Amongst other things, the engine dies. He steps from the Mitsubishi and sees the locusts crushed in the grill of the radiator. Hears the hot motor ticking. His shoes grind in the gravel at the side of the road. A barricade has been erected on the casual bend where his brother died. Reflective arrows indicating the slight camber, leaning to the left. The ditch is full. He sees that it’s actually a creek. A vein of some larger tributary that he cannot name. Hans Heysen reflections sit on the water. Reeds and flax growing thick at the edge, covering his memory of the oily gouge in the sand at the bottom. He almost doesn’t recognize the place. Everything is green. Dooley stares down at the creek, buffeted by the chilled slipstream of a passing car. He wonders what he is doing here. Is it glass or ice he sees amongst the reeds? The noise of the motor takes a long time to fade in the still air. Where is the thunder? Where is the earth cracking apart? He can actually hear birds. There seems little point in throwing his flowers into the water; they’d just float away. Or sink. So he stands them against the tree. Not that Grant, Dooley’s brother, would have cared. In life Grant had not been sentimental. He couldn’t have named a flower. Flowers were for funerals.
Dooley finds a place to cross the creek. He wants to thank the woman who’d been first on the scene; who’d been with Grant when he’d run off the road and died in the ditch. No time for euphemisms now. This is pragmatic sentiment he is exercising. In the distance a house nestles amongst some trees. He climbs beneath the top strand of barbed wire and has to unsnag his jumper. The paddock is sodden from recent rain. Distant sheep, heads down, ignore him. Old straw coloured horse pats with an icing of frost in the grass. Dooley kicks one apart and watches the worms writhe away from the light. The paddock is deceptively bigger than it looks from the road; the house much further away. He tries to avoid the puddles, some of them, in the shadows, still icy. He follows the tracks worn by sheep, but they are little rivulets, and his shoes soon become soaked. It feels strange to be in a strange field, so far from a path or a road. A dog barks at his approach before he can see it. Looking back, the tree too has diminished, no bigger than its neighbours which line the verge of the road. A postcard aquarelle. He is disturbed by the thought of the noise of the impact, how loud it must have been to carry all this way.
Masking the house are tall laurel trees. Once they’d been hacked into the semblance of a hedge, but have now outgrown any attempt to regulate it. Inside the gate a yapping Jack Russell terrier bares its needle teeth at him. A rat-dog. Dooley edges his way around it, careful not to turn his back. An old pockmarked water tank lies on its side, half filled with fire wood and sleeping snakes, no doubt. It rests near the garage like something haunted. A broken axe handle lies on top of the pile. He finds his way to the door, paint scratched to the wood at the base by the dog’s claws.
He waits for a long time, the dog sniffing at his shoes, before the door opens. The man is wearing only underpants; scratching his whiskered cheeks.
‘I’m wondering if Alison Tetley is home?’ Dooley asks feeling strangely abashed at this proximity to another man’s breasts.
‘She’s at work.’
‘Oh. At work.’
‘Yep.’
‘No matter, I just wanted to thank her.’
‘What for?’
‘She’s a nurse, isn’t she, Mrs Tetley?’
‘Yep. Thank her for what?’
‘The accident. My brother. My brother was in an accident down by the creek there.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Your wife, she was with him at the end.’
‘She’s not my wife. An accident eh? Which one was this?’
‘Six months ago. December. I don’t get down this way very often.’
Dooley turns and looks back towards the road. He feels the heat of angry tears bristling in his eyes. Anger at the injustice of being human. Still, he thinks, after all this time. This no time. He does not want to look at the man.
‘The pissed guy?’
‘No. He wasn’t drinking. It was early in the morning. Like this.’
‘There’s been a few bingles down there.’
‘I notice they’ve put up a barricade.’
‘About time. Some fool ran through it a while ago.’
‘It doesn’t look such a dangerous spot.’
‘It isn’t if you drive carefully. Corner sometimes gets icy in the shade.’
There is an awkward silence. The dog sniffs at the back of Dooley’s knees. Neither Dooley nor the man try to shoo it off. Beyond the door, Dooley hears a television.
‘Anyway I just wanted to thank Mrs - Alison for, for, I thought I’d catch her before work.’
‘It’s put her through a great deal of drama,’ the man shivers.
Dooley is aware of his gooseflesh. The dog at his shoes. He would like to kick it.
‘She said a prayer for him I understand,’
‘A prayer? Nah, not Al. Who told you that?’
‘A police officer. I forget his name.’
‘Nah. Doesn’t sound like Al. They probably always say that.’
‘It must have been very upsetting.’
‘You bet. Couldn’t sleep. Took the tow-truck ages to get the mess out of the creek.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘People should drive more carefully.’
‘Anyway, I just wanted to -’
‘I’ll tell her you came. What’s your name again?’
‘Dooley, Gerard Dooley. My brother’s name was -’
‘Dooley. Right. I’ll tell her. Get in there.’
The man edges the terrier inside with his bare foot. The dog’s tail quivers between its legs.
‘And thanks again,’ Dooley says.
‘I didn’t do anything. I was asleep.’
‘I mean thanks to Alison.'
‘Sure. I’ll pass it on.’
The man closes the door and Dooley hears him yell something at the dog. He turns through the gap in the hedge, looks down the run of conifers lining the long drive way. He climbs through the fence. Tufts of wool caught on the wire; Dooley plucks one off and smells it. The sheen of frost has begun to melt in patches. His shoes squelch across the paddock. He hears frogs. Crows. He looks at them for a while, notices other things in the paddock. Toadstools. Hoof-prints. The grey sky. He recollects that he has only ever touched a sheep once in his life. It’s quite pretty, he thinks, but for the fact that this is the worst place on earth. All his worst secrets choke in his throat.
Who could live here? Half way back he comes across the bones of a wallaby or some similar creature. Perhaps it is a sheep. A blackened parchment of hide joining the ribs into a vaguely familiar configuration. He thinks I should never have come. Why should they care? He is aware of a numbness somewhere in him, like a deprivation of his rights, when what he wants is to cling possessively to his grief. In the distance his car, forlorn in the gravel at the edge of the bitumen. His flowers look silly now, hidden by the long grass at the foot of the terrible tree. A silly gesture. Not like the cairns and wreaths and floral crosses spaced at regular intervals elsewhere along the road, all over the state, all over the country. Thin ribbons of bark hang down from the tree and gather on the ground. It had been hot when Grant died. Summer. He remembers a line of black ants silently climbing the trunk, rising higher above the turgid ditch, scourging the blossom for nectar.
Mark O'Flynn has published four collections of poems, most recently Untested Cures, (2011). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many Australian journals as well as overseas. His novels include Grassdogs (2006), and The Forgotten World, (Harper Collins, 2013). A collection of short fiction, White Light, was published by Spineless Wonders 2013.