What Happens In The Street
Late summer and the house behind and one down from mine has a pool. I can’t see it but I can hear splashing and children yelling lots of “Polos” to one child’s hopeful “Marco”. Their small and excitable dog barks constantly when the kids are in the pool. I can imagine it running up and down beside the pool fence, overflowing with a canine’s endless enthusiasm and desperation not to miss a thing. I can also visualise it as bait in a crab pot.
Next door is quiet though. For the last twenty years mother and daughter, Dulcie and Maggie Bowen have been our neighbours. Dulcie and Maggie have always been nice to chat with and it is a bonus to have quiet neighbours on the bedroom side of your house. But five or six weeks ago a For Sale sign appeared on the footpath in front of the Bowen house.
Named after an otherwise forgotten British general, our street is a steep uphill cul-de-sac with six houses on each side, plus three facing the turning circle at the end. Our house is the last of the six on the east side of the street. Dulcie and Maggie Bowen live on the low side of us in an unrenovated, charmless brick home built immediately after the street’s creation.
There has never been a Mr Bowen while Rose and I lived next door. There was one once, his name was Frank, but he just walked out one day decades ago and never came back. Rose and I were told the story when we moved in, by Sheila Stuber, the self-appointed street historian. Along with the Bowens, the Stubers were original, as she liked to put it. Sheila also made it clear that she had not been a fan of Frank Bowen.
The only male around the Bowen house is a splendidly leonine ginger tomcat named Errol who enjoys a life of sleeping in the sun mixed with occasional outbursts of caterwauling and short, vigorous fights with the Vanderberghe’s Persian from across the road. In these early morning feline battles, I am biased in my support. Errol, whose general demeanour of idleness and self-indulgence reminds me of Keith Richards at his finest, is all debauched style. The Vandenberghe’s Persian, boringly named Smoky is wound up way too tight for my liking, although in his favour, he is not as irritating as Sunny, the elderly Stubers’ psychotic Pomeranian. It’s no surprise that Rose and I never had pets.
Dulcie Bowen is a tall and rangy woman with a direct way of talking but always to a point just above your left shoulder.
“Yeah, rest of the family, my two sisters and all their family are around Nowra so Maggie and I thought we would go and join them. Prices have gone up a lot so we will do alright. Time for a change we think, and Maggie can work from just about anywhere anyway,” she rattles off when I ask about the sign.
Maggie is a few metres away, pulling weeds from an unkempt garden bed but says nothing. She is as tall as her mother with a warm smile of perfect teeth when she decides to employ it and undyed salt and pepper hair worn in an out of fashion long bob. Apparently, she is some sort of specialist writer working in the areas of science and medicine. I see her infrequently and she has never said much. Whole years have gone by without more than the occasional good morning.
There was a night a few years ago when I surprised her beside the side fence. Maggie was carrying a plastic bag of rubbish to her wheelie bin. The fake and faintly nauseous lavender smell of the plastic bag did little to mask the smell of empty tins of cat food and the rest of the bag’s contents. Maggie was wearing a short and diaphanous summer nightie and the light from her lounge room window backlit a surprisingly shapely figure. Something I mentioned to Rose at the time and regretted thereafter. Just as surprising to me was the cigarette that she was puffing.
I had come from my own backyard with a gardening fork in my hands. I was on the hunt for a cane toad that had escaped the fork’s prongs by a lucky jump seconds earlier. No doubt I startled her, but Maggie recovered and blowing a long stream of smoke into the warm, humid air, she pointed with the cigarette towards the front of the house and with the faintest of smiles said, “He went that way.”
Then she lifted the wheelie bin lid and dropped the waste inside. I thought she was enjoying the moment and the action of leaning forward and dropping the bag in the bin raised the short negligee higher up her her white thighs. She held the pose for a second or two longer than necessary. Closing the lid, she moved towards her own door before stopping and pointing again with the cigarette’s tip at the base of one of our magnolias beside the side fence.
“Can’t you see him? The fucking thing is right there.”
Then she flicked the butt and hit the toad square on the back. The toad must have been as shocked as I was because immediately after, it allowed me to drive the fork through him and into the soft earth.
“Good job, I bloody hate those things.” Then she was gone, leaving me with the memory of the outline of her full breasts through the translucent fabric and the clean-up of an impaled amphibian.
***
The Bowen House sold before auction date, not uncommon as the property market was, as the boosters love to say, “Hot!” It is never cold if you believe real estate agents.
One morning a removalist’s truck arrived empty and then departed full, before the ladies Bowen headed off in their matching white Kias. I saw them go, after saying goodbye to them and Errol, who was comfortably arranged on an old blanket in a cat carry cage. He looked particularly laidback and I wondered whether the vet had given him some quality relaxants suitable for a rock star with a long drive. He meowed goodbye before he closed his eyes again. Then, in a slow convoy of Korean practicality and value they were gone.
A day or two later Geoff and Aaron arrived.
I was visiting my mother at the nursing home when the removalist’s truck arrived and unloaded. When I drove up the street in the afternoon, the removalists, two bikie types, all steroid muscle and bad tattoos plus a skinny, acned, white teen were just closing the truck’s doors. I pulled into my driveway just as they roared off in low gear with the footy broadcast blasting on the truck’s radio. Apparently the Tigers needed to lift their defensive workload.
“No surprises there,” I thought.
In the front yard of the Bowen house were various chairs, a rolled-up rug and a forest of pot plants. Two men were sitting on dining chairs of Ikea origin, between them was a low coffee table on which there was an opened bottle of French champagne, two brimming glasses, two half eaten wedges of cheese and a packet of water crackers.
The men were wearing expensive workout gear and looked to be in their mid-thirties. One was tall with the wide shoulders and the narrow waist of a swimmer. His brown hair was cut in the latest style with high shaved sides, a big quiff and sideburns merging into trimmed beard. He was sprawled in the chair nodding and listening intently to his companion.
His companion was shorter and muscular with tanned, shaved arms and legs and clippered hair only millimetres long. I could not hear what he was saying but they were deep in conversation. I turned off the engine, opened the car door and when I closed it, they both turned to look at me.
The short man’s face immediately split into a wide grin but the swimmer seemed less interested in introductions. And then, in one of those weird moments that can set the tone for all else to follow, the three of us said “Hello” at the same time. There were a few seconds of silence before we all laughed together.
“No time like the present,” I thought, so I walked to their front gate, still wedged open from the removalists’ work, strode through, and introduced myself.
“Welcome to the street. I’m Ross,” I said offering my hand.
The shorter man jumped up.
“Thanks, I’m Aaron and this is my husband Geoff. Nice to be here.”
Aaron’s grip was soft and short and I could feel cracker crumbs on his fingertips. Geoff smiled hesitantly and offered a firm shake that lasted longer. His eyes were slightly bulgy and a beautiful green.
Before long I was sitting on a wicker chair with a tumbler of champagne in one hand and a cracker smeared with warm Brie in the other. They were funny and engaging and like all newlyweds completely self-absorbed. I heard about the wedding in Byron, the honeymoon in Patagonia and the planned renovations [extensive]. They were both in sales. Aaron sold Audis at the city dealership while Geoff was an account manager in food wholesaling and distribution. I told them about the street and gave them a brief rundown of the Bowens, unconsciously taking on the role of the now ill Sheila Stuber. I told them, after being asked about my marital status, that I was a recent widower. This brought words of condolence delivered with real warmth and reassuring pats on my shoulder. I was moved by their genuine reaction and warmed to them further.
Before I could tell them more a car rumbled up the street. It was Janet Vandenberghe in her husband’s gargantuan work Ute. Janet waved at us as she pulled into her driveway. Sitting in the back, her two teenage daughters, Tamsyn and Clare, gave the whole scene a hard stare before they returned to their phones.
After parking Janet came over. An athletic woman with an aggressive ponytail and quirky humour we got on well despite her annoying feline. I knew she would be pissed off that I had met the boys first.
Aaron and Geoff introduced themselves with hugs and all concerned performed the art of air kissing, something that I had not yet mastered. I was still not sure whether your lips touched the other person’s cheek, or did you stay back a bit and make some kind of kissing sound. And if so, at what distance from the ear? Without Rose I had no one to ask, or at least no one I wanted to ask.
No doubt Janet would have liked to find out all she could about our new neighbours but her meaningful look at the champagne bottle was wasted because Geoff’s mobile rang. He excused himself and after a few minutes returned with an apologetic smile. “That was Mum. She wants to know if we can come over earlier.”
Aaron gave a small shrug of the shoulders and a nod.
Geoff turned to Janet and I. “Sorry, but we have to hustle. My mum said she would make us dinner, save us the trouble, which is nice, but now we need to pick up some basil on the way.”
It was getting dark anyway so I downed the rest of my glass. I stood and said, “Well thanks and welcome again, looks like I owe you a drink or two. Let me know if I can help with anything as you get organised.”
Aaron started to clean up and Janet did her best to hide her disappointment. Saying her goodbyes she joined me on the walk to the gate. Searching for something extra to add, as I closed their front gate, she offered, “Bin night is Monday night by the way.”
Aaron smiled again.
“Good to know, nice to start things off with a drink and a chat too. See you later.”
He went inside. Janet looked at me.
“Fantastic”’ she said deadpan, “How contemporary Australian can our street be? A gay married couple moving in, guess now we just need some Muslims from the horn of Africa to truly represent our nation’s future.”
I wasn’t sure if she was upset about not getting the low down on the new neighbours first or was just taking the piss. I had never thought of Janet as a homophobe or racist but now I was not so sure. She sounded genuinely aggrieved. Before I could reply, she turned and strode off into the gathering dusk, her high ponytail swinging.
Janet was right or I should say factually accurate. When we first moved into the street the residents were all white and either elderly or empty nesters, basically old farts and Rose and me. Now the adults were now much younger and there were kids in the street. The Stubers and I were now the odd ones out.
**
Cul-de-sac in the literal translation from French means the bottom of a sack.
There are great advantages living in a cul de sac especially if you have small children. If you can get them off the assorted devices that fill their world, they can play out on the street reasonably safely.
The other thing about a cul-de-sac is the almost unavoidable extra level of sociability it can provide for the grownups. Most streets are neighbourly but that recognition often only extends to the houses immediately on both sides and maybe one across from yours. But in a cul-de-sac it covers more houses every which way.
Every few months on a Sunday afternoon a casual get together usually initiated by a text or a chat in a driveway will break out on our street.
The venue is the footpath outside the Vandenberghe’s house as their grass, unlike my own, is well maintained and prickle free. Their footpath also gives a clear view of the entire street and advance warning of any cars driving up it. Vital when kids are running up and down the street or riding scooters and bikes everywhere. Of course if your own kids are now adults and long gone then you might pray for a through road when seven or eight yelling kids are playing in the street on a Sunday afternoon and you are trying to have a nap.
So when Rose was alive, we didn’t always attend. But now I’m alone the feeling of belonging is welcome. It feels good to sit on the grass and have a chat with my neighbours even if you are surrounded by a tribe of kids.
About a month after the boys’ arrival there was a long weekend and with Monday a public holiday, the Sunday was a perfect time for a cul-de-sac get together and to formally welcome our new neighbours.
**
Sheila Stuber, cancerous in lung and breast watches her husband Max read a paperback as he sits in his worn rocker recliner in the early afternoon light.
She has been trying to ignore the dull ache in her chest but wonders why she is bothering. It’s time to get up and have a little eye dropper of morphine. Her pain is constant and Sheila has little concern about opioid dependency. Why would she? The cancer cells multiply in her like the weeds in their once immaculate lawn.
Sheila hears her neighbours and their young children mingling out on the street but she has no interest in joining them. She can feel herself slowly uncoupling from the world she has known. She tells Max to be neighbourly and go down and say Hi before bringing Sunny up as he is beginning to bark furiously.
Sheila misses Dulcie Bowen. They had been friends and neighbours for forty years.
Then with a sudden shudder Sheila remembers Frank Bowen’s sneaky hand groping her bottom at a street get together many years ago. She never told Dulcie or Max about it. Thinking back, it must have happened just before Frank disappeared, just before Dulcie had had Maggie. Sheila can clearly picture a pregnant Dulcie radiating happiness as a sullen Frank dug garden beds in their front yard. And then he was gone.
There had been another man back then, a bachelor who had lived next door to the Bowens till he had his stroke. He had a funny name that she can’t remember now. She thought it was a shame when he had his turn; he was quite dashing and very charming. Not at all like Frank Bowen.
She never asked Dulcie why she married such a horrible man like Frank Bowen. Over the years Dulcie had hinted that there had been other women, which rang true to Sheila and after a while when Frank never returned, Sheila had thought, good riddance to bad rubbish. Dulcie was lucky he had never come back. With a groan Sheila shuffles to the kitchen and takes her dropper of morphine, then returns to her rocker recliner and dozes.
**
During the week leading into the long weekend Aaron and Geoff commenced their renovations. I wasn’t happy about the first stage.
On the Wednesday a family of Pacific Islanders ranging in age from grandmother to teenage son descended on the boy’s front yard and in quick time took a healthy Leopard Tree ten metres high down to a stump a few centimetres above the earth. Watching from my window I could see everyone had a job. When not offering advice to the men suspended by ropes in the tree and wielding chainsaws with no regard to Workplace Health and Safety guidelines, the matriarch walked up and down the street putting flyers advertising their services into letterboxes.
I hate seeing mature trees cut down and I was pissed off. The tree had been the only thing in the front yard that seemed to have any vigour in it. Every other shrub and garden bed had always looked half dead despite Dulcie’s best efforts. Or maybe that was because of them.
Then on the Thursday a man arrived in a lightweight tip truck loaded with a small backhoe digger combo. In between puffs on cigarettes, he worked his way around the stump’s root ball before lifting it out, breaking it up and taking it away. He left a hole, a metre deep and two metres wide with a corresponding pile of dirt.
At the Sunday gathering I was chatting to Matt, Janet’s hulking builder husband when Sunny, the Stuber’s Pomeranian got out of their yard. Feeding on the excitement and energy of eight young children running around, he spotted as if predestined, the Vandenberghe’s cat Smoky as it emerged after a nap, from underneath the thick hedge that served as my front boundary.
Until this point the afternoon was as per usual. Drinks, potato chips and dips, talk that was mostly about parenting issues, new shows on Netflix, the previous day’s football, nothing too deep. Aaron and Geoff had been made welcome; a welcome that seem to go up in fervour when the quality of their wine and savoury offerings was noted.
There was no discussion about, although we all knew, of Matt’s not so secret pokies addiction, or Mrs. Stuber’s impending demise, or the pools of vomit and broken bottles that dotted the footpath after Tamsyn Vandenberghe’s 18thbirthday party two weeks ago.
The kids kept playing but the adults watched as Smoky took off into Aaron and Geoff’s yard disappearing behind the mound of dirt piled up by the backhoe. Sunny, barking with even more than his usual hysterical excitement scampered after him.
We looked at each other for a few seconds as the barking, now slightly muffled, continued from behind the pile of dirt. Janet sighed and headed towards the Stuber house, presumably to tell Max to come and get his dog or at least pass out a leash so one of us could collar him. She climbed the stairs and I saw her talking to someone inside. Within a few seconds Max appeared at the front door with a dog lead in hand and started slowly down the stairs. Janet trailed behind, talking endlessly and fussing with her hands. In his 80s, short and once built like a wrestler, Max had been a powerful man but the news of his wife’s sickness has halved him.
Aaron and Geoff, one of the kids and I made our way across the street to see what was what. From Sunny’s frantic barking it sounded like Smoky had been cornered and battle was imminent. But when we passed through the gate the cat was nowhere to be seen. Sunny was down in the hole and alternatively yapping at and pulling at what looked to be a tree root that had been disturbed but left behind by the backhoe’s bucket. Sunny gave it another furious tug and it came loose. It was dark down in the hole but looking at the root I thought to myself, “Isn’t that a bone?”
Aaron jumped in and half pushed, half kicked Sunny away to pick whatever it was up. Sunny was undeterred and started digging again. Aaron held Sunny’s find up to get a better look and one of the Leong kids from three doors down said it before Aaron or I could.
“Shit, that’s a leg bone!”
A few seconds of silence followed and by that time Sunny had the skull pretty well uncovered.
After that things were very different. The Leong kid ran off yelling to the other kids that he had found a dead body. Sunny tried to carry off what Aaron, Geoff and I all agreed was a human jawbone. Then Aaron, craft beer in one hand and mobile phone in the other, dialled triple 0. Geoff suddenly realising that this would certainly delay the renovations, burst into tears and stormed into the house. I attempted to do what is known on TV shows as, “securing the crime scene.”
This was not easy. Between holding my half pissed and very inquisitive neighbours back from the hole and helping Max get the lead on Sunny, who was now yapping nonstop with excitement, I had to ask more than once for calm and a top up of Shiraz. Smoky appeared and sat on the fence looking at events with disdain. His lifetime spent slaughtering birds and native wildlife made the discovery of some old bones no big thing.
Then the cops came and before we knew it the professionals had taken over. Later as the sun lowered herself on to the western horizon, we cul-de-sacers found ourselves where we had begun, sitting on the Vandenberghes’ footpath in camping chairs, sipping alcohol while watching Forensics start their work under a white tent and the glare of floodlights. The boys were not at home.
After talking to the police, Aaron and a distraught Geoff had grabbed their plates and glasses, said their goodbyes, and fled for Geoff’s Mum’s house.
The Campeses, Camerons, Lusis and Leongs had also gone home. Their kids, still burning with excitement and speculation, would have been hard to settle. Before he was dragged away, the Leong boy kept asking the constable guarding the crime scene if there was a reward.
Max, after taking Sunny home and checking on Sheila, descended again and re-joined Janet, Mike and I. There was still some of the boys’ excellent Shiraz left which I reluctantly shared with him. He slumped in a camp chair after checking that we would be happy to help him out of it when he wanted to go home.
Someone had to say it.
“Wow, I guess now we know what really happened to Frank Bowen,” I said.
“I reckon by 9.00 tomorrow morning the Nowra police might be having a chat to Dulcie.”
“Nowra, Why bloody Nowra? You mean Newcastle, don’t you?” Janet snapped.
Her husband just stared into the distance before finally mumbling, “Told me Nihill.” We all just looked at each other. Max said nothing.
Mike said, “I wonder how it happened.”
“You know, years ago what’s his name told me something,” Max said in his old man’s rasp.
“Who is what’s his name?” Janet asked.
“You know the bloke who owned your place before you.” He was looking at me.
I was blank for a few seconds. “You mean Claude. Claude Clarke.”
“Yep,” he said with a sigh. “That’s his bloody name. You think I could remember that.” Max shook his head and gulped some wine.
“He said he had come home late after a ball. Gee, he used to go to some classy events that Claude. Very snappy dresser, I thought he might have been queer but the ladies loved him.”
I wanted to point out that I know about Claude from my father. Claude had actually been a silver service waiter; one of the city’s best when waiting was a real profession. He certainly would have gone to lots of balls. But I let him go on.
“He said he had a skinful and had trouble getting his front door open and when he finally got inside he was just about passing out.” Max grinned, “Claude did like a drink. He reckons he was sitting on the bed trying to get his shoes off when he thought he heard an argument next door and then a loud thud and groaning. Then he passed out. He forgot about it for a few days and by then Frank had vanished and Dulcie was finishing off the new garden beds and planting shrubs and trees.”
“When did he tell you this?” Janet used her best caring but firm schoolteacher voice.
“Can’t really remember. About a year or two later, before he started work on those cruise ships and rented the place out to that Greek family. They were there a long time, must have been fifteen, twenty years. Then you bought it.” He nodded towards me again.
After a while Mike spoke up, “You didn’t suspect that Dulcie did Frank in?”
I didn’t think Max would answer.
“Of course I did. But you know what? I didn’t care. Dulcie was a good woman and Frank Bowen was a bad bastard, anyone could see that. I saw enough blokes like him in the war to know we have too many of them. Dulcie was better off without him and so was the street. The cops came around at the time and asked some questions but I said nothing and I guess Claude did the same. One day I was going to ask him if he knew any more but then he was away for a few years and then he had the stroke while working on the ship and there was no point after that.”
I think we were all stunned. There was silence for a few minutes.
Max gestured to me to help him up. It had grown dark so I walked him back to the bottom of his stairs. He slowly climbed with one hand on the railing, the other on his lower back.
“It’s a bugger getting old Ross, let me tell you. You get weak, forget things. I had forgotten the whole thing until I saw where Sunny was.”
I was about to say goodnight when I thought of something.
“Hey Max, Dulcie was a big woman, but she would have had to dig out a lot more dirt to get the body in and then fill in the hole, all before the next morning. She couldn’t have done that, at least not on her own.”
He paused on the landing but didn’t look around, just added over his shoulder.
“Bugger getting old Ross, let me tell you. The mind becomes vague, forgetful.”
Photo by Sebastian Enrique on Unsplash
