Grassdogs Read online

  ‘Good boy…Down now.’

  Edgar had no need to think beyond the pleasures of each minute. It was the father who insisted he try to think ahead to next year’s harvest, sowing, scarifying; the future needs of the soil.

  ‘Gotta think ahead, me boy. Hold yer head up.’

  Alf thought of nothing else, burdened as he was by his debts. Forget the past. But that year he had to sell the tractor and the seeder and spent more time in his shed than ever.

  When Sophie Trelawney disappeared there was a terrible outcry in the district and the town. Edgar had all but forgotten her. Who? He recalled that she wore her hair in plaits. Concern grew to fear, and soon to panic. Stormwater drains leading to the river were untangled and searched. The river was dragged by a launch with police divers sifting through the mud and willow roots on the bottom. Nothing.

  A small mannequin dressed in the clothes in which Sophie was last seen was placed at the entrance of the supermarket. Edgar did not recognise the mannequin. The father hurried him on to the ute.

  Fear turned to hysteria. Mr and Mrs Trelawney begged on the television. Days went by. Father Fletcher offered up a mass. It seemed everyone knew someone from the district who was questioned. To object invited suspicion. But it was still a surprise when the hare-lipped boy from her primary school days—what was their relationship again?—was taken in for questioning.

  Actually they came out to the farm, two detectives in suits, and found Edgar and his dad at sullen work in their shed beside the lacerated shade of the peppercorn tree. Edgar tracing the flight of birds, the S’s that Sophie had taught him, in the dust with a stick. The father had long given up trying to get a sensible conversation out of the boy.

  ‘Alf?’

  A great gash of sunlight in the door.

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Detective Gould, and this is Detective Tavistock. We want to ask you about the young girl, Sophie Trelawney.’

  ‘I heard about that. You haven’t found her, then?’

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  ‘So what are you doing?’

  ‘We’re looking.’

  Edgar looked at them from a circle he had drawn around himself in the dust.

  ‘I bet you are.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Alf?’

  ‘What makes you think she might be here?’

  ‘Since you know what we’re talking about, you wouldn’t happen to know the whereabouts of Sophie Trelawney?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Alf whacked at a piece of metal stuck in a vice.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nope, I fucking wouldn’t.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone.’

  ‘This is my fuckin’ property. I’ll take whatever tone I like.’

  Edgar saw the hairs on his father’s knuckles. Whack whack.

  ‘Things must be pretty desperate.’

  ‘They haven’t taken me house yet.’

  ‘Well, Alf, they seem to have taken everything else.’

  ‘Pissorf.’

  The police were very patient. The second one was staring firmly at Edgar. Rex sat beside him in the dirt. Sunlight from the holes where the rivets had rusted through.

  ‘We understand that Sophie was friends with a lass called Ivy Cornish, who knew your son. We have information that he once tried to pull down her underwear.’

  There was a pause. All three men fixed their eyes on Edgar.

  ‘It’s him we’d actually like to talk to, Alf,’ said the other. ‘We’re questioning everyone.’

  ‘Well yer can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘’Cause lookit him, he ain’t got the brains of a rissole.’

  ‘He’s a big strong lad.’

  ‘And he was here any night you care to mention.’

  ‘Which night was that?’

  ‘Any night you care to mention.’

  ‘He’s not under suspicion, Alf, we simply want to rule him out of our inquiries.’

  ‘Well, yez can fuckorf out of my shed,’ the father raised his voice, ‘and yez can fuckorf of my property.’

  ‘Alf, we’ll simply get a warrant.’

  ‘Get what yez like, but I’ll meet yez at the gate.’

  ‘What do you say, lad?’ They turned to Edgar, but Edgar said nothing.

  The detectives looked closely at the father and at Edgar, before walking out of the shed. The father flung a spanner after them which clanged against the corrugated iron. The dust hanging in the still air. He looked at Edgar as though he was about to make another of his pronouncements. There son, that’s how yer deal with scummy fuckers that want yer balls. That’s how yer keep whatever shitty little bit of dignity yer got left. But he said nothing, and his breathing rasped and echoed in the hollow shed.

  The mother smelled of dough and sherry.

  She cleaned her fingernails with a broken match.

  She hummed along to the wireless.

  She spoke fondly of ‘Blue Hills’ by Gwen Meredith.

  She hated the news and knew in advance when to turn the wireless off.

  She cleaned her ear by wiggling the tip of her little finger in it.

  She had no photographs of herself.

  She had a silky-haired terrier that she loved.

  She quilted bedspreads.

  She knitted jumpers.

  She counted the stitches.

  She had blue eyes.

  She was not fat.

  She liked baking.

  She had long hair which she kept tied up in a bun.

  She chuckled like a gang-gang parrot.

  She could not drive.

  She had red hair.

  She had once been proposed to at a bush dance by a man named Clifford Bull.

  She liked to sit on the porch and slap flies.

  She liked sherry.

  She went with the father when he was taken in for questioning.

  She hated mosquitoes.

  She lived in the Riverina all her life.

  She had never climbed the Rock.

  She grew old suddenly after she found the body of the father and the rifle near him in the empty shed.

  She would not speak to Father Fletcher.

  She hugged Edgar to her skirts.

  Her red hair turned grey. Grey turned her clothes.

  She stopped her knitting.

  She liked sherry.

  She fed the silky the best cuts of meat.

  She spent longer on the porch.

  She fed stale scones to the chickens.

  She did not chase Edgar any more when he left the house.

  She did not ask where he had been when he returned.

  Her name was Mrs Hamilton.

  Edgar watched the body of the father, covered in a sheet, wheeled on a gurney to the back of the ambulance. Sunset bleeding over the stubble of wheat. The stretcher’s legs folded up like an ironing board. One by one the cars left. The police. The neighbours. The welfare people. Was there anyone who could come to stay with Mrs Hamilton to look after the boy? No sister, or relative? No, there was no one. When they were finally alone, the mother closed the door to her room and lay down on the big bed. Edgar heard her crying to herself. ‘Nnn, nnn, nnn.’ The rhythm of her sobs had a stamina in it, like a parrot, as if it were conserving energy to last all night. The silky scratched at the door and Edgar heard her shuffling footsteps, heard the door open a fraction to admit the dog. He glimpsed her wan, desolate face. He went out to the big shed under its powerful tang of pepper, and looked at all the footprints in the dust.

  I, Tony Tindale, did not choose to be involved in this avuncular history. I had ambition in the world of jurisprudence. Long-winded common sense. What right did my mother have to come and interrupt my rise? How could I pay attention? And what exactly was it she was asking me to consider? That which she could not face herself?

  Among my mother’s papers I found a card, suitably sombre, which read:

  Your father die
d last week. I suppose you will be glad to know. Funeral St. Michael’s, 14th Nov, 10:30. Father Fletcher presiding. You would be most welcome.

  She did not go. She hadn’t given him much thought when he was alive, so what did it matter now that he was dead?

  Now fatherless, Edgar grew. He tried to take over the running of the farm, but he could not plough a straight line, could not shear a clean sheep. His hay bales fell apart in his hands as soon as he lifted them. Season by season the weeds prospered. Under his own volition he would scoot off into the bush. Truant officers never laid an eye on him. Letters came from the bank with increasing frequency, threatening to foreclose, and in time the mother succumbed, selling off the paddocks one by one, which were snapped up by Dungay, their neighbour. He also took the father’s cattle dogs, Rex and Bex, off their hands, such a waste to see good work dogs not doing what they were bred for. The mother asked Dungay would he take on Edgar when the hay carting season arrived—but, Dungay lowered his voice, he was afraid that Mrs Dungay did not trust Edgar around their daughters. They were at an impressionable age. Anyone could see that the boy was about to run wild. History repeating itself, eh? The mother was too stunned to answer, and watched Dungay retreat, dragging the father’s dogs.

  Sometimes the mother, rocking back on a kitchen chair, would make noises which sounded to Edgar like:

  ‘MygodwhathaveIdone?’

  Edgar stared at her with his head turned on one side, a chop bone poised in his fingers.

  Sometimes it seemed that the father was still alive, clanging about in the shed. Sometimes it felt that the sun stopped still in the sky, or else refused to rise, smouldering below the horizon. Other times he woke and was surprised that months, or years had passed. One morning he stepped into the bathroom and found sprouts of pale hair growing in copses on his face. But not on the pink weal where his lip was sundered like an old feather. He could not remember if they had been there the day before or not.

  What he did remember was one day coming down from the edges of the dish that were not hills, a stone in his mouth, his body satisfied like a dog after vigorous exercise. No smoke coming from the chimney. The chickens still not released. The mother’s silky burst through the door’s torn flywire when it heard him approaching. It barked in frantic orbit about his legs. Inside he found her lying on the floor of the bathroom, beneath the thin fabric of her dressing gown and the chill of the autumn air.

  Edgar bundled her up in his arms like a bag of kindling and carried her out to the father’s old ute. He had done enough paddock-bashing in it to know roughly what to do. The mother slumped against the door. The ute bounced over potholes and obsolete cattle grids. When he braked too suddenly in a spray of stones at the main road, she slumped forward onto the floor. Edgar jumped out and ran to rearrange her on the seat again, pulling the gown over the pale, doughy flesh he did not wish to see. He wrapped the seat belt around her this time. Her head lolled. The tongue in her mouth large and purple. She moaned: ‘Nnn.’

  Edgar apologised continually in the language only she and he understood, telling her to hang on, give it a rub, old girl. He was helping her. Behind them, in the tray of the ute, the silky yapped through the glass of the rear window—the same vantage from which Edgar had often watched the father wrestle the ute into town.

  He sped along the highway in third, despite the fear he felt at the open road with the trucks barrelling past. The less complicated gear-changing the better. His hands knew when to turn the wheel. He knew which hairpin corners to navigate carefully—the S-bends at Kapooka, the T-intersection at the golf club. He put the indicator on. He understood the reasons why. The surprise and power he felt at this knowledge fizzed through him. He was driving to the rescue.

  He knew the tall red-bricked building, where the highway became Edward Street, was called the hospital. He’d been born here, with the cord around his neck, they’d never tired of telling him. He shouldn’t have lived. He sped through the red-lit intersection at Docker Street without stopping. Horns blared. Tyres screeched. He lurched the ute off the road, through the gate, too fast up the ramp and, as gently as he ultimately could (‘Hang orn, Ma’), smashed through the sliding glass doors that formed the entrance to Casualty. The engine stalled. Glass skittered across the polished linoleum. A row of astonished faces all turned towards him. Edgar barely noticed (as his head shot forward and his jaw hit the steering wheel) that his four lower teeth also disappeared amongst the carnage. People ran everywhere, shouting, some of them on crutches. Nurses and other staff came and gawped. Patients sat in hardbacked chairs, bandaged, eyepatched, silent or screaming, staring in shock at the ute and the bloodied driver throwing open the door. The silky in the back yapped without pause. Edgar fell from the cabin and raced around the front of the car. When he released her from the seat belt, the mother fell into his arms. He lifted her from the cabin and stood in the shattered foyer, the mother loose in his arms, her gown gaping. Finally a nurse came to him and led him to a trolley in a corridor where she helped him lay the mother down on a frighteningly clean sheet. He gulped at the blood in his mouth. Spat out a tooth. No sooner had he laid her down than two hefty fellows in security uniforms pounced on him. They tried to pin him to the floor, but Edgar was strong for his age and it was only with difficulty that all three of them sat down, in some clumsy embrace, with a bump on the floor. Their arms were entangled, while two orderlies quickly wheeled the trolley away and the mother disappeared behind a white door which swung and swung until it swung no more.

  When they creaked open the lock-up the copper asked how long had he been driving around with his mother’s body in the car? Behind him stood another man in a suit who said he was from the Base Hospital. They stared at Edgar’s ravaged face. Edgar did not try to cover it. His bottom lip was split and purple as a slug. His tongue explored continually the space where his teeth had been. He could not grunt his name. He stared at the buttons on the man’s suit. Where did such buttons come from?

  They took pains to explain that before an autopsy established the cause of death they could only hazard a guess, but until that time his mother would be registered as dead on arrival. It had not been as a result of the impact with the hospital doors.

  ‘But she groaned. She were alive,’ said Edgar.

  There was a short pause in the conversation. They conferred. While they sympathised with his sudden loss, there was the question of the cost of repairs to the sliding doors. Edgar said nothing. While they understood there was no appropriate time to raise these matters and no delicate way in which to do it, they further understood that there was no insurance cover attached to the vehicle involved in the accident. In addition it was not registered. Nor did Edgar have a licence. This was a delicate situation, they understood, but one that could not retrospectively be overlooked by hospital bureaucracy.

  ‘What about me dorg?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Me dorg. The silky.’

  The two men looked at each other, then at Edgar. Was it the toothlessness or the cleft palate that made him so difficult to understand?

  ‘Do you know what we’re talking about?’

  Edgar did not. Only that the mother had vanished behind some swinging doors, the silky was missing, and his teeth were also gone.

  The policeman made several phone calls while Edgar stood waiting by the desk. The man in the suit went, with perfunctory words of condolence, deep sympathy, terrible tragedy, yap yap yap. They would be in contact regarding the funerary arrangements and that other matter, though he did not say who they were, or how they would contact him. They wanted the names and numbers of other members of the family so that they could be contacted.

  Eh?

  The policeman told him that the ute had been impounded. He could not have it back, and without a licence he ought to have had more sense than to drive it in the first place. Didn’t he think to phone for an ambulance?

  What with?

  Edgar made a squiggle on the release papers.
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br />   The door. The steps.

  The driver of the patrol car stared at him in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘What happened to your face, mate?’

  Edgar turned the face to the window. Houses rushing past. Fences. Sprinklers waving their fronds of water on desperate lawns. Kids riding on bikes and skateboards. The life of the town carrying happily on. At the council pound the policeman left him. Edgar found his way up the wooden stairs into the office. A bell tinkled above the door. A large poster of a miserable looking puppy hung on the wall, some vaccination program, Edgar didn’t bother with the small print. A girl behind the desk looked up. It was Ivy Cornish. She blinked when she saw him. He also. She no longer wore plaits, but jeans and a chequered shirt. Her hair was shorter. He saw that she still chewed her nails. She asked politely what he wanted.

  ‘Me dorg.’

  He breathed deeply. He wanted to tell her about the mother, but did not have the words. He saw that Ivy had chosen not to remember him.

  He watched her take a bunch of keys from a drawer, then she led him quickly through to the cages. Past a row of wire pens full of cats. Ivy took a pair of yellow plugs and inserted one in each ear. A man in wet gumboots was hosing down the concourse. The silky set up an immediate high-pitched yapping as soon as it saw him. Other dogs joined in, leaping at the wire, and soon there was a howling, barking cacophony that came to Edgar’s ears as a keening wail of grief. He stared at them all behind the wire as Ivy retrieved the silky from its cage. The dog writhed frantically in Edgar’s arms. He let it lick his face. Ivy looked away. She would not meet Edgar’s eye. They would not chat about school, about the good old days. She was disowning him too. Part of him felt hot with fury. He wanted to bite her fingers off. Part of him was hardening and cracking with sadness. He followed her back to the office, where she marched behind the fortress of her desk, tossed the ear plugs in a bin.

  ‘The old girl kicked the bucket,’ he said, lamely.

  ‘That’s no good. When?’