Black Diamonds

by Kim Kelly

  I’ve been a good artist too, sending off Dunc to his father, without making myself any dippier over his knee: no one but me could see the splash for what it is beyond a stain, and Mr Duncan sent me back a letter full of happy tears anyway. And I sent strange Fanny Adinov my first portrait of France — she’s just got up, sitting on the edge of the bed, blinking awake for the baby — to see what he thinks of me without horror. He thinks he wants some more pretty. All right, I’ll see what I can do.

  I’ve been a good and proper husband for my France, too, in all the obvious ways, as well as suggesting that she find something better to do with her own time, eventually, if she’s not going to have that big family. She’s not just going to be my wife, that’s certain, and she’s well earned her Certificate in Housework. I would like her to give that up altogether, but when I suggested that she send the washing out, she gave me that sharp look and said: ‘No, couldn’t now.’ So, instead, she’s driving down to Sydney today to talk to her angels Stanley and Bragg to see how she might go about studying the law, without having to go to university — Stanley and Bragg won’t live forever, it’s amazing they’re still alive, and France wants to be on top of that side of the business herself: contract, insurance, liability, company, industrial laws, all that palaver. Good on her. She’s taking Mim and the three eldest girls, Kathryn, Roz and Bronnie, with her, so she can haul them all before the court of David Jones. She’s had to take our Davie too, of course, since he has to go along with her for the food. What a legend she is as always. My only disappointment is that she’s cut her hair again. Can’t have everything. They’ll be back sometime day after tomorrow. And I’m not even thinking about the cost of the hotel and inevitable unnecessaries, since she presented me with a budget for them, entitled The Essentials of Feminine Indulgence, including Swishest French knickers, as of yet indeterminate value. It’s all all right. Better than all right.

  I’m busy being an all right boss this morning. Seven o’clock and everyone’s about to head in and I’m looking at a skip I’ve moved onto a flat bit of side track, out of the way. It’s funny looking at something you look at all the time for the first time. Really look at it. It’s a very simple animal, the skip: four iron wheels with a hardwood crate on top. I’m looking at it because I want to work out if it’s possible to somehow put a brake on it, to avoid the need for spragging. Spragging is also very simple: shoving a piece of hardwood between the spokes of one of the wheels to keep the skip stationary. It’s a finger-losing exercise for boys, as a few blokes here could attest, apart from being very inefficient at times, as Jimmy Skelton might say if he was here to tell you more about it. There must be a smarter way of doing it. Wouldn’t have a clue how, though: I’m no engineer with this sort of thing; I don’t even know how the brakes on the car work. I could build a house that wouldn’t fall down for a thousand years, but anything mechanical: ask France; and I will when she’s back, and she’ll no doubt tell me, again, that we should look at investing in a whole box of safer mechanised cutting, loading and hauling like they have everywhere in America; and I’ll tell her again that the union wouldn’t have us put wheelers, let alone colliers, out of jobs; neither would I. So, now, I bend down to have a look underneath, as you do when you have no clue. And there’s absolutely no explanation for what happens next.

  Something makes the skip move, very sharply, like it’s been kicked by a pony, very cranky one, right smack into the side of my head. That’s all I know for the moment as I hit the deck.

  I can see stars and hear Evan say, very slowly: ‘Oh boyo. Nasty.’

  FRANCINE

  We pile into the car and I’m still feeling a little queasy; have been since I woke up. There’s a smell of coaldust and something sweet in the air, some sort of chemical perhaps floating across from one of the fat cigars in town, and I think, yes please, let’s get out of Lithgow today. I don’t really have to go to Sydney; I could have simply written to my angels and asked them to send books and advice and they’d send back the entire College of Law library and pay the freight. They’re an odd couple, don’t know how they make money out of their practice. For all the advice they’ve given us, they’ve never sent more than the slimmest of bills, a token. I suspect, being old acquaintances of the Leprechaun, they play stocks and horses to make up the shortfall. They don’t look much like gamblers, though, those sweet old men; but you can’t ever tell who you’re looking at, really, can you.

  It’s Mim we’re really making this trip for; she’s so excited as she climbs in next to me, holding Davie, and it’s not about the DJs experience much at all. There’s a few ships due in to Sydney Harbour sometime tomorrow and she wants to see them come in. She says it’s because she loved going in to Wollongong and Port Kembla as a child, seeing all the steamers and the bustling round the docks. Not coal steamers coming to the Quay tomorrow, though; they’re troopships, and I think I can fathom another reason why it might be important for her to see them. To see the soldiers disembarking, perhaps to make Roy’s absence real and sharp and bathed in the joy of others’ reunions. She is back with a vengeance: impossibly jovial. The Ackerman stern- stoic trait missed her entirely. Praise be.

  She says now: ‘The first thing I want to do when we get there is go to one of those fancy continental bakeries I’ve heard about. Must be the Fritz in me because I had a dream about strudel last night.’

  Ackerman obsession with food didn’t miss her at all; I say: ‘Strudel? Haven’t you had enough apples? I want something crammed with chocolate and walnuts and laced with brandied caramel.’

  One young lady and two little girls behind us say: ‘Oh, yes!’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Mim says, as serious as she gets. ‘You can’t have too many apples, Francine. Humble but perfect in every way.’

  I glance at her as we turn into Main Street.

  She adds: ‘So long as they come with lashings of brown sugar and honey and cinnamon and buttery pastry.’

  I’m still laughing as I pull up outside the grocers, to grab a bunch of bananas to tide us over till morning tea, when I hear my name: ‘Mrs Ackerman.’

  I turn around and see Polly, it’s Polly Rogers, after all this time. ‘Goodness, Polly. How are you? Please, it’s Francine to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says frowning, her great bust on the verge of heaving up a sigh, except she’s in a bother. She says: ‘I think I should tell you I’ve just seen your husband, on my way down the hill. He didn’t look very well.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You should go to the hospital.’ She means now.

  Mim says: ‘What’s he done this time?’

  Don’t wait for the answer Polly seems too shocked to divulge. Head up the hill, here we are. Mim stays in the car with the children while I go in. Dreading.

  And there he is. Big gasp.

  He sees me and says: ‘It looks a lot worse than it is.’

  Couldn’t look much worse. Looks like someone’s thrown a bucket of blood over him. He’s holding a towel to the side of his forehead and that’s soaked through too. There’s a puddle of blood on the floor.

  I say: ‘It looks fairly bad to me. What did you do?’

  He says: ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘I hit my head is all. You don’t have to be here. Keep on to Sydney, I just need a stitch.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I won’t go to Sydney.’

  He says: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It really isn’t anything.’

  But it is something, with a shiver: some kind of two and two? The smell, the sweet smell … it’s here, stronger than blood or bleach. It’s hyacinth, unmistakable, like a perfumed hankie under my nose; and an odd collection of memories hits me quick as a flutter of playing cards … fresh linen, lilac glitter of amethyst, Mama dabbing a spot from my cheek … I did call her Mama. Odd moment for epiphany and this one feels like a warning: not for Daniel but for me. Don’t go to Sydney. Don’t come back. Look after Danny.

  Can�
��t tell him that, can I, it’s all a fluttery figment, so I say: ‘Don’t you be ridiculous.’

  He belts out a big laugh then and says: ‘Apparently I can’t help it.’

  Poor darlingest.

  But a week later I’m just about prepared to accept bizarre extrapolations as clear and direct instructions. Timely ones. The soldiers returning from the Middle East have brought with them a different kind of rapid and brutal destruction: influenza. Hundreds have dropped with it within a few days and it’s well out of control in Sydney; papers say Melbourne and Brisbane too. The thought that some of those men made it through all that, only to die of the damn flu, or bring it home for the family: must be somewhere near the zenith of unfair. To make it through bullets, bombs, dysentery, cholera, pneumonia, malnutrition and who knows what else, only to … Grateful to be an atheist and not prone to thoughts of God’s wrath.

  I tell Daniel what I think about my ‘rescue’, mainly just to lighten the news.

  He says, and he’s still got a corker of a black eye below the bandage: ‘So you think your mother pushed a skip into my head so you wouldn’t go to Sydney and get the flu?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and I’m teasing him now, but who knows? It’s as reasonable an explanation as any. Kinder than the thought that he’s simply inexplicably prone to injury. Kinder than the thought that I was inexplicably destined to see him drenched like that, like a vision come back from the depths of old terrors.

  He says: ‘You really are barking, aren’t you.’

  But I can see he’s considering it too. He considers it fairly seriously in the months that follow, when the flu begins visiting Lithgow, closing the schools, churches and even the pubs — even the arms factory shuts down completely with a mass outbreak. He forbids me from going beyond Sarah’s, even as he tells me the only ones dying of the flu in any numbers are alcoholics and those on their way out anyway. Daniel, of course, doesn’t get the flu, doesn’t wear a mask in town, doesn’t need to, because he’s infection- proof. I have to wonder if that might not be true. Fate might have had a decent go at mangling him, but he’s never had so much as a sniffle. Neither have I for that matter. But I obediently stay under house arrest at Josie’s with the boys till the threat passes, not prepared to push our good fortune an inch further.

  Fortune. That’s a tangle, isn’t it. At least I’ve come to recognise there are antidotes available against the worst of it, and they are really rather easy to obtain when you need them; you only need look for them: David’s seven months old now and he has a little dimple in his chin when he beams, a little dimple that no one else has. I can wonder all I like if Joe would have had that dimple too, but I don’t wonder too long, because I have a choice, and I do have a power. Sometimes I like to imagine that Joe made that little dimple on his brother, with his tiny, perfect pinky finger, when they were playing tip inside me; sometimes I wrap myself in the gentleness of an old man with a deep raspy voice saying to a small boy: Look at the sun on the hills; and I don’t care if that makes me a nut. It has its own logic, one that makes sense to me.

  One that means I have now taken my mother’s photograph out of the bottom drawer in the wardrobe, so that she sits on the mantel in the parlour next to Father — whose photograph I had left inside a packing box with that tatty old piece of embroidery I never finished, all this time. Mama. Good gracious, look at the girl you raised, Frank. And imagination or not, I can hear her laughter somewhere. True enough I would have heard it once: she was married to the Leprechaun, after all.

  Look at them there together, Mr and Mrs Connolly: hard not to imagine they’ve been in cahoots here all along. Fanciful but beautiful notions. My Insurance, if you like.

  DANIEL

  In the real world the barking is getting harsher and louder, right here in front of me. In the paddock, where we’re having a collective meeting, or were until it became a brawl. Verbal at the moment. Probably a bit more than that in a minute. I should do something authoritative. Say something. But it’s too stupid. I’m looking at it in morbid fascination.

  It’s started because there’s been a riot in Brisbane, more than five hundred miles and a whole state away from here. Apparently a thousand or so returned men pulled apart the Russia Association building, doing a very proper job of it, because the trade unionists had marched the day before against the War Precautions Act continuing, keeping wages low, the cost of living high and mouths closed in continued censorship as well as hunger. The Queensland constabulary, who are not Hughes’s best mates and who act under the only Labor state left in the country, opened fire on the Anzac rioters. No one was killed, but the police were not being careful to avoid hitting anyone with bullet, bayonet and fist. I’m split.

  I can appreciate the returned men acting like animals, because that’s what some of them are now, if they weren’t animals before the AIF taught them how to be. They were carrying on about the unionists being in bed with the Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners; said they were all waving the red flag. And The Red Flag, as we all know, has been banned by the Federal government. Better keep my autographed copy of the Manifesto under the bed from now, if I can find it in France’s Islands of Slovenliness as she calls her bookshelves in the sitting room. Our government has also, just a few weeks ago, finally come through with a housing plan for the veterans. Hard not to see some sort of a connection between this momentous event and the riot. France, when she mentioned it last night, is convinced they’d been encouraged to stir things up, to set an example against disloyalists — she would: she’d find a connection between the ends of a rainbow if you gave her a moment to think about it. But if this particular thing’s supposed to be a Hughes show, it backfired, because the so-called enemies of the state were well behaved on their march, just saying their piece; the Anzacs’ attack was actually unprovoked, so the response of the police would seem fairly appropriate. I’m inclined to shout above the brawl: ‘No one died, so who fucking cares?’ But clearly a lot do.

  There’s about thirty or so blokes in front of me who are frothing for the returned men, at the police brutality, and a few are returned men themselves. Then there’s about fifty who are frothing for the unions and for Russia’s right to run its own game, without Australian communists getting belted for having an opinion. But then there’s every two-bobs’ worth being thrown in, from the blind murder in Ireland, to Hughes deliberately inciting trouble in all unions to prevent the One Big National Union, which some poor bastards still think is a possibility. One bloke’s even going off about Welsh independence. Jesus.

  All of these men work at the Wattle, where, regardless of whether they have a stake in it or not, they are all on the best fucking wicket in the country probably, when it comes to coal anyway. And every single one of them is a paid-up member of the union. Thought I was an expert at irony. Not today. No class confusion, Dunc, just confusion. All I can see is about eighty different flavours of anger, banging away, letting off four years’ worth of steam and more, and I’m thinking how well this sort of thing must suit the Nationalist government, state and commonwealth, and right across this wide brown land of ours. Solidarity is dead, even if it was only ever half alive. Who’s going to hold a mourning service for that? No one. Mateship was born in the AIF, wasn’t it: not in a mine. Eureka. True blue. Never forget.

  I look at Evan next to me. He’s looking off at the sky above the hill, thinking about rugby no doubt. It’s a look of weary contempt. He’s saying on that hard old stone face: Let them brawl and think about it tomorrow, when they’ve hurt themselves for no purpose. Ten minutes ago, before the brawl took off, I’d been talking about the bathhouse going ahead. Your fucking heated bathhouse, and probably the first one in the state. Thank you all very much, lads.

  Punch is thrown, rowdy now. All in.

  Evan says: ‘Come on then, Danny, let’s go and have a cup of tea.’

  Yep.

  And anyone who doesn’t turn up tomorrow won’t be paid injury time. I’ve half a mind to order that box of machine
ry and get rid of the lot of you.

  Anzac Day, my pretend birthday. This time, it’s fear of the national reverence that keeps me at home with my own mourning and silence. That and the service medal I received in the post last week: thanks for the reminder. Got shoved straight in the kit, still in the back of the wardrobe. I realise there’s not a lot of room for those who’d rather forget. There must be thousands who don’t show up to services and get-togethers, so we’re invisible; won’t be anything in the papers about the abstainers. I don’t show up to work either: I go for a run and come home and paint instead. France comes back from the shops in the afternoon, says it looked more like Lest We Forget The Publicans in town. That’d be right.

  July is Anzac Month for me this year. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because drought has brought the wattle out early and my eyes are full of water as soon as they’re open. Doesn’t help that I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night. No nightmares, no dreams at all, but when I wake up it takes me a moment to work out where I am. France can hear the wheels turning, but she doesn’t rag me about it this time. She wraps herself around me, I think to remind me where she is; not that I need telling. She’s always with me, somehow: how did an idiot like me catch one like her? Who doesn’t question why I’m not going into work much at the minute, and why I can’t seem to get into town at all. Just the thought of going into town makes me sweat, because I know I’ll run into someone who’ll make me lose it: one of the permanently damaged, and there’s something like a hundred thousand of them all over the country. It sounds more than backward, but I find it very hard to accept that I was spared. That grinds into my mind more than the thought of the sixty thousand who died. I really want to believe in France’s magic, I really do; I’d want to believe that her parents were in cahoots, that Frank said kill him and Josie said no, just hurt him so he knows about it, if it wasn’t just one of France’s funnies against miserable facts. I’d even believe Hughes’s jabber about Australia’s sacrifice being the largest of any of the Allies, if that would help me sleep through. But, over there, there’s millions dead, and more millions damaged; and I wasn’t one of them. And then there’s more millions that starved to death. The hollowed-out faces of little French kids, not asking for money, just food. Starvation. That thought will never stop horrifying me; personally, I couldn’t think of a worse way to go. France reckons more will have died of the Spanish flu in the past year, but it’s not the same, is it: we don’t make the flu.