by Tony Birch
‘I’m not driving over there. Just curious. As it is, I got no car. Thanks for the lift.’
Old Bob was standing by the gate waiting for me.
‘How much longer you thinking of being with us, Cal? I don’t like my boat out in the sun. Or the rain.’
‘Oh, not much longer at all, Bob. I’m about to move on.’
I skipped my mother’s cooking and lay on top of my bed thinking about what Bruce had said. Just on dark I grabbed my jacket and wallet, left the garage and headed for an old haunt, the car park at the RSL. I walked the aisles and settled on a battered Ford sedan with an unlocked back passenger door. I’d wired the car in less than a minute and was on the road in another thirty seconds. I passed the speedway and turned onto the fire road, driving through the pitch-black night. Pairs of eyes flashed at me from the scrub and from behind trees. A fox raced onto the dirt road carrying the bloodied carcass of a rabbit in its mouth. I felt the left front wheel slam into it, crushing its ribcage. By the time I’d turned onto the highway I’d dodged a dozen more animals and hit maybe two or three, although I couldn’t be sure on account of the bumps and divets in the road.
The Lion Park wasn’t hard to find. A faded billboard with the face of a roaring lion welcomed visitors. I pulled off the road at the gates. A light burned on the porch of a house at the end of a drive. I left the car and walked. A dog barked and came running from its bed on the porch. It was an aged blue heeler, a little timid. The porch light went on and the door opened.
There was no mistaking China. The shapely silhouette resting against a door post could belong to no one else. Another dog sat by her side.
‘Can I help you? This is private property.’
‘China,’ I croaked, as if someone had shoved a handful of dust in my mouth.
She stepped forward and stood under the porch light. She was barefoot and wore a floral cotton dress, with her hair tied in a bun. She looked beautiful.
‘Jesus, Cal. Is it you?’
I felt shy all of a sudden, like a schoolboy.
‘It’s me.’
She came down from the porch and walked across the yard.
‘Christ. It is you. Let me look. Wow. What are you doing here?’ She was a little nervous. ‘My husband, he’s away at an ag meet. He’ll be back soon.’
‘I don’t want any trouble, China. I was just driving by.’
She raised a hand, the same soft hand she used to rest in the small of my back.
‘It’s no trouble. It’s just that I wouldn’t have expected you to show up out of the blue like this. It’s been … four years?’
‘A little more.’
‘I read about you in the papers. How long have you been …?’
‘About a month. I’ve been staying back with Mum.’
She looked out to the highway, to where the stolen car was parked.
‘You say you were driving by? How did you know where I was?’
‘This fella I’ve been working with, Bruce Conlan, I guess you don’t remember him? He bought one of your dogs some time back. We were talking and your name came up and he told me that he’d seen you. I had to come over this way and I thought – only then when I saw the old sign – that I’d call in and see how you are. But like I said, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.’
She shifted on her feet, reached behind her head with a hand and pulled a clip from the back of her hair. Her hair dropped, bounced and rested on her bare shoulders.
‘Where are you heading to?’
I heard a car engine, turned and spotted headlights at the end of the drive. China nervously smoothed the front of her dress.
‘Here’s my husband now.’
I had only seconds left to me.
‘China, I just wanted to tell you that when I was inside I thought about you. A lot. It sounds stupid but I need to tell you that you were a good person. I never understood that before. I was too wild to know anything when we were going out.’
I scraped my boot in the dirt.
‘And I want to also tell you that you were beautiful. You are beautiful.’
‘You told me that plenty of times,’ she laughed. ‘You were pretty nice yourself.’
‘No, I was trouble. I’ve always been trouble.’
‘You were not.’ She leaned forward and brushed my arm with a fingertip. ‘You were sweet. Most of the time.’
The car pulled into the yard and the dogs ran to meet it. The driver hopped out. He was tall and thin and fit looking, full of purpose, and no doubt suspicious of me.
‘Can I help you? Is that your car on the highway?’
‘I’m working for a farmer over east and he’s after one of your working dogs. I was driving this way and I thought I’d call in on the off-chance. I shouldn’t have done so. It’s late. My apologies.’
He relaxed a little.
‘We don’t have pups at the moment. It’s not the time of year for them. You should have called ahead.’
‘Your wife was just explaining to me that they’re out of season.’
He kissed China on the cheek.
‘Sorry I’m late, Marg. It went on longer than I expected.’
I hadn’t heard China called by her proper name since school rollcall. He took out his wallet and handed me a business card.
‘Give me a call around December and I’ll let you know what we’ve got. Should have some pups then.’ He offered his hand. ‘Tom.’
‘Bruce,’ I answered. I took the card. ‘Thanks.’
I stepped back and took a last look at China, arm-in-arm with her husband.
‘And thank you, Marg.’
‘You too,’ she answered, looking down at her bare feet.
I sat in the car for an hour or more. I couldn’t get my mind off her. I got out of the car and watched the house. A honeyed glow framed a narrow window on the side of the house. I walked quietly behind a row of apple trees until I reached the window and stood among the trees, listening to my own heavy breaths as I watched China through the window. She stood naked before a mirror, brushing her hair. Her husband lay back on their bed, smoking a cigarette and admiring her until she turned to him.
I walked back along the driveway to the car, gunned the engine and pulled out onto the highway. The country gradually flattened until the dark horizon fell away. Although the air was cold I wound down the window to keep myself from fading away. I could smell the sea in the wind and thought of China and the nights we’d spent in each other’s arms. I could see her hair glowing against the moon and hear her laugh.
I didn’t want the highway patrol bearing down on me. I turned onto an irrigation road, running flat and hard into the distance. I could see a radio tower, pulsing a beam of red light across the dark sky. I set my bearings for it, as if it were the Star of Bethlehem itself.
THE TOECUTTERS
We went in search of the bunker throughout spring and into the early summer. The story of a wartime underground command centre, secretly built upriver from the city in the event of a Japanese invasion, was well known. I’d never paid it much attention until Red half convinced me that the story was true.
His Pa had taken a fall staggering home from the pub and broken his leg. He was staying at Red’s, where Red’s mother was taking care of the old man. There were no spare beds in the house, seeing as there were eight kids in the family. Red and his youngest brother, Charlie, gave up their shared bed for their Pa. Charlie was moved out onto the balcony on the dog’s couch, the dog ended up in the yard, and Red took the bedroom floor in a sleeping bag. It sounded like an adventure to me, but he wasn’t happy about it.
We were down on the riverbank above the falls, watching workers with survey poles and measuring tapes and binoculars hiking across paddocks, marking the ground for the new bridge being built across the river. It was going to link the new freeway, built to conn
ect the city to the faraway suburbs, with the other side of the river. The streets and the houses behind our own had already gone to the bulldozer, replaced by a deep canyon being gouged out by prehistoric-looking bobcats.
I watched as one of the workers stuck his striped pole in the dirt.
‘You know that where we’re sitting now, it’ll be gone soon. Vanished.’
Red wasn’t listening. He was busy getting stuck into his Pa.
‘You know he farts in bed. And drinks and smokes all night.’
I picked up a chipped piece of sandstone and pitched it towards the water.
‘Everyone farts in bed. When you sleep over at my place you fart all night.’
‘I do?’
‘In your sleep.’
‘Okay. So some of us fart in bed. But what about this? When he wants to have a piss, which is about five times a night because he’s drinking so much, he swings his legs out of the bed and nearly knocks me out, whacking me in the side of the head with his foot. He aims for the piss-pot, on the floor, not far from my head, without getting to his feet. Most of the piss misses the pot and goes all over the floor. It will soon rot the lino and floorboards, my dad says.’
He picked up a rock and wrapped his fist around it.
‘Do you reckon your mum would let me bunk at your place?’
‘How long for?’
‘I don’t know, until the plaster’s off his broken leg.’
‘I suppose she wouldn’t mind. We’ve got the room. She says she likes it that you say thank you after eating. And the way you take your dirty plate to the sink. I’ll ask tonight.’
I brought the idea up at the tea table. My mother was for it, but the old man wasn’t happy. He dropped his newspaper on the table.
‘That kid eats like a horse. And don’t be giving me a sob story about him missing out on a bed. He probably doesn’t get a feed in that house. They breed like flies over there. How many kids are there?’
He was shitty enough, without me asking for a bed for Red. He worked in the foundry at Ruwolt’s and the Iron Workers Union had called a go-slow so he wasn’t picking up penalties. They were due to call a walkout, which meant he’d be getting no pay except a few dollars from the strike fund. My dad enjoyed a drink and a quiet punt, and unless he was holding out, which wasn’t likely, judging by his mood, he’d quickly be broke. Mum always had money put away. That would get us through. But she’d hand it out like a slow dripping tap. There’d be no play money for him, and an extra mouth to feed wouldn’t help.
To the old man’s relief Red didn’t come to stay. That same night, after he’d gone to bed on the floor and his Pop asked him what he’d been up to during the day, Red talked to him about our love for the river and the long days we spent walking its banks and swimming in it when it was warm. His Pop had sat up in bed, downed the dregs of a glass of beer and told a river story of his own.
‘You know the old pump house behind the cotton spinners there, just below the waterfall?’
‘Yeah, I know it. Me and Joe and some others hang out there when it’s wet. We dragged an old couch down there last year. Rolled it down the bank.’
‘True? A mate of mine ran the swy game down there for years on Sunday mornings. They’d haul a couple of barrels of beer down there and put on some meat. There’d be hundreds of them, from big punters from the track to a couple of old boys who’d lived in a shack along the bank since the Depression days, all wagering pennies. What a life them boys had. Never worked a day in their life. And out of choice. Except for a bit of labouring they did down there on the shovel during the war.’
Red’s ears pricked up just as his Pa was reaching into his underpants to have a good scratch of his balls.
‘At the river? What work did they do?’
‘Roll us a smoke, son, and I’ll tell ya. I have to take a leak.’
‘I’ll roll a smoke, as long as you keep your aim and don’t piss on my head.’
Red rolled two cigarettes, a stock for the old man and a whippet for himself, and lit them both. The old man took a deep puff on his rollie, coughed up some phlegm and spat it into the piss-pot.
‘They helped build some sort of air-raid shelter down there. The Americans were holed up at Victoria Barracks near Princes Bridge. Had some sort of speedboats tied up under the bridge. The idea was that if the Japs attacked they’d jump in the boats and head up the river as far as they could. Couldn’t get above the falls, of course. They say they picked a spot this side of the falls and dug into the bank with pick and shovel. Couldn’t get heavy machinery down there. It would have got bogged.’
Red took a drag on his cigarette and dropped it into his grandfather’s empty beer glass.
‘Do you think them old river boys were putting on a story? People have been talking about that war bunker for years and years. Looking for it too. If it had been built someone would have found it by now, wouldn’t they, Pa?’
His Pa picked up a half bottle of beer in one hand and a glass in the other. He held the glass up, looked at the soggy butt sitting in the bottom and shook his head. He put the glass on the floor and took a long swig at the bottle.
‘Maybe.’ He burped loudly and followed with a trombone fart. ‘My body’s a fucken symphony, I tell you, son.’
Red tried getting him back on track.
‘If there had been a shelter down there, wouldn’t they have found it by now?’
‘Maybe not. You’re talking near thirty years back. All the weeds and shit that have grown up along there since, all the rubbish washed from upriver. Fucken stolen cars dumped and old machinery pushed out the back of the cotton spinners and thrown down the bank. Anything could be under all that. Look long and hard enough and you’ll come across the Titanic.’
Red knocked at my door early the next morning to report what his Pa had told him. My father opened it, on his way out to work.
‘You’re early Red. Travelling light. No bags?’
‘What?’
‘You got a clock at your place? Joe’s still in bed.’
Red dodged him, ran up the stairs and charged into my room to tell me the story.
I wasn’t convinced about the old river boys’ story, but went along. It was winter, not warm enough to swim, and we had nothing better to do. We decided on a plan that we would search the bank from the Johnston Street Bridge to the falls. We’d walked the same bank around a million times and had never spotted evidence of the bunker. I didn’t expect that to change.
The bank was covered in a thick mat of weeds, mostly wild fennel and morning glory, from the water’s edge to the dirt track running behind the cotton spinners’ red-brick wall high above the bank. I wasn’t too happy getting in among the weeds, on account of the nesting river rats. Red came up with the idea of tucking the bottoms of our jeans into football socks and wrapping electrical tape around them to stop the rats climbing up our legs. We also carried a golf club each. Red had a three-iron and me a heavy wood. His older brother, Corey, had stolen a set of clubs from the boot of a car, and hadn’t been able to sell them off in any of the pubs, with the game of golf being a bit of a mystery where we were from.
The first morning of the search was pissing with rain. As I waded into the bed of weeds I heard the squealing rats scattering about beneath me. Red claimed he couldn’t hear a sound but wasn’t worried anyway.
‘One of them water rats shows its head and I’ll fucken club it to death.’
‘But what if it gets its teeth into you before you get to it? My old man reckons there’s enough poison on the end of a rat tooth to kill a family.’
Red jabbed me in the guts with his club, like it was a sword.
‘I’ll knock its teeth out of its mouth before it can get near me.’
‘Bet you don’t’
‘Oh, I fucken will. Just watch me.’
We walked on, towar
ds the bridge and poked at the ground with our golf clubs. It didn’t take long before we found stuff – bits of rusted machinery, old bottles, a keep out sign and the skeleton of an animal. I’d seen dead rats before, and another time a bag of rotting kittens in a hessian sack dumped in our lane. I don’t know why, but I was more afraid of a dead animal than a living one.
I didn’t want to touch the skeleton and called out to Red, who had walked on ahead of me. He came back and pulled the skeleton away from the weeds tangled through its bones.
‘What do you think it is?’ I asked, standing a good way back. ‘It looks like a dog.’
‘Na. It’s a fox, I’d bet. Look at that bit of red fur on its back. And those teeth. They’re longer than a dog’s. What do you want to do with it?’
‘Nothing. Come on, let’s keep going.’
He held the skeleton up by its ribcage. The bones from one of its back legs fell away.
‘You sure? We could take it home and make a necklace from its teeth.’
‘Fuck off. We’re taking it nowhere. If I take that stinking thing near my place my mum will kick my arse.’
Red sniffed along the animal’s back, where tufts of fur hung on its backbone.
‘It don’t smell of nothing.’
‘You can’t smell it because you’ve got so much snot up your nose. Get rid of it.’
Red chucked the skeleton into the weeds and ran after me. We reached the bridge having found only more rubbish. We were out of puff and stopped and rested against the bonnet of a burnt-out wreck that had been dumped and set on fire months back. There were another two burnt-out skeletons, a HJ Holden and a VW resting under a span of the bridge. The Council tow-truck came along the track every few months and hauled the wrecks away to the local tip, a few bends along the river.
Red and me shared a cigarette and watched the surveyors working on the other side of the river. He jumped onto the bonnet of the car wreck and used it as a trampoline. A cracking noise bounced off the sandstone cliffs on the other side of the river and shot back to us. The workers stopped and looked over at us, and a flock of cockatoos lifted from a gum tree. They squawked and screeched at Red to cut it out. He went on jumping and giggling to himself until he landed badly and slipped off the bonnet onto the dirt.