Peter Temple - White Dog

I waited until they passed before getting out. It was a raw day, icy air smelling of wood fires and damp and turned earth. In the Balmoral bar, a sad place of fake wood, formica, split plastic seats extruding yellow foam, the smell was of fried onions, cigarette smoke and something chemical, carpet cleaner perhaps, sickly. There were five customers, an old woman at a table by herself, two wizened men at the bar, a man and a woman playing pool. She was shooting, leaning over the table and showing a roll of naked fat the colour of porridge above huge buttocks sausaged inside stretch pants.

I went to the bar. The barman was side-on to me, head tilted, listening to a small radio on the bottle shelf. I looked at my watch: the first race at Moe, first of four maidens, all hope and no pedigree. I didn’t bother him, turned my back and looked around, stopped short of the buttocks and came back along the photographs on the wall. Football teams.

‘Fuckin nag,’ said the barman.

The race was over. He had the long, choleric, dog-jowled face of an eighteenth-century hanging judge, all he needed was the horsehair wig to cover his moulted scalp.

‘Good-day,’ I said. ‘I’m having trouble finding street signs.’

‘Yeah?’ Eyes just red slits, weeping.

‘I’m looking for Eales Street.’

‘Yeah? Drinkin?’

‘No thanks. Just looking for help.’

‘Not the fuckin tourist bureau here, mate. Fuckin pub.’

He went off down the counter, turned right through a doorway. He had a limp.

‘Eales,’ said the nearest of the wizened men. ‘Say Eales?’

‘Yes. Eales.’

He gave me a good examination. ‘Bank,’ he said. He looked vaguely fishy, head rising to a point, no dip between forehead and broad nose, mouth lipless.

I registered. ‘No. It’s a family matter. No trouble involved.’

The man beyond him was leaning forward to look at me, alert eyes in a face like a thrashed golf ball. ‘Ballick, right?’ he said.

‘Right. Mrs Ballich.’ I said the name as he had.

The men looked at each other, nodded, pleased.

‘How did you know?’ I said.

They turned to me, Fish and Golfball.

‘The girls, not so?’ said Fish.

‘Janene,’ I said.

Golfball made a whistling sound. ‘Janene,’ he said. ‘She come in here one day, back from Melbin with this other sheila, this bloke, flash car. Big bloke, mind you. Like that Rocca.’

‘Soft,’ said Fish. ‘Soft. Wog. Had the wog look. Pissweak wogs. Wogs and Abos. No guts.’

‘Well, the wogs run, din they?’ said Golfball, eyes on me, waiting. ‘In the war.’

‘That’s possible,’ I said.

‘Like dogs,’ said Fish. ‘Bloody pathetic. Our fellas coulda shot em up the arseholes. Showed mercy they did. Up the arseholes, crawlin. Like dogs.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘Eales Street. Which one is that?’

Golfball waved to his left. ‘Last one,’ he said. ‘Last on the right. The young bitch gone off too now. Darwin, they say.’

‘Bloody good riddance,’ said Fish. ‘She’s a lowie, deadset. Pulled fellas like a bitch on heat, they come from bloody miles around, lizards damn near pokin out.’

‘All Abos and chinks,’ said Golfball. ‘Darwin. Me Uncle Ross was up there once. White man’s grave he used to say.’

‘Piss artist, your Uncle Ross,’ said Fish. ‘Still, hadda beat his liver to death with a stick.’ He eyed me. ‘Door open and engine goin, mate. Mary Ballick’s run outta roots in this town. She’d be hungry.’

The barman appeared, he’d had another drink in the back. ‘Still here?’ he said. ‘Still not fuckin drinkin?’

I took out a fifty-dollar note and put it on the counter. ‘These helpful gentlemen are a credit to your lovely town,’ I said.

He looked at the money, frowned.

I beckoned. He hesitated, came closer. I looked into his eyes of red. ‘Give them whatever they’re drinking, judge,’ I said. ‘And don’t keep the change. Clear to you?’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

It took me two minutes to get to Mary Ballich’s house, a weatherboard standing behind a wire fence on a bare block, nothing growing except couch grass and weeds and moss and fuzzy grey mould on hundreds of dog turds. The house’s white paint was almost gone, the naked wood turned grey. Smoke lisped from a brick chimney that had lost most of its mortar and would fall down in a high wind one day soon, some soot-blackened bricks would go through the rusted corrugated iron, through the lath and plaster ceiling.

An old orange Corolla with a savage list to starboard stood in front of a fibreboard garage it had never called home.

I parked outside the front gate, half open, leaning, its hinge post broken at the base, and got out.

The rain had stopped but the wind had picked up, coming over the featureless green undulations with a whooing sound that acted on the brain the way organ dirges did. I went up the cracked concrete, stepped up to the verandah, avoiding a collapsed plank. The verandah felt unsteady, nails loose in rain-eroded boards. I stood before a screen door with holes in the flywire of the upper panels. They had the look of holes punched — drink and testosterone holes. I opened the door and the dents in the front door said mine was not an unreasonable assumption.

I could hear the television inside. I knocked, knocked again, less politely. After a while, I hit the door a few times with four knuckles and waited. It opened.

‘Yeah?’ A woman, short, plump, face pink with new makeup.

‘Mrs Ballich?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Jack Irish. I spoke to you…’

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Didn’t think you’d be early.’

In the passage, we shook hands. She was in the last phase of pretty, doll-like, a small nose, rosebud lips.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, smoke and alcohol and mint toothpaste on her breath. ‘Back room’s warm, almost bloody warm, this fucking place.’

I followed her, walking on nylon carpet, feeling the sag of the floorboards. Down there in the underfloor, the stumps would be rotten, the air would smell of decaying wood, damp earth, of fluids leached through carpet and underfelt, there would be chewed bones and the skeletons of small creatures. It would be icy cold, cold a hundred sunless years in the making.

The back room had been two rooms once, the kitchen and something else, floors not level. Knocking out a wall left gaps, patched with whatever came to hand. A fire was burning in the kitchen hearth, logs smouldering, more smoke than heat. The curtains were drawn, two overhead lights on, one a pink plastic chandelier.

‘Whole fucking day to warm up,’ said Mary Ballich. She picked up a remote control from a chair, pressed several buttons before the television died. ‘Fire goes out, place’s a fucking freezer inside ten minutes. Start again next day. Sit down, have a seat.’

I had the choice of a squat leather chair, its arms folded and held down with buckles, and an old office chair. I sat on the office chair. Mary went to a counter, a two-litre cask of wine on it, wet circle on the carpet below the nozzle. She showed me a glass, half full, yellow liquid in a Vegemite container given a second life.

‘Little heartstarter,’ she said. ‘Shit, I slept so fucking bad, I can’t tell you. Take a wine?’

‘A small one,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

She found another Vegemite glass for me, filled it from the tap. I got up to take it from her.

‘Cheers,’ she said and went back to get hers, lit a cigarette, offered me the pack. I shook my head. She sat down on the yellow leather couch. It sighed.

‘A lawyer,’ she said. ‘Didn’t get the other bit.’

‘I’m acting for someone in a criminal matter. Janene’s name came up as a possible witness. I found out she was a missing person, so I rang all the Ballichs in the book.’