Yesterday's Dust (21 page)

But when he was out, when he was in town, the property was
his, and the Melbourne solicitors
and accountants thought the property was his. He was the only Samuel Burton they'd seen in thirty years.

He straightened, stretched his shoulders, his neck. The winter chill had crept into his joints this year, and winter hung on, determined to wear him down, kill him with old age. He needed heat and some of Ellie's curried chicken soup to sweat the aches out of him. Chicken soup and a feed of
her sago plum pudding, lost beneath fresh cream. A few fresh eggs fried in butter, served on thick toast, made against hot coals. And a slab of her bloody pumpkin cake with a plaster of scalded cream on top.

She could cook, he'd say that for Ellie. She could make something out of nothing and have you asking for more. May lived on dry hash and rabbit food; his taste buds were shrivelling for lack
of use, or old age had hit them as well as his liver. Nothing tasted like it used to – even the cream he sometimes smuggled into the trolley at the supermarket didn't taste like cream.

Almost sixty-bloody-seven. Three years away from seventy. He shook his head. He couldn't, wouldn't believe it; might as well be dead once you hit seventy. Maybe he should hang himself from the rafters and get it
over and done with.

He'd come face to face with his age in America that first year. It had crept out of a hotel mirror in New York and king-hit him. He hated America for that. Refused to go back there.

He'd worn his wig and fake mo for months after he'd run from Mallawindy, and he'd kept his head low playing the role of teetotaller Saint Sam, complete with his fake halo. Knowing that Jack was
hiding beneath that wig and mo had been enough to keep him sane. Sleeping each night as Jack, then putting on his Sam-face each morning had been an extension of the old role he'd played since Liza and Sam had died. He could do it, and did it well. He'd got a kick out of it back then, and if his audience didn't applaud, they'd been convinced.

May had applauded. They'd been happy for a while.

‘Like a pair of bloody old honeymooners, we were. Sex on the bloody floor in front of the fire. Sex for breakfast, and better than eggs on toast.'

He'd sat through the inquest in his wig and mo. He'd handled it, but he'd sweated when the black-headed little bitch had started talking. He never had known what that one was likely to do next. May hadn't been too certain that day either. She'd clung
to his sweating hand. Two hands, clasped, welded together with liquid fear.

But the little bitch had stood up there and spoken of a man who probably had an English accent, but it could have been Scottish or Irish. When you're six they just sound different. Not Australian, she'd said. And Jack had almost believed her. She couldn't guess at his age, she'd said, but she thought he was older than
Uncle Sam, and he'd had sandy-red hair. She remembered that. He'd ridden a motorbike with a sidecar. She said she had watched him bury Liza in the rose garden, but remembered nothing after that. She couldn't remember him locking her in the cellar.

There had been many questions but her story had not altered. Just the image of the man. And his voice. No. He had not spoken as if English had been
a second language. It was some sort of English accent.

The psychiatrist she'd seen after Mandy's death had said his piece, and the old copper who had run the search – eighty if he was a day, and eager for his moment of glory – hadn't been able to remember what he'd eaten for breakfast that morning.

They'd called Samuel Burton's name then, and Saint Sam had released May's hand to tell his tale.
He'd been away at the time, in Queensland. He'd driven day and night to get back home. He knew nothing of the day Liza had disappeared, but he'd retold the tale of the Englishman who had come to their door looking for a job. Crow. Ted Crow. He'd been on a working holiday around Australia.

May copped the worst of it. She'd said her piece, admitted leaving the girls watching television while she'd
driven to town for bread.

‘There had been several cases of meningitis in town. I was petrified. I kept the girls home from school. Sam did the shopping. I was afraid to take the girls into town. My friend's son had been left deaf by the disease. The girls were in my care and I made a bad decision I'll regret until my dying day.'

They'd questioned her on the length of time she'd been gone from
the property and doubted her reply. A child murdered and buried in the time it had taken May to drive into town, buy bread and return home, but they gave up when she broke down and howled.

David had done his fair share of staring that day. He hadn't seen much of Jack, and had never set eyes on him sober, so he'd been taken in by gentleman Sam in his wig and his mo and halo, his sibilant Ss. He'd
shaken his sweating hand when the day was over, but Ann had walked away, walked away fast with May tailing her, begging her to wait.

Jack had sighted his own discarded car in the car park, and he'd known that Johnny Jesus was in town. Hadn't seen him, but later that night the car had been parked for an hour at the Narrawee gates. May had panicked; she'd sat on the telephone until she'd got two
cancellations on a ten-week tour leaving the following day. Canada and America – she wouldn't have cared if it had been to Timbuktu.

Piebald at night when he'd taken his wig off, when they hit American soil, Jack pitched his wig to buggery and May had given him a haircut. No black then. Only the grey left, and a greyer grey than the wig.

He wasn't Jack hiding beneath a wig and mo any more, and
he wasn't bloody Sam either. He saw his great-grandfather in the hotel mirror that night, old Samuel standing there with age and death staring him in the eye, so he'd escaped May and gone on his first bender with the money a pawnbroker had given him for his watch. Got a bit for it too. He might have stayed away long enough to miss the morning bus out, but he'd been mugged, and the mugging little
bastards had put the boots in, letting him know just how bloody old and decrepit he was.

The New York cops got him back to May, sore enough, sober enough to fake it. He told her he'd gone for a walk, sightseeing, that the muggers had taken his watch as well as his wallet. She'd still believed him back then.

Ten weeks of trains and buses had been enough to grow a good beard and moustache, and
the dinner tables at night had given him freedom to have a few glasses of wine. He'd done all right, lost his halo but not his sainthood.

It had taken longer to grow hair down to his collar.

‘It's safer,' May had said when he'd fought her for the old short back and sides. ‘For the moment it's safer to look the way you've always looked, Sam.'

Bloody Sam.

For weeks after their return to Australia,
he'd stayed in Sydney alone, and had a ball, then for two months they'd lived at the Toorak flat. He'd spent his pocket money wisely, had a beer or three when she wasn't around, and sucked mints when she was due home. He'd got away with it until she deemed his hair, if not him, fit for Narrawee.

And he'd left it too late. Without realising it, he'd let the nagging little bitch gain the upper
hand.

‘Poor hen-pecked, grey-headed old bastard.'

Hen
reminded him of chook shit country, and Ellie. A lot of things reminded him of Ellie lately. His youngest, the wild little bitch Bronwyn, had reminded him of Ellie. She had her walk, her legs, her build. She and her smartarsed husband had arrived at the door only minutes after he and May had driven in with the groceries. He'd seen her as
she walked from the car, and he'd gone to ground. Hidden in the cellar while his liver ached. May entertained them, and left him starving in the cellar, and no bloody butter for his toast when she let him know it was safe to come out.

How old was that youngest one now? Seven years younger than Liza. ‘Bloody near thirty-one,' he said. Born a bare month before
Liza and Sam had died. ‘Shit,' he
snarled, then shook his head and smoothed on a coat of shellac.

His hands working independently of his mind were those of a perfectionist. They'd surprised him, those hands. There had been a time years ago when he'd believed in them. Time had stolen his belief, left his murdering bloody hands lost in a limbo of waiting. Poor bloody things, they couldn't do much now. They could still lift a bottle,
hold a pen, forge his brother's signature, and push sandpaper. Couldn't run the property. Didn't know how. But they worked on, his hands, and his brain worked on, and never the two did meet.

Mallawindy. He couldn't ever go back. Even before they'd found his body, he'd been aware that he could never go back. The best he could hope for was that Ellie might give him a good Catholic funeral, buy
him a decent tombstone with her insurance payout, and stick his name on it.

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand! She'll give half of it to the church, you see if I'm wrong,' he told the can of methylated spirits. ‘Bloody Catholic church. Got money coming out of its ears – it doesn't need my bloody money.'

For years he'd worked, on and off, for AMP, and during one bad month back in the eighties,
he'd sold himself a big policy. Had no intention of keeping up the payments, but Ellie had liked the idea; she'd paid up every month.

‘It's like putting money in the bank, Jack. We'll get it back when you turn seventy.' He could still do her voice, that nasal country tone.

‘Bloody seventy. Bloody Mallawindy – sprawled in the dust like a worn-out harlot with her legs spread wide.'

Narrawee wasn't
much better these days. Like every other town in Australia, it was dying while the cities choked on cars and people. Narrawee had been a world when he was kid. It had possessed a life, a personality; it thought it had a future.

Melbourne sucked the life from this town. Good farmland was
being sold off in five-acre lots to Melbourne's more affluent retirees. Hobby farmers. They built their own
mansions, determined to outdo their neighbours. They built tennis courts but they were too old to hold a racquet. They kept horses they didn't ride. Poor old Samuel Burton would roll over in his grave if he could see his town today. He'd built it, naming it after his property. The Burtons had been someone back then.

Jack lifted his head, straightened his shoulders and sucked in his stomach. Old
Samuel, his great-grandfather, had stood tall until the day he died.

Then he heard May's running footsteps, and his shoulders sagged and his stomach sagged. As the door opened he saw her silhouetted against the light, her umbrella high. For minutes she stood there, looking down.

‘You spend too much time in here, Sam. It's not good for you.'

‘Depression is a state of mind, induced by self for
the self-satisfaction of wallowing in self-pity. Get used to it.' He glanced at her to see if his words had hit home, then his hands smoothed another coat of shellac on the cabinet barely recognisable now as the battered old workbench he had dragged from a corner only weeks ago.

May placed the umbrella against the wall and walked downstairs to his side, where she stood, watching his hands.

‘It has come up well. That's the old one that used to be in the hall in your mother's time, isn't it?'

‘It came over with old Samuel. Two of the drawer handles have gone.'

‘There's a lot of junk in one of the old tin trunks. They could be in there. We never threw anything away.' She walked the cellar until she found the old tin trunk, and she opened its lid, squatting there, searching for minutes.
‘Take it up to the garage and I'll go through it for you.'

‘I'll look when I'm ready.'

‘Please yourself.' She stood, wiped her hands on her handkerchief.
‘I don't know how you can stand to work down here. Why don't you take the cabinet into the garage?'

‘Because I choose to work here, May.'

‘It's not healthy.'

‘Don't like the fumes? Or the ghosts?'

‘Don't start that again.'

‘Can you still
see them lying there on the floor, May?'

‘Stop it! Every time you wallow in your guilt, you force me to wallow in it with you. Is that what you want?'

‘Come on in, the wallowing is fine.'

‘You're killing me with your moods. I'm trying. I'm trying as hard as I know how to make this work. You won't let it work.' He stepped back studying the finish on a cabinet door. ‘I give you access to money
and what do you do? You go off drinking. Do it again, Jack, and it will be the end of you. And well you know it.'

‘What do you care?'

‘I'm finding it more and more difficult, I can promise you that.'

He picked up the can of methylated spirit, shook it. ‘They say it goes down well with a dash of cordial. Got any cordial in the house or is it fattening, May?' The sponge again in hand, he wiped
another coat of shellac across the cabinet with smooth, easy strokes.

‘You need professional help, Jack.'

He smiled. She'd called him Jack. ‘Good idea,' he said. ‘Join me up to the local AA, or I'll get myself to a psychiatrist. Spill my guts to him. Think he'd keep it under his hat?' She walked away, and he called after her. ‘What I bloody well need is to hear you say my name. That's what I
need. Do you know how good it sounds?'

For minutes she stood halfway up the stairs, watching him work. She had no reply. She knew what he was going through. She also knew she had to wipe that name from her mind.

‘I've got to go into town. Do you want anything?'

‘Yes. A couple of pounds of butter, a crate of Jack Daniel's, boss, and a cake of Solvol for the bathroom.'

‘Do you want anything!'

‘No, boss. Not diss boy. He don' wan' nuttin. You lockem him in, boss. You takem metho with you, boss.'

‘Stop it, you fool. Do you need cigarettes?'