A Long Way From Home

by Peter Carey

  I loved the dictionary in spite of this, but I was fascinated by the competition between the man and woman on the quiz show. Deasy clearly favoured Bachhuber. He was the king. I was never one of those who wished him to lose his crown but – fair is fair – I was dying for Miss Honeyvoice to get a break. I will not say Bob Deasy taunted her, but he certainly brought out something in her opponent – lovely as he was – that suggested it was his man-born right to win.

  You better marry that fiancée, I thought. She is every bit as smart as you.

  I barracked for Miss Cloverdale so loud my family teased me for it. When I noticed her questions getting harder than his, I said so. For example: In what year did Australia have an inland sea?

  Miss Cloverdale’s answer was sixty thousand years ago, before the land was invaded by humans from the direction of New Guinea. What clever children they will have, I thought. But no. Her answer triggered one of these dreadful sound effects, a slow creaking noise, then an explosion, like a tree crashing to the earth.

  ‘Mum?’ protested Edith. ‘Mum! They’re ganging up on her.’

  ‘Wrong answer,’ Titch cried. I did not see why he should be happy.

  ‘What says the king?’ cried Deasy.

  ‘The correct date is 1827.’

  Bob Deasy’s voice was so happy, I hated him. ‘What do you say listeners, is it yes or is it no? Australia with an inland sea? Get on the blower. Give us a tingle. You’ve got nothing to lose.’

  ‘Call them,’ Edith begged me. But we were not rich and would never make a trunkline call for fun. We gathered around the glowing dial, hearing telephones ringing thirty miles away. The popular vote was all for Clover which was pure ignorance we learned.

  ‘The king is sorry,’ Deasy purred. ‘You should see his face, listeners. He’s sad to be correct, to defeat the pretty lady. He’s sorry to the tune of five hundred pounds.’

  He then had Bachhuber educate us: a certain Maslen map had been drawn in 1827. It included an inland sea where, in real life, there were only blacks and desert. There was no inland sea, not ever. Yet because the madman’s map was in the State Library of Victoria so the inland sea existed, and our neighbour was judged to be correct. What tosh.

  There were bad fires at Bullengarook and Mount Macedon in early summer. The siren rang all day, and the hot wind blew from the north. During these few weeks, when you could smell the smoke inside the hairdresser’s, the tide of local opinion turned against our neighbour. The new judgement was freely expressed at the co-op and the post office. Bachhuber was a good bloke. He’d had a great innings. Now let the lady win.

  Mr Dunstan, obviously, did not follow the quiz show. As to the significance of Friday, he had no clue. He assumed there was a place for him at our dinner table, which would have been true on any other night when he might arrive with his plans, contracts, cashflow charts, spare parts inventories. Then I would be quiet as a mouse and listen to him talk and I would fill his beer glass and not be disgusted by the froth which gathered in his fat moustache.

  When I demanded silence for Nothing to Lose, he was offended.

  Then, when he finally paid attention to the wireless, all he noticed was the prize money.

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said. ‘You’re living next door to a bank.’

  ‘We would never take advantage.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ my husband said.

  ‘Jeez.’ Dunstan looked to Titch as if he should get his wife in order. ‘I’m only speaking from a cashflow point of view. We could always use a little more investment in the firm.’

  We? I thought, but my husband did not catch my eye.

  To be fair, Dunstan did us favours. He found us sponsors for the Redex Trial. He released us an FJ Holden demo model before the franchise was officially in hand. Titch used that demo to sell a record-breaking seventeen vehicles. So thank you, Mr Dunstan, I suppose, although our success stressed our family to its sleepless limit. In those days we had to drive forty miles to General Motors and pick up the cars ourselves. If we were getting one vehicle then OK: I would drive Titch down with a set of trade plates and then we would both drive a vehicle back. To pick up two cars meant the train to Melbourne and an expensive taxi to GM. We could have used another driver in the family.

  On account of this we missed the quiz show twice. We must have been somewhere in the industrial dark on Dynon Road, past the West Melbourne Stadium, when poor Willie Bachhuber lost his throne. We did not even notice it had happened, only that he was suddenly in his back garden pulling down his chook house and stacking the wire and broken timber up the front. If we had even read the paper we would have known what happened to him, but we had our own worries, not least my sister claiming she had been reduced to penury by me forcing her to sell the Geelong house. She said she now was forced to live in a caravan at Barwon Heads.

  Meanwhile Miss Cloverdale had become the champion and Willie Bachhuber had been replaced by a new challenger. How could I live next door to him and not know? His heart was broken. His life was destroyed, but my main concern was that Ronnie fell out of the walnut tree and broke his arm. Also Edith was trying for her Herald learn-to-swim certificate.

  We were sometimes forced to drive the new Holdens home over roads just sprayed with tar, a small enough thing until you understand the value of a new vehicle and the damage this risked. When we hit the wet tar we crawled at five miles an hour, but not even this could save us from those little bits of bitumen sticking to the lower body then hardening as we rushed down Anthony’s Cutting towards home. What a nightmare. It was all hands on deck and a rag and a bottle of eucalyptus oil for every one of them. I did not hesitate to rouse up our genius next door. Cough cough, I cried, not understanding how that must have hurt.

  If he appeared reduced, I did not notice. I had a rag and a bottle of eucalyptus ready for him and it was a presumption, I said, sorry, my husband would pay him for his time. We had to remove the tar before it set, under the wheel wells, hubcaps, rims, lower parts of doors.

  I worked on the front mudguard while Bachhuber did the door.

  ‘That “cough cough” business,’ he said.

  ‘We’re very proud,’ I said.

  ‘I’m dead in the water, Mrs Bobs.’

  And then Edith and Ronnie arrived, Ronnie in his plaster cast, crying because I had not picked him up and he was forbidden to walk home alone and Edith had twisted his good arm and made him walk past the Catholics, the sale yards, the house full of illegal communists.

  I dried my son’s tears and cooked the tea and tried to help Edith with her long division. I returned to find Bachhuber squatting on the grass thoughtfully removing specks of bitumen.

  ‘You’re not going to let that woman beat you, Mr Bachhuber.’

  ‘It’s done, Mrs Bobs.’

  I thought, it ’s not too bad, she is his fiancée. ‘Keep it in the family,’ I said, but I saw his face and then the penny dropped. Dear God, I thought, why is life unfair? It was not for me to comfort him. That was why I brought Titch into it.

  After tea, the kids were clean and calm and happy and Titch got off the phone and read to them and they both snuggled up against him in Ronnie’s tiny bed. Our neighbour was at home, I could see the light. I washed the dishes then found my family all fast asleep like creatures in a burrow. I woke Titch and gave him a fiver and a bottle of beer and sent him visiting next door and I crept outside and stood in the driveway in the dark and I could hear their voices, on and on. Then Ronnie was Mum, Mum, Mum. He had wet his bed, poor sausage. When he was once more dry and sleeping I fired up the copper in the laundry and had all the time I needed to wash his sheets and jamas, put them through the mangle, hang them on the line, forget the dew and pray for sunshine.

  I was in bed with my face cream on by the time Titch lay down beside me.

  ‘What a fascinating bloke,’ he said, but he had learned absolutely nothing about his broken heart.

  19

  Here’s a knocking indeed! Knock, k
nock, knock! Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub? Knock, knock! Who’s there at the back door? ‘It’s me,’ called Mr Bobbsey.

  Why not the front door then?

  My sad bachelor kitchen was piled with dead and dying dishes, the roasted leg of lamb – what shade of green was that?

  Knock, knock. ‘Mr Bachhuber.’

  I saw the shadow. Birds, I thought, a tumbling troupe of them.

  But no, dear God, I had a conjurer visiting.

  ‘It’s only me.’

  Only? It was the marvellous midget juggling three oranges while he wedged a beer bottle between his tiny knees.

  ‘Mr Bobs,’ I said. ‘Please enter.’

  ‘Puss in Boots,’ he announced, pausing to present a single orange then heading politely up the hall and into the front room where he set the beer down before my private map. Up and down the street all windows were open to catch a little breeze, but I was securely locked and my front room was as humid as a henhouse. Titch Bobs, a gentleman, did not even twitch his nose. He had sold cars to Irish bachelors with no time for housekeeping, that is, he was not in the judging business. He came to me as an angelic presence, luminous in his lemon yellow pullover, dry and sweet as Johnson’s baby powder. His cheeks were wide and freshly shaven, his hair smooth and black and his eyes alive with mischief. I thought, he is like a girl, so pretty and light, the way he listens to you before you say a word about your failure.

  ‘Beer first,’ he said, ‘and oranges for pudding.’

  I never drink without regret, but he had already lifted my heart and I found two clean glasses and a bottle opener and he was immediately busy with his wallet. He offered a fiver which I declined and he used his hands with inscrutable good humour until, finally, like a child at a birthday party, I found a five-pound note behind my ear.

  ‘That’s for good luck,’ he said. ‘You’ve had some bad luck I hear.’ What had he heard? What did he know? That I knocked on Clover’s door and found her in the company of an older woman eating my tuna casserole? No-one moved. No-one spoke. It was impossible to fully understand the situation except: I was not liked or wanted.

  I later discovered that Clover had been a shop assistant not a schoolteacher, but had I known it at the time I would have loved her just the same. On the day Titch found me I was still living amidst the ruins of Jacob Burckhardt and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. That exquisite phantom head was resting on my imaginary chest.

  I was slow to realise he had come into my house with no more motive than you might expect of a kind-hearted child of the Great Depression, ready to pay a homeless man to chop a stack of wood. He sat companionably cross-legged on my floor and poured two glasses. Why had he mentioned Puss in Boots? He didn’t know. He did not recognise Puss’s famous lines: ‘Costantino, do not be cast down, for I will provide for your well-being and sustenance, and for my own as well.’

  And yet, surely, he wanted something. He was quiet in the way someone might be silent with desire. If he had been a girl I would not have doubted what was up, but he was not a girl, and he did not wish to go home, and I finally understood that he had seen my map-in-progress, and was waiting for me to tell him what it was.

  I had not touched my beer and surely he saw that too because he filled his own glass twice, but not before insisting I take an orange and he watched while I peeled in the way my dear pastor always had, making a spiralling snake, an action which produced its own sweet homesickness.

  ‘We’ve all been down on our luck from time to time,’ he said, but he had become distracted, peering around my sweaty front room which must have seemed a Loony Bin, with its interesting slogans, thoughts and quotes pinned against the blameless wall. For instance, A VAST, OBSCURE COUNTRY, words which Alessandro Spina had used to evoke the Italian view of his own bleeding Libya but of course I had meant it in another way. Titch Bobs approached my map like a stalking cat, refilling his glass without looking down. My cartography included a dimension not normally suggested on flat paper, I mean the layers of time, the way the tree with the canoe scar sat in relationship to the effluent discharge. Being aware that he had abandoned school for ever on his fourteenth birthday, I did not expect him to be curious about such scholarly annotations, so how could I guess that he was being drawn, almost physically, across the carefully rendered car park of the Deer Park Hotel and up the Ballarat Road and hence along the corrugated gravel leading to Diggers Rest and Sunbury, up the driveway of Kippenross, the farm in Melton where the Robinson twins had played such tricks upon the doctor who could not find an appendix scar he had caused just the week before.

  ‘You’re a surveyor, Bachhuber?’

  ‘Good Lord no.’

  He finished another beer and refreshed it without losing interest in my wall. ‘What are you going to do for a crust now?’

  ‘I’ve got some savings.’

  ‘Would you do something for me? It will sound a little odd. Do you have a set of bathroom scales?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Would you take off your clothes and weigh yourself ?’

  I laughed. I did not understand I was in the presence of a salesman, which is why I soon found myself walking with him down the hallway, not believing that I was about to stand nude before him and he, being closely focused on his own objective, would have no interest in my actual body, my privates, my skinny legs, my scar. He produced a stubby pencil and wrote down my weight.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said when I returned to join him in the front room. ‘The thing is, Bachhuber, the three of us would weigh less than a two-man crew.’

  I would later learn that it was quite normal for Titch to omit certain steps in his thinking process. In his own mind, he had already proposed that I join the Redex as a navigator. So when I asked him what was this about he was already one step ahead of me.

  ‘Petrol,’ he said. ‘Miles per gallon.’

  For this I had removed my clothes?

  ‘Me, the missus, you. The three of us together. Two drivers, one navigator. We would still weigh less than Lex Davison and Tommy Fox, you get it?’

  I was the we?

  ‘Don’t tell me the high school will take you back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there a quiz show that wants you?’

  ‘No-one wants me.’

  ‘I want you,’ he said. ‘We want you. You are the bee’s knees.’

  Good grief, I thought.

  ‘I could use you to pick up vehicles from GM.’

  ‘I can’t even drive.’

  ‘I’ll get you a licence. Don’t worry. The thing is, mate, you are expert in the required field. You can read a map.’

  ‘Surely your wife?’

  This was where he revealed a second bottle. ‘She’d cook my balls with the bacon if she overheard. I mean, she wouldn’t take it well. You must never say I said this, but Irene cannot read a map. You’ve heard the expression, woman driver?’

  I had.

  ‘Driving a car is all in the bum, and her bum is a perfect instrument for the job.’

  Was I blushing? Could he see it?

  ‘Driving is like an art,’ he said. ‘Not everyone is physically or mentally able to do it well. My missus is a better driver than any man I ever rode with.’

  I did not wish to think about her bottom.

  ‘Do not repeat this, ever. We do not want her to be the navigator.’

  He had been haunted by this thought, he confided in me, mate, from the day he picked up the Redex entry forms. It was an issue that must be confronted, and he dared not give offence in the female department.

  ‘And here you are.’ He raised the glass, a jam jar with jonquils printed on it. ‘A bloody miracle is what you are: a chap who can read a map and also – and also what? Tell me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Also speak clearly.’

  ‘My mum was hard of hearing.’

  ‘There you are: a reason for everything on earth. As for the map business, you have obviously inherite
d it.’

  I did not reveal that neither my mother nor father had any sense of direction and my Nazi brother was forever getting lost on the way to meet with his fellow Aryans in the Barossa Valley. Instead, I allowed myself a glass of beer and suffered a dreadful hangover which endured into the following afternoon when I found myself reincarnated as the navigator of an FJ Holden while Titch Bobbsey drove like a maniac through the dirt roads of the gnarled Brisbane Ranges, stones ricocheting off the sump, huge trees flanking my vision as he slid through lethal corners. We streaked down long straights into hidden bends, or hairpins with dizzy drops awaiting us. He executed a handbrake turn above a precipice and I came to rest with my head nodding like a plastic dog.

  Through all this ‘training’ I was expected to hold the stack of notes he had supplied me with and to read them out loud above the engine roar.

  ‘You see,’ Titch said. ‘It’s in your blood.’

  20

  Beverly said she could never live in the Marsh. She would die of boredom. For me it would be perfect, she allowed, because my life was one straight line. I was Mrs Average. Her life was like a wrong ’un, googly, bosie, a cricket ball that looks like it’s going to break one way but then does the opposite. That was her, she thought, but in the end it would be me who was Mrs Wrong ’un. I wish it was not so.

  No-one ever came to the Marsh without thinking, what a pretty town. It was a secret, almost, tucked down at the bottom of Anthony’s Cutting. If there is a prettier war memorial than our Avenue of Honour, I never heard of it. Every tree in the avenue was planted for a local boy who died. Every trunk had its own name. The dead boys are now huge elms and they join together above the road and give a very calm impression. This is how you enter the town. You drive beneath them, up the aisle, beside the apple orchards, the shire offices, the lawn bowls games in progress.

  You can dawdle through the wide streets and get some glimpse of our boring life. You will find no more exciting noise than the ding-ding of the blacksmith’s hammer. On the other hand, there is nothing to warn you of the possibility that Mrs bloody Guthrie at the state school might release your children to the care of their grandfather.