St Kilda Blues (6 page)

The boy left the ship at Adelaide, walking carefully down the long wooden gangplank with his kitbag, his name scrawled on a piece of cardboard tied around his neck with string. Amongst the crowd of disembarking passengers, stevedores, waiting family, friends and taxi and hire car drivers, he noticed a tall, freckled and sunburnt man wearing long brown robes. The man was watching the children as they disembarked, head moving side to side as he carefully studied the name cards they were all wearing. His eyes fixed on the boy's sign and he began waving his arms and smiling.

The man worked his way to the front, apologising constantly as he moved through the crush of people. When he reached the boy he stretched out his hand. ‘Welcome to Australia, young fellow,' he said, ‘and praise be to God for a safe voyage. I'm Brother Brian and we have a long way to go so it's best to get started as soon as we can.'

Brother Brian led the boy away from the crowded dock and out to a dust-covered Dodge station wagon parked in the street. He opened the back for the boy's kitbag. The space was already crammed with boxes, several of which were marked with the Kodak name.

‘I keep a photographic record of the mission,' he explained, ‘and if you like you can be my assistant in the darkroom. I think you might find it to be a lot of fun.'

So far the boy hadn't said a single word, which didn't seem to worry the man. Most of the new boys were like that, shy and frightened, bewildered at their arrival in a new country on the other side of the world.

The drive to the mission took almost nine hours. They stopped for petrol at a lonely roadhouse somewhere out on the seemingly unending dirt road. The roadhouse had a cafe but they didn't go in. Brother Brian had greaseproof paper–wrapped sandwiches in a small suitcase on the back seat of the car, thick-cut bread with ham and cheese. There was a thermos of hot water for tea and a couple of rubber-stoppered bottles of weak lemon cordial, warm from the heat in the car.

The boy watched from the car window as mile after mile of flat, dusty, sun-blasted plain passed by with the occasional glimpse of a far-off farmhouse or bounding kangaroos and, twice, naked black people carrying spears skirting the road.

After each of their regular stops for sandwiches and something to drink, brother Brian insisted the boy make water before they got back into the car. He stood beside him, hitching up the front of his robe and pulling a flaccid penis out of grubby underpants before spraying the saltbush scrub along the roadside. The boy sensed Brother Brian was looking down at his little jigger as he peed, and he smiled, thinking of Mavis at the bottom of the stairs, legs splayed, her little split exposed at the base of her belly, and the bright blood running from her ears and nose.

It was only a short walk from the Scheiner house to Gudrun's school friend Rosemary's home. Berlin tried to keep his mind occupied with the Scheiner girl, to stop himself remembering, imagining the unimaginable. The idea was totally ridiculous, that it was the same man and their paths were crossing again after all these years on the other side of the world. Berlin walked quickly, head down and with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. He did it so Bob Roberts couldn't see the fist clenched so tightly that his knuckles ached.

The interview with Rosemary Clairmont took just ten minutes and was a waste of time. It was obvious the girl was totally boy-crazy, and the outings to the Saturday night dances with Gudrun Scheiner were a chance for her to run amok unsupervised. Berlin guessed that Gudrun had been pretty much left to her own devices the moment the two girls were out of Vera's sight and he understood the housekeeper's anger. Young Rosemary had fluttered her eyes at Roberts one time too many for Berlin, who had to fight the urge to turn her over his knee and belt her bottom. He doubted the girl's mother would have even noticed if he had. Her odd smile and slightly glazed eyes indicated her way of coping with a dreary suburban domestic life was by combining sweet sherry and a couple of Valium tablets in a mother's-little-helper morning cocktail.

It was on the ride back to the city that the image of Gerhardt Scheiner and the right hand with its missing finger had forced itself back into his head. Could he even remember exactly what the SS officer had looked like? Had he even seen his face on that freezing, snow-covered Polish roadway? He had been watching the pistol held at the girl's temple, seeing her eyes and the gentle smile on her beautiful, gaunt face as she chose her time to die, found Berlin's eyes and held them with her own, picked him out of the line of miserable, shivering, starving POWs to be her witness.

He remembered the SS man's hand with its missing finger, saw the index finger tighten on the trigger, and at that moment a truck in front of the Triumph backfired. Charlie Berlin's head snapped back, he saw the puff of blue smoke from the truck's exhaust pipe, his stomach heaved and he yelled for Roberts to pull over. It was just good fortune the wide-open space of the marina car park had been right beside them.

Berlin spat and straightened up. He used the side of his left shoe to kick gravel over the remains of his breakfast tea and toast and Vera's excellent coffee. He hated using his shoes for anything other than walking and hoped he hadn't scuffed the leather. He spat again. The taste of acid and bile in his mouth refused to go and the muscles of his lower abdomen ached from retching. Across the empty car park a caravan with a serving window cut into the side advertised coffee and doughnuts. As he walked across the parking area, shoes crunching in the gravel, Berlin saw Roberts watching him from the Triumph.

The man in the doughnut caravan didn't seem offended when Berlin swirled the first mouthful of instant coffee around in his mouth and spat it out. He looked towards the waiting car and raised the waxed paper cup. Roberts shook his head. Berlin briefly considered a jam doughnut to go with the coffee but his stomach immediately let him know it wasn't a good idea. The caravan was parked with the serving hatch towards the roadway and its back to the water. An ocean liner was making a its way across Port Phillip Bay towards Station Pier, a thin trail of white smoke pencilled into the blue sky behind it. Just round to his right, past the new marina, was St Kilda, and the lake where the body of the seventh or eighth missing girl had been found.

He swirled more coffee around in his mouth, spat again, then tossed the cup into a rubbish bin. He didn't want to talk to any more fathers with missing daughters and he really didn't want to see the spot where the body of some other bloke's missing daughter had been found. God, he wondered, was there anything about this fucking job he had ever liked? It was a little like war, just a lot less bloody and final. It left strong men bent low under the weight of the things they had been forced to witness and broke weaker men, broke them sometimes into such tiny piece that they could never be put back together again.

It was ten years since the beating that had scarred Roberts' face and broken his body, and broken something else deep inside the man. Constable Bob Roberts had earned the beating by doing Berlin a favour, tracking down a licence plate missing from a truck. The brutal attack was meant as a warning to Berlin, to stop him nosing around in areas that didn't concern him, and Roberts had almost died from it. His recovery had been slow, and while the physical damage had mostly healed, there was other damage, damage that only Berlin could see. It was there in the eyes if you knew what to look for and Charlie Berlin did. It was in his own eyes, and the reason he didn't like seeing his face in mirrors. His eyes constantly reminded him that there was only and always a split second between life and death, between being here and being gone forever. For some people that knowledge was too much to live with.

Charlie Berlin knew he was lucky. Rebecca had pulled him back from the brink several times and then the kids had given him a focus, a reason to fight the blackness and despair when the memories reared up from the dark place he kept them hidden. Rebecca had her own ghosts, of course, but she handled them better than he did, and she understood him. Alice, Bob Roberts' wife, was a good woman, a good wife, a good mother, but she wasn't Rebecca. Alice Roberts hadn't understood the changes in her husband after his beating and she'd dealt with them by smiling and pretending everything was fine.

The Roberts' marriage had struggled on for six or seven years until it was suddenly a time of free love, doing your own thing and sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. This new era suited the different person Bob had become and there were a series of steadily younger and younger girls on the side until the day he finally up and walked out on his family. He'd eventually set up shop in a run-down Carlton flat with a blonde, pretty enough and just old enough Melbourne Uni arts student. Though christened Justine, the girl now called herself Sunshine and favoured long peasant skirts and tie-dyed cheesecloth blouses worn without a bra. She came from old money, with a barrister father and society-page mother, and Berlin figured her affair with Roberts, an older man, was rebellion or some sort of rite of passage.

He walked slowly back to the waiting car. After checking one more time for any sign of vomit on his coat or trousers he climbed back into the passenger seat.

‘Something you ate, Charlie?'

‘Probably. I made dinner last night so who knows? Let's get going.'

It was a short run from the marina and the bad coffee to Fitzroy Street and the St Kilda end of Albert Park Lake. Half a night, a day and a full night had passed since Gudrun had disappeared, and it was the nights Berlin most wanted not to think about. He also knew he had to put aside that memory from the snow-covered Polish roadway for the moment. It was just one more thing to force down deep into the black space where all the bad moments lived. He had to concentrate on the girl, and just the girl, if she was to have any chance of coming home.

Roberts parked the sports car on Lakeside Drive just a short walk from the lake. Reaching across Berlin to the glove compartment he took out a fresh packet of Craven A cigarettes. Berlin saw several more cigarette packets inside before Roberts slammed the lid shut.

As they walked across the grass to the lake a strong breeze from the east was puckering the sleek grey surface of the water. A muddy area by the lakeside still showed residual signs of being trampled flat by police and ambulance men. The odd patch of grass was gamely fighting its way back, reminding Berlin of the condition of the ground on a cold and rainy late Saturday afternoon at Windy Hill after Essendon had trounced or been trounced by a visiting team. Apart from the battered earth, there were very few signs marking this spot as the place where the life of a young girl had ended.

Towards dusk he heard the sound of bells somewhere ahead and the landscape began to turn from brown to green. The mission sat on an artesian basin, Brother Brian explained, and the water pumped up from below ground was the only reason that life could exist in such a hostile place. The boy first saw the windmills that did the pumping and then there were fields of green crops, with farm machinery scattered about and, on a hillside, neat rows of little bushes. Grapevines, Brother Brian explained, to make wine for the mission.

Buildings began to appear, mud brick houses and rough wooden barns for the horses that pulled the farm machinery and pens for the cattle and sheep. Half a dozen two-storey buildings surrounded the church, the severe and utilitarian design reminding him of the orphanages in which he had been placed. There was a central lawn surrounded by trees with a statue at its centre. The statue was a smiling man wearing the same robes as Brother Brian and with his right hand raised in a benediction.

‘Our founder,' Brother Brian said and he crossed himself. ‘The boys are at evening prayers right now so what say we get you settled and then you can meet your new young friends at tea.'

He led the boy into a long building with wooden floors and tiny windows. There were rows of rusty metal beds along both walls, each separated by a narrow, crudely made wooden cabinet. Each bed had a single blanket over a lumpy straw-filled mattress that reminded the boy of his time on the farm in Dorset. He counted three dozen beds. There was a large bathroom at one end of the dormitory with two tin bathtubs and an open tiled area with half a dozen showerheads suspended from the ceiling. Brother Brian opened the door at the far side of the bathroom and pointed to a low wooden structure set away to one side of the compound area.

‘Over there is the privy,' he said. ‘That's where you do your business. Our friends in Adelaide send us old newspapers and as the new boy one of your jobs will be to cut them into squares and make sure the privy is always well stocked. You will also have to help empty the tubs of nightsoil as required.'

Brother Brian allocated him a bed and gave him a towel and a nightshirt. Both items looked to have had many previous owners and the towel smelled of stale sweat and mildew. The boy placed his meagre possessions in the wooden cabinet while the brother stood and watched. When he was done the boy slid the empty kitbag under his bed, back against the wall as far as it would go.

As they crossed to the building containing the dining room, Brother Brian laid out the rules. The boy was to be quiet and respectful, to instantly obey the brothers in all things, to attend morning and evening prayers, to work hard at any task to which he was appointed and to seek the guidance of the Lord in all things. And he was to avoid spending overlong periods alone in the privy. He must be wary of the solitary vice and avoid it, and likewise avoid those who indulged in it. The boy had no idea what the solitary vice was, and he was distracted by the sight of a cat as they passed one of the barns. He wondered if the dagger would be safe in its hiding place in his kitbag and decided his first task would be to seek out a better place to store it.

There was a row of washbasins fitted to the wall outside the dining room. He followed Brother Brian's example and washed his hands in the brackish-smelling water, though there was no soap. He shook his hands and followed the brother into the dining room. It was the same dimensions as the dormitory but with rows of tables and hard wooden benches instead of beds. There were no windows in the dining room, which was illuminated by a row of hurricane lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

The six tables nearest the door had four occupants along each side. There was a brown-robed brother at each table and then seven boys whose ages ranged from four or five up to perhaps fifteen. At several of the tables Aboriginal boys were mixed in amongst the white children. Their skin colour varied from brown to black, with several having such a deep blue-black tone that it was difficult to make out their features in the weak light of the kerosene lanterns. The boys were all wearing grubby shorts and patched and faded cotton shirts and were barefoot. Their hair was cut short or shaved off completely. Brother Brian saw that the boy was staring.

‘We've had an outbreak of ringworm, I'm afraid your hair must come off tomorrow as well, then a good rinse with kerosene. It shouldn't sting too much but it has to be done.'

The boy nodded. Pain didn't matter all that much to him, not his at least.

The dining room was silent even though almost every space at the tables was taken. This silence surprised him after the horseplay and rowdiness that had become a feature of the children's dining room onboard the ship, especially after Mavis's death. He hadn't joined in the fun, preferring just to eat what was put in front of him and watch the antics of the others. He spent the mealtimes carefully studying what made the ringleaders into leaders and what made the others into sometime-challengers or simply submissive followers. It was the submissive ones, the followers, the lost ones, those who always seemed about to cry, who most held his interest.