A Long Way From Home

by Peter Carey

  ‘After all I did for you,’ he said.

  17

  I was emotional, yes, but not in the way Mrs Bobbsey imagined. How could I have told her that, even as I dug the graves, I was happy. I was loved. I loved in turn. It was all I ever wanted, that was the immoral truth I could never tell a soul. I drove the spade deep, cutting off my own potatoes, and all the time I thought of Clover, those unflinching eyes bright behind her lashes, her tennis player’s legs drawing me in deeper.

  I stood my spade against the side wall of the house. I washed my hands. I scrubbed the floor and made the bed. I swept the front verandah and burned the legal letters demanding child support. I saved only the envelope marked ‘The Education Department of the State of Victoria’. This I read as I dressed for the recording session.

  ‘Dear Blah blah blah. As you have failed to appear as requested the tribunal has no choice but to suspend you without pay as of the date of the offence. Should you wish to appeal this decision you may present a sequestered defence at the meeting December 10,1953.’

  What was a sequestered defence? I didn’t care. I wished only to return to Clover and the studio.

  And what a quiz show we recorded there, a dance in fact, floating in a field of jasmine and orange blossom. Deasy must have dealt the yellow cards but I hardly noticed him. It was not until the final minutes that I became aware of his ferocious stare. Had he been looking like that all through the show? Perhaps. But he was a strange man with a peculiar past and wide rings on his large fingers and I had never tried to really ‘understand’ him. When Baby Deasy rewound the tape, Deasy invited me out for tea. That is, he pinched the sleeve of my jacket and, with no farewell to frowning Clover, tugged me down the stairs, all the way up Collins Street, not slowly either, dragging me up Spring Street and through the grand doors of the Hotel Windsor.

  The waitress asked Deasy would he like scones and clotted cream.

  ‘No scones,’ he said. ‘Tea.’

  ‘And you, sir?’

  ‘He’ll have tea,’ said Deasy and chewed at his moustache until the waitress departed. ‘Did you root her?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Root, fuck, bang. Did you schtup her?’ He showed his big teeth and nodded his head ferociously. ‘You did, didn’t you?’

  I thought, what gives you the right to speak to me like this?

  ‘Strike me lucky,’ he said. ‘I never saw a fuck so public. She’s lost her spark. You have too. If I was a sponsor I’d take my advertising budget somewhere else. Jesus, Willie. Don’t shit in your own nest. Not now.’

  I thought, I am not your dog.

  ‘This is meant to be a contest,’ he hissed. ‘ We don’t fix the questions. That’s the point. Neither of you know what’s going to happen next. You want to destroy her, or did you forget? She wants to kill you. That’s the point. That’s why we cast her.’

  Frankly I thought he had gone cuckoo, with his great hands enclosing a soft pack of unfiltered cigarettes, crumbling tobacco onto the Windsor’s white tablecloth.

  ‘What are you looking at? This?’ He held the pack, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Philip Morris cigarettes.’

  ‘Do you know the slogan?’ he asked. His eyes were far too bright.

  ‘Nothing to lose but your smoker’s cough?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stared at me with eyebrows raised dramatically. ‘What would you say to a national quiz show called Nothing to Lose?’

  ‘They’re signing on?’

  ‘I am this close. Nothing to Lose, brought to you by Philip Morris. We’re going to have to record today’s show again. I can’t play them this lovey-dovey bullshit.’

  ‘There’ll be real prize money?’

  ‘Real cheque. Real money you can put in the bank. We’ll re-record on Wednesday. OK? You want to kill her. Comprenez vous? You want a job?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said but frankly I was not certain any more.

  ‘Well piss off.’

  I thought, poor monster, sick with greed.

  It was cold and drizzly on Spring Street but there she was, my darling, tucked into a dark doorway in her bright red overcoat.

  ‘You waited.’

  ‘But of course.’

  I thought, she will wish to know what Deasy said to me. I was relieved when she did not. Her nose was cold and her mouth was warm and we bought two tuppenny fares on the 15 Tram and soon, minutes later, we were entering a Queens Road apartment building. Perhaps you know the type, always divided by a long thin garden path punctuated by blind white statues and melancholy topiary, one of those ‘Spanish style’ blocks which had previously seemed so lost and loveless to me. We entered chastely, brother and sister as far as all the world could see.

  Then the door was closed and locked and never mind the rest. Afterwards, Clover asked me if I was pleased to have my feathers clipped, and I said nothing about the murders. I told her that I loved her, and proved it once again. We lay on musky sheets redolent of jasmine, with her hair curling upon my chest. She kissed my nose. She had discovered Adelina was living in Prahran. She had seen her, she said, and my son as well.

  Another man might have been alarmed, but I trusted jealousy.

  ‘She’s in the phone book, sweetie. Your red-haired boy,’ she said. ‘Oh poor poor Willie.’

  Thus she spoke to me in a code, and I could now trust her absolutely. She knew, now, certainly, my true history, and she showed me how she accepted my disastrous past. I lay drowsily in the perfumed bed and watched, with the pride and vanity of ownership, her slender athletic body as she moved around her tiny kitchen and then brought me mushrooms on toast and I kissed her earthy buttery mouth, at once so strange and so familiar.

  Why would I ever want to kill her? I would rather lose to her in fact.

  We moved from mushrooms to Sparkling Rheingold. In vino veritas, by golly, only half a glass. We discussed our savings, the cost of life in Italy. I was a balloonist cutting loose the ballast, and with every slash I rose until I was once again a teenager who might become anything he wished.

  I told her that we had a sponsor. Somehow she already knew. We agreed we would spend weekends together. I returned to Bacchus Marsh with no-one to tell me how to spend my time. The education department had lost all power over me and yet, like many men who find themselves unemployed, I could not be idle.

  Now, each day, I would arrive in Melbourne just after noon and enter the State Library of Victoria when Sebastian Laski was at lunch. That is, I would not face the map librarian just yet or justify my inexplicable occupation. And as he never manned the desk and stayed in his office above Little Lonsdale Street, I was able to call for maps of the pastoralist properties which lay like a lethal patchwork on top of the true tribal lands. Here, beneath Norman G. Peebles’ gorgeous dome, I was at peace transcribing the coordinates of the famous properties of Deanside and Rockbank. It was a map of murder, of course. What else was I to do?

  In Bacchus Marsh I removed an entire wall of books and tacked tracing paper on the plaster. My dining room became a bombsite of homeless volumes, a destruction that permitted the future to exist.

  We re-recorded. What a show. Clover attacked me and Deasy was beside himself. He was an auctioneer, conductor of the philharmonic, a prancing villain in a cloak. Then, as he had promised, we signed real contracts. When that was done I sat in the control booth while Clover recorded the first commercials. ‘Nothing to lose but your smoker’s cough.’ Oh Lord she had the voice for it. Do I root her? Deed I do.

  Now we did shows with real prizes. The cheques all cleared. I spent my weekends in sweet tumescence, my weekday afternoons in the library, and on the road to Kororoit where the guards at the ICI factory had recovered from their early panic and obtained permission to guide me to certain trees whose bark, they believed, had been used by Aboriginals to make canoes.

  Being so occupied with my own happiness I saw little of the Bobbseys and I only learned of their own adventures when Mi
ssus called on me.

  ‘Cough cough,’ she cried knocking on my kitchen door. ‘Nothing to lose.’ They had heard me on the radio, she told me. They were so proud to know a famous person.

  Her excitement was not solely the product of my own success. She and her husband were now Holden dealers, or almost. They were planning to be heroes of the reckless Redex Trial. Imagine that. Around the whole continent, followed by newsreel cameras and photographers.

  I revealed my ignorance of matters Redex and she was happy to educate me. The quotidian brands, Ford, Holden, Plymouth, would take on a gladiatorial persona, armoured against bulls and kangaroos. They would be sticking ugly decals all over a brand-new car. Castrol Oil. SPC. Lucas Battery. They would have Bobs Motors written right along one side. She had to go to the solicitor’s. Cough, cough, she said. Bye-bye.

  I set off to bicycle to Kororoit Creek with my notebook.

  The wind was at my back as I sailed down the highway, giving myself entirely to this symbolism. For almost ten miles I flew, until, on the long plain near Exford, just where those inexplicable foreign cactus plants grow in the corner of that sheep paddock, my bloody tyre was punctured and I fell and grazed my knee. But even then my luck was good for I had come to ground exactly opposite a motor garage that seemed to have been freshly decorated for my arrival. Here I found a single Caltex petrol pump, a two-tone Ford Customline, violent yellow paint splashed everywhere about the concrete forecourt. Bold whitewash had been applied excitedly to the windscreen of the Ford: Low Deposit Finance Available.

  As I approached, an old man emerged from the office carrying a ball hammer. He wore heavy oil-stained boots, and was disguised by a pale grey shop coat. When his thin white hair lifted in the wind, I recognised the famous aviator.

  ‘It’s you Jimmy,’ he said. When I did not immediately follow him around the corner, he turned. ‘You need me to carry you?’

  Thus I beheld what had been hidden from my view: the eastern Day-Glo wall with red letters taller than a man: BOBS MOTORS. Here also was a tap and hose, a big steel bath of the type used to locate air leaks, an air compressor, and a battery shed against which leaned the propeller Mrs Bobbsey had so cruelly amputated.

  ‘Come here Jimmy. Hold this.’

  He already had the front wheel off my bicycle. The tyre was just as swiftly liberated. He called for the air hose and inflated the tube and, not without a grunt, kneeled to submerge it in the tank. We watched the air bubbles escape the puncture while the westerly wind whipped dust across our faces. Looking at his stern countenance I thought of Boreas, the god of wind, a sometimes violent old man with a billowing cloak. In the case of Boreas, it was said he had snakes instead of feet.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve got your own repair kit.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He did not criticise me for my lack, and yet, when he disappeared into the battery shed, I felt myself severely judged. He returned without explanation and set to work, drying the tube, washing it with petrol, marking the leak with a white X, and clamping a small black device to the wound. He threw me a box of matches.

  ‘Make yourself useful,’ he said.

  I lit the match and held it to the patch, startled to see the conflagration thus instigated, like a fuse on fire, hissing, sputtering, dancing around the device.

  ‘That’s a vulcanising patch, did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you were a schoolteacher, Jimmy.’

  ‘I’m Willie.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You think I would forget you?’

  He draped the snaky tube across the seat and while the vulcaniser cooled we stood with our backs to the vast sign gazing out across the volcanic plain. The tarpaulins on the passing trucks cracked like sails in a storm but the wider view was blocked by the battery shed against which the amputated propeller continued to cause unhappiness.

  Of course it had been a beautiful piece of design. It had been maliciously damaged. I could not help but feel guilty for my part in that.

  ‘How’s my boy?’ he asked at last. He held me with his rheumy grey eyes. ‘I miss the little bugger.’

  ‘I think they’re OK now,’ I said.

  ‘I heard he ran off to GM. Going to sell Holdens.’

  ‘They seem happy.’

  ‘Do they now? You never drove a Holden.’

  ‘I’m not a driver, no.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. I had a fellow in here yesterday, Jim Woodall, from out on Long Forest Road. I said to him, how’s the Holden handling? (You might not know this, Jimmy, but with the light weight in the rear end of a Holden, the handling can get a little hairy.) Jim said he had been exceptionally unhappy with the handling but then he laid a couple of bags of cement dust directly over the rear axle. That almost did the trick. So then he thought, why not, so he took out the rear seat and filled up the well with cement, gravel, water, like he was laying a garden path. When it was set hard he put the rear seat back and Bob’s your uncle. You might pass that on to little Titch,’ said Dangerous Dan, as if he were about to smile. ‘He might pass that on to GM if he wants to make a living. Woodall bought a Ford last week. And by the same token,’ he said, ‘does he have any bloody idea of how he’s going to feed himself ?’

  ‘I believe so. They seem happy.’

  ‘Happy, with Miss Lesbefriends? Did you clock the way she dresses?’

  ‘They’re going in some race. There’s big excitement in the camp.’

  ‘What race would that be? Not the Redex?’

  ‘That’s the one, I think.’

  ‘What a circus.’ Dan ground his cigarette into the ground. ‘How could they afford that?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m wrong.’

  ‘In a Holden?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Think?’

  ‘I’m almost certain, yes.’

  Dan picked up the tube without a word. ‘He’s not a driver’s bootlace,’ he said. He looked to me. I kept my counsel. He inflated the tyre and flung it into the bath.

  ‘Do you think you can manage to put it back together?’

  ‘Do you have a couple of tyre levers I could borrow?’

  ‘Borrow?’ He stared at me.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s a piece of shit,’ he said, producing the tyre levers from his coat pocket. ‘The FJ Holden.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bobs.’

  ‘Are GM helping him financially?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Whose idea was this? Who did this to my propeller? You knew what you were looking at when you first saw it. You knew its value, I know you did. So tell me, Jimmy, can you imagine what a father feels? I’m the one who raised him. Don’t ask about the mother. Don’t ask what it cost. Years of sacrifice, thrown back in my face. I keep the prop here so everyone can see what I put up with. People are shocked. People who thought they knew him. They thought they liked good old Titch, but then they look at this. Good luck to them,’ said Dan, and I saw he was once more talking of the Bobbseys. ‘How can they go in the bloody Redex Trial and have two children? Don’t tell me Miss Lesbefriends will stay behind?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Here, give me that bloody wheel.’

  I thought, why is everyone suddenly speaking to me like this?

  He fitted the tube and brought it to its proper pressure with the air hose.

  ‘Listen to that. You hear that? That’s the compressor. They call it Free Air,’ he said bitterly. ‘They come in here. Don’t want to buy any petrol. Can I just have some free air? Listen to the compressor, does that sound free to you?’

  Go root yourself, I thought. I smiled. ‘How much do I owe you, Mr Bobs?’

  ‘I’m a Ford dealer,’ he said, although this was not true.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come back,’ he said. ‘Tell your friends.’

  I suffered his handshake and set off towards my original destination, blown forward on the gusting wind,
but the further I went, the more I thought of how this benevolence would turn to punishment when it was time to get back home. I turned and came once more past Bobs Motors, with my head down low, my bum high, my legs in agony already. There, beside the Caltex pump, was Boreas, bringer of winter, the devouring one with his gown billowing. What a miracle was Titch, I thought, to rebound against that force.

  18

  At teatime every Friday we Bobs gathered round our wireless and listened to the quiz and ate toasted cheese sandwiches and were very pleasantly livid that the dumb high school had fired our famous neighbour. He was a ‘gebius’ as Ronnie said. But who would have guessed it to see how he lived? His narrow weatherboard cottage was sad as suicide. The roof was rusting, its paint peeling. There was no sign of fame visible from the street, and in person he was just a bachelor with old-fashioned bicycle clips to keep his trousers from catching in the chain. You might see him in the coop buying butter, or pushing his Malvern Star up the Gell Street hill, or trundling a wheelbarrow full of manure he had collected from the sale yards. He was top heavy in the chest and shoulders and although shorts revealed a pair of thin and boyish legs, he would, in normal costume, have been mistaken for a labourer from the brickworks. But when Titch took the trouble to add up all his winnings, it was clear our next door neighbour must be a wealthy man.

  I was sorry when he began to spend weekends away from us, in Melbourne with his ‘fiancée’, as he called her. Who was she? When we heard Bob Deasy (‘Now knock that off, you kids’) we guessed that Miss Cloverdale was his intended.

  Bachhuber was our neighbour but we knew him better on the wireless, and Nothing to Lose was our family entertainment and our education. It was why we invested in that dictionary and fought for its possession.

  ‘He hogs it, Mum. He can’t spell cat,’ etc.

  If anyone ever wondered why a person of Titch’s education might say ‘It ’s a cardinal error’ it was from his study of that dictionary. ‘Ubiquitous’ was another word from there. He brought the dictionary into our bed and I was often awoken when it slipped from his grasp and exploded on the floor.