‘Takeaway!’ Mum said. ‘Do you really think that McDonald’s and Pizza Hut came out with the First Fleet?’
Oh! I realised then that when she’d said ‘you’, she hadn’t meant me, Dan Baker, but me the convict. (What was my name?)
‘You can take some of the camping utensils if you like,’ Mum went on. ‘But make sure they come back, OK?’
‘OK.’ But somehow the thought of it (the bush, the cooking-for-myself, the hard earth, the snakes) had gone sour, and I shoved the wire and stuff back on the shelf. I was me, Daniel John Baker, this was the twenty-first century, and I was a free person, so as the rain had stopped I went down to the takeaway where everyone hangs out. (Somehow I just had to see them. I mean, I knew I’d make new friends in Perth, but still . . .)
It was a couple of nights later when I was watching TV (Mum was out at her design course) that I suddenly thought ‘Seamus’. The name just came into my head and I knew that was me. Seamus Murphy. That meant I was Irish, didn’t it?
That was all at that stage, but it’s funny how, when you become aware of something, it somehow seems to crop up all the time. Over the next week, there was a show on TV about all the fighting between the Irish people and the English landlords that’s been going on for centuries, and in English we did a poem about the Easter Rebellion. And then Mum’s friend Liz who’s overseas sent this postcard of a tiny fallen-down stone cottage on a headland, with the sea on one side and steep green paddocks all around and a little village with a church spire in the distance.
That’s it, that’s where I come from, I just knew. I read the caption on the back of the postcard: Deserted Cottage, Connemara, Ireland.
The next day in library period I found myself looking up Connemara in the atlas, but it seemed to be a whole area. I ran my finger down the jagged coastline, reading the names of the villages – why didn’t the bloody postcard say exactly where I lived? I shut my eyes and kept fingering the map, as if that might help me remember, and then I was aware of everyone laughing and the librarian saying, ‘Daniel! Daniel! You look as if you’re holding a seance!’
If this is all sounding as if I was getting totally obsessed with the history thing, then I’m giving the wrong impression. Most of the time I was just the same as ever (except for the uneasiness with Mum). I went out skating with my mates after school, or if it was too wet I mucked around at Damien’s place. On Friday nights we usually all went to Jason’s (his parents run the video shop and he gets all the latest DVDs for free). On weekends we went down to Penrith and hung out at the mall, and a couple of times I went to the movies with my old friend Tim. Meanwhile I’d rung Dad and told him I wanted to move over to Western Australia at the end of the year, and he said he knew, Mum had already rung him and discussed it. (That pissed me right off. Whose future was it anyway?)
‘OK, but leave it till January,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve got to come to Sydney – the band’s doing a bit of a tour across to the east, finishing up on New Year’s Eve at a pub in Rozelle. Then I guess I could drive up, we could pack your stuff in the van, and you could come back to Perth with me.’ He was quiet, as if he was thinking.
‘There won’t be much room, you know,’ he warned. ‘I’ll have a lot of the band equipment. So keep it down to a couple of bags, OK?’
‘No worries,’ I said. If you’re used to living out of a shoebox (the Seamus bit of me thought) then a couple of bags sounds like heaps of room. All the same, I didn’t find it easy when I started going through sixteen years of accumulated junk, making a big pile to take to the op shop.
Toy trucks and cars from when I was a real little kid; the bulldozer Dad gave me the Christmas after he split; Monopoly and Junior Scrabble and Uno and Gameboy; the farm set (I used to really love that); Little Golden Books and Thomas the Tank Engine and the Hardy Boys and Paul Jennings and Roald Dahl; the plastic speedcar raceway and the Lego and my surfa-plane. And then there were all the clothes I’d grown out of, and four brand new pairs of pyjamas (Nan gave me some every birthday and I never wore them).
The other pile was the hardest because I’d have to take it to the tip. Stuff like my three broken skatedecks and all my old Reeboks and Nikes that I’d worn out skating; my first football (that had punctured when Tim and I were playing near the highway and a car went over it); my first cricket bat (that had split down the middle when Damien hit a six right down the back gully and we never found the ball); the two-way radio (that Jason and I had made out of beer cans and clothesline); and Dino, my old green velvet dinosaur, who was sprouting fluff from his earholes. I just had to look at that stuff and I’d remember all the good times . . .
‘I never thought I’d see the day,’ Mum stuck her head around the door, ‘when Daniel Baker voluntarily cleaned his room!’
‘I’m not cleaning. I’m throwing stuff out.’
‘What in heaven’s name for?’
‘Well, you won’t want all my junk,’ I said, ‘when you set up your studio.’
‘Oh . . .’ I’d caught her out, I could see. She hadn’t actually told me about her plans for when she got rid of me. ‘OK, but you don’t have to pack now, do you? Dad won’t be coming to get you till New Year. And we can’t shift all that stuff, without a car.’
‘Just practising,’ I said. ‘Making sure it’ll fit when the time comes.’ I looked at my third pile: Things to Take. My skateboard. CD player. CDs. My Swiss Army knife. Two pairs of jeans (besides the pair I had on), four T-shirts, tracksuit pants, jumper, coat. And the hardback set of The Lord of the Rings that Mum had given me when I’d started high school. That was Dan Baker’s convict box.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Mum said, real sort of off-hand. ‘I saw this in the op shop and got it for you. I hope you don’t mind.’
She held out something that looked like a tin whistle. What the hell could it be?
‘It’s a tin whistle,’ Mum said. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’
I stared at her. OK, throwing out all my stuff was making me miserable, but she didn’t know that. And the last thing I needed was more junk.
‘When you’re by yourself at night. In your hut, if you have a hut.’
Oh. It was you-the-convict she meant again. ‘Thank you,’ I said rather stiffly. ‘But I don’t know if Seamus can play it.’
‘Seamus?’
‘Yeah, Seamus Murphy. That’s me . . .’
When I said that, I . . . Look, I’m not trying to make this out to be like a horror movie or something. Nothing spooky happened, such as seeing my hand go all calloused and warty, or hearing moans, or the room going sideways, but I did feel – something. As if someone out in space had a machine like a TV remote control, and they’d flicked for a second from my channel to Seamus Murphy’s channel and then back again.
‘I mean,’ I said quickly, ‘that’s him. The convict that I am.’
‘That’s appropriate,’ Mum said.
‘What is?’
‘That you’re Irish.’
I looked at her.
‘Well, you are,’ Mum explained. ‘On my side. Nan was a MacBride before she married. Not that she’s ever been to Ireland or anything – we’re fifth-generation Aussie. But still. Oh well, if you don’t want this, I suppose I can give it back to the op shop . . .’
‘No, it’s OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could learn to play it.’
‘Maybe you could and all,’ I heard Mum say in a put-on Irish voice from the other side of the door.
After that, it felt even more like I didn’t really live here any more. It was too much of a hassle to get the stuff to the op shop and the tip, and so it all stayed in the middle of the floor (it’s still here now), with things slowly spreading from one pile to another.
And so the month disappeared. If I still sometimes thought stuff like ‘A bit of broken mirror – I could make fire with that!’ or ‘There’s that rusty fishing knife in the garage . . .’, I was mostly thinking of my new life, the one I’d have in Perth. No school – I’d just hang out with Dad �
� travel round in the van to wherever he was playing. There’d be all these chicks at the gigs – I’d grow my hair and get a couple of earrings . . . Maybe the band would take me on as a roadie; it was a pity I wasn’t musical (I’d had a few goes at the whistle but it just made this high lonely noise, like the wind).
And then it was a Thursday afternoon, the assignment was due in the next day, and I didn’t even have a shoebox, let alone all my convict belongings. Leave it till after tea, I thought, the garage had a light and I’d just grab some of the camping gear and some wire and bolts and stuff. Oh, and write a couple of letters. Ms Pap wanted some letters in the box, she said, to show the research we’d done. As if!
It was just on dark, and Mum was sitting down to watch the News when the TV and light went off.
‘Quick, Dan,’ she said, ‘nick out and get the fuse – here’s the little torch – and I’ll look for the fuse wire.’
But when I went out to the fuse box I realised that the whole street was in darkness. As I looked out over the town I saw . . . well, I saw nothing, because it was completely black.
Now I should have said that there was a dreadful wind that evening – I could feel it tearing at me the minute I opened the door, and I could hear it rushing through the branches of the pine trees all around our house. It sounded like the surf, it was so loud and kind of pounding.
‘Quick, come inside, Danny!’ I heard Mum yelling through the kitchen window. ‘A branch might fall!’ Just then there was a great flash of lightning, and a boom of thunder.
I pelted back in. By now, of course, Mum had realised what had happened. ‘Thank Christ for Seamus,’ she said. I thought she’d really flipped, and then she said, ‘I thought you might be needing a bit of candle for your project, so I went to buy one, but they made me take a whole box. I know they’re here somewhere, give us the torch . . .’
The torch. It wasn’t in my hand.
‘Oh well,’ Mum said, ‘they are here somewhere.’
We stumbled around in total darkness, like a game of blind man’s bluff. Suddenly the house was unfamiliar. Doorways, the dresser, a chair at an angle became things to crash into. I remember at one stage our feet hit something and we fell together in a pile. It was the first time we’d touched in ages. ‘Bloody skateboard!’ Mum said. Then down there, on the floor, with the storm crashing at the windows, we started laughing. ‘On top of the fridge,’ Mum finally said. ‘That’s where convicts keep their candles.’
We lit all six of them, three up each end of the kitchen table. The fuel stove was going, Mum was cooking one of her oxtail stews. Potatoes in the oven. We were warm, and wouldn’t starve, but it really was a bit scary – not the thunder and lightning, but knowing that the pine trees were huge, and far too close to the house, and shallow-rooted in the sandy soil, and the wind could easily bring one down. It was obvious that that was the cause of the blackout: trees had brought down the lines all over the town.
‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘it’ll be a good excuse to tell Ms Pap.’
‘Come again?’
‘Why I can’t get my convict stuff together. Why I can’t write my letters.’
She started then. ‘What letters?’
I told her and she went on to ‘Why do you always leave all your homework till the last night?’ Then bit her lip. Since the fight, it was as if she really had decided that it was my homework, my life, my future.
‘But you might as well,’ she urged, ‘write the wretched letters tonight. I mean, Ms Pap will just make you do them for Monday. And it’s not as if there’s anything else you can do.’
When she said that, I thought, We’re stuck together tonight. I can’t disappear to my room and listen to music, she can’t sit in the lounge and watch TV, we are together for a whole night with none of the toys of the twenty-first century to help us not to talk to each other.
So that’s how I started. In the dark kitchen, with the stove going, the smell of stew, the crashing surf noise of the wind through the pines, the flares of lightning through the window, the boom of the thunder, the flicker of the candlelight, me up one end of the kitchen table, and my mother up the other. And half a world between us.
Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
24 January 1832
To My Mother,
I hope you are feeling good. Though I have been in this country for more than a year, this is the first chance I have had to write to you, as up until now I didn’t have a pencil.
I will tell you of the trip over here first. The boat we travelled on was very overcrowded. All of us were treated and fed very poorly, resulting in numerous deaths from scurvy and other causes.
Shortly after I arrived in Sydney Town I got into a fight with some of the other prisoners. I swear to you it wasn’t my fault but when you are new in a place, people pick on you and test you out to see what you are made of. So this group of three men began to taunt me, laughing at the way I speak and saying Ireland is a boghole, and I began to argue back, and the next thing I know we are all fighting on the ground and an overseer arrives and the others say I started it. As a result I was sentenced to 12 months in an ironed gang and sent to work on the new road at Victoria Pass. That was sheer Hell – working in leg irons, breaking rock, grubbing out massive tree roots, carting huge blocks of sandstone for the culverts. We rose at daybreak and worked all day, and at night slept in bark huts (5 or 6 men to a hut) inside a stockade.
Anyway, I do not wish to worry you, and that is over now. I have been assigned to a Master called Mr Mace and I arrived at his farm yesterday. The farm is out on the western plains, beyond the mountains, and I am told it is 650 acres of which 5 are cultivated. At the farmhouse, there are two other men in service (one of them kindly gave me this pencil) but I am to work alone as a shepherd at the other end of Mr Mace’s land.
I will finish now, as there seems little point writing when I do not know how I will ever post this to you.
Your Son, Seamus Murphy.
Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
17 April 1832
Dear Mother,
I hope you are well. It is three months now since last I wrote to you but there is little News, as one day here is very much the same as the next.
I have a little hut of bark and thatch, and my job is to keep an eye on the sheep by day and herd the flock into their pen at night in case the dingoes get them. It is easy work, compared to building the road, but boring and lonely, for my only companions are the sheep and the flies, the snakes and mosquitoes.
Once a week Mr Mace rides out to check up on me and bring me supplies. I am entitled to 1 pound of beef or mutton a day but he sometimes brings kangaroo instead. This meat is very rich and has a good taste, a bit like oxtail. The problem is that in the hot summer months the meat is flyblown within hours, so I subsist on damper-bread and fish that I catch in the nearby river.
So that is really all I can tell you of my life here, for nothing ever happens. Sometimes at night when I am in the hut I think of our cottage, by itself on the hillside. After Dad died, I guess you and I got used to the loneliness, but it’s a different feeling, to be alone here.
I write hoping that one day I might meet someone who can take my letters to you. As an assigned servant, I have no money, and just one small box of belongings. I play the tin whistle that you gave me, but as you know I have no musical Talent. Remember Dad, and how he would play his fiddle for all the dances!
Your loving Son, Seamus Murphy.
Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
17 July 1832
Dear Ma,
Since I have come here I have realised how important it is to read and write and I am thankful that you forced me to go to Father Malarkey, and learn. Though I still do not know how I will ever send these letters to you, it is a comfort to me, just to write them.
Tonight there is a tremendous Storm, and
I am afraid. I could not have said this to you, at home, but here sometimes things are frightening. Do you remember how the sea would crash against the cliffs, on our headland? Well, here sometimes it feels as if the very land is our enemy. And I feel like an alien in it. I wish you were here.
Love from Seamus.
‘Here,’ Mum said. We’d eaten the stew and spuds as I’d been writing, and she’d made a pot of coffee. ‘A dash of the Irish,’ she said. And blow me down if she didn’t get out the bottle of whisky she’d won in the Volunteer Bushfire Brigade Christmas raffle and pour a slurp into each of our mugs. Now this was weird – Mum being against grog as she is – but what was even weirder was that she passed across a letter that seemed to be written exactly to me, Seamus.
c/- St Josephs Presbytery
Ballyfermough
Connemara
17 July 1832
My Dear Son,
Father Malarkey has kindly offered to write this letter for me, for as you know I have no schooling, and he says that if I send it care of the Governor of New South Wales it may reach you. It is some years now since you left, to go to the city, and then after your trouble, they took you far away, and though I have not heard from you since then and sometimes wonder if you are still alive, I just want you to know that I think of you and pray for you.
We are all struggling by here, as usual. His Lordship has raised the rent again and the MacBrides have been evicted. Last winter was the worst I ever remember. I think of you there in the sun, and I know it seems wrong to say this, but at times I think we should all break the law and be transported, for no punishment could be worse than what we endure. Still, I should not dwell on our troubles, for I know that your time out there will not be easy, amongst the snakes and the heathens. And we hear tales of savage beatings, and I pray that you are safe.
Listening to Mondrian Page 6