Nate

‘Skeleton Tree’ croons from my laptop, the speakers not doing Cave’s baritone justice. The song offers a fitting soundtrack as I navigate through a website with stories of the missing. Click on names and photos, like shopping for tragedy.

A four-year-old boy with a scab on his nose and a chipped front tooth.

A six-year-old girl with tight red plaits.

She’s been missing for the same amount of time she spent with her family, who describe her in loving terms and include the kind of details they must hope will save her from the anonymity of the lost. All written in the present tense.

has a small strawberry birthmark on her left cheek

loves to help her little sister colour in

I lean back and tap the table in time with the song till my shoulders begin to relax. Poring over this site never did me any good. The kitchen is already warm for an October morning. The house was thrown in with the pub and, like most places around here, the insulation is inadequate for inland extremes. Despite that, and the banality of its design, it still provides the retreat I crave at each end of a hectic day, and a place to store the few belongings I’ve kept over the years since Lil’s death. Itinerant, like much of the Wimmera’s real estate, the house was lifted from a property near Goroke, where it was inhabited by a man who owned a sheep farm and recorded the monthly rainfall on the kitchen doorframe in the same way most chronicle their children’s heights, as if his true family was the weather. Its most recent inhabitant, before me, was the hotel manager whose abrasive nature led to a decline in clientele and the pub being put up for sale. Since I moved in two years ago, I’ve done what I can to make a home of it. Wooden flooring to replace the manky green carpet. A fresh coat of neutralising paint. An approximate map of Australia stuck to the kitchen wall, constructed from beer coasters I collected during my travels, including a rare one from the thirties of two kookaburras smoking cigarettes.

I eat the last of the toast I made for breakfast, now cold and dry. Beside my laptop is a book about the birds and fauna of the Little Desert, which I bought for the girl. Beth already has a copy, but she might like one of her own as Beth’s is full of sticky notes and looks like it’s been dragged through a swamp, which it probably has. Beth called this morning to tell me Pearl had been over the day before, which didn’t surprise me. Maybe that it was Pearl who came, but not that someone had beaten a path to her door. The stone-throwing episode was also predictable. But Beth naming the girl – that came out of the blue.

Freya.

As she explained the story behind her choice, I almost said to her, you’re wrong, her name is Lil. Though, of course that’s crazy. The old loan shark of grief calling in another debt.

I return to the website, scroll past the photos of smiling kids in school uniforms, oblivious to what life is about to hand them. No picture of the girl. Not unless she first went missing when she was little and has outgrown her image. Some even project into the future – wishful portraits of what their lost ones might have become.

During those first weeks after Lil disappeared, I’d stay up all night trawling through these sites till the birds greeted me, taunting: you’re looking in the wrong place. For a long time after they found her body, I couldn’t shake the idea that she was still out there, in some form we couldn’t for the moment apprehend. And that if we posted her beautiful little face on a website like this, someone would call to say they’d found her, drenched and shivering, but alive.

That the river had returned her to us intact.

A snake trail winds between the wheels of the truck, so I keep an eye out as I unload a carton of gin. There’s been a run on spirits. Seems a mysterious arrival from the desert, no matter how small, requires fortification. This lot should tide me over until the special order for the festival arrives. I noticed Jake was out on the main street this morning putting up signs. The man’s seriously into it. To the south, the twin silos stand firm against the sky – giant relics of an abandoned technology – and, as so often happens, they draw out memories, as if their emptiness is a vacuum that must be filled. But the morning has already had its share of recall. Time to focus on the present.

A red late-model Forester pulls into the car park and the engine cuts. A guy with messy blond hair, probably in his early forties, gets out. He presses the remote key to lock the car, a sure sign he’s from the city.

‘I’m guessing you work here,’ he says, gesturing to the carton, ‘unless you’re running off with the stock.’

‘Right the first time. Own the place, actually.’

‘The name’s Henry Parmentier.’ He holds out his hand for me to shake. I balance the carton on my hip, his grip firm. Both arms covered in tattoos.

‘Nate Fischer. What’s the accent?’

‘Bit of everything. Done a lot of travelling. You got any available rooms?’

‘Just so happens. How long you staying for?’

‘Not sure yet.’

‘You here to visit the desert?’

‘No, business.’ He takes a calculated glance at my boots, last polished the day they were made, and the sleepers that hang from both ears, no doubt trying to work out how small-town I am. ‘Local boy,’ he says, pointing at my Nick Cave T-shirt.

‘Cave, yeah, Warracknabeal born and bred. You’ve done your homework.’

His smile is short-lived. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ he says, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘I’m in need of a little local expertise. I imagine you’ve seen this.’

He holds up his phone, angling the screen away from the sun. It’s a Facebook post talking about Freya, though of course it doesn’t use that name. The general gist is that an unidentified girl walked out of Little Desert and is being ‘harboured’ by a Gatyekarr local. I don’t recognise the name of the person who posted it, which is worrying, as is the arrival of this guy.

‘No, I hadn’t seen it.’

‘If you work here I guess you’ve heard something, though. From my experience most of what happens in towns like this gets funnelled through the pub.’

Henry pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead and fixes me with his gaze. Definitely a journo. We had one out here a little while ago doing a story on ‘drug rings in the sticks’. Wasn’t a good opening line if you wanted anyone to talk. He figured that my being the ‘sole legal trader of drugs in town’, I might know a thing or two. I sent him on his merry way without even a headline.

‘Sorry, can’t help you.’

‘Not a problem. Still like that room, though, if that’s okay?’

My first instinct is to say no, but I still have a mortgage to service. Besides, regardless of whether I put him up or not, he looks set on finding a place to stay.

‘You’ll need to sign in.’

He flips his boot, drags out a travel-hardy backpack and follows me into the bar. As I spin the registry round for him to sign, he pulls a pen out of the spine of a black notebook, a dead giveaway.

‘All the rooms are booked out from the end of next week. Big event on. But until then, you’re good.’ I nod to the festival poster on the wall.

‘Been to a few of those lately,’ he says. ‘Contested histories. Can put a town on edge.’

‘Right.’

I could tell him about the heated discussion going on in the back room the other night – when I delivered the drinks to the Historical Society – but I don’t know the guy from a bar of soap.

‘Is there a local priest in town?’ he asks, returning the pen to its home.

‘Priest? You’re out of luck, though Maggie should be here in an hour or so. She’s about the closest thing we’ve got, unless you’re willing to wait around till the next service at the Lutheran church, Sunday week.’

‘Maggie,’ he says, taking in the white fox with the appraising eye of someone forever in search of a defining detail. ‘I can see you’re not open yet, but any chance of getting a coffee? I had an early start.’

Not so easily shaken, this one, and polite. I better call Beth and warn her.

‘Why a priest?’ I ask him. With all those tatts, he doesn’t look like much of a churchgoer.

‘Priest, minister. After the publican, they’re usually one of the best informed people in town.’

‘Makes sense.’

But from the way he’s fiddling with the wristband of his watch, that’s not all of it. You don’t have to go to journo school to recognise when someone’s withholding a cut of the truth.

As I collect a glass left on the windowsill, I see Jake on the other side of the street. He’s heading into the Historical Society building, carrying a cardboard box that looks heavy. I glance across at the lounge area. Henry’s still finishing his flat white, a laptop open in front of him.

‘Be right back,’ I call to him, and unlock the front door.

A warm wind chases me across the street, along with a surge of dust. The old woolshed has seen better days, cobwebs so thick beneath the eaves that they might be the only thing holding the roof on. The door’s wide open.

‘Jake?’

I head in, the front room about the same size as the lounge area of the pub. One wall is lined with shelves, mostly stacked with folders and paperwork, glass cabinets of varying heights spread out across the room, full of objects arranged according to theme, many with white labels attached by strings. Jake walks out from behind a bench with a collection of guns spread across it.

‘Nate, come in,’ he says, flicking a switch so the cabinets light up. ‘This the first time you been in here?’

‘My mum brought me in once. She helped out for a bit filing photographs.’

‘Must’ve been before I started volunteering.’

‘Listen, Jake, there’s something I need to talk to you about. A journo just checked in and he’s here because of the girl. You need to stop spreading the story. She …’

‘Wasn’t me, mate. That first day, after I saw her, I told a few people, but not since,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘She’s not good for the festival. All this fuss might overshadow it. We’ve worked so bloody hard. It’s important for towns like ours to come together to celebrate – it’s what people should be focused on right now. Not to mention the money we’ve spent. All that’s for the festival.’

He points to a pile of cardboard boxes, a T-shirt laid across the top of one with a drawing of a corella, Back to Gatyekarr written in a sloping black font. Beside it, another box sits open, full of printed stubby holders.

‘Been giving this lot a good shine for the festival open day,’ he says, picking up a rifle from the collection of guns on the bench. ‘1924, Winchester Model 52. The king of the .22s.’

‘Same model and vintage that shot the white fox in the pub, from what I hear.’

‘That’s right,’ says Jake, nodding in appreciation, and hands me the rifle. ‘You know what – we could do with some new blood. Young fella like you. Smart to boot. The average age of the committee is seventy-two, which at sixty-seven makes me an upstart.’ He laughs. ‘I know you like a good story and this place is full of them. See that wedding dress there. Muir family. 1893. Bumper crop that year, which paid for the dress and the whole shindig. People from all over the Wimmera and Mallee came. She married a Russian, thought he was aristocracy, but turned out he was some kind of anarchist on the run from the tsar. Had barely a penny to his name. Then he up and disappeared one night and no one saw hide nor hair of him again, or the family silver for that matter. The Muir girl hanged herself from a buloke in the family plot. People reckon if you listen hard enough you can hear her whispering his name. It’s all in the files over there.’

He nods at a collection of black folders lined up on three shelves, a white sticker on each with the beginning and end dates.

‘We have every copy of the local rag, from first printing till it ceased to exist. Got bought by Murdoch. 1959. Bet you didn’t know that. It’s where he got his start, buying up regional papers. And now look at him. And this here’s our Chinese display,’ he says, walking over to a cabinet that contains a collection of boxes, some with Chinese characters on the lid, and what must be an opium pipe. ‘Jenny looks after the multicultural stuff. Personal interest of hers. Makes a great chow mein. They called them Celestials in those days, you know, after the old name for China – the Celestial Empire. They came through here on their way from Robe to the Goldfields, avoiding the poll tax in Melbourne. Some of them stayed, though they’re all gone now.’

‘Thanks for the tour, Jake, but I should be getting back.’ I hand the rifle to him, the barrel cool to the touch. As I turn to go I notice a box of stones on a table in the corner.

‘Someone left them on the doorstep a while back. Pre-history,’ says Jake with a sweep of his arm, as if clearing the air. ‘It’s all dying, you know. Young ones like you aren’t interested in history. Or if they are, it’s all ancestry dot com. Finding out about where you’re from. Well, we’re right here, and this community isn’t done yet.’

I hold up my hand. ‘I’m sorry, Jake, I really have to go, but if you’ve got any more of those flyers for the festival, I can take some back with me. I think we’ve almost run out.’

He nods and returns the Winchester to the bench.

‘Know your past, know your future,’ he quotes, and switches off the cabinets.