A Long Way From Home

by Peter Carey

  By the simple expedient of not reading my mail or answering my own door, I had been safe, until I hung young Bennett Ash by his ankles out the classroom window.

  What would happen now? Would the disciplinary tribunal treat me as my father’s church did pregnant girls, demanding they stand before the congregation?

  Do you Adelina Koenig confess that you have manifestly sinned against God and given offence to his congregation?

  Do you pray that God for Christ’s sake will forgive your sin, and do you also ask the congregation to forgive you?

  Do you also intend to amend your life and by the help of the Holy Spirit live according to God’s will?

  Or will you just run away and not tell anyone your trouble?

  Bacchus Marsh High School was a two-storey red brick building in approximate Edwardian style, separated from the Maddingley oval by a two-lane road along which the five-ton colliery trucks, having spilled a little of their load on the railway crossing, accelerated on their way to no-one knew exactly where.

  I had already broken my father’s decent heart. Had he stood across this busy road on a certain afternoon in the early autumn of 1953, he would have been destroyed to learn that it was me, his beloved son, who was responsible for the bawling thirteen-year-old hanging from the second-storey window.

  I was sorry. I am always sorry. I had arrived in Bacchus Marsh four years and three months previously. I seemed to have no wife or even girlfriend. My name was obviously German but I was not, as far as anyone could see, a sissy. In my first year I played on the wing for Bacchus Marsh where the Express reported me to be ‘fast and slippery as an eel’.

  Then Butch Daley called me a kraut.

  My name was Bachhuber. Take a joke they said.

  I smiled and was as misunderstood as I had wished to be. Soon I got a hamstring injury. That seemed the only safe response. And that is the creature I had spent my life becoming. I was so expert at avoiding conflict that it still seems impossible that I was brought down by a child.

  The second form of the high school had been, until my arrival, a notorious scene of rage and uproar, a simmering pot, ruled by boys who had been yearly denied promotion to the third form and were now in limbo, waiting for the day on which they could legally abandon their education. ‘I turned fourteen and you can’t fucking touch me.’

  I had a degree but no teacher training. To my surprise I was a successful teacher of the untouchables. The headmaster was grateful, but what my amiable colleagues secretly thought of me I can never really know. The education department inspectors, however, loved me: A very good teacher working earnestly and zealously in a challenging environment.

  So I had never expected to be vulnerable to Bennett Ash who I had long ago brought to heel. Bennett had dirt ingrained on his skinny wrists and lice eggs, doubtless, beneath his broken nails. It was Bennett, sitting in the front row where I kept him, who accused me of having ‘Balts’ in the class.

  Where would one start?

  I asked him what he thought a Balt was.

  He thought it was a reffo, sir. He meant a refugee, a person displaced by war.

  I could have escorted him to the map of the world, that is the pink British Empire and the other bits. I could have shown him that Balt was short for Baltic, or a person from the Baltic states. But could he even recognise the Baltic Sea?

  How could I possibly ‘teach’ him that the Australian government had deliberately misnamed the displaced persons Balts? That was the path by which the word had entered his vocabulary. How many weeks might it take to have him understand that the Australian government were selecting light skinned ‘Nordic types’ as future citizens and that they had, for the sake of obfuscation, named them Balts?

  Of course I had my own ancient scars and fears, my deep sense of displacement, that I was not from here, that this was not my landscape, that I had been denied my natural land which had been accurately depicted by Caspar David Friedrich.

  I asked Bennett did he know what a ‘Nordic type’ was.

  ‘You never taught us, sir.’

  ‘Then sit down. Put your hanky back in your pocket.’

  Then Suzy Winspear, whose father was a dentist with a slow old-fashioned drill, said that Sippe Van Hanraad was a Nordic type.

  Sippe, in the second row, was actually Dutch. He was tall with fine blond hair and was quickly beginning to grasp the lessons.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bennett Ash holding up a warty hand, ‘Sippe is a Balt, sir. You favour him.’

  His point was that Sippe’s hair was pretty much like mine.

  ‘Yes Bennett, what is a Balt?’

  ‘What about you, sir? Why did they let you in?’

  I am a calm man, have been so all my life. I grabbed the heel of the boy’s hobnailed boot, and yanked him off balance and pushed his body out the window and held him there while he bawled and shouted.

  He was not a big boy but he had mass. He squirmed and flapped and I felt the horror of my relentless dreams which were peopled not only by snakes but creatures like possums that would end up being born as children if I did not kill them. The rivers in my sleep were filled with fish which broke apart like wet cardboard. I often sleepwalked, but in my classroom I was wide awake, dangling a pupil out my window. There was no precedent for this except the unexpected fit that had me leave my marriage.

  It would later be alleged that I had refused to haul Bennett Ash back to safety until he promised not to breed. This was never true. Once he was safe I gave dictation just to calm the situation. Anyone can now tell me I had ignored a valuable teaching moment, but Bennett lived in a world where the truth would die of thirst.

  I had been a peaceful much-loved child with a great passion for atlases, but there would be no such thing, even of the musty cheaply printed variety, in the shadow of the condensed milk factory where Bennett Ash lived. Nor would anyone in that dark place discuss, in terms high or low, the government’s thoughts on non-British migration into monocultural Australia. No-one would care what Nordic or Baltic meant, or see the parallels between the government ’s recruitment of ‘Nordic types’ and their habit of removing the paler Aboriginal children from their mothers and giving them to white families with the total confidence that half-castes would never give birth to ‘throwbacks’, wishful racial thinking with no basis in genetics.

  The headmaster did not visit me until after the final bell when I found him blocking my exit, posing, I thought, running a large index finger along the disturbing vein in the pale eggshell head that I would see again, much later, in the work of George Grosz.

  ‘You know a lot of idiots will be pleased to hear what you did?’

  I suppose I must have sighed. If not I irritated him another way.

  ‘You do know that, don’t you Willie? The whole Marsh will be talking about it now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ll love it,’ said Harry Huthnance, biting off the words while continuing to smile. ‘They’ll say the boy deserved it. But none of them has my job.’

  ‘Sorry, Harry.’

  ‘There’s a social worker involved with the Ash family. Did you know that? She’ll want to advocate for her client.’

  ‘Client?’

  ‘It’s not funny. Yes, Bennett is her client. She will want to address our disciplinary tribunal.’

  ‘Harry, don’t do this.’

  ‘Willie, I don’t have a choice. You didn’t give me one.’

  ‘Perhaps I could have a chat to the dad.’

  ‘You will not go near that family. Luckily I have a little influence with the tribunal.’

  I had no way of knowing if this was true. But Huthnance surely wouldn’t want to lose a teacher who could actually handle the second-form boys. My predecessor had punched him in the nose before departure.

  ‘I will have to suspend you, Will. Please don’t frown like that.’

  ‘With pay?’

  He gave me a sharp look and I knew what he was thinking. Bachhuber is rich. He gets the
se big prizes from his quiz show.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the bloody paper work involved in a tribunal.’

  ‘What sort of suspension is it?’

  ‘Maybe you could think about the wool syllabus while you’re off?’

  It was typical that he should wish to trade with me. The wool syllabus was his chore, not mine. It was bureaucratic not pedagogic. He had been directed to remedy the total ignorance of high school students on the issue of wool and its vital role in the history of the state. The source of this correspondence was the state education department in Melbourne, but what political forces were behind this aberration? Who would know?

  ‘It’s rubbish,’ I told him. ‘You said so yourself. This is more your sort of thing Harry.’

  ‘If you remain on the payroll, you must do something. You’ll make something of it. I know you will. You can design this better than anyone else in the school, certainly better than me.’

  ‘You’ll only rewrite it afterwards.’

  ‘I won’t have the time. You have my word. You’ll give me time to concentrate on the tribunal. Come on, give me a break. Full pay, OK?’

  He was disgusted by my imagined greed. I couldn’t really blame him. He was not privy to the value of all Deasy’s phoney cheques. He straightened up and buttoned his shiny suit and held out his damp hand.

  ‘I can save your bacon. You have my word.’

  He was weak and his word was worthless, and I didn’t believe him for a second. So why was it that I rode home in such a strange light mood? Was I finally in that state Sebastian Laski had spoken of? Was I now empty of myself, formless, like water? Was it possible that I was happy to have once again destroyed my scaffolding, to be hanging from another window, tremulous and giddy on the brink of my real life?

  5

  I had relinquished our children to one more foreign school but all I could think about was that damn propeller. Clearly I was not a normal mother. And yet the propeller was a danger to us all, not least because someone had woken in the middle of the night and dragged the damn thing inside the shed. Was I meant to think it walked in there? Had it been transported there by elves? Or was my husband still his father’s slave?

  ‘Out of the weather,’ Titch said. And looked at me, with his mouth wobbly.

  Out of the bloody weather? Why had we carted our kids a hundred miles from anything they knew? Not to see their father carrying Dan’s propeller like the Holy Cross. I loved Titch, of course I did, but we were not returning to our former servitude.

  ‘I have a mind to dump it up the tip,’ I said.

  In reply he kissed my hand and I saw he would let my temper run its course. Like a grassfire by the road, he would have said. Very bloody funny. Ha ha. But not all grassfires stay by the verge as is well known. They can rage for miles, for acres, destroying all the fences as they go, all the way from the Marsh to Mordialloc to burn a certain scrap yard to the ground.

  My father-in-law had owned stables and taxi services and had maybe sold a lot of Fords but he had never been within spitting distance of a franchise. His mates at Ford would drink with him, and listen to his airman stories, but he was an artful dodger and would go to the grave without ever being an authorised dealer in anything. At seventy-five years of age he was still in competition with his son.

  Dan worshipped Henry Ford to an extreme degree. Titch had the same disease. He was therefore happy to let the Ford Motor Company go snooping through our bank account, our debts, our credit history, and now, while they were deciding if we were good enough to be their authorised dealer, while there were no new vehicles released to us, Titch would take the train to Ballarat to buy used stock from Joe Thacker. You would fear for Titch to see him walk into the pub that Joe Thacker called ‘my office’: all those windburnt faces, cow cockies, racecourse touts, bookmakers, cockroaches living off the smell of spilled beer and last night ’s cigarettes. I only saw it once and I thought he would be killed in there, my Titchy. He was too small, too neat, and his shoes were far too dainty, but, as I was compelled to accept and understand, he was at home in Craig’s Hotel. He was a strange and unexpected creature, unlike anything you could imagine, controlled and well dressed, then like a crazy little animal when the lights were off. No-one would believe it, if they ever knew, or heard, good grief. His mouth.

  So I drove him to the station and parked the car and walked hand in hand onto the platform and I wrapped his tartan scarf around his neck and buttoned it inside his camel overcoat. I kissed him. He kissed me. It was perhaps not the best occasion to say what I said, but I said it anyhow. We should not wait for Ford’s approval. We were better off without them. We had arrived in the era of ‘Australia’s Own Car’ i.e. General Motors Holden. It was now Holden Versus Ford and Ford were set to lose. We should tell Ford to jump in the lake, snaffle the Bacchus Marsh Holden dealership while it was still available.

  Titch listened to my blasphemy. He did not ask how I could be so confident of getting a Holden dealership. He said he would think about what I had said but clearly he couldn’t wait to get away from my opinions. He kissed my eyes and said he loved me but he was hurt to be called a ‘nervous Nellie’.

  He boarded the train. I drove first to the co-op and then the butcher’s where they tried to find out who I was. They were very eager to deliver but I wouldn’t give them the address. Everybody wants to know your private business.

  I drove home and straight into the shed. And there was the copper-tipped propeller catching the light like some disgusting Catholic saint. I had not really intended to dump it on the tip, today or ever, but now I ran inside and snatched the eiderdown off our marriage bed and returned to the shed where I tied it across the roof of the Customline, running binder twine through the open windows. My dad had been a stock and station agent and I had spent my childhood going from farm to farm at harvest time. I got the eiderdown tied down as firm as any bale of hay.

  The sight of that pink quilt would have been more distressing to Titch than mud splashed on the hubcaps, but that would be a wifely secret now.

  The propeller was heavier than I had imagined when I saw my husband hurl it through the air. But I would move it, first one inch, then another, across the concrete floor. Of course I had no idea how I would lift it to the roof. But if I had been so easily discouraged I would still be a virgin bride. That was not how I did things, by being defeated at the start. In less than half an hour I had the propeller leaning gently against the car.

  I never really hoped to find Mr Bachhuber home – he was a teacher, it was a weekday – but I went through the garden gate and I stood on his back doorstep and knocked. No-one answered. A more genteel woman might have given up, but I snuck around the side and, what a shock it gave me to find him staring out his bedroom window.

  It would never have occurred to me that such a polite nice-looking man was hiding from the law. All I thought was: thank the Lord.

  He met me at his kitchen door all shaved and shiny and I was in so much of a hurry to get his help that I inadvertently gave him the impression there had been an accident. I handed him the twine and, he told me later, he understood it was for a tourniquet and even when I brought him to our shed he was not inclined to look at the propeller.

  ‘Can you lift it for me?’ I asked him.

  ‘This?’

  What else? I thought. ‘Could you lay it on the roof?’

  He said he could, but he didn’t move.

  I asked him did he need a hand.

  No he didn’t. He embraced the prop and swung it to the horizontal and laid it on the quilt and I saw I had given him an oil stain and was too guilty to mention it.

  ‘That was all you wanted?’

  ‘I can tie it on myself.’

  But he was running his long fingers along the prop as if he had sanded it himself. ‘Do you know what this timber is, Mrs Bobs?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ I said.

  ‘It’s laminated white oak. See how tight the grain is?’

  I
looked into those strange German eyes. ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  Of course I was completely unaware that my neighbour was famous on a quiz show. He knew everything, it turned out – the history of Egyptians and volcanoes – and when he saw I wanted to secure the prop he dismissed my binder twine and I let him fetch his own rope – why not? – and then it seemed ropes were made from hemp, cotton, coir, jute or straw. And I admit it was rather nice, the affectionate familiar way he talked about the rope. I stood back and let him lash the prop on.

  When he was all done I asked could he direct me to the tip.

  ‘The tip?’ He raised his eyebrows. He stared at me. I got hot cheeks.

  I told him he had a spot on his nice white shirt. I was sorry.

  He didn’t even look at it. ‘You can’t take this to the tip,’ he said.

  It was not his fault he didn’t know my character. I explained I had to dump it. There was no choice.

  ‘I’ll look after it,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to.’

  ‘No. I have to dispose of it.’

  He folded his arms across his chest and admired the propeller as if it were a statue of Our Lady. I said I was sorry. That was how it was.

  ‘What does Mr Bobs think?’

  I asked him where was the tip.

  ‘Someone will scavenge it,’ he said.

  I saw his point. I located our hacksaw in our big green box. I put this in the boot. ‘Will you tell me where the tip is?’

  ‘You’re not going to cut it?’

  He was smiling now, just a small smile. His nose was a little broad but in perfect proportion to his jaw. His head tilted to the side as if he finally got a glimpse of who I was.

  ‘How will you lift that down off the roof?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  He clearly thought I couldn’t, so he got in the passenger seat. I don’t know why I trusted him. I just did. I took off up the drive and paused at the street. ‘Left or right?’