Yesterday's Dust (4 page)

So time moved on in Mallawindy, and the pages of the ‘Burton & Dooley' calendars were turned, offering a photograph of twin calves for the flies to defile. May came in hot and left without a drink, then June arrived, a T-shirt June by day, but each night she spun her carpet of glistening ice over the bone-dry paddocks and the farmers cursed the
blue sky and their dry dams; they bought hay for their stock and they waited.

By late July, all hope of rain was dead, but old Granny Bourke, born on 19 July 1897, had no intention of dying and wasn't too worried about the drought either. She was planning her hundredth birthday party.

‘Only fifty guests, Gran,' her aging daughter-in-law stressed.

‘I've got more than fifty bleedin' relatives.'

‘Fifty, Gran. No more.'

Gran could, by tracing a line back far enough, claim relationship to most Mallawindy residents. Supplied with only fifty invitations, she found a way around the problem.
Milly and Joe Crocker and family. Bessy Bishop and family. Ellie Burton and family. Jim Watson and family
. She received few refusals.

Ellie coerced Bronwyn. Bronwyn coerced Ann. Ben said he'd pop in for
a while, but Johnny said no.

The party was held in the residence at the rear of the hotel but the hundred and fifty guests spilled out to beer garden and bar, to ladies lounge and pool room. The marble clock on the mantelpiece had ticked its way to three-thirty. The cake long cut and demolished, the Daree
Gazette
photographer been and gone, still the old dame wasn't ready to give up her spot
of limelight, though her legs were. Expecting the party now to come to her, she settled into her favourite chair, from where she could keep an eye on that clock.

‘I say. I say, take Jillian Fletcher as an example,' she yelled. Didn't get any takers but she got a cigarette out, and lit it, singeing her sparse hair in the doing.

Few in town made it to eighty with their faculties intact. Old Gran
may have had the body of a smoked goanna, but she possessed the memory of a rogue elephant and the logic of a city bean-counter. She had been living behind the hotel since her wedding night in 1914, ingesting nicotine, stout and the town's secrets on a daily basis.

‘I say, take Jillian Fletcher.' A dogged old bird, she persisted, determined to capture a listener.

Bronwyn Burton heard her, but
kept her distance. She wasn't feeling sociable today so she leaned against the wall, watching people, watching Ann, who stood by the window with Jeff Rowan, Kerrie and Ben. Ben was five-seven. Kerrie and Jeff stood eye to eye with him, but Ann, her hair pinned high, was half a head taller. Easy to find Ann in a crowd. Still thin as a rake handle; she could wear loose jeans and bulky sweaters and
still look slim. Bronwyn looked at her own jutting breasts; she had inherited Ellie's buxom build and never, never, never wore bulky sweaters.

Two women joined the group. Bronwyn smiled, watching Ben evade Judy Watson's greeting kiss. Ann copped the kiss and she flashed her smile. Bronwyn envied her sister the strong teeth she'd inherited from their father. She had his determined jaw too, but
not his eyes; still wide, still more black than brown in the cold afternoon light, still wanting to run, to get away – if only Bronwyn knew it.

Ann wasn't into fake kisses, though these days few would guess; she put on her party face with her make-up, carried her party manners in her shoulder bag. She'd strip them off, toss them onto the back seat as soon as she slid behind the steering wheel
for the drive home.

Both Burton girls had their father's long hands. Bronwyn looked at her own now. No rings. Didn't want any either. Ann wore three; David had bought her an eternity ring for their fifth anniversary, wanting to lock the engagement and wedding ring more firmly onto her finger. They'd had a few bad years after Mandy's death, but he'd hung in there. He was a nice guy, more brother
than in-law, an accepting guy and easy to be with, to talk to. But he wasn't here today and Bronwyn didn't feel like talking anyway.

Then Ann turned her head, her eyes scanning until she found her sister. Her hands high, she signed, ‘Had enough.' For seven years she'd communicated with hand signs, and they were still put to good use in crowded rooms. ‘Want go?' the hands asked.

‘What you think?'
Bronwyn's hands replied. Fast. Emphatic. God only knew why she'd agreed to put in an appearance. God alone knew why she did anything these days.

Her bag over her shoulder, she walked to the door, waiting there for Ann to make her break for freedom, and she was halfway across the room, too, when Bessy bailed her up. Bronwyn moaned, took a cigarette from her bag and lit up.

The ash grew long,
longer. Outside in the biting wind wasn't an option. She was forced to walk to old Gran's side, or to her standard ashtray.

Granny squinted at her guest, measuring her up before offering a running commentary on their old connections.

‘. . . anyway, when the bleeding war got my Jimmy, Katie, your great aunt on your grandma's side went into mourning and never came out of it. We buried her two
years after the war ended. Blow-ins, the Granvilles – they had no staying power. Look at your grandmother. She was dead at forty.'

Bronwyn nodded, wondered how much blow-in Granville blood she carried. The way she was feeling today, she probably wouldn't make it to her thirty-first birthday. Sick and sore and sorry for herself, her world had been picked up and used as a bowling ball and she
was one of the tenpins. Down.

She'd broken a front tooth in February. It had abscessed in March. Penicillin injected into her backside, penicillin by mouth before meals and some super bug killer to pop after meals, and not enough hours in a day to swallow what she had to swallow plus painkillers. She'd blown her cool when Jeff Rowan had pulled her up for speeding. Instead of flirting with him,
as she had on previous occasions, she'd told him where to go, and where to put his ticket too. She'd blown her licence. That was in April. She'd told Nick where to go in May, told him to drop dead in June, and now it was July and things were looking worse.

The old dame drew hard on her cigarette, priming her brain for the next instalment of yesterday.

‘She took to her bed, you know, after she
lost her last one, and she never got out of it again. Bessy raised your mother.'

Didn't make much of a job of it, Bronwyn thought, but offered no comment. Get Granny going and you couldn't shut her up.

Bessy was talking, Ann was nodding, nodding, but looking at her watch, looking at Bronwyn.

‘Save me,' the younger girl signed.

Ann smiled, backed away from Bessy, backed into fat old Fletch.

‘No!' Bronwyn moaned aloud, aware that her sister would not be so eager to get away from him. What was he doing here anyway? He wasn't a relative. She considered asking the old dame, but Gran's mouth was moving again – or still.

‘Now you take your mother, she's got staying power. She'll make old bones. You need staying power in this life, girlie. You need to find a reason to go on when there's
no bleeding reason to go on.'

‘Tell me about it, why don't you, Gran.'

‘Humph,' Gran said, eyeing her guest up and down, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. ‘Never could see how anyone with half a mind could do hisself in. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, I always say.'

‘You may be right.'

‘Now you take old Fletcher's wife. She done herself in, but she was
as mad as a hatter, that one.'

‘Married to that bloated old toad, who'd blame her?'

Granny chuckled awhile, eyeing the toad in question, but from the corner of her eye she saw Bronwyn sidling away. ‘He wasn't such a bad-looking coot when he first come to town. Sort of baby-faced he was, and only a shadow of the man he is today.'

Bronwyn shrugged, lit another cigarette as Bessy joined her at
Gran's ashtray.

‘What are you on about now, you old reprobate?' Bessy was doubly related; not only had her maternal aunt forged a direct connection to Granny Bourke, but Mickey, her only son, had married one of her great-granddaughters.

The old dame basked a moment in the glow of attention as Ellie Burton followed on the heels of Bessy, Jim Watson one step behind.

Bronwyn caught Ann's eye,
pointed her thumb towards the door, signed, ‘Five minutes and I'm walking.' Ann nodded, and Bronwyn turned her eyes to Jim Watson, who looked like his mangy old blue heeler cattle dog.

‘Having a good day, Gran?' he said, his red-rimmed, stubby lashed eyes not leaving Ellie.

‘Humph,' the old dame replied before returning to her previous conversation. ‘And Lou Evans. You'd remember her, Bessy.
She drowned herself and her three kids, she did. Remember that day? Mad as a hatter, that woman was. Always was. Got herself born with a clubfoot, she did. No one ever thought she'd find a man and have a family, you know. Mad as a hatter.'

‘Lou-lou with her built-up shoe?' Bessy said.

‘To her dying day, Lou's old mother blamed the priest for her misfortune. Reckoned he put a jinx on her because
of her marrying out of the church. He had a clubfoot, you see. O' course, Lou's father, him not being of the faith, he blamed the priest too. But not for the same reason, if you get me drift, girlie.' Granny jabbed Bronwyn with a witch's finger and she cackled.

Granny knew this town, knew every skeleton in every closet, every man who had ever strayed, every woman who had produced a child who
did not bear his true father's name. Superstitions, adages slid readily from the old dame's tongue while her voice rose and fell, keeping time with the minute hand of an old marble clock that tick-ticked, tick-ticked, tick-ticked, much slower than its city counterpart.

Her eye wasn't straying far from that clock today, that old killer, Time. Someone had given it to her for a wedding present.
Like a malevolent god, it had sat on this mantelpiece since the war of 1914, counting her girlhood away, counting her life's seconds down to nil.

‘What's the time say, girlie?'

‘Quarter to four.' Bronwyn yawned, her eyes straying back to Ellie and Jim Watson. He'd married Granny's youngest, and only recently buried her. Always keen on the Burtons' river frontage, he'd tried often enough to buy
some of it, but Ellie wasn't selling. For his stock's sake, it looked as if Jim had decided to wed some of it.

Granny's eyes were also on Jim. ‘He won't be a widower long, that one. Ugly as a bag full of whippets, but he'd be a good catch for your mother,' she hissed at Bronwyn from behind a hand.

‘Over my dead body.'

‘Haven't found no sign of your father's yet.'

Bronwyn ignored that one.

‘He's no more drowned than I am, girlie. He wasn't mad, just bad. My word but he was a handsome devil when he first stepped into that bar. I never seen a nicer looking boy. They were a good-looking couple there for a few years – your mother and him.'

Bronwyn blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. Jack wasn't mad, just bad. She'd go along with that. She glanced at Ellie. Her face was pink and
Jim Watson was walking away, heading for the bar. He wouldn't get Ellie's river frontage, or any other frontage. Each year that passed, Jack Burton came closer to achieving sainthood status in Ellie's eyes.

‘What's that sister of yours doing these days?'

‘Bloody good question, Gran, and I wish she'd stop doing it.'

Granny Bourke looked at her guest, head to the side. ‘Humph,' she said. ‘Your
mother was telling me that she was having another one?'

‘Mum? Christ! Not Jim's, is it?'

‘Your sister! Annie! Don't you go getting smart with me, girlie.'

Bronwyn smiled and looked at Ann's long sweater. It hid the six-month bulge, but there was so much length in her that her babies probably had room to sprawl out flat on their backs instead of rolling up in a heap. She never looked pregnant
until the last weeks.

‘Terrible about her first, wasn't it?' Granny's tongue worked around her teeth, it licked thin lips eager to rehash some old drama. Bronwyn wasn't playing ball. She lit another cigarette, and lit one for the old dame. ‘Thanks, girlie. Your blood is still worth its bottling, even if you're not much of a talker today. What's wrong with you?'

‘Nothing, Gran.' She sucked smoke,
looked at the old dame; she liked her guts, and she sighed, tried. ‘I see the newspaper photographer was here. You'll make headlines tomorrow.'

‘Cruel buggers. I'm not worth photographing these days, but there was a time when I was the belle of this town.'

‘Not a lot of competition in Mallawindy, Gran.'

‘You've got your father's tongue, girlie, and it's laced with acid. He'll never be dead
while you're alive.' She puffed smoke, closing her grey lizard eyelids against it, and Bronwyn moved back a pace, preparing again to edge away. Granny's eyes opened, caught her on the move.