Two disobedient, curious boys found the bodies of a man and his former girlfriend in a loft. A typical murder/suicide, the police said. The woman's body was dressed in a wedding gown, and was headless. The burnt head was found in a potbelly stove with the fused remains of many tape recordings and a pair of glasses.
***
It wasn't until Dagmar Fox, a former psychology major, found the wedding gown - white satin, tulle, the traditional works - in Thin Boyle's built-in wardrobe, actually her built-in wardrobe, that she rummaged around in her memory for a label appropriate for people like him. When she found the dress after her children had finally gone to sleep, her husband, Mel, had distracted her by leading her to the potbelly stove which had not been lit. He placed a cushion on the stove and lifted Dagmar onto it so she sat with her back resting against the flue. He had then begun undressing her.
`I thought you were getting too old for this kind of thing.'
Mel's tongue on her nipple.
`I think I know what Thought thought.’
`Don't.'
`I thought you liked it.'
`Not that. Keep doing that. I meant don't make those weak, vulgar jokes.'
This scene took place months after Dagmar had asked Thin if he was interested in renting their home which also had an adventure of a garden surrounded by farmland. She was considering another career step-up. Thin replied that, given his usual luck, this prospect was probably too good to be true. He lived in the nearest town which was where Dagmar held a management position. He said his life would be perfect if he could live like Mel, but the question was would Dagmar and Mel leave their comfortable home and strike out towards a new challenge?
Thin had once worked in the same office as Dagmar. This was before his wife had taken their four children and left him for the last time. Someone saw him buying Simple Meals Cooked Simply at the bookshop, and Dagmar and most of her colleagues felt sorry for him, deciding together that his wife must be a bit cracked.
`It's not all her fault,' Thin had said, head bowed, his scalp showing through frizzy blond hair tied in a long ponytail, his innocent, chilly blue eyes cast down and his voice so soft they had strained to hear.
Dagmar, the same age as Thin, had held a senior position even then, but despite the workplace gap in responsibility and status which had widened until he had accepted a small package and `retired' in his early thirties, their friendship had remained intact, if slight.
Thin had had trouble with his neighbours about the loud music he and some of his other friends, those Dagmar only knew vaguely, who never seemed to live with the same people or in the same place for long, played late into the nights, and his landlady had asked if he could find somewhere else to live. She told him the house was going to be demolished to make way for a block of flats.
Thin telling the landlady he was waiting on a chance to rent a friend's house even though he had not followed up Dagmar's tentative offer.
Mel, twelve years older than Dagmar, wrote music when he wasn't looking after their two boys who had been born late in the marriage. The boys made the mothers of other young children flinch, and Mel's best days were when they attended a child-care centre in town. He ignored the heavy hints from the child-care workers which indicated that his best days were their worst days.
Thin had sometimes attended gatherings of selected people from Dagmar's work at the Fox home in the spring and summer when the garden had bloomed. The last time he went he had taken his new girlfriend, Anna, a quiet young woman, a good influence, Dagmar thought. She told Mel that Anna would move in with Thin if they rented their home to him. They had both told Thin how much they liked Anna.
Mel, who also liked Thin, despite, or perhaps because of the easy target he made for a welter of wisecracks, joking to Dagmar about how Anna must be desperate.
***
Mel observed people closely, sometimes too critically. He knew Thin was impressed by his modest achievements in the music field. Thin had already admitted that his own life had never matched the success of his dreams. Once Mel had listened politely as Thin had strummed his guitar and sung several songs he had written, tuneless songs which all sounded the same, in a croaking voice which fell somewhere between imitations of Mark Knopfler and Bob Dylan. Thin's hands had shaken and he had gazed somewhere to the side of Mel's face as he asked what he thought of the songs. He had already told him about his plan to tape the sounds of Mel's garden with the idea of featuring them in a recording that would knock the music world on its ear, but Mel had given up paying proper attention when he couldn't follow what Thin meant.
When Mel had lied, saying the songs showed promise, and then told a kind of truth about them needing more work, Thin had nodded but said nothing.
***
A knowing look had crossed Mel's face, a look of disappointed triumph, as soon as Thin was late. He checked the time regularly until Thin, wearing what Mel later joked to Dagmar was a hybrid between a psychiatric patient's pyjamas and a clown's outfit, arrived an hour later for Dagmar’s invitation. He also arrived with three of his children, instead of Anna.
Dagmar fussing about the meal which has been kept hot too long, and is too small after being shared among the extra children as well as the adults.
Mel doing one of the few things Dagmar is not good at, entertaining their guest.
Thin paid attention to everything Mel said although he often looked worried, as if Mel might think him a fool if he failed to laugh at the right time. Mel's jokes - obscure references and puns - had Thin grinning a lot, strain and bewilderment making him look old.
Dagmar's impatience with the small talk, the jokes which never interest her, and the way the children obviously are not going to eat the meal she has first wasted time over, and then eked out, a meal she is beginning to hate.
She tried to talk about the rental details - the adoption of animals was involved, dates, a lease, the amount and method of payment - and there were some other minor things concerning the upkeep of the property she wanted to discuss with Thin who showed his usual reluctance to get down to business. Mel helped by reminding her of things sporadically. He rarely had much to do with any business other than to give his advice which was always shrewd.
When Dagmar finally forced Thin's attention his children interrupted. He allowed them to interrupt, and by then the Fox boys, who wouldn't go to bed while the older children were there, began to get even more excited than usual. So Dagmar gave up. She started to scrape the children's leftover food into the compost bucket instead of joining in the conversation, what there was of it.
Mel said: `Leave that. I don't mind cleaning up a mess.'
***
In the evening of the day Dagmar and her family left, Thin parked beyond the open gates which usually shielded most of the property from `...potential Fox hunters. Those outside who might want to get inside' - Mel's words - and just sat in the car as if he wondered what he would find. Dagmar had sold him the car which was too old to be driven interstate. She did this when she had finally managed to get him to pay attention to all the rental details. The proprietor of the garage she always used had looked at her with surprise and respect when she told him what Thin had paid for the car.
Everything had been left in working order. Dagmar had apologised in advance for the dirty places where furniture had stood, saying she hoped Anna would understand. They had to catch a plane while the removalists were still loading the van. Thin said he wasn't bothered. He had moved into empty houses before. Mel had left the garden looking immaculate.
The keys were where Dagmar said they would be. Thin unlocked the office in the back garden where Mel had worked at a large desk hemmed in by Dagmar's books and an old piano. Steep stairs led to a loft, previously out-of-bounds to the Fox boys who are at this moment flying high above Australia attracting nervous looks from other passengers.
Their parents wondering what the future holds.
***
Thin borrowed a trailer and filled the house with artefacts and decorative items he had gathered over the years; scented candles, wall hangings, bowls of unusual shapes filled with dried petals, a set of bongo drums in receding size, a Javanese flute, and even stuffed birds which he hung on a brick wall near the potbelly stove.
He would use the stove until it clogged with ash, and then, when he had thrown the ash out the back door into the wind which had blown much of it back inside again, he used the stove until all of the wood, cut to size and stacked on the back porch by Mel, had been burned. He ran out of wood one day in mid-winter when the rain had caused him to light his candles early, so he squelched down the back where he thought he remembered seeing what was left of Mel's supply under cover. When that was used up he plugged in a small electric radiator. A friend brought a chainsaw and cut some logs from one of several large boughs which had fallen in the garden during a prolonged period when Thin had remained indoors smoking dope of poor quality and listening to the music of the high winds thrashing the shrubbery. They didn't cut or split the logs to fit the stove so Thin clambered around the fallen boughs to gather up only the pieces that would fit which he burned until he had to switch the radiator on again.
Leaking water steadily flooded a corner of the huge garden. Thin must have heard the constant whine of the pressure pump but he didn't investigate. The animals survived despite almost no attention, with the exception of the budgies which were left too long without water. The donkeys' tiny hooves were a mess, and the clippers Dagmar had left for Thin rusted where he had dropped them in the grass which soon grew long enough to hide snakes when winter was over. One cat, which always reached Thin's scraps first, became fat, while the other cat got thinner as it was forced to survive on rats, mice, and sliptail lizards.
From his hilltop home a kilometre away a neighbouring farmer heard what he later reported as foreign music and strange cries far into the night.
***
With Easter approaching, Dagmar and Mel realised they would have to plan something to entertain their children during the holiday. They decided to ask Thin if they could rent their place back from him for the two weeks. They knew he attended an Arts Festival every Easter, staying with people he knew at a minor artists' colony on the coast.
Thin agreed. He always had money problems but Dagmar thought his agreement had been influenced more by a fear of displeasing Mel. She had spoken impatiently to Thin on the telephone when making the arrangements. He had been erratic with his rent payments, and after several calls from her he had stopped answering the telephone. She eventually reached him by ringing friends of his, and then his mother. They told her that he sometimes didn't answer because he claimed to know who was ringing. They sounded worried.
`Handy, that,' Mel had remarked when she passed the news on.
`What?'
A furious Dagmar.
`Telepathy.'
`What? Oh, telepathy. Huh!' A sneering Dagmar. `His mother said he and Anna have split up. I don't think she ever moved in to our place.'
***
They travelled at night. Their bright, beautiful boys slept most of the way, as planned. At four-thirty in the morning, Mel, his arthritic right knee pulsating with pain, pulled up outside their front gates, or what was left of them. One gate had been torn from its supporting post and was propped against the fence. Its mate gaped at a queer angle.
`Charming,' whispered Mel as the boys started to wriggle awake in their seatbelts. Thin's car - their old one - was parked near the house. `Looks like he's still here.'
`I told him we'd arrive in the early hours of this morning. He was supposed to leave the key.'
`Sic the kids on him.'
Mel laughing silently. Fiendish expression. Dagmar almost giggling, so tired.
They couldn't find a light switch that worked. As they fumbled, their voices low despite their annoyance with the presumably sleeping Thin, their children began to run and shriek as they remembered the house.
The hall light still worked. Gauzy material had been draped over the old-fashioned fitting. Mel made slow, stiff trips to and from the car, carrying a little at a time, glad to be moving again but tired beyond the immediate reach of sleep. The toilet was flushed again. Dagmar thought it was one of hers but a sleepy face resembling Thin's emerged to stare at her.
`Hello. Where's your dad? Go and wake him up.'
`We're not allowed to wake him up.'
`Oh, really!'
***
By eight-thirty they had managed to get rid of Thin and his children. Dagmar had. Mel, who had driven all the way, was sprawled on Thin's mattress on the floor enduring jet-lag dreams. Thin had told Dagmar that he was still in the house because he wanted to see them. Wanted to rave on to Mel who wouldn't be listening, Dagmar thought. She was compiling a mental list of indignations for when he woke up. The boys, delighted to be home again, played like normal children.
The holiday was a success even though Dagmar and Mel had to train themselves not to see dilapidation everywhere, even though Dagmar, jittery, had to keep moving artefacts above the boys' Plimsoll Line of curiosity and accidental mayhem, even though Thin's tools, arranged in a rusted tub like flowers in a vase, turned out to be for antique display, not for sensible use, although they did provide Mel with a wonderful opportunity to be inventive with language.
Mel hacking and chopping and lugging away the more obstructive of the fallen boughs. The boys delighted by his outrageous cursing.
Dagmar, frowning, doing her best with donkeys' hooves and the enemy weeds.
The boys had knocked over an arrangement of candles, pebbles, dried leaves, jewellery, a cameo photograph of Anna, incense cones, melted candle wax, and other, unidentifiable bits and pieces. Knocked the arrangement flying. It had been left below a blown-up picture of Anna in profile wearing a cloche hat. Dagmar had put the arrangement back together but she couldn't remember exactly how it had been, and had to throw away some of the scattered bits.
They answered the telephone. Dagmar had let friends know they were there for the week, and they caught up with gossip. Thin's friends had no idea Dagmar and Mel would be there. They were abrupt, even rude and demanding, or vague and slow to understand. Dagmar tried to remain polite and helpful, and Mel resisted his habit of being sarcastic.
One friend of Dagmar's, Zelda, was a friend also of Anna, and now a former friend of Thin. She told Dagmar how Thin, at two in the morning, had driven Mel's old car - somebody had thought it was Mel who was horrified when told this - up and down the street where Anna was staying, after Anna had broken off with him. He had stalked her, telephoned her and then said nothing, and he even sat outside her office door inside the building where he had once worked himself, sat for hours claiming a need to talk to Anna who said she was sick of talking.
`No wonder he's too tired to do any work around here,' quipped Mel when Dagmar relayed this news. `I think Thin's playing with his willie too much.'
In court Thin had lied, Zelda told Dagmar, saying he still worked in the same building as Anna who exposed his lie and won a restraint order.
Zelda told her that Thin had made a shrine to Anna: candles, petals, and incense, even some jewellery he wouldn't return. Dagmar told Zelda about the wedding dress she had discovered in the wardrobe when they returned but Zelda already knew, said Thin had bought it without consulting Anna, added a bit about tearful pleading and a bended knee.
`Mel's knee's playing up,' Dagmar said. `So he couldn't go down on it if he wanted to. He prefers warming his hands at the stove. The kids flattened that shrine. I think.'
The sound of Zelda's giggling stopped sudden. Indrawn breath.
***
They decided not to renew Thin's lease. Life was not the same as it once had been. With much manipulation Dagmar found a way for her family to share its time between states despite the great distance involved in travelling. She was familiar with fax machines and teleconferences. They would restore their lovely garden and enjoy the boys' delight in the old place. They would sit around, perhaps even on, the potbelly stove sipping brandy again, rediscovering good times.
Dagmar didn't relish giving Thin his notice. When they had driven back through the night after Easter the realisation that she had left a pair of Mel's glasses behind had jolted Dagmar. They had only been driving for half an hour and Mel offered to turn around but because they had so far to travel Dagmar told him not to waste the time. She would ask Zelda to collect them and post them express.
She had been relieved when Thin answered the telephone, but told Mel later that she thought there was something odd about their conversation. Thin said he had found what they left behind. Yes, somebody could come to collect them.
Zelda arrived at ten-thirty the next morning. Children she didn't know racing through the house. No sign of adults. Odour of dirty nappies.
It looked to Zelda like a commune. She asked a child to get Thin. Was told he is in bed. Asked for Mel's glasses after looking without success where Dagmar said Mel had left them. Zelda sent the child to the bedroom, heard Thin's voice, his slightly American way of talking. But he wouldn't get up so she had to leave without the glasses.
Dagmar was angry and embarrassed when Zelda reported back.
Another call to Thin. A child answers. Thin isn't there. Are you sure? queries Dagmar, impatience puffing at the edges of her words. An unidentified adult whose voice she doesn't know. The glasses? Sure, no problem. They'll be left in the mailbox for the friend and her express bag. Then Thin's voice. An obvious angry tone Dagmar had never heard before from him.
`What the fuck's going on?'
`Thin. I thought you weren't there.'
`I wasn't. I just got home. What the fuck's going on?'
Dagmar trying to explain about the glasses - she is just about fed up with Thin - when Mel does something as uncharacteristic as Dagmar leaving anything behind in the first place. He grabs the telephone from her.
`Hello? Thin?'
A pause.
`Yeah, babe. Hi.'
`Pull yourself together, not to death, and give Zelda my glasses, you insignificant blip on the radar screen of life. I need them.'
Another pause.
`They're on their way, my friend.'
`What are you doing with them? Balancing them on the end of your nose hoping they'll inspire intelligence where none exists?'
Thrusts the telephone back at Dagmar who, filled with curiosity, listens to what she later describes to Mel as `shocked silence'.
A tentative `Hello' from her and then Thin says: `I can't take any more of this shit, doll.'
Dagmar had managed to soothe him a bit before ending the call. The glasses were not left in the letterbox as promised. Now Mel told Dagmar not to waste any more time over them. There were months to run on the lease.
***
They drove home in early summer, back over the mist-shrouded mountains, John Coltrane playing so soft and low. This time they carried a lawnmower and tools. There had not been much news. Zelda had told Dagmar that Anna had disappeared, a smart move, according to Zelda, and there had been some trouble concerning Thin's son at school, sexual problems. Dagmar had rung Thin well before the lease was due, had rung ten times before he answered, to tell him they were returning, to tell him he would have to find somewhere else to live.
`I suppose something will turn up,' he had said.
`Yes. We will. The day after the lease ends.'
And now the Foxes' conversation revealing relief at finding everything more or less the way they had hoped. Hauling mattresses from the top of the car. Children chasing a skinny cat in the dark morning through grass half as high as themselves. More plans added to those already formed. A tremendous buzzing in the air. The promise of a warm day ahead.