Death in Brunswick (6 page)

And he told her about Carl's mother and the famous legacy.

She listened impatiently.

‘Well, if he does get all that money—and I hope his mother lives for ages—I do hope Prue gets at least half. I
know
he hasn't been paying her maintenance. I'll write to her tonight. She's living in New South—on that commune, what is it? Amazon Acres.'

‘Now June. You better not interfere,' Dave said, amused, but a little alarmed.

‘Dave, just go to work! I've got to put the baby down and you're in the way. Go on!'

Dave trod heavily down the front path. He was limping slightly.

‘Hey, Dad, where ya goin'?'

‘I'm off to work, kids.'

‘Can we come, Dad? We want to dig a grave!'

‘Next time maybe,' he said easily.

‘Don't you
dare
, Dave! You keep those kids out of that dirty place!'

June's voice, roughened by years of yelling at recalcitrant children, carried effortlessly from the house. Her pupils called her Miss Vinegar. Dave shrugged at the boys, went out the gate and climbed into his battered Holden.

*

He sat for a moment reflectively kneading his bad leg. He knew that he couldn't work as he did for too much longer—maybe he could get a job with the union. He was a good shop steward, after all. That would make June happy. He released the brake and drove off in a cloud of smoke.

Gunning the old car down into Sydney Road, he nipped neatly in front of a tram. Changing up with gusto, he drove toward Coburg enjoying the crowds out for Friday afternoon shopping: Greeks, Italians, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese.
What a place!
He was a little early so he parked the car, got out and wandered up and down Sydney Road for a while, looking at the shops and enjoying the people. He paused as he always did at a big Italian furniture store, gazing with wonder and amusement at the extravagantly carved chairs and tables. He stopped at a delicatessen and bought a quarter kilo of fetta cheese. He sat in his car eating the salty slab.

Why did Carl hate Brunswick so much? He didn't have to live round here.

He shook his head and restarted the car. Driving north up Sydney Road and turning up Bell Street, he came to the cemetery gates.

The main gate was locked. He sounded the horn and waited till the caretaker came out of his bluestone cottage and undid the padlock with a great rattling of chains.

‘Hi, Bluey. How you goin'?'

The caretaker leaned in the car window. He was a bit drunk and Dave could smell heavy wafts of beer. Bluey's face was flushed and raddled, veins crawled over his pitted nose, and an incongruously youthful shock of ginger hair stood above his forehead.

‘There you are, Dave. Come in to help Mick, have ya? He's got your tools.'

‘Where is it, Blue? Not a sinker is it?'

‘No, no, mate. She's an old one, not six foot, down in C3, in the wog section, you know.'

‘All right. Ta, Blue. Listen, mate, you've started pissing on a bit early, haven't you? Don't let Bruce catch you. You know the rules. The Trust'll arsehole you if you don't watch out.'

‘Ah, fuck Bruce and the Trust. You'll look after me, Dave, you're the shop steward.'

‘Yeah, well. Be careful, Blue, all right? You owe me your last sub, by the way.'

‘Yeah, yeah, off you go, Dave.' Bluey stepped back. ‘There goes the gun gravedigger!'

The caretaker bowed mockingly and, staggering slightly, went back to his cottage. Dave drove slowly into the cemetery.

He parked the car under a huge gum and got out. The cemetery was old and nearly full. It stretched for a kilometre before him on two slight hills. To his right a wrought iron fence ran gently up and down, narrowing into the distance. The other slope was a little higher than the one on which he stood and the brow of the hill hid the end of the railings. The thickly clustered headstones seemed to run into the horizon.

He could see the flash of a spade on the other slope—that must be old Mick. He started walking down. Most of the graves were topped with weathered granite slabs sunk with time, the monuments leaning every which way, some split and broken, like discarded toys. Great old cypresses stirred softly against the blue sky. The chirp of countless sparrows and the coo of pigeons nearly drowned the low hum of traffic from Bell Street. High above a hawk drifted.

Now he was walking through the oldest section: Irish Catholic. Rank grass grew over rusty iron railings and the tall Celtic crosses were spotted with lichen. As he went his eye flicked over the inscriptions: ‘Patrick O'Donohue, Native of Co. Antrim. Died 1860.
Requiescat in Pace.
' ‘In Loving Memory of little Tom Ryan, died aged two. 1882. And his brothers and sisters: Gervase, Sebastian, Florence (Dolly), Malachi, Brigit and Dominic…'

He walked on past a sign—‘C of E and Nonconformist'. Here was a forest of stern angels, veiled urns and broken pillars. ‘In Loving Memory of Michael Dawson, Saddler of Coburg, Died 1880 in his sixty-fourth year. Only Sleeping'.
You've really overslept, mate!
A great stone archangel holding a double-edged long sword brooded above the leather-worker's tomb. Dave often wondered how a Victorian artisan's family could afford these monstrosities. He supposed that there were just as many greedy undertakers round then as now.

He crunched through gravel. He was approaching the bottom of the hill. Here the graves were neater; here prosperous Edwardian burghers lay with their families. ‘In Memory of James (Jim) Lang, died 1911, aged fifty-two, a much loved husband and father.' And (in fresher gold lettering) ‘His wife Emily, died 1937, aged eighty-four'.

Why did women live so much longer now? They didn't in the old days. Repeated childbirth and drudgery did for them early—Dave thought of June. She'll die before me, probably of rage! We'll bury her with a loud hailer!

He sniggered and then felt remorseful, for he truly loved the termagant.

Starting to climb the hill he looked back—how pretty it was! People used to have picnics here— how odd we would think that now.

This was the start of the Italian section. It was more difficult to walk in a straight line now. It was so crowded that graves had been sunk in many of the paths. This had taken place before Dave's time; a corrupt caretaker had let the city's biggest Italian undertaker plant his defunct countrymen anywhere, like radishes. The grasping mortician had even sold grave plots twice and three times to different families, leading to much unseemly wrangling among the bereaved. After the inevitable government inquiry a Trust had taken over and ran the cemetery on sober and commercial lines. The older gravediggers remembered the former times with regret: bribery had flowed freely and the caretaker was so busy hiding his ill-gotten wealth that supervision was non-existent. The old man had stashed banknotes all over his cottage where most of it was found after his death, but Bluey spent much time tapping the walls and floors looking for hidden treasure.

Now Dave was in the midst of the Italian section, called on the caretakers' map ‘Wog Cath'. Here the mortuary extravagance was Baroque, not to say Rococo. The headstones were long, low, built of expensive marble and black shiny granite. There were masses of gold lettering. Many graves had glass cabinets containing plaster statues and, disconcertingly, photographs of their occupants. On a few, by some stonemason's witchcraft, portraits of the dead were impregnated into the marble. They shimmered wraithlike in the warm sunlight. There was a profusion of plastic flowers and here and there Dave could see stout black-clad Italian women tidying, watering and praying. It made a pleasant and homely scene.

He saw old Mick now, working slowly on the hill. Dodging behind a line of shiny black slabs Dave approached him from behind.

‘Get a move on, you old bugger!'

The ancient gravedigger started and flicked a spray of gravel into the air.

‘Dave, Dave, you naughty boy! Good you come.'

Grinning with a line of pink gums, Mick climbed rheumatically out of the grave. He was tall and remarkably spare—his old legs were so bowed that Dave could see three tombstones between his knees.

Mick was near retirement. He had worked at the cemetery for twenty years. Dave, who had never worked anywhere more than eight or nine months, found this extraordinary. The old man was a devoutly religious Hungarian Catholic and was often shocked by Dave's irreverence, and, being a 1956 expatriate, even more shocked by Dave's politics—but they got on very well. Dave was fond of him and Mick relied on Dave's muscles to do the work the old man could no longer get through. He wore a faded pair of pinstriped suit pants and a khaki shirt. Rain or shine, a waterproof hat sat on his bald head. White stubble covered his sunken cheeks.

‘Easy, this one, Dave. Five foot nine only.'

He flexed his knees repeatedly like a decrepit policeman and he indicated a rusty iron probe lying nearby. This was pushed into family plots till it met the resistance of the previously buried coffin. It was marked off in feet and inches.

Dave grunted, looking at the modest grave and the low tombstone. ‘Maria Di Marco D: 1954.
Ora Pro Nobis
'. A heap of marble chips and clay lay on a green plastic groundsheet draped over the next slab. The hole was about knee deep, carefully trimmed into a neat coffin shape.

‘Jesus, Mick, it's a bit narrow, old mate.'

Dave stepped in, grabbing his pick and hefting it easily. He stretched and looked round.

‘What a great day! No wonder you've been here, what is it? A hundred years?'

‘You wait till winter comes, boy. Not so good then!'

‘
Vait till Vinterre
! Go on, you old Dracula, fuck off and get some lunch. And bring back some props. This digging looks a bit soft.'

‘Yes, Dave, I do that. You a good boy, but you fucking
red.
'

Mick had caught sight of the faded hammer and sickle tattooed on Dave's shoulder.

‘Go on, you silly old bugger, and if you see Bluey, tell him to lay off the piss. The boss'll be around sometime this arvo to check out this hole.'

Mick shuffled off and Dave knew that he wouldn't see him for a couple of hours. The ancient Magyar had some hiding place over near the Jewish section where he went and read Hungarian newspapers in peace.

*

Dave dug out the damp clay, working easily and getting into the slow pick and shovel rhythm.

Funny how it gets wetter as you go down. There must be underground springs up here on the hill. No wonder they didn't last long, buried in this—what's clay? Acid or alkaline?

He couldn't remember. In his time at the cemetery he had not actually seen any corpses, but he had found bones, pitted and brittle. Old Mick reckoned that the coffins lasted longer than the bodies.

It was getting hotter. He took off his T-shirt; there was thick grey hair growing on his back. He was a little bored—he wished he had brought a radio. The only sounds he could hear were the birds and the soft breeze whispering around his ears. He dug on, occasionally looking up. Once, with delight, he saw a flight of rosellas flash brilliantly in and out through the trees.

An hour and a half passed. He was waist deep. The clay was getting very wet now and he had difficulty keeping the coffin shape. Where was Mick with the props? He hoped the old man hadn't gone to sleep.

He was gazing across the graves in a mindless daze when he heard a heavy tread behind him. He turned with difficulty in the narrow hole. It was Bruce, the Trust foreman, a big middle-aged man—an ex-gravedigger. He wore a plastic anorak in the hot sun and a collar and tie to show his exalted position. Dave grunted a surly greeting.

‘How's it goin', Dave, gettin' there? That looks a bit sloppy. You need some props, mate.'

‘Yeah. Mick's just gone to get them.'

‘That's right, Dave. Ah, listen, Dave…You know you're not supposed to have your shirt off. It's Trust regs.'

The foreman looked away embarrassed.

‘Oh, for fuck's sake! There's no funerals today. No one's going to swoon at the sight of
my
gorgeous body!'

‘Yeah, OK, Dave. I didn't make the rules. But listen talking about regs…um…Bluey just let me in and he's definitely pissed. Now you know I don't want to arsehole him, so have a word to him, will you. I mean, even the union won't cop that.'

‘Yeah, yeah, OK,' Dave muttered. ‘Anything else? I have to finish this by five.'

‘Yeah, can you come in tomorrow at eleven to fill her in?'

‘Yeah, sure.'
Beauty! Overtime after twelve.
Turning his back, he started work again.

The foreman coughed.

‘Just one more thing.'

‘Yeah, what? For Christ's sake!'

‘Dave, we need a new leading hand. You know the Kiwi from St Kilda? Well, he's done his back. He'll be off for Christ knows how long. How about it? You'd have to work full-time but.'

‘What! Be fucked, boss, driving round telling other poor cunts what to do and they all hate you, for what? An extra ten bucks a week? Jesus! Piss off.'

‘Oh, all right! Just thought I'd ask.' Annoyed, the foreman turned away. ‘You better go and wake Mick up,' he said, and trudged off.

Dave shook his head and started digging again.

Better not tell June about that! She'd have me running the whole show in a year! Leading Hand! What a con.

Soon Mick returned, pushing a barrow piled with short planks and screw props. He grunted as he dropped the handles.

‘I think I see boss. What you tell him?'

‘Now don't worry, Mick. I told him you just left to get the props.'

Still, Dave knew they were onto the poor old bugger. He wouldn't have put it past them to sack him to save on superannuation. He looked at the old man. He stood there, stooped, his eyes gummed with sleep.

Ah, why can't they…?