Frying an Egg on a Hot Road - Episode 13 of 'Paternity' an Australian mystery novel

This is Episode Thirteen of 'Paternity' in which Pip returns to the town where her mother was pack raped. The young journalist may soon know who her father was.

LINKS TO OTHER EPISODES ARE ON THE SIDE BAR

And please leave feedback in a comment at the end of this instalment.

As she humped her bag across the scalding bitumen Pip thought again of her cadetship days and another of those stand by fillers that Frank pulled out of his kit when there was a shortage of copy.

On a hot Australian summer day he’d get the newest of the photographers to crack an egg on the road outside the office and take shots as it gradually fried in the rays of the sun. Often, it was also a sort of twisted initiation for the cadet.

The city cooks in forty degrees heat the heading would scream.

Sure enough, Frank was wetting his whistle in the bar when she wandered downstairs after her shower. He caught sight of her and grinning hugely, enfolded her in a bear hug.

‘So you’re back mate.’ He held her at arms length and the smile in his eyes turned to worry.

‘You’ll have to be damned careful my girl.’

Pip shrugged with fabricated bravado. ‘Con will be the one who has to be careful. What’s the latest?’

‘Some bad news about George. He’s been flown from over at the regional hospital by helicopter to Westmead Hospital in Sydney. I’m afraid that his broken ribs have pierced his lung and there are other issues too. The doctors say he’s in a bad way.’

It seemed that George was in such a bad way that the assault charge could easily become one of murder.

It was a while before either spoke again, and Pip broke the silence.

‘This is getting out of hand … Perhaps I should let everything drop Frank.’

‘What difference would that make now mate? The damage is done. On the other hand Robson could get his comeuppance, if we’re lucky.'

Frank said the sergeant was still working on Gazza in the belief that self preservation would produce information to incriminate Robson.

‘I reckon Con is a goner,’ he said with conviction.

‘Let’s hope you’re right. Is the beer cold?’

‘They’re not game to serve it any other way … I’ll get you one.’

Frank was as good as his word. The beer was icy cold and as the fluid slipped down she could feel herself relaxing. Her old friend was looking intently towards her.

‘I don’t get why you’re here right now Pippin. What do you hope to achieve?’

Pip glanced outside the window and into the distance. The bare brown paddocks seemed to stretch forever. This land could be so impersonal. Her mind came back into the bar and her eyes met those of this kindly man.

‘It’s just a feeling that I needed to be here. It’s as though I’m looking after Selene’s interests … I can tell myself it is a holiday too.’

‘Well don’t do anything stupid.’

Pip hoped the look she gave him conveyed a confidence she didn’t really feel.

She had been given the same bedroom upstairs – Room 22 with its faded pink chenille bedspread and the swirling pattern of English-style roses embossed on the fake plaster ceiling. It was like old home week.

The trip had been long, hot and dusty and she really needed an early night. The mattress objected with a squeak when Pip threw herself full length on the sheets and opened her latest thriller at the post-it note book mark.

Tired or not, a couple of chapters were mandatory if she was to get to sleep easily.

It wasn’t too long before her eyelids drooped and the book threatened to drop to the floor. The central light still burned bright in the ceiling but she wouldn’t interrupt that dreamy feeling between waking and sleep for anything right now … right now …

The mobile shrieked her awake only half an hour later with a full blast of the William Tell Overture.

She’d left it on loudest for the trip so that she could hear any ring above the CD player.

Groggy, Pip staggered off the bed and over to the oak dressing table, and lifted the phone from where it lay on the starched doyley.

‘It’s Denzy – were you asleep? Sorry …’

‘Thatsh okay mate … wotchawant?’ She was half in dreamland.

‘I thought you’d want to know ASAP. It’s the Raven thing … They’ve ruled him out as well. Nothing like a match it seems.’

The news wasn’t a huge surprise. She had never thought that Raven was the one.

‘Pip? Still there?’

‘Yep. Sorry. And thanks Denzy. You’re a good mate. So it looks like I don’t have any African American in me eh?’

‘Seems not. Look I’ll let you get back to bed … I could do with some sleep myself.’

Pip let the phone drop on the sheets and gathered the pillow beneath her cheek. Of course she WAS awake now.

Not Raven. Not Gazza. Not Wimpole.

Surprisingly though, within five minutes Pip was lightly snoring.

Next morning Pip faced the distinct likelihood that Robson was her father. Con Robson, the sleaze who masterminded the pack rape and yet turned up for some spoils only after the others had kidnapped Selene.

Con Robson, the corrupt country solicitor who did old ladies out of their trust accounts. Robson who could have killed her that dark night out on Rouse’s farm. The guy who had the most to lose in all of this.

When Denzy rang Pip had been too sleepy to take in the reality. Now it hit her. Con Robson. But how to prove it?

She knew Frank wouldn’t be downstairs. He’d said he had to leave early to get over to the District Court before the 10am start.

The old journo would have to be told the news when he got back that night.

Someone had remembered her request to leave the newspapers outside the door, so she read them in her room. Even the front pages were full of the latest test cricket. When would they wake up that not all Australians were sports mad?

She checked her emails and then wandered down the hall for a shower and rinsed out some undies in the bath tub, rolling them in a towel so they wouldn’t drip all the way back to her room. There she spread them on the backs of two chairs near her bed.

Pip had promised herself a meal down at the Greek café. Anything but soggy toast and hard eggs at the pub. That meant a very late breakfast, so she drove the couple of doors to the petrol pump at the store and filled up before the café opened.

Irene Rouse was in the shop with her children when she went in to pay the bill, and the farmer’s wife rushed over to Pip with an anxious look on her face.

‘Miss Holmes have you heard?’

‘Heard? Mrs Rouse?’

‘The teacher just told me that George Wimpole is dead. He died just after they got him to the hospital in Sydney … George is dead.’

It was murder.

Pip gunned her car mercilessly down the main street, screeched left just past the warrior and roared down the straight dirt road that led into the bush. Here she slammed the car door and almost ran to the space of her mother’s nightmares.

In a rage of torment Pip gathered rocks. Gathered rocks and threw them in a flurry at the dusty ground and towards the trees. A dozen missiles she let fly, each one serving to lessen the pent up fury and anger that had been hers alone for too long.

Eventually, energy spent, Pip’s frame melted to the ground. A tear found its way down her cheek and became a flood. She howled with emotion.

Her rage had spoken of her mother’s years of agony. It screamed at the rapists who had lived their lives untrammelled, while others suffered. It bellowed at injustice wherever it was felt. Most of all it scarified Con Robson.

George’s death may have been the catalyst for this release, but Pip’s crisis was much more than that – it was a leap in which the past and the present melded into an understanding.

At this moment in the Australian bush the jigsaw puzzle that had been the lives of her mother and herself became one whole: an entirety that must now be cherished and nurtured; set into its own special safe place in the scheme of things; a basis that would become a springboard towards her future.

Pip now knew that life had to be lived and that the future would not look after itself. George’s death and all that went before had writ large the truth that life was no rehearsal but must be lived full the first time around. Life needed to be faced and dealt with, and the past placed gently in position ― prized yet no longer dominant.

Many minutes later, she grew quiet. She felt a relief that she had never known before.

It was still morning time, but Pip believed that she saw the moon – her mother’s moon – in the sky above. And it comforted her.

Calmed, Pip drove back to the Greek café feeling very hungry. She ordered spinach and fetta cheese pie and olives, biscotti and thick black coffee.

Cosmo, the son of the proprietor, was full of George’s death. Naturally it had by now become the talk of the town, and he was keen to chat. Even his father, the plump old Greek with the drooping moustache, seemed energised by the news.

Everyone knew Gazza was being held for the assault and it seemed the mechanic had few real friends in the town. According to the Greeks, he’d bullied too many of the locals over the years and now they had no sympathy to spare for him.

On the other hand George was well thought of, and regarded as an excellent teacher and a good bloke – even if he was believed to be rather strange.



Back at the pub, Pip walked through the rear door and along the corridor that passed the bar.

The place was just beginning to fill with thirsty workers and most were milling around the bar waiting to be served, or lighting up the first really relaxed smoke of the day.

Her eyes swept the room and came to a stop at the far corner where two figures were huddled at a small round table, sitting on tall stools. Gazza and Robson were deep in private conversation.

Pip slipped across the open door way as quickly as she could, and hoped she hadn’t been seen.

She’d imagined that Gazza would have still been in remand but of course assault wasn’t the most serious crime in the book and he’d have got bail okay – if he’d actually been charged.

The huddle put the two men together in common purpose. It was certainly unusual to see a solicitor and a mechanic like Gazza in a social situation, and showed they were reasonably sure of themselves. Although Con could always pass off the meeting as ‘legal advice’.

It was most unlikely that Gazza would have sought out Con if he’d actually dobbed him into police about the rape.

This probably meant that Gazza hadn’t split on Robson despite the police sergeant’s best efforts, and that they were comparing notes on how to face future events.

You can bet they would soon hear about George’s death – now murder.

Pip spared herself a smile as she thought that it would only be a matter of time before the sergeant put two and two together – and acted. That was good dream material, so she decided to have an hour’s sleep.


The foregoing is excerpted from Paternity by June Saville. All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be used or reproduced without written permission from the author.


Have you ever fried an egg on a hot road?

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Before I sign off, may I vehemently disagree with the latest Google literary quote:
‘It seems, in fact, that the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian novelist)

What do you think? Is this true for either man or woman?

PATERNITY - An Original Australian Novel Part 1

Michael Myers photo

Last week I posted a taste of my novel Paternity and the bloggy mates wanted more. Today I begin at the beginning with Part One and will continue the story with regular episodes posted here.
Enjoy - and please repay the favour with feedback via a comment. That's the only royalty I require! (Unless you're a publisher and then we can talk.)

LINKS TO OTHER EPISODES ARE ON THE SIDE BAR

PATERNITY – A NOVEL Part One
© June Saville 2008

They waited with some sort of bizarre discipline, although straining at the leash.

The vicious wind set leaves scuttling on the ground, and branches arching against the bright night sky. The full moon saw it all, and intensified the shadows at the bases of the trees. She felt freezing then, and fear took over from the anger. What did they intend with her?

Soon two white lights shattered the gloom, appearing first at the top of the track. They followed its bends and twists until they lit the clearing and then the target directly … blinding her.

The car door slammed once.

*

By age 22 Violet Selene Holmes, yoga fanatic, had saluted the sun in a dozen different countries. She draped her long limbs on the sand at Goa as the saffron sun swelled above the Arabian Sea, and, less comfortably, on mountainsides in the Andes, the Himalayas, and among the Kurdish sheep on the slopes of Mount Ararat.

Her mother named her after a flower, and an old fashioned one, although Violet was anything but a delicate petal. Given the choice between a rough pebble-strewn path and a smooth one, she’d take the pebbles.

Her second name was borrowed from the moon goddess of Greek mythology. This was Selene's favourite, and she used it throughout her life.

Selene paid for her fares from a cache she began collecting at age seven, and she travelled alone. But she knew how to party.

She had been roaming for three years, luxuriating in the sights and sounds and smells of other lands, when her thoughts turned homewards. Selene found herself longing for the toss and tumble of a Sydney surf, the smell of eucalyptus leaves burning in a barbecue fire, for streets clogged with Australians — whatever their hue, whatever their accent.

So the young woman with the wheat field hair booked a flight home and did those things which had set her aching while on foreign shores. She steeped herself in old friends and familiar places, but a year or so later she felt again the old need to move along. This time she would explore the vast spaces of her own land ...

*

The thin strip of gibbers and gravel which had passed for a road for the last two hundred kilometres became wider now and Selene’s hands relaxed on the smooth vinyl of the steering wheel. She could even see signs of desultory attention from a grader. The car picked up speed, rattling by occasional clumps of ancient pine trees, branches gnarled and foliage bedraggled, and spewed dust high into the air. The dust changed colour to red, and eddied and swirled, to settle on the stumps and drunken fence posts on either side.

The town must not be far away.

She took the bend too fast, and had to wrench the wheel to avoid a row of mail boxes on posts set too close to the road. They stood there like abandoned skeletons with no real connection to humanity. Where were the people who got letters in this godforsaken place?

Everything she saw was evidence that people had been there — not that they were there now. A tractor ravaged of moving parts, and rusted. A wattle and daub hut, collapsed upon itself. A lonely sentinel chimney, fireplace attached. Willy nilly tangles of barbed wire, battered baked- bean tins and scattered shards of lager bottles.

The car groaned towards an outcrop of round red rocks lying topsy turvy on a sudden rise. It heaved up the hill, gasped as it came to the top, and died.

In the distance, a small town lay all but concealed on the flat below, as though resisting prying eyes …

Selene stormed out of the driver’s seat and tugged open the bonnet. Her tall frame doubled itself as the fair head bent towards the engine, seeking reasons. There didn’t seem to be any. Finally, she locked the car. Her boots clomped rhythmically, exciting the red dust as she made her way down the slope.

*

The sun’s glare ricocheted from the galvanised iron walls of a shed dimly labelled War Memorial Hall, and bounced off the road to hit the figure of a soldier dressed in World War 1 uniform, ramrod straight as the gun he held aloft. The cenotaph warrior was the token human being in the place, for the single street was hushed, and empty apart from a clutch of cars shimmering in the relentless light at the far end.

This town was the product of a time tunnel. Small windows of a shop front winked at her, sharing Selene’s delight at its wares. Rolls of cloth, scissors, umbrellas, packets of needles, children’s clothing dangling raggle taggle on wire hangers, and shoes. A battered and cracked mannequin stood proud of her daisy-showered cotton dress, and rubber knee boots. There was a sign on the wall: Closed for lunch.

Next door two small wooden houses leaned against each other, also in siesta.

However, the milk bar was open. The long fake marble counter was coloured with rows of sweet jars, bottles of ice cream soda flavours, stacks of plates and containers of cutlery, all reflected in the long mirror engraved with a likeness of the Parthenon, and swirls of leaves and flowers. An endless row of cubicles with laminated tabletops set with salts and peppers, menus and sugar, lined the opposite wall.

A row of slowly moving ceiling fans hummed a greeting.

‘Afternoon,’ she smiled in relief. The chubby man behind the counter was tied at his middle by the strings of an apron, and his hesitant nod came framed by a moustache, curled and drooping on either side of stacked chins.

‘I’d die for one of your milkshakes — caramel malted?’

‘Just arrived in town?’ He craned his short neck towards the street.

‘My car threw it in at the top of the hill … Lucky to get so close.’

She sat in the corner of one of the cubicles fondling the coolness of the glass, which was thick and squat. The tumbler came empty, accompanied by a tall dented aluminium container filled with creamy milk and froth. You poured the drink into the glass yourself, and there was enough for two helpings. There were no straws, and as she drank, the froth tickled her nose.

The smell and sound of crackling bacon sidled its way from the kitchen, soon followed by the proprietor and a hamburger on a plate. A fly buzzed in his wake.

‘With the lot!’ He slid the plate across the slippery table towards her. ‘I’d have thought you’d be busy … it’s lunch time,’ she glanced around the empty cafe.

‘If you must know they generally wet their whistles at the pub first, and maybe eat later. Watcha here fer lady?’

‘Just wandering. Is there a mechanic?’

‘Gazza’ll probably fix you up. Ask at the bar.’

*

The clatter in the pub ceased immediately she walked in from the street. Schooners of beer stood ignored among the slops on the bar, and every eye leered in her direction.

'Ladies’ lounge is out the back,’ the barman whined.

Selene chose not to hear: ‘Is Gazza around? I’m after a mechanic.’

The little knots of drinkers, wearing broad hats to a man, stood mesmerised. Then, as Selene stood firm, the entire bar seemed to shift weight from one foot to another.

‘I’m after a mechanic!’

Finally, a mountain of a man extracted himself from the crowd, lumbered over, and breathed a stink of rotten eggs at her. Selene thrust her hand forward to force a greeting and immediately wished she hadn’t. The fellow had hair growing on his palm!

‘Got car problems eh?’ The drinker’s currant eyes flicked over Selene’s jeans where the denim stretched tightly across her thighs.

‘At the top of the hill. It died at the top of the hill … ’

‘Oright. I’ll see ya after I’ve had me lunch.’

*
Selene drifted into the street just as the last of the sun began to disappear behind a hill. A bed she’d organised at the pub bent in the middle like a hammock, and the shower rose down the hall was broken, but it was all clean enough. Her car was supposed to be on the road next morning.

She thought about the wild ride up the hill in the rusted old ute, engulfed in Gazza’s breath of bad eggs. The mechanic was a soaring suet pudding with cold eyes staring from slanted brows that met at the bridge of his nose. He was impervious to her attempts at conversation. However, once they reached her car he was a changed man: methodical and efficient. To each his own.

That peculiar disinfectant smell of pubs in Australia lingered even on the footpath outside. The barman was hosing down the tiled wall with its mural of brawny footballers advertising KB Lager. He seemed to ignore her, but directed the hose closer as she passed, splashing her shirt. She could feel the damp spreading on her skin.

Where were the women? She hadn’t even caught sight of the ladies’ lounge.

A couple of doors down there was a grocer’s shop with long scrubbed counter and bags of potatoes and onions near the till. Closed. A lone petrol pump outside cast a long weak shadow …

It was good to be in the open air after the smoke and stench of the pub. A full moon sat majestic in the sky, occasionally blotted out by scudding clouds. Washing on a decrepit clothesline flapped with the strengthening breeze …

This place was so silent. The moon withdrew again, and the shadows disappeared as well, becoming one with the sombre darkness.

Close to the cenotaph at the far end of the street Selene paused before an aged building: Guardian Printers. The town had a newspaper! She pressed her nose to a window, opaque with grime. It was now too dark to see anything.

An engine roared somewhere. The moon came out from behind the clouds. She strolled on towards the hall at the edge of town, and then crossed the road. The engine was still roaring. Some hoon trying out his V8. The engine screamed repeatedly, but the car remained hidden.

An abrupt howl and a shriek of tyres, and Selene, startled, stared down the silver road towards the pub. A red Holden screeched into view and was thundering toward her.

The three faces in the front seat of the car gleamed white with the return of the moon. They sneered at her: evil ghosts.

The car propped.

‘Ya fuckin’ cunt. Git in!’

Selene’s body became a spring. She leapt to the side and was running. Her legs were pistons. On foot now, the men clamoured after her, increasingly near and shouting obscenities. The buildings, monsters on either side of the street, mocked her plight.



What did you think of Part 1? Have you seen a town like this? What will happen next? Have a guess and leave your idea in a comment ...

The foregoing is excerpted from Paternity by June Saville. All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be used or reproduced without written permission from the author.

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