One thing was sure, seeing him with Sheila. Jack was mated. Their characters, in fact, were much alike – they had the same loyalties, audacities, obstinacies, prides, the same strong and frank sexuality. Whenever I visited them at Windsor I would ask if they needed help, and it would always be Sheila who would say, ‘No, we’re all right, thanks, Davy. We’re managing fine.’
It was during these visits that Sheila began to exert on me an unsettling fascination. With her return to health she had become quite extraordinarily attractive, with her colour and vitality and the sparkle of her personality, and she was well aware of this, and with me she played a game that was deliberately coquettish, but not cruelly or wickedly: more in a kind of bold, joking way. It was unmistakable, all the same. She would deliberately assert her physical magnetism, in a roguish glance, a way of moving, in a ‘leg show’ or a trick of leaning against me: she would leave the top button of her blouse undone so that one could see the rich, creamy top curve of her bosom or the delicate lilac shadow of the cleft. It was almost like a teacher taking a child through its first primer. ‘Look,’ she was saying in effect, ‘this is a woman. This is a real woman.’ She would challenge me with good-natured sexual teasing. When I was leaving she would always embrace me tightly and kiss me and rub herself against me and sigh, Mmmm-mmm-mmm! in an amused parody of sexual ecstasy. I realized that Jack had put her up to this, perhaps as a more effective extension of the indoctrination he had unsuccessfully tried to force upon me years before, for when he was away she never conducted herself like this at all; she was just pleasant and nice and friendly to me.
Yet her indoctrination was far more successful than Jack’s had ever been, or perhaps it was just that I was older: I know that I would walk up to the Windsor railway station stupefied by a swirl of strange, disturbing sensations and aching with a queer hunger I had never known before.
One day I called at the house to find that Jack had gone away again. ‘He left the Thursday before last,’ Sheila said to me. ‘Somebody told him there were better chances of finding a job up in New South Wales, so he decided to give it a try. He got a lift in a lorry as far as Tocumwal, but I’ve not heard from him since.’
‘Well, how are you placed?’ I asked. ‘Do you need anything?’
‘No, thanks, I’m all right, Davy. I can manage fine.’
She kissed me good-bye, but dispassionately, and I think it was no disloyalty to Jack that I found myself wishing she had been more warmly provocative.
Several weeks passed before I went back to Windsor. In the right-hand front window of Rose of Sharon there was a hand-printed card which said, ROOM VACANT. Apply Next Door (No. 21a). I went out again and in at the other picket gate and rang the bell and the landlady appeared. She was a big, scary-eyed woman who looked as if she lived in a perpetual state of siege behind the intimidating ramparts of her breasts. Her handshake had the limpness and the slightly clammy, unpleasant touch of a used church candle.
‘Them in there?’ she said. ‘Oh no, dearie, ’e went away some little time back, an’ she left ’ere las’ We’nsday. No forwardin’ address, dearie, no, nuthin’ like that. Not the least idea, ducks. No, she jist paid up proper-like t’ the end of the week, an’ orf she went with ’er port’, down t’ the station, I suppose. Left the place nice an’ tidy though, I must say. An’ that’s the main thing, ain’t it?’
It was a long time before I saw either Sheila or Jack again. I assumed that Jack had found work in New South Wales and that Sheila had followed him: it meant nothing that one had no direct news of this: during his two years in the Wimmera Jack had written only that one letter home. With their absence the Depression seemed to drop more into the background of our lives. Behind the sign on our front gate we were secure and comfortable. The men in black coats no longer bothered us: Dad had his job and I had mine. The recurring crises at Klebendorf’s affected me only as an enhancement of my self-esteem, and later there were the excitements of my new job with the Morning Post. (There was much to write about for the city was beginning to plan the festivities which would celebrate the centenary of its foundation. ‘This is the place for a village,’ John Batman had said – and one of my roles in this was to arrange for the restoration of one of the old coal-hulks as she had been in the time of her pride to act as a nautical museum. The sufferings and hardships of the Depression gradually had come to have a blurred, out-of-focus quality of a film background.)
Jack came back one wild winter evening in July, with hard squalls of rain blowing in on the southerly, and Dad and I were sitting by the gas-fire reading the papers and waiting for Mother to bring supper in from the kitchen, and she came in wiping her hands on her apron and said, ‘Wasn’t that somebody at the front door?’
She fussed off up the passageway to the hall, and we heard the front door open, and then there was a strange, strangled cry of ‘Mum!’ above the slash and slap of rain against the window, and immediately after this a heavy crashing thud. Dad and I rushed up to the front of the house, and there was Jack flung unconscious on the hall carpet in a dark spattery stain of rain water, and the hallstand fallen across him and Mother kneeling there beside him and staring down and trembling as if she had seen a ghost.
It was the sight of Jack’s feet that shocked me first – the broken uppers of his boots hanging in strips of wet leather, and his soles a mass of blood and torn flesh and the wet threads of ruined socks, all pulped into a horrid wet paste: and then I saw the white wasted face lying there on the faded Axminster in a tangle of pale wet hair, and I pushed out through the door and raced through the pelt of rain to Gillons’ house to telephone the doctor.
For three weeks he hovered precariously between life and death, and for most of that time he was either in a coma or delirious with fever, so that it was not until much later that we found out what had happened.
It appeared that after he left Windsor he found that conditions were just as bad in New South Wales as in Victoria, if not worse, so he had worked through the back country all the way to Sydney, enduring God knows what hardships and privations, and when Sydney proved as useless as anywhere else he had shipped as a deck-hand on a Chilean freighter bound back for South America.5 How he got his papers I never found out, but anyway the ship was laid up in Chile for want of a cargo and Jack was paid off. He got work for a few months as a labourer, helping to lay an oil-pipeline across the Chilean Andes, but then that project, too, failed because of the Depression, and Jack must have been in pretty desperate straits by the time he was shipped out of Valparaiso as a ‘Distressed British Subject’ in a tramp steamer bound for Sydney.
He landed back in Australia sick, exhausted, and virtually penniless. Not knowing where to go to be given help – or perhaps too proud to plead for it – and without any money for the fare, he set out to walk home to Melbourne. The way he went, with detours in search of work, was a journey of over seven hundred miles, for he had worked it out that the chances of finding odd jobs and occasional meals and shelter for the night would be better on the coastal road. He was wrong. Doors were closed, there were few handouts, even places of shelter were infrequent and far apart, and it was the dead of winter. Through the long, lonely stretches of the eastern forests he should, by all the standards of reasonable chance, have perished of starvation, of exposure, of exhaustion – yet somehow he survived. Once past Eden and Twofold Bay (where an earlier Jack Meredith had put a barque ashore), even the points of settlement were dangerously separated and the grim wet forests of Cape Howe and East Gippsland bitterly inhospitable. And still he survived. There were, of course, occasional kindnesses. A timber-splitter near Cape Disaster fed and sheltered him in his crude bark humpy for nearly a week: the lighthouse-keeper at Gabo Island looked after him for a day or two: near Orbost a dairy-farmer’s wife gave him a bed and hot food during a storm that lasted forty-eight hours. But after Bairnsdale, which was still a long way from Melbourne, he never remembered anything of his journey home. Somehow the bloody pulp of his feet and the ind
omitability of his spirit carried him on.
I shall never know for certain what homing instinct it was that brought him back to our house. Or was it that in the blind delirium through which he moved this was, after all, the sanctuary to which those who were flagging always come for help? … the maimed and the sick and the ruined and the failed and the dying? That one terrible choking cry when the door was opened, ‘Mum!’ insists to me that this was the prime and powerful force that urged him on.
Dr Sheridan came and made his examination and gave little or no hope of survival. ‘Do what we can,’ he mumbled grumpily. ‘’Fraid the poor devil’s pretty far gone. Bad case. Malnutrition, pneumonia, total physical debilitation, considerable loss of blood – those feet of his, really shocking state, you know! – can’t tell what else besides. Do our best. Don’t want to hold out too much hope, though.’
‘But shouldn’t he go to a hospital?’ I asked.
‘Do just as well here. Have to be sat with, day and night, every minute. Get better care here, I think. Your mother is a firstrate nurse, after all. We can give the medical attention. Only be a matter of luck, anyway. Game’s up if we try to move him at this stage. Better off here. Lap of the gods now.’
Even Dad, although he was mumbling and grumbling all over the house, was deeply affected, and he offered no objection when Mother and I insisted that we should try to find Sheila Delaney. I was able to get small paragraphs inserted in two of the newspapers, and 3LO, the wireless station, put over police broadcasts at intervals for two successive days – ‘Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Sheila Delaney, last heard of at … the matter is very urgent.’
On the third day Sheila came from Moonee Ponds, where she had been sharing a room with her cousin. She brought her portmanteau with her. She seemed pale and anxious, and thinner than I remembered her, and she looked Dad squarely in the eyes and his own glance wavered and fell and he took the suitcase from her and said huskily, ‘You’d better go and see him. He’s in there. I’m afraid he’s – he’s pretty crook.’ Dr Sheridan was no more optimistic than he had been. But Jack was still alive.
She came out of the room after about ten minutes. Her distress was obvious – she was white as a sheet, and her hands were shaking, and I could see that she had been crying – so I led her down the passageway to my bedroom.
‘But he looks ghastly, Davy,’ she whispered hopelessly. ‘He looks terrible! He – he didn’t even know I was there.’
‘He hasn’t been conscious since he came here,’ I told her awkwardly. ‘The doctor’s been putting things into him with tubes. We – we’ve been trying to get you for two days,’ I said. ‘What on earth are you doing out there at Moonee Ponds?’
‘I’ve been there almost a year,’ she said. She had wiped her eyes and was getting control of herself. ‘It – it was convenient. June helps me with the baby. Well, she’s looking after it now.’
‘Baby?’ I looked at her quickly. ‘Whose baby?’
‘Jack’s baby, of course. Whose would you think?’
There was a long pause before I could say, ‘A boy?’
She shook her head. ‘A girl.’ A faint smile touched her mouth and vanished. ‘I’ve called her Sharon,’ she said.
‘Does Jack know?’
‘No.’ She bit at her lip. ‘No, he doesn’t know. He never wrote. I – I didn’t know where he was.’
‘I suppose he didn’t write because … well, if things were going badly with him he wouldn’t want to worry you. He – he’s not much of a letter-writer at the best of times.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, and tried to smile.
‘Would you have told him if you had known where he was?’ I asked her.
She thought about this. ‘It would have depended, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, really. I would have told him if I thought it would have helped him. So I’m glad I couldn’t tell him, I think. I don’t see how it would have helped him to have known.’
I rubbed at my knuckles and said, ‘Sheila, why didn’t you get in touch with me? I could have helped you. You must have been having an awful time.’
‘Oh, we managed,’ she said.
The perspective of time has fused the anxieties and the tense pain of those interminable days and nights into a bearable recollection, yet there is one particular night that stays vividly with me. It was probably some time between midnight and three in the morning, because this was when I would usually take my turn to sit by the bedside. Jack was running a high fever that night, and off and on was raving in delirium about somebody who had cheated at two-up, or gabbling on about some racehorse that had ‘run dead’, or trying to sing strange, slangy, ridiculous old football club parodies of years before:
She barracks for Richmond I bet you a zac,
Because her bloomers are yellow and black:
Face like a dragon, bashed in by a wagon –
That’s Peggy O’Neill!
Probably it was the song that started me off, because it took me back at once to the school days we had shared, although there seemed no connection at all between the raving emaciated face on the white pillow and the cocky little Jackie Meredith of those earlier years. It occurred to me suddenly that this was the first time in his life that Jack had had the privilege of occupying the double-bed in the front room. The thought at once filled me with unspeakable horror; I stared aghast at the rumpled violet-patterned eiderdown, at the white-enamelled rods and columns of the huge contraption rising to the balls and acorns and crazy curlicues of brass, and behind all this in the shadows of the corner of the room was the toilet-commode that Aunt Lizzie had used, and suddenly the whole room in the weird dim glow of the nightlight was dancing with the apparitions from a nightmare. They were all there, gibbering around that big bed in which most of them had suffered and some of them had died – Stubby and Aleck and Gabby Dixon, my grandmother Emma clutching her picture of the Grafton, Aunt Lizzie and Auntie Gin and all the rest of them … and now my own brother was there among them, colourless as a corpse on a starched white pillow, with a glaze of sweat on his wasted face, stretched out in a dreadful dying smell of rosewater-and-glycerine and stale talcum and sweat and iodine and chamber-pots … that old familiar smell of death in a closed room … and then I found myself out in the hallway, shaking like a leaf, and beating on the door, and calling, ‘Mum! Mum! I think you’d better come!’
She came in her shabby dressing-gown and took over with her cool, practised efficiency, and I saw that Jack’s fever had passed and he was lying quite still and breathing fairly evenly, and Mother was dabbing his temples with cologne and smoothing down the sheets and putting things to rights on the medicine-table.
She gave me a tired smile as she went back to her own bedroom, and as soon as I heard her door close I moved across to the chest-of-drawers and reached for the bottle of medicinal brandy. That was the first drink of alcohol I had ever taken. I pulled the cork out and drank from the bottle – one choking, scalding gulp to burn the pain out.
Jack recovered. Dr Sheridan shook his head almost in disbelief it seemed, and mumbled something about ‘constitution of an ox, by Jove!’ and Sheila went out to Moonee Ponds and came back to the house with the baby Sharon, six months old and beginning to be very pretty. (A few years back they sent me the catalogue of her first show of sculpture; I was very sad that I was not able to attend the opening, although I did buy one of her pieces, a small bronze ‘Lucifer’, which is up there now on the ledge in front of my desk.)
As Jack’s health began to mend, Dad showed a very definite inclination to pull down the flag of truce and resume hostilities – he had got hold of some handbooks on free-masonry to reinforce his arguments – but Sheila Delaney had her man and her child now as well as her own spirit, and Dad was no match for her. About two months after Jack’s return they rented a little house at Black Rock and went away.
In the meantime I had telephoned Joe Denton. Things were beginning to pick up at Klebendorf’s, he told me, and all th
e artists, except old Steiner, who had died, were back to full-time work. I told him what was in my mind, and he promised to do what he could; I imagine he felt under some deep obligation to me because of what I had done to help Young Joe. At any rate he telephoned me that same afternoon.
‘Yes, I talked to Werner Klebendorf about it,’ he said. ‘There’s a job going as storeman in the paper department. At the moment it’s only temporary. Old Jamieson’s still there, of course – we can’t very well put him off, after all these years – but he’s really too old now and too weak to lift the bales. Tell your brother he could start next Monday if it suits him.’
Jack took the job and a month later old Jamieson died, and Jack got a permanent job as storeman-packer in the Klebendorf and Hardt paper store, so he rode out the Depression, after all, without ever having taken the ‘Susso’ or put on the dyed black coat.
It was at this time that I took my savings out of the bank to help Mother and Dad redecorate the house, which was looking pretty down-at-heel because nothing much had been done to it since the end of the war. I bought three-ply panels and cedar battens and new wallpapers and various paints and everything that was needed, and we dug out the old Dollicus and tore its vast clinging dark haunted bulk away from the sleep-out wire, and although I remember ripping it down very savagely, it was not until I was in the front hallway hammering up the new panelling that I realized what I was doing.
I was trying to hammer out all the past, trying to seal it off forever behind a skin of polished veneer – the crutches and the wooden legs and the wheel-chairs, and the smell of funerals and the comings and the goings, and Mother weeping in the night, and a boy standing with an old-fangled typewriter in his arms and Jack’s body sprawled there on the faded wet carpet.
All through the afternoon I worked, silent and intent, hammering on the cedar sheets and the panel strips, battering away at childhood and boyhood and youth, desperately driving nail after nail after nail through the treacherous emotions of a tiny suburban history.
My Brother Jack Page 20