The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘There you are, my boy. There you are,’ he said, beginning to blink, with tears appearing on his lashes.

  It was foolish of me, but I could not help asking, ‘What are you trying to make of that, Alfred? Are you really trying to tell me –’

  ‘Apart from Henry, who is such a clever chap, the guvnor sent Walter to India, Frank to Canada and us here because he saw us all as unfortunate boys, in the same way he saw the girls of Urania Cottage as unfortunate girls. What else am I to think? The issue has nothing to do with the fact of flourishing here, as we clearly have. The issue is that he weighed us as he weighed the lost girls, and found us wanting, and in need of a new heaven and a new earth.’

  ‘You make it sound as if he abandoned us, as if he threw us into a pit. But he wrote letters ahead and he made inquiries about Melbourne and the bush. He did it carefully and for our own good.’

  ‘As he did for the tarts,’ Alfred drunkenly insisted.

  ‘It’s Christmas,’ I protested, ‘and you sit there full of brandy and judge Father in that way. I hate it, Alfred. I’m going to bed.’

  Alfred blinked at me with those watery eyes. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t cut me off, Plorn, there’s the boy!’

  ‘Then don’t insult Father.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, who else can I sit and reflect on him with? Besides, Plorn, do you really understand love? All love in the world is the love of imperfect people. Imperfect children love imperfect parents. It’s easy to love someone who’s never put a foot wrong. And you want me to believe the guvnor, despite his gifts and difference from all us other humans, never put a foot wrong? That is delusion, not love, Plorn. To know . . . and then to love anyhow . . . that’s the trick!’

  I was still in a fury, and wondered later whether I was distressed because the way he spoke about our father might distract me from applying myself – for the guvnor’s sake – in Momba. ‘Yes, but the trick isn’t to slur everything the guvnor’s ever done for us. And for others, whoever they are. That stuff with Urania Cottage . . . that’s the work of a good man!’

  ‘Oh, Plorn, he’s just a man. Only to everyone else is he God bloody Almighty! Look, when he was starting his magazine he went and saw that Chisholm lady, the famous one who shipped boatloads of ragged young girls here from England and from the Irish bogs. First issue of his magazine, of Household Words, there are five . . . yes, five . . . articles on how Australia is heaven for the lower orders.’

  ‘Perhaps I ought to begin with the magazines and then get on to the books,’ I suggested, to distract him. Even the text of magazines seemed as dense as jungles to me.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he advised. ‘Pa doesn’t need you to read his books, so don’t think not reading them is an insult to him. It’s just that it’s handy to read them because every bastard in the colonies seems to have done so. And to want a discussion, you understand.’

  But it mattered more to me than that, and neglecting his works still felt like an insult to the guvnor, so that redressing it went along with applying myself on Momba.

  ‘Anyhow,’ continued Alfred, ‘the guvnor parodied this Chisholm woman in Bleak House, calling her Mrs Jellyby, and though he gives her a great cause, she also has a slovenly home, uncared-for children and a beaten-down husband. He didn’t even like her, you see, but he believed her. The problem was she implanted this bug about Australia in his damned ear and it wormed its way into his brain. And who’s better in the end? Mrs Jellyby, who doesn’t notice when her little’un gets his head stuck in the railings on the landing. Or the guvnor, who sent them to India and Canada and here?’

  I wanted to stop him. I cried out, ‘I’m here by my choice.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re here at parental direction.’

  ‘Of my own choice!’ I yelled, furious that Alfred was embroiling me in childhood again, and so in failure.

  Thank God he said nothing and the resultant silence stretched. We had reached an impasse and perhaps an end, though I still itched to say more. I had felt I’d somehow got into wool as Henry had got into the law at Cambridge, its own strange outstation of England, and that we were both now equally successful sons, Henry, Alfred, me. Alfred refused to believe it, as it seemed I needed to if I was to go on breathing.

  ‘I must go,’ I told him, rising, and feeling soured wine in my gorge.

  He said, ‘I want the same thing as you, Plorn. I want to understand.’

  ‘But you look at the bad. Never the good.’

  He belched briefly and contemplated this accusation with bleak eyes, then said, ‘The whole damn world utters the good for him. Ten years ago, ten years, he pitched Mama out of the house! And he told us we were not to trust Mama’s family except for Aunt Georgina. That’s what I can’t forget, my little brother. And yet still his authority is absolute.’

  ‘Not to everyone,’ I told him, remembering McGaw. ‘Some ask questions.’

  ‘So few,’ he sniffed. ‘So few.’

  ‘Not many good ones either. I must go. I’m feeling sick.’

  ‘Go then, little brother. For Christ’s sake, go!’

  I stood up as he continued to look fixedly before him.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ I asked, suddenly full of brotherly sentiment.

  ‘As ever,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you, without you to raise these matters with, I think I would go mad. When do you start out for Momba again?’

  ‘Morning after next.’

  He held out an arm towards me, the gesture nearly unseating him. ‘No one I can say these things to, these things that I feel must be said. Except for you. And you’re two or three damned days’ ride away!’

  I called goodnight.

  ‘We have an excursion tomorrow, out along the creek,’ he promised me. ‘You’ll enjoy it. We’ll take your man Cultay with us.’

  I went back to my room and locked myself away, feeling the weight of his propositions. I thought I had applied myself, but according to Alfred I’d applied myself in the realm of the fallen, where it meant nothing. I was unable to lie on my bed, unable to do anything, and in the midst of my furious tide of indecision, I thought that Mrs Geraghty’s quandong tart might rouse me or be the final joy before my moral extinction. Quandong tart.

  I made my way to the kitchen in my shirtsleeves. It was still hot in there from the endeavour to reproduce my mother’s recipes. I found the wonderful tart beneath a wire canopy and began to shove handfuls of it into my mouth. Then, hearing a noise behind me, I turned and beheld Mrs Geraghty, wearing a white nightgown which encompassed her from the neck to below her knees, beneath which her large white feet stood on the beaten earth floor.

  ‘Mr Dickens,’ she said in bemusement.

  I was not in a position to explain myself. If I’d been eating her quandong tart like an adult, I could plead late-night hunger. But I had been eating like a greedy child, and she had caught me.

  She came over, took my elbow, and said, ‘Sit, Mr Dickens.’

  I obeyed her, still swallowing the last of what I’d shovelled into my mouth. ‘No,’ I protested. ‘No! I . . .’

  She said as if it were a secret, ‘I heard your brother arguing with you.’

  ‘Well, brothers do quarrel,’ I replied tersely. Then, to my shame, I began crying.

  Mrs Geraghty pulled me against her body, and I felt her abundant life beyond that one layer of cloth. She said, ‘You poor little fellow, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I am splendid,’ I said, unable to cease weeping. ‘I am applying myself. I am making my way.’

  ‘As is Mr Alfred,’ she replied.

  ‘I wish he would not drink,’ I said, feeling a great relief to be weeping into her breast, too distressed with Alfred to think of Maurice’s advice on all this.

  ‘You argue about your father, I think. You certainly don’t argue about your mother.’

  ‘Yes. My guvnor’s the complicated one.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, releasing me.

  I lunged at her as if I
could not bear to be separated.

  ‘Please, Mr Dickens, it is not proper,’ she said.

  And with a great reluctance, I let her go.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it is a matter of wonder to me that whoever we are, we are all the one lost baby. I would dearly like to sit by you until you were asleep, Mr Dickens. But there would be gossip, deadly gossip. Please, sit down, and I shall cut you a slice of the tart.’

  Like a child I did sit and waited for that measured slice, that polite ratio, which was all I was entitled to.

  24

  Through all this, Cultay kept his own festival, if for him it was one, with his relatives. But on Boxing Day, Alfred and I set out with Cultay and Alfred’s native escort, who was also Paakantji. Alfred had woken with an astonishingly clear head and I felt aggrieved with him for his treacherous night binges and morning serenities.

  After passing Corona’s handsome stone woolshed we followed the creek north-west. It was very different country from Momba, fewer hardwood trees, more quartzite rock. We were on our way to meet a chap Alfred described as an exceptional fellow, a man named Sparrow, who was boundary rider in a paddock two to three hours’ ride up the creek, in the direction of the South Australian border.

  I felt that, between them, Soldier Staples and poor Dandy had exhausted my interest in hut-keeping boundary riders, and as we rose up the ridge to the north of the station homestead, I clung sullenly to that proposition. Oh, if I could just sit at Chard’s store and listen to Mrs Chard mangle the English language, what a happy young Briton I would be!

  I asked Alfred why Hayward was not with us for this holiday excursion and he explained that Hayward was not yet presentable after the festive carousels. However, he would meet us at dinner that night and had promised to perform one of the guvnor’s favourites, ‘The Dogs’ Meat Man’, with which the guvnor himself had entertained guests at Gad’s Hill.

  My thoughts turned to the previous evening and the outrage I’d tried to commit on Mrs Geraghty. Could I ever forget it, or ever face a quandong without being reproached by it? And yet the rhythm of horseback, the canter, the careful rein-work on the descent on the far side of the ridge soothed me for the present, and the terrain and my Waler’s passage over it absorbed me, and half-convinced me towards contentment.

  Corona had an undulating succession of these ridges and gullies. Finally, beyond one of them, by a creek delineated by river gums, we saw Sparrow’s hut, which had a horse saddled by the door. A jaunty little fellow emerged flanked by two sheepdogs. He was carrying a rifle and wearing a striped shirt, new shaven behind his whiskers, his hair combed.

  We descended to his house and as we got abreast of it Alfred got down from his horse and called to Cultay, ‘You will talk to your brethren, sir, will you?’

  As I dismounted, Cultay and the other dark rode a little further to confer with some natives I now saw, who were camped amongst trees along the creek.

  ‘These are the Cooper’s Creek blacks?’ I asked, remembering what Chard had told me.

  ‘Yes. Bonney’s sent me Cultay to deal with them. Cultay is a powerful man and a magus, and the blacks over here have been waiting for him.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ called Sparrow cheerfully, stepping up. He did not seem to have any of the reclusiveness, the air of the hermit, which had marked Staples and Dandy.

  Sparrow shook Alfred’s hand and greeted him with a slight frown, then greeted me in the same manner. I thought he might mention the ochre-seeking travellers along the creek, but instead he said, ‘You picked a furnace day to come riding, Mr Dickens.’

  Alfred said, ‘You are my most remarkable boundary rider, Sparrow, and I could hardly let my brother go back to Momba without meeting you. Did the darks trouble you last night?’

  ‘I slept soundly, Mr Dickens. Depended on my dogs to warn me, and I had the horse saddled. The darks don’t concern me.’

  ‘Sturdy man. I half thought I’d come yesterday but the note you sent seemed so admirably calm . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sparrow. ‘They’re just staying here a long time, that’s all. It might be the heat.’

  ‘Cultay will read them the terms,’ Alfred said blithely. ‘He is the pacifier and has kept the Bonneys free of any attack all these years!’

  Fred Bonney had told me that Cultay was adept at the use of the yountoo and moolee, the items of potent vengeance which in hands less wise than his might be used recklessly. Fred, as close to a member of the tribe as you could get and still be white, explained that the yountoo was a small bone taken from the leg of the corpse of a friend, a fellow clansman. It was then wrapped up in a small piece of dried flesh cut from the thigh of another deceased but friendly body – friendly at least to a man of power like Cultay – before or after burial and dried in the sun. The string for the package was made of the hair of yet another deceased friend. The yountoo was taken to the place where a lawbreaker was sleeping, warmed in the ashes of his fire, pointed at him, and then a small flake of bone was thrown at his body, the subject remaining unconscious through the whole procedure. As the lawbreaker came to sicken, he would no doubt call on his own doctor to try to suck the killing flake of bone out of him. His survival became a contest between curse and cure.

  The moolee was a rough piece of white quartz two inches long, with a length of possum hair, which was dipped in human fat from a further dead clansman, pointed at the victim, and then left to warm in or by fire. As it blazed, so did the curse within the victim. Cultay was the high priest of both of these rituals, ponderous with symbols and significance, and in that country, amongst native stockmen, his rites somehow seemed as authoritative as the rites in the Book of Common Prayer.

  ‘I have brought you some cheer, Sparrow,’ said Alfred, producing a bottle of rum from his packsaddle and waving it in the torrid air.

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was actually Christmas yesterday,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘By the common agreement of the Anglican Church and Western Christendom,’ Alfred told him as I watched Cultay and his kinsman moving amongst the visiting Cooper’s Creek natives along the creek.

  ‘I didn’t think it was till the day after tomorrow,’ Sparrow told us with a short laugh. ‘Just shows a man! You must come inside. I’ve got wet hessian on the door. We’ll drink your gift, Mr Dickens.’

  Worried now, I followed them in; it was a little cooler in the half-darkness. We sat down at a small table covered with newspaper items pasted in place, exactly the same as the one in the hut Staples and Dandy had occupied.

  Sparrow fetched pannikins for the rum, but I asked if I could have tea instead, which he made for me outside on the fire, bringing me back a jet-black brew. Then he served himself and Alfred rum. I felt an admiration for Alfred’s capability with liquor, and his air of command. So we all drank, and Alfred reached out and took Sparrow by the wrist, saying, ‘Do your tricks for my brother, if you’d be so kind.’

  Sparrow showed an amount of reluctance, arguing that his unstated skills were not of much merit and that he was in any case rusty at them.

  ‘No, no,’ Alfred insisted. ‘I won’t abide that. I’ll start off. Let’s see. Here’s one! How many rivers are there in Scotland?’

  ‘More than in this damned Western Division of New South Wales, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But how many are there?’

  ‘How do you know I am right if I tell you how many rivers there are in Scotland?’ asked Sparrow, letting the rum reside in his upper throat and choke him a little.

  ‘You insult your own honesty, Sparrow. Besides, Plorn knows the answer.’ Alfred winked at me.

  ‘Very well,’ he said casually. ‘Do you mean rivers or waters?’

  ‘Let’s keep it to official rivers.’

  ‘In that case it’s two hundred and nineteen bodies of water named as rivers in Scotland and the isles. This would include rivers of the same base name but normally divided by the annotation North and South, as in North Esk River and South Esk River.’
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br />   Again a wink to me from Alfred. ‘Tell me, Brother Plorn, is that correct?’

  ‘It sounds credible to me,’ I admitted, deciding to join the game. ‘Though I thought it was only two hundred and eight.’

  ‘Well done, Mr Sparrow,’ cried Alfred. ‘And please confirm to my amazed brother that you used to do this for a living at the Alhambra and Britannia theatres in London. Now tell me, Omniscient Wizard, how many feet is the length of the gun deck on HMAS Victory?’

  ‘One hundred and eighty-six, sir. As paced by myself as a boy.’

  ‘And while we’re at it, with sail fully set, how many square yards was the canvas Victory could carry?’

  ‘Why, sir,’ said Sparrow in a suddenly enlivened voice, ‘that is a favourite question of patriotic Britons and the answer is six thousand five hundred and ten square yards.’

  ‘Why, I do believe,’ said Alfred, ‘based on our own educations, that my brother and I concur.’

  ‘You are wise to do so when faced with the infallible Man Who Knows Everything,’ Sparrow cried, then held his mug of rum up, and drank it as Alfred clapped and shook his head and murmured, ‘The Man Who Knows Everything.’

  ‘You were on the stage?’ I asked him. ‘The Dickenses are mad for the stage.’

  Alfred nodded. ‘I told him that. I told him. How the guvnor had a theatre room in Tavistock House. And the Queen wanted to see one of his productions there. The Frozen North it was called, a title that rings pretty ironically in this place.’ He sounded proud now, to be the guvnor’s son. ‘But ask him something, Plorn! Anything! They used to accuse him of having a man with a gazetteer backstage whispering the answers to him, but there’s no one here. Ask him then, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Could you tell me the height of the Crystal Palace?’ I asked.

  ‘In its original structure in Hyde Park or its present one at Sydenham Hill?’

  ‘You see, you see,’ said Alfred, as if the point was already proven.

  ‘When it was opened,’ I specified.

  Sparrow’s eyes were bright but had a certain sadness, as if he was not entirely happy to show his act or actually wished he could be less forward about it.