A Family Madness (41 page)

58

“One thing,” said Dick Webster, echoing the wisdom Stanton had once learned from the Serbian husband, “is that family is very strong. And when a family's got some crazy illusion, that's strongest of all.”

Delaney was very familiar with this small and tired truth. But he loved Webster for going on talking like this—it was exactly the sort of talk Delaney wanted to hear—something that passed for an explanation. Webster had all the marks of the New South Wales copper—the crenellated face, the brewer's goiter slung over his belt. Once, when he was an unimaginable boy, he had played for Wests, before there was any money in the game. All the marks. Seeing him in his suit, you knew at once he was a detective, a cop badly disguised as a member of society. But what he still had was the ability to be shocked. Delaney could gratefully see that Rudi Kabbel had shocked Webster. Warwick and Scott Kabbel had shocked him. Danielle had shocked him profoundly by being passive. His shock was precious to Delaney, a prodigious comfort. And with it came a willingness to speculate about the Kabbels, and why families should go to hell in a group.

Webster began with his own homely example. “My wife's family,” he said. “The thing with them was a disinheritance in the bloody Edwardian era, or maybe early World War One, I'm not interested enough to know the date exactly. My wife's grandfather was cut out of the family wealth because he got into the booze, and that crowd were temperance. Quite a pile of money he missed out on. Now my mother-in-law, when I first met her, lived like bloody nobility-in-exile in a little terrace at Stanmore. She didn't have any sort of life at all. Her delusions didn't let her live working class, her poverty wouldn't stretch to anything else. And that's the way
my
wife lived as a girl. It was blokes like me who had to break the news to them, her and her sister, that sorry and all that, but they were just girls from Stanmore.”

“
He
was like that,” said Delaney. “They all were. Even Danielle. Nobility in bloody exile. He thought he was somewhere else.”

Webster drank reflectively. He's a happy man too, Delaney realized with surprise. Like old Greg? How did they manage it, on a dangerous planet like this?

“You know,” Webster said, “he was a cluey bastard, Terry. He left a family history, he translated his old man's diary from bloody Belorussian and his sister's letters from French. The state psychiatrist from Long Bay—he's going to give evidence at the inquest—said Kabbel reminds him of that Polish sailor who started writing novels in English. You know, Joseph Conrad.”

Delaney flinched. Danielle had at one time been studying
Heart of Darkness
.

“Talent to burn, poor bloody Rudi Kabbel. But he believed in this voice he heard, this character called “Uncle.” There are some people of the same nationality have a coffee shop in Parramatta, and Rudi—intelligent Rudi Kabbel—would go round there and talk to these people's old uncle, who could only speak
that
language, and Rudi took everything the poor old bugger said literally. Whereas the old man was senile, the family knew that. He's in Lidcombe Geriatric right now, in a coma and on life support.”

“I searched for the old man everywhere,” said Delaney. “In all the bloody ethnic dives.”

Webster laughed gently and then stifled the laughter. “It wasn't any wog cafe the old man came from. It was a place called the “Boomerang Milk Bar.” Owned by Belorussians, sure, but catering to hard-core Aussies.”

Delaney himself began to laugh, and Webster joined him uncertainly. What camouflage! The Boomerang Milk Bar!

It was upstairs at the Boomerang, in the flat above the shop, that the old fellow had given the date when civilization would cease—when the great Wave would cleanse the earth—had slipped the news to Rudi. And on account of that Rudi had bought his farm, stocked it with explosives, had sold his house, and let his business go to hell. To keep this holy date, he had taken his family in two cars, towing two trailers, into Heather's Glen and, nothing happening, had come back down to the plains again to consult his Belorussian prophet at the Boomerang Milk Bar. The relatives said there had been a frightful scene, the old man had grown terrified and yelled, “His father killed his mother! His father killed his mother!” He could just as easily have yelled, “Fish live underwater!” It was all senile gibberish. But on hearing it Rudi had suffered a fit and passed out. Apparently it related to some idea Rudi already harbored about his father.

“Did you know he had all those weapons?” Dick Webster asked Delaney. “Magnum .357s—two of those: Two .22 rifles, three shotguns, a carbine.”

“Warwick threatened me with a shotgun once.”

“Could've sold them to pay the rent and electricity if that'd been the point. Warwick—Warwick had a bloody crossbow. All prepared to shoot wild pigs west of Lithgow when civilization ended!”

Civilization had ended, Delaney came close to telling the policeman. Mothers died placidly without begging for their babies' lives.

“And bloody manuals of booby traps. Would have been damned difficult to get into the Kabbel property once that tidal Wave he talked about turned up.”

Delaney was pleased to be where they were, in this particular crowded bar. Webster, after calming him down at the station, had offered to take him to the Leagues Club, but Delaney hadn't wanted that, hadn't wanted footballers coming up to commiserate with him on his suspension or surreptitiously congratulate him for breaking Lynch's mandible. They had come to the saloon bar of the Oarsman therefore. Webster drank scotch for, as he said, the sake of his waterworks, which must have been extensive in that mass of flesh. Delaney had no such inhibition. He was young and muscular, had nothing any more to
do
with his body. He could sin with impunity, if it made any sense. He drank as quickly as he could, feeling a blunt ache at the back of his neck, the first sign of the leaden irrational hope which liquor could generate in him.

Webster asked him, “Remember that Jonestown thing a few years back now. Someone like Rudi took a thousand people into the South American bush and made a town. Same idea—the world would end and only that little group would come up trumps. Same thing happened—people began to close in, police and politicians. The bloke in charge just like Kabbel, mad as a meat-axe, and suddenly the world isn't going to end for his convenience, isn't going to come his way. So they all drink Kool-Aid full of cyanide. Some had to be forced, but most were willing. And the thing is, some took it because they still believed in the miracle bloody man, and others took it because they'd lost faith but didn't want to live on without someone divine telling them which way to jump. Same thing here. Same thing exactly.”

He waved to a barmaid, who came at once to serve them. He had some pull over her—perhaps once he'd let her off possession of marijuana.

“You don't have to remember any of this,” Webster, draining the watery scotch he still had left, told Delaney. “I'm the officer assisting the coroner's investigation, and I won't forget it for some time yet. But you're under no obligation. Clean slate. Will your missus take you back?”

“She's Italian,” Delaney said, hoping—not for the first time—that that would do as a total explanation. After giving it, he found himself weeping against his best will not to. He was shamed because Webster might think it was merely marital remorse, doubt about whether his Italian wife might forgive him.

“Okay, son,” Webster murmured, “it's been fucking horrifying, I know.” The mountainous detective took him at once by the elbow and helped him out of the saloon. It might have looked a bit comic, Delaney understood without caring a damn. It might have looked halfway between arrest and protective custody. No one in the saloon took any notice except an idiot by the door looking up from the afternoon
Sun
, the sort of fool who bought the paper not to find out if the geriatric President intended to fry us all in our tracks, but to play the Bingo card thrown in with each copy. “Did a Rabbitoh hit 'im back?” the man asked Webster.

“Watch your bloody mouth,” said Webster.

There were thunderclouds over the mountains, a sheet of falling water over Brian Stanton's way. Stanton waited on bail, under that torrent, for his case to come up. If he did something irrational, fled to the Northern Territory, say, it would break Delaney for life.

Webster propped him against the trunk of his Holden and asked him how he was.

“I know,” said Webster, repeating his original thesis. “You thought you could lever her out of that mob. We all have ourselves on about that. But it's their hutch, you know, their original nest, that's what counts with them. While they're becoming the very woman their old woman was, they keep on being the girl they were there, you know, in a home you know bugger-all about, a foreign country. I mean if you don't believe me, I'll lend you some of the stuff Kabbel wrote.”

Choking on the words, Delaney said, “I'd like to read that stuff.”

“No you wouldn't. Besides, it's really not available until after the inquest. Look, I've got to go, taking the missus to Parramatta for dinner. Forget it, eh? Give yourself a chance. And don't fight the burial arrangements. The message they left was in favor of the present setup. They want to be interred together. Wouldn't surprise me if they all bloody expect to rise again.”

“They didn't ask the child for
its
opinion. All right for them to bloody lie together!”

Webster said, “Oh Jesus!” and kicked one of the front tires of Delaney's car. “Listen, the people next door heard Danielle talking at the back of the house that morning. They heard her say to her father, ‘Don't be cruel!' She wasn't shouting, just conversational.
Don't be cruel
. Did I mention that to you?”

“No.”

Delaney could hear her, the sentence was palpable. It was the dominant aspect of the earth. It hung over the parking area, the automobile-crazed highway, the hacking voices of men on their way to drink. Delaney saw Webster anxious all at once that he had made a mistake, that he had given a further argument for the rescue of Danielle's body and the child's from the Kabbel shambles. And that Delaney would use the news rashly, build it into a system of faith that would cause him mischief in the end.

“And I'll tell you something else,” said the detective quickly. “You can't look at her as a victim in the normal sense of the word. She lay on the bed, Terry, and pulled her pillow over her head and waited for Warwick to finish her. It was a calm death. Believe me, I've seen all the variations.”

After Webster had gone to take his wife to dinner, Delaney sat on in his car. His hands were slung over the steering wheel, but the clammy tedium of the thing, manufactured of something chemical which mimicked both cloth and steel, revolted him at last and made him drop his hands into his lap. The rain made marks like tiny fractures on his windscreen and then fell without stint.

“Don't be cruel,” said a voice to his left.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1986 by Serpentine Publishing Company Propriertary, Ltd.

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3805-8

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