The Long Memory
A pub on Argent Street, a bar stool, and Brock Polden can name every face in the room — the father, the brothers, the trouble they got into at fifteen. It is what he has always done best. Except now there are faces at the end of the bar he cannot place, and cases on his desk nobody from here would have done. He has been keeping a list. It used to feel like a gift. Now it feels like something he was handed to keep him from looking anywhere else.
His grandfather told him about the 1915 Turkish attack the way other men told fishing stories, and Brock grew up believing he could read this town the way he read his own handwriting. He did his time in Sydney. He came home the minute they let him. Stock theft, missing men, domestic rows in houses he had been inside as a child — he was good at it because he knew who had been angry at whom since Year 9, and who drank, who hit, which brothers had stopped speaking over which drought.
Then a woman he had been at school with walked into the station to tell him her husband was missing, and Brock — who had known her since she was fifteen — did not believe a single word of it. That was the first crack. The ones that came after did not stop. Bodies arranged in places that do not arrange bodies. Strangers with stories that will not sit flat. Old names surfacing in files from before he was born. A man who has known a place his whole life can stop being able to see it. He is long past that now. The place has been hiding things from him his whole life, the hiding was never an accident, and he is the only one still looking.
