t that one of the worst ways to die? Frantically, John threw aside the shovel to check again the body’s carotid arteries. No pulse. He was furious at himself now. There is no pulse, okay? Lyle is dead. Finish burying him.
Yet he couldn’t do it with the shovel.
Weeping, John picked up handfuls of dirt and packed them gently around Lyle’s head. When only Lyle’s face showed, John covered the forehead, cheeks, eyes, and had to stop. He stared carefully at the nose and mouth.
Buried alive…
He grabbed the shovel. Looking into the trees, wheezing, guts churning, he flung the dirt into the grave until Lyle was gone. Then he leapt up and frantically shovelled the remainder of the dirt as fast as he could, his muscles burning and the breath rasping in and out of his parched throat. When the grave was full, he walked over it, tamping it down. Once the grave was as flat as he could make it, he scooped up the piled leaf litter by the shovelful and scattered the leaves over the bare ground.
Breathless, he stood back and surveyed his work.
You couldn’t tell.
Honest to God, you could not tell.
The site looked no different from the land surrounding it.
“Don’t haunt me,” he whispered. Did he believe in ghosts? He wasn’t sure. “Mate, you know it was an accident.”
No answer, of course.
He picked up the shovel and his t-shirt, and staggered back to the river, to the esky with melted ice and one remaining beer, to the fishing rod, the tackle box, the gurgling of the current, the call of birds hidden in the trees, the old man’s Commodore. Everything looked so normal.
John spent a long time washing the shovel.
When Lyle failed to return from Aaron’s house that Sunday night, his parents reported him missing. The police quickly established that Lyle had never reached Aaron’s house. The last sighting was of him walking the footpath alongside the highway, carrying his schoolbag, as reported by a neighbour who had waved at him while cycling past. Lyle had waved back. Sometime later, he had just…disappeared.
Over the next few days, the police interviewed everyone associated with Lyle.
They interviewed John at home.
The detective, a man named Barker, wore a green suit with his hair slicked back from his forehead. John showed Barker to the kitchen table and they both sat down. His adoptive parents were out on the patio, wanting no part of this. John couldn’t meet the detective’s eye. Instead, he stared at the table and kept his hands clutched in his lap, his blistered and raw-skinned hands. He felt sick inside.
“I understand this is tough for you,” Barker said. “Lyle is your best friend?”
John nodded.
Barker opened a notebook, clicked a pen. “Can I start by asking you where you were on Sunday?”
“Fishing in Warburton.”
“All day?”
“Most of it.”
“Righto.” Barker made a note. “Can anyone verify that?”
“Uh, the bartender at the Warburton pub: a bald bloke with a goatee beard. I was there sometime mid-morning for a couple of pots.”
Barker made another note. “When did you last see Lyle?”
“At school on Friday.”
“Did he seem to be acting differently in any way? Unusually happy, for instance? Maybe sad or angry? Anxious? Depressed, in your opinion?”
John shrugged.
“Was anything troubling him in particular?” Barker went on.
“I don’t think so.”
“Had he confided in you lately about problems? An issue with a mate or a girlfriend, perhaps? Is Lyle unhappy at home?”
“If he was upset about stuff, he didn’t tell me about it.”
“All right, that’s fine. What about drugs? Does he take any drugs that you’re aware of? Prescription meds? Dope? You can tell me, son. You won’t get in strife, I give you my word. All I care about is finding Lyle.”
John shook his head. “He smoked and drank. That’s it.”
Barker paused, closed the notepad. “You think he’s dead?”
Startled, John looked up. The detective was watching him closely.
“Dead? Why would I think that?”
“Because you spoke about him in the past tense.”
“I did?”
“Yeah,” the detective said. “You did. Instead of saying, ‘He smokes and drinks’, you said, ‘He smoked and drank’, as if he were already dead.”
“Well, shit… I didn’t mean it that way.”
Barker drummed his fingertips on the table. Then he tucked the notepad into his inside jacket pocket, clicked the pen and stashed it with the notepad. He smoothed a palm over his hair as if to check the gel was still holding. “Was Lyle mixed up in anything serious?” he said.
“Serious like what?”
“Crimes, gangs,” Barker said. “Some type of illegal activity.”
“Not that I know of.”
“No enemies?”
“None.”
“Lyle was expected at Aaron’s place to finish a science project. Can you think of any reason why he wouldn’t have gone to Aaron’s place?”
Because he came fishing with me…
John gazed at the table’s green swirling pattern. Despite himself, he could feel tears rising. “I don’t know,” he said.
“That’s fine.” Barker took out a business card and put it on the table between them. “If you think of any information that might be helpful, give me a call.”
“Yeah, sure.”
The detective stood up. John followed him to the door. They shook hands. Barker didn’t seem to notice the raw skin and blisters on John’s palm. So much for the sixth sense of police officers… John’s stomach lurched, making him want to vomit. He watched Barker stri
de along the driveway to the unmarked cop car, get in, and speed away. John kept staring out at nothing.
The old man came in through the back door where he had been waiting on the patio, obviously spying through a window. He said, “Well? How did it go?”
John shut the front door.
“Have they got any ideas on what’s happened to Lyle?” the old man said.
John trudged down the hall to his bedroom.
The Berg-Olsens wouldn’t let him see Merry. They wouldn’t let him talk to her on the phone either. She’s not well, they kept saying. Please try again later.
It made a weird kind of sense, he finally decided. After all, how could he face her after killing her brother? Wouldn’t she read his guilt in his body language, tone of voice, the touch of his hand? Even if he could have convinced her that Lyle’s death had been an accident, what then?
She would have hated him.
And rightly so.
She would have told her parents, her friends. Somebody would have turned him in to the police. And he’d be languishing now in jail, with decades yet to go…
No, no, no.
Stop.
Choices had been made. It was too late to go back.
At a mere eighteen years of age, John had destroyed everything of value in his life. He wanted to sleep and never wake up. Depression flattened him. Lethargic, without the sufficient energy to suicide, he fantasised about car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, leukaemia, allergic reactions to peanuts, measles, violent home invasions, choking on a chicken bone…
He didn’t return to school. Getting out of bed every morning proved to be impossible. He was so tired. The nightmare kept him awake half the night. Always the same dream: Lyle screaming and suffocating under dirt.
At first, John’s parents were patient. For a couple of weeks, they indulged him, tiptoed around him. Then they got fed up; soon after that, mad as hell.
“You lazy sod,” his mother yelled one day in early summer. “Get up!”
He obeyed. While she slammed around in the kitchen, making coffee and muttering under her breath, John dressed, packed a bag and quietly left. Hours later, he was stepping aboard the Spirit of Tasmania ferry, bound for Devonport, Tasmania.
Within a few days of arrival, he sent a postcard to his parents: I’m living in Tassie and I’m fine. Initially, he assumed they might try to find him via police or private investigators. But no, they hadn’t. At first, their lack of interest hurt, sharply and deeply. After a few months, however, the freedom of this grimy little town and the mindlessness of his job at the carpet factory combined to give him the happiest time of his life. Well, perhaps happy overstated it.
More like content.
Yes, he’d been content in Devonport. Within walking distance of his cabin, twenty minutes along the same street, a pub full of wood and leather booths offered cheap fettuccini carbonara, rib-eye steak with mushroom sauce, chicken parmigiana, surf ‘n’ turf. Four nights per week, he frequented the pub. The remaining three dinners consisted of simple fare, on toast, he prepared at home—baked beans, eggs, sardines—to mirror his simple life, and he had eaten those meals on the veranda overlooking Bass Strait no matter what the weather. He enjoyed watching the ships. In summer, the sea glittered under a bright dome of blue sky. In winter, the horizon disappeared inside cloud, fog and rain. He preferred the view in winter; the ships moving in and out of the mist appeared and disappeared like ghostly apparitions.
If the carpet factory had not gone bust, he would no doubt still be there.
As if in a fugue state, he had lived the same weekly routine in Devonport over and over and over, and it had calmed him, anaesthetised him. The same food, the same bullshit from the managers and co-workers at the factory, the same conversation from the Russian bloke who ran the corner supermarket who used to wink and say, “The eye can see it, but the tooth can’t bite it” (which didn’t mean anything until John had started to live with Meredith, until he realised that he was helpless against her), the same blare of ship-horns in the dead of night, the same terrible dream…
His cigarette had gone out.
Sitting on the bed, shivering, John dropped the butt into the ashtray.
Stop raking over the past, he thought. Lyle’s been dead for thirty-one years.
Donna has the right attitude. Did you mean to do this thing, whatever it is? So, it was an accident. Then how can you blame yourself if you didn’t mean to do it? From now on, he would try to his best to reframe the incident—
(murder)
—through Donna’s perspective.
But, by God, he would always regret not telling the police the truth. Regret gnawed at his insides like an ulcer. Yes, it had been an accident. Stupidly, he had panicked and buried Lyle. By the time he had realised his error, it was too late. How could he have gone to the police and explained Lyle’s death as an accident after spending hours upon hours carefully burying the corpse? Who would have believed him? Nobody: that’s who.
Yet if he had told the truth…
Things may have turned out differently.
If Lyle had been given a proper burial, in a cemetery with a headstone, the Berg-Olsens would have got closure, at least. Perhaps Meredith would have dodged the death wish that had taken her into locked wards and, ultimately, into the hands of that monster, Sebastian, who had made her a monster in his own image. Perhaps John would have applied for that plumber’s apprenticeship, found a woman to love who loved him back, married her and bought a house, had some children…
No, fuck it. Stop.
Trembling, he lit another cigarette.
How many more times would he fret over this exact same point?
What’s done is done.
You play the hand you’re dealt, and all that bullshit.
A great fatigue swept through him. Gritting his teeth, he wiped a hand across his stubbled face and tried to throw off the dark mood.
What’s done is done. He repeated it over and over in his mind, like a mantra.
He looked about the room. While he had been chain-smoking and torturing himself with memories, dawn had crept around the edges of his window. He dressed in yesterday’s clothes, opened the curtains, and went into the back yard.
The air felt cold and crisp. At this time of the morning, everything looked washed out and grey. There were no sounds apart from the half-hearted clucking of wattlebirds, the cheerful whistling of a blackbird. John went to his vegie patch.
Crouching, he poked a finger into the black soil—red, volcanic soil, easy to dig with an undersized shovel—and found it too dry for his liking. Uncoiling the hose, he turned on the tap and sprayed a fine mist of water over the tomato and capsicum seedlings, moving the hose constantly from side to side so as not to pummel any of the tiny leaves.
This is what soil means to me now, he thought with great determination, nodding, biting at his lip. It is a medium in which to grow things. And he grew lots of wonderful things, each plant tended with such care and attention that it yielded large, healthy and brightly-coloured vegetables. He had never tasted better vegetables than the ones he grew himself. In a couple of months, when these spindly little seedlings would be waist-high and drooping under the weight of heavy, red fruit, he would give tomatoes to Donna by the kilogram.
His thoughts turned to last night’s dinner after the circus, the unexpected breaking of the ice with Cassie, and the lingering kiss from Donna that held so much promise. He glanced at his watch. Donna would probably be in the shower by now, getting ready for her 7 a.m. Sunday shift at the café.
He longed to see her again.
It was too soon, but to hell with playing it cool. He would find some excuse for visiting her house later that day.
9
Donna finished work at 3 p.m. on Sundays, he recalled, so John gave her an hour’s grace. He crossed the road with a
bottle of chardonnay and knocked.
When she opened the door and saw him, her face lit up. Honest to God, she actually lit up. He grinned, could feel his eyes shining, his blood pumping.
I’m in, he marvelled. In like Flynn.
He lifted the paper bag. “A thank you present,” he said, “for dinner last night.”
Donna giggled. “And dinner was a thank you present for the circus. There was no need, but you’re very sweet. Come on in.”
He followed her to the kitchen. She was wearing tracksuit pants, t-shirt, bare feet, her hair pulled into a low ponytail. A half-empty glass of wine sat on the bench, and he put the bottle next to it.
“How was work?” he said.
She shrugged. “Oh, you know: same old same old.” She took the bottle out of the bag and admired the label. “Gosh, this looks expensive.”
John felt himself blush. “The sheila at the bottle-shop reckons it’s very popular with chardonnay lovers. I wouldn’t know. I don’t drink the stuff myself.”
“Well, I’m going to save it for a special occasion.” Donna put the wine into the fridge and, with a flourish, took out a beer stubby. “Ta-dah. Look what I’ve got for you. Victoria Bitter is your tipple of choice, right?”
“Right.”
A warm flush spread through him as he took the stubby. When was the last time anybody had done anything like this for him? Kept him in their thoughts while going about their business? Jesus, she must have gone to buy wine and decided to buy something for him too. He choked up, just a little, and swallowed hard.
Oblivious, Donna continued, “I’ll make sure to stash a half-dozen from now on. Oh no, shit, I didn’t get a stubby holder. They were right by the register too.”
“No worries. It’ll be down the hatch before it gets warm anyway.”
They both laughed. Donna topped up her glass from a two-litre cardboard cask, almost to the brim, and walked through the kitchen into the lounge. John trailed behind. They took their customary seats; John on the couch facing the fireplace, Donna on the couch against the windows. He had been drinking slowly but steadily all day and felt relaxed, sociable; almost happy.
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