A Woman of the Inner Sea (33 page)

She picked up Burnside’s signed papers from the table. She began
tearing them to pieces. She worked them into small wads and fragments. They fluttered down to her feet in a straight line in this still country. At some times of year, of course, tides of wind moved across this ocean bed. Today nothing moved, and the seafloor was stagnant.

Old Mr. Kozinski’s check vanished amongst the other bits of paper.

She got Gus his cool cloth.

After Gus had been awakened and been held during his confusion by Kate, and been sick on the boards and slept again and again been grayly awoken, the first he said was that he would be having a word with his sister-in-law. He was still not aware for some time of the exact form of Burnside’s apparent absence. When he first got up and saw him, flattened and perhaps gutted in the still, fading afternoon, he grew desperate, a state alien to Kate’s experience of him.

—Christ, Chifley hit him!

—Yes, Kate admitted, wanting to sound cool. He says his pelvis is broken. He had everything he wanted. He’d broken your nose and I’d signed the papers. But on top of it he wanted to box Chifley. That bit didn’t work.

Gus began to weep, anguish bubbling bloodily at his nostrils. To Kate, these tears were an even more alien phenomenon.

—Chifley? he asked.

—He’s run off.

—He’ll come back. He doesn’t know better.

They went together down the stairs and inspected Burnside. His color was poor. Kate felt contemptuous toward him.

—He wanted a doctor. Where did he think he was? Boxing a marsupial and wanting a doctor.
Kangaroo strike. Item 123C on the Medical Benefits form
.

Giddy again, Gus told her his vision was full of splotches. Her voice echoed and seemed black to his demented optic nerve.

—My bloody sister-in-law, he kept saying.

—Her check will be canceled now. The Kozinskis don’t pay for unfinished work.

—Well, said Gus. Staying here is all bloody finished.

This was suddenly so clearly the truth that she began to weep.

—You’ll drive to town, Kate.

—What? Get a doctor?

—Get everyone.

So Burnside’s power to bring others in his wake was unimpaired by a smashed pelvis.

—Drive to town, Kate. Keep the truck for a borrow if you want to then. I’m a big enough truck-borrower myself, aren’t I? Keep away till all this is settled …

—No, she told him. No, I want to keep going with you.

This was the ménage she wanted to be associated with. Jelly’s shadow. Gus and the beasts. That was the ménage.

—Okay, Gus told her, flushing with pleasure. But you can see it’s temporary, the way things have been here.

And they kept arguing and Kate dreaded the descent from bounding which lay before her. But Burnside had to be treated. Tetanus injections would be needed too. If he perished he would create even greater havoc.

Barely clear-eyed, Kate was in the car, and was turning it toward the gate, when she saw Gus emerge on the verandah with the farmhouse rifle he had spent hours of idleness reconditioning. For a second she had the shocking thought that he intended to add a bullet to the mess which had been made of Burnside. But she saw Gus sit down at the verandah table and take up a dolorous waiting posture, rifle on lap. She stopped the truck at once and as a sign that she would not easily go on again, she shut its engine off, got out and went up the steps to the verandah again.

—The police will need him, said Gus. You know, for forensic purposes. Blood matching. You know. He’ll be in the sideshow again. All along I’ve tried to save him from the sideshow. It was a disgrace I sold him to that oaf in Wagga. That was a lapse. Can you imagine what it’ll be now.
Mankiller Roo!
On all the television news.
And
 … he’d become police property. And they’d do it to him in the end. Without an ounce of affection.
Police shoot killeroo!

Again tears came effervescing out of Kate. She said, not very clearly, Please. Please, he’s my only joy.

—Well thanks a million, said Gus, and then more leniently, I know, I know.

She knelt in front of him and grabbed both his wrists.

—If you shoot him, I’ll be finished.

—No. That’s not right.

—It is. I’ll be finished. With my children.

—Children, Kate? he asked, a huntsman’s gentleness. I didn’t know about children …

I
N AN EFFORT to distract Gus, to show that she could not bear further bereavement, and so to save Chifley by indirect means, she found herself offering up with some speed the story of Bernard and Siobhan. She was confused by the dangers and yet the ease of this. As we know, she had spent so long futilely trying to become another, slovenly woman whose cells were gorged with steak fat and whose hair was unwashed. A woman who had never had
that
kind of child, never even known golden children whose bodies, when washed at dusk, shed orange grains of sand from between the toes and brine from out of the hair. Children studiously reared. Who on special sweet-toothed occasions were directed not to fried protein of the kind which came from the Murchison Railway Hotel kitchens, but to honey and nectarines. Children who would carry the habits of childhood into a place where at full height they would slimly catch and turn.

Was she the mother of such children? Apart from her one confession to Jelly, she had been on the edge of disbelieving it. Now, for Chifley’s sake, she began reclaiming them.

When her father Jim Gaffney told her that night they had still half an hour to drive. She could argue herself out of the news two or three times in that distance, so thoroughly that Jim said in the sort of gentle despair with which he treated Mrs. Kate Gaffney’s tantrums, Do you think I’d lie to you? Do you think I’d try a joke like this? For pity’s sake, Kate, prepare yourself!

The narrow cliffside street was crammed with shiny civic vehicles whose lights flashed red and white and blue: blood, mercy, sorrow. Only the roadside end of the bridge which ran to the front door was still standing. The sandstone walls of the garden fell away briskly. An oily fallout seemed to coat them. The house itself
lay in a moat of ruin. She could see in the charred collapse of the garage the black framework of her car, the one which had refused to start, devoured to a skeleton. Paul stood amongst the singed rubber plants and oleanders on the edge of the road. He roared.

—Why weren’t they at dance class?

Ambulance men held Paul back from Kate, as if privy to the Kozinski marriage problem. Jim Gaffney’s arm stood round Kate, preventing any answer. But at the time Paul’s question sounded to her a cogent one. Why not go to the dance and catch a treatable pneumonia? Better than to be consumed.

A little off to her left, Denise the baby-sitter’s mother was on her knees crying
No
, while Denise’s father and a policeman tried to raise her. There was still that frightful feeling that Denise and the children were there, hidden or hiding behind the angle of sight. Even that, though, was shocking, and the weight of blame shocking too. Every mother, as Paul Kozinski had remarked, sent her children to the dance rather than to the furnace.

Ambulancemen carried three stretchers up the hard way, up the slope in the corner of the garden. There was a risk that they would stumble, but they did not want to bring them the easy way, in front of people. Kate heard her own wailing and was held forcibly. Jim Gaffney, many policemen and other ministers of heaven pinioned her.

—Why weren’t you with them? Paul Kozinski roared again and again. Again it seemed utterly reasonable. What sort of mother will not step off the edge with her children when the dance ends?

The other parties to this frightful night began to appear. The other Kozinskis, mother and father, white-faced. Their tears could not be gainsaid, and when Paul saw them it spurred him toward uttering those questions again, just at a point when grief had threatened to strike him mute.

—Why weren’t they at dance class? Your car was here? Where were you? Why weren’t you here?

Her father Jim Gaffney, holding her close, sometimes put his hands over her ears, a hopeless and—she thought—hysteric act to guard her from the justice of other people’s questions.

—God, she said, accepting but demented by Paul’s screaming.

Uncle Frank and her mother arrived in the one car, staggering forward from it to join Jim and Kate. Seeing the black hole where the children had vanished, Uncle Frank also at first fell to his
knees. By habit, he uttered the words of absolution in the direction of the ruins from which the angels had already in any case been carried away. Then he got to his feet and put a hand on Kate’s shoulder. He was anxious next to shut Paul Kozinski up.

—Why doesn’t someone give that gobshite an injection? Kate heard him asking Jim Gaffney.

—Where were you? Paul kept challenging.

In the light from the emergency vehicles, his face was redly glossed from tears. It was too much for Uncle Frank, who walked over to the Kozinskis. Seeing him coming Mrs. Kozinski, weeping quietly, turned half away, sustaining the mean little daily feud no matter how horrible the night.

Paul yelled to Uncle Frank, She should have been here with them!

Uncle Frank took his hands and strove to look him in the eye.

—Now listen. Now listen my good man. Would you prefer you’d lost your wife as well as your small ones? Think of her. Think of her for Christ’s sake!

But Paul evaded Uncle Frank’s repute as a soother.

—Her car was there! Why was she out when her car was there?

A young doctor from Avalon, who had treated the children and referred Bernard to the coordination clinic which had made him a catcher, appeared. He began muttering to Jim and Kate Gaffney senior about sedatives. He himself looked so stricken that Kate thought madly something grievous must have happened to his family too, that this was like the curses of Egypt, and all the firstborn gone. She was so focused upon this site that she did not know what was happening in others.

She noticed that ambulancemen were pushing a cup of hot tea in the direction of Paul’s mouth, but he shook his head, avoiding contact with the rim of the mug. He did not want to be paused in his yelling.

—Why weren’t you with your children?

Uncle Frank made a last attempt with him.

—Oh think of how your wife feels, for Christ’s sweet sake.

But there wasn’t any getting through to him. With Paul still fretting in the arms of ambulancemen, and the senior Kozinskis averting their eyes, Uncle Frank gave it up and returned to her. She was so pleased to see him coming back. She hoped he had the spells for this moment and could interpret things to her.

A young fireman with an ash-smeared face held something out to her. A bottle of vodka.

—I got my hand inside the door, he said.

He was shaking. He needed ambulancemen himself.

—This was all I could get before everything went. Sorry. Sorry.

He put it in her hands. It was no more than warm. The residue of her household, her academy, her gentle forcing school for excellent children. Jim Gaffney offered to take it from her but she clung.

Uncle Frank murmured, We should take her home. The bloody Kozinskis are utterly beyond reason. Of course, they’ve an excuse, as we all have.

Tears broke from him. Helpless ones. Did it mean Uncle Frank himself was helpless?

She was confused when they started marshaling her back toward Jim’s car.

She thought, But who will look after the children?

A plainclothes policeman flanked by two uniformed ones intervened tentatively between them and Jim’s Jaguar. He simply said that he didn’t know what to say. She had his sympathy for what it was worth. And that he might talk to her when she was feeling better.

Unless this awful night was reversed, there would be no
feeling better
left.

Her mother Kate Gaffney got into the back seat, going ahead as one will with a child, to make sure it knows it’s safe to follow. But Kate balked. For Murray was standing there, under the escarpment which made a suntrap of her vanished house. He stood amongst the banksias and the tea tree and the palms, and he stepped out fully into sight now. He had nothing to say, but extended his arms, an extraordinary public act for a plain man like Murray. She hurled herself into them and gagged with the horror. It was the first sound she had made. She had been keeping quiet in case the whole drift could be turned around. The sight of Murray—like Uncle Frank’s tears—somehow indicated to her that there would be no alteration to the nature of the night.

She was aware of her parents and Uncle Frank milling around, even of their sense that she was playing into the hands of the enemy by flinging herself at a man other than screaming Paul. This was such a picayune item beside the mass of her loss, however,
that she wanted to tell them all, while she choked and hawked in Murray’s grasp, to go to hell and lose themselves.

You could not deny though that the Kozinskis would make much of the fact that she had not wailed early and had then thrown herself into the arms of some neighbor. So Uncle Frank moved in at Murray’s shoulder.

—Come on, young feller. Better she gets away now.

He had got back the old capacity to make shocked people obey him.

Even when they had her in the Jaguar, and she saw Jim seeking
Drive
as fast as he could, the lack of street lighting for once supplied by all the flashing red and blue and yellow, she could still hear Paul Kozinski asking, Why weren’t you here?

She was distracted though by someone groaning and wailing inside the car. Her, but it was too profound to be merely derived from lung capacity. Nothing at all, she found to her dread, lay beneath the base of that wail. She had become a pillar of loss, bereavement incarnate. And at some stage, at some point in the column of grief, culpability set in. Paul Kozinski her husband, lover of Mrs. Krinkovich, was absolutely right of course. Who could doubt he deserved a more observant woman?

He was quite right saying she should have been there.