One Sunday (26 page)

The baton prodded and Vern moved on, limping on his heel, keeping the ball of his foot off that burning earth, and watching that the pedal didn't get him in the shin again.

Tom was enjoying this walk, enjoying jabbing that same place on Vern's scrawny little arse too. If nothing else came of this arrest, Vern Lowe would have a nice bruise to remember it by. He'd gone to the pub hoping to find that Pommy bloke, who may or may not have been a figment of young Mike's imagination. Lowe was the consolation prize. Morgan had shown interest in him, and with a bit of luck he might be waiting up at the station. And with a bit more luck, Rosie would still be sleeping and not entertaining Morgan. He gave Vern another prod, just to cleanse his mind of that particular image, then watched the little runt limp on.

‘New shoes pinching, Vernon? You should have tried them on before you nicked them.'

‘I told you. I sprained my ankle, and my name is Vern.'

Tom prodded him again. ‘That's not a sprained ankle limp. You don't walk on your heel when you've got a sprained ankle. You walk on your toe. I've had enough of them to know.'

‘I'll bloody walk any way I want to bloody walk, you big walloping bastard. And stop pokin' that mongrel of a thing at me. I'm walkin' as fast as I can. What are you arrestin' me for, I arst ya?'

Tom prodded. ‘That's the arse, Vernon. Right there, and you've just been arst. Asked has got a K in it, and I'm arresting you because I hate useless runty little bastards who say
arst
, Vernon.'

Dave Kennedy's hands were still, his feet were still. He was sitting on the same log Tom had sat on that morning. Worn and greyed by the years, set at the right height for a man and offering the smooth bark of a gum tree for a back rest, it was perfectly positioned for those who wanted to watch that hill, perfectly placed too for watching the Reichenbergs' gate, watching who might go in and out that gate. Dave had spent a few evenings sitting on this log in recent weeks.

Since noon he'd been controlling his pain by controlling his mind, thinking peaches, thinking cannery, thinking truck. He couldn't do it anymore, so he'd swallowed two pain powders. His ears were ringing, but he was feeling no more pain.

His truck would have to go. Not much he could do about the house, except pay it off, and he couldn't pay it off without his truck. And the loan? Dave laughed. He'd lost, lost everything, lost the last of his early peach crop too. It was half an hour since he'd walked away from his trees and sat down here, allowing forbidden thoughts to flow over him. They weren't hurting. Nothing was hurting now.

He could see Nicholas's bouquet, the first set into that tepee of timber. In the hour since Dave had sat here, others had wandered down that hill, bringing their own flowers, many spending time arranging those flowers in and around the tepee. It looked like a floral funeral pyre for a pretty little witch. Tomorrow those flowers would be dead, and he'd put a match to it and watch it burn.

No woman should have spoken the way she'd spoken to him. ‘I love him,' she'd said, and in broad daylight, said it to her husband she'd vowed to obey. She looked him in the eye and said, ‘I love him, Dave, and I'm not going to waste my life living here with you and wanting to be with Chris.' And she thought she could get away with saying that?

He'd seen Thompson ride down, seen him stop by the pyre, shake his head at the flowers, then open the Reichenbergs' gate, close it behind him. Five or ten minutes later he'd come back out that gate and ridden on to Dolan's. He hadn't stayed long there either, but he'd come out with Vern Lowe wheeling that bike, Thompson behind, driving him uphill.

The pain powders were drawing Dave's eyelids down; he wanted to lay his head back and sleep. If he wasn't careful, he'd nod off here and make a laughing stock of himself. ‘Already done that,' he said, his eyes leaving the walkers to return to the Reichenbergs' gate, to their windmill, their haystacks, brassy, brittle and dry, as they had been when he'd sat here with his father, sat on this same log, staring at a haystack.

‘There they were, sitting in their comfortable house, living off the fat of our land for all those years while you was over there getting shot up by their bloody relatives,' his father had said. ‘And I've got to look at that German's hay every time I come by this way. I've got to live out my last years watching that German's sons grow tall. And look at you, boy. I've got to look at what they left of you, and know that you're to be the last of the Kennedy line. Who are you going to leave your grandfather's land to, boy?'

His arms grasping his stomach, Dave leaned forward, moaned. His stomach was cramping – he hadn't eaten a meal since last night and the powders, swallowed on an empty stomach, felt as if they were chewing through the lining of his gut. He'd put that piece of beef on but hadn't been back to the house to stoke up his stove. It would have gone out. What did it matter? He'd done his best and it hadn't been good enough.

Through October, through November, he'd tried to make the marriage work. Half of December gone before she decided to ruin his plans.

‘I know you're trying to live up to your bargain, Dave, and I respect you for that,' she'd said.

‘Marriages have been built on less, Rae.' He'd chosen his words carefully, as he had with Nicholas.

‘This one isn't going to get built. I'm so sorry that I've made a mess of things, but when I agreed to marry you, I had no intention of going through with it. It was just a way out of that room. I would have agreed to anything if it had meant I could get out and go to Chris.'

‘You went through with the wedding. We've got the photographs to prove it.'

‘I barely remember that photographer. I don't remember the priest. All I remember about that day is telling Father that afternoon that I'd changed my mind. He smiled at me, said he'd expected it. Then he walked out and locked the door. I thought I'd stopped it in time, but he came back with Arthur's calming medicine, held me down on that bed and forced it into my mouth, held my nose while I gagged on it. I don't know what happened after that, but Heli said Arthur's keeper must have heard what went on, because he'd spoken to Nicholas about it and been told to go about his business. She said you were there too, that you were limping up and down the passage. You must have known what he did, yet you still went through with it.'

‘I noticed you were quiet for a change, Rae, now practise being quiet. I've heard enough about it.'

‘You wanted your house and truck signed, sealed and delivered. Did you hold me upright while the priest said the words. Did you nod my head for me?'

‘For whatever reason we did it, let us not forget why you needed to get a ring on your finger. It's on there now, and we will both make the best of it.'

‘There is no best to make of it, and I won't live like this.'

‘In a few months' time, you'll be going down to Melbourne with your family. Once the infant is born, you'll be more content.'

‘Listen to me, Dave. Try to see what has happened here. Nicholas God Almighty Squire might think he owns me, but he doesn't own you yet, and you can't let him own you. He's a harsh master, Dave. Don't let him be your master.'

‘I'd say he's pretty much bought and paid for me, Rae. Now that's enough.'

Then she said it, came straight out with it: ‘There are doctors in Melbourne who will do abortions for money. Drive me down there tonight. Help me to find one. He's desperate for a grandchild. If he thought I'd lost the baby, he'd agree to an annulment so he could marry me off again. Please listen to reason, Dave. We have to get ourselves out of this mess.'

He walked away from her, but she started in again the next morning. Always calm, speaking quietly, but determined: ‘I've got six hundred pounds left to me by my grandmother. I don't get it until I'm twenty-one, but you could ask for it, and I've got an old-fashioned ruby necklet and earrings. The rubies are probably valuable. I promise they're yours – if you help me now.'

Nicholas Squire's goodwill was worth more than six hundred pounds and old Molly's necklet. He hadn't wanted to lose that goodwill, or Squire's grandchild.

That was the day he first noticed her swelling waist – just the way she was standing, the frock she wore. Maybe that was the day he realised his entire future depended on a parasitic German growth. It was going to buy back the deeds to his grandfather's land and nothing to pay. That was the agreement he'd made with Squire. And he'd get her six hundred eventually, and old Molly's ill-gotten gains. With money coming in and nothing going out, he'd be able to add a few rooms, pull down that old shed so he could look out over his orchard. He'd be able to hire a couple with a bunch of half-grown kids, set them up in the hut . . . have his own Johnsons.

Or maybe he wouldn't bother building on. Sooner or later he, Rae and the grandchild would end up running that estate. It might be willed to Arthur, but he couldn't run it, and even if Nicholas tracked down Arthur's son, how likely was it that he'd give him and Jennifer control of the property? Not likely, not once Rachael had that infant. All Dave had to do was keep the spoilt little bitch happy until after the birth, get his name on the birth certificate, then she'd never be able to leave him, or she'd lose the kid.

‘If you could see your eyes now, Dave,' she'd said, interrupting his dream. ‘They are looking directly at me, but what they are seeing is your own personal branch of the Squire money tree. I could almost see the pound notes you were picking off me. Tell me the truth and shame the devil. Tell me how you really feel about raising Chris's baby.'

‘I'll be raising your father's grandchild, and it will be my child, and the only child of my own blood I'm ever likely to have, Rae. I want it,' he lied.

He thought she believed him. She started knitting white. Nicholas said it was an excellent sign. ‘The girl is settling, preparing for motherhood,' he said.

Not such a good sign for Dave. Every time he stepped inside the house she'd be sitting there, showing him booties and tiny jackets, Olivia sat knitting with her some days, speaking to her daughter of cribs and cots and prams, and including Dave in the conversation. Raymond's crib and pram were still in the store room, and in perfect condition. Names too. Would Dave want to name the baby for his grandfather if it was a boy? Or what about Frederick? Frederick David, or Frederick Arthur?

Why not Christian Joseph, or Joseph Christian?

His trees were loaded, and so were every other bugger's in the district. He'd had to keep pumping up that water, had no time to think, or to choose the right words. Working from daylight to dark, carting for the cannery, driving half the day and coming home to water his trees. And there she'd be, sitting, knitting, watching him.

Long exhausting days those, days when Dave had considered begging the doctors to cut him off at the hips. Like a piece of regurgitated dog's meat dragged around by blowflies – that's how he'd been these last weeks, falling asleep every time he'd sat down, taking the click-click-click of her knitting needles into his dreams. Bad dreams. And when he'd awakened, he'd got his leg steady beneath him and dragged himself out again.

No time to drive her to the big house. Let her walk there, swim there, do what she wanted. Too tired to take her to the movies. Let her go with her sister and Percy. Any other wife would have been working at her husband's side.

Christmas lost. Days all one. Nicholas had driven her home at around six one evening between Christmas and New Year, and she'd brought a meal and a baby's gown.

‘I made it today. Isn't it cute? Can't you just see little David wearing it when we baptise him?' she said, smiling that fixed smile. ‘Mummy bought the material in Willama last week and she still had the pattern from Raymond.' She kept it up, playing with the white gown, laying it out on the table, showing him the lace, the tiny buttons, until it got so he could see the kid inside it, see his blond hair, his blue eyes, hear the priest baptise him Joseph Christian Reichenberg-Kennedy. And he'd seen old Joe Reichenberg walking Kennedy land too, owning Kennedy land.

‘Get it out of my sight,' he said.

She looked at him, smiled. That's when he understood what those last weeks had been about. She wasn't dumb. Never had been. She'd been trying to drive home a fact that needed no driving. Then she tossed the gown at him. He allowed it to fall to the floor, its small sleeves outstretched, taunting him.

‘You know as well as I do that we're both wasting our lives here.'

‘I have no life to waste, Rae. This is about as good as it gets for me.'

‘It's as bad as it can get for me. I'm eighteen years old, and I've got forever looming over me and it looks like one of Heli's night-time monsters, waiting to gobble me up, Dave.'

‘Put that thing away if you want it, then go to bed.'

‘You'll end up hating me. We'll hate this baby.'

‘Your father wants the child enough for both of us, and we will give him his grandchild. And you will learn to make the best of a bad bargain.' He tried to go, to get away from her and that white gown. He tried.

‘Living here like sister and brother for forty years? Never having again what I had with Chris, and him living over the road and my whole body aching at night to go over there, to feel his arms holding me, feel his hands touching me. If you'd start thinking with your head instead of your hip pocket, you'd know we can't ever make this work.'

Aching for that German bastard. And that bloody baby gown lying between them. All he could see when he looked at that gown was a blue-eyed little German bastard running around his property, laughing at him. ‘Failure, Dada. Not a man, Dada. You're a castrated dog, Dada. We won the war, Dada. We won that bloody war.'

He kicked out at the gown, lost his balance and, if not for the table, would have landed on his back. Had to get out of the house. Get away from her.

He went out to his truck, trying to calm himself by looking at the motor, listening to it run. He walked beneath his trees, loving them and knowing he didn't need to wait to start hating her. He hated her now – and he hated that nest of German bastards over the road, wanted to rip out their guts with a bayonet. Wanted to rip out Nicholas Squire's guts too – then ram that bloody bayonet through her and that bloody German parasite inside her.

Couldn't go back to the house. She'd be sitting in her front room, waiting to start on him again. Couldn't stand the sight of her pretty little face, couldn't look at her without seeing the swell of that parasite. Had to go somewhere. Had to get away. Drive. He was backing the truck out when she came from the house.

‘It's no use running away from it. We have to make a decision.' She stood there, her arms folded, her eyes watching his face. ‘You might think that you'll be able to raise this baby, but you won't. Half the town knows you can't have a family, and the other half knows about me and Chris. The whole town will either pity you or laugh at you, Dave.'

‘Get to bed!'

‘I'll go to his bed. You run away from me now, and I'll walk over that road as soon as you leave. That's a promise, and tomorrow morning we'll be together on that train to Melbourne. That's my promise to you – if you won't help me to end this farce in the only decent way we can.'