“Notice, he hasn’t put us in cells,” Tim whispered to Bandy.
As well, and at last, Hanney returned the flask to storage. Carrying it, he moved like a tired servant.
Tim tilted his chair and forced the back of his head against the wall. The back legs of his chair provided him with the other half of the leaning equation which would enable him to sleep. Bandy slept too, and at one stage Tim was drowsily aware of the little man slipping from his chair and curling himself on the floor.
At one stage that morning Sergeant Fry, who was bull-necked but had what many people called an intelligent face, came into the office like a man who hardly had the time for it, and Hanney pointed out the two offenders at the rear of the room. Hanney did not use large gestures or try the smart-copper act on his sergeant. Fry murmured brisk things at Hanney, and Hanney nodded.
Don’t try to scrutinise or interpret the buggers. Drowse. From nowhere now Tim remembers a music hall song, “Never Buy a Copper a Drink”:
Sleep. Waking again, he found Dr. Erson in the office, talking energetically to Hanney. Tim now adjusted his chair and sat upright to convince the doctor of his respectability. He watched Hanney begin shrugging, but Erson was a large magician in the Macleay for his medicine and for his singing, and so the ungifted Hanney now looked shorn of power.
Erson came to Tim now, smiling a little as if remembering miscreant Johnny.
“We should have had guards on the Trial Bay road, shouldn’t we?”
Tim said, “My regrets, doctor. But I was anxious about my wife.”
“I was pleased to see in passing the shed that you have a new horse.”
Tim lowered his eyes for the first time since arrested by Hanney.
“Oh, a borrowed, reliable one. I still use the old one for deliveries. But keep Johnny separate from him.”
Erson grinned briefly, considered him and coughed. “A terrible searing day, Mr. Shea.”
“Yes,” said Tim.
Dr. Erson reached out and felt the glands under Tim’s chin. Then he asked to see Tim’s tongue. Tim let him do whatever he wanted.
Bandy stirred on the floor and sat up.
Dr. Erson smiled. “Mr. Habash.”
Bandy stood up now. “My dear Dr. Erson.”
Tim was of course astounded that they greeted each other as friends.
“Sir,” said Bandy, “forgive my journey, but I know well that the strict quarantine time had expired.”
“Had it?” asked Erson. He still seemed amused, reaching up to Bandy’s chin as he had earlier to Tim’s. “You are not to talk about any of this, Bandy, or of going up there. And God help if you do it again. It is not a good precedent. You must both give me an undertaking!”
“I understand,” said Bandy. “You are such a good friend I have no problem in offering my solemn undertaking.”
“Well, I think in that case you can both go.” The doctor turned to Constable Hanney, who was making himself busy at his desk. “These fellows are free to go, constable?”
Hanney thought a while, an actor who had forgotten the play’s simplest line. “Yes, doctor,” he managed in the end. He began tearing up the page he had written for them to sign.
Outside the air ferocious, an incoming tide, and they fought their way through it, crossing the yard. It scalded the cheeks. It was so thick and full of flecks of black leaf. Yet Erson had made this blazing day habitable.
Tim murmured, “What a civilised fellow!”
Bandy said, “I am a fool for fainting.”
He wavered in the white haze.
“You’ve never seen her before though?”
“I have not, old fellow.” Bandy shook his head to clear it of apparitions. “But as to the rest, they don’t want people to know about us. You noticed what Dr. Erson said? We are not a good precedent for people to know about. It is up to them to guard the camp, and we have shown them up.”
“He seemed such friends with you.”
Bandy smiled. “He visited my father, my brother and myself, looked into our prescriptions to make sure they were safe, and found they were. As of course he should have expected. We have been herbalists and chemists from generation to generation, Mr. Shea. Out of our meeting grew a compact with Dr. Erson. We are to urge our clearly ill customers to attend the surgeries of the doctors in town. We are all brothers in concern for health.”
Tim began to laugh, far too much for the day. But he was tickled by this unexpected kindly alliance the world harboured.
“Bloody hell!”
The air too ferocious for him to consider other alliances and their meaning. The alliance between Ernie and Hanney, stated so fulsomely in Ernie’s letter. What did that bloody signify?
Ten past nine, he saw by his fob watch. Unless she was overtaken by a vengeful mood, Ellen Burke would surely have opened the store. Though who would buy butter on a day like this? Butter from the Central or Warneton creameries melting to a smear in the hands or the back of the cart. Yet he must make deliveries in this furnace.
They found their horses in the shed. The poor beasts were snuffling. The air worried them. They knew that fire was everywhere, downriver and up, out of their control, out of anyone else’s.
Remembering Missy, Bandy continued to shake his head and climbed onto the grey. He said nothing as they rode the horses out of the gate, steering them towards the water trough outside Kelty’s where Tim had got his first bad reputation with Constable Hanney. They found the beasts unwilling, pulling at the reins. Having been pliable all night, they were now jacking up.
“Oh, dear sir, we could have been in great trouble,” said Bandy.
“See,” said Tim, “I told you there was nothing to be gained from friendship with me. I am just one step away, Bandy, from you. I am a white nigger. If I’d been an Orangeman or Good Templar, that old bastard Thurmond would have taken his hat off to us and wished us a good ride.”
As his horse and Bandy’s drank from Kelty’s trough, “How well a lager would go down,” Tim murmured.
“I must not,” muttered Bandy.
Tim felt a sigh escape him. “Black tea is always the best.”
“Mr. Shea, I saw that woman dressed as a boy.”
“A boy?”
“A boy in a school uniform of the English type. I saw him walking in West. This being at a time early in the summer. I saw him at once and thought, that may surely be a girl in masquerade. A beautiful being, boy or girl. More beautiful than most other beings in the Macleay.”
“A boy?” Tim asked.
“That face however,” Bandy murmured. “The very chin. The very forehead. Europeans are so distinct to me, one at a time.”
In a fever, Tim hauled his horse’s head out of Kelty’s slimy water and turned it to the river which the day had turned turgid and browner than manure. Bandy obligingly followed.
“You’re telling me it’s the very girl, are you?”
“Certainly,” said Bandy. “A memorable child.”
“A child,” said Tim. Bandy had the same word Tim had harboured within himself so long. “That’s right. A child.”
Her name wheeled above him in the air, at the margin of sight. It cast the day’s sole shadow.
Eleven
SAVOURING BLACK TEA at last from a big mug in a respite in the living room, the deepest, most shadowy room of the house, Tim in his crazed exhausted wakefulness turned to the Argus. Ellen Burke had bought it that morning in between kindly making up the orders in the storeroom and scratching clients’ names on them with indelible pencil. What he sought, for relief from all the wakeful tangles of the day, was the normal mismatched bags of bones newspapers, the restful oddments of fiction and items off the wire and cattle sales and distant murders.