One Boy Missing(60)

Moy stopped to think. Had he just been put in his place? I’m the detective. He wondered whether he should call him back in, dress him down. He opened his desk drawer and found the kids’ book stashed at the back. Mr Slow. He leafed through. New Year’s before he’d opened his presents. Easter before he’d written his thank-you notes. Laing had given it to him as a birthday present. With a cake, in the staff room, with everyone gathered around. They’d all laughed. He’d laughed along. But he wondered now, was this really what they thought of him? Later, a copy of Mr Forgetful. But that was somewhere in the mess at home.

Respect. He’d had it in town. But maybe this is what his colleagues thought of him now. He looked at Mr Slow, his big white moustache and yellow nose, and felt a pang of recognition.

MOY CAME AROUND the back. He tripped on a bag of fertiliser and walked past the kitchen window. He heard voices from inside the house. ‘Thirty years, maybe,’ George was saying. ‘No guarantee it’ll work anymore.’

‘Can we try?’ Patrick asked.

Moy stopped, and looked in the window. He could see that his father had cleared the kitchen table, fetched his old train set from the shed, and set it up on the dining table.

‘Perhaps you could be an engineer,’ Moy heard George say.

‘No,’ Patrick replied.

‘You’ve got your civil engineers, who make bridges and roads, chemical engineers…petrol and the like.’

‘I wouldn’t be smart enough,’ Patrick said.

‘Report card no good, eh?’

Moy could see how Patrick was looking at George. He was fascinated how the two interacted, how they ebbed and flowed, talked over each other, waited, laughed.

‘Or maybe a pilot?’ George said.

Moy could see the detail of their bodies, and clothes, highlighted by the glare off the venetian blinds.

‘No? What about a copper?’

‘That’d be okay, I guess.’

‘A detective?’

‘No, the ones with the dogs. Did you know they get to keep them? Take them home…and when the dog’s too old, they live with them.’

‘No?’

Patrick had finished the track: an elongated oval, stretching a half-inch or so over the edge of the table. He took the tunnel, wiped it down and positioned it next to George. Then he started with the legless, headless farm animals, allowing them to graze the cracked melamine. Every animal was dusted, wiped and positioned carefully. Spots were tested and rejected; angles considered; distances varied.

‘Or maybe you could be a designer?’ George continued. ‘Like your dad.’

Patrick didn’t look up from his menagerie. ‘Dad always said, you learn the job in a month and then you just keep repeating it for the next thirty years.’

George shrugged. ‘That’s most jobs. Farming, for instance. Once someone shows you how to vaccinate a lamb…or fill a seed box. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. You like eating bread, don’t you?’

‘But some jobs are different.’

‘How?’

‘Farmers get to see things grow, which is kind of cool.’

‘Cool?’

‘Yeah…but when you get a brochure, you look at it once, then you put it in the bin.’

Moy smiled. It was like watching a couple of kids play. His father, he sensed, had allowed himself to become happy, almost.

‘So Dad eventually threw it in?’ George asked.

Patrick frowned. ‘Threw it in?’

‘Gave it up? Quit?’

‘No.’

‘But what about when you moved?’

Patrick took a few moments. ‘He didn’t come with us.’

‘Ah.’

‘Coming to Guilderton, that was Mum’s idea.’

Moy tapped on the window. ‘Looks like you two are having fun?’ he said. Then he came inside, and stood looking at the evolving diorama. ‘Bloody hell, where did you find that?’ he asked, leaning against a cabinet that still displayed the best of his mum’s crockery.

‘I don’t throw nothin’,’ George explained.

‘I know,’ Moy replied. ‘Good to see you two getting along.’

‘He’s no trouble.’

‘Best to keep busy, isn’t it, Patrick?’ Moy asked.

The boy looked up at him.

‘Patrick Barnes.’ Moy stepped forward, pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘The funny thing is, you’ve got the same middle name as me: James.’

Patrick’s jaw tightened, and he played with the trees.

‘And the same as your brother, and father…Austen.’

Patrick placed his hands in his lap.

‘Austen James Barnes. And your mum, Helen, but you’ve already told me that.’