Yesterday's Dust (33 page)

Liza shouldn't have bit Aunty May and run into the lounge
room with her dirty shoes on. She should always put her slippers on inside.

And she shouldn't bite! Only puppy dogs bite, that's what Johnny said.

Liza is a naughty girl.
Her shoes were dusty brown.
She ran into the lounge room
when Sam came back from town.

Making up poems then. Making up lots of them and saying them, twenty times, until they remembered themselves. And trying to make a poem
about Red Hairy, but Hairy just rhymed with berry and fairy and merry and good things, and Red Hairy wasn't good, so making his name Ted Crow, because Aunty May said his name
might be Ted Crow.

Old Mr Crow, where did he go?
Into the trees with the birds and the bees.

And it is a very, very long time and the dark won't go, so sleeping again on the couch so her hand can touch the cat and it
is warm and furry and purry.

Then it's a little light, but cold. Wrapping the blanket right around her, and lifting mummy cat up to cuddle her and get warm, but mummy cat wanting to go back to the kittens to keep them warm, so Annie curling up with the cat and the kittens and not dreaming at all.

And waking up and all the light has come back bright at the little window and soon Aunty May will
come. One dark time and one light. That's what she said. And now it was light.

Eating two more sandwiches for breakfast and watching the window bars making stripes of light on the other wall, and soon Aunty May will come back and she'll open the door and the sandwiches aren't even nearly all gone yet.

Kittens sucking milk from mummy cat, and Annie putting some milk from the bottle into a saucer
and watching mummy cat's pink prickly tongue clean it all up. And drinking lemonade that hasn't got any fizz in it and eating more sandwiches again, but the banana is all brown. And pretending it is her own picnic, but picnics are only good when other people are there, and banana isn't good when it goes brown.

Then wanting to do wee again, and doing it under the stairs, but needing to do the
other one too, very, very bad, but she couldn't do that under the stairs.

The scared starting up again, big, because she really has to do it and it makes her tummy hurt very bad, like 'pendicitis that you have to go to hospital to get fixed from the doctor, like Benjie had to get his fixed. And you get stitches and you can't walk for a week.

And light for a long, long, longer time and Aunty
May won't come, but a car comes and a dog comes too, and it might be Red Hairy come back with Liza, or the little girl's dog. And the dog, scratching at the door and barking, and Mr Murray yelling, ‘Sit down, Cobber.'

Mr Murray is a good man. He's not a Red Hairy. He's just Ted and he is a working man for Aunty May and Uncle Sam, and his big girl and his Mrs Murray do all the work for Aunty May
in the mornings, and they wash her floors and clean the bath and they are very good, so Annie doesn't have to hide from them.

Except Aunty May said.

But Annie wanting to yell out and make them open the door so she could go to the toilet, but she promised that she'd be quiet as a mouse. She promised. And you can't break a promise, because Johnny said.

Window, way up high. But she can climb up
there. If she makes some steps up, she can climb up and watch for Aunty May's car. Getting an old chair and putting some wooden boxes on top of the chair and like building a cubbyhouse, like she does with Benjie, but Liza always pulls them down, though.

Miss Smarty Pants, more like it. That's what Johnny says and Liza gets mad. She breaks everything and she stamps her feet and she screams, and
she bites everyone. And Mummy kisses her all better, not the everyone else who got bit. And she curls Liza's hair in rows and rows of fat yellow curls and she puts bows in her hair.

Not Annie's hair, though. Mummy says Annie's hair is too curly to curl, but Aunty May can curl it. She can make a hundred curls, more even than for Liza, and she ties some curls up top with a big blue ribbon and makes
Annie look like . . . like a special girl . . . like an Ann Elizabeth girl.

Aunty May is a good lady and she'll come back soon, and she'll say, what a good girl you were, Ann Elizabeth, and she'll say sweetheart.

Sweetheart is nice.

Old Mr Crow, where did he go?
Into the trees with the birds and the bees.

And she's up on the wardrobe, because Johnny said she was the best climbing girl in
the whole world, and she is too. And if she reaches right over, she can see Mr Murray's dog. It is a big shaggy red dog, big as a lion with curly ears. His name is Cobber, and Johnny said cobber means friend, so Mr Murray's dog will be her friend and talk to her through the window till Aunty May comes back.

What if she doesn't? Maybe she won't come back and open the door. Maybe she won't never,
ever come back, but Uncle Sam will come back from Brisbane and he'll open the door and . . .

Annie doesn't like that big door and the big key that makes that hard sound, like a monster door. Like it is too heavy to open and it will never open. Maybe another dark time will come soon.

Liza is in the dark. Daddy put her in the dark because she was bad and Aunty May stomped all the dirt in her eyes.
That's a very bad thing to do.

Annie gets too frightened with thinking, and her heart goes thumpity-thump. And she reaches over very far, so her feet are just on the wardrobe, but it is very, very rickety. And she's hitting the window with her hand. And the dog is coming over and he is looking at her like dogs always look when they don't understand something. Like with his head to one side, and
his mouth hanging open, and his good dog eyes looking right at her eyes, like he's saying, ‘What are you doing in there, Annie?'

She takes her shoe off so she can hit the window with its heel, and maybe break the window, and she doesn't care if she breaks it, because Aunty May is too long, and all the air is used up, and the thumpity-thump is in her ears so she can't hear the dog barking, because
that's what happened in the submarine when everyone went to the pictures at the shire hall one time when Daddy was
away. All the men's air got gone and they had to just sit down and get dead and she doesn't want all the air to be gone so she has to get dead and get put in the dirt.

And that man's name who cleaned the fish pond wasn't Ted Crow, it was Mack someone. And Aunty May is playing a trick
on her. And maybe sweetheart is a trick too, and promises are tricks too, and Annie wants Johnny very bad, and her tummy hurts very bad and she cries.

Then she's not careful, because of crying too much.

And the falling and dropping her shoe and grabbing at the stupid rickety old wardrobe and . . . and . . .

Black.

And black air and the dog barking.

And, ‘Lay down. What's got into you today,
Cobber?'

Liza is in the dark too.

Aunty May won't never come back.

She said, one more dark, and one more light. Aunty May will come. She promised.

She tricked you, she tricked you. Aunty May tricked you.

Away with the old nightmares, only a small segment of Ann's consciousness had been on the road ahead. A red traffic light drew mind and car to a rapid halt somewhere in Sydney Road, Brunswick. Wet road, street lights glazing the bitumen with colour. A strange, still land, all of the houses sleeping, no cars crossing over, only the sad old ghosts
flitting by.

She shivered, suddenly aware of the cold, aware of the rain, aware of how close she was to the city. The lights changed from red to amber to green, and still she sat, glancing to the right and left, attempting to work out which way to go.

Ten years of her life had been spent in the city. She'd rented a room in Brunswick when she was sixteen. This road looked much as it had on the
day she'd stepped from the bus, her possessions stuffed into her small school case. Twenty years ago she'd walked here, walked for hours with nowhere to go until she'd found that little house in a side street, a sign taped to its front window:
ROOM TO LET APPLY WITHIN
.

Old Mrs Hadley, eighty if she was a day.

Come in. Come in. You look all hot and bothered, my dear. Would you like a cup of tea?
I've only just made a pot.

Brunswick had given her immediate employment too. Twenty years ago she'd caught trams each morning to a clothing factory where she'd stitched sleeve hems on shirts for two weeks before moving on to the office of an estate agent.

One house had led to another, one office to the next. She'd had few office skills at sixteen, but her typing speed had got her the jobs,
and she'd been young enough to train. Then Michael had stopped by her desk one morning and asked her how she'd prove one loaf of bread superior to another.

Two courting pigeons had been outside the office window that day, billing and coo-cooing.

‘Toss them some breadcrumbs and ask for their comments,' she'd said.

And that's what he'd done. The pigeon ad had run for years on television.

Two
years later she'd moved upstairs, and when Michael had decided to go out on his own, start his own advertising agency, he'd hijacked her.

‘Our minds are on the same planet,' he'd said.

Friends. Good friends, but only ever friends. It had been a good life. A free life – until Roger Wilkenson the Third had walked into their office one day.

A smattering of cars still on the roads but the trams
had been put to bed. Ann followed the tramlines to town and past the hotel where Roger had stayed when he came to Melbourne.

Where did you come from? Did someone give birth to you or did you evolve from the ocean waves and the night wind, my lovely?

Memories. They were swamping her tonight. Where was Roger Wilkenson now? Had he found a wife to bear his children? Where was Michael, Mrs Hadley?
All too long ago. Half a lifetime ago.

‘God, how did I get to be so old, Annie?'

So long since she had been alone with time to think. Always a little hand tugging at her jeans, a little voice calling. What if she had remained here, had never gone home, hadn't married?

‘What if?'

She was at the hospital before three a.m. She locked the car and hurried into the building. Hospitals. She could
live without them. They raised goosebumps and memories, but tonight she shook off
the goosebumps and found a guide.

A night sister pointed her to May's ward. One bed and many machines. Ann peered through the open door, then stepped away, again seeking her guide; she'd made a mistake. Elderly woman in that bed, gaping mouth, tubes feeding into her and from her – that wasn't Aunty May. Ann glanced
with pity at the small shape of some damaged old woman, her identity lost with her hair and dentures, then she turned from the bed to a figure slumped in a chair.

Him?

So grey. Long hair. But surely him. His arm was held high in a sling, a white bandage covering his brow and one eye; pyjama-clad in green with grey stripes, a worn white hospital-issue dressing gown gaping open, his head back,
jaw sagging.

So old. A snoring old man.

Daddy.

Ann drew a deep breath, lifted her chin then walked to his side. He didn't move. She stood for minutes looking down at the closed eye, the open mouth, at the years of lines at his throat, and her vision blurred. Then she breathed deeply again, once, twice, and she reached out, touched his shoulder.

Jack Burton sprang into wakefulness, his unbandaged
eye terror-filled. Not since that day in the cellar had she seen such fear.

‘Ann.' Just one word.

Had he spoken that word before? Black-headed little bitch, maybe. Shamming little bitch. Wild, black-eyed Burton bitch. But never Ann. Never.

‘Dad.'

Silly little words. Where had they come from tonight? From the depths of a long night of memories and from the dark outside and the cold white room
and the machines and the laboured breathing. Oxygen tube to May's nose. Blood dripping into her arm. Electronics charting her heartbeat.

Both faces were now turned to the bed and to the small shell of
May, so filled with life, so overflowing with vitality only yesterday. May, the organiser. May, the diplomat. May, who had learned early how to love and how to lie for those she loved, had learned
early how to fix things the best way that she could.

Wordless, they stared at May. Nothing more to say. Their words had been spoken.

Dad.

Ann.

Nothing more.

May's hair had been clipped. Thin gauze covered the ridged raw flesh of her scalp. A head wound? What was hiding beneath the gauze, beneath the stitches, and beneath the white sheet?

She looked at one of May's hands and automatically
sought the other. Only one hand. Where was the other, the other arm? Her left arm?

‘She's all fight, that one. She'll make it.'

‘How?' Ann reached for May's right hand. All that was left of her to hold. One single hand. The other was gone.

His reply was slow in coming. Perhaps he'd misunderstood the ‘how?'.

‘A transport. Coming towards us. A mob of spaced-out hoons trying to pass on a bloody
sixty-kilometre curve. She didn't have a hope. She didn't have a bloody hope. We were almost home. Didn't have a hope in hell.' She watched a tear trickle, become trapped in his beard, watched it glisten there, watched it joined by another tear.

She had tasted his tears that day. She had patted his wet face with a tiny hand.

I love you, my Daddy
.

But she shook her head. Hard. She freed her
hair from the band, ran her fingers through it, determined to ignore his tears.

‘Her head. Mandy – '

‘Her head is okay. She said your name. Before they operated, she was talking. She knew what she was saying. Her head's okay. It's internal. The injuries are internal, but she's going to be okay.
They took her arm off. Crushed. Had to cut her out of the car. The microsurgeon couldn't . . . couldn't
do a bloody thing. But she's got the elbow. They've saved the elbow. She'll be okay. They've pumped gallons of blood into her. Hours – hours in the theatre. Eight hours. More. I don't know. I don't know. But she came out of it. They didn't think she'd come out of the theatre. But she came out of it. She showed the . . .' He was leaning forward now and Ann watched a fat tear drop onto the bed
cover, then two more.

She lifted her chin. His tears would not move her. They would not move her. She clenched her jaw, her teeth. She tapped her foot on the floor.

But how could she let him cry like this? How could she sit there and watch him cry? She couldn't. His tears had always hurt too much. She touched the back of his hand. A brief touch, and his hand turned, gripped her own, then as
quickly released it.

‘She's got to be all right,' he said, and he broke down, put his head on the bed and howled.

She moved away, afraid of the power of touch, of sympathy. Better it be withheld tonight. Let him hold his fear inside as she held her fear. In the morning tears may not be needed. Time enough in the morning to mourn for May's lost hand, her lost hair. In the morning. Just let the
light come, let the sun flood this room and lend her strength. Let the morning come.

Jack turned his face when a sister glided in, adjusted the drip flow while Ann walked the corridors. She found a coffee machine and she made two steaming cups then returned to the room.

For half an hour then there was silence, but the coffee was hot and strong. It went down well and she went back for more. Sweet.
One sugar for him, She remembered.

‘She's holding her own,' a doctor said at four-fifty.

‘What does that mean?'

‘All we can do now is wait. You should be getting some rest, Mr Burton.'

Jack lifted his good hand. A swipe. Go to buggery, the hand
signed. His lips could form no words. The doctor didn't understand. He saw a broken, aging woman in the bed, a woman without hair, without teeth. A
problem to be fixed, if fixed it could be.

May would have hated this. May had always brushed her teeth in private. No one ever saw her without her upper denture. And no one should ever see her like this. But the doctor didn't care about hair and teeth. A car full of druggies had created this problem for him and he had to work it out. He didn't understand that his problem was Aunty May, and that
she could make twelve small pairs of bloomers from a fine linen sheet and she could stitch pretty dresses and curl wild black hair, that she could cuddle and tickle and kiss and fix things. He didn't know that. But he wouldn't let her die, because that was his job. He was a fixer too. He fixed the broken, repaired the maimed. He wouldn't let her die. Not now. Not now that the world was finally
getting back on track.

Ann glanced at the drawn blind, then at her watch. Bethany would be waking soon for her bottle. How would David manage today? He'd have to miss work. He rarely missed a day.

Johnny would be walking off to the school room in a few more hours to spend his day a wall away from Kerrie. She'd be good for him. In the short time he'd been with her at the school she'd done more
for him than his family had done in six years. He needed a wife, children, a life.

But Ben. What about Ben? Poor Ben. He'd be pussyfooting around Ellie until the day she died.

She'd be waking. Up, dressed, and out to her paddocks, happy as a cow in clover. She'd be out playing bingo tonight at the shire hall, maybe taxied there by Bob Johnson instead of Ben.

Dear gentle Ben, what then? What
if Bob Johnson became a permanent installation in Ellie's life? What then for my Benjie? He'd wasted his life on Ellie.

May's breathing slowed, then she gasped, and the two watchers at her bedside breathed deeply, willing breath into her lungs, and her lungs laboured on.

She wouldn't die. Not now, not with the two she loved best in the world guarding each side of the hospital bed. They wouldn't
let her die.

For another hour they sat there while night, crouching like a hungry black beast outside the window, gave up and left. Jack stood then, he limped to the window and opened the blind, allowing in the weak dawn light. Stiff with sitting, he limped the sterile room while sisters and doctor again leaned over the bed.

Ann saw the hand move when they were gone.

‘Dad. Her hand moved. It
moved. Aunty May? Aunty May? We're here. We're here. We're with you.'

‘Jack.' Barely a whisper.

And he was back at the bed. ‘I'm here, May. Ann is here. She drove down last night.'

May sighed and slipped away again.

Seated on either side of her bed they shared that one hand, and sometimes their own hands touched and they pulled back, but that hand was all they had, and their hands, their fingers,
crept back to touch it, to stroke it, both aware that May could not leave them while they pumped their strength into her, willed each breath into her lungs.

But too tired to hold up her head, Ann rested it on her hand. Perhaps she slept.

Jack kept watch, and he watched the curtain of dark hair shielding one closed eye, framing the contours of her face. The chin on the hand, determined Burton
jaw. Large Burton hands. They had danced through her childhood, held a doll to her scrawny little breast.

It's mine,
Daddy. My ticket was 48 and I won, Daddy. It's my dolly.

And he saw the other one, his Liza. Her hair the gold of Ellie's, but that was where the similarity ended. Foot-stamping, manipulating little bitch, that one, she'd had him wrapped around her little finger.

Give me the
bloody doll
.

And that little half-wild waif had handed him her dolly and he'd smashed its brains out against the wall.

He wasn't fit to live.

‘Take me,' he said to Ellie's Jesus. ‘Let her live and take me. Do something right for once in your bloody life, you useless bastard.'

‘Jack?' May murmured.

‘I'm here, May.' Maybe Ellie's Jesus had been listening.