The Lost Child (26 page)

‘I used to think…' her voice, tiny and frail, ‘…not knowing was…' Her fingers curling chops into the frypan. ‘Compared with…but maybe it's better…'

It can't be him. I thought he'd come home.

‘I don't understand,' says Mum. ‘He must have gone to the soak…his sock was there. All this time I had to believe…to survive. But why…why would he ride four miles to Bindilla without his sock?' She waits as if I should know the answer. ‘Or his boots? They haven't found his boots. Or his bike. I told Bill Morgan, it doesn't make sense…unless…'

Unless? Her eyes are muddy brown soaks, the sizzling chops, the kitchen full of fatty smoke. Tears leak out of her eyes and drip off her chin. ‘Maybe it's better,' she says. ‘In the long run. Better to know.' She looks at me and I see how tired she is, as if she's run a long race and reached the finishing line and she's folding into herself with relief. ‘Now we can bury him. Now that we know.'

But we don't know anything!
She serves up our chops and I peck at my plate, squeezed tight with no tears. What about me? It's not better for me. Before it was all blocked out with not knowing. Now there's no hiding. From remembering. Imagining. From the mud. I don't want to know. It can't be true, can it?

He says he doesn't care what the dental records say, every nong knows there's mud on that side of the lake that sucks you down in seconds, and Dunc knew too. He would never have gone there. And how long did it take the oil team to build a platform so they wouldn't be sucked down? He says he's not going through a fancy-pants funeral with bones that could belong to anyone, even a bloody Abo, even a roo.

He doesn't say any of this to Mum. As far as I can tell, she hasn't spoken to him about Dunc, not at the inquest, not since. The lagoon is a moat between them with battering rams and boiling pitch pouring down from invisible battlements and no hope of peace, no hope of anything. ‘You'd better organise it yourself, Nella,' Bill Morgan tells Mum after the autopsy in Muswell. ‘Doesn't matter what I tell him, he doesn't want to know. I reckon he can't take any more.'

‘More likely he doesn't want to pay for the coffin,' says Mum that night. ‘And how will I? That's what I want to know.'

My eyes stare at a page of
Twelfth Night
. I want to hide in the words but they keep smudging. I can't believe Sebastian could come back from the dead and be confused with Viola, even if they were twins.
I can't believe Dunc is dead.
I am stiff with the cold of stone castles. I should be in bed but the lino will be cold under my feet, the sheets will be cold, they will become as tangled as the plot of
Twelfth Night,
as tangled as my wide-awake thoughts in the night. Thoughts about what I said, and Dunc said, and what I should never have said.

‘I'll have to ask the Old Girl,' says Mum. ‘There's no other way.'

Grannie pays for a pine coffin with silver handles. She sits in the front pew on the other side of the aisle from Mum and me, the coffin on a stand between us. It is covered in carnations, roses, gladdies and lilies. I try not to look, not to think. I will not believe it.
I will not look again.
I pretend I have my camera and focus on the altar, the wood panelling, the coloured-glass window. I frame Jesus on the cross, red paint dripping from his hands and feet. I look down at my shoes; I need new ones, pointy toes with squash heels like Faye Daley's new ones. I examine the scar on my shin. It is lumpy and uneven. I will have it forever.

Again and again, I sneak looks behind. More people have come to Dunc's funeral than can fit in the church. Mrs Winkie and Lizzie, and Mary, who's taken the day off work. Roy's father and mother, Wanda the Witch. Mrs Marciano with Tania and Joe. Tania sees me glancing back and calls, ‘Silby! Silby!' before Joe bounces her on his lap and distracts her. Cele and Jude arrive and take the spare seats in the front pew next to us. Cele looks at Grannie; Grannie looks at Dunc's coffin.
I will not look again.
Cele sits next to Mum and squeezes her hand. Mum's face crumples. Milan's hand reaches from the pew behind and gives her shoulder a squeeze. She straightens her face but doesn't turn back to him.

Milan is a mystery. Mum has known him for almost four months and been to four dances with him. He has never been to our house except to collect her for the dance, or to chop wood before taking her for a drive in his old Austin. Where did they go? Here and there, she said when I asked. Is he a boyfriend or isn't he? If he is, why isn't he sitting next to us in the front row? I feel sorry for him and turn to give him a little smile. He looks as if he's won the lottery. Straightaway my face heats up with guilt for not being friendlier to him, so I turn quickly back to the altar.

Mrs Boland has filled the altar vases with roses she's probably scrounged from farms all around. I focus on a pink rose with my camera eye, long-shot, close-up. Mrs Parsons starts up the organ, playing something dark and drawn-out as if she can't pedal fast enough to get it going. What sort of music would Dunc have liked? The Beatles, or the Stones? Maybe something different like the Dreamers?
Why am I even thinking this?
My mind flits about like a blue wren on a branch. Dunc prancing behind Mrs Winkie, wobbling his bum in time with hers. Mum telling Mrs Scott over the side fence:
It kills me every single day but I've just got to cope, I've
got Sylvie to think about.

The priest from Muswell enters and Mum nudges me to stand. Again I glance around. What sort of father doesn't come to his son's funeral? He should be making the speech called the eulogy, saying the words that Denver Boland is saying. What did Denver know about Dunc? Then I catch Grannie glancing behind and I look too.

He's there! A face at the side door, as white as the limestone walls, except for a whiskery shadow on his cheeks and chin. Abruptly he disappears. Is he coming in? No, he reappears closer to the door, still half-hidden. What is wrong with him? He should be sitting in the front row like us. Why isn't he coming in? The organ bellows and groans and the cold in me heats up with the shame of him.

The coffin is being carried down the aisle, Mum pushing me to follow. Why is Kenny Sweet a pallbearer? I'd rather be a pallbearer myself than have him. I stumble outside. People are spilling from both doors. Spoggies swoop from the pine trees, bare earth beneath the dark branches.

There is no sign of him anywhere.

He's not at the cemetery either. But as the priest begins to speak, Lizzie whispers to me and I see a man half-hidden behind Jude, head down like a dog. Pardie? Is it really him? He's wearing a bodgie black jacket and blue jeans, longish hair like Ringo's, a richer kind of red. It must be five years since he left. Jude has talked of him bumming around Queensland, working on prawn trawlers and cane-cutting. Did she know he was coming home? She must have told him about Dunc.

Then I see Kenny Sweet nudging up to Pardie. Straightaway Pardie slides through to the front row, leaving Jude saying something to Kenny. Whatever she says, Cele turns to glare at Kenny and he slinks off a short distance, his eyes never leaving the back of Pardie's head.

Dunc is lowered into the ground on long ropes by two men from Muswell in black suits. Amen, I say with everyone else but there's a muddy black taste in my mouth and I can't think why we're burying Dunc in dirt when he's just been dug out of it. I would rather believe he was drowned in the bottomless waters of Bunny Brennan's soak than know he choked to death in Lake Grey's stinking mud. And if they hadn't started drilling for oil and found him, we'd still believe he was in the soak, wouldn't we? Would it matter if we didn't know exactly where he was? What's so good about the truth if it's more awful than a lie?

Mum bends to toss dirt on the coffin and I look up at a sky full of clouds with long tails blowing in from the sea. In my coat pocket, I find the skull ring. Burying it with Dunc seemed like the right thing to do but now I want to keep it. I step back to let other people toss dirt and I see Grannie heading down the path to visit other graves, other Meehans, walking carefully down the slope in her good shoes, past headstones bulging and bent as if bodies are trying to break out of the ground, past rose bushes grown wild and scratchy, past graves with urns and angels on top that stare at Grannie with sad, stone eyes.

As people head back to their cars, I stand on the rise under the old black she-oak, waiting for Mum to finish shaking hands. Pardie leaves in a dusty white Ford with a badly dented bumper and a Queensland numberplate, and Kenny leaves soon after. I think: I want to run away like Pardie, to Queensland where it's always sunny. I think: It's my father's fault, and he didn't even come to see his son buried.

Then Lizzie is standing next to me, saying something about Chicken, who's walking towards us. Her voice is full of squeaky scorn because she thinks he's become a foreign species since he's grown sideburns and begun using his brother's aftershave. Roy sidles up behind Chicken as if not sure of his welcome, and why would he be when he's hardly spoken to me since Elvis gave me a lift home?

‘Sorry about your brother,' says Roy, scuffing at the ground with his boot, still not looking at me. His cheeks have grown sharp bones and the freckles on his nose seem paler than before, hardly there at all.

‘Do they know what happened?' asks Chicken, pushing in. ‘You know? How he got there?' At first I don't understand what he means and then I realise he's referring to the inquest. But before I can speak, he tells me what he thinks. ‘Maybe there's an underground river that runs from the soak. Maybe he got sucked down and it's taken all this time for him to flow out to the lake. Whaddya reckon?' His eyes are greedy, his face red and blotchy. Roy pings a scrap of gravel at him.

‘What?' says Chicken, looking from Roy to me. ‘What?'

‘Misadventure,' I say.

‘What's that mean?'

Now Roy gets stuck into Chicken, pinging gravel, making him bend and duck. Chicken slides behind a headstone, ducking out to ping gravel at Roy. From the telephone pole near the gate, a pair of plovers swoops at a starling,
kekekekking
until they drive it onto the road. Mrs Winkie beckons from the car.

‘It's like the resurrection, isn't it?' says Lizzie as we walk away. ‘I mean with Dunc sort of coming back from the dead.'

I finger the skull ring in my pocket. It feels as if everything is coming to an end, or beginning, I don't know which. Chicken and Roy are still pinging gravel at graves, making the headstones talk. I think: How could he
not
come?

Next day, I follow the sea wall to Stickynet because the tide is too high to walk on the beach. There's a cold wind and a heavy grey sky, more like winter than autumn. When I push through the scrub to Cele's, I find Jude packing Pardie's car. Then Pardie comes out, carrying a brown duffle bag. He sees me and smiles a pleased, chipped-tooth smile, dimpling cheeks.

‘Sylvie?'

I'm suddenly shy and can't look at him. I think: Why's he leaving already? Right then Cele comes out too and she's carrying a bundle of blankets that she loads into the car. Pardie dumps his bag on the back seat, Jude slams the boot closed and looks to the main road, listening, waiting. Cele and Pardie too.

Then the throb of a hotted-up exhaust, gurgling to a stop at the end of the track. Kenny Sweet's old Ford? It revs and snarls. Pardie takes car keys from his pocket, quietly, as if he's afraid of them jangling. Even Fred is silent. Then another noisy gear change and Kenny roars off.

‘I'll be okay,' says Pardie, reaching for Jude. She buries her face in his shoulder and tells him not to come again, that she'll come to him. Cele tries to hug Jude and Pardie too and there's a whole mess of hugging and crying going on. And when Pardie pulls away, he looks at me, confused, as if he's not sure what I'm doing there and whether I should be hugged too.

‘Sorry,' he says, opening the driver's door. ‘I'll give you a lift home, if you like. We can have a bit of a yak on the way.'

With a quick reverse and turn, we drive down the track, Cele and Jude waving behind, Fred now screeching after us with every
faa-a-a-ck
he knows. At the main road, Pardie noses forward, frowning into the rear mirror as we head towards town. Is he watching for Kenny? At Stickynet, he swings the wheel sharp right, slamming me hard against the door. ‘Sorry.'

‘What's happening with you and Kenny? What's Kenny done?'

He doesn't reply. Soon we're on the track that runs beside the lake and connects with the road near the pub, the tea-tree a jungle of black trunks, writhing arms, cloud-leaf heads. Approaching Nobby's corner, Pardie checks nervily both ways before moving forward. At our gate, he turns off the engine and sighs over the wheel like an old man. ‘What
hasn't
butcher boy done? That's what you should be asking.'

It's a second before I realise he's answering my question about Kenny. And that's when I see, really see, how much he's changed. The skin on his face is stretched tight. Thin lips. Tired eyes to match the sigh. Again he checks the mirrors. ‘Sorry, Sylvie, I can't hang around here. I've really gotta get going.'

Everyone leaves.
I look at the white tips of Pardie's ears poking out from under his Ringo hair and I remember him dinking me out to Five Mile Drain, my cheek pressed against his warm shirt. And Dunc dinking me home, the wind in my hair. The three of us, as it was before. And even though we've buried Dunc in the cemetery, I realise I'm still waiting for him to come home. ‘Do you miss him?' I say.

His eyes lift warily. ‘Dunc?'

Who else, I think, looking straight at him. But he turns away quickly. And I think: He looks scared. How could he be scared of me? And then the word
blame
rises up in me like the wave on the reef that tried to suck us both into the deep. It's not my fault, I want to tell him. It's my father's fault. If he hadn't burned down our house, I wouldn't have told Dunc. Don't you see? There'd have been nothing to tell. That's why it can't be my fault, can it? And while I'm saying all this, I try to hold on to the reef but my neck and legs hurt, my head is under water, under mud; somehow I'm holding my head down with my own hand. Then I can't hold it down, not any more. I see Pardie's fingers tap-tap-tapping on the steering wheel, and words bleed out of me like the cowardy custard I am.