Yesterday's Dust (11 page)

‘She can still dance,' he said. ‘He tried hard enough, the bastard, but he couldn't kill her, could he, and he couldn't steal her dance. She beat him.'

‘He was no saint, nor was she. If she'd ever thought of anything other than her chooks and her cows, he might have been different. You're celebrating his death and everyone here knows it.'

‘I am. I am. Won't you drink to a dead dog with me?'

Ann stood, knocking her chair over, her dark eyes wide. ‘Did you . . .'

‘Ask me. Go on,' he taunted her. ‘Ask me, Annie. Say it. Did you kill him, my Johnny?
Ask me, Annie. Did you blow his brains out, my Johnny? Did you bury him out the Daree Road? Come on. Where's your guts? Ask me.'

‘Where's yours? You won't find it in the bottom of a bottle,' she said and she walked away, skirting the dancers and making her way to the bridal table, where she sat on Ellie's vacated chair.

By ten the numerous Smith offspring had escaped parental restrictions and
taken over the function. Balloons burst as the older boys jumped, prodding them with drinking straws and safety pins. The crowd began to segment, and as the various Smiths gathered their own together to begin the sorting out of pot plants and dishes, the hall rocked to the thunder of children's feet and echoed with their screams. Malcolm Fletcher said his goodnights.

‘They sound like a herd of
bloody horses in hobnail boots. I think we'll take off. How are you getting home, Kerrie?'

‘I'll grab a lift with your sister, thanks, Mrs Bishop.'

‘We should get going too,' David said.

John lifted his bottle to the group as they left the table. After ten
minutes, Kerrie Fogarty gave up attempting to talk to a weaving brick wall; she excused herself and found a vacant chair opposite the bride.

He was alone then, alone, the way he liked it. All alone at a long table with a half-full bottle and plenty more where that came from. He propped his foot on a chair, and his head on his hand and he watched Ellie. He saw her smile and walk to the dance floor with one of Bron's new in-laws, and he wanted to howl.

Then his eyes turned to the door, watching, waiting for the ghost of his father to
return and again still her dancing feet.

Ann and David were barely out of town when the skies opened. Rain thrashed the car and the headlights hit the slanting stream and bounced back.

‘We should stop. Let it ease off.'

‘Too dangerous to stop here, and if we get off the road we'll end up bogged.'

Dangerous to drive too. This was kangaroo country, the forest tall, native scrub and wattle
trees growing too close to the road offered shelter to countless kangaroos. A large roo exploding out onto the highway could do a lot of damage to a car and its occupants. Did they have enough sense to stay out of the rain or were they out on the roads tonight, celebrating the start of a delayed breeding season?

‘There's another one,' Ann said. Thirty kilometres out, and they'd already counted
fifteen dead roos. She sat forward, watching the road, four eyes safer than two.

‘John was flying tonight,' David said.

‘He'd taken two tablets and he wasn't supposed to be drinking. Thank God he's not driving home.'

‘I doubt he's still walking. What got into him? Finding your father?'

‘I told him he was celebrating Dad's death. That's what it looked like.' Five minutes passed before she spoke
again. ‘I've been thinking about Aunty May all night. She should be contacted before
it hits the papers.'

‘Ben said he'd called her – or tried to. She wasn't at Narrawee. He left a message on her answering machine,' David said.

‘Told her Dad's body had been found?'

‘He didn't say. Just that he'd left her a message.'

‘When were you talking to him?'

‘You were with Bron.' A road train roared
by, spraying water and cutting their vision to nil. The windscreen wipers battled a while to clear it. ‘He was worried about your mother, but I was amazed how well she got through the day.'

Ann's hands signed ‘strange' but he couldn't see her hands, and he wouldn't have understood anyway.

‘She looked well tonight,' he said. Still she made no reply, and he tapped her knee. ‘What are you thinking
about?'

‘May's answering machine. Ben's message. Not a nice way for her to learn that . . . that someone she cared about has died.'

‘Better than hearing it on the evening news.'

‘I suppose so.' Too much traffic on the road tonight, and a too narrow road. David hugged the edge of the bitumen while some fool in a four-wheel drive tried to prove his vehicle was a mud-runner. ‘Bloody idiot,' she
said.

‘Ben was saying he's been checking the newspapers. It got five lines in the Sydney
Herald
, but didn't get a mention in Melbourne.'

‘It will once he's identified. They'll bring up the Liza business again. Poor May.'

‘Why don't you try her at Toorak in the morning?'

‘It's been too long. I've left it too long, David.'

‘I'll give her a call for you.'

‘No. No. Leave it to Ben.'

She hadn't
seen May since the inquest. She'd walked away from her that day, and from her father – walked away and refused to look back, determined to wipe them from her life and from her mind. The last time she'd spoken to May was on the phone, over four years ago.

A sad call that one, May had been weeping and Ann didn't want to think about it tonight. Her hands playing, she opened her evening bag, closed
it, she fiddled with the radio, pressing buttons, selecting, rejecting until she found some mellow music.

Johnny the stranger, seeking a new identity as Jack Burton's son, tossing the wine down as if it had come from the last grape crop on earth. Each time they met, she had to pack a part of herself away, place old love and vulnerability in some inner space, protect herself from him.

What if
she'd asked her question?

Did you kill him, Johnny?

Didn't want to know the answer. Better to play the ostrich, bury her head in the sand. Just wait it out.

The music ended, and again she pressed buttons. They were approaching Mallawindy when David turned the radio off and flicked the headlights onto high beam. The rain had been left behind.

‘I can understand to a degree what you must be feeling.
Our parents are not perfect, but it doesn't stop us caring about them. It's natural that you'd feel upset by his death. Talk to me about it. Get it out of your head.'

‘Kangaroo!' she yelled and David swerved, bracing himself for the impact, but the kangaroo lived to play chicken another day.

‘I thought we were going to hit it,' he said.

‘God,' she said, her hand on her womb. ‘God. Why don't
they learn, David?'

‘Pinheads. Small brains.'

‘You'd think they'd learn from old mistakes and near misses, wouldn't you? You'd think that when they get a second chance at life, that they'd breed knowledge of danger into the next generation, wouldn't you? They've been dodging cars for eighty years or more. Why don't they learn?'

‘I doubt it's the smart ones that survive. I think it comes down
to luck, my love.'

Only the rush of wind then, only the noise of the road to challenge the silence for the remainder of the journey.

Dee and Peter Williams, their neighbours, had the boys tonight. They swapped babysitting services. One by one, David carried blanket-wrapped bundles to their own beds. Only one eye opened.

‘Lipe sayba,' Tristan the tyrant said.

‘Tomorrow. It's bye-bye time now.'

‘In dere. Lipe sayba, Mummy. In dere.'

Ann kissed him, tucked him into his cot and slid the rail high. It was a large cot. He hadn't learned to climb out yet. Not quite.

‘Lipe sayba!'

‘Shush. Tomorrow we'll find it. Hush now. You'll wake your brothers.'

‘What's his life saver?' David asked.

‘God and Tristan know, and maybe Dee. She said she couldn't get him to stay down so she let him watch
television until he dropped. Do you want a cup of tea?'

‘Not particularly. I've eaten too much. Did they say how long your father had been dead?'

‘No more than – no,' she said, her eyes wandering the kitchen cum family room, unchanged since the house had been built. Same tiles on the floor, same clock on the wall, same fridge. A large room. Room to walk. She walked.

‘Sit down and talk to me.'

‘I feel wound up, restless.' She tossed the red and gold scarf onto the back of a chair and removed her earrings, released her hair from the band and her fingers massaged her scalp. ‘Go to bed, David. It's been a long day.' He reached out a hand and she took it, looked at a chair, then shrugged. ‘They'll be up and rampaging in five hours. Get some sleep while you can.'

‘But will you?'

‘I will,
but later. I'll crawl into Mandy's bed when my legs are ready to lie down.'

That was her place when she was restless. Narrow bed with its hand-worked quilt, the revolving nightlight that made patterns on the walls.

He held her to him and kissed her brow. Perhaps she'd sleep in Mandy's bed. Perhaps she'd walk the silent house all night too, and tomorrow the half-moons beneath her eyes would
be dark.

‘It may not be him, my love. Have you considered that?'

‘In a way I hope it is him,' she said. ‘In a way. I know it sounds callous – and I don't mean it to, but he'd be at peace, David.'

‘Try to stop thinking about him and get some sleep,' he said and left the room.

She walked. Walked to the sink, filled the jug, then shook her head. She didn't want a cup of tea. Didn't want to think
about her father either.

She'd told her last lie for him and for May at the inquest. Pregnant with Benjamin at the time, she'd been ill, head aching, back aching all of the long day. And when it was done she'd walked away from May, vowing that from that day forward there would be no more Narrawee. For her, the property and those who lived there would not exist.

Then May had telephoned when Ann
had been newly pregnant with Matthew.

‘I know you don't want to speak to me, sweetheart, and I do understand completely, but I'm out of my mind with worry. Have you seen your father?' she'd said.

‘You know he wouldn't come back here, Aunty May.'

‘He's been drinking again and he's disappeared, Ann. I haven't heard from him in three months. There are things that . . . has your mother heard from
him?'

‘He won't come back here.'

‘Where else would he go?'

‘I don't know and I don't want to know. He's Sam now, and Sam has got to be your problem.'

‘I can't report him missing, Ann. God knows who they'll find.'

‘Will it never end, Aunty May? Will it never go away?'

‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Forgive me for troubling you, sweetheart.' May had wept then, and Ann had waited, waited for the
tears to end. ‘I miss you so much, my dear, dear child. I have no one if not you. No family. No one. I feel so alone. So afraid.'

‘I'm pregnant again, and I'm happy about it this time. David is happy and it's been a long time since we've dared to . . . to hope. I'm sorry, but I don't want to know if he comes back or if he doesn't come back. And I . . . I don't want to be cruel to you, but please
don't call me again, Aunty May. Please. It just brings it all back.' She had hung up and left May weeping.

So cruel. How had she become so hard?

Self-preservation, that's how.

After Mandy's death she had lost over a week of her life. She'd been at her baby's funeral, had been looking at the flowers and the small white coffin and then . . . then nothing. She'd been nowhere.

Like a one-dimensional
shadow on the wall she'd watched a world she was no longer a part of. And when she had somehow rejoined the world from a hospital bed, she had no memory of how she had come to be there.

So much fear had followed that awakening. Blind, black fear. For weeks afterwards life in this house with David had felt like a temporary reprieve. For months she'd moved within these walls afraid to be alone,
in fear of her own mind, and of the other one, the Little Annie she had always believed to have shared a part of her mind.

Fear had sent her back to Dr James, a Sydney psychiatrist she'd spoken to briefly after Mandy's death. She'd kept her appointments with him, and she'd learnt to speak to him of her fear, and of Mandy. He'd helped too, but there was so much she could not tell him, and in the
latter months he'd known it.

You said that you had been watching the television with Liza just prior to her death, Mrs Taylor. Can you remember what you
were watching?

She couldn't tell him about the midday movie, about a redheaded man on a motorbike who had stolen a little girl's dog, because she'd already told him that the gardener had ridden a motorbike, and that he'd had sandy-red hair.

Were you enjoying the film?

Yes
.

Was Liza enjoying it?

She liked television
.

Can you remember what it was that made you leave the house that day, why Liza went to the cellar?

No
.

I believe you can if you try, Mrs Taylor. Try to remember
.

She didn't need to try. Since waking in that hospital bed she had remembered the day of Liza's death in detail, but she could not speak of Sam and the new
kittens in the cellar.

Time and time again Dr James had turned the conversation back to the television and to the gardener.

What was the gardener doing when your aunt left the house that day?

I don't remember
.

Was he mowing the lawn? Pruning the roses? Digging?

I don't remember, I said
.

Was he tall, short, thin, stout?

I don't remember!

Or don't wish to share those memories with me, Mrs
Taylor?

It was her final appointment with Dr James that convinced her she must cut her ties with Narrawee. She'd spoken to him two days before the inquest into Liza's death.

You obviously loved your aunt. How did you feel about your uncle?

I . . . I had little to do with him
.

How do you feel about him now?

I don't want to talk about Narrawee. Can we move on to
something else?

You said you
had been feeling restless, not sleeping well this past week. Do you think this might be due to having to attend the inquest, or possibly because you will see your aunt and uncle there?

I don't know. If I knew why, then I wouldn't be here, would I? Can we please change the subject?

We keep coming up against that same brick wall. I believe there are many unresolved issues associated with Narrawee
and your uncle. And they will not be resolved until we can get beyond that self-constructed brick wall, Mrs Taylor
.