Gift of the Gab (9 page)

If you want to find out the truth, play a mouth­organ in a cemetery, that's my advice.

I started playing mine to cheer myself up. And to let Mum know I wasn't beaten.

I can only play part of one tune. Dad taught me ‘Waltzing Matilda' on the plane over, but we'd only got halfway through when the flight attendant took the mouth-organ away and locked it up till we'd landed.

I was sitting next to the grave, sadly playing half of ‘Waltzing Matilda' for about the sixth time, when a small black dog ran up and sat in front of me. It gazed up, panting happily.

I stopped playing.

The dog jumped up and barked.

It wouldn't stop. I decided to try and distract it so I started playing again.

The dog sat down and listened contentedly.

Despite everything that had happened, I started grinning. A French dog that liked ‘Waltzing Matilda'. Weird. Trouble was, every time I grinned I had to stop playing and every time I stopped playing the dog started barking.

After a while I realised someone was standing behind me, watching.

I stood up.

It was an old bloke, even older than Grandad. He was so frail, his clothes looked like they were propping him up.

He was smiling.

‘Her favourite tune,' he said, nodding towards the dog. At least I think that's what he said. ‘I play the record for her all the time at home.'

I stared at him.

Not because it's unusual to play records to dogs.

Because he was speaking with his hands.

‘You speak sign,' I said. Then I stuffed my hands in my pockets. I hate it when they embarrass me by saying really obvious things.

The old bloke's smile faded. ‘When I was very young there was a battle near our house. A banana exploded too close. It blew up my ears.'

Some of his hand-movements were a bit different to the ones I know, but I got the gist. I was pleased to see his ears were still in one piece. On the outside, at least.

I pulled my hands out of my pockets. ‘How did you know I speak sign?' I asked.

He frowned at me, thinking.

‘Fry them with garlic and onions,' he said.

I realised we had a bit of a language problem. I asked him again, making my hand-movements slow and big.

‘Ah, I understand,' he said, making his slow and big too. ‘How do I know you speak sign? I know much about you Australian visitors. I watch people's lips. I have been hoping to meet you. I love all Australians.'

Boy, I thought. You obviously haven't met Dermot Figgis or Darryn Peck.

The old bloke's face wrinkled into a scowl and for a sec I thought he had.

Then he said, ‘Nobody told me about the party at the cafe last night.' He sighed and gave a shrug. ‘Perhaps it's because they know that me and Simone go to bed at seven-thirty.' He patted the dog.

‘Why do you like Australians?' I asked.

‘Come,' he said. ‘I will show you.'

He led me out of the cemetery and across a big paddock. It was a long, slow, muddy walk.

Probably the best long, slow, muddy walk I've been on in my life.

While we walked, the old bloke told me how during World War One the town was attacked by a German sausage. That's what I thought he said. Then I realised he'd said German army.

There were French soldiers defending it, he went on, and English, but mostly Australian.

Suddenly he stopped.

We were at the other side of the paddock. Running along by the fence was a deep trench, too wide to jump across. I could tell it was old from the weeds and rain gullies in the dirt walls. Parts of it had caved in, but other parts were about twenty times as deep as Erin's sandpit at home.

It would have taken some digging.

For a sec I thought the old bloke was going to tell me the town people dug it in the war to work off the stress of being attacked by the Germans.

He didn't.

‘Australians dug that,' he said. ‘The Australian soldiers who saved the town.'

He had tears on his cheeks.

I didn't blame him. I'd cry too if Australian soldiers saved my mum and dad.

Then it hit me.

Of course.

That's why everyone here's been so kind to me and Dad. They must treat all Aussies that way. To say thanks for saving their town.

I sat down at the edge of the trench, weak with relief.

Dad didn't do a deal with the local council after all. The reason they look after Mum's grave is gratitude for the war.

The dog was licking my face, probably hoping I'd play ‘Waltzing Matilda'.

I was so happy I almost did.

Then I remembered a couple of things and my lips went too stiff to get a note out of the mouth-organ even if I'd wanted to.

One, Mum's killer is still at large.

Two, the old bloke's an expert on Australian visitors.

I looked up at him. My hands were shaking but I got them under control.

‘Do you know who killed my mother?' I asked.

The old bloke wiped his eyes on a hanky and looked at me for a long time. At first I didn't think he'd understood me. I pulled Erin's rag doll and plastic car out of my pocket and made a little road in the dirt and crashed the car into the doll and knocked her down.

I hated doing it but I had to be sure he understood.

I did it again.

I only stopped when I couldn't see for tears.

I felt something being pressed into my hand. It was the old bloke's hanky. I wiped my eyes and gave it back to him.

He gestured for me to hand him my notebook.

I did.

He wrote something and handed it back.

Even before I made out the words I saw it was a name and address. I jumped up and threw my arms round the old bloke and hugged him.

He looked startled, but I think he liked it.

Thank you, my hug said. Thank you, thank you, thank you for finally telling me the name of the man who killed my mum.

I looked at the name and address.

Boy, was I totally and completely wrong.

It's a woman.

I stood by the trench in a daze, dog dribble drying on my face, staring at my notebook.

My brain felt like stewed apple.

I don't remember saying goodbye to the old bloke and the dog. I was too busy getting used to what he'd just told me.

That the person who killed Mum wasn't the stupid, careless, hairy-knuckle cowboy hoon I'd imagined – it was a woman called Michelle Solange.

That felt very weird.

Michelle has always been one of my favourite names.

I had a pet rat once called Michelle.

Stop it, I told myself. Pull yourself together. Because it doesn't make any difference.

If she's Mum's killer, I'm going to bring her to justice. And if I can lay my hands on a decent quantity of rotting apples, I'm going to teach her car a lesson too.

First I went back to Mum's grave to let her know that everything's under control.

Then I went into town to the tourist map. I found the killer's street. It's on the northern edge of town.

I was about to head over there when I remembered Dad. I'd told him I was going for a walk hours ago.

I imagined him sitting by the window at Mr and Mrs Bernard's, pulling threads out of the carpet and chewing them, which is what he usually does when he gets worried sick.

Suddenly I felt really bad.

I'd been really unfair to Dad, thinking he'd done a deal with the council and losing respect for him like that.

He'd probably wanted to expose Mum's killer but had been scared to in case the locals got angry and yelled at him for lowering the tone of the district. Then he'd have had the Australian embassy yelling at him for lowering the popularity of Aussie tourists in the district.

It must be really scary, having people angry and yelling at you when that's all your father ever did.

Poor Dad, I thought.

I decided not to go straight to the killer's house.

I decided to go to Mr and Mrs Bernard's first and give Dad a hug.

I wish now I hadn't.

At Mr and Mrs Bernard's place the kitchen was empty. I couldn't see Dad anywhere. I hoped he wasn't out leading a search party.

Then I heard voices coming from the lounge-room.

I opened the door and stepped in.

And froze.

Sitting on the settee, next to Mrs Bernard, was the young woman in pink jeans. Next to her was Mr Didot. Opposite them were Mr and Mrs Rocher from the sausage shop.

They were all staring at me.

Every single one of them looked awkward and uncomfortable.

I thought it must have been because they were all detectives and I'd just blown their cover as nice, concerned local citizens. Then I noticed they weren't jumping on me and arresting me to stop me getting at Mum's killer.

I was confused.

I took a step back.

None of them moved.

I had to find out what was going on.

I wish now I hadn't. I wish now I'd run out of the house and gone straight to the killer's place.

Instead I grabbed my notebook and wrote in big letters ‘WHO ARE YOU?' and thrust it at the pink-jeans woman. Mrs Bernard looked at it and translated.

The pink-jeans woman stood up and held her arms out as if she was going to hug me.

I hadn't expected that. I took another step back.

The pink-jeans woman opened her mouth to speak. Mrs Bernard grabbed her arm. She said something to the woman in French. The only word I understood was Dad's name.

The pink-jeans woman gave me a sad, worried look and sat back down.

Mr Didot and Mr and Mrs Rocher were giving me sad, worried looks too.

I wanted to jump on the coffee table and scream ‘WHAT'S GOING ON?'

As it turned out I didn't need to.

Mrs Bernard took my hands in hers and stroked them gently.

‘Your father is upstairs,' she said. ‘He wants to see you.'

My brain was racing as I went upstairs. Why was everyone looking so sad and worried? Had Dad been offered a recording contract by a French CD company? Had the sausages I'd left outside the post office gone mouldy and someone had eaten them and was suing us?

When Dad opened his door I saw it was much worse than that.

Dad had been crying and he only cries at Disney movies or when things are really, really crook.

‘Rowena,' he said, ‘I've had some rough news.'

He made me sit on the bed and put his arm round me.

My mind was in a panic.

Was someone sick?

Had someone died?

‘Claire rang,' he went on. ‘She's had a letter from the TV people. They've come up with some more evidence.'

Dad's voice wobbled as he said evidence, which made my guts wobble too.

‘Claire faxed the new evidence to her old science teacher at uni,' continued Dad, ‘and he reckons it's kosher.'

I didn't know what kosher was, but Dad's strangled voice was enough to give me a knot in the guts bigger than Western Europe.

‘Love,' said Dad, ‘it looks like the TV people were right about those sprays. The ones I used before you were born. They probably did what the TV people said they did. They probably stuffed your throat up.'

My brain went to stewed apple again.

Dad started crying again.

I sat there numb, while Dad sobbed, ‘I'm sorry, I didn't know,' over and over into my hair.

Then he sat up and wiped his tears and gripped my shoulders and put his face close to mine.

And softly started to sing.

He sang one of my favourite songs, ‘I Love You More Than Pickled Onions', and he's never sung it with more emotion in his voice, but I didn't want to hear it.

By the end of the first verse I was feeling sick and dizzy.

I pulled away from Dad and told him I needed to lie down, and left him there and came to my room.

It's not fair.

Dads shouldn't do this to kids.

Tell them this sort of news.

No kid wants to feel angry and let down and violent towards her own dad.

Luckily I don't have to.

Luckily I'm using all my anger up on someone else.

A woman who I'll be going to visit in another hour or so, just as soon as I'm sure everyone in the house is asleep.

A woman who has brought misery and sadness and loneliness and grief into the life of an innocent child.

A woman who deserves to die.

The gun was old.

And heavy.

When I lifted it off the wall of Mr Bernard's workshop, I nearly pulled a muscle.

I didn't care.

It was big.

The barrel was long.

It looked like it could shoot a hole in a fridge. Or a cowardly hit-and-run driver.

Which was exactly what I needed.

It even had a convenient strap for slinging it over your shoulder. I slung it over my shoulder. The wooden part smacked against some hanging cheeses.

I snapped my torch off and held my breath, hoping I hadn't woken anyone up.

It didn't sound as though I had.

Then I saw a dark shape behind the workshop door.

One of the good things about having a dud throat is you can't scream with terror and wake the whole street up.

Inside my head, though, I yelled good and loud.

Then I realised it was just a coat.

A big, old, heavy coat hanging inside the door.

It was as thick as a doormat and I nearly dislocated a shoulder getting it on, and as I walked it dragged on the ground behind me.

But it completely covered the gun. I checked in the hall mirror as I crept out of the house. Only really dumb kids carry big guns along streets at two in the morning without hiding them under coats.

Boy, those World War One soldiers must have had serious muscles to carry those guns.

By the time I'd lugged mine about two kilometres down the road towards the killer's place, I felt like I was carrying a sink.

Even the bullet in the coat pocket was starting to feel heavy. There'd been three in the display case on Mr Bernard's wall. I was glad I'd only brought one.

One was all I'd need.

Then I saw it, up ahead, glowing white in the moonlight behind some dark bushes.

The killer's house.

Her bushes weren't carved into any shapes. She obviously didn't want to draw attention to herself. I didn't blame her. If I'd killed an innocent member of the public, I wouldn't want to win gardening competitions either.

I checked that the number on the gatepost matched the number in my notebook.

It did.

My guts tightened and suddenly the gun didn't feel so heavy.

I crept past the bushes.

There were no lights on in the house.

I tried the front door. It was locked.

I moved as quietly as I could round to the back. Country people hardly ever lock their back doors, it's a known fact. This place was on the edge of town about half a kilometre from any other houses. I hoped the killer thought it was the country.

She didn't. The back door was locked.

OK, I thought, a window.

I can get through really small windows. Once on Dad's birthday I snuck in through our toilet window with his present. A long-handled toilet brush is almost as big as a rifle.

I moved down the other side of the house looking for an open window.

I wish I hadn't done that.

I really wish I hadn't.

Because that's where it happened.

I found a window. It was only open a bit, but I was able to get my hand in and release the catch and swing it open.

Peering in, I saw a figure asleep in bed. I could just make out a frilly bed cover. And a frilly dressing gown hanging on the wardrobe door.

My heart was thudding like a battlefield.

I took the bullet from the coat pocket.

I looked at it in the moonlight.

This bullet, I thought, is going to get justice for our family.

When I climb through that window, and wake her up, and point the gun at her, and she sees me loading it with a bullet, she'll know I mean business.

With a bit of luck I won't have to pull the trigger and give away that the gun doesn't actually work and the bullet's just a replica.

With a bit of luck she'll write out a confession so fast she'll need a non-skip ballpoint.

That's what was supposed to happen.

Instead, before I even got one leg through the window, the person in bed rolled over so her sleeping face was in a patch of moonlight.

I stared, my brain spinning.

It was a kid.

A girl of about my age.

She couldn't be the killer. She'd only have been a baby when Mum was killed. She wouldn't even have been driving a pram, let alone a car.

I realised I must be looking at the killer's daughter.

I tried desperately to stop the pictures that were crowding into my head.

Me getting a confession from the girl's mother at gunpoint.

A judge reading the confession and sentencing the mother to life in a maximum security prison with no carpets.

The girl growing up without a mum.

Just like me.

That's when I started trembling.

That's when I knew I couldn't do it.

And that's when I heard the vehicle.

I spun round, peering through the bushes at the headlights coming along the road towards the house.

I prayed it wasn't a police car.

It wasn't, it was an ambulance.

I prayed it would drive past.

It didn't, it stopped at the front of the house.

I ran.

The backyard was like an obstacle course with garden furniture and washing and bean poles and about a million compost heaps.

As I darted between them, the big coat flapped around my legs almost tripping me up and the gun cracked me in the knees.

I didn't dare stop and take them off.

At least when I dived over the back fence the coat helped cushion my fall onto the mud.

As I picked myself up I heard the ambulance door slam. Mr Bernard must have found the gun missing and panicked. He must have called the ambulance.

He and the other police wouldn't be far behind.

A horrible thought stabbed through me. What if stealing a gun is an even bigger crime in France than running someone over?

It could be me who ends up in the maximum security prison.

I kept on running.

I was in a big ploughed paddock with mud furrows shining in the moonlight.

Then the moon went behind a cloud.

I tripped over and sprawled face-down in the muck.

I didn't care.

Darkness was what I wanted. I picked myself up and staggered on. I felt like a big cockroach in that coat, scuttling through the blackness. Glancing anxiously behind to see if they were following me.

They weren't.

Or if they were, they were doing it with much less panting and falling over and scrambling to their feet and mud-spitting than I was.

Then I tripped for the last time.

Instead of my face hitting cold mud again, I somersaulted forward into empty air.

And landed so hard on my back that even the coat couldn't stop my brain from scrambling.

When I was able to stand up, I looked around.

Walls twice as tall as me towered up on both sides. I ran my hands over them. They were dirt.

I looked up at the strip of moon-hazed sky overhead and realised where I was.

In an old trench like the one the old bloke showed me.

The perfect place to bury a gun.

I started digging, using the barrel of the gun as a crowbar and the wooden end as a spade.

While I dug I thought bitterly about Mum's killer.

It wasn't over. I wasn't going to let her get away with it. I'd just have to wait till her daughter was old enough to do without a mother.

What age was that?

Twenty? Thirty? Seventy?

Be fair, I told myself, it's not the kid's fault her mother's a criminal.

Just like it's not my fault my father's a ratbag.

She's lucky.

At least her mother only damaged someone else.

At least her mother didn't hurt her.

Not like my father.

Not like Kenny the Cowboy.

Not like the fastest spray gun in the western postal district.

Angry tears flooded my eyes but I kept on stabbing the gun blindly into the dirt.

I had to keep digging to make a hole deep enough to bury the evidence.

Except suddenly it wasn't the gun I wanted to bury, it was the mouth-organ jiggling in my coat pocket.

And the elastic-sided boots Dad bought me last birthday.

And the photo of him in my wallet.

Everything that reminds me of him.

I was crying so hard I wasn't watching what I was doing.

The hole I was digging must have been too close to the wall of the trench.

I was swinging the rifle like a pick axe, eyes squeezed tight against the tears and the sadness and the memory of what a good dad I used to think he was.

Then the trench wall started to collapse.

I felt lumps of dirt cannoning into me and stones stinging my face and before I could jump back a dark object started sliding towards me out of the crumbling wall of the trench.

I put my hands up to protect my head and found myself being pushed backwards by rusty metal.

I tried to stay on my feet but the metal thing kept coming and wet dirt was showering into my face and my feet slipped on stones and I fell onto my back and the thing came sliding down onto my chest.

I waited to be crushed.

I wasn't.

I'm trapped under it, but.

In the moonlight I can see if s a metal cylinder about the size of the water heater we used to have over the bath. Before Claire and Erin came along and we got one outside.

It's so rusty I can't tell what it is.

It could even be a water heater.

Or one of those big gas cylinders people use if they've got a lot of welding or barbecueing to do.

It could be a million things. Give people a hole and they'll dump anything.

Anyway, I'm lying here, half covered in dirt, trapped under it.

Luckily it's still half in the trench wall, sort of balanced, so it's not actually crushing my chest, just pinning me down. Trouble is, both my arms are buried so I can't even try and shift it. And when I try and wriggle, the thing starts to slip and more bits of trench wall collapse.

I've been here for about half an hour already.

I could be here for days.

I don't care, but.

When your mum's dead and your dad's ruined your life, where else is there to go?