A River Town

  “I am not aware of any second name,” said Bandy.

  Hanney looked up, considering this departure from the given.

  “All right then,” he conceded at last.

  Reading upside down what the constable wrote, Tim saw Hanney put down Solus after the word Bandy and before Habash. This perhaps to save magistrates asking the question or presuming that Hanney hadn’t asked. They were deep in the moils of the thing now. They were being prepared to appear in Court Notes in the Chronicle.

  “Constable,” said Tim, “with the greatest respect, I will not be signing any documents before I have spoken to Mr. Sheridan.”

  The words sounded momentary to Tim, fugitive birds uncaged. Hanney looked up at him. Barely a dent made on the air.

  “I’m not accusing you of murder, Tim,” he said with a painful grin. “I’m accusing you of violating the New South Wales Quarantine Act.”

  Bandy watchful beside him, expected something clever of him, just as he’d expected a horse of Bandy.

  Tim said, “Isn’t that a matter for the sanitation officer to report to you?”

  “Jesus, you are a bush lawyer, Mr. Shea. It’s like the bloody Impounding Act, Tim. I can impound wandered cattle and lay a charge, and so can the impounding officer. And now I can impound stray citizens under the Sanitation Ordinance and under the Act.” Hanney shook his head. He found Tim hugely eccentric. “You’ve got deliveries to make, Tim, and I have a day’s work. Do you mind if I expedite matters?”

  He continued writing, muttering, “You’re lucky I caught you. If I was in this game for the sake of persecution, I could keep you buggers here all day, ruin your business, confuse your children, leave you spare of anyone’s trust.”

  “I have no children,” said Bandy, speaking in defiance for the first time.

  “That’s what you say, you black bastard.”

  “Brown bastard, constable.”

  The second policeman laughed in the dimness of the office, of the eucalyptus shade which fell over the back of the police station.

  Tim consulted the watch in his fob. Nearing eight o’clock. His schoolboy son would be along soon, going to Imelda.

  Hanney turned the document to them at last. It said,

  “I, Timothy Edmund Shea, and I, Bandy Solus Habash, freely admit that each in the company of the other in violation of Section 17 of the New South Wales Quarantine Act and of Macleay Shire’s Sanitation Ordinance 8 illegally travelled to and entered the quarantine camp at the New Entrance, thereby placing ourselves and the community in peril and making ourselves liable to sentencing and a fine before the Macleay District Police Magistrate’s Court.”

  He wrote that stuff well, Tim saw. Dressing up a mean intent in flowing terms.

  “You both sign at the bottom,” Hanney told them. He turned the inkstand to them so that they could conveniently sign.

  Tim said, “Just charge us and let the magistrate decide. You’ve said already it’s not like we committed murder.”

  Hanney tilted his chair back, “Is that your casual attitude too, Mr. Habash?”

  “I would rather await the settlement of the question before the court,” said Bandy, grandly but looking away.

  “Well, I think you two fellows should know that some of us think that as a whole there’s a stink of murder or near-murder about you two. There—yes you, Brownie!—there is a fellow, a herbalist, who supplied specifics to Mrs. Mulroney the abortionist. We found quarts of his arsenic remedy on Mrs. Mulroney’s premises.”

  Bandy sat forward and his delicate little hands came passionately into play. “My arsenic tonic is quite harmless, constable, and could not be blamed for anyone’s ill-health let alone demise. The same prescription has a renown absolutely everywhere—from the Alps to Turkey, and from Persia to China, as a specific for rheumatism, anaemia and weak nerves. Mrs. Mulroney was one of my customers, but used the tonic you refer to for her own purposes.”

  The hated look from Hanney, snide in the heavy, heavy way of lesser yet total power. “Where’d you get him, Tim? Talks like a bloody professor. Look, cases could be bloody made, Habash. I could consider going lenient on you if you sign up here and avoid court squabbles. But if you bloody rile me …”

  With a dry mouth, Tim said, “I won’t advise my friend to sign a confession for something as silly.”

  Bandy had gone as pale as a European, but it was clear he was resolved to stand solid. Tim wondered too how he could have been blind to his fellow prisoner’s qualities, the courage and the loyalty. Just the same, there was a sort of plea in Bandy’s eye. Just remember, things will always fall more heavily on me than on you. Police magistrates will believe you more than me.

  But not by too bloody much of a margin, Tim wanted to tell him.

  “Let me show you something,” murmured Hanney. Standing, Hanney moved to a storeroom and past the junior policeman’s desk. Tim could not think of anything to say to Bandy in the man’s absence. After a time, Hanney emerged, oh Jesus, with the basket covered by the checked cloth. The letter Tim had risked writing had been futile. Had it gone astray or been lost by a clerk? Had the Commissioner lost interest in the young woman’s name?

  He placed it all on the table, removed the great flask, took the checked cloth off it. A glimpse showed Tim that Missy leaned here, brow first, in hostage to Hanney. Tim felt his blood abandon him, fleeing this sight. The fixity of dimmed and barely brown eyes more open than at last viewing. Unblinking. Disconnected from the intent of her heart.

  “There you are, you black bastard,” said Hanney. “Would you like to come clean that this is what your rheumatic mixture did.”

  “Untrue, untrue,” cried Bandy. “My mixture could not achieve this horrible thing. Dear heaven!”

  Bandy averted his eyes. You could tell that as much as any North Corker farmer’s son, he was seized by Missy’s unreleased spirit.

  “My mixture is nothing,” said Bandy in a thin voice. “A tiny, kindly ripple, constable, on the huge ocean of human pain.”

  He stood up, his mouth warped.

  “Not this,” he said, trembling. “This is not my tradition or my father’s.”

  He fell. His legs gave way. One delicate groan as he dropped like a thrown-off garment.

  “What do you think that could mean?” Hanney—looking over his desk at the stupefied Bandy—asked Tim.

  Tim had begun to rise to assist Bandy …

  “Leave him. Leave him! Tell me what you think it bloody well means?”

  “It means he hasn’t seen her before.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t find a woman like her messing around with a black hawker.”

  “But you said you’d shown him! You told me that. You showed it to cow-cockies but not to Bandy!”

  “Are you dissatisfied with my investigation, Tim?” Hanney opened his desk and took a letter out. “Read that, eh.”

  It was a letter on the stationery of Ernest Malcolm and Company, Accountants. It was addressed to the Commissioner of Police for New South Wales. “I would be remiss not to commend to you the work done by way of the present enquiry into the identity of the unfortunate young woman by Constable Hanney …” It was signed by Ernie, along with a list of all his secretaryships and posts as treasurer.

  Hanney took the letter back. “Bloody nice to be appreciated by a pillar of the community. Now, tell me what you think it means, this bloody fainting?”

  “It’s the bloody horror. It’s not guilt.” Another glimpse of the child in the flask. “I feel the same as Habash.”

  “So you’d say you are similar characters, would you?”

  So tediously Hanney fancied himself as cornering a man whatever way he turned. Were coppers like that as babies? Or did the uniform do it?

  “Well?” Hanney insisted. “Similar types, would you say?”

  “Will you let me pick up my friend? Fainted people shouldn’t be left lying like that.”

  “Just sit there.” Again Hanney craned over his desk and surveyed Bandy
. “Look at him there. You’d be bloody surprised, Mr. Shea, by the numbers of women upriver who’d do him favours. The old cow-cockies mistrust him, but the women think he’s a bloody darling. They let him camp near the homestead, and when their old man’s snoring, they go creeping down to his wagon.”

  Why would Ernie praise methods like those of Hanney? “If Habash is the sort who gets round to the women, why didn’t you show him Missy earlier?”

  Hanney did not answer, but went back to the matter of Bandy the seducer. “You’d be astounded. Even your sister-in-law and that step-niece. He’s the sort of little bugger women like to take on their knees. Look at that! Hands and arms like a bloody cherub.”

  Bandy began to cough. Tim got up now and helped him to his feet, and sat him in his chair again. Bandy fluttering his lips like a man about to be sick. He seemed to be unsure of what had befallen him.

  He saw the flask again but closed his eyes then.

  “Can’t you put that bloody thing away?” Tim asked Constable Hanney. It was not of course a bloody thing. It had a holiness.

  The policeman said, “You keep pestering me. Has she been recognised? Buying me drinks, getting me pissed. Were you her bloke, Tim? Where did you meet her? Was it Sydney on some trip?”

  Tim writhed. The copper’s profane ideas were a torment.

  “I haven’t been to Sydney in five years.”

  “So why are you so fussy about Missy’s name? Hoping it’ll come out. Or hoping it won’t.”

  Try the truth out on him. Defy him with it. “She’s in torment until she’s named. Any idiot can tell.”

  “How do you know, in torment?”

  “That’s the way it strikes me. Again and again. If it doesn’t strike you and spur you on, I bloody pity you!”

  “Is this some potato superstition you’re into, Tim? Some spuddy thing?”

  “I think it’s bloody called using your imagination.”

  “Ah,” said Hanney, setting his big jaw. “I’m sorry, my imagination’s not up to scratch with yours. But there’s something all the old coppers in Sydney used to tell me. That if there is a person who hangs around and ask lots of questions, he’s generally the bugger.”

  Bandy had placed his hands on the desk.

  “And my God,” he murmured. “Woman’s fine features.”

  “What do you say, Tim? Don’t wait for others to do it. You give me her name.”

  “Get me a Bible. I’ll swear. I just don’t bloody know!”

  “Sign this then,” said Hanney, sighing in a concluding manner. “You’ll both receive a summons to answer the charge.” He nudged the flask. “The charge of visiting the quarantine. You do remember that one, don’t you?”

  “It’s hard to remember anything with that on the table.”

  “You remember some things, son! You couldn’t wait for your wife to be home in two days. So you went up the river to get your end in. You remember that.”

  Tim burned but leaned forward in his chair.

  “There is no plague,” Bandy murmured to reinforce Tim.

  “This isn’t what all the messages off the wire say, but you two smartalecs know better. Sign the bloody thing here.”

  But neither of them moved to sign, so Hanney put on a sour mouth and said, “Go and sit down the back of the office there, the both of you.”

  Tim, still blazing as any man would from that accusation of lust, one he didn’t want mentioned in court, stood up, helping Bandy by the elbow and grabbing the backs of the two chairs with his free hand. They passed the younger constable’s desk and Tim repositioned the chairs against the back wall and eased Bandy into his.

  “Notice, he hasn’t put us in cells,” Tim whispered to Bandy.

  As well, and at last, Hanney returned the flask to storage. Carrying it, he moved like a tired servant.

  Tim tilted his chair and forced the back of his head against the wall. The back legs of his chair provided him with the other half of the leaning equation which would enable him to sleep. Bandy slept too, and at one stage Tim was drowsily aware of the little man slipping from his chair and curling himself on the floor.

  At one stage that morning Sergeant Fry, who was bull-necked but had what many people called an intelligent face, came into the office like a man who hardly had the time for it, and Hanney pointed out the two offenders at the rear of the room. Hanney did not use large gestures or try the smart-copper act on his sergeant. Fry murmured brisk things at Hanney, and Hanney nodded.

  Don’t try to scrutinise or interpret the buggers. Drowse. From nowhere now Tim remembers a music hall song, “Never Buy a Copper a Drink”:

  Never buy a copper a drink,

  It might only make the blighter think.

  He will get all suspicious,

  As you sip the wine delicious,

  So never buy a copper a drink.

  Sleep. Waking again, he found Dr. Erson in the office, talking energetically to Hanney. Tim now adjusted his chair and sat upright to convince the doctor of his respectability. He watched Hanney begin shrugging, but Erson was a large magician in the Macleay for his medicine and for his singing, and so the ungifted Hanney now looked shorn of power.

  Erson came to Tim now, smiling a little as if remembering miscreant Johnny.

  “We should have had guards on the Trial Bay road, shouldn’t we?”

  Tim said, “My regrets, doctor. But I was anxious about my wife.”

  “I was pleased to see in passing the shed that you have a new horse.”

  Tim lowered his eyes for the first time since arrested by Hanney.

  “Oh, a borrowed, reliable one. I still use the old one for deliveries. But keep Johnny separate from him.”

  Erson grinned briefly, considered him and coughed. “A terrible searing day, Mr. Shea.”

  “Yes,” said Tim.

  Dr. Erson reached out and felt the glands under Tim’s chin. Then he asked to see Tim’s tongue. Tim let him do whatever he wanted.

  Bandy stirred on the floor and sat up.

  Dr. Erson smiled. “Mr. Habash.”

  Bandy stood up now. “My dear Dr. Erson.”

  Tim was of course astounded that they greeted each other as friends.

  “Sir,” said Bandy, “forgive my journey, but I know well that the strict quarantine time had expired.”

  “Had it?” asked Erson. He still seemed amused, reaching up to Bandy’s chin as he had earlier to Tim’s. “You are not to talk about any of this, Bandy, or of going up there. And God help if you do it again. It is not a good precedent. You must both give me an undertaking!”

  “I understand,” said Bandy. “You are such a good friend I have no problem in offering my solemn undertaking.”

  “Well, I think in that case you can both go.” The doctor turned to Constable Hanney, who was making himself busy at his desk. “These fellows are free to go, constable?”

  Hanney thought a while, an actor who had forgotten the play’s simplest line. “Yes, doctor,” he managed in the end. He began tearing up the page he had written for them to sign.

  Outside the air ferocious, an incoming tide, and they fought their way through it, crossing the yard. It scalded the cheeks. It was so thick and full of flecks of black leaf. Yet Erson had made this blazing day habitable.

  Tim murmured, “What a civilised fellow!”

  Bandy said, “I am a fool for fainting.”

  He wavered in the white haze.

  “You’ve never seen her before though?”

  “I have not, old fellow.” Bandy shook his head to clear it of apparitions. “But as to the rest, they don’t want people to know about us. You noticed what Dr. Erson said? We are not a good precedent for people to know about. It is up to them to guard the camp, and we have shown them up.”

  “He seemed such friends with you.”

  Bandy smiled. “He visited my father, my brother and myself, looked into our prescriptions to make sure they were safe, and found they were. As of course he should have expected. We
have been herbalists and chemists from generation to generation, Mr. Shea. Out of our meeting grew a compact with Dr. Erson. We are to urge our clearly ill customers to attend the surgeries of the doctors in town. We are all brothers in concern for health.”

  Tim began to laugh, far too much for the day. But he was tickled by this unexpected kindly alliance the world harboured.

  “Bloody hell!”

  The air too ferocious for him to consider other alliances and their meaning. The alliance between Ernie and Hanney, stated so fulsomely in Ernie’s letter. What did that bloody signify?

  Ten past nine, he saw by his fob watch. Unless she was overtaken by a vengeful mood, Ellen Burke would surely have opened the store. Though who would buy butter on a day like this? Butter from the Central or Warneton creameries melting to a smear in the hands or the back of the cart. Yet he must make deliveries in this furnace.

  They found their horses in the shed. The poor beasts were snuffling. The air worried them. They knew that fire was everywhere, downriver and up, out of their control, out of anyone else’s.

  Remembering Missy, Bandy continued to shake his head and climbed onto the grey. He said nothing as they rode the horses out of the gate, steering them towards the water trough outside Kelty’s where Tim had got his first bad reputation with Constable Hanney. They found the beasts unwilling, pulling at the reins. Having been pliable all night, they were now jacking up.

  “Oh, dear sir, we could have been in great trouble,” said Bandy.

  “See,” said Tim, “I told you there was nothing to be gained from friendship with me. I am just one step away, Bandy, from you. I am a white nigger. If I’d been an Orangeman or Good Templar, that old bastard Thurmond would have taken his hat off to us and wished us a good ride.”

  As his horse and Bandy’s drank from Kelty’s trough, “How well a lager would go down,” Tim murmured.

  “I must not,” muttered Bandy.

  Tim felt a sigh escape him. “Black tea is always the best.”

  “Mr. Shea, I saw that woman dressed as a boy.”

  “A boy?”

  “A boy in a school uniform of the English type. I saw him walking in West. This being at a time early in the summer. I saw him at once and thought, that may surely be a girl in masquerade. A beautiful being, boy or girl. More beautiful than most other beings in the Macleay.”