All That I Remember About Dean Cola

by Tania Chandler

  You were fine, Christos said, breathless as he swung back into the Mazda. Ambos and fireys were on the way. Was the fire out, I wanted to know. Getting me to hospital was of utmost importance, he said. How did he know an ambulance and the CFA were coming? It would be quicker if he drove me to the hospital himself. There was no pain in my hands. I thought they must have been fine too. The dermis and some of the underlying tissue had been destroyed, that’s why there was no feeling.

  I blacked out. I woke. I thought I was still with you in the Skyline, but we’d swapped seats and you were driving. I asked why we were going back. But it was Christos, taking me to hospital. He was heading in the wrong direction.

  Then we were at Broken River Road? Christos said he had to get something from inside the house. I must have blacked out again, and then I was awake. I asked if Catsby had food in his bowl. I worried that he might drown in the toilet when nobody was there, so I always locked him in the kitchen before I went out. But I couldn’t remember if I’d fed him. Christos swore. I asked if he was sure you were fine, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said I was having a psychotic episode — after he had dropped me home after work, I’d called him saying Mum, Nan, and Pop were at the pokies, I was alone, and I was going to burn down the house. Christos had hurried back but hadn’t been fast enough. The house was on fire, and I’d hurt my hands very badly, but everything was going to be all right. He’d just pulled me from the blaze, saved me. Lucky. He forced a tablet into my mouth, saying it would help me calm down.

  In the side mirror of the Mazda, I saw flames climb the front-window curtains. It must have been true.

  I screamed for Catsby. [A sniff] Christos told me he would be fine too.

  [A pause] None of what happened that night between you and me was real. You were the one who’d hurt me at Sandro D’Angelo’s party. You hadn’t come back to the pub. My involvement in the car accident had been a hallucination. And Christos and I hadn’t really left you there to die. (This is what the doctors and Christos told me.)

  It started to rain.

  And that’s all that I remember about you, Dean Cola.

  [Click]

  I GLANCED at the rear-view mirror, at Jordy in the back, strapped in her car seat. ‘I love you,’ I cooed. She giggled and kicked up her feet. We drove across the bridge. ‘This is where I used to live,’ I said as we passed the Broken River Road turn-off. Aubrey, in the passenger seat, looked up from her phone and yawned.

  The airport, the sprawling housing estates, the railway line. The chicken shop was gone; the whole block had been turned into a shopping centre. The caravan park was still there.

  ‘Dad might be moving back,’ Aubrey said.

  ‘Oh. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Pretty happy. Mum’s happy too. She’s stopped drinking.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And Dad’s taking me to Luna Park.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Don’t be jealous. We can still go, another time.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m not jealous.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘We can take Jordy when she’s a bit bigger.’

  ‘Mmm.’ We headed north, past the lake.

  ‘There’s the pub where I used to work.’ A big black-and-white sign on the front advertised POKIES. Aside from that, it looked relatively upmarket — French doors open to the street, tables with white tablecloths in what had been the front bar. The motel was gone, turned into a section of the pub: a glassed-in courtyard beer garden.

  ‘And that’s the showground where I kissed a boy one New Year’s Eve.’ I checked the rear-view mirror again; Jordy had fallen asleep.

  ‘I’ll meet you back at the car in about an hour,’ I said to Aubrey as I lifted Jordy, still asleep, from the car seat and into her pram.

  ‘Can’t I come with you?’ Aubrey said.

  ‘I told you, it’ll be boring.’ I buckled Jordy’s straps.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Aubrey looked down the deserted main drag.

  ‘You wanted to come.’

  ‘Where is the real-estate agent?’

  I sighed inwardly. ‘OK, it’s actually the hardware shop I need to go to.’

  Aubrey screwed up her face. ‘What for?’

  ‘Sort out some old stuff. Here,’ I handed her twenty dollars from my purse, ‘go get something to eat.’

  ‘Can I take Jordy?’

  My heart fluttered, wanting me to say No. I hadn’t left her with anybody before. ‘OK.’ I tucked Jordy’s blanket around her and kissed the top of her head. She felt like warm velvet.

  I watched them head off towards the town centre.

  Every second or third shop was vacant. ‘Closing down’ signs, broken windows, and dead leaves. Cola Hardware was still there, the blue-and-green signage faded. A wheelbarrow of dried-out pot plants, a bin of brooms, and a few tubs of assorted dusty tools stood out front.

  The door tinkled as I entered. Frank Cola was sitting at the desk down the back, and Anna was rearranging tins of paint on a shelf. ‘Morning, love.’ Frank stood and glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘I mean afternoon. How can I help you?’ He was wearing a faded polo shirt.

  Why hadn’t I planned what I was going to say to them? What had I come for? Closure? Redemption? Frank and Anna couldn’t give that to me, and nothing I said was going to help them. Driving all this way had been a stupid idea. ‘I’m Sidney.’

  Recognition furrowed Anna’s brow; Frank looked at me blankly.

  ‘I used to live around here. I was a friend of Dean.’

  Frank sat back down.

  ‘Have a chair, Sidney. You like a coffee?’ Anna said, heading out the back before I answered. The doorway was naked — no teardrop beads.

  I sat on the chair next to the desk. Obel Cola’s photo was still pinned to the corkboard, faded so much it appeared he was standing in a snowstorm. There were several photos of Shelley: university graduation; in a wedding dress; with a baby; with a toddler and a baby. There was only one snapshot of Dean: about the age he was in the part of my memory where I’d kept him, where it was always summer — almost as gorgeous as my imagination had tailor-made him — sitting where Frank was now. Next to the snapshots was pinned a yellowed front page of The Adviser from 15 July 1991. Horror road smash on back road. I was too far away to read the text below the headline, but I could see the photo of a Nissan Skyline burnt out and wrapped around a tree, and an insert of Dean playing football. Why would the Colas keep that news page, where they would see it every day, and be reminded? Guilt? Punishment?

  I wondered if Italians’ funerals were similar to Greeks’. Christos’s brothers had come to his from overseas and interstate, and family and friends I hadn’t known existed had filled the church. They’d kissed him in his open coffin. I had pretended to. The service had been conducted in Greek, so I had no idea what they were saying or singing. At the gravesite, the priest had poured oil, red wine, and boiled wheat — which Sophia and Christos’s aunt Tina had prepared — over the coffin. Sophia told me the oil was for anointing, the wine was for cleansing, and she couldn’t remember what the wheat was for. The mourners had placed handfuls of sand in the grave, symbolising a return to the earth.

  ‘Tell me what you remember about Dean,’ Frank said.

  I looked from the corkboard to Frank, struck by the realisation that Dean had been so insubstantial to me that, discounting what had been on the cassette, I didn’t really remember much about him at all. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  Frank told me that Dean was so smart at school, at books, but a silly boy. He’d warned and warned him about drunk driving. ‘We shouldn’t buy him that new car. Too powerful.’

  I’m sorry.

  Frank glanced at the back doorway and lowered his voice. ‘There was somebody else there that night. I kn
ew a bloke from Red Wolf freight lived out that way. He’s the one who call the ambulance and fireys. He saw a second car. Maybe they run Dean off the road? Maybe he still alive then? They stop, but not help him.’

  I felt hot, but there was an icy twinge in my chest, or the back of my throat. I put a hand to my left clavicle but couldn’t locate the precise source of the pain.

  ‘I tell the cops about the second car, but they don’t listen, don’t do nothing, lazy. A half-arse investigation so they don’t have extra paperwork.’

  It hurt to breathe.

  ‘Too long ago, Frank,’ Anna said as she returned with the coffees and a plate of those lemon biscuits. ‘Sidney doesn’t want to hear your conspiracy theories. You should take down that old news story.’

  ‘Soon.’

  Anna shook her head.

  I glanced at the door, suddenly aching for Jordy. My everything. Once Dean would have been Anna’s everything. He cried for you. I’m sorry I couldn’t hold his hand.

  ‘Where did you go, Sidney?’ Frank said.

  I frowned.

  ‘Where you live now?’

  ‘Oh. Melbourne.’

  ‘We leaving soon too. Up to the border. Play the pokie machines all the time.’ He winked.

  Anna scoffed. ‘Pokies everywhere now, love.’

  ‘Better than this.’ Frank gestured at the sparse, dusty stock on the shelves. ‘Nobody come here anymore. They all go to bloody Bunnings.’

  I finished my coffee and biscuit, stood, and said I’d better be going. ‘A long drive back. And then my daughter and I are heading off tonight for a holiday in Tasmania.’

  ‘Why you want to go to bloody Tassie?’ Frank said. ‘That’s where Dean say he want to go too. Hobart. Just before the car accident, I get so angry I tell him he have to move away. Melbourne not far enough. We fight. I stop paying for his university. My son. I shouldn’t do that. I do what I think is the right thing at the time. But sad now, always.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I never understand why he come back that night.’

  Anna looked at me as if she understood, as if she forgave me. Of course, she didn’t and wouldn’t have, but it was enough — it would have to be. She reached out and held my hands.

  The door tinkled. Aubrey and Jordy — so substantial — backlit fire-gold by the winter sunshine. ‘Ready to go home now?’ Aubrey said.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my partner, Greg, for his love and support, and for putting up with me during this (not easy, I know); and the rest of my family: Reece, Paige, Jaime, and my mother, Pam. Thank you to Graeme Simsion for restoring my confidence in my writing when all was lost; for reading early drafts; for your wisdom, honesty, and generosity; for being my sounding board and the voice of reason; for the walks and talks; and for always being only a phone call away, no matter where you were in the world (before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdown). Thank you to Fran Willcox for reading, being my shoulder to cry on (you know how many tears went into this), for your encouragement, and for helping me ‘keep on truckin’’ every time the wheels fell off. Thank you to Paige D’Arcy for helping to bring Aubrey to life. Thank you to Jaime D’Arcy for listening, and for your love, clever ideas, and singing in the car.

  Thank you to my first readers and the experts who helped with advice on everything from firefighting, psychiatry, and severe burn injury to bonsai, Greek traditions, and art therapy: Jenny Green, Janice Simpson, Anita Smith, Paula Keogh, Anne Buist, Steve O’Malley, Michelle McSweeney, George Panagiotidis, Aoife Clifford, Jennifer Berlingieri, Danny Rosner-Blay, Sean Donovan, and Bonsai Kyogei. Thank you to Paul Taylor for planting the seed of the bonsai moss idea, and to Span Community House for the writing space.

  Thank you to Scribe. Thank you to Sandy Cull for the awesome cover design. And last but certainly not least (like Heather Locklear in the credits of Melrose Place), a huge thank you to my editor, David Golding.