THE

CANE
MARYROSE
CUSKELLY
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2022

Copyright © Maryrose Cuskelly 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

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 Fo r my fath e r, Te r r y Cuske lly,

a n d i n m e m o r y of my m oth e r, Ire ne Cuske lly.

In yo u r h o u s e, I  have a l ways fe lt safe.

 ONE

cane and Janet McClymont has not been found.

THEY’RE LIGHTING THE
A week after she disappeared, her mother Barbara walked
into Jensens’ shop and bought every box of matches and all
the Bic cigarette lighters on the shelves. She then stood outside
striking the head of each and every match against the phos-
phorus strip, watching it flare before shaking out the flame and
dropping the spent stick on the road. Then she drove down to
the inlet and threw the lighters into the water.
No one knew what the hell she was playing at. Then it
dawned on me. With the crush about to start, and all of us
believing that her daughter’s body must be lying in the cane,
some harebrained notion had got hold of her. She thought she
could stave off the lighting of the cane fires until Janet’s body
was found. You see, in Barbara’s mind, on top of everything
else that probably happened to her daughter, burning her body

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would be yet another desecration. But nothing is going to stop

the sugar crush. It’s already been delayed. We’re almost at the
end of June, what with all the searching and the upset.
I mean, I understand Barbara’s need to hope that after all
this time someone will find Janet’s body lying unblemished in
the cane fields near where she found her daughter’s bag. Or
maybe even that the girl herself is alive. You have to remember,
apart from the fact that she’s been missing for so long, there’s
no evidence that Janet’s dead. But hundreds of people combed
through those drills from Quala to Kaliope and back again for
weeks looking for her and found nothing. That hasn’t stopped
Barbara, though. She still goes out every morning by herself,
walking through the cane fields belonging to the Creadies and
the Tranters, looking for her daughter’s remains. She comes
back hours later, covered in dust and dirt.
I’ve got all the sympathy under the sun for her and Ted
and what they’re going through, but if their girl is in the cane,
she’s dead, and burning isn’t going to change that. And I tell
you what, I’d rather find her bones after they’ve been scorched
clean by fire than see what she’d look like after a month of lying
in this heat. Fire’s cleansing, I reckon. When it goes through
the cane, it burns off the dreck and drives out the rats, the
snakes and those filthy toads. Sure, everything is scorched and
black and there’s ash everywhere, but the real muck, the stuff
you can’t bear to look at, it’s all been burnt away.
Not that Barbara sees it like that, and I’m not saying I blame
her. It put me in mind of that time Dot dropped her pearl
earring that had belonged to her mother on the kitchen floor.
We heard it bounce and there were only a few square feet

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 THE CANE

of floorboards where it could’ve possibly landed, but it was

as if it’d disappeared into thin air. Just like poor little Janet
McClymont disappeared into the cane as if something unseen
had swallowed her up. But those fields have been searched
thoroughly—​dozens of times—​and the cane must be harvested,
and for that to happen it has to be burnt. Even the Tranters,
with Connie Tranter being so close to Barbara, aren’t going to
be able to hold off much longer.
Connie was very taken with Barbara right from the start.
Barbara’s an artist, you see, and Connie knows a bit about that
sort of thing. Culture and whatnot. Before she married Cam
she had a public service job with Queensland Arts Council or
some such. Gave it all up when she got married.
Barbara being an artist was why the McClymonts lived at
Quala, rather than in town, in Kaliope, despite how much
bigger it is. She’d only agreed to come north for Ted’s job on
condition that they bought a house with a view of the sea. As
soon as they moved in she set up a studio with canvasses and
brushes and paints in their big sleep-out on the eastern side of
the house. All you could see from up there was ocean. That,
and the cane, of course. There’s nowhere you can’t see the cane
around here.
There’s a few people around Quala who do arts and crafts, the
kind of stuff you see sold in Kaliope for the tourists. Macramé
owls, clocks with numbers made from shells, woven bags, that
sort of thing. But Barbara, she’s the genuine article, a real artist.
She paints landscapes mainly. Big bloody canvasses. I had a bit
of a gander at some of them hanging up at that housewarming
they had not long after they arrived. They invited everyone in

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Quala, even old blokes like me. I’d just got myself a beer when
Barbara walked up behind me while I was having a look at
one of her paintings she had up in the hall. Straight up, she
asked, ‘Well, what do you think, Arthur?’ I told her it was
very impressive. A close-up view of the rainforest up on Mount
Tamborine, that’s what Barbara said it was. A bit strange, but
in a good way. Moody, I suppose you’d call it. Dense. Splashes
of bright colour among the darkness of the trees. Not that I
know anything about it—art, that is.
Anyway, Connie thought an awful lot of Barbara. They
had a bit in common, I suppose. Neither of them being locals.
Now, I know how that sounds. Connie’s been living in Quala
for what, almost thirteen years? But you know what I mean. It
takes a while to be seen as part of the furniture in little places
like this one.
Janet was walking up to the Tranters’ place when she went
missing. It was a Saturday evening, just on dusk. Connie had
asked her to babysit her girls, Essie and the little one, Helen,
overnight. Cam Tranter’s brother had just got engaged and
there was a bit of a shindig planned. Cam and Connie were
going to be away till Sunday morning.
The McClymonts’ house is right on the edge of Quala town-
ship and up against the boundary of the Creadies’ place, and
the Tranters are the next one over. Janet would have taken the
track that runs through the Creadies’ two biggest fields to get
there. Lots of the local kids use that track—​or used to—t​ o walk
to the main road to catch the bus to the high school in Kaliope
of a weekday morning, or the one that goes late on a Saturday
arvo if they’re going to the pictures in town.

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 THE CANE

About twenty past six, Connie rang Barbara to see why

Janet hadn’t turned up. She was a reliable girl, you see. Barbara
was in a tizz right away. Janet had left the house at least an
hour earlier, maybe more, she said, which surprised Connie,
because it would have only taken Janet twenty minutes to walk
over to their place. Later on, the fact that Janet set out so early
was enough to make people twig to the possibility that she’d
arranged to meet someone—​a boyfriend maybe—​before she
went to the Tranters’. It made things hot for Joe Cassar for a
bit, because it had got about that he and Janet were keen on
each other.
Anyway, Barbara was so worried that Cam left Connie with
the girls to go and help Barbara look. And when he wasn’t
back within half an hour, Connie called John Creadie to see
if he could help. He and his father Vince took off in the ute
to look for Janet as well. After an hour or so Connie herself,
still with all her makeup on and her hair curled, dropped her
girls over to Jean Creadie to mind and she joined the men and
Barbara in the search. Connie and Cam ended up missing his
brother’s engagement party altogether. Not that that’s a tragedy,
not compared to a young girl going missing.
For Cam and Connie, it immediately brought up memories
of when Jean and Vince Creadie’s daughter, Cathy, went
missing. Of course, it must’ve hit the Creadies even worse.
It must be nine, almost ten years ago that Cathy disappeared
swimming off the rocks up at Danger Point. It was several
days before they found her body. Cathy was about the same
age as the McClymont girl when she died. Sixteen, I reckon,
and John about four years older, I suppose. A terrible thing.

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Terrible in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. Mind
you, the McClymonts have had weeks to endure the uncertainty
of what’s happened to their daughter, and it’s not over yet.
It took them a while to track down Ted McClymont that
night. He’d gone out fishing with Les Comerford in the after-
noon. Ted works for the Department of Primary Industries
and he’d helped Les with a compensation claim against the
state electricity commission. His cane crop had been damaged
when they were replacing power poles or something. I can’t
remember exactly. Anyway, Ted knows a bit about these things
and Les offered to take Ted out on his boat because he’d done
such a good job for him. They’d stopped off for a few beers
with Les’s mates after they tied up the boat at the jetty.
Ted’d been drinking for a few hours by the time they found
him, but he sobered up pretty quick smart once they told
him Janet was missing, and he got stuck into searching for
his daughter as well. Cam and the Creadies had searched
alongside the track Janet would have taken, so Ted drove
up and down the highway mostly. Cam went into Kaliope
on a hunch and went round the pubs, but she wasn’t there.
Then he drove out to George and Nola Cassar’s place because
Barbara mentioned that Janet had dropped a few hints that
she and Joe were going around together. No one was home.
They were at one of Nola’s people’s place, apparently. A bit
of a family get-together. Nola’s the eldest of eight, so there’s
always birthdays and whatnot to celebrate.
The police weren’t called until about ten o’clock that night.
Some young bloke just out of the academy was the only copper
at Kaliope station. There’d been a brawl earlier in the day at

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 THE CANE

the footy game in Candleford, between their blokes and the

Kaliope team. It’s still early in the season but there’s a bit of
bad blood left over from last year’s grand final. All hell had
broken loose again later at the Commercial Hotel in town when
the Candleford boys turned up for another go. So there was
no one around with any brains to take a report of a missing
teenage girl seriously. The young constable didn’t even let Bill
Wren—​he’s the local sergeant—​know about Janet until early
the next day.
Barbara and Ted were out all night looking for their
daughter, of course. As were Cam Tranter and John Creadie.
Connie tried to persuade Barbara to get an hour’s sleep, but she
wouldn’t hear a word of it. At sparrow’s fart the next morning,
before the local cops even turned up and got a proper search
going, Barbara found Janet’s shoulder bag a couple of drills
into one of the Creadies’ fields. Jean Creadie said she heard
Barbara screaming her daughter’s name all the way from their
place up on the hill. I suppose it was then that Barbara knew
her worst fears had probably been realised, because no woman
I know, young or old, willingly goes anywhere without a bag
of some sort. It was the only clue as to what had befallen her
daughter, and a pretty strong indication she hadn’t gone of
her own accord.
The bag was open, all of Janet’s things spilled out onto the
grass. Her purse, I suppose, perhaps some homework to catch
up on and whatever else it is that young girls carry round with
them. Maybe a handkerchief. I think she would have had a
handkerchief. She was a neat, clean little thing. I’d seen her
round and about. She always had some little bit of feminine

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frippery like the butterfly hair slide she was wearing in that
photo they published in the paper. She had a knack for looking
smart, well put-together—​even I could see that—​like her
mother. Well, like her mother used to.
By the time the Kaliope coppers arrived, most of the
McClymonts’ neighbours had joined in the search for the girl.
Even Dot and me were helping as best we could. There were
blokes on horses, blokes driving tractors, others on motorbikes
tearing through the bush, and four-wheel drives roaring up
hills and along the beach down at the inlet. We’d just about
thrashed our way through the entire field where Barbara had
found her daughter’s things, as well as the one opposite and
all along the riverbank. And a few men had already fanned
out into the field beyond the creek further up. We’d found no
other trace of her.
When the police managed to get a few of the searchers
together, someone said they’d seen footprints in the sand by
the river, but by the time the coppers went to look for them
all the ground there had turned to mud, churned up by those
who’d come running when word had got out.
None of us locals were saying it, but we were all thinking
it—​the same way we were when Vince and Jean’s daughter
Cathy first went missing—​just how bloody easy it would be to
hide something or somebody in this type of country. The cane
fields are just the start of it; then there’s the creeks, the gullies,
the swamps, and the bloody mangroves, of course. The guinea
grass was that tall, not to mention the cane. Most of us were
soaking wet, our boots caked in mud from pushing through
the waist-high grass and the gullies filled with muck. There’d

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 THE CANE

been so much rain in the months before that water was lying
everywhere, and the growth was that thick. Plenty of snakes too.
I was half afraid of blundering across a wild sow and her
piglets, but not much chance of that given the noise we were
making. I gave myself a hell of a fright when I caught a glimpse
of something white in an overgrown gully. They’d told us
Janet had been wearing cropped white pants, you see, pedal
pushers they called them, and a blue sleeveless top. Thought I
was going to shit myself. I called over one of the Froome boys.
Too bloody scared to find her by myself. Turned out to be a
dead horse. Most of it was hidden in the long grass. It was one
of its legs I’d seen poking out of the end of the gully. It had a
white fetlock. We laughed, if you can believe it.
The search was all a bit bloody ad hoc, if you want the
truth. At least on the first day. It wasn’t until that afternoon
when some of the women—​Dot and Connie and Meg and Jean
Creadie and a few others—​brought sandwiches and tea and
set up a canteen that the coppers got all the searchers together
in one spot. The Jensens even donated soft drinks and chips,
which was a bit of a turn-up for the books. Anyway, one of
the coppers, I think it was Bill Wren, finally got around to
marking off sections of a map of the surrounding area. It was
only then that they got us to break into groups of two or three
to systematically search within a four-mile radius of where
Janet’s bag had been found. Before that, we’d just been tearing
off in whatever direction we got into our heads.
We searched all day. People came from everywhere to help.
Even the tourists from the caravan park and hippies from that
commune up near Danger Point, blokes from the dive shop.

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There must have been hundreds of us charging around the

place. And not just men. There were plenty of women too. At
about five-thirty the coppers called it off for the day. It was too
bloody dark to see anything. Ted McClymont made a point of
shaking the hand of every man that was there. He was kind
of hearty, trying to smile, slapping our backs and that. It was
bloody cruel. I couldn’t look him in the face.
On Monday, the principal of Kaliope West High, Ern Shaw,
told all the students they could have the day off to join the
search, and before long every man and his dog from Kaliope was
traipsing round the place. Over the next five days, thousands
of people turned out to look for her. We searched every creek,
every waterhole. There were people tramping along the beaches
north and south, a couple of army helicopters buzzing over-
head, vehicles driving up and down the highway looking in
ditches by the side of the road. Ted McClymont even hired a
pilot with a private plane to fly him over the area. Apart from
Barbara finding her daughter’s bag that first morning, we found
nothing. Absolutely nothing.
That’s when the fear really set in. The fact that a young
girl had just disappeared without a trace and no one knew
what had happened to her, like something had just swallowed
her up. Everyone was watching their kids like a hawk; they
still are. No child within a two-hundred-mile radius of the
place is allowed to walk to school. People on the farms have
organised rosters to pick up their kids and drive them into
town every morning. No more riding their bikes. Even kids
who only live a couple of doors away from the school have to
walk there in a group or with a parent. I’m glad my grandkids

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 THE CANE

are just about grown up. The fear must be something awful if
you’ve got young ones. And the poor kids. What’s being a kid
if you don’t have a bit of freedom to muck about?
W

Four weeks have passed since Janet’s disappearance and Ted

McClymont still hasn’t gone back to work. Lucky for him he
works for a government department, because anywhere else
and who knows what they’d be living on.
Ted hasn’t accepted that Janet’s dead; at least that’s what
he says. ‘I’ve not given up hope, not by a long shot,’ he shoots
back at anyone who tells him how sorry they are about what’s
happened to Janet. He has this awful grin smeared across
his face like a scrape of dough. His lips all twisted and baring his
teeth. Mind you, when he thinks no one is watching, his mask
drops away and something horrific happens to his eyes. It’s as
if he’s watching his daughter being tormented with the worst
things he can imagine.
Barbara, though, she knows her daughter’s gone for good.
She staggers about as if she’s carrying Janet’s corpse in her
arms. She was a striking-looking woman, was Barbara, even
though she dressed in a pretty peculiar way. Bohemian, I guess
you’d call it. That’s what Dot says. Hair all piled on top of her
head, some bloody great pin or scarf securing the lot of it. I don’t
think I ever saw her in what I would call normal get-up. She
was always going about in caftans and harem pants like that
woman out of I Dream of Jeannie, her hands stained with paint.
Now of course, well, it’s a different story. Poor woman.
She looks terrible. I’m not saying that to be unkind, but hell’s

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bells she’s thin. From what I can see, she barely changes her
clothes, just wanders around in what looks like a pair of Ted’s
old trousers and a T-shirt.
The women tried to keep Barbara and Ted fed at first. Dot
and Jean Creadie and Connie Tranter and a few others would
drop off casseroles at the house for them. Barbara was hardly
ever there. Always trudging about in the cane, looking for
Janet’s body. Even when she was at home, more often than not
she wouldn’t answer the door. People left the food on the door-
step—​spaghetti Bolognese, salmon loaf, sweet and sour pork.
There were buckets of the stuff going off in the sun. All that
trouble people went to going to waste. Ted eventually hosed out
the dishes and left the empty pots and Tupperware containers
at the gate to be picked up by whoever owned them. Not that
anyone holds it against them. People can’t be held to account
for such things when they’re grieving.
Some people say it’d be easier for Barbara and Ted if
they knew exactly what happened to their girl; that what they
imagine has to be worse than the reality. I don’t reckon that’s
right. If it was my daughter, I wouldn’t want to know. Not
the details. There are men who are capable of anything; blokes
whose instincts when they have something or someone in
their power go beyond what decent people can imagine. If
the McClymonts asked my advice, I’d tell them to accept that
their daughter’s gone, rage and howl for a while, and then
settle quietly into their grief. It’s what I would do.
But if those detectives from down south ever do catch that
bastard who killed Janet—​if they’re lucky enough to trip
over him and he holds up his hands and says, ‘Yep, it was

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me’ (because they’re that bloody useless it would be the only

way they’d find him)—​then they should tie that black-hearted
bastard to a tree, give Ted McClymont a cane cutter, and walk
away. A few swings of that hooked blade and he’d be crying
like a baby; crying like Janet would have been.

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