One Boy Missing (10 page)

George looked at him strangely.

‘With everything going on…with your balance. Your old legs.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with my legs.’

‘What, the ground moved?’

‘Don’t get smart with me, Detective.’

‘Dad…you’re getting older. You’re gonna have to swallow your pride occasionally.’

No reply; more feeling around on his forehead.

‘Admit you may need help. Or else it’ll just be…’

‘What?’

‘It’ll just be me.’

‘So?’

This time Moy didn’t reply.

‘Well? You came back to look after me, didn’t you?’ George said.

‘Of course.’

‘So?’

‘I’ve got work too.’

‘Everyone’s got work. Doesn’t mean you can’t look after your old man.’

Moy was shaking his head. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t.’

‘It’s an inference.
Get some help or I’ll put you in that fucking nursing home
.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘I don’t want to put you in a nursing home.’

‘But you would.’

Moy bit his lip and looked at his father. ‘That’s why I sold up, and moved here, was it? To put you in a nursing home?’

George dropped his head. ‘You started the conversation.’

‘You fell over.’

‘So fucking what?’ the old man shouted.

They sat in the car, in front of George’s house.

‘Thing you forget is that I’m happy here,’ George said, looking at what was left of his garden.

Moy just looked ahead. ‘I didn’t mention the nursing home.’

‘Well, you have before.’ His head fell back onto the padded rest and he said, ‘You can’t make a fella do what he doesn’t want to.’

16

THE FOLLOWING MORNING there were two dramatic bursts of rain. Within minutes the clouds had cleared and the sun had appeared. George always put this sort of thing down to a rain shadow, and Moy always told him there was no such thing. George would ask how he knew. Had he studied meteorology? Had he farmed beyond Goyder’s Line all his life? Or was he just a smart arse? One day, sick of his son’s arrogance, he went to the library and photocopied an article out of a
Britannica
. That night he’d put it in front of his son. ‘See?
A dry area on the lee side of a mountainous area
.’

‘Yeah, but this isn’t a mountainous area,’ Moy had replied.

George had just looked at him. ‘The point is, rain shadows exist.’

‘Not around Guilderton.’

Bart Moy was wearing jeans and a polo top, holding a clip-board as he stood at the counter of Bowey’s Chemist. An old woman in a cardigan was arguing with an assistant over safety nets, referring to receipts in a shoe box on the counter beside her. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ the assistant said to Moy.

‘No rush.’

Moy sat down and waited. The smell of eucalyptus and cheap perfume radiated from the front of the store. It reminded him of pills—wrapped in foil and deposited in boxes, hundreds of them, with
Mrs Anne Moy
printed in economical letters on the front. His mother making little piles of pills on a bench. Ten, twelve, eventually fifteen—yellow, white and pink. By the time she was done she’d have to go back to bed, as George buzzed around asking if she wanted tea or toast, mostly destined to be vomited.

The old woman finished, but then presented a new script. ‘Does this have a repeat?’

‘It is a repeat,’ the assistant replied.

‘Oh, so I’ll need to go back to the doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘And my gout medication?’

‘You don’t need a prescription for that.’

And the smell, again. Something, he guessed, to spread on a sore or insert up your arse; something to rub on a rash; or maybe, yes, that was more likely, an antiseptic: something to tip in a bowl and soak your feet in. It was a smell he remembered from the oncology ward, drifting down the hallways they mopped and buffed every few hours. Mandarin, or pineapple. It was always there, as he buttered toast in the visitors’ kitchen.

‘Do you want to wait or come back?’ the assistant asked the woman.

‘Eh?’

‘Do you want to wait?’

‘What for?’

‘Your medicine.’

The old woman looked at her strangely. ‘Where else am I going to go?’

Toast. He was sure he could smell toast. And he could remember carrying the plate in to his mother in the room with the recliner chairs and drips. Placing it on the table beside her and smiling and asking, ‘Is that enough?’ The clear bag, too, nearly empty (caution cytotoxic drug), and the pump that beeped every ten minutes for a nurse to come and press more buttons. His mother’s face, and George spending hours on the same page of a magazine.

But mostly he remembered the plate of toast, still untouched, hours later, as his mother was helped from her chair, saying, ‘Bart, take that back to the kitchen, the nurses are busy.’

Moy approached the woman at the counter, introduced himself and showed his identification. ‘You’ve heard about this boy?’

‘In the back lane?’ she said, indicating a door at the back of the shop.

‘Yes.’ He looked at her name tag. ‘Jay?’

‘Quite young?’ she asked.

‘Nine or ten, perhaps. We’ve found him.’ He showed her a photo Gary had taken of the boy before he left with the carer. ‘Not familiar?’

She studied the photo. ‘No.’

‘Let’s see,’ the old woman said.

Moy showed her.

‘Has he been taken?’

‘He was, we’ve found him.’

‘Good…parents’ll be glad.’

Moy returned to Jay, and a hair comb holding back her fringe. ‘Could I leave a copy?’ He gave her the photo. ‘He won’t say a word, so we have no idea who he belongs to.’

The shop assistant was lost in a thought. She met Moy’s eyes, took a moment and said, ‘This is probably completely irrelevant.’

He leaned forward. ‘Yes?’

‘Just a thought,’ she whispered, looking around. ‘I open in the mornings.’

‘Yes?’

‘And I walk to work…I only live down Dawes Street. The thing is, I often see this car…’

He waited.

‘Just cruising around.’

The old woman was sorting through her prescriptions.

‘How often?’ Moy asked.

‘Most mornings.’

‘What, just driving?’

‘Yes.’

‘And who’s in it?’

The shop assistant closed her eyes. When she opened them she was even more determined. ‘This man.’

‘Yes?’

‘And the funny thing is, I think I recognise him.’

‘You do?’

‘He’s a teacher, at the high school.’

Moy leaned forward, splaying his hands on the counter. ‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be.’

‘And this man, you know his name?’

‘No.’

He stared into her small, brown eyes. ‘And what sort of car is it?’

She stepped back. ‘Goodness, I’m not sure, but it’s an old-looking car.’

‘Old?’

‘You know, 1970s, or early ’80s, with a box shape.’

Moy laid his folder on the counter. ‘Like an old Falcon?’

‘I don’t know cars, Detective Moy. But it’s big and he always drives around with his arm out of the window. You know how they do?’

‘Who?’

‘Young folk.’

‘So he was young?’

‘Yes…well, youngish, not old.’

‘Thirty, forty?’

‘Mid-thirties,’ she guessed.

‘What about his hair?’

‘Brown, perhaps?’

The old woman stood up, walked towards the counter, picked a pair of reading glasses off a stand and tried them on.

‘They’re too weak for you,’ the assistant said to her.

‘At the high school?’ Moy asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

But she just smiled at him. ‘It’s a small town, Detective.’

17

IN THE EARLY part of the evening Bart Moy passed through the Flamsteeds’ front gate, his arms full of casserole dishes, and knocked on the front door. Louise Flamsteed was out straight away. ‘Let me help you,’ she said, taking the dishes, disappearing into the kitchen. There was a sound of glass and crockery being rearranged.

Moy waited.

‘Mrs Flamsteed?’ he called down the hall.

More dishes; more rearrangement.

‘Doug,’ he heard her calling, standing (he imagined) at the back door, scanning their quarter acre of succulents and cacti for her husband. ‘Doug, Mr Moy’s here.’

Moy looked down the hall at the freshly vacuumed rug, the 1960s telephone table and a macramé pot-hanger overgrown with a maidenhair.

Mrs Flamsteed came trotting down the hall towards him. ‘There was no rush,’ she said. ‘You could’ve held onto them.’

‘I have some others, at Dad’s house, and in the freezer at work.’

‘No rush, I’ve bought a few more.’

‘Not on my account?’

She tried to smile. ‘Come in for a cuppa?’

‘Thanks.’

Ten minutes later there were three cups of tea and a pot with a crocheted cosy cooling under the regard of a Virgin on the wall. A few inches below this was a tired-looking Christ slipping from his cross.

Doug Flamsteed, still in his overalls, snapped a biscuit in half and dunked it in his tea. ‘Harvest nearly done,’ he said. ‘Paschkes at least.’

‘Be glad when it’s over, with the noise,’ Moy replied.

‘Low yield this year.’

Although Moy’s cup was only a quarter empty, Louise Flamsteed topped him up.

‘Thanks.’ He could smell disinfectant again, this time laurel sulphate, a smell he always associated with the glowing lino floors at the RSL.

‘Every year there’s less rain,’ Doug said. ‘Global warming they reckon, who knows? Used to be they’d get thirty bushels to the acre, but not now.’

Moy wondered what a bushel was, but dared not ask. Flamsteed had once taught him maths and probably still thought him stupid. Still, he thought, forty years of metric and the world goes on like it’s 1959. ‘That’s what they reckon,’ he said. ‘Every few weeks they open another power station in China.’

Doug looked at him strangely.

‘Anyway,’ Moy said, looking at the deputy principal, ‘I was wondering, Doug, if you’ve got a teacher at your school who drives an old Falcon, or a Valiant?’

Doug massaged the tip of his nose. ‘Alan Williams?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Teaches art. What’s he done?’

‘Nothing.’

Doug sat forward. ‘He’s a very good teacher. Did that mural on the girls’ toilet, you seen it?’

‘Yes.’

But Doug still wasn’t happy. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No, truly, it’s nothing.’

‘You wouldn’t have asked if it was nothing.’

Moy felt himself back in Mr Flamsteed’s year nine general maths class.

‘So, he’s kosher?’ Moy asked, looking at Doug.

‘Yes.’ Pause. ‘How official is this?’

‘Not at all.’

‘There’s nothing he actually…?’

‘No.’

Doug laid his biscuit on the table. ‘About eight, nine years ago he took this year ten back to his place, after school, to show him some artworks, books or something. Anyway, shit hits the fan.’

‘Doug,’ Louise said.

‘Parents put in a complaint to the Education Department, reckoned Alan was, you know, after this boy.’

Louise wasn’t happy; she shook her head. ‘That’s all over.’

‘This Alan Williams,’ Moy said, ‘he’s not actually…suspect, in any way?’

‘No…he’s softly spoken, and wears these fancy shirts and tight pants. Not typical dress for a country teacher but hell, he’s told me he’s not a poof, and he wouldn’t…well, as far as I know. No…he’s okay.’

Moy was watching Doug’s head rock back and forth. ‘So the kid didn’t actually complain?’ he asked.

‘No, just the parents. Kid said it was all a load of old…But you know, when you do something stupid like that, and it was probably just a lack of judgment, everyone’s out to get you. And a place like Guilderton. Mud sticks.’

Yes, Moy thought.

Then he sat up, drained his cup of tea and asked, ‘This boy’s mother…name wasn’t Jay, was it?’

Doug took a moment. ‘No, don’t reckon.’

‘Well, thanks for the cuppa, Louise.’

‘It’s nice to see you, Bart. You must pop in more often. And… any requests?’

Moy studied the pink cosy. ‘Ever tried teppanyaki beef?’

18

THE NEXT MORNING at two a.m. Moy was awake again, turning onto one side, the other, his back, as he tried to clear any thoughts from his head. Before long he gave up. Got up and walked out into his backyard; ambled over to the trampoline and fell back, bouncing a few times then settling. The air was cold, laced with sow’s milk and oestrogen, traces of Mrs Flamsteed’s braised steak.

‘Watch,’ he heard Charlie say. He watched as the boy jumped, tumbled and rolled onto the broken springs.

‘Careful,’ he said, ‘you could crack a tooth on the side.’ But he was already back on his feet.

‘I can do a somersault.’

‘No, I’m not sure.’

‘I can.’

‘No.’

But there was the small body, curled up in itself, turning in mid-air, landing on its feet, dropping to its knees and putting its arm around his neck. ‘See?’

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘My first time.’

‘Do you think you could do it again?’

‘Course.’

The moon had just lifted above the horizon. Moy walked down the driveway and stood at his front gate. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxers torn down the front. His moon-shrunk cock kept popping out. He crossed the road towards the fence that was the very edge of Guilderton. Someone, possibly Paschke, had nailed dead foxes onto each of the fence posts by their tails. Some were fresh, some dried out, their pelts reflecting the moonlight. A warning, Moy guessed, to other foxes. Even the little ones, jiggling in the little bit of breeze.

He lifted two loose wires and stepped into the paddock. Soon he was walking, then jogging, across a hundred metres of stubble, looking back at his house and the glow of his television in the front window. He arrived at a second fence, pushed the wires down, climbed over and started walking through the wheat, up to his ribs in places. The land started rising and soon he was climbing a hill. A few minutes later he was at the top, looking down over Guilderton.

He studied the houses, and found his dad’s place.

And then realised, and sighed.

Right
, he thought.
That’s easy
.