St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(32)
Jacka pushed the boy once, making him stumble backwards, then a second time, harder now when there was no sign of resistance. The total lack of reaction bewildered the bully, and a third shove landed the boy on his backside. At that point Jacka made the mistake of turning his head briefly to smirk at his laughing gang, missing the moment when the fallen boy regained his feet, scooping up a thick tree branch. Putting up his left arm to protect himself was what gave Jacka the broken arm. He was lucky, as the boy had fully intended to break his skull.
Jacka rode back to the mission on the cart, crying and gasping as every jolt moved the broken bone in his left forearm. The smaller and weaker boys had been press-ganged into pulling the cart as usual, and on this trip they managed to find the very roughest parts of the rocky track. They also found many reasons to stop and start the painful journey, dragging it out to double its usual duration.
The weeping Jacka was joined in the cart by a recent arrival at the mission, an orphan boy who. had immediately been christened Fatso, though the Spartan diet of the mission was already beginning to eliminate the reason for the nickname. Fatso had told the brother in charge of the wood-gathering party that he was feeling unwell, so they’d let him ride on the wagon. He was worse by teatime and received a sharp smack for putting his head down on the dining room table. He groaned and suddenly vomited up his stew before sliding off the bench and under the table in a semi-comatose state. They put him in the sickbay next to a still-whimpering Jacka, who now had an arm in plaster. Fatso grew worse, sweating and delirious, and passed away around three in the morning after calling out once for his mother.
The brother who fulfilled the duties of doctor was perplexed by the event, but as usual filled out a death certificate listing the reason as ‘natural causes’, which was in fact correct if snake venom is considered natural. Breakfast porridge served in a badly washed bowl had given Fatso a bad case of the runs and the chronically shy youngster had crept away from the wood-gathering party to void his tormented bowels in private. Reaching behind to grab a handful of leaf litter to wipe his bottom, he had disturbed a hidden king brown, mistaking the snake’s lightning-fast strike for the sharp sting of a prickle, a mistake that doomed him.
Fatso’s death certificate was typed up by a young Aboriginal girl in the mission’s records office and then sent along to Brother Brian to be photographed and filed with his birth certificate and other related documents. By now, the boy had taken on this task and as he put the dark cloth over his head and focused the image of the birth certificate on the ground-glass back of the camera, he realised that he and Fatso had been born just three days apart. This fact interested him and occupied his mind as he agitated the glass negatives in the developer to the tick, tick, tick of the darkroom clock with its luminous hands.
In six or seven months’ time Fatso’s death certificate and other documents would be sent down to Adelaide together with other records from the mission. Brother Brian had recently suggested to the boy that he might be allowed to go along on the trip. The hinted-at price for accompanying Brother Brian was an expansion of the boy’s sexual repertoire in the locked darkroom. He had initially ignored Brother Brian’s suggestion but as he filed away the slender manila envelope that now held the details of Fatso’s short, unhappy life, he decided it might not be such a bad idea after all.
FOURTEEN
The house was quiet, too quiet for Berlin. Rebecca had said she might be late home that evening and he was missing her. He walked to the back door and looked out into the yard. The back lawn would definitely need mowing on the weekend, and the vegetable garden needed work too. There was rubbish to burn as well, stacked up by the brick incinerator he had built in the far rear corner of the yard. No fires on Monday, though; Monday was wash day. Every Hills hoist in the neighbourhood would be weighed down with white sheets, pillow-cases, shirts and underwear. The wooden kennel he had built for Pip was waiting by the backyard incinerator too, broken up and ready for the flames. With Sarah away it was a good time to get rid of it.
The dog, Pip, had been dead five or six years now. He was buried under the paperbark tree by the back shed. Sarah had brought that tree home as a seedling from primary school one Arbour Day years back and now it was about 12 feet high. Pip had burrowed his way out under the side fence, as terriers will, and Berlin figured he had been clipped by a car somewhere out on the main road. But the tough little bugger had managed to crawl almost all the way home before he died.
Sarah had been devastated, and his heart ached when he remembered the tears on her face and the bunch of jonquils clutched in her hand as he’d dug the little grave. She’d wanted a new dog after a time but they hadn’t ever got around to buying one and now the girl had other things on her mind. Didn’t they all.
He turned and walked back into the house and looked into the boy’s bedroom. It was neat and tidy but that was always Rebecca’s doing, never Peter’s. Peter had been a mess for as long as Berlin could remember. In his clothes, in his thoughts and in his life. He was always dark and morose, and Berlin had once confessed to Rebecca that while he loved his son he wasn’t all that sure that he liked him. She’d smiled and said, ‘He’s like his dad, Charlie, that’s his only problem. We made him at a bad time in your life. You grew out of it and so will he.’ Berlin couldn’t recall any other time when Rebecca had been so wrong.
He hated going into Sarah’s empty bedroom but he couldn’t stay away. The neatness in this room was all her doing, as were the framed sketches and photographs on the pale yellow walls. They had painted those walls together, though she had chosen the colour. It was a grown-up girl’s room and Sarah had been grown-up since she was six or seven, maybe even younger. He loved her with all his heart, so much that it sometimes hurt.