Skull river, p.21
Skull River, page 21
‘But she’s a maid, isn’t she?’
‘No, she is not. She’s his daughter-in-law, under his protection, if you can call it that. Ray doesn’t believe in women working for money. Says it’s vulgar. But women slaving from dawn to dusk for family is not vulgar, to his mind. She’s used as an unpaid beast of burden with no rights. No eight-hour day for her.’
‘She could leave.’
‘With what money?’ she said, impatient with me. ‘And besides, Hilde has been a modest and obedient girl all her short life, raised to put others before herself, and has never done anything without her father, husband or father-in-law telling her to do it. By the time she gets to my age she’ll be alone, exhausted and poverty-stricken, and they’ll wash their hands of her.’
I must have looked bemused, because she shook her head impatiently and said, ‘Stick to sorting out pub brawls, Sergeant, do-gooding is obviously not your forte.’
Maybe Mrs Lennox was a socialist or a suffragette or something like that. I was wrapped up in my own concerns for so long that I hadn’t caught up with these ideas. I had meant happiness in a different sense, but now I wasn’t sure what I meant.
I wandered back to the station. Best to leave do-gooding to those who knew better. I had a weapons search to carry out. That was a task a man could get his fist around.
24
After that perplexing talk with Mrs Lennox, I took a moment to go to the bathroom and apply ointment to my scar, dabbing and running my finger up and down it from hairline to beard, soothing and reassuring. I had a fear of the scar returning in all its livid ugliness if I didn’t apply the ointment several times a day. My father had reassured me that this could not happen, but I dismissed his comments. It was my face, not his.
Thus anointed, I took Vogel and Jackson and we rode up to Ringer’s Rocks. As we got closer, we saw figures splashing about in the river, the rugged cliff behind them, sheltering the two dredges. The bend in the river here was quite pronounced, leaving a stony isthmus as a sunny beach on which somebody had lit a fire, while across the road, higher up, lay the ramshackle remains of the town.
We rode closer and Vogel gasped. I called a halt. The girls ran from the river onto the shore, completely naked in the cold afternoon air, and began to taunt us, waggling their skinny arses, lifting their breasts and bouncing them, yelling foul curses like sailors carousing in the Rocks in Sydney.
‘That’s obscene,’ Vogel spluttered, bright red. ‘We have to arrest them, filthy little strumpets.’
Jackson was silent, gazing at the bare female flesh in a primal daze as he chewed on a stalk of straw.
‘We have to arrest them, sir,’ Vogel said.
‘Trooper, what did I say about telling me what to do?’
‘Yes, sir, but—’
Conjunctions like but make me want to hit something. Vogel shut his mouth just in time.
‘Permission to speak, sir.’
‘No. They are provoking us and it’s working. Learn this lesson now and learn it well, Vogel. Your facial expression must be as a rock, hard, impassive, unmoved. Or they will shit all over you.’
A titanic inner struggle played out across his face, then he emitted a strangled, ‘Yes, sir.’
Foufoune appeared wearing a vast, magenta flowered kimono. She strolled across the road and picked her way down the stony beach as if she were on the sands at Coogee. She gave us a wave, then dropped the kimono. Both Jackson and Vogel groaned and carried on as she stood there, her great pink belly hanging down to her bulging, dimpled thighs, her arms akimbo, flesh hanging and wobbling, two bags of bosom quivering, her brassy hair tied up on top in a coquettish bow.
This was too much for Vogel and he began spluttering his outrage.
‘Stow it, Trooper,’ I snapped. If ever there was a time for the rock face, this was it.
Then the old doxy raised her arms and held them out to the side, threw her head back and shimmied her great dugs in an act so brazen it was all I could do not to laugh. She was like Scylla in the Odyssey, eating living men, using our weakness to survive. Vogel, burning with fury, repelled her onslaught with a barrage of moral fire. She laughed at him, all her ragged succubi joining in, dancing around her, screeching with laughter. Vogel had broken the square and now we were for it.
I ordered the troopers to fix in place the mask so essential to this sort of work, then sent them off to search huts and tents for weapons, noting where they’d been found. I dismounted and went over to Mrs Foufoune. The girls were skipping around the troopers, still naked, poking out their tongues, making lascivious gestures, whipping their wet, ropy hair around, squealing like imps.
‘Call your girls off, Mrs Foufoune,’ I said, watching Jackson watching the girls. Vogel spat insults, assuring them brimfire would rain upon them all the way to the eternal flames of Hell, and then they’d be sorry.
Meanwhile, Foufoune, her kimono open, displaying her corpulence to great effect, said thoughtfully, ‘The dark one – looks like he might come back for a taste. He going to be stationed at Colley for a bit?’
‘Not if I can help it. Now, call them off or we’ll charge them and lock them up.’
She clapped her hands and screeched, ‘Girls, get dressed, you’ll catch your death.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, nodding and keeping my eyes above the neck. ‘A dredger called Mutkins – what can you tell me about him?’
‘Don’t take much notice of them really, as long as they pay and don’t get too rough.’
‘Was he one to be rough with the girls?’
‘You want to know about Pearl,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It happens in this game, sometimes a john takes to a girl and doesn’t want to share her. He doesn’t understand or he doesn’t care to. Mutkins was like that with Pearl.’
‘Do you know where she is now?’
She shook her head. ‘I heard that Mutkins got himself in trouble buying grog for her. She hung about town while he was locked up. Some fella was seen groping her behind the post office, and next day Mutkins got out and that was that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He went asking around for her, heard about the other fella copping a feel, got angry and we never heard from Pearl again. I’m not saying he killed her or anything, but if he found her, he wouldn’t have been happy with her. But what else was she supposed to do? Anyway, that’s what I heard.’
‘And Scanlon?’
‘Just doin’ his job. But Mutkins reckoned it was his fault Pearl had to fend for herself.’
‘Was he angry enough to kill Scanlon?’
‘Wouldn’t know, luvvy. I’m not interested in them and their ways, to be honest. Been in the game too long, probably. Pearl was picked before she was ripe, her English was bad and she’d go with anyone who gave her a pat. Girls like that don’t last long.’
‘Did you report her missing?’
‘Cops wouldn’t give a rat’s bum about a china doll, you know that.’ She waddled off up the stony shoals, kimono flapping in the breeze.
‘Aren’t you supposed to keep them safe?’ I called after her.
‘Can’t do much if they run off,’ she yelled back.
I turned and looked at the dredges, silent and ugly. The river like a sallow gutter. Could be anything stashed inside the dredges: guns, illegal alcohol, maybe even Pearl’s clothes.
I followed Foufoune up the stony incline to the ragged settlement. The huts were a jumble of timber slab, bark and corrugated iron. Vogel and Jackson worked their way around, taking notes, piling up rifles. Two old men, not dredgers and not with Foufoune’s travelling brothel, and so weathered they looked like tree knots, nodded at me, said g’day. Both wore striped shirts and ragged waistcoats, stiff with grime, stained old daks, shoes with toes sticking out.
‘Blackie McGeehan,’ one of them said, holding out a wizened hand, which I shook.
‘Mr McGeehan, excuse me asking, but were you aware that the state now pays an aged pension? Your camp looks as if it could do with a flush of funds.’
‘Next year, officer, I’ll be sixty-five, and me brother, Bundy,’ he nodded at the other old fella, ‘the year after. Then we’ll get ourselves some dancing shoes, eh?’
The two of them laughed, croaked and coughed, hacking up phlegm. Poor old buggers, with their blackened teeth and scurvy spots. Hopefully they’d have a few decent years on the pension, if they lasted that long.
We had a haul of half a dozen rifles, mostly .303s. We’d send them off to Ballistics in Sydney, and we might get a match with the bullet that killed Scanlon or we might not. The doors to the cabins on the dredges were padlocked so we couldn’t search in there. At least, not yet.
Jackson was speechless as we rode back to Colley, but not Vogel. On and on he went about how he never thought he’d see Sodom and Gomorrah here, right here on the Bull River, of all places.
‘Just see it as part of the rich tapestry of policing, Vogel,’ I said, swatting at a fly.
‘We’ve told them twice to move on and they haven’t, and we just ride away, sir?’
‘Complete the mission,’ I said. ‘One day, when we have nothing else demanding our time, we will have another go.’
‘I want to be there when we do, sir. Put that woman in the woodshed with a Bible for a few days. Do her good.’
Given a few more years, I mused, Vogel would be a formidable law enforcer. Or he’d be exhausted from trying to clean an uncleanable world and would become a quartermaster.
When we got back to town, I wired Bathurst and requested they provide an alert when they released the dredgers. I wanted to enter those dredging cabins at the same time as them.
~
With another hour before dusk, O’Malley and I returned to the Simmons house. We knocked on the door and Mary opened. She had bruising around her neck already and looked like one eye was on its way to turning black. She wouldn’t look at me.
Jack Simmons was at the table having a meal with Frank. Dawn was sitting on the floor with a shabby knitted doll. Frankie jumped to his feet, his chair falling back, and his father roared at him to sit down. I don’t know who he was more frightened of, us or his father.
Simmons took a gulp of tea and said, ‘What is it?’
Mary stood at the sink, her back to us, like she didn’t care anymore.
‘We’ve come to question Frank Simmons for arson on the morning of the nineteenth of April. We believe he deliberately lit a fire beneath the police station knowing a man was inside, with intent to murder said man.’
Frank tried to run again but his father was too quick, and he lunged from his chair and caught the boy by the ear, twisting it. ‘What the fuck have you done, boy?’
The poor kid had tears rolling down his cheeks as his dad twisted harder.
‘That’s enough, Mr Simmons.’
‘You telling me how to discipline my own son?’
‘Like you discipline your wife, by the looks of it,’ I said.
‘Don’t, Gus, please,’ Mary said, turning around.
‘Oh, it’s “Gus”, is it? You been whoring around with a copper now?’
‘No, she hasn’t,’ Frankie cried, and he pulled himself out of his father’s grasp, ran to Mary and threw his arms around her. She hugged him tight, cradling his head while the baby cried.
‘Been away working my arse off for months and this is what happens when I’m gone? You, slut, fucking a demon?’ Simmons went for her, but O’Malley got there first, slamming him back against the wall.
‘She wasn’t fucking a demon,’ Frankie cried, ‘He was a—’
‘A stock and station agent, in the district for work,’ Mary said in a dull voice. ‘Name of Charlie.’
‘And I killed him, Dad, I didn’t want him here in our house, and he wouldn’t go and so I called the cops and burnt down the lock-up in the morning.’
The four adults in the room looked at him with astonishment. Twelve years old and he had done that.
‘You stupid little bastard,’ Simmons said.
Frankie winced. Probably thought his father would approve.
‘You emptied out the black powder from some bungers and used it to set fire to a stack of magazines under the station,’ I said.
He nodded, his face against Mary’s shoulder. ‘Yep,’ came a muffled reply.
‘This is your fault, you faithless bitch,’ Simmons said. O’Malley braced himself but Simmons confined himself to verbal abuse.
‘See what I have to deal with?’ he said to us. ‘She’s always whining or crying, and then she goes out whoring.’
‘And what do you do on your long stints in other towns, Mr Simmons? The only difference here is that the boy saw her being unfaithful. He doesn’t see you whoring around.’
‘He never,’ Frank shouted.
‘What happens now?’ Mary asked.
‘We’ll take him to the station and charge him. One of you will have to accompany him while he’s being charged, then he’ll go to Bathurst on remand, unless you can bail him, and then, like as not, he’ll be sentenced to a boy’s reformatory.’
Frank cried harder as I spoke, clutching at Mary as if she could save him.
‘You go with him, and take her with you,’ Simmons said, nodding at Dawn on the ground as if she were a bag of flour, nothing more.
Mary scooped her up, prised Frank from her skirts and took his hand, and we walked in silence to the station. We completed the paperwork while Frank and Mary sat in front of my desk, both silently crying. Then O’Malley took Frank out to the woodshed after Mary kissed him goodbye.
She turned back to me and shook her head. ‘What good will it do, Gus? A reformatory will turn him into a hardened, angry man, and he’ll probably go on to even worse things.’
‘Worse than deliberately burning down a police station in order to kill the man inside? At age twelve? No, as I said, I’m sorry but I can’t look away.’
I pulled open a desk drawer, took out a cheque I’d written and gave it to her.
‘What’s this for?’
‘Take the next coach,’ I said. ‘Get to Bathurst and get that kid her operation.’
‘I can’t take this,’ she said, trying to hand it back.
‘Please, take it. Just for once I’d like to do some good instead of cleaning up after the bad.’
Mary hesitated.
‘I’m lending you this as an old friend, because you need to keep Dawn alive. Once she’s stopped screaming, you can think about what to do next.’
‘It’s an awful lot.’
‘I don’t spend my pay on anything other than Mrs Owen’s knitting.’
‘You buy her things?’
‘Got a nice tam-o’-shanter for sitting outside on a cold night, and I bought a blanket from her and one for the dog, and some of that soap she makes. I use it when I have my bath upstairs and smell all dainty and fresh when I’m done.’
Mary laughed, then looked down at the cheque. ‘Jack won’t be happy. Because if I go to Bathurst, I’m not coming back.’
‘His problem.’
‘I used to love him, you know. But not anymore,’ she said, tucking the cheque away. ‘And what about Frankie? I’ll never see him again, and I’m the only mum he knows.’
‘You write to me at this address,’ I said, giving her my father’s address. ‘He’ll forward it to me, and I’ll tell you where they’ve taken him. Come on, I’ll walk you back and stay while you pack a bag. Then stay here in the hotel until the coach comes tomorrow. Jack won’t come after you here, not with all of us troopers loitering about.’
We walked down the street in silence until we came to their house. Mary hitched Dawn up on her hip, looked up at me, took a deep breath and we went inside.
I didn’t want Mary’s gratitude, or the money paid back; I just wanted to see right being done, to feel as if I could do some good in the world. As if I could atone for the bad done in South Africa. I’d thought I was going there to fight for an Empire that needed me, an Empire under threat, but it wasn’t that at all. It was to satisfy the Empire’s rapacious appetite for gold, and it was us soldier fools who did the digging.
25
I made my way back to the pub, a wave of weariness crashing over me. I felt as if I had not recovered from the convivial refreshment of Scanlon’s farewell yet, let alone the dredger smack-up. In that swamp of fatigue, I saw myself wandering up and down this main street over the years to come, administering, thumping, warning, nipping the heels of the recalcitrant like a sheepdog. And for no thanks, from above or from the townsfolk. No wonder Barrett amused himself with other men’s wives – women who might make him feel better or wanted or simply more than just a uniform.
This train of thought led straight to Flora, dwelled there for some time, then flowed towards the Light Horse. Surely a military career would be better than this? Staff in Remounts, lunching at a fine club with other officers, robust arguments on how the Japanese military managed to give the Russian army a good thrashing, whisky and billiards afterwards, regimental dances with pretty girls all wide-eyed and breathless at my swagger and dashfire.
I stepped over a dog conked out in the sun, flies swirling around him, and pushed open the door to the pub.
‘Why is Frankie in the woodshed?’ Fitzgerald asked as I made my way down the hall.
‘Been a naughty boy,’ I said.
‘He’s a terror all right, always up to no good, lying and getting into scrapes. His father needs to take a strap to him.’
‘I’m sure he does.’
Kennedy was where I usually found him: drinking tea and reading the paper.
‘Been following this Titanic sinking?’ he said, slurping his tea.
‘My mind has been otherwise occupied.’
‘Fifteen hundred people,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t an iceberg. Couldn’t have been. All of those Irish travelling steerage; it’s the Fenians, put a bomb together and blew a hole in the ship. Y’see, they knew there was millionaires on board.’ He turned the pages, frowning as he read. ‘And my Joan agrees.’
