Peter Corris: Aftershock

Helen Broadway. I hadn’t seen her for three years but sometimes I dreamed that we were still together and laughing at something, walking somewhere, making love in one of the many ways. I never knew whether to call these good dreams or bad. They left me feeling thinned out and desperate. The antidote was to think of our last fight, over commitment and priorities and how hopeless it had all been. It was a jolt to hear her name being spoken by a stranger. I wrote ‘referred by H. Broadway’ in block capitals on the pad and tried to switch the past off and tune in to the present. ‘Tell me what you told her, Mr Jacobs.’

As a story-teller, Horrie Jacobs was a good miner. He started well back from the work-face with an account of how he met his mate, Oscar Bach. ‘He was a funny bloke, Oscar. I met him on Dudley beach, fishing. I’m a keen beach fisherman, see? Oscar was a new chum but he got the hang of it pretty quick. We caught some bloody huge bream and flathead, me and Oscar. He was a bit impatient, wouldn’t look for the gutter, properly. Couldn’t wait to get his line in. I showed him a few things. He loved catching fish.’

I felt I had to steer things a little. ‘Was he a miner, too?’

‘Oscar? No fear. I tried to take him down the pit once, just to show him how it was. He stepped into the cage and stepped straight out again. Couldn’t face it. No, Oscar had his own business. He was in the pest control game. You know, spraying and laying down poison for cockroaches and that. He was in it in a small way, but he did all right. Just rented a cottage in Dudley, nothing flash. He didn’t like the work much, especially getting under houses, but he was his own boss and he liked that.’

Horrie Jacobs lit another cigarette and gazed in the direction of my single window. As it happened, he was looking north and that was where his thoughts were. ‘We were good mates, me and Oscar, for going on five years. I’d been a bit short of friends ever since I gave up the grog. Miners, you know, they all drink like crazy. When you stop, you lose your mates.’

I nodded. I could easily imagine it happening. One of the reasons I’ve never stopped.

‘I had to stop. I was getting a belly, couldn’t work properly. The wife hated it. So, I stopped. Oscar didn’t touch it. Never had. Said he didn’t like the taste. He was a bit of a fitness fanatic, too. Walked everywhere. I don’t suppose you know Dudley?’

‘No. What’s it near?’

‘Redhead.’

‘I’ve surfed there. Years ago.’

‘Yeah, big surfing beach. Dudley’s different. Couldn’t even drive to it till a couple of years ago when they put a dirt road in. Still doesn’t get a lot of use. It’s all recreation reserve around there, the foreshore and that. You can stand on parts of Dudley beach and not see anything man-made. Anyway, I’d drive down to where the track starts and walk to the beach. Fifteen minutes down the track. Oscar’d walk from home every time. Put another fifteen minutes on the time to get there. And he’d always walk back, wouldn’t accept a lift. Big bloke, very strong. Twenty years younger than me.’

I had a picture of the two men, old and middle-aged, tiny and large, the quintessential Australian and the man with the European name. Bach. What was that? What nationality was the composer? German? And Jacobs? Was that Jewish? Was the picture even more bizarre than I first thought? ‘Are you having some sort of dispute with Mr Bach, Mr Jacobs?’

His eyebrows shot up and he almost choked on the cigarette. ‘Me and Oscar? Never. Best of mates. Never had a blue. Not once. ‘Course the wife didn’t altogether take to him. She’s a bit on the old-fashioned side, May. Oscar being a German was a bit of a trouble to her. She lost some family in the war.’

I could see that Horrie was going to tell the story in his own way at his own pace. I wrote May Jacobs on the pad and put German alongside Bach’s name. Johann Sebastian. Of course, what else could he be. ‘But that didn’t worry you?’

Horrie butted the cigarette only half-smoked, as before. ‘Me? No. I worked on the Snowy River scheme with blokes from all over the world-Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, you name it. Good blokes and bastards, same as us. Oscar was a good bloke.’

He reached into the breast pocket of his suit coat and took out a leather wallet. From the wallet he extracted a newspaper clipping. He unfolded it and pushed it across the desk to me. The clipping was from the Newcastle Herald of 3 July. It was a report on the opening of the inquest into the deaths caused by the Newcastle earthquake. The bulk of the report focussed on those killed within seconds of 10.27 a.m., when the quake hit, in the collapse of the Workers’ Club in the city centre. Also under enquiry were the deaths of two men and a woman caused by falling glass and masonry in Hamilton and that of Oscar Bach, forty-eight, who had died when part of a church had fallen on him Mr Bach had been treating the church’s foundations for pest infestation at the time. The bit about Bach had been underlined.

I scanned the clipping quickly. It looked as if a lot of the blame was going to fall on the city fathers who’d put in unstable land fills in the Newcastle area. Safe target. I’d followed the inquest in a random way at the time and remembered these findings. I hadn’t remembered the name of Oscar Bach. If I’d been running a modern, high-tech operation I’d have passed the clipping over to a secretary to run through the Nashua. Not here in St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst. I returned the clipping and was encouraged to see that Horrie had put a cheque book on the desk beside his wallet. ‘That must have been a shock,’ I said. ‘To lose a friend like that.’

‘That’s the point, mate. I didn’t lose him like that. I saw Oscar Bach alive and well at 10.32. That’s five minutes after the bloody earthquake.’

I sat up straight in my chair and took a new look at Horrie Jacobs. An ex-miner with a weatherbeaten face. What did that mean? Nothing. He was a fisherman as well as a miner. What sort of a miner forms a friendship with a German pest controller? I brushed that one aside immediately. One of the few Australian historians I’d ever read was Manning Clark and his remark that ‘life was immense’ had always struck me as true. Friendships could be as various as anything else. Horrie Jacobs’ old, pale eyes bored steadily into me. ‘That’s the problem, Mr Hardy. My mate Oscar didn’t die in the earthquake. Someone killed him and put him down in all that busted up brick and mortar under the church. But no-one’ll listen to me.’

‘Let’s tackle it from the official angle first,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying this is the right angle. Just that it’s best to see how the system’s dealt with it.’

‘The system’s shoved it under the bloody carpet,’ Horrie muttered.

‘What did the inquest find?’

He opened the wallet again and took out another clipping. He looked at it and shook his head. ‘Death by misadventure. Want to see?’

‘Not now. Did you give evidence, Mr Jacobs?’

‘No. That’s the snag. I rushed off to see that May was all right. Some silly bugger ran into me and I finished up in hospital with cuts and concussion. I was out of it for a few days. When I came around I was worried about May more than myself. But she was okay. I’m not as young as I used to be and I’ve got plenty of money. They cotton-woolled me for a while. It was a week or more before I heard that Oscar had been killed in the quake. I tried to tell them that was bullshit, but they wouldn’t listen. Not even May believed me. They reckoned the car accident had scrambled my brains. Do I sound confused to you?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’