The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett

Author:Shirley Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I did not like being left alone with poor Miss Barker. She was not a pretty sight. And yet I felt uncomfortable about just abandoning her there.

“Give me one minute,” I say to her. “I’ll go get the cops.”

I run up to the police station, which is a good ten-minute run entirely uphill, so by the time I get there I am really puffed out and exhausted and I have a really bad stitch. The police station is this little one-room weatherboard shack, with a big sign that says POLICE and a very tall flagpole from which the Australian flag is drooping like it’s depressed. It’s still early and the building is locked—there’s a cheery SORRY WE’RE CLOSED! sign on the front door, like you’d expect to see in a milk bar. Regardless, I pound away on the door for a solid five minutes. Then I hear this irritated voice call out, “It’s closed!” and I realize there’s a dwelling behind the police shack, and this woman in Ugg boots and a terry-cloth bathrobe has come out onto the veranda. So I’m like, “I need the police!” And she goes back inside, and a minute later, this big fat uniformed copper walks out with a mug of coffee. And he’s peering at me suspiciously from the veranda, like he doesn’t appreciate being interrupted during breakfast.

I literally scream at him, “Miss Barker is down in the Pondage!”

Now he starts to take an interest.

So Senior Sergeant Saunders drives us down to the Pondage with one hand on the steering wheel and the other balancing his coffee mug on his belly. By now, the sun is just beginning to poke over the mountains, and the mist has mostly lifted except for these sparse ghostly patches floating on the surface of the Pondage. The whole thing is feeling so surreal that I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I actually dreamed it. But sure enough, there is poor pathetic Miss Barker floating gloomily about in the pondweed. And Senior Sergeant Saunders picks up a big long stick and pokes her with it, and says, “That’s her, all right,” because poking a corpse with a stick is his idea of identifying the victim. And he immediately hypothesizes that she has floated down from the Reservoir when they opened the sluice gates last night. And then he says, “Most likely she jumped off the Ridge. That’s where they generally like to do it. Well, it’s a good hundred-foot drop, isn’t it? Plus, you’ve got the freezing water.”

So we stand there a few minutes staring down at Miss Barker while he drinks his coffee, and finally he tosses the dregs in the water and tidily rinses his mug, like he’s a boy scout. I’m staring at him, dumbfounded. I’m like, “Haven’t you ever heard of contaminating the crime scene??” And he’s like, “Guess who’s watched too much CSI?” And then he gets distracted by these two big kangaroos getting stuck into each other nearby, and he starts commentating the action like we’re watching Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr.

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