Hare's Fur Page 4

  Frustrating, though, to have to repeat the walk. And how many days should he wait before trying again? They might still be here. He levered himself up and studied the intent faces with a matching intensity, not sure why, but wanting them imprinted on his memory. He closed his eyes, checked that he had them, looked at them again, it only now occurring to him that they were not so feral that they sensed being watched.

  The girl paused in drawing on the string to blow a strand of hair from her left eye rather than brush it with wet fingers. Despite the game she was engaged in, her air of calmness was adult. In the second half of his life he’d had little to do with children. Had they perhaps all grown more self-assured? Well, Helen’s two hadn’t. The boy — Jerome — was older than this girl, but wouldn’t meet his eye when he spoke to him and, according to his mother, was terrified of the dark. He’d perhaps misjudged the parent here. These two seemed not at all fearful — of being out in the bush, or of what, down here, would be pitch-dark nights, just a slit of sky. They obviously felt themselves safe, whatever the reason for being here. He shouldn’t destroy that feeling.

  He took a last look. The girl had pulled the saucepan boat to the beach. She unlooped the string from her fingers and passed the coil to the boy. Russell looked behind his feet for the rock he’d stepped up from.

  He came round the side of the house and the forty metres further to the annexe looked a long way. The ore bags could stay in the pack until morning. He took off his boots and knocked them together above the herb bed, then, carrying them, climbed the steps in his socks. A small but perfect butternut pumpkin sat on the bamboo stool, holding down a note. He knew who they were from, and what the note would say.

  The invitation was to dinner. If he was free. He was always both touched and irritated by the phrase. She’d have warned whichever of the kids was her messenger not to disturb him at the workshop. He walked to the phone and looked at the list taped to the wall and dialled. The girl answered.

  ‘Hello Lucy, it’s Russell.’

  ‘I’ll get her.’

  When Helen came on he thanked her for the pumpkin and the invite. Unfortunately, though, he’d just got back from one of his trips down into the valley, why she’d not heard from him earlier. He hoped she hadn’t started cooking, he’d been planning just to have a bath and a boiled egg and fall into bed. No, she said. She’d just thought, being the end of the week, he might like to share ‘a relaxing glass’. He’d told her before that he didn’t have a working week, his cycles were firings. Not strictly the truth, he reminded himself — when Adele still worked they’d taken some note of Fridays — but the truth now.

  ‘How about tomorrow or Sunday? It’s just we haven’t seen you in a bit.’

  He knew what she was doing, repaying her debt to Adele by keeping an eye on him, and he allowed it — as much as he could stand anyway before forbearance crossed over into annoyance. Adele had introduced her to painting, and changed, even perhaps saved, her life. The reason for her persistence now, though, he knew, wasn’t just gratitude. She’d finished a new painting. When Adele was alive, she’d been her sounding board. But Helen knew he’d performed the same role for Adele, as she had for him. That, he missed exquisitely, unpacking the kiln together, discussing the merits or faults of a pot held in gloved hands, the glaze still softly pinging as it cooled and crackled. Adele had started Helen in her own field, still lifes, but the woman had quickly outgrown watercolour and started in oils. Her confidence soon matched her growing skills. She began painting what she called ‘psychological landscapes’. The few he saw he’d found technically accomplished but turgid. Adele, though, had more sympathy for what the woman was trying to do. ‘She’s painting what she’s feeling, Russell. And if she persists she’ll paint herself out of what she’s feeling.’

  The Kents had arrived in the house across the road six years ago, with two then small children. He was a civil engineer with the biblical name Gideon. Russell and Adele saw little of him, work took him away for weeks at a time. But when home he was friendly enough, asking Adele’s advice on what natives to plant and taking an engineer’s interest in the kilns. A year after their arrival a bridge had taken him to Thailand, and he hadn’t come back.

  ‘Um — can we say Sunday? And what time would you like me?’

  ‘Early’s fine. Six? Don’t bring anything, just yourself.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely! Please.’

  He hung up, then stood, seeing in his mind the seconds shelf in the workshop. He had five teacups he’d saved to refire. He’d give them a wash, choose one. He picked up the phone again, dialled from memory. Hugh answered.

  ‘You’re back. How are the knees?’

  ‘A bit crunchy. I’m going to give them a soak.’

  If he said he had to go down again, he’d have to explain. Leave it a fortnight and he wouldn’t.

  ‘You got Tiger?’

  ‘I can’t use it! I’ve told you. The damn stuff burns.’

  ‘It’s supposed to! How it works.’

  ‘Well, I’m not giving it the chance.’

  ‘Suffer, then.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He put on Arvo Pärt’s Alina and lit the heater, ran a bath. He left the bathroom door open. He wet a flannel under the cold tap and enfolded his balls and cock, then slowly lowered himself into the steaming water and sat with his legs straight. The water was too hot, but he made himself be still, his mind on the music, and after a couple of minutes his legs could bear it. With his fingertips he began to massage the sides of each knee in turn. And as he’d known they would, the children came.

  Where would they be right now? ‘Not in a hot bath, that’s certain.’ If they were washing at all it would be in the pool. They wouldn’t be washing, it was getting dark. Hopefully they’d be sitting round a fire. Eating what, though? Chocolate bars? He closed his eyes and looked at their pinched faces. They couldn’t have been living down there long enough, they must already have looked like that, or half like that. He’d been to garage sales on the town’s northern side, dead fridges and washing machines in the front yards, cars on bricks in driveways. The cops would probably know who they were, might even be looking for them. The last people he’d tell. If it was a woman escaping some bastard bashing her, why hadn’t she gone to the Women’s Centre? No matter how terrified you were, it wasn’t fair to young kids to drag them down to a place like that. Just the walk was enough without making them lug things like saucepans and buckets. And where were they getting food? Or was Mars bars all they’d taken?

  He opened his eyes. ‘They’re not your worry. And she won’t welcome knowing they’ve been spotted.’

  He made himself listen to the piano trickling through the doorway, the clarity of each note in the tiled room. But his mind refused to stop. When he got out he’d be putting on his heavy jumper and heating up soup to have in front of the news, then into bed under a doona. They’d be sleeping in their clothes. In bags if they were lucky, but more likely blankets, and thin ones.

  ‘Listen, they were playing boats. That’s hardly a sign of desperation.’

  He cupped water and sluiced the sweat from his face, then stood and stepped out onto the mat, not reaching immediately for the towel, letting his skin cool. The mirror was too steamed to see himself, but he addressed the shape there.

  ‘They’re skinny, yes, but they didn’t look sick, or like they’ve been knocked around. Go down in a week and they’ll be gone. It’s not your mystery to solve.’

  The heater had taken the chill off the living room. He stoked it, then went to the kitchen and took the pot of soup from the fridge, set it on the front burner, and cut two slices of bread and stood them in the toaster. The words rose up from his childhood, give us this day our daily bread. He laid the bowl in his hand back down and went to the drawer below the phone and brought out the book, carried it to the table.

&n
bsp; He knew the acronym, a very public history of stuff-ups and heavy-handedness had made it notorious. So much so, he discovered, that the body had been relabelled. Formerly Department of Community Services. See Family and Community Services. He turned to the new listing. There was a helpline. To report child abuse and neglect. 24 hours. He stared at the words. Did they describe what he had witnessed? Two children playing in a creek with a saucepan? Whoever came wouldn’t settle for having the creek pointed out on a map. He’d have to be prepared to lead welfare officers, or even police, down to the pool. It wasn’t certain that the person with them was a woman. Too many disturbed men waving a knife or a lump of wood had been shot dead. He closed the book. Then found the page again and turned down the corner.

  He slept badly. Once it was his bladder, but the other times he simply woke, and each time the two crouched at the pool were in his head.

  The light in the bedroom was grey. He dressed and went to the kitchen, performed his morning ritual of standing at the sink and drinking a glass of water. It was colder than yesterday, the grass lightly frosted, but with a clear and probably windless autumn day to come. He put on his sandshoes and walked to the workshop, the sand of the path crackling. The teapots and spouts were stiff enough to join, but with the stove not lit could safely be left till the afternoon.

  Back in the kitchen he set the shopping pad on the table and jotted his own few needs, then drew a line and below it wrote hard bread, tea, milk (long-life + tube condensed), Milo, honey, cereal — he paused, put a question mark — apples, cheese, meat (sausages/chops?). He read down the list. He had currying chops in the freezer, crossed off meat. Did children still drink Milo? Was it even still being made?

  It was. But he chose the smallest. He took down then put back on the shelf Weet-Bix and from the other side of the aisle chose a toasted muesli in a strong resealable bag. Cans, too weighty, were deliberately not on the list, but he overruled himself and from the next aisle selected three different flavours of tuna in small ring-pulls. Coming back past the confectionery aisle he hesitated, then left the trolley and walked in and found Mars bars. They came in packs of four or six. He took a six-pack.

  At the ford he brought his feet together on the last stone and checked the tiny beach for prints, hoping, despite the weight on his back — and which he would have to lug back up — that he might see three new sets, fresh that morning and leaving. The only prints were his own, from yesterday. He stepped onto them and walked to the rotting log and set the pack down, then returned to the ford and drank. The black pebbles in the water renewed the thought he’d had coming down the glen. How much of the creek they might have explored. He’d never bothered to hide the evidence of his rock-getting. The decomposed basalt he scooped up in his hands and the marks he left could, he supposed, to an urban mind, be mistaken for the digging of an animal. But even children couldn’t read the shattered vein as natural. So if they had been up to the head of the creek they would know, and so would the man or woman, that the canyon had other visitors.

  When he reached the rocks where he’d found the wrapper he halted. He’d heard them from here yesterday. There was just the low rush of the water leaving the pool. He was two hours earlier. But he continued to stand, staring up at the shrub he’d used as a screen. The silence didn’t mean they weren’t there. His own stillness was so convincing a pair of rosellas skimmed his head and crested the dam and dropped out of sight. A moment later he heard splashes and chirping. He rock-hopped to the pad etched into the earth to the left of the dam and climbed till the strip of gravel and the hump where they’d been squatting the day before came into sight. The rosellas were in the shallow where the hump entered the water. One gave a squawk of panic, and they launched into the air in a spray of droplets and clattered away upstream.

  He stepped along the pebbles at the back of the beach. He badly wanted a coffee, but had left it too late. Air was moving up the creek, their sense of smell would be acute. At a dip, the pebbles both skittered and compacted, he found the start of a path he hadn’t known was there, running up towards the cape. He halted and stared through the columns of trunks. It was like peering into the gloom of a cathedral. The path disappeared among mossed boulders and ferns and pepperbush and the five or six other species that made up the understorey, and which she’d have been able to name but he no longer could. But as his eyes adjusted he saw between the trunks the pale yellow of unweathered sandstone. He brought the hanky from his pocket and quietly blew from his nostrils the fern spore he could feel tickling. He didn’t want to be near that rock face and suddenly sneeze.

  The path had not been made by the feet of children in a few days, it was old. They were just its latest users. The bucket had left traces, scrapes in the moss, flattened blades where they’d stood it to rest. A hair, made golden by a rod of sunlight, dangled from a leaf. He lifted it on his finger and it became merely white, but he saw the girl clearly. He released the hair into the air, moved again. He was watching his feet, but each time he brought them together on a boulder he returned his gaze to the rock face and watched for movement. From behind him came the soft slosh of the milk and a clank from the cans. The sounds had been with him all the way, but here were magnified. He debated whether to take the pack off. No, his breathing was louder.

  He climbed for a further ten minutes, the trunks thinning and the pale yellow dominating the scape ahead. Suddenly, like yesterday, he heard their voices, and froze. He told himself they were further away than they sounded, because of the rock. Nonetheless he stayed where he was, debating again whether to take off the pack. What if he overbalanced in getting it off? Safer to leave it on. The voices came again, and again just children’s. Was their adult not with them? Or just not talking? He was too far away to make out words, but could discern tone. They sounded happy. He hoped they were sitting — and facing one another. He didn’t smell smoke. The girl spoke and the boy giggled, enabling him to get a proper fix on where they were. Some forty metres above him, and thirty degrees to the angle of the path.

  He swayed his head to see through the leaves of the cissus clogging the lower branches of a clump of possumwood saplings and, like a lens shifting focus, made out one end of an overhang and its ceiling. It was this hollow space that was amplifying their voices. He could stay where he was and go on listening, wait for an adult voice. But what if they suddenly started down to the pool? He lowered his gaze and studied the path. It was twenty metres more of damp litter studded with mossed boulders to where the slope became loose rock with scattered ferns. He could try for a few more metres, even for the foot of the scree, but every step risked their hearing and bolting before he could say what he’d rehearsed.

  He breathed deeply twice, trying to quell the fluttering in his stomach, then took a deeper breath and cupped his mouth with his hands. ‘Hello? I’m a friend! My name’s Russell! I’ve brought you some food!’

  He heard a deeper female voice hiss ‘Shit!’ and the different hiss of nylon on itself, then a scuffle of feet, then silence.

  Well, he’d answered the question, and his fear, of the parent being a man. It was the mother. There was no point calling again until she believed she’d got them to safety. He counted under his breath to twenty.

  ‘I’m going to come up! All right? I’m by myself! As I said, I’m a friend! I saw the kids yesterday at the pool! My name, again, is Russell!’

  What was almost a stairway was worn up the face of the scree. He climbed the last few metres in a crouch with his eyes trained on the rim, straightened when he thought he could see over, hoping he wouldn’t meet the eyes of a scared but determined girl clutching a rock. He didn’t, the shelter was deserted.

  He stepped up onto the floor and thumbed off the straps and lowered the pack to the dirt. His scalp itched from tension. He took off the beanie and ran nails through his hair, then stood flexing his shoulders. Their escape route was plain, a slit between boulders that angled sharply up and disappeared
. In the dust at its opening were fresh prints. He would have to enter the slit to see properly where it went, and that might send them fleeing higher. He turned and took in the shelter. It was some six metres deep and thirteen or fourteen long, canting up steeply at the rear wall and levelling to a roof a metre above his head. He half-expected to see painted animals or hand stencils, but the walls were bare, ferns and grasses growing in cracks stained black by seepage.

  Lying at his feet, rucked from their flight, was an old tartan rug. They must have been sitting on it in the patch of broken sunshine hitting his boots. A large and very old circle of fire-scarred stones was set in the centre of the floor. Beside it, on a flat stone serving as a table, was the saucepan he knew and a larger one, a blackened steel-handled frying pan, plates and bowls of the heavy yellow plastic he remembered from picnics in his childhood, and, spread on a thin tea towel, an unmatched assortment of forks, knives, and spoons. He looked for a serious knife, but there was only the cutlery. He hoped a kitchen knife hadn’t been snatched up and was now in a frightened hand.

  The fire was dead, but sitting round and black in the ashes was an object it took him a moment to recognise, so long since he’d seen one, a cast-iron camp oven. It must already have been here, no child could have carried it. The cutlery looked to be of the same vintage, with thick tines and handles. Beside the slab table, its mouth covered by a second tea towel, stood the bucket, its handle still lashed to the carrying stick.

  Between the fire circle and the back wall — for what reflected warmth there would be — lay three torn-edged planks of yellow foam rubber side by side on a sheet of clear plastic. The bags lay on the foam like worm casts, thin polyester things, not down. Two zippered sports bags he guessed held clothes. Hard on the arms to carry, especially a child’s. Why didn’t they have school rucksacks? Piled against the wall to the left of the foam planks was a stack of dry sticks. He looked for and couldn’t see an axe, for proof had the broken ends of the bucket stick. ‘Good!’ he murmured.