Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest

timber, townspeople and sky as its momentum slowly worked the remaining hinge out of the cabinet. As the door fell it revealed to the town Alf Barber’s two pairs of trousers and three shirts still hanging from the rod, and a tumble of blue-and-white-striped aprons on the floor of the wardrobe.
    Jack Mulligan made to switch off the engine of his tractor but Sybil waved toward the back fence where the outdoor lavatory still stood, and shouted above the engine noise that the rubble should be pulled into a tighter heap.On the second pass of the chain the cracked boards of the lavatory disintegrated into the pile, as did the wooden seat and toilet can it contained. The onlookers, not expecting any smell from the old can after so many years, gasped and moved back with hands held to mouth and nose as a foul miasma rose. Alistair Meakins – ever one for taking care of a sensitive nose and stomach – retched violently and left the scene, giving in to the sudden urge for a pot of tea in the calm of his own back verandah.
    Brigid Connor covered her nose and commented to Granna that it was just as well a ghost’s sense of smell wasn’t good, as the stench of Alf Barber was like nothing she’d ever smelt before. Can’t smell a thing , Granna said cheerfully. Maureen Mather, in her bed at the other side of town, struggled into her wheelchair and tried to close the windows against the sudden gust of malodorous wind. Even Kelpie Crush paled slightly, and found that using shallow, panting breaths made the odour a little more bearable. Kelpie, though, was more drawn forward than pushed back, wanting in a vague sort of way to find the source of the corruption.
    Sybil directed the tractors into the street and well away from the rubble. In the silence after the roaring engines were turned off the bells from the Catholic church were suddenly loud, but no-one spoke and no-one moved. The play was not finished yet. Sybil picked up a bucket and threw kerosene over the pile, splashing it around well. She crouched down and from her pocket took a packet of matches, struck one and touched it to a piece of saturated wood.
    Two minutes , they say in the telling, two minutes and that old shack went up like a beacon. Old wood it was. Mainly deal and pine from those packing cases the Farmers’ Co-op used to get machine parts in. And one room was made from the big container that Ford sedan arrived in for old Thomas Aberline.
    Flames followed the rivulets of kerosene into the heart of the pile and at first there was a smokeless blaze. Then the fire found Alf Barber’s shit, dried and refined to a fine fuel by time, and a ball of purple and orange smoke burst into the sky and spread across the town, dropping black ashes on the exposed heads of those watching. Upwards and outwards it spread, the sudden wind catching the ash and residue.
    Sybil retreated from the flames and looked at the people standing in the street. A good barbecue now , she said. But this was Alf Barber’s house, and you knew what he was doing in it. All of you knew, and not one of you tried to stop him. And Sybil Barber left the ashes of her father’s house for her own home near the salt lake.

    On the evening of the day Alf Barber went off with the boxing troupe those twelve years ago, Sybil had walked out to the lake whose surface glinted icily in the setting sun. At the edge stood eucalypts petrified by the salt water into stark grey sculptures: ghosts of trees past reflecting in the surface of the salt lake. I wonder how long the lake has been here , she thought, but no-one in the town could have answered thishad she asked; as far as the town remembered, the lake had always been there.
    Sybil also saw that the salt had crept across the ground and closer to the road since she had been here the summer before, and was climbing the wooden posts of Brigid Connor’s boundary fence. Sybil went to tell Brigid about the fence, and at the same time she