Crowie, accompanied by a stray dog that he has rescued, paddles his dinghy up to the submerged gate of the old Kelly place on Clam Street. He moors his boat by tying it to a fence post and wades into the house through waist-deep water to find Kevin Kelly sitting on top of the old kitchen table. He slides off the table when he sees Crowie and follows him out to the dinghy. As he boards the boat, he and Crowie adopt an exaggeratedly genial tone with each other, calling each other ‘mate’ twice in every sentence. They both understand the extent of Kevin’s humiliation. The dog welcomes him into the tin boat, jumping all over him and scratching him with its long claws. ‘Get off me, mutt,’ says Kevin, pushing it away.
When Kevin appears at the tent city in Geraldton, Marjorie organises a set of dry clothes, dabs mercurochrome on the scratches made by the dog – they are looking inflamed – and feeds him his first hot meal in a couple of days. But what he really needs now is something Marjorie can’t give: a beer. He joins a merry band of men heading off to the pub.
With Kevin drunk for days on end, Marjorie absorbs herself in the activities of the Country Women’s Association, slicing polony, making sandwiches, handing them out. She enjoys herself. It reminds her of the war when she was a little girl, helping to knit socks and make bags for parachutes.
As the floodwaters subside, the residents of Port Badminton trickle back into town. Linoleum feels squishy underfoot, meat in fridges is off and stinking, and there’s a slick of mud over every surface. Dead fish are found in strange places; for example, wedged in the wire of an aviary, as if they had died trying to join the birds.
Out at the mission, the missionaries notice that the doublegees – sharp, three-horned prickles brought down by the river – are ruining the children’s precious shoes. Matron tells the children to save their shoes and wade barefoot through the water on the basis that feet can grow back but soles can’t.
A plantation woman notices a little bean plant growing in the silt on the kitchen floor. Her children think this is funny, but she can only think about all the valuable topsoil that has been washed away.
Marjorie, Kevin and old Mrs Kelly return to their sodden home. The sun shines steadily out of a big blue sky, making it hard to believe there were ever clouds and rain and flood.
The whaling station shuts down, and Kevin gets a job on a prawning trawler. He goes out to sea for weeks at a time, returning first to the Port Hotel to drink half of his wages and then, contrite, on to his home in Clam Street. Marjorie shows him the tiny baby asleep in its bassinette. It is another perfectly formed thing that Marjorie has made in his absence, like a cake or a lady’s dress.
To celebrate, Kevin goes out and buys a large tin of paint. He paints his house blue. Just the front, not the sides or the back, because he runs out of paint.
Every year, there is a new baby. All girls.
About a year after John F. Kennedy first announced his intention to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth, a little team of surveyors could be seen pegging out Clam Street. Along one edge, it was not so clear where the road ended and the samphire flat began. A clearer line would be needed.
Suddenly, the Kellys’ humble street is the centre of attention. The Department of Supply has decided not to accommodate the influx of tracking station workers up near the Dish on the red sand dune, but closer to town, to schools and shops for the trackers’ families.
As development picked up pace, Crowie stood at the narrow join between the outside world on the one hand and local business and government on the other.
At first, the tracking station was just a small huddle of men in clean white shirts, stark against the red earth, pointing about and referring to notes. Then the large yellow machines arrived to reshape and smooth the dune. Cement footings were poured. Sweat poured down faces and stuck shirts to backs, as men worked in the unbearable heat of the day. They gathered in Crowie’s Port Hotel at the end of it to drink ice-cold beer.
When everything was ready, the Dish itself rolled majestically into place. Townspeople, children and barking dogs were there to greet it. It sat on the dune like a giant mushroom, at once casual and purposeful, surrounded by adoring attendants.
And then, all that remained was for someone to press the ON switch.
With the Dish now plainly seen on the horizon, the pace of work in Clam Street took on even greater urgency. Wooden frames went up and shirtless men assembled walls made of wide sheets of Wittenoom asbestos. They cut the pieces to size, unaware of the invisible filaments lodging in their lungs.
In view of the potential for floods, the floors of the new houses were set a few feet up off the ground, unlike the Kellys’ place, which had been built straight on the earth. The old Kelly house seemed to shrink and sink down even lower on its haunches as the perky new houses sprang up around it.
As a rejoinder to all this noise and excitement, Kevin Kelly’s old mother toppled over her apple crate and could not be revived. She was laid out on the kitchen table for her viewing, but as the weather was warm, she was carted off more quickly than she would have liked.
The sawing and hammering continued regardless. Marjorie Kelly, with small children at foot, watched the progress as she boiled sheets in a copper tub in the backyard. The sheets, filling with hot air, rose like balloons. Marjorie had a long smooth stick for pressing them back down into the bubbling soapy water. Her face was pink, a slick of heat and steam.
After her mother-in-law’s death, Marjorie made some tactful but purposeful readjustments. The old lady’s room was made over as Marj’s dedicated sewing room. She installed her Pinnock sewing machine, and nailed a picture of Mother Mary and Baby Jesus on the wall above it. She acquired the wooden dressmaker’s dummy, a silent figure to accompany her through the years. The neck, bust, waist and hips were nicely rounded out but the head was a mere stump, a small wooden handle on which someone had drawn a face with a slight smile or perhaps rueful smirk. Two legs were represented by one sturdy pole on a flat base.
She went through the spilling boxes of her mother-in-law’s haberdashery, things from before the last war and the one before that, ordering it into jars and tins and small cardboard boxes. She assembled these in the apple crate that the old lady had used as a walking frame, turned on its side to become shelves. She added her own buttons to the Kelly buttons, allowing them to mix in: it was like the blending of DNA.
The children, as they came along, would all be added to one room, crammed into corners and up on bunks. As each new baby graduated from the cot beside the marital bed, Kevin and Marjorie would get to work on the next one. As the children grew, they would guard personal space with lines on the floor marked by floorboards or the edge of a rug. ‘Get out of my side!’ they would yell, or, when feeling sociable, ‘Come over to my side.’ And the child, thus invited, would step over the line between old floorboards and feel that she had gone from one room into another.
The Kelly children will not be allowed to set even a fraction of a big toe across the threshold of the sewing room. You’ll smear the fabric with your dirty little hands. But this will be softened by the promise that one day, when they are old enough, they’ll be let in. They will even be taught to sew. But this will not stop the sticky brood. It will be their eternal goal to sneak in, to snatch a look at their mother’s sacred, separate territory.
If a child creeps in, Marj will always know, no matter where she is in the house or yard. She’ll yell: ‘Who’s that in the sewing room? Get outta there or you’ll get a wallop.’
When she can, Marj will lurk in there, not sewing, just sitting with a cup of tea and a Bex powder, getting away from the lot of them.
As Marj runs down a long seam, she hears a cascade of screeches, human and avian, coming from the front yard. For some time she blocks it from her mind, but the racket becomes so insistent that she lifts her foot from the pedal and listens. She snips the thread, dusts down the front of her dre
ss and opens the front door to have a look. When she appears the noise ceases immediately. Kevin and the tiny girls look up at Marjorie nervously. A child is holding up a bloody finger, a howl on pause. Marj looks more carefully and notices that they are all gathered around a small wooden box with a bird in it.
‘Oh, Kev, not a bloomin’ galah!’ says Marjorie.
There is a general silence. Even the galah seems embarrassed.
‘It – bit – me,’ hiccups the bitten child.
Kevin turns on his best beseeching/beguiling expression, looking deeply into Marjorie’s eyes. She relents, issuing the following orders: ‘Take it round the back. Rinse it off and put mercurochrome on it. Wash your filthy face. Set the table. I don’t want to hear a peep out of the lot of you. I’ve got to finish this dress or there’ll be what for.’
By the time she’d reached ‘set the table’ she was back in her sewing room; by the time she got to ‘what for’ Marj had almost completely trailed off. She was now talking to herself, at work on another long seam.
The new houses in Clam Street sit quietly for a little while, gathering strength. Then the first tracker family moves in, and another. Before long Clam Street has a strip of bluish bitumen down the middle, a footpath down one side and pale, pampered children with neat haircuts riding colourful new tricycles.
Marjorie Kelly is not shy (and has good business instincts). As soon as people move into the street she gives them a day or so to settle before mounting the stairs to the front door with a plate of tarts or lamingtons under a freshly laundered tea towel.
Marjorie taps at a new door. Once inside, she eyes everything off hungrily. She reports her findings to Kevin.
‘She’s got a kitchen bench with a couple of metal poles sticking up out of it and cupboards coming down off the ceiling. She’s already got cafe curtains over the sink.’
Kevin: ‘That’s quick work.’
Marjorie: ‘What’s quick, Kev?’
Kevin: ‘The cafe curtains.’
Marjorie: ‘I’d say she brung them with her.’
Marj copies the cafe curtains, using a remnant of dress fabric.
A sewerage drain is put in to serve the new houses. No more does the nightman quietly arrive from behind, rattling his small flatbed truck to a stop behind the back fence, stealthy as the Easter Bunny. Now, there’s the industrious, hygienic sound of water flushing against the new ceramic bowl. While Kevin is at sea, Marj burns the old wooden seat, worn to a shine by countless bottoms, in the fire under the copper. A cement path is made between the back verandah and the revamped toilet. The path continues under the door and into the little room itself. It can now be hosed out easily. A small plastic flower is nailed to the wall. Its hidden plastic compartment houses a crystalline block of a sickly-sweet air freshener.
Everything is ready. All that remains is to add a pink and grey galah in a cage. I am duly installed on the back verandah, facing the outhouse containing the new flushing toilet.
I was a whim of Kevin Kelly’s and an extra chore for Marjorie. From my spot on the back verandah, I could smell the waft of scent from the air freshener when someone opened the door. Eventually it lost its smell.
***
Evan Johnson and Kevin Kelly stand in the Kellys’ backyard, each holding a glass of Swan Lager freshly poured from a brown long-necked bottle. Their backs are to the outhouse; they’re facing me but not particularly looking at me. Kevin is wearing a blue work singlet and shorts and his feet are bare. His hair is gingery, his eyes as blue as the Indian Ocean and his shoulders are burned and blistered. He has the beginnings of the beer belly that will slowly expand through the rest of his adult life, some years faster than others, like tree rings.
The two men discuss towropes, trailers, diesel generators, roof racks, tarpaulins and eskies.
Linda Johnson and Marjorie Kelly, meanwhile, are standing in Marjorie’s sewing room; the dressmaker’s dummy is a silent third companion. ‘Oh, I can’t sew for nuts,’ says Linda, and she immediately commissions Marjorie to make a sleeveless cotton dress. Within minutes she is standing in her underwear being measured at bust, waist and hips.
Marjorie Kelly’s green maternity frock – still worn because it is comfortable, even though she has had the baby – is old-fashioned, voluminous, but clearly well-made. Linda notices the picture of Mary and Baby Jesus on the wall above the sewing machine. Marjorie, in turn, notices Linda’s immaculate handbag and slender waist. Each notes these points of difference. At another time and place they might not have been friends but history – in this case mankind’s ascent to the moon – has brought them together, and they are glad.
The two women take to sitting on kitchen chairs brought out to the back verandah near my cage. They drink tea – I note how they love tea, and sigh over it – and gossip as they watch the children play. The new baby lies in a bassinette at their feet, surprised by her own arms and legs as they appear in front of her own face. The two women nibble ginger nut biscuits that release a scent I find intoxicating. I poke my open beak through the wire, hoping that someone might put a bit of biscuit in it. They rarely do. If I shriek, they tell me to shut up. From time to time the women intervene in a squabble between toddlers, remove a dangerous object from little hands or disappear inside the house to change a nappy.
Their friendship is mostly carried out privately, just between the two of them. Linda hears all about, but rarely meets, Marj’s extended family; the Kellys are not invited to dinner parties with the tracking station crowd, although they do come along for the big all-in barbecue parties held in the Johnsons’ backyard, at which smoke billows from a sliced-lengthways forty-four-gallon drum and children run in packs.
When Linda sees Marjorie boiling sheets in a wood-fired copper in the Kelly backyard, the same one slaved over by generations of Kelly women, Linda exclaims over it and magnanimously offers her washing machine. Marjorie is embarrassed and faintly suspicious. She does not believe a washing machine can possibly be as hygienic as a good boiling. On the other hand, Marjorie is so delighted with Linda’s friendship that she quells her discomfort and hands over a bundle of sheets and towels.
In those days I was more interested in Jo than Linda, though Jo was barely more than a toddler. She came straight over as soon as she saw me and squatted beside my cage. She examined me curiously. I enjoyed the attention. I fanned out my crest, bobbed on my perch.
‘This is what you do,’ an older Kelly sister said. She bent down beside Jo, waggled a conductor’s finger at me and sang: Dance, cocky, dance! Jo followed suit, waggling her finger and singing.
I danced. I even felt the urge to repeat the phrase in my quavering little voice. I couldn’t mimic the consonants, but I achieved something approximating the vowel sounds. I easily mastered the rhythm.
Jo was delighted. She scrambled to her feet and danced in front of my cage, a full-bodied dance, her knees bending, her torso twisting. Her white leather sandals had a fringe of leather that flapped slightly with her movements. We danced, looking at each other as we danced. We were two young creatures. Then she sat down again and leaned closer to my cage.
She wanted to pat me. I could tell she wanted me out of the cage and in her lap like a doll. She reached a translucent pink finger into the cage. I was just moving towards it when a bigger hand snatched the little hand away.
‘Don’t put your finger in the cage! It bites!’ She was a bossy girl, that Kelly sister. She shepherded Jo away, in through the back door.
I waited for them to come back out again. The door opened and shut a few times, thwip, thwip, but it was always someone else: another little Kelly, or Mrs Johnson, with her long legs, on her way to the toilet.
Jo didn’t come back out again that day. She must have left through the front door with her mother.
A few days later, she burst through the back door unexpectedly and made a beeline for my cage. She sat besid
e me and looked into my pink eye conspiratorially.
‘I’ve pinched a button,’ she whispered. She looked about to make sure no-one was watching. Then she uncurled the fingers of her left hand, revealing a small blue button. It had a tiny sparkly stone on top.
‘That’s a real diamond,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell.’ She closed her fingers over it again.
I nodded quickly, briefly opening and closing my crest.
‘Where are you, Jo?’ came Linda Johnson’s voice from inside. And then Marj’s voice: ‘She loves that cocky, doesn’t she?’
But they didn’t come out. We were free to socialise.
I pressed my head against the wire and gave a tiny, soft, clicking sound. Slowly, Jo brought her forefinger up to the feathers behind my hidden ear and scratched gently. She knew I needed a scratch even before I knew it myself. As she hit the right spot, I felt my nictitating eyelids slide up over my smooth pink eyes. Bliss.
Then she ran off again. She was young, like me, but relatively free to move about. I waited for her return. I waited for a long time, returning to my obsessive perch walk, up and down, up and down, through the hours until dark.
Eventually – probably only a day or two later, but time passed so slowly for me then that it may as well have been weeks – Linda and Jo are there again. The tea, the biscuits, the children squabbling.
As the women chat, I listen closely. Linda Johnson brings news of a wider, bigger world. The rich veins of information available to me later – data dumps from the Dish, books from the Book Exchange – are still a long way off. For now I must make do with what comes before my cage; what I can hear in the background; noises that sometimes carry from the street. I try to keep track of information, to work out how one piece might relate to another. I construct mental maps and theories, adjusting them as new evidence becomes available.
The days continue long and hot. And this, Marj tells Linda, is nothing. The heights of summer are yet to be reached.
The Lucky Galah Page 7