Yesterday's Dust (24 page)

‘Thanks,' he'd said to her, aware that he should say more; what was there to say? It had all been said, said and done too many years ago.

May had tried to kiss her. ‘How can I ever thank you?'

‘By making sure he never sets foot in Mallawindy again. I
promise you – I promise
both of you, if he ever goes back there, then I tell it exactly how it was in the cellar. I promise you.'

‘He won't go back. You have my word on it. Our word on it. Thank you. Thank you for everything, Ann. Thank you, my dear, dear child.'

No reply, just a squealing U-turn Jack would have been proud of. He and May had stood together, watching her car out of sight.

‘Shit. Shit.' He sifted sand
through his fingers, sifting out a beer bottle top. Probably one of his own. He'd spent many nights sitting on these dunes, cursing his brother's name. ‘Shit,' he said, and he lifted the bottle top to his nose, sniffed it, then pitched it. ‘Shit.'

Sitting, swearing, he sifted sand until the sun fell down behind the trees. Still he sat, staring at the western sky as it turned from blue to mauve
to purple and gold, sat until two rabbits came out to eye a dead man, their ears high.

It was near dark when he drove away to tour the town, look at the old place. No lights showing. Deserted. Ellie would be living in her old man's house with her sons, running around after them like she'd run around after her old man.

‘Bloody kids. Too many bloody kids. Always put them first, and her bloody
old man. She'll be happy now with her mummy's boy Benjie and her Johnny Jesus. She'll be happy now.'

He turned, cruised back, parked his car on the verge of the road while he took out his cigarettes, struck a match and watched the small flame burn, felt it lick at his fingers. Familiar, these night noises. The river rustling by. Hardly a river, just a snag-riddled stream for most of the year,
twisting, turning, still fighting the will of the dusky gods who, in some forgotten Dreamtime, had charted its course west.

Made a muck of it, didn't they, he thought. Never big enough, it hadn't gone far enough to do much good. It seeped underground, crept out into reed-infested billabongs; there was little left of it by the time it got to Mallawindy. But it had a smell of its own; a mud and
fish smell, mixed with honey and eucalypt, chook shit and
cows. Old essence of Mallawindy. It hung in the air tonight.

Essence of Ellie.

‘Trapped by her, you stupid godforsaken bastard,' he said.

A door slammed behind him and he swung around to face it. Light filtered out, framing Malcolm Fletcher's shapeless bulk.

‘Christ! Is he still alive?'

The cigarette stubbed out, Jack started the motor
and took off, spraying gravel; he hit the brake and did his skidding U-turn. ‘A bloody man is a maniac. That's the one bastard who'd recognise me with a black face and a boomerang in my hand. How the bloody hell can he still be alive? The obese old bastard has got to be hitting eighty.'

Jack was back at the Warran motel before eight and, May waiting, her eyes worried, her kiss of greeting given
only so her nose could pick up the scent of whisky.

‘I'm clean.'

‘Where have you been, Sam?'

Bloody Sam. She was halfway to convincing herself that was who he was these days and he didn't like it. He lit a cigarette, wanting to stir her, pay her back for her suspicious kiss, for her Sam. ‘I went down to see Ellie.'

And she bit, like he knew she would. ‘You fool. You hopeless fool.' She stood
before him, her face red. ‘What in God's name possessed you to do a thing like that?' For minutes she ranted and he sat in silence smoking up the unit. ‘What did . . . did she – ?'

‘She didn't say much.
Where have you been for so long, love?
' He did the nasal voice; an actor born was Jack Burton. ‘
I've been worried sick about you, love. Oh, by the way, the old brindle cow had twin poddies.
'

May swallowed, waving his smoke away with her hand. ‘You didn't go there.'

‘Do you think a man's a total bloody maniac?'

‘Don't make me answer that.'

‘Then leave it alone. I think I'm dying. My head is crawling on
the inside and lousy on the outside. Lay off me tonight, will you?'

‘But you did go to Mallawindy?'

‘I bloody well told you I did. I went out and spat on Sam's grave.'

The power
struggle would continue until one of them died. May had held all the cards for too long and she wasn't going to give them up. She fought like a fiend, but she fought him with words, not tears. He could stand words. Many were the nights they warred, but only with words.

‘Who saw you there?'

‘A few rabbits.'

He didn't mention Malcolm Fletcher. He didn't want to think about that snooping old bastard
who should have dropped dead twenty years ago, died of diabetes, been stomped on like the bloody old slug he was. Always pulsating around someplace, sticking his nose in where it wasn't wanted. Always behind you, listening. Always in front of you, derisive.

I shouldn't have parked there, he thought. Should have thought. Shouldn't have lit a cigarette. How long had the old bastard been watching
before he opened his door? He was dangerous, and Jack was worried, and when he was worried, he preferred to blame someone else.

‘You promised me you would never go back there.'

‘Leave a bloody man alone tonight, will you? I've been through enough today. I did what you wanted me to do, didn't I? Gave them my blood, let them shoot me with their bloody X-rays, gave them the bloody hair off my head.
What do you expect from a man? Some perverted cockroach you can crush beneath your bloody stomping little foot?'

‘What if someone had seen you? You're a fool, Sam.'

‘And you were hiding behind the door when the milk of human kindness was handed out. You push a man too far with your bloody demands and your questions and your bloody Sam. Shut up with your bloody Sam.'

‘What else do I call you?
Tell me that. You do what you want, and to hell with everyone else. You promised you wouldn't go near Mallawindy and that's exactly where you went. Your promise is not worth the breath it is given with, Jack. And you left me stranded at the hospital. I had to walk back here without a coat.'

Jack. He'd dredged one out of her. He wouldn't let her forget who he was, and while she knew who he was,
Jack lived.

‘I told you to take your bloody coat with you, didn't I? I offered to get it out of the boot for you, didn't I? If you'd listen to me sometimes instead of thinking you know every bloody thing all the bloody time then you bloody well wouldn't have had to walk home without a coat, would you?'

Safer territory, coats. Safer ground. And they both knew it.

‘Go and have your shower and
cool off,' she snapped.

‘Where are we eating tonight?' he replied in like tone.

‘David said they do a good meal at the club.' She took clean underpants and shirt from the case, tossed them at him. He caught the underpants and walked to the bathroom, leaving the shirt on the floor.

‘You frightened me tonight, Sam. You frightened the life out of me. I didn't know what to expect. I've been sitting
here since five, sick to the heart with worry that you'd come back drunk.'

‘Don't bloody call me Sam!'

‘I've been calling you Sam all day. Ben, your son was there. He's a lovely boy.'

‘He's a mealy-mouthed mummy's boy little poofter and always has been.'

‘Stop that! He said he remembered . . . Sam.'

The shower was running, the bathroom door left wide open. His voice rose to compete with the
splashing.

‘He probably had to dodge the bastard too. Hang on to his pants when Uncle Sam came visiting. Maybe that's what's wrong with him. Maybe he didn't hang on hard-a-bloody-nough.'

‘Stop it, Jack. For the love of God, will you let up on it?'

‘It's the only way I can get you to say my bloody name. I've got to fight you for it every time.'

‘Be reasonable. If I call you Jack in private,
it's going to come out one day in public. Be reasonable about it. I've got to stop calling you Jack, and well you know it.'

‘Just for tonight, May, for Christ's sake call me Jack. Just for tonight let me hear my own bloody name. And dig me out a half a dozen of those Panadol extras. My head is like a nest of bloody stinging hornets.'

Thursday 21 August

The wind and the rain hadn't left much behind. Three white camellias and a few reliable little violets had lifted demure faces to this morning's sun, which hadn't wasted time in creeping up on Mallawindy. By tomorrow the garden might be looking for shade.

Malcolm wandered his gravelled paths, selecting, rejecting until he
had a small posy. He hadn't been to Warran in over a month, but he was dressed for visiting today, and as sober as a judge; not that he'd ever had great faith in the sobriety of judges. He wound a rubber band around the stalks of his posy, washed his hands, then slipped into his new jacket, the tailor-made dark grey with silver buttons he'd worn to Bronwyn's wedding. Quite sporty. It had set him
back eight hundred dollars, but it concealed some of his bulges.

Monday's Warran
Advertiser
was still on his bedside table, the headlines screaming:

IDENTICAL TWINS' MOLARS NO MATCH. BODY NOT JACK'S
Samuel Burton's X-rays when compared with those taken from the body found near Daree prove conclusively that it is not that of the missing Jack Burton, a police spokesman said yesterday.

The slim
paper came out on Mondays and Fridays; it was full of items of no interest. Malcolm rarely kept newspapers for more than a day – except this one. It had Bethany's birth notice in it. He
loved the mother, thus he loved the as yet unsighted new daughter.

He'd glanced at the full-page write-up on Jack Burton and his twin brother, but it was old news to Malcolm. He had seen the dead man smoking,
he had recognised his tyre-skidding U-turn, and he'd checked the skid marks in daylight, always envious of how Jack could turn a car by hitting his brakes and allowing the rear of the vehicle to slew in a half circle. The old teacher had never attempted it himself, though many of the town hoons had perfected the art and now coloured the roads with their rubber.

So, with Jack no longer dead there
would be a few in town eager to collect their winnings. Malcolm had placed fifty dollars on his nose, but he'd allowed a decent interval to pass, not wishing to look too eager for his winnings.

‘Fifty dollars at five to one.' He rubbed his palms together, soft pink palms, then he clapped his hands. He'd be delighted to take a little of his own back from young Bourke's mean pocket. This morning
the world was looking brighter, and not all of it due to the sun. His car keys and licence were again in his pocket.

After a mild confrontation with a passing bus, Malcolm had blessed his ten-year-old Falcon. It was of solid construction; its steering wheel a captive between hands, thighs and belly, the car had taken the jolt then continued on, in a near straight line, until all four wheels had
come back to earth in the middle of a boxthorn hedge.

Then Jeff Rowan, the town dictator, had arrived on the scene and offered his breathalyser, and at a time when air was still at a premium. Malcolm had, of course, refused to blow, and for over a week now he had been without wheels.

‘Ah, the power of my distant solicitor,' he'd quipped when licence and keys had been handed back at his door.

‘You're a danger to yourself and everyone else on the road. I'll be following you, Malcolm. Every time you look in your rear-view, I'll be behind you, and next time you refuse to blow, I'll run you in. One wrong move and you've done your licence, and I'll see that
you don't get it back.'

‘I believe the term is police harassment, Constable.'

This morning Malcolm drove sedately to town, his posy
of flowers on the passenger seat. When he parked in front of the Central Hotel, beneath
his
peppercorn tree, it was ten past eleven. Unable to absorb his smile he fronted up to the bar and Mick Bourke reached for a small glass.

‘Never before lunch, thank you, Mr Bourke. I have come for my winnings.' Malcolm's puffy little hand was out, but Mick Bourke had other ideas. Though Jack was no longer
dead, it appeared that he was not yet alive.

‘Not today, Fletch. The cops still reckon he's a goner. With all the publicity he's had, they reckon he would have turned up, or the insurance blokes would have got him. They've circulated his dial all over Australia.'

‘I have seen him quite recently, Mr Bourke. I believe the money is mine.'

‘Yeah, but you got fuckin' pink elephants running loose
down your end of town,' young Bob West commented from his corner.

‘Oh, nothing so common, Mr West. The pink elephants with hobnail boots are waiting around some near corner for you, I fear. Good morning.' Malcolm left. He drove to the cemetery, one eye on his rear-view mirror.

Alcohol had not touched his lips while his wife and son had lived. He never came to their graves with the smell of brandy
on his breath, thus his visits to the Mallawindy cemetery were rare, and always morning visits.

JOHN KELVIN FLETCHER, BORN
1954.
DIED
1968.

His bright and beautiful son, who had grasped the world by its tail, had been stolen from him by this town. So fast. A healthy teenager one day, and dead within the week. Filthy, diseased little town.

And his wife.
JILLIAN MAREE FLETCHER
.

Always of nervous
disposition, poor Jillian had taken her own life. She'd jumped from the Mallawindy bridge with enough
weights tied to her dressing gown belt to hold her down. No one had seen her jump, but the river, cleaner, clearer back then, had given her up the following morning – unlike Amy O'Rouke. From the bridge Jillian's dark hair and her pink dressing gown had been visible to a drover herding his flock
of sheep across the bridge.

Malcolm had sucked on his first bottle on the evening of his son's funeral. He had taken up the brandy bottle his wife kept in her pantry for cooking and medicinal purposes, and found it to be very good medicine. Then he'd slept for the first time since his son had died. Not until awoken by the then local lawman, Bob Johnson, had he been aware that Jillian was not
beside him in the bed, but had wandered away in the night carrying the two flat irons they'd used as doorstops. The three days of waiting for her funeral was all it had taken to alter Malcolm's status from sober husband and father to childless widower with his bottle.

Poor, grief-crazed Jillian. He should have seen it coming, should have found some way to comfort her, but his own grief had been
too blinding.

A month after they'd arrived in this town she'd begged him to leave, pleaded with him to take her home. ‘No colour,' she'd said. ‘It's grey. It's all grey, Mal.'

Heat and dust and flies and fools, and he the greatest fool of all. A foolish move, coming to Mallawindy. And he'd known it. Perhaps he would have taken her home. Perhaps he would have, in time, but his boy had revelled
in the freedom. How he had thrived, for a time.

Determined Jillian. She'd slipped the belt of her chenille gown through the flat iron handles, knotting them tightly so her fingers might not change her mind and she'd climbed through the railing and drowned in six feet of water.

Malcolm glanced at her stone as he placed the small posy down. She had loved flowers. He never came here with an empty
hand, but not once had he bought her flowers while she lived, bought her some colour. So much more he could have done to help her make the transition. Sad, really, how we need to lose those near to us to
realise just how dear they were.

He moved to his son's grave. No flowers, but a groan escaped his throat. He closed his eyes, pressing his fingers to them as he thought of his son. So tall, so
fine, and if not a conventionally handsome lad, he had epitomised perfection in Malcolm's eyes. A miracle, born of two plain and lonely people who had married because it had seemed like the correct thing to do at the time. Both unattached in their mid-thirties, mismatched certainly, but their embarrassed fumblings had somehow given their boy a brief life.

Malcolm felt an internal blush begin.
He'd been a late starter in the sex stakes, his only experience with women gained in his unlit marital bed. Each lusty scene in his novels had, to a greater or lesser degree, been taken from his own limited marital experience. A shy lover, Jillian had refused to remove her nightgown, had never allowed him to see her unclothed.

As he stepped back from his son's grave, he heard the movement of
gravel behind him, and for a moment believed it was Jillian rolling over, turning her back again.

Then that voice. ‘Good morning, Mr Fletcher. We've got a lovely day for a change.' Ellie Burton had three children sleeping in this place.

‘Mrs Burton.' He replaced his glasses. ‘Yes. Indeed it is a lovely day.'

‘I suppose you heard about it not being Jack that they found,' she said.

‘Indeed I
did,' he said. ‘Indeed.'

She looked well this morning, due obviously to the fact that her absconding husband was no longer only a collection of bones. Malcolm watched her walk down a gravel path to a stone and place flowers there.

LIZA, LINDA, AND PATRICK. LOVED CHILDREN OF JACK AND ELLIE
.

All in together, he thought as she placed her palm on the stone, smiled, then she saw him watching and
turned her smile on him.

‘There's something . . . something comforting about knowing
where they are, isn't there?' she said.

‘Indeed there is, Mrs Burton.' He found conversations with this woman difficult, so he usually agreed, whether he agreed or not.

‘I asked Father Fogarty if I should . . . could put Jack's name on the stone. It might make it easier for me to accept that he's . . . gone.'

Malcolm nodded. A very strange woman. Didn't want her husband found dead in his underpants and sock, but apparently she had no problems in burying him. He shook his head and stood on, his eyes roaming this sad little place.

A hundred and fifty years ago the Catholic and the Anglican dead had been well separated, but necessity moved them closer each year. People kept dying, would continue dying,
until only a gravel path marked their religious dispute. Mallawindy's forefathers had not been far-seeing. Perhaps they hadn't expected the town to survive, and thus produce such a field of the dead. No doubt if the ghosts walked, there were some rare old brawls at night between the orange and the green, sleeping toe to toe.

Ellie finished with her praying, walked back to join him in no-man's
land.

‘Are you on foot, Mrs Burton?' He pointed to his car.

‘Oh, you've got your licence back. That would be lovely. Thank you very much, Mr Fletcher. It's a long walk from town, but it was such a lovely morning, I had to come out and see them.' They walked to the metal gate together. He held it open for her, saw her seated in his car. ‘Young Jeff says that with all that publicity last week,
it's pretty unlikely that Jack is going to come back.' Perhaps she wanted him to disagree. He kept his silence. ‘He said that finding the gun in the river, and knowing how fond Jack was of his father's gun, that it's pretty certain . . .'

He couldn't tell her what he had seen on Friday night. The match struck down on the box, the movement of the hand holding the cigarette, the silhouetted angle
of the head. He hadn't seen the face. Had not needed to see it. That fast escape. That tight-screaming
U-turn on the narrow road, the gravel flying. Malcolm had seen it all before, and too many times, to be mistaken.

‘And his bank accounts too. He hasn't made a withdrawal since before that last Christmas. I think that's what's got me convinced. Benjie's convinced. He said that I have to accept
it. And as he keeps on saying, Jack never had any money in his accounts. He was always waiting for the next payment to go in. I mean, what could he be living on? Benjie said he wouldn't find work at his age, and he's probably right, although Jack was a very good salesman. But, as he says, even the younger men can't get work these days.' Still Malcolm kept his silence. ‘And Father Fogarty too. He
says it would be better for me to realise that Jack isn't coming back this time.'

Father Fogarty probably had twenty dollars riding on Jack being dead, Malcolm thought. The old reprobate had been known to wile away many an hour in the hotel, watching the races with more interest than the average onlooker.

‘Jack hated cemeteries, you know. He didn't come to any of the children's funerals. He
wouldn't want to be here, but if I put his name on the children's stone – sort of look on it as Bessy did when Bill died – she had him cremated then spread his ashes in the river, you know, but she got him a nice little brass plaque in that new wall.' Ellie pointed to a green lawn, and a brick fence that went nowhere.

Malcolm nodded.

‘I've been thinking, Mr Fletcher, that not finding his body
is . . . is maybe God looking after him, so he doesn't have to end up out here.'

Or Satan, Malcolm thought.

‘He was Church of England, you know. He wouldn't change, but he let me baptise all the children Catholic – except Annie. She would have been baptised that day – if she hadn't spoken. I'll never forget that day as long as I live. It was a miracle, and no two ways about it, and I don't care
what anyone says.'