Time's Long Ruin (22 page)

A few moments later Gavin and Anna appeared from Thomas Street. They ran across the road without looking. ‘Careful,' I called.

‘What?' Anna asked, climbing the slippery-dip and looking at me.

‘Who's with you?'

Dad strolled across the road with his hands in his pockets. ‘Morning, Master Page.'

‘You finished the lawns?'

He came over to my tree. ‘I can't mow with that piece of shit. Two of the wheels keep coming off. I had to chase one down the road. Until
she
allows me money for a new one . . .'

She being Mum. Mrs Thrift. She'd always done the bills, divided up Dad's pay and spent it for him. Dad always claimed he was too busy to do it himself. But lately there'd been problems. Money, he said, had been disappearing down sinks and between cracks and crevices. He wanted to know why. He'd only just got a pay rise. But Mum wasn't about to be questioned. One day she threw a pile of bills in his lap and said, ‘You do them then. Do you see me buying new dresses?'

‘I didn't mean – '

‘Well think about what you're saying. You don't know the cost of things. House insurance is half again as dear this year.'

‘OK, point taken.'

That's how relationships flourished: attack and counter attack, guilt thrown around like beer bottles on the mound at Adelaide Oval. But then someone would back off, or compromise, and things would continue in relative harmony, like a warm summer day at the Pompeii markets. Bills would get paid and there'd be enough money to go around, just.

I took a break from train spotting and went and sat next to Dad on the bench. We watched as Anna and Gavin pulled branches off shrubs and small trees and started camouflaging a cubby-house.

‘What is it?' Dad asked.

‘In case of Stukas,' Anna replied.

Dad stretched back, crossed his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes. ‘Yes, a honeyeater,' he smiled, listening carefully.

‘It's a crow,' I corrected, pointing it out.

‘It's not.'

‘It is.'

He half opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘What have they been teaching you at that school?'

‘Why have you got the Rileys?' I asked.

He closed his eyes again. ‘Bill's at work. Liz has taken Mum to the shops.'

Silence. To get her out of the house, of her room – not that he'd ever say that in front of me. Not that he'd explain how Liz had taken her to the Balfours Café for a quiet cup of tea. To whisper things across the table. ‘Ellen, if only we knew then what we know now.'

But Dad was happy. She was out of her room. That was the hard part.

Anna and Gavin started arguing, fighting over a dead bird they'd found. Gavin pushed Anna, she fell, and Dad said, ‘Come on you two.'

Dad sat up. He lifted my shirt and looked at a red hand mark just above my hip. ‘It's fading,' he said, relieved.

I didn't reply. Apart from my orthopaedic shoe, it was the worst pain I'd ever known. He said I'd been building him up to it: moping around the house, complaining and arguing every little thing. But I think it had more to do with him: Mum in her room, the house a pigsty, days and days of heat making all of us miserable. And then me answering back, one or two words, and Dad holding me by the arm as he gave me one God almighty smack with his open hand, not stopping to think I didn't have a shirt on. I dropped to the floor, holding my side, screaming how I hated him, hated him, and how I never wanted to see him again, ever. My skin turned red and started to rise in a welt. Dad saw this and he was suddenly overcome with shame and fear and self-loathing. He dropped to the floor beside me, held me, and said, ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to', checking my skin to see how bad it looked. His voice was starting to quiver and crack and he almost cried.

I came to my senses, and allowed him to hold me, whispering, ‘It's alright, Dad.'

And for days he kept checking my side, avoiding my eyes and mumbling apologetically, hoping no one would see it, or perhaps dob him in to the police.

‘I'm sorry,' he repeated, taking my hand and squeezing it, as we sat on the bench.

‘It's over,' I replied.

‘It's not,' he insisted, his eyes closed, refusing to forgive himself a lapse in the one thing he really did have to get right. Who cared about the Somerton mystery man if your own child couldn't trust you? What else mattered – a car, a house? You might as well be dead, like a rat with broken back legs, dragging itself through life. You may as well swim into a rip, or swallow a handful of untraceable barbiturates.

Meanwhile, my eyes drifted over to Elizabeth Street and I saw Doctor Gunn standing outside his clinic, smoking a cigarette, staring at me. Here was my chance. Dad, look, you know Doctor Gunn, you know what he did to me? I wanted to say it – I could, I should, but Dad had enough on his plate already. And so what, it could've ended worse. The last thing I needed now was Dad locked away somewhere, brooding, crying, blaming himself for someone else's stupidity.

Doctor Gunn stamped out his cigarette, blew the smoke in the air and gave me a little wave. I pretended not to see. He smiled and went inside his shop.

We headed home for lunch: ham, cheese and chutney on stale bread. Then I entertained Gavin and Anna in our front yard while Dad ‘made some calls'. He always said it like that, like they were important calls: the police commissioner, Playford, Elizabeth Taylor. But the conversations seemed to be so-and-so's wife seen with big John Liebelt from Traffic, or someone getting out of the force to set up a bakery, as Dad started his lecture on getting your fingers burnt and the need to stick to what you know.

Gavin and Anna lined up a dozen or so sheets of pad paper along our cracked and crumbling garden path. I taped them together as they fetched my paints and crayons. Then they started their portrait of Thomas Street, January 1960. Gavin drew a big Red Hen railcar with smoke coming from a brick chimney. Then there was a sort of abstract playground in watercolours – Anna's monkey bars, slippery-dips and swings coming together in a pasta bake of shape and colour. Homes: the Housemans', the Pages', the Rileys', Con and Rosa arguing over the fence with Eric Hessian as he stood brandishing a sword. The healing tree: foliage exploding green, red and orange above the whole neighbourhood, towering as high as a ten-storey building and obstructing the flight path of an airliner.

‘How can it get past?' I asked.

‘It flies through,' Gavin explained, wondering how I couldn't see something so obvious.

Dad came out and sat on the verandah.

‘Who'd you call?' I asked.

‘No one,' he replied. He looked at me. ‘No one important. Some woman rang the office. Said she knew the mystery man.'

‘Did she?'

‘No, course not. Said he was five foot two. Unless he'd shrunk three inches.'

I watched Anna paint the Villa de Dionysis, including a fat old man with black hair and a toothbrush moustache. ‘That's Hitler,' I said.

‘Doesn't he live there?' she asked, looking up at me.

‘No, that was Himmler.'

Dad smiled. ‘Himmler?'

‘He lives in Cedar Street,' I explained.

‘Himmler lives in Cedar Street?'

‘He installs air-conditioners.'

Dad sat thinking. ‘Fair enough. Three inches. Nah, y' remember a person's height.'

‘It's like the elephant,' I offered.

‘Eh?'

‘There were all these blind people, and they'd never seen an elephant. So along comes an Indian elephant and one of them grabs a tusk and says, Ah, an elephant is hard and smooth, like wood. Another one grabs his tail and says, An elephant is like a paint brush, and another one holds his trunk and says he's like a rubber hose.'

Dad was confused. ‘So?'

‘Well, it's like the mystery man. Everyone's seeing a different bit but no one can work out who he is.'

‘Except me, supposedly.'

‘Yes, but that's just the thing, you have to listen to everyone. If you didn't know, you'd never work out what the elephant looks like.'

Gavin overheard me. ‘I know.' He was drawing an elephant: legs, body, head, tail and half a dozen trunks. ‘There, it's walking down our street,' he explained.

Knocking down trees and destroying front yards, picking up cars with his trunk and stepping on Eric Hessian. The Thomas Street elephant: red crayon and blue paint.

Kevin Johns pulled up at the end of our driveway. He got out of his car and slammed the door. ‘Hello, Bob, what you up to?'

Dad stood up. ‘You still driving that thing?'

‘Long as it goes.'

Janice opened the passenger's door and climbed out. She stood staring at us.

‘How was the movie?' I called.

‘Okay, I suppose,' she managed, shrugging.

Kevin took Janice's hand and led her along our driveway. She sat on the verandah next to me and asked, ‘What have you been doing?'

‘Looking after these two.'

‘Where's my mum?'

‘Gone out with mine.'

She sighed. ‘Ah. That's a nice elephant, Anna.'

‘It's mine,' Gavin growled, defiantly.

‘Where's Mariel?' I asked.

Before Janice could reply, Kevin Johns touched my head and said, ‘Her mother's stewin' apricots.'

So? I thought.

‘Mariel's stirrin' the pot. So they don't burn,' Janice explained.

Kevin sat next to Dad. ‘That Wurlitzer, it's a bloody marvel,' he said.

‘At the Capri?'

‘Rises out of the stage, like the devil playin' “Greensleeves”. Fella turns and smiles at us . . . straight out of a toothpaste ad. He's wearin' a jacket covered with sequins. Bloody marvellous. Like Liberace.'

‘What about the movie?'

‘Yeah, seen better. On top of the organ there's this little mechanical monkey playin' a drum. Lights flashin', steam, smoke.' He demonstrated, baring all of his yellow teeth at once as he played a mock organ with stiff, mechanical arms. Gavin giggled. Kevin looked at him. ‘Without a word of a lie.' And then he started humming ‘Greensleeves': ‘
The worms
go in and the worms come out, they go in thin and they come out
stout
.'

This time Anna laughed too. ‘What's the rest?'

‘Let me think . . .
Your eyes sink in and your teeth fall out,
Your brain comes trickling down your snout
.'

The young ones rolled about on the ground, tipping over the paintbrush water and upsetting the tray of watercolours. Janice wasn't so amused. She sat with her arms around her knees, staring into the mid-distance, thinking.

‘What did you do to yourself?' Dad asked Kevin, looking at a bandage rolled tightly around his upper arm.

‘Ah, grazed it. Now it's all infected.'

‘You wanna put something on it.'

‘I did.'

Fresh red blood was seeping through the bandage.

‘It's still bleeding,' Dad said.

Kevin checked his arm. ‘Would you look at that. It is too.'

Janice was looking at his arm too. When I met her eyes she looked down at the ground. I could see the scissors poking out of her pocket. She seemed to sense this and pushed them back in. ‘What was the movie?' I asked.

‘What?'

‘What was it?'

She tried to remember. ‘It was about a kid who turns into a dog.'

‘
The Shaggy Dog
,' Kevin interrupted. ‘Fred McMurray. Bloody funny man. You like Fred McMurray, Bob?'

‘Don't know him.'

‘You're kiddin'?'

‘I saw a movie with him,' I offered.

‘Which one?' Kevin asked.

‘Can't remember.'

‘You coulda come too.'

‘What about us?' Anna asked.

‘Of course,' Kevin smiled. ‘Next time, eh?' And then he looked at Dad. ‘You worked out who that fella is yet?'

‘What fella?'

‘At Somerton?'

‘Workin' on it.'

‘How long's it been?'

‘Forty-eight.'

‘Sounds like he's keepin' you guessin'.'

‘I've got other cases, Kev.'

‘Yeah? Still, there's always somethin' sticks in your craw, eh?'

‘It's not like that.'

‘Just a bit?'

Dad raised his voice. ‘No.'

Just then the mums pulled into our driveway.

‘Gotta be gettin' on,' Kevin said, standing. ‘Hope you liked the movie, Janice.'