The odd thing about Jake’s travel to East Timor was the involvement of the Foreign Minister. After Jake made the move into Defence Intelligence, Henry Hunt got in touch with him once more, after a very long silence. Apparently Henry claimed some credit behind the scenes for Jake’s transfer. Jake was never comfortable about that if it was true. He didn’t want to be in Henry Hunt’s debt, professionally or personally.
There was a lot of water under the bridge but some things don’t change including what Jake wore when the Minister invited him to lunch at the Commonwealth Club for old time’s sake. I know because I ironed his shirts. Jake put on his single-breasted grey suit and a blue and white striped shirt with navy and white striped tie. It was the school uniform. Not exactly, but close enough. A uniform at any rate, as if Jake were still a schoolboy when it came to Henry Hunt. Henry on the other hand had evolved his dress with up-to-the-minute flair – pastel shirts, loud ties, tweed, a Wall Street look – that made an impression.
At the first lunch Henry asked Jake what he knew about East Timor.
‘Nothing much,’ Jake responded, careful not to claim any special expertise.
That was the right answer for Henry. He wanted his own independent advice on the matter and liked the idea of his own eyes and ears inside Defence Intelligence. He was being strategic, insinuating his presence into a key area of a rival Department. It was the sort of meddling that Ministers like to do. Jake could accept it if it was kept discreet.
There was a follow-up meeting, another lunch for which I ironed that same blue and white striped shirt. The Minister needed to know if the line that the government was developing on East Timor would stand up against the facts on the ground. Jake had given DI’s view when Henry asked suddenly, ‘Would you be interested in going there, my friend?’
Jake must have shown that he was tempted by the offer, although he expressed concern at what his Director would say, who was suspicious of him already. It was his immediate colleagues, the sigint specialists and Paula, his Section Head, who held him in high esteem.
‘They won’t know,’ said Henry Hunt. Aid programs come under Foreign Affairs. As Minister, he had the capacity to approve Jake’s attachment to an aid project in East Timor without any further consultation. It would go under the radar, all at arm’s length, though Henry would need to take his Department Secretary into his trust to make it happen. ‘You’ll go there incognito.’
Henry refilled their glasses of red wine and tilted his in Jake’s direction. His blood was up. His eyes were pink in the bath of the Club’s discreet lighting, ringed with the yellow lashes; his hair was stark white. As a tall man he bent uncomfortably into the low Club chair. He might have been albino, if he were not some throwback to a Nordic ancestor. Jake would not say no to the proposal.
And so it was that Jake got a passport with a different name and after a bit of training became a visiting water systems inspector assigned to the sole AusAID project remaining in East Timor. It was the perfect alibi for travelling the length and breadth of that side of the island.
Gavan, the bloke who ran the project on the ground, was an ex-pastor from Far North Queensland who spoke fluent Bahasa after working for years across the Indonesian archipelago. He was a character, Jake told me over the phone in one of his cryptic calls. That meant they could get on.
The Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Gavan’s nominal employer, had demanded confidential reports on the situation from their man in Dili. For Gavan that crossed a line. But he did have things to say. He had picked up enough Tetun, the local language, to know what was going on. Actually, Jake was privy to Gavan’s reports in Canberra already. They were enjoyed for their colourful language and dismissed as wild exaggeration. Not much of what Gavan had to say found its way into briefings for Cabinet.
Jake returned from his six-week reconnaissance trip to East Timor with a sense of feeling his way. That’s how he put it to me. The Minister invited him to another private lunch to hear his off-the-record commentary. Jake cautiously alerted Henry to the possibility that he was being deceived by his own people. The diplomats, the intelligence analysts, the court academics were holding to a line that supported a position defined as being in Australia’s national interest and open neither to scrutiny nor question. That’s what Jake was coming to see. Distortion, filtering, manipulation, as long as the established policy settings were maintained.
At work Jake went along with it. He kept his head down, feeding in analysis and watching as it was used to support conclusions contrary to his own. His interventions served only to refine the principle of plausible deniability. In private, however, in his lunches with Henry Hunt at the Club, he was able to tell it differently. The Minister was smart enough to see when he was being treated as a dummy and resilient enough to turn it to his advantage. The intelligence was unpalatable. It left the government exposed, and himself as Minister. He appreciated his old schoolfriend’s honesty.
The government line was the line of all Australian governments since 1974 and the same as the Indonesian government’s line, that East Timor only made sense if it could be integrated into Indonesia as another province, like Irian Jaya before it. The more peacefully that integration could happen, the better. No one wanted any fuss. It was a pragmatic, big-picture policy setting and the sort of view that a cool, analytical mind like Jake’s might well have arrived at. But he had reservations now. There were alternative scenarios. If his advice to the Minister over lunch on balance seemed to green light the continuation of the status quo, it did so whilst acknowledging the growing opposition. That allowed the Minister to sense that there was something more to be extracted from the situation. He was not without ambition. Indonesia was in transition, with Suharto accused of corruption on a massive scale, the economy in desperate straits, and the idea of a referendum on East Timor’s independence gaining momentum. The Minister began to imagine a sequence of events that would play out to the eternal credit of his side of politics and in a personal triumph for himself. He would outmanoeuvre the ‘Jakarta mandarins’ in Canberra. He could sell that idea to the Prime Minister.
Still the doctored reports kept coming, through Foreign Affairs, through Defence. Jake kept his powder dry.
I asked Jake if Henry ever commented on the fact that he wore the same outfit every time they met for lunch. Jake countered by saying that Henry always looked different. He was changing before his eyes. His complexion was more roseate, his hair a shock of white, his nose stuck out like a Viking prow. He spoke as loudly as ever but with a jollier laugh that imposed itself on his surroundings. He was expansionary in his behaviour towards other departments, a predator whose sense of his own prospects was greater than ever. A metamorphosis was taking place. The Minister was pleased to have Jake in his corner.
Jake’s reward would be the appointment to Washington. It became official with the election victory, after Henry scraped in on the recount and kept the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
Patronage relationships are complicated. There is always the need to reaffirm power by pushing it a little further. There is no end to the satisfaction of fealty. The landlord always ups the rent. A renewal of gratitude is demanded. Tribute payment. It seemed that Henry Hunt was determined to get something more from the country boy whom his family had taken under its wing.
For his lunches with Henry at the Commonwealth Club Jake wore the school uniform as a default position, the choice that was no choice, the most faceless outfit anyone could choose to wear. Many old boys wear it to the end of their days. For Jake it was a kind of armour. As a schoolboy he had been made aware of how social differences could be read. Henry didn’t need that. He was flamboyant and modish, signalling distinction with his rare colouring and rank in the confidence of his dress. His outsize being was its own shield. He and Jake never matched; they were no Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But because I did the ironing I couldn’t help noticing how Jake dressed according to his place in the scheme of things. Always a lance corporal, a lieutenant colonel. He came home from those lunchtime meetings so wound up.
At their last lunch Henry told Jake he wanted him back in East Timor. A reliable on-the-ground assessment was urgently needed before action could be taken. This second trip was more furtive than the first, hastily arranged, harder to explain away probably, although again it seemed to go unnoticed. Jake could have refused but didn’t. It was timed for the anniversary of the Dili massacre on the twelth of November, which was coming around for a seventh year amidst growing turmoil and agitation for change.
I was already packing up our house in Canberra for the move to DC when Jake announced he was off to Dili again. It was after our walk in the cork forest when he told me his concerns. Call it cognitive dissonance. A troubled conscience. Something in the picture wasn’t right.
Henry’s Jake wasn’t my Jake. My Jake wore check flannel shirts, polo shirts, faded jeans and work shorts. He spent money on elastic-sided leather boots, R.M. Williams, and looked after them in order to make them last. That’s the gear I packed for this unexpected trip. Jake had his sleeping bag and a sheet, his cotton hat for the sun, a water bottle, insect repellent, medications – a neat well-stocked pack as befitted a civilian soldier. Sunglasses, notebooks, camera, chocolate mints to give away as gifts, a powerful compact shortwave radio, and an unopened copy of Dante’s Inferno.
‘I always wanted to read it,’ he told me.
Later, much later, I checked the book. Jake had marked some lines in Canto X:
‘We see asquint, like those whose twisted sight
Can make out only the far-off,’ he said…
‘when things draw near, or happen, we perceive
Nothing of them.’
This time Jake went AWOL as far as I was concerned. I hardly heard from him. I knew he was with Gavan. Gavan must have twigged to what was going on when Jake turned up unannounced to check for leaks in the water tanks they had installed only a month or two earlier. That wasn’t the usual approach.
I finished up my work and took Nicole out of school in Canberra for good. We went back to Adelaide to our place in the Hills. My mum had a fall. She tripped on the dog. It was lying on a step and too lazy to move out of the way. I was pleased to be able to spend time with her as she hobbled around in rehab. We were due to leave for DC in the New Year on Jake’s posting. Nicole would start her new school there after the winter break. It was the end of something, though it didn’t feel like that. Nor a beginning either. We couldn’t have guessed. It was unreal, once we were there in our house in the Hills, with Nicole riding Piper, her new pony, around those yards as if she were me when I was young, so happy, as if nothing ever changes.
The wrecking of our life hadn’t happened then, or it was happening already in another place compared to which our old house of solid stone in the countryside was nothing more than a fantasy, a delusion. A place safeguarded. But what was wrong with that?
I kept sketchy notes in my diary during Jake’s trips to East Timor. It was my way of keeping track of him as best I could. Arrived safely. Canberra–Sydney. Sydney–Darwin. Darwin–Denpasar–Dili. The Mahkota Hotel. That’s where he stayed the first time. It was run by the generals, cronies of the Suharto family, and was good for Jake’s bonafide. He was hobnobbing with them, or not shunning them, to keep up his neutrality as a visiting worker. The Mahkota was the only place in town where things like phones were guaranteed to work. That was because calls could be so easily tapped through the hotel switch. Jake didn’t like the place. He called to let me know where he was but didn’t say much after that.
On the second trip he was based at a local guesthouse where the phone was down. He got a line through to me eventually and said his usual affectionate things but that was all. I don’t know if someone else was listening in. Sounds ok, I wrote in my diary with the date and time.
The power went out on the night of the anniversary of the massacre. I saw it on television in Australia. The day passed peacefully in Dili, despite those hoping for bloodshed – activists, the media. It was peaceful. But then after dark the power went out and candles were lit in their thousands in spontaneous commemoration of the dead, before the rain came pouring down and washed them away.
Jake moved in with Gavan after that. He had a concrete house with trees and shrubbery and a fence around it on the edge of town. I found it hard to visualise. Three more nights passed without a call. I tried to get through to Gavan’s number on the second night but no one answered. On the fourth night Jake finally called in. He sounded strange, conscious that he was communicating nothing and that I would be frustrated.
‘Tell Nicole to get back on the horse if she comes off,’ he said with a laugh. I noted it down verbatim, as if it were a coded message. ‘You seem very far away,’ was the last thing he said before he hung up.
Were there other voices in the background? I think so. Other languages.
He called again the evening before he flew out to confirm his flight details. He was all packed, he said. ‘I can’t stay any longer.’ In the tone of his voice I heard something, a weight, a concern, that was not Jake.
‘Don’t miss the plane,’ I joked. He had almost missed the plane that took him there.
My Jake. We made an occasion of farewelling him at Canberra airport when he left for Dili that time. He checked in early and we all went through. Nicole wanted to escort him right to the gate and wave him off. We sat on tall stools at a round table in the sun that Saturday morning and drank smoothies through straws. Somehow we missed the boarding announcement. The plane, the little Dash 8, was parked on the tarmac where its propellers whizzed. We were talking and laughing in the comedy of our self-enclosed group. Suddenly it was the final call for his flight, ready for immediate departure, and Jake jumped up. He strode to the gate and I took Nicole’s hand and we ran after him. He had to argue with the attendant to let him through. He had a connection in Sydney to make.
‘Sorry sir, the flight is closed,’ the attendant said.
He waved his boarding pass, his onward itinerary, until she gave in. He came back to us for goodbye hugs. I remember it. I can feel it now. There was something in the way he held me and something in the way he let himself be held that was the old Jake. His need to surrender to an expression of our oneness had the utmost urgency. Then he bent to give Nicole a cuddle and a lingering butterfly kiss.
I remember it because I did not experience it again from him, never with that simple anchoring depth.
He ran across the tarmac buffeted by the churning props and was bundled inside the cabin by the attendant as the door closed. The steps were wheeled away. The machine raced down the strip, the blades spinning until they were invisible, and he was gone into the blue.
Nicole and I held hands, in tears.
‘Wave,’ I said. We had to do something to dispel our emotion. My emotion, which was namelessly profound and disturbed. Though he would never see, we waved as he disappeared.
—
The man who came back to me was estranged, from me, from us, from himself. He did a good job of passing. He was relieved to see us. He hugged me at the airport. He embraced me in bed at night. But something was withheld. He was exhausted, of course, but there was an opacity in his eyes, a depth, a blur, as if a film had come between himself and our world, which should have been his world too but no longer was. It was subtle. It didn’t show obviously. It required a shift in the optical settings for things to focus. I didn’t know it consciously then. I know when I look back.
It wasn’t that we didn’t talk about what he had seen. He wanted to talk, and talk openly. He told me about the candlelit vigil at the Santa Cruz cemetery. He described it as a luminous point of suspension in the darkness. The reports of violence came in the days that followed, pro-independence people seized and shot, tit for tat killings, pretexts that escalated each time, disproportionate response by militias, coordination by Indonesian forces massing behind the scenes.
Jake told me how he made his way to the other side of the island to a village called Alas where the church had been ransacked, the statue of the Virgin smashed to smithereens, the faithful driven away. He saw the body of a man, naked and beaten, who was dragged through the streets, his hands pierced with wire. What need of religious images of suffering humanity when this was the real thing? Dozens of East Timorese were killed. It was characterised as fratricidal violence, tribal killing, civil war, a domestic affair in which no outsider should intervene and which the Indonesian armed forces were doing their best to subdue. Doing the right thing. Even as they fanned the flames behind the scenes and manipulated the situation on the international stage to suit their own interests. Even as they talked autonomy at the United Nations in New York, their determination that East Timor would never get away was an unsheathed blade. Jake saw all this, he understood it clearly.
International peacekeepers were the one thing that could have saved those suffering people. They were the thing that Indonesia and Australia would stop at any cost because the need for peacekeepers would expose their duplicitous narrative. Jake was complicit if he toed the line, if he reported to the Minister that there was no evidence of anything worrisome, when he had seen the reality with his own eyes.
He told me about the woman who was raped, whose family was humiliated in its powerlessness to stop her violation, whose grandfather was killed. She had escaped the country, leaving her older sister behind, unsupported. The sister was married to a Falintil guerrilla whose child she had borne. She was a woman of total faith which gave her the strength to survive. Jake heard her story from others. He met her. They only exchanged a few words but she inspired him. He witnessed the hope that lay behind her courage and dignity, even if it was worn to the bone. What did such determination mean, he asked himself. He bore witness to something in her that was beyond his comprehension. It disturbed him almost as much as the atrocities he saw.
He showed me a silver medal on a blackened silver chain. When I looked more closely I could see that it was an Australian shilling piece with King George VI on one side and a merino ram on the other. The year was 1942. A hole had been hammered in the top for a chain to pass through, making it a medallion, a pendant, an heirloom.
‘They told me about meeting Australians in the war,’ he said, ‘about how they helped the Australian commandos when they were fighting the Japanese, the other war, not this one. I had heard the stories before. I know that history. I knew it from my dad. He was there. Before he was finally evacuated and the Japanese took over. The Australians would not have survived without the help of the local people. Their criados who brought food. Who passed information. Everything from intelligence on enemy movements to fresh crocodile to eat.’
Jake grew more excited as he spoke. ‘I was listening out for any stories people had to tell. Stories from their grandparents’ time. I was curious as to whether there was evidence of things that happened back then that had slipped through the history books. Any further proof of what might have occurred.’
The coin sat in his hand as he went on. ‘The Australians wanted to pay the East Timorese for the work they did, but paper money was useless. The silver was better. So they had bulk shillings brought over in an airdrop. Can’t have been easy. They presented a silver shilling to each of their comrades – men, women and children. The woman’s mother got one. She kept it and treasured it and passed it on.’
I looked at Jake. It wasn’t hard to see his romantic fancy running.
‘How many men were there in Sparrow Force?’ I asked next.
‘A few hundred by that stage. Including a few signallers.’
‘Your dad was a signaller?’
‘What are the odds,’ he grinned, ‘that the woman’s mother came across my dad?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ I said. ‘Would you like to polish it up?’ He looked puzzled. ‘The shilling,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember what we did as kids to dirty old coins? We rubbed them with soursobs. Crushed soursobs, for the oxalic acid in their juice. There’s a whole patch of soursobs down by the dam at the moment that shouldn’t be there. Shall we go and get some and rub the silver shilling? See what happens?’
‘You mean the dam at our place in the Adelaide Hills?’ he asked, looking at me as if I were humouring him, spinning a fantasy from childhood. For a moment I’d forgotten where we were.
—
Now we have to work out how to divide Jake’s ashes. He belonged to the three of us, his mother Lily, his daughter Nicole, and me, his wife. These days ashes can be divided and subdivided so as to include everyone. Portions are deposited in all the places you choose. It’s a new ritual, a balm for the living, when the bigger problem – of absence, of ending – can’t be solved. We could spoon the remains into three and have three different ceremonies of scattering or interment. We could take into account what Jake would have wanted or we could decide for ourselves.
He told me what he wanted, a few weeks before the end. We were visiting the National Cemetery at Arlington, walking through the serried ranks of the American dead. He said he had been thinking about the farm a lot, the place where he spent his childhood, on the southern peninsula back home. He said he thought about being buried there, in the place where he had been born, coming full circle.
‘I don’t know why,’ he reflected. ‘I could have my ashes scattered there. There’s something about the dust and the limestone and the shell grit. The wind scours it clean.’
He grinned, his mind faraway, remembering the farm.
When I told Lily about it, she cried at the thought. She wanted her son’s memorial to be on consecrated land, in holy ground. For her that would be a redemptive gesture, regardless of how he died. Nicole said she wanted some of him at home with us in the Hills, under the big old gums at the top of the rise. I might have thought of another sacred place, where we were married, the red brick church by the sea, the seashore, the jetty into the gulf where we promenaded then and where now it would be simple and swift to stride to the end on a fine brisk day and fling Jake’s grit to the fishes. Onto the swimmers. Or a visiting shark.
But I felt I needed to follow the pointer from Jake and return him whence he came.
So we set off, the three women, three generations, driving north from Adelaide to the top of the gulf on that flat road through tomato greenhouses and olive groves into wheat and barley country. Hugging the low mangrove coast we turned south, keeping the inky water on our left as it stretched to a horizon line of pale hazy hills in which the city dissolved.
The peninsula roads run straight when they do not follow the coast. They rise and fall in ribbons over gentle contours of land. The few features stick out, a fringe of trees, an abandoned stone dwelling, a windmill, a tank stand, a crossing up ahead.
By midday we had turned off the main road and reached the town. The farm was on the way, out on the road to Mount Rat. Cemetery Road was in the other direction. Coming from the northeast we passed that turn first, an unsealed road that skirted the town. The dead were lodged away from the living, on a hill among dark pines that overlooked the ripe fields and the distant blue of the ranges on the other side of the gulf.
I had not been here since the days when Jake and I were courting, when he wanted to show me the important places in his life. He had left it behind him, I thought at the time. I didn’t take much notice. It didn’t make much of an impression. We did the drive and looked around the quiet little town and drove on, agreeing there was nothing much there. The family had left not long after Jake’s father died. His name was on the honour roll in the park at the fiveway intersection at the centre of the town, the list of those locals who had served in war. There was the primary school where Jake started out, where his teacher picked him as one of her bright ones. We had driven out to the cemetery then too, on a rough track, and paid our respects at his father’s grave.
The road was better now. Nicole, seeing the place for the first time, was goggle-eyed. For her it was historic, a ghost town, a lost world.
‘It seems so sad,’ she said.
It was early summer and the crops were full. The trees heaved their florescence on the breeze. The garden blooms and roadside weeds sprawled in abundance. At the heart of the town in a dip of ground was a well that never ran dry. Always the place had been a source of water. For the Narungga from time immemorial, for the Cornish who came to mine, that underground life was sustaining. Caves ran beneath the ground in limestone tunnels, further than anyone dared go.
I was there with my mother-in-law and my daughter and my husband’s ashes. They were greyish, pinkish white and stony, powder the colour of the land, the birds and animals, brushed grey, black and white, so legend has it, by a great fire.
Nicole was a tourist and I was a visitor. Lily was returning to a place she had left thirty years earlier. She was dressed in pink slacks and a loose cream shirt and had her humouring, worn-down look on to balance the thickness of her flesh. Her hair was a chewed ginger aureole around her pudgy, baggy face. She walked slowly, with difficulty, moaning.
Someone from the Council had agreed to meet us. Lily wondered if we needed a priest and which kind. Which we didn’t for this simple transaction. The cemetery manager would be on hand to dig a little hole in the plot where Jake’s father lay and where Jake would go.
We drove out on Cemetery Road in a convoy of two cars. It was Saturday afternoon and the kids were playing tennis on the town courts and the bowling club was full. I suspect the cemetery manager would have preferred to be there with his team. The Australian flag flew over the green, ripping in the wind. Patriots all, as Jake had been. We drove out to the site and did it. No words were said except ‘Bye Dad!’ from Nicole at the last. We three all cried. I had ordered a small pillow of black granite to be inscribed with Jake’s name and span of years. It would be placed there later near the stone that read Lawrence William Treweek 1924–1970, loving husband of Lily and father of Jacob and Susan. A pale slab already worn.
A few pine cones bounced to the ground. The wind soughed. Magpies hopped about, feeding. Across the gold and green fields was the lilac band of the other shore, like a promise, an impossible destination. In truth the dead stayed where they were. The gate of the cemetery wasn’t even locked. When Lily looked at the names, she recognised most of them as local. She had known people with those same names in her generation, had served them in the pub or gone with them to the pictures and walked into the bush with them afterwards, before she met Larry. Agnew, Gregor, Polkinghorne, Smith. Those were the names.
Our business done, we went to the pub for lunch. It was under new management but everything else seemed the same, including the food. The absence of ceremony at the grave site made me less resentful than before at having to be there. It was what Jake had imposed, the insistence on a certain kind of history which we were asked to claim as our own.
Lily ordered herself a beer. She was ready to fall into a heap, a puddle. Only absolution in the form of a few drinks could save us. So we sat in the dark low room eating our steak sandwiches and letting time flow around us.
A man with a ruddy beam on his well-fed face came up and spoke to Lily. ‘You’re Lily Lucas. I heard you were in town.’
‘Lily Treweek,’ she replied, pleased to be recognised and remembered.
‘Lily Treweek,’ he repeated, her contemporary. ‘Do you remember me? Alf Coop.’
‘Alf Coop,’ she parroted.
He nodded to Nicole and me, still beaming. ‘I used to help out at Larry Treweek’s place. Helped his old man sew bags for the barley. Then Lil here come along and we used to go dancing on Sat’dee nights, Larry and Lil and me. You remember?’
Lily was tilting her head at this picture, flattered. ‘You married, Alf, didn’t you? You married Betty.’
‘Dear old Bet,’ he murmured. ‘That’s right. We went up to Ardrossan and I worked on the gypsum. Betty passed away. I come back here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘I remember when Larry come back from the war. He was only a young bloke still and the experience made him hungry. He went away again soon after. Travelled the world. There was something he wanted to understand. He thought it was because he come from a small country town where no one had seen anything that he couldn’t understand. But it was never that. He couldn’t understand the morality of it, why people did things, who owed what to who. There was no answer to those questions that he carried round with him. He talked to me about it when he finally settled down here. We got together over a few beers sometimes. We knew each other as kids. That’s when he found you, Lily. You were new in town. He was a good bit older than you then. He had a bit of experience. You liked that. You were a match for him.’
‘Stop talking rubbish, Alf,’ she chided. ‘The young ones don’t need to hear all that. It hurts.’
‘I heard you lost your son. That’s terrible. I’m sorry. Larry’s boy. I remember him. A good kid.’
‘Thank you, Alf. It’s very hard – for all of us. This is his wife, his daughter.’
‘You were Roman Catholic,’ he said. ‘Faith. That must help.’
Lily smiled without much enthusiasm. She turned to me and said, as she had said to Jake a hundred times, ‘We married in the porch.’
In those days a Catholic and a Protestant were not allowed to marry in the church proper. It happened outside, off-stage, out of God’s sight as it were, if such a thing could be.
Alf laughed. ‘Well, the church is still there, just, with a few stragglers going along on a Sundee. There’s a new minister from the Islands somewhere.’
Before we left the town we walked down the road to the church. St Christopher’s was a squat stone structure with pink oleander and blood-red bottlebrush pressing around it, all in profuse flower, and shaded by a stunted white cedar. The gate in the fence opened and we went in and tried the door but it was locked. There were two windows at the front and three down the sides, each covered with a metal awning. The building looked stunted too, of a scale to do the job it had to do.
‘I can hardly remember it,’ said Lily. ‘Looks different surrounded with all this garden. I can hardly remember it at all. I was so wound up that day, wondering what would come of us.’
I put my arm in hers as we walked around the mute stone edifice.
‘We did all right,’ Lily said. ‘We were happy, Larry and me.’
Nicole had gone quiet. She was taking it all in. Jake and I had been happy too, I thought. We were lovers and friends. There was no one else. It is the greatest gift, even if it leaves you with utter loss.
Is that right? Jake’s ashes have been laid to rest in shallow ground for birds to peck at. But there is no rest. Is that just? Is it right? If he did it for me, for us, to preserve what we had modestly gained, what did he expect me to do then?
We drove out of town on the dirt road that led to Mount Rat. The fields were fat and full on both sides. The white dust churned. The tops of the mallee gums spread like fans. Lily squirmed when we got near the place where the farm had been. Its stone buildings faced the road across a paddock, in high grass now, the track grown over. The house, the main shed, the other smaller shed. The walls of the house stood firm with the pride of a timeless ruin, a wide front door with windows on either side, the windows blind like empty sockets, the doorway blocked, and no roof above, the iron gone, the structure open to the sky. The sheds still had their rusty iron on top but it was loose and useless against the holes in the gaping crumbling walls. It all looked so thoroughly abandoned. It might have been magnificently picturesque to a passing stranger or to someone with a dream of renovating it and starting again. That would never happen out here. For Lily it was devastation, an unanswerable expression of failure. A world laid waste after she walked away. Her world. It was pure loss, which was mine now too.
In the car on the way back to the city I said to Lily, ‘Jake deserves better than this.’
‘This is what he wanted,’ she sighed. ‘All of it.’
Lily leaned round to Nicole in the back seat, reached a grandmotherly arm out to touch her. She didn’t want the girl to be unconsoled.
‘He needs justice too,’ I said. ‘He was never a coward.’
Which is what his colleagues implied. They said he took the easy exit from the mess he made. But that wasn’t what it looked like. There was something else. Maria came the day after I found Jake in the garage. As usual she went to the garage to get her bucket and mop. She mopped the floors once a week. On the other days she vacuumed. She found three cigarette butts in the bucket that had not been there when she last put the bucket away. She brought them to me and showed me. Jake didn’t smoke, I said. He hated smoking. Someone else must have been there. Had Jake accepted a cigarette from his executioner in his last minutes on earth, as was the custom in the trade, to go with the gift of whisky? Maria and I examined the butts. They looked like three dead little mice. On one there was enough paper left to see that it was Winfield Blue. Australian cigarettes. I put the butts in an empty matchbox for safekeeping and I put the matchbox in my bag with the valedictory card from the Minister and kept it with me when I flew home. This was the evidence that things were not so simple.
‘Justice doesn’t just come,’ Lily said.
That was a fact. The Embassy had handled Jake’s death with unseemly haste, rendering his body to ash in time for my flight home. They wanted the matter gone. Since then Canberra had been courteous but unresponsive.
‘I know,’ I answered. ‘I will have to fight for it. For whatever I can get.’