The Lucky Galah

by Tracy Sorensen

  Linda, meanwhile, has changed her mind about Port Badminton. She rubs at fly spots on the windowsill, rehearsing to herself the speech she will make to Evan that night.

  I can’t bear it. I want us to go back to Melbourne.

  Evan and Linda had arrived in winter, when the weather was gentle. Now it is summer, and hot beyond belief. Clothes dry within minutes of being hung out on the line. Clothes are wet with sweat within minutes of being put on the body. Linda hates the wet circles under her arms. Her dark hair is sticking to her neck and should be pinned up. She can’t be bothered to do it. She can only bear to stand here at the sink with the dishcloth. It’s not fair, she repeats to herself. She lets go of all logical thought processes and abandons herself to the mental repetition of some key phrases: Too hot, Can’t bear it, Not fair.

  A small subgroup of Tracker Wives have formed themselves into a Bitching Circle, and Linda is part of it. They have a long list of grievances. Besides the shocking heat, there is no fresh milk, no television, limited radio, nothing in the shops, few opportunities for middle-class children, no culture to speak of, the flies swarm over one’s face, sucking at its juices, the mosquitoes eat you alive and give the children nasty red welts and you’re forever having to paint them with calamine lotion and tell them not to scratch. One Englishwoman is terrified of snakes and refuses to leave the house. Another wife, stirred into action by her own repeated pronouncements, has already ‘up and left’. She has flown back to Perth with the children and is now waiting for a truck to follow with furniture. The husband sends money and all in all finds life more straightforward without her. This sobers the Bitching Circle, turns the volume down. Most of the women just want to complain, not act.

  ‘It’s too blinking hot,’ blubbers Linda, giving voice this time. She collapses into the kitchen chair, the dishcloth still in her hand. She rubs the damp dishcloth over her arms, enjoying the momentary coolness.

  She is tired of the heat, but most of all she is tired of the Bitching Circle itself, the cosy negative web these women have woven for themselves with its predictable gossip and judgements. She has worked hard to fit in to this particular subgroup – the group with the most beautiful furniture and dresses – and now she has done almost too perfect a job; she is right in the centre of weekly tennis and afternoon teas and the company of teeming children. These women are tiring because she feels compelled to perform her Normal or Better Than Normal routine with them. That only makes them want to drop in to talk and smoke for hours. She is widely admired, and her clothes and style are being copied.

  And it’s too hot.

  Linda starts to thump the table with the dishcloth. Jo comes over to hug Linda at the knees. Linda cries harder and louder, patting Jo on the head.

  There is a cheerful ‘yoo-hoo’ chorus at the back door. It is members of the Bitching Circle, just dropping in. When they see that Linda has been crying, their faces form a range of expressions, from concern to embarrassment to poorly concealed pleasure in anticipated gossip (‘Poor thing, I think she’s had enough’).

  Linda sits back down at the table, allowing herself to be petted. She throws the dishcloth over the women’s heads, aiming for the sink, and grabs a hanky held out to her. It smells of naphthalene. Someone has put lamingtons on the table; someone else has removed the greaseproof paper and is swatting away the flies. The kettle goes on and a tin of Carnation evaporated milk is opened. Linda’s closest friend among the tracker wives has an arm around her shoulders but loosens it after a few seconds because it’s too hot for bodily contact. The women shoo the children away and lean inwards, waiting to hear.

  Linda glances up and sees all their faces, and laughs. She is suddenly laughing at all of them, feeling the laughter bubble up from deep inside her. The more she laughs and fails to explain what she is laughing about (‘What’s so funny, Linda?’ ‘Nothing, nothing!’) or what she had just been crying about (‘Oh, nothing!’), the more she has to keep laughing. She feels them all slipping away from her, feels their bewilderment. She didn’t mean to do this, but she can’t help it now.

  Yes, she can. She pulls herself up with a gulp, stops laughing. ‘It’s the heat! It’s driving me mad!’

  Everyone relaxes: a nice, comprehensible problem. Linda is immediately back in her place not just at the centre of the group, but on a pedestal slightly above it. Linda gets them talking about something else. She enjoys her lamington and tea. She feels fundamentally at odds with the aims and values of the Bitching Circle, but for the moment there is nowhere else to go. In any case, there is comfort in a pack, that can’t be denied.

  The second time Evan stays out to watch for galahs, Linda enjoys the luxury of a whole bed in which to stretch out her long legs. She dreams that she can hear someone calling ‘Mrs Johnson! Mrs Johnson!’, but it takes some time for her to understand that the voice is calling her. She wakes, confused, as the voice grows more urgent. ‘Yoo-hoo! Are you there?’

  It is Marjorie Kelly from two doors down, enormously pregnant, a green melon about to explode. She is standing beside the EH Holden with her hand on it, as though it is salvation itself, a provider of relief from pain, a transport to a better place.

  Linda runs back into the house to bundle up the sleeping Jo, runs out again, throws Jo in the passenger seat, herself in behind the wheel, and starts the engine. Marjorie gets herself into the back seat, her watery eyes not seeing; they are turned inwards, somehow, watching the baby descending into the birth canal.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Johnson,’ she says. ‘Kevin’s at sea and I’ve been waiting for my sister. She’s coming soon but I don’t think . . . it’s not . . . she’s not . . . ow!’

  ‘Don’t worry about that now,’ says Linda. ‘You’ll be right, we’ll be there in a minute.’

  The EH Holden is alone on the road, blinking pointlessly at the corners.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ says Marjorie as they pull up outside the hospital. ‘I think the baby’s here.’

  ‘Don’t look,’ says Linda to Jo, who is standing on her seat, looking.

  Linda leaps from the car and opens the back door to find, by the car’s dull interior light, that Marjorie has positioned herself nicely, her nightie all bunched up around her chest, a round head between her legs. Marjorie gives one last push and a baby slithers out into Linda’s hands.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ says Linda.

  ‘Is that a girl?’ asks Jo, looking at the slithery thing.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Johnson,’ gasps Marjorie, reaching for it.

  ‘Please call me Linda,’ says Linda. She has nowhere to wipe her hands.

  ‘Marj,’ says Marj.

  Baby Susan, resting on Marjorie’s belly, gives a little mew. Linda dashes off into the hospital, holding her hands away from her clothes, shouting. Soon, all manner of people, equipment and a hospital trolley emerge, like ants boiling out of a disturbed nest. Elated, Linda walks down a quiet middle-of-the-night linoleum corridor, searching for a sink. She finds one with taps with long silver arms meant to be flicked on and off with an elbow.

  She drives back to Marjorie’s house, where she finds the anxious sister just getting out of her car. Linda is in a generous, expansive mood and wide awake. She tells the sister that everything is in hand.

  In the morning Linda washes the back seat of the car using a rag, a cake of yellow soap and a red plastic bucket. The following week, the first of Marjorie’s tributes to Linda arrives. It is a crocheted doily distinctly at odds with the modernist style of Linda’s home.

  FIVE

  An affair to remember

  At the age of thirteen, Marjorie won first prize in the Decorated Doll’s Pram Parade. She did not push the pram herself; her tiny five-year-old sister pushed it proudly down the dusty wide main road, with the blue first-prize ribbon tied to the pram’s handle. But everyone knew it was Marjorie’s work. Marjorie stood there on the side of the ro
ad with the hatted and gloved townswomen, soaking up the praise.

  But this was also the day she discovered that she was plain. ‘Plain girls can always cultivate charm,’ said a lady from the Red Cross, who was possibly only trying to be kind. Later, Marj’s sister confirmed the diagnosis. Marjorie had slumped shoulders; a neck thrust forward at an angle rather than perpendicular to the floor like the girls who mastered the art of walking with books on their heads; and slightly bulgy eyes. No curve at the waist, just a little barrel of a trunk. To her credit, Marjorie was capable of genuine admiration of beautiful girls. She liked to measure them and dress them and make them even more beautiful, without envy.

  The years went by and the girls she knew all married, one by one. Then the weddings stopped, because they had run their course. She was considered to have been left on the shelf when Kevin Kelly unexpectedly asked Marjorie to go to the pictures with him. He stank of whale blubber but she said yes. A girlfriend, on hearing the news, said thoughtfully: ‘It doesn’t matter what a person is like on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts.’ She was referring to the stink. All the flensers stank, there was nothing that could be done about it. They could wash themselves for a week and the stench would only fade, not disappear.

  On the night of her date, Marjorie’s bulgy eyes glittered, her cheeks were pink, her wide froggy mouth was moist and inviting. When she saw Kevin coming down the street towards her he was wearing a boot on one foot and a slipper on the other, and he was limping; the day before, he had slipped in the blubber on the flensing deck and twisted his ankle. Although he’d had four showers that afternoon, he stank of whale blubber and Palmolive soap.

  Marjorie’s new dress (turquoise with taupe trimmings and accessories) was flattened against her body in the strong wind. She had to use both hands to hold her dress down and hat on. They swept into the Memorial Theatre, dancing on air like movie stars, held up and driven forward by the wind. Kevin forgot all about his ankle. They watched An Affair to Remember as the cyclone set in in earnest. ‘Keep her going!’ the audience yelled when the power cut out and everything plunged into blackness, bringing the sound of the screaming wind into the foreground. Kevin and Marjorie took advantage of the velvet darkness combined with general commotion to move seamlessly into a series of long kisses. Despite the ominous crashing and breaking sounds, the audience stayed on in the dark for a long time, hoping the film would start up again, unwilling to face the storm outside. Eventually they had to surrender. All had adventures getting home.

  After her wedding, Marjorie Kelly moved in to the Kelly place on Clam Street.

  It was a well-known house, one of the oldest in Port Badminton. ‘Little did I know I’d live in it one day!’ she liked to remark.

  It was a house full of things: shelves and boxes and corners of them. There were bottles of different-coloured sands, interesting-shaped rocks, bits of driftwood, seashells, and a genuine old Persian carpet. Generations of Kellys had brought things home; things were shifted about but never thrown away. No, you can’t throw that away! It might come in handy, or someone might come looking for it. It was Marj’s job to live among it as best she could.

  When she moved in, the house stood alone on its flood-prone spot at the edge of the samphire flat. Generations of Kellys had been born there; children who liked to hunker in the slightly soggy, slightly salty clay of the samphire flat, studying the succulent bulbs of the reddish, greenish vegetation that grew there. Kevin was the youngest of his siblings. Eventually everyone else died or moved out until it was just Kevin and his mother left in the house. Then Kevin surprised everyone, his mother most of all – I nearly fell off me chair – by getting married.

  When Marjorie moved in, the old lady was ailing but still shuffling from room to room with the aid of an apple crate that she pushed forward an inch at a time.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Marjorie would ask. ‘Just a small one,’ old Mrs Kelly would say, as if to ask for a large one would cause extra bother.

  It is a year after Marjorie’s first date with Kevin. There is another cyclone coming. In the dead eye of the storm, Marjorie goes outside and stands in the middle of the street with the houses at her back and the low salty scrub in front of her. In the distance, the low scrub gives way to mangroves and, beyond that, unseen, the Indian Ocean and humpback whales. The sky is an eerie navy blue. The world is like a snow dome just after it has been picked up and shaken and left to settle again. It is an uneasy stillness. Marjorie can smell the talcum powder on her sweaty skin. She hears a voice say, ‘Hello,’ loud and clear. It isn’t shouted – the word is spoken at conversational level – but Marjorie knows it comes from far away. Another disembodied voice answers, ‘Hello.’ Other than that, there is silence. An extreme, vertiginous silence.

  Inside the house, Kevin is eyeing off the heavy wooden table in the kitchen. He is thinking that, if necessary, he and Marjorie and his mother can cower under it. Marjorie comes back in, talking about the navy sky and disembodied voices. She finds Kevin under the table. He asks her to join him, to test how comfortable they would be if the roof blew off.

  The eye passes and the winds come screaming back in the other direction, trashing Port Badminton thoroughly this time. Two bedraggled men turn up at the mission not far from Chinaman’s Pool, shouting over the wind. When the matron opens the screen door, it blows right off.

  Banana trees are flattened. Roofs are lifted off houses. Small boats are lifted bodily out of the sea and deposited on land.

  Marjorie and Kevin Kelly pass their cyclone in old Mrs Kelly’s bedroom, listening to the screaming wind and rain clattering on the iron roof like continuous machine-gun fire. The house stands firm. There is no need to evacuate to the spot under the table. In the morning they celebrate their good fortune, feeling fresh and well.

  But then comes the flood.

  ‘She’s a big one,’ they’re saying around town. ‘She’ll be over the bridge by the morning.’

  A hammering at the door wakes them at four in the morning. In the dark, an official from the Shire is telling them that they must leave town right this minute. It’s an Evacuation.

  Marjorie and Kevin have trouble taking this in. They had already stacked things up off the floor. Their bed linen is on top of the wardrobe; their clothes are sitting in a pile on the kitchen table along with the sewing machine. The bathtub is full of clean drinking water in case the town’s water supply fails. Old Mrs Kelly is sitting up in bed, the bedclothes piled all around her so that they will not droop into any water that might lap around the legs. They have matches, candles, tins of baked beans, newspaper for toilet paper and reading, a tiny gas stove with a spare cylinder, powdered milk, sugar and plenty of tea-leaves.

  Kevin tells the Shire man to bugger off. Marj murmurs apologetically in the background. But the man refuses to leave. Kevin eventually pushes the man out of the doorway; punches are thrown and Marjorie yells at them to stop.

  A policeman materialises out of the night and manages to catch Marj’s eye while Kevin is mopping at his bloody nose with a handkerchief.

  Marjorie says firmly: ‘I’m going with the cop. I’m taking your mother.’

  Kevin lets them go, but to save face he insists on staying. The policeman shrugs.

  They bundle old Mrs Kelly into the car. Marjorie runs back for her sewing machine. The policeman carries it out for her.

  ‘It’s quite heavy,’ he says.

  ‘It’s a Pinnock,’ say Kevin and Marj together.

  Kevin passes in the apple crate for his mother. Marj settles it awkwardly over her knees, with the edge pressing into her shins. They drive away.

  Kevin returns to his house, the only one he has ever lived in. He sees it with new eyes. He sees that everything is makeshift and worn but comfortable. Marjorie has made a small yellow gingham curtain for a doorless cupboard.

  Marjorie and old Mrs Kelly are taken out
to the marshalling point at the Forty Mile Tanks on the road heading south. For days, they sit with other families in a camp beside the concrete tanks full of fresh water. The evacuees rig up some shade by hanging grey ex-army blankets between cars. There is much tying on, rolling up, pegging into the ground. They make and eat sardine sandwiches with slightly rancid melted butter and curling stale bread. They wash them down with billy tea and powdered milk and play cards with old scuffed packs. Children run and squabble, enjoying the novelty. Marjorie has brought her knitting. Women notice that she is making little booties and congratulate her.

  And then the camp moves on, this time to a temporary town for the people of Port Badminton that has been set up on the cricket oval in Geraldton, a day’s drive to the south.

  The young mayor, later to be known as Crowbar, stays in town, paddling about in a dinghy, collecting marooned strays, animal and human. Decades later, in his rambling parliamentary speeches, he will declare that his years in Port Badminton were the best of his life. He will begin many a monologue with the words: ‘When I was the mayor of Port Badminton . . .’

  Crowie arrived in Port Badminton in his early twenties. He got out of his car and looked about him. Here, he could be a big fish: this was clearly a very small pond. Port Badminton, materially languishing somewhere in the 1930s, was overripe for modern improvements.

  Crowie built his fortune quickly, gathering enemies, supporters, a bulldozer, employees, contracts, a caravan park, a hotel and the mayoralty. He lobbied government ministers to seal the road all the way from Perth to Port Badminton, arguing that this was a better way to transport bananas than by ship from the One Mile Jetty. Once the road was sealed, he regretted that it brought pests: union officials and other busybodies.