On the steps as they all left, Billy Thurmond accosted Offhand, Tim saw, and said, “Just look at what our bloody cream will be like if Britannia no longer rules our waves, sonny! We will be mongrelised by Jews and Kanakas and Chinks. An enjoyable prospect, Mr. Scribbler?”
The Offhand started chuckling at that.
Ernie Malcolm touched Tim’s elbow in passing. “Shea,” he murmured. “In view of your origins and persuasions, it might be more politic not to say anything when zealots like Billy get going.”
Ernie perhaps meant to be a friend, but there was coldness there as well. The civic merit Tim had got together through his big cricket innings with Wooderson had now somehow been cancelled.
Tim cried out, “Ernie.” And Ernie turned and looked at him and returned close up, as if he really knew what Tim was going to say and didn’t want others to hear it.
“Ernie, I’m not haunted by any of this. I’m haunted by that child in the bottle. The girl, you know. Missy.”
Ernie stared as men jostled past.
“Are you haunted too?” Tim asked. Across the lines of class and politics, Tim wanted to know, are we united in a brotherhood of concern? “Hanney is not doing a good job with this. If someone of your authority told the Commissioner…”
No smiling valley till this is attended to, Tim meant to make clear. No valley of heroes. No safe bridge from this shore to the other.
Ernie said, “What are you trying to say?”
“I would write myself but what would my complaint be worth? Constable Hanney is not properly pursuing the question.”
“Some would say,” said Ernie in a narrow voice, not playful at all, “it’s not worth pursuing. If it were important a sergeant of police would be put on the job. What does it matter? Best dropped.”
One could imagine though. Missy. Adrift in fluid, nameless female. On a bench in some police museum. Far into a new century.
“Aren’t you tormented too, Ernie? Isn’t every man tormented by this?”
And there was a glimmer there, in Ernie’s face. Or it was more like a telltale lack of a glimmer. All night Ernie’d been playing the civic father, but it was Missy who secretly plagued him. That was a conclusion which now tempted Tim.
“Don’t you go round uttering this bullshit. We are together in nothing, Shea. Don’t try dragging me down to your level, or I’ll show you what dragging down is.”
He didn’t wait for Tim to explain himself. He went off fuming and definitely haunted, Tim knew. But certain of his power and so twice as dangerous.
Eight
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, select a nondescript page of ruled letter paper and a nondescript plain envelope such as any cow-cocky might employ. And begin, printing in large letters, using a different slant of the hand from that you normally employ.
Dear Sir,
It may be important for you to know that many citizens in the Macleay are concerned at the partial and intermittent way in which the search for the name of the unknown Female in the Mulroney case is being conducted. This may be due to the fact the enquiry has been entrusted to a very junior officer when perhaps a more senior one would pursue the matter in a better way. The Mulroney business distressed many citizens who wish to see the matter cleared up, and I urge you to treat it with continuing seriousness.
Once he’d taken this letter to the post office and dropped it into a box when no one was around, he felt he had done everything he could for Missy in both the temporal and spiritual realm.
Now he found himself reading shipping reports more closely than was usual. There were so many bomboras and reefs off the New South Wales coast, and onto one of them the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company’s SS Burrawong might some foul night blunder with his spouse.
An hour before sailing, when Tim was loading up the dray with Kitty’s trunk, Ellen Burke strolled across from old Mrs. Manion’s, a cousin of Old Burke’s, where she’d been staying since her father and stepmother left town. She carried an emu egg for Johnny and a knitted doll for Annie. She was well pleased with herself—this business of watching the Shea children had been her reason to remain on in Central. She had wanted to stay at the Commercial at her father’s expense, like her own woman. Like an actress on tour. Old Burke did not permit that.
“Do you like stews, Uncle Tim?” she asked Tim, smiling up from her place at the table where the children made a fuss of her. She had dark hair and fine brown eyes and a big-framed build, which all put the banal question: was she a beautiful young woman, or was she what people called arresting?
Kitty’s trunk still had things that were stuck on it in Cobh. Traces of her great exodus from the hearth of Red Kenna. An uneasy feeling to see it on the dray again, a place it hadn’t been in for the past seven or so years, since she arrived in the Macleay for good. Looking at it, he felt a baseless fear that perhaps a reverse migration might be on the cards. Why did she need such a big trunk? Half of it filled with food. She was going to sustain, build up and cosset her sister in the big port of Sydney, as well as having gifts for her relatives, the Rooneys of Randwick. That was another thing he knew only now to have been arranged. She had written to the Rooneys and got a reply. This had all been long-planned. A man should complain more.
So strange to drive her down Smith Street, the children and young Ellen Burke excited in the back, though Annie was cautious like him about proceeding so merrily to the ship and yielding up Kitty as if it were a festive matter.
Tim went aboard and paid one of the deckhands a shilling to help him get the trunk onto the deck. From the main deck he saw tall Captain Reid, whiskered like a parody of a coastal captain, leaning over the edge of the bridge. Tim and the sailor lifted the trunk, one on the front, one on the back.
“Christ, mister,” said the deckhand. “The normal load of boulders!”
“It’s the weight of absence,” Tim could have told him, but didn’t. Edging the great load aft past the crowd on deck, he knew that there would be no adequate or calm good-byes. Mr. Alfred Howe’s Travelling Variety were all—he was horrified to see—on board, returning to Sydney to pick up a train or ship to some other bush community. Some of the performers had yellow waistcoats, and others wore plaid, just like the Sydney swells, the pushers of the Rocks. The women had flouncey skirts and looked as if they’d been drinking to ready themselves for the voyage. Thank God he’d insisted on paying for the saloon. Kitty would have had to share steerage with smartalec commercial travellers, tumblers, and mandolin-players. And might have enjoyed it too much.
By the time he and the deckhand got the trunk below decks, the space in her cabin seemed full of Annie, Ellen Burke, Johnny who was somehow barefoot again, and dear dumpling Kitty herself. The cabin white and panelled with Macleay cedar. A middle-aged man and woman in there too, along with the two bunks and the hinged washing basin and fairly spacious portholes through which the vivid Pacific Ocean would glitter. The man stood side-on, and the woman sat on the bunk she had already chosen, the one aft as it turned out.
Both these people were well-dressed. He recognised them. Mr. and Mrs. Arnold from Sherwood upriver. Mrs. Arnold off to her niece’s wedding in Sydney, said Mr. Arnold, with an Old Burke haughtiness which said, “You wouldn’t get me leaving the Macleay for some flippant Sydney wedding.”
What he said in fact was, “I hope those damn aerialists and jugglers don’t keep you ladies awake all night.”
Later, deep in the night’s meat, Burrawong would need to pass over the Macleay bar at the New Entrance. In his temperamentally anxious mind, Tim could envisage a scene of disaster: the ship stuck there on the bar of sand which cramped the entry. The vessel then ground about by waves until beam-on to the crashing open sea. Seas fizzing over the decks. Mrs. Arnold and Kitty flying out of their bunks, colliding in the space between, struggling in darkness up a canting floor.