Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“You show it to the black gins though.”

“Well, it’s a good warning for them.”

Holy hell. Did the Police Commissioner in Sydney know the random and illogical way Hanney was carrying out his orders? Should he be told?

The policeman drank down the rest of his pot. Tim had barely sipped of the sour, heavy brew from kegs shipped up aboard Burrawong . He liked rum better than ale anyhow.

“I’m getting another,” said Hanney. “You?”

Tim said no, he would hold what he had for a while. He noticed that when Mrs. Kelty refilled Hanney’s pot, there was no exchange of cash. Hanney did not expect to pay; Mrs. Kelty to receive payment. His transaction however, or lack of transaction, changed him. He came back with a strange, frank gleam on his face, and sat down. Tim no longer felt as safe with him. What sort of fellow, forced to travel to Comara in awesome heat, missed out on trying to solve his puzzle by showing Missy’s features to women?

Hanney drank again and then stared at Tim from beneath a lowered brow.

“Look, you’re very interested in this, aren’t you? Strikes me you’ve got a load of interest in this Missy. I have to wonder. Why do you keep quizzing me? A man no sooner back from Comara…”

“I have a normal desire to see the poor child finished with.”

“A normal desire, eh?”

Tim felt now an unwelcome panic in his blood. How fast a uniform would turn on a person! How it divided man from man.

Deciding not to take a step back, Tim said, “Bugger it, constable. I claim to have no more pity than other fellers. But the girl’s face struck me very hard.”

“Enough to buy a constable a bloody ale,” commented Hanney pretty much to himself. “I’ve never known anyone to take so much interest. Upriver, you show Missy and they hold their heads on the side and say no, and that’s the end, she’s forgotten, the little slut. But not you, Tim. It’s the big interest of your bloody life.”

By now the new tack had enlivened Hanney. Tim wondered how he’d not noticed before how large the man’s hands were. Shall I be able to break such a grasp?

“You have something to tell me, Paddy?”

“My name’s not bloody Paddy. I was Tim when I bought you a drink.”

The constable raised his chin and drained his glass the second time. He had a good, defiant swallow. He put the nearly finished schooner down.

“And you can buy me a drink a second time, Tim.”

Tim said, “But then I’m going to leave. Back to the store. My wife…”

“Do you think I am a leper?”

“Not on the strength of a few jars. But you’ve already started to rave.”

Men at the bar were frankly turning around now to sneer at the argument between the policeman with his poor capacity for liquor and the grocer from Central.

“If I took you in for some long questioning on the matter… do you think that would do your business any good?”

“You know it wouldn’t.”

“Well, I won’t yet anyhow. I’m too buggered.”

A blowfly distracted Hanney by swimming noisily in a little pond of ale on the table. Hanney’s gaze got stuck on that area of standing liquor, and the insect’s agitated desire to stupefy and drown itself there.

“You know, you’re a tall feller to be married to such a short woman,” he said, still watching the fly. “I’d say you’ve probably got other women. Taller girls. Missy was taller.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t have any interest in other women.”

Almost true. Mrs. Malcolm an exception. An Australian incarnation of Tennyson’s heavenly girls.

“Get me that beer though,” said Hanney. He did not seem capable now of raising his eyes from the small lake of spilled beer and the fly. Tim took both pots up to the bar. He put down a two shilling piece in front of Mrs. Kelty and said nothing.

“Mad bastard,” she said without moving her lips.

“Me or the copper?” muttered Tim. No one could hear that. “Make mine a smaller one.”

She nodded minutely, her stewed-looking brow. She was used to muttered arrangements. Kelty himself lay in the cool cellar most of the day, asleep amongst all the fermentation. Where had liquor got its reputation from, its name for joviality? Tim felt a genuine but enlarged dread taking the beer back to big Hanney, who had managed now to loll back and take thought about the ceiling. His white breeches and black boots seemed to take up a lot of space between the few tables.

“Truth is I’m like you, you hapless bastard,” Hanney said. He sat forward, applied himself and drank some more, but his mouth was sour when it rose again from the rim of the glass. He drank far too fast, but Tim wasn’t going to tell him that.

He covered his eyes with both great hands which could just as easily have taken hold of Tim and forced him into custody. Tim could hear him groaning from behind the fingers. It was a short little session of gasps, and it ended soon.

“Aaah,” said the constable, clearing his hands away from his face now. “No decent sleep, that’s the problem.”

In fact he stretched his arms straight across the table and laid his head on them and got ready to sleep.

“Dear God,” said Tim. “We must get you home.”

“Home’s not home,” Hanney murmured.

This was said not necessarily for Tim’s instruction.

The drinkers at the bar, and Mrs. Kelty herself, laughed to see the grocer trying to help the constable to his feet.

“Put the bastard in charge, Tim,” one of the men called. “Charge him with all the bloody heifers gone missing!”

It was a relief to push Hanney outside, let down the tailboard of the cart, sit the constable on the tray, jump up yourself, haul him along so that he lay flat. Bugger, his hat was still inside. Tim jumped down and walked in again and took it from the table, and that made the drinkers double up with hilarity. Tim and the hat, Victoria’s laughed-at crown on the front of it.

“Your hat,” said Tim outside again, putting it in beside prone Constable Hanney.

Then tether the weary police horse to the tailboard. No mockery echoed out here, in this silent, stolid air.

Now they started off for Hanney’s house in Cochrane Street. Slow, slow. No quick pace likely. They waded through swamps of light towards Central but turned left then. And there in Kemp Street, Habash’s wagon parked. Habash labouring out of a house carrying three bolts of linen he’d taken in there for some wife’s consideration. Habash stood still with his eyes lit.

“Mr. Shea,” he called tentatively.

Tim shook the reins. Pee Dee increased his pace a little. Gracious of the bugger!

Habash of course saw the prone constable in the back.

“But what are you doing, Mr. Shea?”

“Taking Constable Hanney home. He grew sick upriver.”

“Ever the man of mercy, old chap,” Habash yelled after him. “You see. Ever the man!”

“Go to buggery!” Tim called.

They rounded the corner of Cochrane and he pulled up outside the right house. A dreary little weatherboard place, with a low-slung verandah, the designated house for New South Wales constables of police.

Missy’s unreliable constable. Missy’s berserk officer of peace. Who showed her to some, protected her from others. Ease him down and prop him up and take the side gate. Then there could be at the front door no problem or scene observable from the street. Let it be backyard drama, if there had to be a drama. Backyard smells—shit and creosote from the jakes, a sourness from the refuse pile, a fragrance of split wood from the pyramidal woodheap.

Tim didn’t have to knock. Large Mrs. Hanney appeared at the door and advanced down the steps. She had delicate shoulders, spacious hips, and wore the broiled complexion which suited the season and which all citizens were wearing. Macleay fashions.