Time's Long Ruin (56 page)

She'd even sleep in on the weekends. Dad would take me on the train to the museum or Port Adelaide and we'd arrive home at lunchtime to find Mum still in her nightie. Dad would say, ‘Come on, Ellen, what would the neighbours think?' and she'd reply, ‘Who cares? Doesn't bother you, does it, Henry?'

‘No,' I'd say, looking at my feet.

We walked past the playground, past kids playing in cold, clean air, wearing nothing but T-shirts and shorts they had to keep pulling up. We went over to Con, standing outside his gatehouse, and Dad said, ‘All taken care of?'

‘Yes,' he replied, going inside his wooden shack and reemerging with a small wire-haired terrier on a chain. Con offered the leash to me. ‘Say hello,' he smiled.

I looked at Dad. ‘Go on,' he said.

I took the leash and knelt down and the small grey-black-brown mongrel jumped into my lap, licking my face and neck, sniffing around my feet and then coming back for more.

I looked up at Con. ‘Whose is he?'

‘Yours,' he replied.

I turned to Dad.

‘Well?' he smiled.

I picked up the dog, approached Con and extended my hand but he just pulled me close. ‘You're a lucky boy,' he said. ‘I had a friend who was moving, and she had to get rid of him.'

I still wasn't quite sure, so I looked at Dad. ‘I can keep him?'

‘Of course.'

‘What are you going to call him?' Con asked.

I stopped to think. ‘Diogenes 34,' I replied.

He looked confused. Dad patted the dog, but then wiped his hand on his pants. ‘You know what this means?'

‘What?' I asked.

‘Two walks a day. A weekly bath. Clean up his poo.'

But I didn't care. I could smell saliva on my face and I was happy. ‘Can we get a kennel?' I asked.

‘What about the rabbit hutch?' Dad replied.

Diogenes 34 had lost interest. He jumped down and pulled me towards a Stobie pole. He stopped and sniffed, pissed, sniffed, pissed, and then braced himself above a pile of fresh shit.

‘Thanks,' Dad said to Con, ‘it will do him good.'

‘I know,' Con replied. ‘I had a dog when I was a boy. He lived for years and years. And when he couldn't walk or see, Dad put him on a leash, loaded a rifle and took him to the quarry.'

A life in miniature, Dad thought. Ended neatly.

Con checked the tracks, as he did a hundred times a day, just in case the timetable was wrong (it never was) or he'd missed something (he never had). ‘Nothing new?' he asked.

‘No,' Dad replied. ‘Nothing. Now we just wait, and hope. All we need's something small – a thong, a train ticket.'

‘I was thinking,' Con continued, brighter, ‘maybe me and Rosa could take Henry to the pictures during the holidays.'

Dad smiled. ‘That'd be nice. He'd like that. Just have to check with his mother first.'

‘How is Ellen?'

‘Fine.' Dad stared down the tracks towards the city. ‘Same old routine.'

And what he didn't say: What does it mean when they don't talk to you anymore, Con? When they look at you like they hate you? When you get into bed, and they get out and sleep on the lounge? When you come home from work at seven and your kid is sitting in front of the television eating baked beans from the can? When your wife just lies on the bed and doesn't wash for days, and someone pops in and she says, Tell them I'm crook. People aren't stupid. Crook? For how long? And since when did that mean you went to the deli in your nightie and slippers, asking for fags and milk for the ‘child' and bread for the ‘detective'?

Soon everyone understood – everyone in Elizabeth and Thomas streets, Day Terrace and the staff room of Croydon Primary. And soon a fine cloud of shame, like bulldust, settled on our house. People stopped visiting, avoiding awkward moments they'd heard described over the hum of the slicer in Ron Wells' shop.

‘The dog will be good for Henry,' Con repeated.

‘Yes,' Dad agreed.

‘He's a good boy,' he said.

Dad didn't reply. He couldn't understand why my mother was lost, or more importantly, how she'd lost interest in her own child. When he thought of her now he thought of his own father, lying motionless on his bed in a nursing home, a body without spirit, without warmth or love or feeling.

‘It's been rough on him,' Con continued. ‘Janice was like his sister.'

‘Yes,' Dad replied.

Con checked the tracks again and then said, ‘We can watch him, after school.'

Referring to the day I got home from school and couldn't find Mum. I searched the house and yard. Things were in a worse mess than usual, like she'd left in a hurry. So I went and asked Rosa and she took me in and gave me a bowl of green pea soup. And then, at eight o'clock, when Dad got home, he came looking for me. He apologised to Con and Rosa and took me home. The next morning Mum was back in her room. There was dry mud on her feet, ankles and legs. She sat in bed with a fag in her hand and when Dad told her to go outside she screamed at him and slammed the door, but he just ignored her, looking at me and smiling, Let's get you ready for school.

‘Rosa loves his company,' Con explained. ‘He's no trouble.'

Dad looked at me intently. ‘We'll see. I'll let you know. Thanks for the offer.'

Con smiled. ‘We're just a couple of old wogs, Bob. Help out where we can.'

A large truck slowed and pulled up on the dolomite beside the tracks. It carried a pair of black and white boom gates, red signal lights, a transformer, cables, lengths of metal and wire, and bags of nuts and bolts. It was all tied down with a frayed rope, the only thing that looked remotely old fashioned.

The engine died, and a bulky, heavily tanned man jumped from the cab. He walked to the back of the truck, released a hook from a small hydraulic crane and started moving its arm into position above the load. Then he stopped and started undoing the rope.

You had to say, even then, it looked ominous. I picked up Diogenes 34 and walked over to Dad and Con, who by now were standing talking to the bulky man.

‘Just here?' he asked Con.

‘What is it?' Con asked, knowing full well.

‘Out with the old, in with the new,' the man replied.

Con couldn't believe it. He walked along and looked at the signals. ‘I wasn't even told.'

The man shrugged.

‘You can't unload them here.'

‘I've got a work order.'

‘Check it,' Con screamed, suddenly losing his temper. ‘It's not the right crossing, I wasn't told.'

The man took a sheet of paper from his pocket, read it and said, ‘Elizabeth Street crossing.'

Con shook his head. ‘It's a mistake.'

‘I don't think so, old man.'

Con took a moment, and then his face turned to stone. ‘This is
my
crossing!'

‘You'll have to take it up with Engineering.'

‘I will.'

‘And in the meantime, I'll unload this lot.'

‘No.' Con stood in the spot where the signals would go.

Dad stepped forward. ‘Why wouldn't they have told him?'

‘Dunno.'

‘It seems very unfair.'

‘Life's unfair.'

‘Like someone taking your truck away.'

He smiled. ‘It isn't my truck.'

‘I don't like your tone.'

‘I don't care.'

Brave Detective Page! Rob Roy and Ben Hur, Mahatma and Joan of Arc all rolled into a polyester suit. Dad pushed the driver against the side of the truck. ‘You ever heard the word respect?'

‘Get off.'

‘You wanna be up for assaulting a detective?'

A long, quiet pause. Crows and a factory whistle and Don Eckert standing in front of his shop watching.

‘Okay,' the man said, ‘I'm sorry. You happy?'

Dad waved a finger in his face. ‘I'm never fuckin' happy.

Got it?'

‘Yes.'

A shorter pause. Dad turned to me and winked. Then he approached Con. ‘What time you knock off?'

‘Three.'

‘I'll drive you into North Terrace and we'll see someone. I'll pick you up here, eh?'

‘Thanks, Bob.'

‘Let him unload his bloody signals. Doesn't mean they'll ever use them.'

So Con moved, standing, watching with his arms crossed as the signals were unloaded. And deep down, I suppose, he knew it was all over. That the signals would go up, and he would become obsolete. Still, he would go to North Terrace with Dad. He would argue and pound his fist on a table and get his blood pressure up and ask why no one had ever bothered telling him.

Because he wasn't important enough, he supposed. In the railways scheme of things.

As I walked home beside Dad (as Diogenes 34 pulled and choked himself for no good reason), I said, ‘Fancy doing that to Con,' and Dad replied, ‘Welcome to the world, Detective Page.'

Chapter Nine

‘The really interesting one,' Liz explained to the reporter, ‘is Bob, next door.'

‘Bob Page?' the young girl asked, crossing her legs and resting her notepad on her left knee.

‘Yes. He knows all the details . . . hundreds of leads. You should talk to him.'

‘Maybe I will. But what about you, how are you coping?'

Liz looked at the words scribbled across the top of the girl's pad –
Days of Despair
– and guessed the article was already written. She just had to fill in the details: the empty rooms, descriptions of loneliness, husband and wife sitting comforting each other (or was there something else? Were they arguing? Had Bill changed?)

‘I'm coping,' Liz explained. ‘I keep busy. I've just been made manager of soft fabrics.'

‘At John Martin's?'

‘Yes.'

And then she was off, explaining, the cards and small presents in her locker, the smiles and rubbed shoulders, and the public, who all knew who she was, the feel of fresh muslin and the smell of brown wrapping paper. A world of yet-to-be-made things, paper patterns, balls of wool, rolls of fabric to make dresses and frocks, jackets and cardigans with camel-bone buttons.

The reporter scribbled some notes in shorthand. Liz could imagine what:
The suffering continues . . . twelve months
of torture, of daily anguish
. Verbs, adjectives and nouns that had ceased to mean anything anymore. Now it was just the grind – burnt toast, another gas bill, a bad egg put aside to return to Don Eckert.

‘And what about your husband?' the girl asked.

‘What about him?'

‘He's back at work?'

‘Yes.'

‘I read somewhere that he doesn't work much.'

Liz looked surprised. ‘He works when he can, when he feels up to it.'

‘What, he's depressed?'

Liz shook her head. ‘No. He still spends time looking.'

‘For the kids?'

‘Yes.'

‘But didn't the police say . . .?' She trailed off, tapping her pencil on her pad.

Liz noticed the six o'clock news starting. She could faintly hear drums and trumpets setting the mood, climaxing and then dying as the newsreader, Bill Taylor, dressed in a sombre black jacket and pencil-thin tie, started reading. A string of words flashed up behind him:
Twelve months to the day
, followed by the photo of the kids with their arum lilies.

‘What do you think when you see that?' the girl asked.

Liz went quiet. ‘Last night I dreamt I heard a knock at the back door,' she whispered. ‘It was the children. They said, “Hello, Mum”, and I said, “Where have you been?” They were standing in the back lobby of the house. I cried and felt them all over.'

Silence. The reporter had no idea what to say. So she waited, holding her pencil against her pad. Soon there was another story, footage of Menzies and the Queen. Liz turned to the girl and smiled. ‘Janice could come through that door any moment. And she'd tell me where she's been and what she's been up to. And then she'd say, “I can't believe so many people made a fuss.”'

‘Do you think she ever will?'

Liz sighed. ‘I don't know what to think anymore.' She turned back and Janice was standing in the hallway. She didn't speak. She just stuck her tongue out at the reporter and Liz almost smiled.

‘You had a clairvoyant?' the reporter asked.

‘Yes, it seemed worthwhile at the time. Kazz, our neighbour, even had a go.'

‘How's that?'

‘She has these pictures of people she reckons used to live in her house. There's one of a fella choppin' wood in her backyard. And another one of a boy crying in her laundry. I can't see anyone, but she reckons. So she said to me, Let's take some photos. No, no, I said, but she insisted. So she sets up her tripod and starts snappin' away.'