Exiting the car, she found herself incapable of movement. Her shoes felt heavy, like they’d suddenly filled with water. She sank back into the seat, struggling to breathe. It felt like something was pinning her to the seat. Like a phantom in the back was wrenching on her seatbelt, constricting her lungs.
She looked at her shoes. Remembered them hitting the old man in his chest, the weight beneath collapsing with each kick. It hadn’t taken much. Like stepping on a snail, the old man’s old bones now much the same. There was nothing to him.
Vernon had had trouble getting up his steps. His walk had been awful. She almost cried thinking about it. Maybe he was dead. She’d have to send somebody around besides William Kelly to check on him.
With shaking hands, she gripped the wheel and rested her forehead on it. She pressed in hard, wanting to hurt herself. Her shaking hands shaking the wheel, her forehead shaking, her teeth were grinding. A low moan escaped her throat. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the car transformed into some beast, her rage manifested in mechanical form. In her mind her rage was far more powerful than impotent. But impotent it was.
When she finally got out of the car the morning sun over the horizon welcomed her. She walked up the path to Jack’s house, which was just like the rest in Port Napier, the same dirt lining the pathway, the same flowers embedded beside the house, though his had seen better days. She knocked on the door. She wondered briefly what Roger was doing. Still sleeping when she’d left him. He wouldn’t be up this early.
Jack answered the door in his dressing gown, blinking in the daylight.
‘Yeah? What’s going on?’ he asked, his face still a clouded bruise.
‘I need you to come with me,’ she found herself saying. Her hands were still shaking.
‘Are you serious?’ he said, looking down at his dressing gown. ‘I just worked yesterday with my face and neck feeling like they were stepped on. I should be getting worker’s comp or something. And you’ve got me coming in again later on.’
‘You don’t even need to get changed,’ she said. Anger at herself for trying to appease him. For once she’d like to walk around and just feel good about herself.
Jack sighed, looked back inside his house. Sharon knew there was nobody to miss him, that Jack’s wife Ruth and unborn kid had left that day to visit her folks in Berrambool for Easter. He hadn’t shut up about it.
‘Why’ve you got your home car? And you’re not in uniform?’
Because she didn’t want people noticing her retrieving Ernie’s car.
Instead of the truth she said, ‘I’m not working right now, just tying up something.’
‘I’m bringing beer,’ Jack said.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’
Jack scoffed, turned back inside. It took him a minute to put on some pants, the dressing gown still tied around his waist as he exited and locked his home.
It didn’t take long to reach the fork in the road, past the cemetery. Neither of them spoke. Sharon turned left, found the boat turn-off.
‘What’re we doing?’ Jack finally asked. He swigged his beer.
They turned down the dirt road. The boat ramp and the river before them a slurping mess of brown. Weed and debris floating the length of it.
‘We’re collecting the car,’ Sharon said. She drove slowly, looking for Ernie’s car.
‘Why?’
‘It’s stolen, Jack. Need to retrieve it, return it to the owner.’
‘Stolen by who?’
‘That old man I brought in yesterday.’
‘Vernon Moore? The woodwork teacher?’
Sharon nodded. She meandered around the boat ramp and soon found the car. Front all banged up.
‘According to the witness,’ she said. ‘And Vernon also confessed to it.’
She didn’t turn the engine off.
Jack said, ‘So I’m driving your car back?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘If I did, would it matter?’
Sharon made no response to this.
‘You have keys to this thing?’ Jack said, nodding in the direction of Ernie’s car.
She nodded. They both got out of her car and Jack walked around, sat in the driver’s seat. ‘Take it back to the station,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you and then drop you home.’
‘I’ll wait to make sure you’re okay, then,’ he said, each word dripping resentment. He shut the door.
She got into Ernie’s car and reached over to the backseat. Opened one of the cardboard boxes, pulled out a tomato paste jar, found the weed. She kept her hands low but Jack didn’t seem to be watching. The product was probably all here, Vernon wouldn’t have taken any. She took a moment to check that all the boxes were full. The old man had been telling the truth.
You would’ve told the truth too, she thought, if you’d been so kicked so hard you’d been left bleeding. She wondered if his dignity had been hurt, her being a woman. Probably didn’t matter to him. Being made to feel completely powerless feels the same no matter who’s dealing the damage. That was the word too: powerless. She knew what that was like.
She started the car. Jack raised his hand to his forehead to form a visor. As she backed out, the sweeping arc of sun over the river made it look like it was illuminated from within, like a thousand luminescent fish had grouped together and spilled over onto the muddy banks. She drove up the dirt track and made her way back to the station.
Back home, Roger still in bed. He’d been in bed asleep when she’d returned home the night before. Still asleep now. She clenched her fists and winced at the sores on the back of them reopening as she stood in the bedroom. Had she struck the old man with her fists? She took off her clothes, returned to her pyjamas, put on her slippers, dressing gown, and went into the kitchen. No Aerobics Oz Style for her today.
She put bread in the toaster, spread the butter thick, the Vegemite thin. She was about to start eating when she heard a loud knock on the door. She hurried to open it.
Jack was on her doorstep. He was still in his dressing gown, though his face had changed. His eyes were rid-rimmed.
‘I got something I need to say to you.’
‘Keep your voice down, okay?’ she said, worried they’d be overheard. She heard Peter shuffling from his bedroom. Then his lethargic figure appeared.
‘Who’s at the door?’
‘It’s just Jack.’
‘You know your mum’s a liar?’ Jack asked, craning over to project his voice around Sharon’s body.
‘What?’ Peter’s eyes lost their lethargy as he focused on the man on the doorstep.
Having her son stand beside her gave Sharon no comfort. ‘He’s just joking,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you, Jack? Come on, let’s go for a drive and talk about it.’
‘No, I’ve been thinking, Sarge. I’m done. I didn’t know it for sure before, but I know it for sure now. That was Cahill’s car we collected. You think I didn’t see you looking at the little baggies in the jars?’
She felt her shoulders slumping.
Peter said, ‘What are you on about?’
‘You don’t have anything to say then?’ Jack asked. A wonder Roger wasn’t up with the noise. ‘I won’t dob you in, because I don’t dob on people. I’m not that sort of bloke. But I’m bloody tempted. I really am.’
She didn’t know how to respond to that.
‘Those blokes the other night making me spew on myself were part of it too, weren’t they. The blokes that did this.’ He pointed a finger at his purpled cheek.
So. He’d been made to feel powerless, too.
‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she said quietly.
But Jack just walked away. He had left his car running in front of the picket fence. He opened the gate and walked to it.
Sharon shouted, ‘Wait. Aren’t you working later today? It’s Good Friday, it’s all hands on deck.’
‘Do it yourself.’
Jack slammed his door and made a lazy half-circle. Sharon watched the car go, not daring to turn to her son. Jack had to stop at the end of the street to give way and in that moment she wanted to go after him, justify herself to him. But there was nothing to justify what she’d done. She could only watch as the car turned right.
Sharon shut the door. Peter was seated in his customary spot at the kitchen bench. Her forgotten toast cold nearby. She grabbed the plate, upended it into the bin, turned on the tap to wash it clean of crumbs.
‘What was he talking about?’ Peter asked.
‘He was just being an idiot.’
‘If you don’t want to talk about it you can just say so. But don’t treat me like I’m a little kid.’
Sharon didn’t feel like eating now. Didn’t feel like doing anything.
‘Ernie Cahill pays me to keep his business in Newbury to himself.’
Peter looked up. ‘Pays you what?’
‘A couple of hundred extra a week.’
‘Is that how Dad got his new ute? And goes on those fishing trips?’
Sharon nodded. ‘A bit of it, yeah.’
‘And you what? Just don’t arrest him?’
‘Something like that.’
‘So, the weed and all that?’
Sharon was silent for a moment. ‘I thought you didn’t know about that. But yeah. Your dad thought it best to go along with it.’
Peter laughed then. The sound shocked her.
‘Dad has nothing to do with it.’
She went to defend herself, but the words wouldn’t form in her mouth. She knew how wrong they would be. No matter what had prompted her actions they had still been hers.
‘Yeah. Maybe,’ she said.
‘You really don’t care about anything anymore, do you?’ Peter asked.
‘I care about you.’
‘No, you don’t. You don’t even care about yourself. You’re just a sad woman who doesn’t care.’
The words pierced something in her, making her bleed internally, from a place long dormant, that she’d thought immune to wounding.
‘It’s like that exercise you do in front of the TV,’ he said, finishing his cereal. He left the bowl and spoon on the bench. ‘It’s useless. Just makes you sweat a little. But it’s just nothing. It’s not working hard.’
‘Come on, Peter––’
‘You know what? I’ll be glad when I’m out of here. You and Dad . . .’ He stopped, perhaps seeing the hurt in her eyes. Then, ‘You know I tried some?’
‘Some weed?’
‘Yeah. I smoked a bit with Cassie.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess you’re eighteen now, you can do that sort of thing.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Peter said. ‘Shouldn’t you give a shit that I smoked pot, Mum? And not just because it’s illegal? Isn’t that something mums care about? Shouldn’t you say something? Lock me in my room?’
‘What good would that do?’
‘At least then I’d know you care.’
Sharon watched him go to the cupboard and retrieve the cereal, pour himself another bowl. She watched the milk dribble down his chin, burrowing its way through his patchy stubble. He wiped it off with the back of his hand and looked for all the world like his father. His hair longer than she remembered him liking it. It dangled near his eyes.
‘All the money he give you make it worth it?’
Sharon looked down at her slippered feet. ‘Not sure I was doing it for the money.’
‘Then why were you doing it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know why you broke the law?’
She attempted, ‘I thought you’d like it, me working with Ernie. You know, your mum and your future father-in-law working together.’
‘He thinks you’re a joke. You know that, right?’
Sharon said nothing.
‘He said so to Cass. Well, if not to her then in front of her. He thinks you’re a cow. That he said verbatim. He said you were like a cow running to the back of a ute giving out hay.’
What to say to that? Peter’s words sat in the air like claggy glue. She wondered where he had learned to be so venomous. Guessed it was on her again. He hadn’t been taught any different.
She sighed. No wonder her son thought the way he did; what he thought was true.
Her father had scooped up the chicken bodies in a wheelbarrow, their matted red feathers clumping together, mottling like fallen leaves. Like you could step on them, play with them, throw them in the air. He had showered, and then wheeled the barrow down the street to the butcher, Mr Oxley. He’d asked her to accompany him and she’d refused.
So now here they were, Sharon and her mother, seated in the lounge room watching television. Her mother had a hot water bottle on the small of her back. She sat forward, clasping her hands together, wincing.
‘You want something to eat? I could make you something.’
Sharon shook her head. Then, softly, ‘I don’t know why you just let him hit you.’
Her mother kept looking at the television. The screen, without the lights on in the room, coating her face in muted colours.
She said, ‘It’s easier.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sharon . . .’
‘What do you mean, it’s easier?’
Her mother sighed, held her hand to her back, repositioned the hot water bottle.
‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’
‘Mum,’ Sharon said. She looked at her mother, willing her to turn her eyes. ‘He shouldn’t hit you.’
‘I know, sweetheart.’
‘You should say something then.’
‘That’d just make him madder.’
‘The cops’d help?’
‘No,’ her mother said. ‘They wouldn’t.’
‘They would. Why wouldn’t they?’
‘They’d come over here and at best they’d talk to him about it. And he’d act all sorry for a little while. But then he’d drink; he’d get mad. He’d look at the other blokes around him and how their wives are so far up their arses and he’d come home wild again. No.’
Her mother was crying now.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘I shouldn’t say arse.’
‘Mum––’
‘I’m sorry this is how it is, sweetheart. But this is how it is.’
She did turn then. The look she gave; Sharon never forgot it. In later years, when she thought of her mother she saw that look, that face only. Fraught with pain, world-weary. But more than that. It was broken.
Her mother said, attempting a smile, ‘It’s best you learn now, sweetheart. You stand up for yourself, you’ll only get shoved back down. Best never to stand up in the first place. Now. Let me get you something to eat.’
They ate in silence, kept watching television until it was bedtime. Her father still hadn’t returned. She dreaded his coming home but knew now what she needed to be: subservient. She vowed she’d help her mother. She vowed she’d help herself. Don’t stand up, push back. Make life easier for all of them. Be small. Don’t argue.
Before she fell asleep she rose from her bed. Quietly padding down the hall, leaving the house, gumbooting her feet, treading into the chicken coop. Her father had shovelled the severed heads into one corner. Had told her he’d get to them later. He was out drinking, she knew.
The verandah light was dim, made the going difficult. She sorted through the heads, her fingers gentle, timid, until she found Daisy’s, with its distinctively coloured feathers near the eyes. One eye still open, staring.
She took it from the coop. In the shed, with the dangling light on, she found her father’s tomahawk. She placed Daisy’s head on the oil-soaked concrete floor. She twisted the tomahawk around, so the dull edge hovered over Daisy’s head. And then just lifted it a little, let it thunk down.The crunching of bone sounding for all the world like an egg cracking. She lifted the tomahawk, hammered quietly away. Daisy now completely forgotten. No part of her remained.
She used the dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess. Still a small smear of blood on the concrete. Let that remain. She threw the head into the oil-drum bin, took off her gumboots, walked inside, got back into bed. Waited for her father to return.