The Dead I Know (9 page)

‘Morning, Mr Barton,’ the policeman said.

‘Morning, Grant. Anywhere we can park?’

‘Hope you’ve brought a bucket,’ he said. He moved a traffic cone and ushered the van through. The small crowd of service personnel parted at the sight of us and John crawled to the roadside and parked on the grass ten metres from the front of the truck. The oil stains I’d seen from the road weren’t oil.

‘Okay?’ John asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The door alarm chimed and we were among the police and the firemen. We collected a hard plastic container from the back, like a small, sleek fibreglass casket, and carried it between us over to the truck. We were steered by the police past paramedics tending a bearded figure huddled under a silver blanket. At the back of the truck, basking in a private lake of crimson, was the mangled body of the motorcyclist. Bones protruded from the black jacket and it took me a few seconds to realize there were bits missing. The jacket sleeve seemed intact but its contents had been delivered elsewhere by the impact. One leg was considerably shorter than the other.

‘Ah,’ John said. ‘Probably won’t need to check for a pulse.’

That’s when I realized the motorcyclist had mislaid his head.

We lowered the casket on the edge of the pond. It unlatched like a toolbox and the lid opened with a disinfectant huff.

‘Right,’ John said quietly. ‘We’ll get as much as we can with one lift.’

There were no obvious handles – like feet or square shoulders – to hold. John circled the tangled remains and bent beside the intact arm. He looked up at me, reading my face.

‘Grab the jacket,’ he said, and I found some purchase. A heavy lift – a true dead weight – and we couldn’t get the whole body off the road. It scraped and grated over the tar, bumped bloody on the rim of the casket and eventually
came to rest on the plastic tray inside. John straightened the limbs and wiped his gloves and the fibreglass with a small dark towel.

‘We can’t leave until we’ve completed the jigsaw,’ he said. ‘No missing pieces.’

So began an hour of sifting through the scrub and grass on both sides of the road. We had police help, but the point of impact was more than a hundred metres down the highway. A boot – with a foot inside – had turned up in the paddock about seventy metres from the asphalt. Between us, we collected every bit of bloodstained clothing, every dark human scrap and every shard of bone. Still, one significant piece eluded us. The search area grew wider and more ridiculous until we were combing a swampy drain nearly a kilometre from the truck. Every empty drink can and ball of takeaway wrapper gripped at my stomach. Every old shred of tire suddenly became mortal remains.

I walked in a line with two policemen. Their radios barked and fizzed with static. They yelled back and forth but their words barely made it to my ears. My head rang with the strangeness of the situation and the sense that we might be searching for the rest of the day; and then I found it.

Pressed among the bright green rushes growing in the drain was an arc of shiny black. I could just reach it without getting wet – the dome of the motorcyclist’s helmet, with his waxen head inside. I lifted it by the chinstrap.

‘Ho!’ one of the policemen said. ‘That’s what we’re looking for. John’s boy wins the cigar!’

I carried it like an odd valise to the casket and laid it gently in position. John – puffing from his own searching – nodded
his approval. We fitted the lid and carried the container to the van. I became aware, as John closed the door, that although we’d been conducting the same search, the policemen and I had been looking for different things and for different reasons. They were hunting mortal remains to finish a job, I was hunting the still countenance of someone’s son, perhaps their brother, maybe even their father, to bring him a final grace. By giving him grace, I found some of my own. The police protected the living, ambulance officers protected the injured and we protected the dead. All as it should be.

17

J
OHN ANSWERED HIS
mobile as the garage door closed. With one hand, he helped transfer the casket containing the motorcyclist’s remains to a gurney and sent me off to the coolroom with it.

I flicked the light switch and opened the door. The tubes strobed and the darkness between the flashes seemed cosmic. I rolled the gurney inside and the chill tap-danced on my spine. I could smell a hint of Amanda Creen; at least I thought I could – something turning in the back of the refrigerator. I propped the trolley beside her pale coffin and shut the door behind me on the way out.

I had the sudden urge to clean, to scrub and vacuum and polish until everything sparkled – but everything already sparkled with yesterday’s effort. I craved some simple and tangible task that might steer my mind away from the questions it wanted answered. How do we care for the
broken man? Undress him? Wash him? Free his head from his helmet? Left to my own devices, I’d build him a box and screw the lid on tight. A little privacy. Somewhere to get changed into something more . . . elemental.

‘Change of plans,’ John said upon his return. ‘We’re to take our most recent addition to the coroner for post-mortem.’

I lit up the coolroom again and retrieved the trolley.

John steered while I pushed.

‘I wonder . . . with all that modern science . . . if they’ll be able to ascertain the cause of death?’

I looked at him askance, unable to work out if he was being sincere or . . .

A smile bent his lips.

I smiled too, involuntarily. He knew he’d got me.

‘They need to test his blood. Why they can’t send someone around I’ll never know. I get the feeling they’re all too important for that.’

A fifteen-minute drive, a ten-minute wait and we were rolling the gurney back to the van with the full casket on board.

‘Now, about your driving,’ John said, as he merged into the traffic. ‘How much experience have you had? Has your . . . someone taken you for a cruise in the car park on a Sunday?’

I shook my head. Mam didn’t drive.

‘Then that’s where we’ll start.’

He drove us to the golf club. There were a few cars in the car park but they were bunched around the entrance to the clubrooms. He parked the van away from the other
vehicles and we swapped seats, my fingers shaking as I took the wheel.

‘Controls,’ he said. ‘Go pedal. Stop pedal. Gearshift. Handbrake. Windscreen wipers. Indicators.’

I wondered if my heartbeat disturbed him; it was certainly a distraction for me. He told me to start the van. With the gearshift firmly in N and the handbrake on hard, I revved the engine, as instructed. By lunchtime I’d reverse-parked. It was that easy. Apparently, there are people for whom driving seems natural.

‘I had to drive the length of the town with one of the local cops on board in order to get my licence,’ John said. ‘Just a lap of the main drag.’ He shook his head. ‘Somehow, I managed to fail three times.’

He poked at me with a single finger. ‘Not a word of that to anybody, you hear?’

I zipped my lips.

‘Not . . . a . . . word.’

We had a deal, as long as he didn’t mention the fact that my first driving lesson was conducted in a golf club car park with a mangled corpse bumping around in a box in the back.

On the way to the office, John stopped in the loading zone in front of the newsagents, ducked from the car and returned with a bag that he unceremoniously dumped on my lap.

‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.

Christmas? In May?

It was a guide to the learner-driver test.

‘Read it. Cover to cover. Let me know when you want to do the examination.’

He looked across, his eyebrows raised expectantly. When I didn’t get the hint, he cupped his ear.

‘Thank you, John. You’re very kind,’ I said.

He beamed.

He parked at the shopping centre. I waited in the car while he visited the post office and the bank. He handed me a fold of cash.

‘Payday,’ he said. ‘More next week if you behave.’

I couldn’t bear to look at it. I beamed back, stuffed it in my pocket and thanked him in a whisper.

I studied the guide between eating sandwich fingers, and again in the afternoon while John discussed arrangements with the families of Amanda Creen and the late Eamon Walsh – the motorcyclist. The road rules seemed logical for the most part; the only real challenges were remembering safe distances and the meaning of obscure signs. I carried the book with me everywhere that afternoon – to the storeroom while I made up Eamon Walsh’s coffin (another Crenmore Eternity), to the toilet and to the main residence for afternoon tea. I was flicking the pages and testing myself when Skye got home from school.

Without hesitation and without greeting her parents, she flopped beside me on the couch. ‘What are you reading?’

I showed her the cover and she read aloud.

‘Ooh! Can I test you? Taylor let me test him when he was . . .’

I handed her the book. Somehow John Barton’s generosity seemed diluted by the knowledge that he’d done this before. This was a well-worn route. Who was I to challenge the natural process of things? Perhaps I
should be buying presents for Skye and giving her my pay? Perhaps I should be in the mortuary fondling men? The thought made me shiver.

‘Are you okay, Robot?’

I nodded.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘Talking about Taylor.’

‘Don’t be silly. You can talk about him as much as you like.’

She nodded once, unconvinced, and then flipped the book open. ‘Where are you up to? Which questions should I read?’

‘Any. All of them.’

She made an O with her lips and clapped her hands.

For half an hour she did her best to trip me up. I was concentrating so hard that I didn’t realize we’d attracted a crowd. When I looked up, John and Mrs Barton were staring from the kitchen.

I stood, reflexively, with the blood charging to my cheeks.

‘What?’ John asked.

‘I . . . perhaps there’s something else I should be doing?’

He waved for me to sit. ‘When you’re done with the questions, perhaps you could give Skye a hand with her homework? Only fair, after all.’

He was joking, but Skye jumped on the idea and flipped my book on the couch.

‘Skye?’ Mrs Barton chided.

John patted her hand, then gave his daughter a grin.

We did surface areas of simple squares in mathematics. We deduced the culprit in a whodunit exercise for science. We shaded the continents on a world map and I listened to her read from her reader.

‘That’s enough, Skye. You’ll wear him out!’ Mrs Barton said.

‘He’s fine, aren’t you, Robot?’

I felt that Mrs Barton was talking to me, so I stood. ‘We have a little more work to do,’ John said. ‘Nearly time we let the boy go home.’

Skye groaned.

I thanked her, collected my book and followed John to the office. He ushered me into a seat and I had the uneasy feeling a lecture was coming.

He was shaking his head again, but smiling at the same time. ‘You really are a mystery, Aaron Rowe.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. It was half-question, half-apology.

‘No, I mean . . .’

He sighed and took a folder from a drawer.

‘Your school counsellor, Andy Robertson, is a close friend. We’re from the same church. When we discussed you, he warned me that you could be reticent, moody and unreachable. That you struggled with every aspect of schoolwork and no amount of personal intervention changed that.’

I bowed my head. It was true, of course. Robertson had seen the worst of me for more than a year. He knew more than most.

‘He forgot to mention that you’re as sharp as a needle, naturally dexterous and wise beyond your years. Where was that hiding when you were at school?’

I had no answer and nowhere to hide.

‘I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, but I do want you to feel you’re safe here. That you are always welcome. I’ve seen enough in a few days to decide that there’s a permanent place for you here if you want it, and I hope you do want it because I see the makings of a fine director in you.’

He shuffled through the papers in the file and found one he liked the look of. ‘Employment declaration,’ he said. ‘How would you feel about making this arrangement official?’

How did I feel about anything? Scared? Confused? Jammed and broken in so many ways. I sat there, staring, all locked and disoriented. Tears crowded my vision. They welled up on my eyelids and when they reached critical mass, they boiled over onto my cheeks and finally onto my work shirt with a tiny
puk.

John stood and offered me his box of tissues, but I wiped my face on my jacket sleeve instead.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize it would—’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

18

M
AM’S ARMS RESTED
on the armrests. She leaned forward in her chair, rapt in the show on TV. I kissed her head and looked at the screen. Adverts.

‘What you watching?’

Her reply was a strange whimper.

‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t everything be okay?

Idiot.’

I straightened. ‘Idiot? Who’s an idiot?’

‘Oh, you are. Who else? There’s only the two of us here and it’s not me.’

‘Idiot?’

‘Are you making breakfast? It’s your turn. I’ve been waiting for hours.’

‘It’s dinnertime.’

She looked outside, her brow furrowed. ‘I know,’ she snapped. ‘I know all this.’

I eased past her into the van and could hear her mewling over the subdued din of the TV.

I made toast. There were other options but toast was fast and breakfast-like. I brought Mam’s to her on a tray.

‘At last!’

‘Sorry. Sorry it took a while.’

Her hand shook, her face twisted in pain.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing!’

Mam upended the tray and stormed inside, growling. She carried her left arm awkwardly, like an injured wing, and I knew it was something serious. She sat on her bed.

I sat beside her. ‘What is it, Mam? What’s happened to your arm?’

The sleeve had grown stiff and dark with blood.