by Tim Buckley
“Yes, it is,” I said, looking out to the water. “Beautiful.”
“I really can’t think of anywhere I would rather be, isn’t that a blessing? I say it to Charles all of the time, we are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place.”
She stared out to sea and it was as if she’d forgotten I was there. When I looked more closely, she seemed even older then I’d at first thought – in her eighties, maybe? – and the black coat she wore over her thick, black dress was threadbare in spots. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was from the old folks’ home in Dunsborough, if she should really be here alone or at all.
“Do you live around here, then?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you here before?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “I live up there, my husband’s the keeper.”
She pointed and when I turned around I saw she was pointing at the lighthouse.
“Your husband’s the keeper? Of the lighthouse?”
She nodded. “Thirty years.”
“And you live up there?”
“That’s right. I’ve just come down to collect some cockles from the rock pools, but there aren’t so many today, I’m afraid. Every day I come down, sometimes to collect seashells too. And you, do you come here to collect cockles?”
She spoke slowly, deliberately, as though she thought I might not have a good grasp of the language. By now I really was worried that she was in trouble and I racked my brain to think of a way to get her somewhere safe. I couldn’t get her back up the cliff path, that much was for sure, and my phone was back up there in the jeep.
“No,” I said, “no, I just come to admire the view.”
“So powerful,” she said, looking at the sea again and then turning to me. She came up close as though she had a secret to tell. “We’re only here by its good grace, you know? Any time, at any moment, it could rise up and take it all away, take everything away.” She stabbed a gentle finger into my chest. “You never know when it could all be taken away.”
I waited for her to go on, but she just stared at me.
“Listen, how did you get here?” I said, trying hard not to offend her. “How will you get home?”
But she just kept staring.
“Tell you what,” I said, eventually, “why don’t you wait here and I’ll just… I’ll go and get my car and maybe we can go for a coffee or something?”
“He’ll be waiting,” she said, shaking her head. “Waiting for his tea and to turn on the lights.”
“OK, look – just stay here, I’ll be back in a few minutes and then I’ll… we’ll take you home. Is that OK?”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said, smiling as she came suddenly out of the trance, “if you’re sure it wouldn’t be any trouble?”
“No, no trouble,” I said and I turned and ran back to the base of the cliff, then scrambled up the path. I got to the top wheezing and out of breath, my heart pounding, and when I got to the car, I called the police station in Clovelly.
“Listen,” I said to the constable, “I’m down at the lighthouse on Cape Moonlight and there’s an old woman on the beach. I don’t think she’s quite right – she thinks she lives in the lighthouse. I can’t get her up to my jeep and it’s miles to walk anywhere. Can you do something?”
“Do you know where she’s come from?”
“No idea.”
“OK. Can you just stay with her and I’ll call the coastguard down at Skeleton Cove? They’ve got a jeep, they’ll come up the beach to where you are. Might take a little while though, I don’t know how they’re fixed out there. I’ll call you on this number, yeah?”
I looked at my watch but there was nothing much I could do – I had to wait with her until help came.
“OK, thanks, mate,” I said, shrugging to myself. “I’ll go back down and wait for the cavalry.”
It was getting cooler so I grabbed my jacket from the jeep and ran back to the top of the path. I couldn’t see her from the clifftop so I scuttled down as quickly as I could and ran out onto the beach. She was nowhere to be seen. I called out but the crash of the waves drowned out my voice. I ran down to the water’s edge, ran back to the other side of the cliff wall, nothing. I peered over to the south, away from the water, but the beach was empty and there was no way she could have made it to the dunes.
I spun round in circles, sure she must be here, but there was no sign of her and nowhere for her to be hidden from my view. Eventually, I took out my phone and pressed redial.
“It’s me again,” I said, slowly, conscious that I was the one who sounded crazy. “Listen, mate, she’s erm, gone… I can’t see her anywhere. It’s like she just disappeared…”
13
Karl was back at work at the farm a couple of days after his abortive attempt at revenge on the Gretz swimming pool. He muttered a sheepish “Mornin’” without looking at me as he passed on his way to the tool shed, but I caught hold of his arm and stopped him.
“Look, Karl,” I said, “we can’t pretend the other night never happened but we can put it behind us, yeah? We have to work together and we’re both looking out for your mum, so let’s just forget it and go back to being mates. And if you’ve ever got a problem and you can’t talk to Bobby, just come and talk to me, all right? I might not be able to help but I promise I’ll do whatever I can. Deal?”
I put out a hand and he took it with an awkward half-smile that was embarrassed and probably a little bit relieved.
The political machinations of a small town are no different to those of the great global centres, just on a smaller scale. People are no less petty and self-centred just because they live in a smaller place. I know that Sergeant Willis is a good bloke. He’s a decent man with a nice family whose only real objective is to keep peace and order in the town. He’s not above turning a blind eye to some small indiscretion if it causes no harm and he’s happy to come down like the proverbial ton of bricks on the smallest misdemeanour if he thinks the lesson will be well learned for the future. But, to his frustration, he’s also subject to the pressures of his overseers in the town’s government classes, and that sometimes skews the delivery of justice.
I was coming out of the post office a couple of days after Bobby’s café was trashed when I bumped into him on the street.
“Any news on Bobby’s place?” I asked him after we’d swapped small talk.
“Not so far, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’ve been all over it but there’s nothing. You’d hope usually that they might have torn some clothes on a sharp edge or even dropped something – but no such luck this time. But I’ll let you know if we find anything. Bobby OK, is she?”
“Not really, no. She’s pretty shaken up and the insurance company’s being a bit sticky because the alarm didn’t go off. It’s going to take a while to get it all sorted.”
He nodded.
“She’s a tough nut, Bobby, she’ll be right. Like I say, we’ll do everything we can.”
It shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise that the police could find nothing to provide any sort of clue to who had been responsible – crime scene forensics capabilities were in fairly thin supply this far from the city. The fact was that, while everybody agreed it had been a disgraceful act, the town wasn’t going to commit the resources to bring in the big guns for what had been, after all, just an act of vandalism. And they were even less likely to spend the money when everybody suspected what nobody was saying – that Walter Gretz was probably at the bottom of it. Leo Gretz seemed like such a nice fellow that you wondered what dark evil coursed through the veins of his wife’s people that led them to spawn a little shit like Walter. The problem was that people felt sorry for Bobby, but nobody really wanted to upset the town’s biggest employer. Bobby was, after all, a hard-working but powerless single mother and she wasn’t going to cause a fuss, and Leo Gretz would, they reassured themselves, take care of things beh
ind the closed doors of his own home. Probably best, then, to draw a line under the whole sorry affair and move on. And probably best, too, if Bobby just let Walter back into the café and put an end to all of this unpleasantness. The town nodded sagely to itself and got on with things.
So in spite of Willis’s reassurances, there seemed to be no progress in the investigation – in fact, the police seemed to have moved on to other things. To make matters worse, Walter was swanning around town and, whether he did it or not, he actually seemed to be revelling in his unspoken notoriety.
I was in The Pantry one morning not long after talking to Willis, editing a magazine article that I was writing for one of the local wine producers, when Gretz came in with a few of his morons. As usual, he was loud and grating. He threw his bag on the floor, sat into a chair with his feet up on the chair opposite, and shouted over to Gemma, the girl who was working behind the counter.
“Strawberry milkshake, darlin’,” he said, “and a choc chip cookie.”
Then he muttered something to his mates and they all looked over at her and sniggered. One of them punched him on the arm and they started play-fighting, knocking over a chair and banging into the table beside them, almost spilling coffee on the woman sitting there and tipping over a little flower pot. Gretz, of course, thought that was hilarious and clapped his mate on the back, braying like a donkey. I tried to ignore them as best I could and got on with what I was doing. The woman at the table beside them stood up and left and another couple, who were sitting in the far corner, gathered up their bags and finished their coffees. After five minutes of their bullshit, I’d had enough. I went over to where they were sitting.
“Walter, isn’t it?” I said, because we weren’t really on first name terms.
“Yeah,” he chirped back. “Who wants to know?”
“Listen, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be in here but that’s none of my business so I’m going to let it slide. But if you are going to come in here, you’re going to behave yourself. That means you’re not going piss other people off and – and I really can’t stress this enough – it means you’re not going to piss me off. Do you hear me, Walter?”
“Or you’ll do what?” he sneered and the rest of them giggled.
I’m guessing Walter wasn’t often challenged by a town that wasn’t quite sure how to handle him or his kind. He’d built a sort of invincibility over the years and people had pandered to it and fed it so that he really did feel untouchable. His problem was that I was new in town, I didn’t depend on his father for a living and I didn’t care. There’s nothing big or tough or scary about me, but I’m bigger and tougher and scarier than him and I’m probably bigger and tougher and scarier than anybody who’d defied him in a long time.
“Here’s what I’ll do, Walter,” I said, leaning over the table and into his face. “I’ll haul your fat, lardy arse up out of that seat, I’ll drag it over to the door and out onto the street. You see that rubbish bin out there, on the lamppost? I passed it on the way in and, I don’t know what it is, but it smells like a dog died in there. I nearly puked, I’m telling you. Well, I’ll shove your head down into that bin and I’ll take bets on how long you can last without throwing up. And I’ll make sure that all your fuckwit mates in here can see you, and that all the folks out there can see you, so that everybody knows exactly what a useless piece of refuse you are. That’s what I’ll do, Walter, and I’d fucking defy you to think of a way to stop me.”
I slapped him gently in the face a couple of times, smiled and turned to walk back to my table. He said nothing for a minute, then found his voice.
“You want to watch who you’re talking to, pal,” he said, not quite so bullish but there was still venom in his words. “I’ve got a lot more friends in this town than you, so your friends’d want to watch their backs!”
And just like that, Walter stepped over the line. I stopped still for a split second then turned around and, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, dragged him over to the door and out onto the street. I marched him over to the bin and smiled apologetically at a couple of passers-by who were staring at the spectacle, then plunged his face into the sticky, rancid rubbish.
“Learned your lesson yet?” I said, pulling his head out but keeping a grip of his collar while he coughed and spluttered and lashed out with his arms. “No? OK, let’s try again.”
I dunked him one more time as he flailed and thrashed under my grip. I snapped a picture of him on my phone and then I pulled him out again.
“All right, all right,” he screamed, spitting out fetid rubbish and swatting at the bluebottles buzzing around his head. “I’m sorry, all right!”
“Good man, Walter, I appreciate that,” I said, showing him the photo. “Not sure this would do much for your credibility around town, eh? Now, do me a favour and get the fuck out of my sight!”
14
If Walter thought that was bad, things for him were about to get a whole lot worse. It was a couple of days later, and Karl was working with Emily cleaning out the drills in the lower field. It was an unseasonably chilly day and there was too much work to do to allow them to come up for lunch, so I took some sandwiches and a flask of coffee down to where they were working. They took a break and we chatted about this and that, and Karl was almost giddy with excitement.
“You’re a bit chirpy today, Karl,” I said. “Bobby letting you have ice cream for dinner, is she?!”
He grinned.
“Dad’s coming into town tonight,” he said, the grin getting wider. “He’s coming to stay for a few days.”
I hadn’t seen Mitch since… forever, and I knew that his last visit hadn’t ended well. The last I’d heard he was in Brisbane and he’d spent a couple of weeks in jail for a public order offence after he got involved in a bar fight. But Bobby was always glad when he came by if only because she knew how much it meant to Karl and so I guessed she’d do whatever she could to get through the few days that he was in town. I just hoped that Karl’s bubble wasn’t about to be burst like it had been so many times before when Mitch had let him down.
“That’s great, mate,” I said. “Tell him I said hi.”
As it happened, I got to tell him myself. The following morning, there was a knock on the door and I opened it to find Mitch standing on the step.
“Hey, Mitch,” I said, “I heard you were in town. What can I do for you?”
“G’day, Wilde. Mind if I come in? There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
I showed him in and sat him down.
“Listen, Wilde,” he said, “I’ll get straight to the point.”
Those words out of Mitch’s mouth always made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Mitch had a long-time habit of hearing words with his own ears. He could wildly misinterpret just about anything and, inevitably, that interpretation led him to take offence at whatever had transpired or whatever had been said. Given how much time we spent with Karl and Bobby, there was a whole spectrum of potential misinterpretation and indignation available to him. I steeled myself and waited for him to go on.
“I heard about Bobby’s place, about some punks trashing it. I’m going to make it right. I heard that you might know about it. About who did it, I mean.”
I nodded. Mitch’s brand of justice wasn’t going to do Bobby any favours in a small town, so I tried to pick my words carefully.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Mitch. There’s a lot of stories going round but from what I’ve heard and from what Sergeant Willis has told me, they have no idea who was responsible. They didn’t leave any trace and nobody saw anything. It’s just one of those things, I guess.”
He just looked at me.
“And what about this kid, Gretz? Karl thinks he had something to do with it?”
I shrugged again.
“You know what this town’s like, Mitch. Everybody has a theory and all but one
of them are bullshit.”
“Karl seems pretty sure. Said the kid had been in causing trouble, Bobby had to kick his ass out?”
“He broke a chair and she barred him but he came back and played the dickhead again so she threw him out. Again.”
“And he was pissed off?”
I paused, but nodded.
“So it was him then? Gretz?” he said.
I sighed, then nodded again.
“I think it probably was, yeah.”
He stood up and straightened his baseball cap.
“Right then. I’ll go pay him a visit, I think. Cheers, Wilde.”
“Hang on, Mitch, wait up. Just think about it for a minute. Look, Gretz is a little shit and I know there are people who think he was behind it. I’d like nothing more than to see him taken down a peg or two.”
I told him about my encounter with Gretz and the dustbin and I showed him the picture on my phone.
“Didn’t have you down for a hard-arse, Wilde!” he said, with a grin.
“I think of myself more as a behaviour modification specialist! But it’s different when I do it, that’s just me and him. Anything you do, as far as Gretz and everybody else in town is concerned, is the same as Bobby doing it herself. If you wade in now, it’s just going to open up the sores all over again and that’s not going to be good for Bobby or for Karl. Gretz’s old man is a big man in town, he has lots of money and lots of clout. They have to live here, Mitch. Bobby has a business to run, Karl still has to finish up at school. And on top of that, with your record, you’ll probably just get yourself put away again. Just don’t do anything stupid, OK?”
He looked at me and thought about it for a minute, or two.
“Well, we can’t just do nothing, can we?” he said.
“I know that. Let’s just keep the pressure on him,” I said, “make sure he behaves himself, make sure he knows we’re watching him. But giving him a kicking is the wrong thing to do, I’m telling you.”