Yesterday's Dust Read online

  Joy Dettman was born in Echuca in Victoria and now lives in Melbourne.

  Joy, a mother of four, is a full-time writer and a published author of several award-winning stories and the highly acclaimed novels Mallawindy, Jacaranda Blue and Goose Girl.

  Also by Joy Dettman

  MALLAWINDY

  JACARANDA BLUE

  GOOSE GIRL

  Joy Dettman

  yesterday’s

  DUST

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  First published 2001 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This edition published 2002 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Joy Dettman 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Dettman, Joy.

  Yesterday’s dust.

  ISBN 0 330 36339 5.

  1. Family – Australia – Fiction. I. Title.

  A 823.3

  This is a work of fiction and all characters in this book are a creation of the author’s imagination.

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  These electronic editions published in 2001 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Dettman, Joy.

  Yesterday’s dust.

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-114-9

  Epub format 978-1-74262-383-2

  Mobipocket format 978-1-74197-516-1

  Online format 978-1-74197-717-2

  Macmillan Digital Australia www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For Aaron, Dallas, Lachlan, Tristan and BD, who paint their more innocent pictures of life on the blank sides of my early drafts.

  contents

  cover

  about the author

  also by joy dettman

  title page

  copyright

  dedication

  farewell, mallawindy

  technology

  the facts of the matter

  the party

  a full set of teeth

  run, rabbit, run

  mother of the bride

  forgive us our trespasses

  the couple

  the never-ending story

  the central hotel

  his father’s son

  a long way to spring

  the lion king

  grievous intent

  where is the butter

  is dad there

  wind in the wires

  poor bloody jack

  the sand dunes

  on the scent

  pride in achievement

  the teachers

  the gun

  the schoolmaster

  on the dotted line

  the phone call

  how many miles?

  and melbourne

  alone

  sydney

  fletch.doc

  eggs

  to hell and back

  funny face

  no more jack

  retribution

  seeing stars

  one. two. three.

  celebration of life

  daree gazette 30th december

  more bestselling fiction available from pan macmillan

  farewell, mallawindy

  Thursday 27 March 1997

  The corrugated iron roofs were as mirrors turned towards the late afternoon sun. A war of white light, a solar war, it blistered the thin skins of painted weatherboard, and the blisters burst and the pink and the green and the grey and the blue skin flaked and fell to the earth. It turned to dust. Red dust.

  And the dogs rolled in the red dust and they scratched at their fleas, they sprawled on footpaths, slept in doorways, mated in the main street – smirking passive beasts, content with their lot.

  Not so Amy O’Rouke, who stepped around a mustard mixed breed mastiff, her pale yellow dress swinging as she wiped sweat from her eyes, shooed at the flies, looking neither left to the bar, nor right to the group of faded women in their faded T-shirts – wrung out, strung out to dry in front of the shire hall.

  Flies. They swarmed like bees in this place. In her hair. In her ears. In her eyes. Fresh meat, Amy O’Rouke, she was a blow-in and every fly in town knew it. Grim facts of life were the flies of Mallawindy, like the ’roo plagues and the rabbit plagues, like the wasted dreams and the suicides were facts of life in this cursed town. But life endured. Children were born – necessary fodder for two neighbouring cities that fed on Mallawindy’s sons and daughters, who grew fast, ran early. Got away.

  Some of them got away. Some of them found the Grand Central Hotel.

  Amy couldn’t walk through that door, drink and forget. In Sydney she could have walked into a bar, tossed down a vodka and tonic and no one would give her a sidewards glance. Or Melbourne. Cool place. Moist air. Dear Melbourne, too far away.

  Up here?

  ‘No can do, Amy,’ she said.

  The new teacher’s wife, her place had been marked; a restricting little box prepared for her to crawl into, its label fixed, stuck on with immovable glue. But she didn’t fit the ready-made box. Too old. Or too young. Fair of feature, fine of frame, and childless. Mutton dressed as lamb, the women in faded T-shirts whispered behind hands while their men stared at Amy O’Rouke with their hard, raping eyes.

  She wasn’t one of these people. Couldn’t be one of them. Didn’t want their box or their label, their social set, or their town. She dressed as she had in the city. She wore yellow sandals with heels, wore her city frocks, wore her yellow-rinsed hair hanging long. She had pretty hair. She’d always had pretty hair. It curled, just a little, just enough.

  Her frock sticking to sweating knees, one foot was placed before the other, then one more. Her sandals had not been made for walking the rough surface of potholed country roads. Their high heels had been made for a city, as she had been made for a city, made for concrete paths and green parks and air-conditioned shopping centres.

  Red dust scuffed up, puffed up with each step, it stuck between her sweating toes. Irritated. She shook her right foot, then her left, shaking dust and grit free, shaking some of it free. Most of it stuck.

  Sun on her left, slowly falling to the west. But still hot. Reckless, abusive heat. Didn’t it know that summer was over? She shook her head, smiled and walked forward. This town ignored the flyspecked calendars that hung on kitchen walls. April only days away. April Fools’ Day come Tuesday; a good day to go, but she couldn’t wait until Tuesday. Shouldn’t have waited this long.

  One year, she’d promised Norman. She’d crossed seventy-five days off the calendar. Too many left to cross.

  A truck roared by, spraying her with grit but creating a momentary breeze. She stilled her sandals until the truck and breeze had gone then, one yellow-shod foot placed before the other, she walked again. One step forward, then one step more.

  Her shoulder bag, grown heavy too soo
n, she moved from left shoulder to right. All she was was in it. Packed in. Squeezed tight. Zipped up. Closed. A plastic card, twenty-five dollars, night cream, make-up and her gold earrings. Not a lot to show for fifty years of life.

  The shoulder strap slipped. Her sunglasses, greased by sweat, slid. Her frock, sweat-soaked beneath her arms, rubbed. Sydney five hundred-odd kilometres east, Melbourne eight hundred south, Warran to the west, and the river, dirty water, grey trees, but cool, and close.

  ‘The fast fix,’ she said. ‘Or – ’

  Fast was good. Fast was –

  ‘Fast,’ she said, stilling her feet. Her eyes closed, she turned around, once, twice. Tight circles, spinning circles, her shoulder bag joining the game; around and around she spun.

  ‘Eenie meenie miney mo.’ Around and around, her arms spread wide, handbag slapping. ‘Eenie meenie miney mo. Which way will poor Amy go?’ Then she stopped her whirling, a direction chosen by fate.

  At the far end of town, near hidden behind tall creepers, Ben Burton’s funny little house leaned. Amy glanced at its walls, then up to the chimney, and she smiled, tilting her head to the side, levelling the chimney, but not the small windows that had looked out on this town for over a hundred years. Wisdom came with the years and this house had grown wise. It hid from the cursed town, hid behind bougainvillea and tecoma, ornamental grapevines and the climbing rose. Cerise. Orange. Red. The wildfire blooming of wild things.

  Only the wild could survive here, the wild and the strong. Amy wasn’t wild, and she wasn’t strong any more. She had tried. She’d given it one last try.

  No creeper to hold me upright, she thought. No shade for my eyes to hide behind. If those creepers should die and fall, the mud bricks would crumble, return to the red dust and blow away in the next windstorm. She knew it, as she knew that another month, another week, another day, one more hour in this town would see her blowing away with the dust.

  ‘Pooof. All gone, Amy.’

  A glance at her watch. Near five. She turned her head, looking behind her, then to her left. Ellie Burton lived with her sons in this old house with its leaning chimney and creepers. She was standing at her front fence, one elbow on the time-eroded wood, her eyes turned south, to Daree, and to Melbourne, and to the South Pole.

  Still mourning the man who got away, Amy thought.

  Got away. Ran. One way or another.

  A breath of cool air lifted from the old garden. Scent of red roses, scent of mint, of lavender. Scent of some place better. It drew Amy from the road, forcing her sandals to step high through the brittle dry grass, forcing her eyes to seek for snakes; then, stepping onto a bare red clay-patch beneath a gum tree, she leaned against the trunk, soaking up the cool of smooth cream bark, soaking up the scattered shade of sparse grey leaves while listening to the older woman’s words.

  Soft words, but no breeze to blow them away, they hung on the heavy air. Sad sound.

  ‘Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord be with me. Blessed art thou – ’

  The rattle of a transport on the long straight road killed the words, and the whiff of stinking pigs in transit washed away the perfume of the garden. For a moment.

  ‘– and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with me. Blessed art – ’

  Movement from the right. Amy lifted her head in time to see three small children scuttle across the road, dusty town urchins left to their own devices while their parents filled an hour or two at the Grand Central – not so grand.

  A fly bit her shoulder. She brushed at it as she watched the urchins. Full up with cheek and questions, they climbed the wooden fence, watching the rosary beads slip through the fingers of the woman who prayed.

  ‘Why do you come out here to say your bead prayers for?’ Words from the mouth of a stunted redhead – one of the Dooleys. Amy could pick a Dooley. Everyone could pick a Dooley. They all looked like old Bill, their grandfather. And the Wests. Dusty little garden gnomes, big ears, big feet, pin heads – small clones of old Robbie.

  They straddled the weather-beaten rail, edging closer to the woman, intrigued by the rhythm of the beads falling through a hand that fitted well into its box. It had no need for a label; it had its beads to hold on to, its prayer book to grasp each Sunday, it had Father Fogarty and two sons to lean on, and two daughters who had got away.

  Amy had carried three sons and a daughter, for a time – a short time. Eleven weeks and sixteen weeks, twelve weeks, then twenty-one. Poor mite, the last one had tried to live for her. He’d lived for a day. She’d named him, touched him, kissed his unfinished face, then buried him and told Norman she wanted a divorce.

  Twelve years ago.

  Poor Norman. He wouldn’t let her leave him. Another chance, he’d pleaded, a new start. A new town. They’d had too many new starts. Too many new towns. She was too old. Too tired. Too sad. And too hot.

  ‘Mallawindy, the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ she said and she listened again to the urchins.

  ‘My mother said you’re still waiting for him to come home.’

  Ellie Burton’s only reply was the swish of her rosary beads as she slapped at a fly.

  Mother of Ben, hairdresser cum newsagent; mother of the other one too, the tall dark one, rarely seen about town, John, the ex-priest – defrocked or disenchanted, or both – a silent man, existing in his uneasy discontent, as lost in this town as Amy.

  He’d had a box ready made for him to return to, but its old label had worn away. The hermit, they labelled him these days. Couldn’t understand a man who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t have a woman – though plenty in town would have had him, Amy thought as she brushed an ant from her sandal. She’d eyed him a couple of times. Tried to speak to him once.

  ‘My mother said old Jack got drownded when I was little, so you might as well stop looking for him, because when you get drowned, you’re dead, aren’t you, and you can’t never come back, can you?’

  Jack Burton, the legend. Gone but not forgotten.

  ‘Struck by lightning,’ they said in town. ‘Standing on Ben’s bridge, he was,’ they said. ‘And he’s still down there somewhere, feeding the fish. I haven’t eaten a yabby since Christmas 1990,’ they said.

  Jack Burton had been big news when the removalist van delivered the new schoolteacher’s furniture north in early January. Ellie’s photograph had been in the Daree Gazette with a half-page write-up on Jack’s quarter of a million dollar life insurance policy with AMP.

  He’d remained big news all February while the insurance investigators nosed around town and Amy had tried to fit into her box, tried to turn the old schoolhouse into a home. Then March had come, and the investigators returned to Sydney, but Jack Burton, though missing, was not allowed to be dead until the courts declared him dead. He’d disappeared on Christmas Eve of 1990, and come Christmas of 1997, he’d be declared dead. That was the law, even though his eldest daughter had sighted him near the footbridge, just as a bolt of lightning had hit the earth.

  ‘Fried, then flung into the river,’ they said in town. ‘But not a mark on the bridge.’

  ‘I say, remember old Coll Martin, that got struck by lightning out at the racecourse? Burned him to a crisp, it did, and never a blade of grass that has grown on that spot o’ dirt for eighty years,’ Granny Bourke, the town historian, said.

  The teacher’s wife glanced at Ellie. Her sons were in their forties; she had to be sixty-odd, though she didn’t look it. No stress lines, no bitter mouth – not a lot of anything, really, except her wide innocent green eyes, and her hair. She had a lot of hair. Only nine more months and she’d collect her quarter of a million.

  Nine months – time enough for a conception and a birth.

  A transport passed by, its breeze flipping up the hem of Amy’s yellow frock, creating a breath of cool on sweating legs. She closed her eyes until the dust and grit settled, then she looked back at the town, her eyes half closed, the better to see, the better not to see t
he roofs, straining now to gather in the last swords of sun.

  A slap at a gorged mosquito smeared blood onto the paler skin of the inner side of her elbow. She stared at it, and as she stared a fly landed on it. Licked blood.

  Flies all day, mosquitoes all night, and no breathing space in between. They shared their hosts at sundown, supping together.

  Ellie’s hand also slapped at an insect, flicked at the hair she wore like a lopsided turban of fading straw. A slow smile touched Amy’s lips. The older woman flicked again, and the turban tumbled as a long plaited rope fell free to her knees. But fast hands caught it and deft fingers found the escaping pins; they removed them, recoiled the rope and again settled the turban into place.

  ‘My mother says long hair is hot and stupid and you get nits in it,’ the small Dooley said. Was it a girl or boy? Hard to tell these days, faded shirts and shorts, basin-cut carrot hair. ‘My mother said you probably come out here and say your prayers so he won’t come back. She said she would, if she was you. She said you’ll get a big Christmas present if he doesn’t come back.’

  ‘You’re Marlene’s boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and she says that God is like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. That he’s just pretend and there isn’t even an Easter Bunny, so there.’