‘Shit,’ he said, standing, feeling the coffee on his legs. Darting into the bathroom, he grabbed a couple of towels and started blotting up around his improvised desk.
There was no space on his bedroom floor so he went into the hallway. He opened the folders and, one by one, took out the sheets, dried them off and lined them up on the floor. After he’d done about a dozen documents, Patrick appeared. ‘Can I help?’
‘Could you keep doing this? Most of them are just wet around the edges. It won’t take long.’
He returned to his bedroom, finished cleaning up and got dressed. Then he heard the boy take a sharp breath. There was silence, small feet running down the hallway, the fly-door slamming. He went into the hall and stood looking at the sheets of paper, some already dry, scalloped around the edges. One was sitting by itself in the middle of the hallway. Picking it up, he looked at the face of the man who’d washed up at Mangrove Point.
He folded the sheet in half, walked down the hall and from the house. ‘Patrick?’ he called, as he stood on the porch.
No reply.
‘Patrick?’
He noticed the shed door was ajar. Jumping down he walked slowly through the ankle-high grass. ‘Patrick?’ He went inside, climbed over a fallen bike and stood staring into the corner. ‘You okay?’
The boy had finished crying but was taking long, difficult breaths.
‘Watch for spiders,’ said Moy. ‘You still upset?’
‘No.’
‘I wondered what had happened.’
‘Nothing’s happened.’
He sat beside him. The iron bit into his back so he leaned forward, took the folded sheet and opened it out. ‘Maybe you know this fella?’
Patrick studied the face. ‘No.’
‘You sure?’
He grabbed the sheet, screwed it up and threw it across the shed. Moy just waited, looking at him.
‘What?’ Patrick asked.
‘Should I leave you alone?’
Shed silence. Objects still, rusted and gathering dust. No breeze. Warm air rising, encountering the roof and turning down in a kero-scented convection. Patrick said, ‘He was the man who came to our house.’
‘When was that?’
‘That morning.’
‘The day of the fire?’
Patrick stretched out his legs and sat back. ‘He came back, and me and Tom had to run.’
He told Moy about the figure in the hallway, the pushing and shoving.
‘It was him.’ He pointed to the piece of paper. ‘He was shouting at Mum, and Mum was shouting back, and Tom tried to help.’ He stopped, staring at the floor.
‘I bet you were scared. This fella…he was violent?’
‘He hit her, and she fell over, and her head…I screamed at him, I said, leave us alone, but he just stood there, looking at me.’
‘And what about Tom?’
‘He was sitting on the floor.’ He looked at Moy pleadingly. ‘The man…I hit him but he just pushed me away and I fell down too. Then he knelt down, looking at Mum.’
‘Like he was checking if she was okay?’
‘He kept feeling her neck and her hands.’
‘What, her pulse maybe?’ Moy asked, holding his wrist.
‘I think…perhaps. Then he stood up and looked at us, like he was angry. Tom said, you better not have hurt her, and he just shouted, shut up, like that, over and over.’
There was a long pause as the boy got his breath.
George came out onto the porch and called, ‘Bart, where are you?’
Moy waited, then heard his father go back inside.
‘He was angry, Bart. I thought he was going to…Then Tom said, run, and we both stood up and ran out of the house. He came after us but he wasn’t that fast. We went into the bush and just kept running until we couldn’t go any further. So we stopped…’
Moy was waiting patiently. ‘So you ran all the way to town?’
No reply.
‘This must have been early?’
‘It was. We were running through the bush and it was hard to see but Tom knew the path really well.’
‘So you made it to the laneway?’
Nothing.
Moy shrugged. ‘That’s enough for now, eh?’
Patrick just looked at him. ‘We were so scared she might not get up.’
34
MOY WENT DOWN to Mango Meats but Justin Davids was off on a delivery, so to fill the time he worked the shops again. He walked down Ayr Street, stopping to look in store windows. The Guilderton Retravision had 42-inch plasmas, surround sound, near cost, easy finance. One was showing an old black-and-white movie: a boat load of survivors floating in the Atlantic, as the radio operator, eyes ablaze, told the captain he hadn’t had time to put out an SOS.