‘Threw him where? When?’
‘School night. I was doing my homework.’ She nodded to a cardboard carton in the corner under the window. Schoolbooks lay on it, and a set of pencils. ‘Wednesday. Yeah, last Wednesday night. He didn’t want to go and they bashed him and Darryl drove him away. Never saw him again.’
We were getting closer to finding that disturbed man, my father. I fished out the folded twenty. The note vanished like a fly in a fish’s mouth. I gave her the dollar coin and she held it loosely in her hand. Such a small, red, hardworking hand. The child was indomitable, durable, and knew no other life. How could such as Nyrie survive in such a place as this?
Perhaps only such as Nyrie could survive in such a place as this. I heard sounds of laughter from the living room. Daniel was making a good impression. I wondered how long I should wait. I didn’t want to go out into that pool full of young sharks prematurely.
‘Pretty soon they’ll have shaken Danny down for all he’s got to give,’ Nyrie told me, reading my mind. ‘Then they’ll get nasty. You can hear the voices change. They get rough. We’re all right in here. Sister Mary said she’d skin anyone who came in here. And she will. She’s all right, that Sister Mary. They’re scared of her. I reckon you ought to go — now. I’ll take you,’ she offered. She put the baby back into the pram, gave her mother a glance of cool pity, and took my hand.
Her timing was perfect. All the young men were on their feet, Daniel in the middle. He was backing away so slowly that they might not even have noticed that the door was getting closer. He had a piece of paper and a plastic bag in one hand.
‘Sister Mary’s lady’s going now,’ announced Nyrie abruptly. The men parted and we slid through them, down the corridor and into the yard. As we left, I saw Nyrie surrender her dollar coin to the big man, handing it over with no complaint, but a look of total contempt which stuck and should have stung like a bikini line wax.
Timbo was leaning on the car, smoking a cigarette. We got in and shut the doors, feeling suddenly safer. Timbo started his engine.
‘I was giving you another ten,’ he said to Daniel.
‘We managed,’ said Daniel. ‘Besides, I had Corinna with me.’
‘Daniel in the lions’ den,’ I said.
‘Was visited by an angel,’ he riposted, and kissed me. It was very nice, having a lover who could riposte. We were drunk with relief at getting out of the Braybrook Den.
‘We need a drink, Timbo,’ said Daniel.
‘I know just the place,’ said Timbo.
Thus we soon found ourselves in the plush parlour of the Royal Hotel, a watering place from the old days, with a gin and tonic and a whisky on the table, and a feeling that we had escaped doom by a mere whisker. Daniel put the plastic bag on the polished wood and folded his hands over it.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked, concerned, as I sucked down the g-and-t and signalled for another.
‘If I think about it I shall have post-traumatic stress disorder,’ I told him. ‘That was a terrible place.’
‘So it was,’ he agreed, as he swallowed his whisky.
‘How is that child going to survive with that baby when her mother dies?’ I asked, shaken and horrified and somehow drained. I hadn’t known there were houses like that one in what I had thought of as a prosperous state and a passably compassionate nation.
‘Sister Mary says that faith manages.’ Daniel tossed off his drink. ‘When she is on the case it mostly does. Nyrie will be all right. Men like Darryl and Gyp are essentially weak.’
‘And blessedly short lived,’ I snarled.
‘That, too,’ said Daniel, and ordered another drink. The first one hadn’t touched the sides. Timbo, who did not drink while he was driving, had wandered off to play the pokies with all my remaining coins.
‘What’s in the plastic bag?’ I asked when I could bear the suspense no longer.
‘Stuff that Sun left. Or that they scammed from him,’ said Daniel, opening it. The contents bore that same unwashed smell, most unpleasant in this clean environment. There was a stained t-shirt and a pair of yellowed Y-fronts. I handled them gingerly. The stain on the cloth might have been tomato sauce but it looked like blood. Wrapped in the shirt was a wallet. I had last seen it when I had handed over a hundred dollars eight years ago, in order to get them to go away. It was old and soft and had a half-effaced crest on the front. Inside was a passport, a Medicare card, some bits of cigarette paper and a little pencil.
‘I remember the tiny pencil,’ I exclaimed. ‘It came off a dance card. He always had it in his wallet in case he needed to write something down.’
‘He has made some notes,’ said Daniel. ‘But too faint to read in this light. We’ll do better under UV, perhaps. Some leaves, maybe a four-leaf clover? Nothing immediately useful. No money, of course.’
‘Of course. What’s the book?’
‘Looks like a bible,’ said Daniel.
‘Surely not.’ I opened it carefully. It was small and damp and the suede cover was limp. It was written in Latin. I saw no signs that it was a bible. Even I can pick out the names of the Christian deities. ‘Have to ask the Professor,’ I said, disappointed. I shook out the bag, harvesting a worn black sock. That appeared to be it for Sun’s belongings. I put them away again.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing to the piece of paper Daniel had been carrying.
‘Darryl gave me the number of a mobile phone they sold to another mate of theirs. Sun had it on him when they found him.’
‘Sun had a mobile phone? Impossible,’ I objected. Daniel left a pause while I added two to two and came up with an ineluctable four. ‘As far as I knew him,’ I conceded. ‘And I don’t really know him at all, as you are carefully not saying. So when they bled Sun dry, where did they dump the body?’
‘Down by the river,’ said Daniel. ‘But he isn’t dead, or Constable Wellesley would have known.’
‘Maybe they just haven’t found the body yet. Daniel, I am so sorry about getting you involved in this affair. It’s awful, and it’s probably going to get awfuller.’
He took my hand and patted it. ‘Now, now, you’re my client, and I can’t allow you to withdraw when the going’s getting interesting. Drink up and I’ll buy you a packet of bacon crisps. Then we can collect Timbo and go for a little walk. That is, we’ll go for a little walk, and he’ll sit in the car. Timbo isn’t built for hiking.’
I allowed myself to be comforted. I nibbled my crisps. I drank my drink. Timbo came back beaming with handfuls of gold coins. He insisted on paying me back double for my initial investment. At least someone was showing a profit on the day.
The river was surprisingly beautiful. It was just after cleanup day so I assumed that someone had removed all the rubbish. A cycle path followed the bank, the water foamed and the wind in the tall eucalypts made a sound like the sea. The place was empty apart from a few worn-out ducks, who were staying right against the bank to avoid being swept out into Bass Strait. They were making plans to fly somewhere else as soon as there was a break in the weather, I could tell. I saw their point.
‘Here,’ said Daniel. The wind caught his leather coat and blew it out on either side, like wings. The ducks rose as though he had given them a signal and rocketed up, forming a clumsy skein which pointed due north, and struggled into the face of the gale. I saw a flattened set of blackberry canes and a lot of tyre marks, and in the middle a lump of something. Cloth. Shoes.
My heart dropped. Hearts do not rise into mouths, I find, they drop. Mine had turned into a plummet and landed with a thud in my lower intestines. It was such an immediate physical sensation that I coughed.
‘Is it him?’ I asked, wading into the prickles. I got one hand to the edge of the bundle — it was a sheet, I saw, twin of the one hanging at Sharelle’s window — and pulled as hard as I could. The bundle was heavy and resisted me. I hauled. Daniel joined me. We dragged and stamped and thorns raked our hands.
Then the sheet unrolled, and we could haul it out onto the grass. Thank the Goddess, no body, no corpse. It was a heavy wet blanket and a pair of shoes and an unravelling green woollen sweater. It was just junk. But it was my father’s junk. The blanket was handwoven and had covered the swag he always carried when he went anywhere. The shoes were Uncle Ho sandals soled with car tyres, as made in Sunbury. And I had repaired that green jumper every time I had seen my father, catching up the threads of thin wool and patching it because he refused to buy another one. I vividly remembered the last time I had done so, perhaps three or four years earlier, listening to Star assassinate my character as I stitched and ravelled.
My father had been here. And the fact that he was here no longer meant that, probably — unless he had flung himself into the river — he was not dead even after the beating Darryl and the sharks had inflicted on him. So the quest had to go on. Suddenly I found myself very, very tired.
We had to bribe Timbo with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps before he would allow me to put the stinking wet remains of Sun’s luggage in his lovely car. Even when stuffed into a black rubbish bag. Even in the boot.
Halfway home Daniel remembered his Spotlight task and we had to turn back. The day wasn’t going to get any lighter or more pleasant and Therese was doing us a favour by looking after the girls. That was another problem. I wondered if Meroe and I had done the right thing, not calling a doctor. I sat, nervously sucking blackberry prickles out of my wrist and wishing that the week had begun in some other way, or I had been born in some other universe. Except that universe might not have had Daniel in it, and that would never have done.
Spotlight, on the other hand, was a pleasure. We had to buy tapestry wool, some fabric paint and some new crewel needles, all of which were somewhere in a place roughly the size of an aircraft hangar stuffed to bursting with fascinating … well, stuff. I left Timbo and Daniel in the car, listening to the news, and dived into the shop with a delight which I had not expected to feel after a day containing what my day had contained. I am clearly a superficial person after all.
Beautiful materials lay casually unrolled around me. Satins, embroidered silk, taffeta in every possible colour, gaudy as the wings of butterflies created by an artist on good acid. Intoxicating combinations of hues as varied as a cottage garden — hot pinks, strong pinks, pale pinks, apricot pinks, barely there at all pinks — presented themselves to my distracted eyes. Sky blue, teal blue, jade blue, baby blue, cornflower blue. It was only when I was telling myself very firmly that I did not — really did not — need a length of fine double damask in bright crimson with phoenixes woven through it that I recalled the two men waiting and busied myself about my errand. Never a good idea to keep men waiting, Grandma Chapman had always said.
Then again, sending me into this shop was like instructing a hungry mouse to go into a granary and not eat anything. I found the needles, matched the wool, bought the paints, and then added three metres of the double damask to my basket. There are days when one needs to be restrained in one’s purchases. This was not one of them.
The nice thing was that when I did finally emerge, Timbo grinned and said, ‘You broke the record. My mum’s always more than an hour in there. You were only thirty minutes.’
So everyone was pleased, and we all went home. The girls were still asleep. Meroe was with them. Daniel went out to talk to the night people, in pursuit of the mobile phone. I scrubbed myself clean of the day. I heated myself a strengthening bowl of goulash and ate it with my own bread. But even though I was exhausted and aching I could not sleep, and lay awake, hugging Horatio and sorrowing for the cruelties of the world until the alarm went off and it was Thursday.
Jason had started the mix as I came down the stairs with coffee and toast (coffee for me, toast for him) and he kept a respectful morning silence as we set all the baking on its way. There was nothing unusual in the orders except more famine bread, and we knew how to make that now. I sat down to chop the ginger for the ginger muffins and before I knew it my cheek was on the cold metal table and Jason was shaking my shoulder.
‘You fell asleep,’ said Jason severely. ‘What have you been doing, Corinna?’
I realised that my apprentice was accusing me of taking drugs. I delved for outrage but it was out to breakfast.
‘I’ve been visiting Braybrook with Daniel,’ I told Jason. ‘Then I thought I’d found my father’s body on the river bank. Then I couldn’t sleep. The only drug I’ve taken is a gin and tonic or two.’
He ruffled his hair and put his cap back on. ‘You look like shit,’ he said kindly. ‘ I can do all this. Get back upstairs and get some more sleep.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. Jason bristled. I dredged up an explanation. ‘Not that I don’t trust you. But if we don’t have the girls, who’s going to run the shop? You can’t do that on your own. Even the amazing Jason can’t be in two places at once.’
‘That dude shouldn’t have taken you out to a dump like that,’ he grumbled. ‘Nice lady like you. You don’t need to see shit like that. I know that Darryl. He’s an evil dude and Gyp is a stone-mad animal.’
‘How shall I make amends?’ asked a soft voice at the alley door. Daniel had returned from the night.
‘You want to help me in the shop?’ asked Jason promptly, before I could speak. ‘She didn’t get no sleep and that’s down to you, dude.’
‘So it is.’ Daniel looked worried. ‘Come along, ketschele, we’ll get you back to bed. Then I’ll come down and Jason can tell me what to do, which will make him feel better.’
‘No shit,’ grinned Jason.
I allowed myself to be persuaded. I re-donned my soft nightdress. I drank hot milk and brandy. I fell asleep on the last mouthful. Sometimes I am not as strong as I think I am.
When I woke it was to a solid sense of comfort and peace. Horatio was curled up beside me, purring gently. The light through the blind was bright. It must have been afternoon. I snuggled down for another few minutes of quality cat-appreciating time and then got up. Two o’clock already. I had slept away my working hours. Not much point in hurrying, I thought. If disaster was going to land on the bakery it would have done so by now, and all seemed peaceful downstairs. No one was shrieking at anyone else, which was a blessing.