Time's Long Ruin (37 page)

Chapter Three

I've often imagined how much Liz suffered in the first few hours and days, how she could bear to walk around the house, drink tea, talk, or even attempt to think about what might have happened to her kids.

No one can know.

But this, perhaps, is how it might have been.

A slight breeze entered through Liz's bedroom window, lifting and dropping the venetian blinds. Suddenly it was cold. The storm had rolled over the city during the night. The gum in front of the Housemans' gave off a smell of lemon and dry wood. Jasmine and mock orange, growing wild over Con and Rosa's fence, had drooped and dropped a summer of dead flowers. Now there were just puddles left, and refrigerated air that turned cheeks red and rubbery.

I hope they're not getting wet, Liz had thought, lying in bed, rocking to the rhythm of the rain, imagining Janice shielding the others with a towel. Eventually she'd fallen asleep, with a photo clutched in her hand.

In the early morning she turned over and, seeing Bill wasn't there, stretched her arms and legs across the bed. She pulled a rug up under her arms and drifted back to sleep.

She had no way of knowing it was a dream. She was playing with her kids on Henley Beach. Janice and Anna were in the shallows, sitting in warm water up to their ribs. Gavin was on the white sand, gathering a menagerie of pretend animals. Liz was between them. She ventured into the water and sat beside Anna but Gavin stood up and started running towards the road, towards a shower that a few other kids had discovered. Liz got up and chased him, ‘Gavin!' and the girls laughed. She looked back, smiled, and waved a finger at them. Then she caught Gavin and carried him back to the shore. ‘Come in the water.'

‘No.'

‘Why?'

He just stared out to sea. ‘It's too big.'

Back at Thomas Street the breeze continued lifting and dropping the blind. Liz opened her eyes, saw the cracks in the ceiling and realised where she was. Then she closed her eyes, thinking, If I could just get back to sleep. I could brush the sand off Gavin's feet, and help them with their ponchos, and fumble in my pocket for bus fare.

For a moment she was back on the sand, running into the water, splashing her daughters, but then she started smelling the lemon scent and sensing the walls around her, hearing the metal-on-metal rub of the ceiling fan and the song of crickets that hadn't said anything else since the beginning of time. After a few moments her eyes were fully open, and adjusted. Her kids were gone, again. The world was hot and cold, changeable, full of hard objects and strange faces. Music played but then stopped. Contentment gave way to slow, sharp fragments of time, full of imagined horrors.

Among other things there was the sound of her husband's ukulele. She listened and heard him form a phrase, and then stop. She checked the clock. It was just after seven. She looked at the picture of her kids she'd almost crushed in her hand during the night.

Soon my eyes will close

Soon I'll find repose

And in dreams you're always near to me

She climbed out of bed. She picked up a cardigan off the floor and draped it across her shoulders. Then she walked down the hallway, out the back door and sat next to her husband. ‘How long have you been awake?' she asked.

‘I can't sleep.'

‘You got to.'

Instead of replying he just started plucking the melody he'd been singing.

‘I don't know what to say,' she whispered.

He stopped. ‘Rosa's right. It could've been me. It could've happened anywhere: Goolwa, the playground.' He looked at her. ‘I'm missin' 'em somethin' shockin', Liz.' And then he dropped his head onto her shoulder. ‘I don't want to fight with you, Liz. I just want 'em back.'

She rested her head on his. Her mind flashed back to Henley Beach, just for a few seconds. ‘Gavin,' she whispered.

‘Janice will look after him.'

‘And Anna, how would she cope with . . .?'

Bill lifted his head and steadied his ukulele across his knees. ‘At least they're lookin' for someone, eh? Not like they've just disappeared.'

‘But what sort of person . . .?'

Bill was about to go through the possibilities, but stopped himself. He heard the front gate open, stood up and said, ‘Who's that?'

He headed down the side of the house and Liz followed. After jumping through a clump of agapanthus he confronted a lone photographer taking a shot of a small bike posed in front of one of their rose bushes. ‘Who you with?' Bill asked.

The photographer extended his hand. ‘Mister Riley?'

Bill pushed his hand away. ‘Where did you get that bike?'

‘It was here.'

‘Bullshit. Who you with?'

The photographer shrugged. ‘We thought, a photo of your house, the yard, a few of the kids' things. Keep the interest up, eh?'

‘So you can sell some bloody papers?'

‘No, so people keep looking.'

Bill pointed to the bike. ‘And how's that gonna help?'

‘It's what people respond to.'

‘Stick to the facts. How'd you feel if it was your kids?'

‘I ain't got kids.'

Bill stormed off down the driveway, Liz following. I watched as the photographer took a small teddy bear out from under his jacket and posed it beside the bike. Then he took a few more shots from different angles. At last he picked up his props and left the Rileys' front yard.

From my bedroom window I stared out at Mr Hessian's concrete Virgin, still shedding tears. She was sitting in a puddle of mud. Water had pooled everywhere in our yard. Along Thomas Street the gutters had blocked and water had flooded our cricket pitch. Janice was still there, tapping the bitumen with her bat, waiting for me to bowl. ‘Come on, Henry, one that I can hit this time.'

I noticed a small package, done up in brown paper and string, sitting on our front porch. I stepped out into the hallway, opened the front door and went out to fetch it. Returning to my room I cut the string and peeled the wet paper from a folio-sized book. It was an old worn copy of
The
Egyptian Book of the Dead
. The cover and pages were damp. I leafed through and looked at pictures of the Egyptian afterlife: Osiris, Horus and Anubis, with his jackal head, busy weighing up the fate of common men recently fallen off cliffs, under carts, or succumbing to liver cancer. Under the pictures were verses describing the main players, their dilemmas, dreams and daily activities. In the middle of the book there was a small card inserted beside the scribe Ani's instructions for letting a soul rejoin its corpse in the God's domain. And on this card, printed in smudged black ink:
Henry, a small gift. Still waiting for you to finish our library. Dr
Gunn
.

I took the card, tore it up and dropped the pieces into my bin. I'd found the book sitting only a few feet from my open window – he must have seen me. A warm, uncomfortable feeling passed through my body. Had he whispered something to me? How long had he watched? Had he tried to get in?

I closed my window and locked it. Then I sat back on my bed with the book on my knees and started looking at it more closely. The characters were drawn flat, part-human, part-animal. Dad was Yesterday and Mum was Tomorrow, Rosa was the Benu-bird and Doctor Gunn was Anubis, judging people's souls on faulty scales. Maybe, I thought, I should give the book to Dad. He was the true law-bringer.

But how would I explain it? ‘He's trying to get to me.' Dad looking surprised. ‘But it's just a book. He has millions. A gift for helping him.'

Then there was a dead pharaoh, lying flat on a table as priests removed his organs and placed them into canopic jars.

It was almost as though Doctor Gunn knew what the images would mean to me. The first time we met he took me into his back room and helped me unbutton and remove my shirt, saying, ‘You've never heard of a massage machine?' He laid me flat on my stomach on his table and ran a big four-fingered machine-hand up and down my back. ‘What do you think of that?' he asked, as he started removing small but significant parts of me, putting them into jars on his windowsill.

I wonder, I thought, sitting in my room, looking at a picture of a pharaoh cradling his son, if this is how he thinks of me, somehow? I could remember him turning off the machine and starting to rub his fingers and hands over my back, squeezing on cold ointment and whispering, ‘People pay good money for this.'

I took the book and placed it carefully beneath my mattress. Then I sat huddled on my bed, looking out of the window, wondering why he was doing this to me now. Maybe he didn't care about the Rileys. Maybe he thought I'd already forgotten them. Maybe he knew that I was too scared to say anything.

Dad opened my door. ‘You okay?' he asked.

‘Fine,' I replied.

He smiled and started to close the door.

‘Dad.'

‘Yes?'

‘Did you check that licence number?'

He felt in his top pocket and pulled out the note. ‘Forgot all about it. I'll do it today.'

‘Do you think it could be anything?'

‘If it is, you'll be the most famous detective in Australia.' Then he was gone – my one-dimensional god of law and order. And the verse under his portrait read,
The Prophet Page
cast his net over the waters of the Underworld, and when he pulled
it in it was full of fish of every shape and size.

The search continued. Later that morning we all stood on the banks of the Port River: Liz (who'd had enough of sitting at home) and Bill, me, Mum and Dad, Con and Rosa, Kevin and Mariel Johns (who told us how she'd been praying almost non-stop since the previous morning, explaining how she couldn't just sit at home listening to the radio reports, and how she convinced her dad to drop around to the Rileys to see if there was anything they could do).

We watched as Bert (who'd been home for a sleep and clean up) pulled up in the Melack Motel. He got out, wearing nothing but overalls, proudly displaying a chest of grey and white hair, and shook everyone's hand. Then he unloaded nine pairs of rubber boots from his car. ‘All the right sizes,' he said. ‘Check the soles. I even made sure they weren't leaking.'

We all sat down on the gravel and took off our shoes. Mum had found me some jeans and a T-shirt with a tear that I used for painting models. I pulled on the smallest pair of boots, plugged them with my jeans and felt my big toes sticking through my socks. Dad was next, springing up, looking across the river and squinting at the sun. ‘High tide's at two,' he said. ‘Bert, maybe you could take Bill and Liz.'

‘I'll go with them,' Mum offered, looking at Liz.

‘You do the west side, we'll do the east. Start at the Jervois Bridge and work your way along. We'll stop at the flour mill, you go as far as the yacht club.'

‘That's all?' Bert asked.

‘The rest has been done.'

‘All of it?'

‘It's a long river, Bert. Then there's Outer Harbour, Torrens Island, the North Arm.' He adjusted his boots, avoiding Bill's eyes, hoping his best mate wouldn't ask about the miles and miles of silty banks, the storm-water outlets and slipways, the factory discharges and a hundred acres of samphire mangroves that met the sea in a knee-deep slush: a million places to dump a few small bodies. ‘Jim's gonna arrange some boats,' Dad said, looking at Bill. ‘They can get in close to the bank.'

Jim Clarke had slept in the caravan, snoring through the worst of the storm, waking up and looking out across a wet, deserted esplanade. But with light came the first volunteers: the entire staff of Radio Rentals (which had closed for the day), the Grange, Largs and Semaphore cricket clubs, the Edwardstown Lions (who'd brought barbecues and sausages), a dozen teachers from Croydon Primary, John Cox and Ted Bilston and a hundred anonymous workers from Holdens who would have to knock off at two to get ready for the afternoon shift. There was a Loys truck full of soft drinks, unloading crates wherever they found volunteers along the coast, a load of towels from the Government Linen Service and even the local MP, Ewan Fisher, strapping on a coordinator's vest and driving along the western beaches.

Jim had been ready for them, pinning up maps of western Adelaide on a board in front of the van and drawing in who was where with a red pen that wouldn't write on damp paper. He assigned his officers a region and told them to use their initiative, making sure the radios and phones in his van (hooked up by the PMG) were always ringing or being rung. Including Dad, who'd phoned earlier that morning. ‘Listen, Jim, I've got half the neighbourhood here, and everyone wants to help.'

‘What about the Port River?'

‘Which bit?'

‘The Jervois Bridge. I'll call Bert, tell him to pick up some boots on the way through.'

I walked beside Dad as we followed the curve of the river. It was slow going. Our boots sank up to the ankles and it wasn't long before our legs were heavy and tired and we had to stop to rest. The grey-brown mud smelt of oil and decay. It was covered with fishing line and a hundred years of rubbish: tin cans and tyres, rusted metal shapes, rims and windscreen-wipers and fence posts, old jumpers, shoes and bottles. But mostly just mud.