Peter Temple - White Dog

I left the table and went to the sitting room and rang Bendsten Associates, gave my name to the brisk person, Simone came on.

‘Don’t tell me this is the damn-soon call?’ she said.

‘Not just yet.’

I gave the name Dilthey in Brisbane. It took very little time.

‘Just the one,’ she said. ‘K. J. Dilthey. You do know that you can find out this kind of information yourself by asking directory inquiries? I have to charge you.’

‘I prefer your voice recognition software,’ I said. ‘Number?’

I rang it. A woman answered. I asked for Mr Dilthey.

‘He’s not really up to it,’ she said. ‘I’m the day nurse.’

‘I’m ringing from the probate office of the Supreme Court in Melbourne,’ I said, lying without effort. ‘It’s about his son’s estate. Our understanding is that Mr Dilthey is Wayne’s sole heir but we’ve had an inquiry from someone else. You don’t happen to know whether there are other relatives, do you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but hang on, I’ll ask the lady next door, she knows everything, been there for yonks.’

‘I’ll hold,’ I said.

I drank the last of the tea. There was a sparrow on the windowsill, pecking hopefully. I should put out crumbs. Isabel always emptied the breadboard tray onto the windowsill. Surely this bird could not remember that?

‘You there?’

‘I am.’

‘She says there’s a daughter. Teresa. She’s Wayne’s twin. She got pregnant and had a big fight with her dad and she left. She says she thinks she married him, he was a local bloke, a brickie. They left Brissie.’

‘Did she say his name?’

‘Hang on, I’ll ask.’

The sky was clouding over, platoons of puffs moving north.

‘There?’

‘Yes.’

‘His name’s Paul Milder,’ the nurse said.

I went back to Bendsten Research. ‘Paul and Teresa Milder in South Australia and WA,’ I said.

‘Hold on.’

It took Simone about two minutes. ‘There’s a P. and T. Milder in Dunsborough, Western Australia,’ she said. ‘Nothing in SA.’

I wrote down the number and the address, said thank you again. The sunlight was gone, the puff-clouds banked up, the room darker. My feeling of recovery was waning.

You don’t need to know, Barry Tregear had said. Never mind fucken certain, you don’t need to know anything.

He was right. Of course, he was right. The man slapped me at will, then he pissed on me. His piss ran through my hair, down my cheeks. I tasted it.

I couldn’t live with that. That couldn’t be the end of something.

Flying over land, the Bight behind us, dark blue and sullen from our great height, whitecaps like tiny teeth, I hired a car.

The doll-lipped, petulant cabin steward left off his hissing conversation with his colleague to become attentive and obliging, succeeded in cranking me up a vehicle notch, some kickback involved no doubt. I didn’t care, the whole venture was brainless enough already. What did fifty dollars matter?

The feeling of doing something stupid became stronger as I lost my way soon after leaving the Perth airport, got off the freeway and drove through endless suburbs, rows of termite-proof brick houses built on sand, all with their straggly, sagging trees, solar panels, stained concrete driveways, basketball hoops. I cursed not bringing sunglasses. The light was too bright for winter, it wasn’t really winter here, they had nothing that resembled winter, no dormant season, no time when moss grew, no dark decaying worm season when humans could stay indoors, sit before dying fires feeling cheated by fate, bad luck, bad character, bad blood, my grandfather had no doubt about the influence of bad blood. How could anyone in this climate gain a proper understanding of melancholy?

On the other hand, the locals probably didn’t miss melancholy much, enjoyed themselves outdoors all year round, wore short pants, towelling hats, sported in the warm pale-blue waters, ignored the threat of stinging creatures, shark nibbles. A lifetime of surfing was less dangerous than a single 3 am walk down King Street, Melbourne.

Eventually, and by accident, I found myself on the highway going south-west. The road was dominated by four-wheel-drives, mostly driven by impatient, angry-looking freckled men. It was a boring journey, flat landscape, sparse vegetation, turnoffs to Coolup, Wagerup, Cookernup, Wokalup, Burekup, Dardanup, Boyanup. Up, Up and Away.

Busselton was reached across what pretended to be a river, dammed near its mouth, stagnant, a suspicious green. I drove around. There was little to the town, all of it seemingly built since the 1970s: a few business streets of surf shops, two newsagents, hotels, hardware places, chemists. The seafront was largely given over to parking, tennis courts, an amusement park, a big grassed area where a man was training an alsatian to sit and stay. In the seafront cafe, I ordered a long black from a young woman with tanned pimples, streaked hair.

What to do? Knock on Teresa Dilthey Milder’s door? Ask her if she knew what had happened to Janene Ballich and Katelyn Feehan, her brother’s hookers? Why should she know?

Twins were closer than other siblings.

Stuck on her, I reckon, the cuntstruck look, pardon me.

Janene’s mother, Mary Ballich, the freezing Gippsland day, the leaky weatherboard house that was a machine for consuming fuels. The sentence that came back to me, wrapping paper floating in the wind. It had no importance, not then, not now.

‘Can I get you something else?’ The waiter.

‘Where would you stay if you were a tourist?’ I said.

‘Not worryin about money, y’mean?’

I found the recommended hostelry a few kilometres out of town, although it was impossible to know where the town ended. It was mock-Polynesian, thatched with nylon fibre, built on the narrow strip of sand between the road and the sea.

I took my leave, went down the herringbone brick path to my tropical room. I poured half a tooth glass of Glenmorangie from Cam’s silver flask and went to bed. After I put out the light, I lay on my back and listened to the sluicing of the sea. Perhaps it was the book, perhaps it was just my cast of mind, but it was a dolorous sound, small comings and goings. I drifted away sad and uneasy.

Early in the morning, showered, I walked on the empty strip of beach left by the high tide. The day was grey, sea and sky joined seamlessly at the horizon. Away to the right, I could see the dark line of the pier. To the left, a long way away, a low blue cape came out from the land. I went that way, as far as the mouth of a narrow creek, possibly tidal, possibly some kind of drain. A man wearing a baseball cap was fishing in the creek, casting a spinner, a gleam of silver in the yellow water. He looked at me. I said good morning. He grunted.

I went back to the hotel and had breakfast in the restaurant, a meal that would not linger in my mind.

Dunsborough wasn’t far away, the road straight and flat, scrub vegetation on either side, Christian fundamentalist holiday camps, extravagant houses inside walled compounds. One monstrosity was called The Shack.

The town was brand new, built on sand, the houses on tiny plots shouting speculation. Paul Milder had presumably done well here. I found the tourist information centre and a map, found Blue Cape Crescent, six houses around a loop of tarmac a block from the sea. The houses were all built of unrendered brick and timber, angular, sharp roof lines, gardens of drab native plants and listless trees.

Number 14 had a green Forester in the driveway. The path from the street curved around a pond, nothing in it, a shallow concrete cone, and led to a big front door of jarrah, old timber, resawn, marked with bolt or spike holes. There was a bell, a small brass ship’s bell. I tolled it and didn’t have to wait long before the door opened, opened fully, the people who lived in this place were not suspicious or fearful.