Marcia Carrier had not told me the real reason for Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall the day before he died. Why? I kept turning my meeting with her over in my mind. Then I went to the office and rang Detective Sergeant Michael Shea. He was out. They would pass on a message. I left my number. I was sorting out Allie’s appointments when the phone rang.
‘Shea.’
I said, ‘There’s something. Ned Lowey complained to the cops about Kinross Hall in late 1985. November. Can you check that?’
Silence. He cleared his throat. ‘November ’85? Why the fuck would I want to check that?’
‘You might find out something.’
There was a long silence. I could hear traffic noises. Then he said, ‘I’m the policeman.’
‘Trying to help,’ I said. ‘Don’t want that, fine.’
Silence again. Someone said something in the background. Probably skinhead Cotter. ‘Get back to you,’ Shea said.
In the half-awake dawn, rain hissing in the downpipes, I lay on my back and, for the first time in years, thought about the old life. When I’d come to my father’s house and the smithy to stay, I had schooled myself to shy away from thinking about my recent past until the people in it seemed unreal and unimportant, as if I’d created them or seen them in a film. In my mind, I called that the old life. I wanted a new life, a life among ordinary people, people like Ned and Stan Harrop and Flannery. Now Ned’s death had shaken everything loose and I didn’t try to fight the thoughts.
The old life. It had been my life for thirteen years. The old life. The Job. The endless, seamless job that had no clear beginning and was never finished. ‘Your job!’ Susan had screamed one night. ‘Don’t call it your fucking job! It’s not a job. It’s your fucking life! It’s your fucking personality! It’s you. It’s what you are. You don’t exist without it. There isn’t anything fucking else in your world, don’t you understand that?’
I did understand that. And then again I didn’t. Not that it made any difference. She left me anyway. I came home one day and she was on the pavement putting suitcases into her car. It was a sunny day in early spring and, from a full block away, I saw the gold of her hair catch the light. A flash, like sun on a helmet.
Another departure. My whole life seemed to be about departures. My father and I changing towns every year or two, the two of us packing everything into the truck, sometimes no-one to say goodbye to, driving away from some forlorn fibro house in the grey dawn. I used to put myself to sleep thinking about the towns, trying to picture the few friends I’d made. Wal in Cunnamulla who gave me a Joseph Rodgers pocketknife. Sleepy-eyed Gibbo in St George whose mother always wanted to feed me. Russell in Baradine whose dog had spotty pups. For many years, I had the feeling that it was vitally important to keep the memories of these and other people and places alive. To let them fade away would somehow be an act of betrayal, of disloyalty. Perhaps this was because I had no recollection of my mother, and I felt that this was somehow my fault, as if I had not cared enough about her, as if I had cast her off, thrown away her memory. Your mother. Other people’s mothers ask you about your mother. The fathers ask: ‘So what’s yer father do?’
Why did we keep moving? I never really understood. I asked my father once, one night in my first university vacation, watching him work in the smithy. He didn’t stop what he was doing. After a while, he said, ‘Never wanted to stop anywhere long after I lost your mum.’ There was a long silence, then he said, ‘Nothin’s forever, John. Enjoy what you can and don’t be scared to move along.’
Before I was in my teens, I could tell when we were going to move. My father became morose, pacing around at night, not fishing, not reading, saying things like: ‘Jesus, imagine endin up in a dump like this.’ Once that started, it was over. Mentally, he was already somewhere else. It only remained for me to tell the teacher and get my sealed envelope. And prepare myself for the fight.
That’s the thing I remember most clearly about the string of tiny towns that looked as if they’d been dumped on the site from the air. The fight in the first week. They trailed you after school like mongrels following a bitch on heat. Big boys, small boys, fat boys, thin boys, all aroused by the prospect of violence, strutting, jostling. You walked on, whole body tense, heart like a piston in your chest, feeling them getting closer, half hearing the taunts through the blood noise in your head. Then someone would try to trip you, usually a small one, over-excited, wide-eyed, flushed. Or a few would run past you, turn and block your path or dawdle along, finally stopping. That was the moment.
By the time I was twelve, I’d learned to short-circuit the process, stop, turn, issue the challenge, draw out some pale-eyed, mouth-breathing boy, spitty lips, hands too big for his wrists. You couldn’t win these fights. Some bigger boy always dragged you off if you got the upper hand. But what my father taught me was that you had to show the whole baying mob that you were a dangerous person, a person prepared to kick, bite, pull hair, tear ears, gouge eyes, squeeze testicles, anything. ‘Don’t worry about fair,’ he said. ‘Dangerous is what you want to be. Go mad. Nobody wants to fight a mad person. Nobody wants fingers stuck up his nose.’
He was right. He also taught me the barfighters’ tricks: the quick chest shoves to get the opponent off balance, the heel scraping down the shin and stamping on the instep, the Adam’s apple punch, the thumbs pressing under the ears, the chop under the nose, the many painful uses of the elbow, the double ear slap, the protruding knuckle in the chestbone. I learned these things and I survived.
Ned Lowey. In all this movement, this rootlessness, this life in shabby houses and scuffed caravan parks and shearers’ quarters that smelled of sweat and ashes, Ned Lowey was the still point. We were on our way to another town, another fight, another departure, when I met him for the first time. It must have been some time after my ninth birthday, but I had been hearing about Ned as far back as I could remember, things like ‘We need bloody Ned Lowey for work like this’, or ‘Here’s a little trick Ned Lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘Back Ned Lowey ridin sidesaddle against this lot’. We drove into Ned’s backyard and he came out and shook hands with my father. They stood there smiling and slapping each other’s arms.
‘This is the young fella,’ my father said. ‘John. We named him for the wife’s father.’ I remember my surprise at two things. One was that Ned was Aboriginal. My father had never mentioned it. The other was that Ned Lowey was not a giant. I remember that he took me by the shoulders, picked me up and held me to his chest. Then we went into the house to meet his wife. She was sitting in a patch of sun in the kitchen, not doing anything, a gaunt woman with faded blonde hair. I knew without being told that there was something wrong with her.
Ned Lowey. I shook the thoughts away and got up. By seven am, I was in the smithy getting ready to start work on Frank Cullen’s latest contraption. Frank inherited the huge property that had been in his wife’s family, the Pettifers, for generations. That was the end of farming. Now he spent all his time designing strange and usually counterproductive devices. Every six months or so, he came in with a set of plans for another machine that was going to change the face of rural life. The first one I made for him was designed to help elderly farmers mount horses. It featured a hydraulic piston and was said to have enabled the test jockey to mount a tree. The latest one was a sort of tray on wheels that fitted on the back of a ute. By fitting tracks, the tray could be run off the back and loaded. A winch operated by the driver then pulled it back up.
‘Came to me in a flash, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t think why no-one’s ever thought of it.’
‘Takes a special kind of mind,’ I said.