The Sunken Road by Garry Disher

Author:Garry Disher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Running

A fresh start somewhere new—that’s how Grandfather Tolley, irreproachably polite, avoided the unwelcome question. His questioners would nod thoughtfully in Tolley’s Four Square Store, and put two and two together: the taciturn man with his city clothes, the motherless small boy—obviously he’s running from something. Grandfather Tolley didn’t tell them that he was placing a specific memory behind him, an image of his young wife flailing in the red-frothed shallows, bewilderment on her face, then fear and shock, then her eyes dulling, dulling. She ran out on him; She died having the kid—both neatly accounted for his gloominess, his presence in the town. Not that the circumstances mattered; something bad had happened, and he’d run from it, simple as that. And so the shark-snatch story remained a family secret. Anna’s other grandfather had also run away from heartbreak. Family and strangers conspired against Grandfather Ison during the Great War, leaving him propertyless and obsessed with property. He left to make his mark, inched his buckboard through the saltbush and mallee scrubland near Pinnaroo, broke an axle, and wept. After the rolling guns and mud of the Sunken Road Trench at Pozières, and the chattering of his five sisters, he’d never heard such dense silence. After the neat geography of the trenchlines and his wife’s and his children’s chubby curves, he’d never been in such a tangled, stringy, monochrome place. Nothing would yield to the match or the axe. A voice told him that he should provide. Another told him that others had done him wrong. Louder, more insistent, was the voice that told him he was not up to it. What made Anna run? A permanent dissatisfaction, to begin with. As soon as she was capable of toddling on bandy legs she wanted to venture beyond the hedge at Isonville, drawn not so much by the promise of the world as by her father’s unaccountable absence every day. She saw him disappear in the Stock & Station car after breakfast, and it was a rare and precious evening if he were there to read to her at bedtime. She hooked her fingers to the thick, white, plaited wires of the garden gate and screamed inconsolably at his departing dust. But someone always carted her struggling into the house and her toys, and the memory faded—until the next morning, when her father betrayed and abandoned her yet again. Once it was Dr Pirie who brought her back, rumbling over the corrugations on the sunken road in his mud-splashed black Humber. Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna spotted her from the overseer’s cottage and telephoned the big house, grimly satisfied, for although they didn’t have a proper home they did have ginghamed twin daughters who never roamed. Dr Pirie encountered Anna on the road for a second time, the mail contractor once, and twice strangers delivered her to the Pandowie police station in Redruth Square. She never did find where her father had gone. Later Anna developed a private running, to places in her head, away from her squared and regulated back yard.

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