The cigarette had done its job. And the tremble in my hands was gone. The screen door shuddered as I turned the key. This house. My childhood home owned everything, including my dreams. I opened the front door, my feet sage on splintered boards, and stood in the mouth of the dark hallway. I waited. I waited for a stream of courage to sluice through the murmuring shadows clinging to the walls. A car pulled up on the ugly smudge of road. A deep voice drew me towards the light. Feeling discovered, I notice the opposite curtains flicker slightly, and a sliver of old Ethel’s face appeared. A man in a black t-shirt leant out the car window to speak to me. He was one of the boys from the Royal. Neither of us was comfortable with small talk. ‘Hey, Nora, back for long?’ ‘Hey, Sam. I dunno.’ ‘See you around, love.’ ‘Yeah – ' There are stories that families tell. And then there is the truth. Behind closed doors, secrets thrived, and my family were great defenders of keeping secrets. They were hell-bent on exterminating the truth. But I wondered would they be able to defend their secrets from a psychic? Perhaps. Most people I knew had family stories like mine – half-truths. The way I saw it, I was half of everything I hated.
II
I didn’t care much for the reality of this day. The old man was dead, I was hungover, and now I had the police questioning me. The policeman asked, ‘Are you, Nora Jones? ‘Yeah – he’s me, dad.’ ‘Right. I’m Senior-constable Bourke, please go sit down, Miss Jones. We need to have a closer look’. Beside him stood a policewoman tall and straight – she was like marble. ‘Uh sure, but call me Nora,’ a watery smile dripped from my lips. The policewoman followed me into the sunroom. I pondered how many times had they seen a dead body. Could they tell how long someone had been dead by just looking? I tried reading the policewoman’s hostile face. Was she thinking I know what you did?
III
The house had the stale smell of being locked up. It was quiet except for the indistinguishable traffic sounds, the business that goes on outside. I slunk along the hallway past the sunroom. The door closed on wicker furniture and faded floral cushions, dogshit-yellow shag carpet past the modest staircase, the sunlit 1950s kitchen and the slanting light that cast a sickly glow on the lime green Laminex benchtops. I stopped at the entrance to the laundry. I looked for evidence. I looked for blood. I looked for a sign Dad had been there, but there was nothing. No proof that his life had ended on the colourless cracked tiles. I sighed so hard the muscles contracted and caught my breath in the back of my throat. I rummaged for my puffer, and eventually, my breath eased back into an audible routine. I was prone to blackouts. Memories slid from my hippocampus and disappeared like water flowing through my fingers. Something I wasn’t grateful for inheriting. I stood there, unable to remember whether I’d gotten away with it. Or whether there was a crime to get away with.
IV I watched Bourke, waiting for his next question. His unabated zeal for truth had consigned him to a bitter world. Although he was physically in his prime, he had the permanent lip-pursing countenance of an arthritic old man. Could he taste the bilious expression, the curdling of life? ‘What time did you get home?’ ‘Around lunchtime’. ‘We are trying to work out the time of death,' he continued. ‘Why are his teeth removed?’ I studied the clock on the wall next to the bookcase with Dad’s encyclopedias. In front of those, the portable radio he listened to the races on. Thirty seconds felt like a generation. I began to doubt these were just routine questions? ‘I took them out. I tried to revive him … you know, mouth-to-mouth.’ The blood pumped in my head. He looked quizzical, and his large ears pricked forward as he observed. What was he looking for? The word LIAR scribbled across my forehead?
V
I slumped back to the kitchen. The four-litre cask of wine was still on the benchtop, but Dad was gone. I opened the fridge, no milk – instead, I took a glass from the cupboard and sloshed wine into it. I sipped the wine and wondered what I would do now to fill my days. There would be no more trips to the chemist to collect his meds nor the TAB to place his bets. No more sliced brawn and black pudding wrapped in paper from the village deli. My old man was a loner. He spent hours in the sunroom writing in his journal, reading, a glass of wine expertly balanced on a lap table, and a detached indifference to the world around him. He became more and more dependent on me to bring him what he needed – what he wanted. He was seventy years old and had reached the year of falling over. I remember the first time he fell over. ‘Nora, my legs aren’t as strong as they used to be, it’s that bloody damn hill past the drain – it’s a killer.’ Booze sloshed around in his feet, abandoned by his legs, his balance went on a bender, and he fell into the rose bush near Arthur’s house, the house in front of the bus stop nowhere near the hill. I had been at work and ran all the way home, stopping several times. I was quite a heavy smoker. Physically, he was okay; a few cuts and bruises. But the more he fell, the meaner he got. We argued about everything, and everything, it seemed, was my fault. I’d set him off talking back, not talking. Looking at him, not looking at him. Then there was looking at him with that look, not looking at him that way. And the sitting, standing, walking, talking, breathing. I was lucky; I could just leave. But I didn’t. I thought of Mum, and the years she put up with him because of me and having nowhere else to go. Then one day, jack of his crazy, delusional ramblings, she packed what she could fit into her red Volkswagon and drove away.
VI
I felt Whiskey, the old tommy, nudge against my leg. I emptied a tin of sardines into his bowl. Stroking his head, I softly hummed, ‘what am I going to do with you, eh?’ Up the stairs, I crept. Each step felt like an interrogation of my soul – calling me out. I skulked past my room to his bedroom. The bed was crumpled — residues of the yellow fish oil he rubbed into his scalp lingered like the stench of rotting fish with the outgoing tide. I opened drawers, slid the wardrobe door open, not for any other reason than to look. The wardrobe drawer jammed, I yanked it and heard the pop of glass – a sherry bottle — the sly old bastard. Empty bottles three deep lined the bottom of the wardrobe. I inched back to the sunroom and turned the knob. It wheezed open. I inhaled air slashed with bitter thoughts. I felt the bitterness burn in my nose and run down the back of my throat, and my eyes fell onto the dust. There was dust everywhere. A clean house was important to him. I was reminded of the time I went belly-up on the polished linoleum floor. But he’d gotten careless. The old man retired when I was ten years old. He’d been a cleaner at the hospital. He’d done what he needed to, to make a living. He traded in stolen goods right under the doctors’ noses. His gall was admired and respected by the other cleaners, working-class and mainly newly arrived migrants. The bloke that replaced him was not so amiable; he was shot eight months later.
VII
‘When was the last time you saw him?’ the policeman asked. I forgot to mention we’d argued that he’d told me to ‘fuck off back to your slut of a mother’. I decided not to divulge. Not to pollute the waters with unnecessary details. I was good at forgetting. The reason I was here and not elsewhere. Whereas Dad – he stored memories like a bull elephant. ‘Were you alone last night?’ Now that was a good question. How to answer it?
VIII
The old man was a hard worker. He didn’t depend on anyone for anything, least of all the government. He’d often say, ‘You got it, good girl – work hard, and you’ll succeed.’ That was a favourite line of his. Big sloppy tears fell down my cheeks. I never felt I was going to make it. The half-qualified teacher, the not-quite-there writer, the check-out chick struggling to pay her way in life. The old man was dead, but it hadn’t really sunk in. Up until three days ago, his body had been stubbornly resistant to death. I’d spent years indulging in prayer, wishing him dead. Not that I really believed in Jesus, but at 13-years-old who else do you ask? I knew I didn’t cause his death, or at least I thought I hadn’t. Or was there power in prayer? Indeed Mrs Clark thought so. I could still hear her stern tones echoing: Matthew 21:22, “Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”
IX
Bourke tapped the pen on his notebook. Question. Tap. Question. Tap. Question, question, question. A cold sweat lashed my brow. I stumbled in my responses. The lines around Bourke’s mouth darkened, and his brow fell into the centre of his face into a frown. Did he question whether I even knew him at all?
X
Overwhelmed and exhausted, I poured another glass of wine. I had my own questions but nobody to answer them. I looked at my bed and flopped into it, hoping sleep would clear out the murky sludge that was my memory.
XI
I awoke to wilted light and drizzling rain. My phone flashed a message from Mum – ‘Call me, sweetie. xx’ Sitting up in bed, memories began ushering in. I heard the hushed tones of Bourke and another unfamiliar voice. ‘So, what do you think is the cause of death?’ ‘It’s preliminary but a massive heart attack, Pete. He was dead before he even hit the ground.’ I felt the rush of bile and scrambled into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. I turned the shower on, stripped off and stood under the hot water scrubbing the successive years of guilt away. A flush of colour appeared that I hadn’t seen in years.
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