Time's Long Ruin (40 page)

Mum sighed. ‘You think, perhaps, someone has them hidden?'

‘I hope. Perhaps.'

Bill emerged from his back door in a suit and tie. He looked over at us and called, ‘You got an hour, Bob? I know it's just Jesus this, Jesus that . . . and you're probably sick of the Rileys by now.'

But, I guess, he wanted to say, You're all I've got left, mate.

Dad stood up. He jogged over to Bill and took him by the arm. ‘I wouldn't miss a dose of God for anything.' Then he led him across the yard and up our back steps. ‘Made bearable by a couple of beers first, eh?'

The back door slammed and Mum looked at me. ‘It will do us all good,' she said.

‘I know,' I replied, smiling, wondering if she might reach out and touch my hand.

We walked along Thomas Street as though it was the most normal day in the world: Con and Rosa, Mum and Dad, me, Liz and Bill. The Rileys had left a note hair-pinned to their flyscreen door:
Meeting at the School
.

A message for anyone who might need them, especially their kids.

Again, Bill walked ahead of us, shuffling, his eyes following the cracks in the footpath. He mumbled to himself but we couldn't make out what he was saying. Up ahead a few mums, dads and kids were turning into the school. Some moved quickly, determined to avoid awkward words, others waited for us with the expression of a dog that had just been kicked.

Bill lifted his head. He watched three kids following their parents – their uninterested faces, their drooping shoulders and their feet dragging on the bitumen. He looked at the girl's hair, longer than Janice's, and lighter. The boy, with tomato-stake legs like Gavin's. And then his heart slowed, or jumped, or however you describe that instant of recognition and disappointment. The middle girl looked back at us with a mix of fascination and horror, as though she knew what Bill was thinking, and was ashamed of coming.

We turned into the school and there were handshakes and nodding heads and clutched shoulders. But not too many words. What could you say? It was too late for hope but too early for commiserations. There were just stories of brothers and cousins who had gone missing, but had walked in the front door a few weeks later. Michael Coulson came out and stood between the Rileys, putting his arms around their shoulders and telling them how the staff thought a few prayers might help.

We were led into the art room. There were ten rows of chairs filled with people in frocks and suits that hadn't been worn for years. I thought it felt like a funeral, like the time Dad's sister had died when I was five: the smell of deodorised carpet, freshly polished chalices and everyone quiet, waiting for someone to say something, avoiding the stares of relatives and whispering to people beside them who they'd never seen before and would never see again, ‘She's holding up well, isn't she?'

Michael Coulson got up, cleared his throat and read the twenty-third Psalm. Luckily it was the only one I could remember from Sunday school. Then, looking unsure of himself, he said, ‘I'm not a religious man but I'm sure if the Holy Spirit is somewhere here amongst us, He'd be taken by the story, the plight, the . . . can't think of the word . . . the situation Bill and Liz Riley are in. Anyway, I'll start with a prayer.'

The motion of heads bowing was almost audible. A few vertebrae cracked, feet shuffled and ties were loosened.

‘Dear Holy Father, I've got to know Janice and Anna, and I've met Gavin, and I've found them to be truly wonderful kiddies. I'm praying that you're watching over them, protecting them. I'm praying that they're safe and that they'll soon be back with their parents.'

Liz started to cry, quietly, as if she didn't want to disturb anyone. Bill was fidgeting, and the prayers, passing from Mr Coulson to Mrs Headley to the bursar, were starting to annoy him. He felt his muscles tighten and his stomach squeeze itself into a small ball. He felt his neck stiffen and sensed the beginnings of a headache. He clenched his fists and mumbled, ‘Christ,' and a few people heard him, each wondering what was going on in his head. And since Bill wouldn't comfort Liz, Mum did, putting her arm around her shoulder and pulling her closer.

‘Dear Lord,' one of the after-hours cleaners intoned, ‘the Rileys are your children too . . .'

Bill shook his head. ‘What?'

A long pause, and then a parent, the father of a friend of Anna's, took up the prayer. ‘Dear Lord, Anna has been part of our family from time to time. I've watched her grow over the years and – '

‘Who are you?' Bill asked loudly, looking at him, scowling, but then dropping his head.

‘. . . and we've watched her grow,' the man continued, cautiously, ‘into a fine young lady.'

Bill stood up, dragging his chair on the floorboards. He looked around at the small group and then walked out of the room.

‘Maybe we should leave it there,' the principal said, standing, fumbling the pages of a small, black Bible and reading a psalm that didn't have anything to do with anyone.

Outside in the hallway a few minutes later people mulled about in small groups and discussed other things: the cricket, the price of a hot water service, beer bottles as garden edging and Dean Martin's eyes. Liz and Bill stood together, sharing a cup of tea, eating re-warmed scones the canteen ladies had cooked that morning. Liz was pleading with him, but he wasn't listening. Then Kazz and Ron Houseman walked in, Kazz carrying a bar of shop-bought marble cake. ‘It's not over, is it?' she asked, looking at Bill and Liz.

‘I couldn't get anyone to close,' Ron explained.

Bill stepped forward. ‘Nice to see you, Ron.'

‘G'day, Bill.'

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Ron's my neighbour, my next-door neighbour. I'd like to welcome him here. It's been a busy few days for our Ron.'

‘Bill.'

‘What with a pharmacy to run . . .'

‘Bill, I couldn't find anyone.'

‘And his wife, Kazz, the ghost hunter.'

Liz put her hand on Bill's arm. ‘Come on, Bill, we should be off.'

As everyone thought, grief or not, this is not the way a man behaves.

‘Bill,' Ron managed, ‘I've got a few days clear. I want to help you look, mate.'

‘Mate? Ha, this is a mate!' He pointed to Dad. ‘Someone who gives up food, sleep, everything.'

‘I was gonna come with you, Bill.'

‘But they've gone, Ron, they've gone. It's too late. They're dead. Somewhere.' He talked slowly, breathing heavily. ‘And it happened while you were sellin' Bex, and Condy's, and little glass swans.'

‘Bill.'

‘Happy and well the Laxette way, mate.'

‘Bill, come on,' Liz pleaded.

‘I'm sorry. I thought there were plenty helping.'

Bill looked at the marble cake, cut into a perfect-sized slab of pink, brown and blue. ‘Nice of you to go to all that trouble, Kazz.'

She didn't know what to say. ‘It's hard for others too, Bill.'

Bill glared at her. ‘You two were always more worried about money. Too busy for kids.'

‘Don't you say that. You don't know – '

‘I know.'

‘I would've loved kids.'

‘You would've . . .'

He stopped, realising he didn't know what he was saying, or why. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then walked outside into the street-lit night. Liz looked at the group and said, ‘He doesn't mean it,' and then followed him out.

We were left with homemade jam and an urn that hissed and spat. The canteen manager filled it and it fell quiet.

Liz found Bill sitting under a pepper tree in front of the kindergarten. She sat beside him and touched her hand to his knee. ‘They're the ones who will get us through,' she said.

‘I know,' he replied.

No more words.

When I'm angry, I can't think of anything else, he wanted to say.

A crow cried out just above their heads. Bill started. Fruit dropped from a nearby fig tree and rolled down a mound, settling at their feet. Crushed, split and rotting figs carpeted the ground around them.

‘Janice probably sat here,' Bill said, at last. ‘Eating one of your stale sandwiches.' He smiled. She linked arms with him and they stood. ‘Come on,' she said.

They walked away. Bill looked back. Sure enough, Janice was there, ripping up her sandwiches and feeding them bit by bit to the starlings, throwing rocks at the crows when they landed.

‘Night night,' Bill whispered.

Night, Dad.

And he turned and walked on, leaving her in the dim shadows of branches shedding their curry-coloured pollen, and power lines, moving with the breeze.

Chapter Four

I remember going to the television studio in North Adelaide. It was an autumn morning, although autumn was a long way off. It was warm, with a cool breeze rustling the leaves of the plane trees in Wellington Square, just outside Channel Nine. The grass was buffalo, thick and spongy, but it had been cut flat and even and neat. There were five of us: Dad, Bert, Bill, Jim Clarke and me. Jim had just discovered that he'd seen one of Bill's acts a few years after the war at the Tivoli. Still, it didn't seem the time or place to ask him about Gert and Daisy. ‘You had to shave your legs?'

‘Of course, we did it properly, me and . . . Christ what was his name? Flaherty, Mark Flaherty.'

And he was back on the stage of the Tivoli, wearing a dress and apron, done up in hair-rollers, clutching a basket of washing and smoking a rollie. He was looking over the fence at his neighbour's washing. ‘Eh, Daisy, your Clem's sure got some shirts.'

Daisy got laughs by talking too low, and then suddenly adopting a thin falsetto. ‘It's Clem's underarms, Gert. Nothing helps. He just stinks. He's tried everything – deodorants, powders. He just stinks.'

‘My Clem used to stink.'

‘Your husband's called Clem too?'

‘Yes, didn't you know?'

The audience laughed and applauded, and Bill and Mark Flaherty tried to stop smiling.

‘Oh yes,' Gert continued. ‘He's always been Clem.'

‘He wasn't Clem last week.'

‘Wasn't he?'

‘No, he was Norman.'

‘Well, bugger me,' said Gert. ‘Either way, he still stinks.'

More applause, as Bill lapped it up with a disguised smirk.

‘I used to love Gert and Daisy,' Jim Clarke said. ‘Those days are gone now, eh? Now it's just Lucy and Jerry Lewis. You can see their gags comin' a mile off. The Tivoli – we'll never know it again, Bill.'

Bill was only just leaving the stage. ‘No, I suppose we won't,' he whispered, returning to reality, to a world devoid of gags and wigs – improvised routines that changed and grew and filled the stage like a tumour, making a world so real you could smell the BO on Clem's shirt and see the stubble on Bill's legs, smell Gert's fag and hear her pass wind under cover of a passing tram.

Jim Clarke handed Bill the note he'd been reading. Bill looked at Janice's handwriting – the looped
s
and formal
R
, the straight lines and angled cursive Janice had carefully composed in a recent note to them. They'd gone out for an hour and left her in charge of the little ones. She'd put them to bed and turned in herself just after nine, leaving a note to explain what she'd done. When they got home Liz and Bill had a laugh about the note and Liz had put it in a drawer, determined to keep it and show her when she grew up.

But the previous night, after returning home from the school, she'd found it and had the idea of releasing it to the media, to keep the interest going. Facts could be forgotten, but not the words of a nine-year-old intent upon showing her parents how grown up she'd become.

‘You sure you want to read it?' Jim asked Bill.

‘Yes,' Bill replied. ‘Then everyone will know what sort of girl she is.'

Twenty minutes later Dad, Jim and Bill sat behind a small wooden table placed in the middle of a milk-white studio, its walls as bare as the Croydon Cold Store. Where the walls met the floor there was a curve so there was no possibility of shadow. Lights hung from a high ceiling on long steel frames that moved in the slight breeze of air-conditioning.

There was only one camera. I watched on a monitor as the men squeezed together in front of a police logo made from cardboard that had been torn and taped back together. Dad poured water into each of three glasses and looked at Bill. ‘You okay?' he asked.

‘Yeah. It's not the Tivoli, but . . .'

Dad smiled. ‘And I'm not Daisy.'

A window opened from a control room high above the studio. ‘Tape's running,' someone called out, and another man, wearing thongs and shorts and a pair of earphones as big as coffee mugs, looked at them and asked, ‘Who's going first?'

‘I am,' Dad replied.