Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  I continued to smile.

  ‘And the bag,’ he persisted.

  ‘Art bag,’ I said and made as if I intended to show him. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would do if he insisted on looking. ‘It’s such a beautiful morning.’ And I began to wheel my bicycle past them. ‘The river calls.’

  Yes,’ he said, ‘it would. You must have a lot of equipment there.’

  ‘Yes.’ I tried not to sound breathless.

  His companion, who had stood by silently, pulled his arm. ‘Come on, Bill, we’ve work to do. Stop trying to chat up a married woman.’

  Bill touched his cap to me and they moved on.

  The sweat trickled under my arms and slid coldly down my sides. I remounted my bicycle shakily. Better to be on the road. I didn’t want any more face-to-face meetings with the police.

  It was a relief to burst onto the wharf area and see the river open out in front of me, the water winking brightly and companionably in the morning sun, the few ships at rest, the gulls squawking and squabbling.

  I wheeled my bicycle over the rail tracks and the uneven planking of the wharf. Our hulk looked solid, secure and familiar. My breathing steadied and my panic subsided. I left my bicycle on the wharf and hurried up the gangplank.

  My mother came out of the galley wiping her hands. ‘Judith,’ she said questioningly, ‘you don’t usually visit us in the morning. How are you, darling?’

  I kissed her. ‘No. Is Dad about?’

  She looked around. ‘Somewhere, Judith. He’s been doing some painting. The wood work, as you know, the salt. It needs constant repair.’

  She noted my bag and then studied me. ‘Is something wrong?’

  I didn’t want to worry her. ‘I need Dad to help me get rid of some stuff.’

  She was quick. ‘What stuff, Judith?’

  ‘Some newspapers and journals.’

  ‘Newspapers and journals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s urgent?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Niels,’ she shouted, hurrying along the deck, ‘Niels, Judith is here and needs you.’

  He came quickly, cleaning his hands with a rag and smelling of paint. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The police,’ I said. ‘They’re raiding houses. They’ve closed the Port Beacon.’

  His face darkened. ‘The dirty rotten bastards.’

  My mother gasped. ‘Where’s Harry?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jock came to warn me. He helped. I came on my bicycle. I need to dump these.’

  My mother looked in the bag and paled. ‘Could we be searched here, Niels?’

  ‘Don’t know, but first things first. I’ll need a sack I can weight.’

  He hurried off and returned with a hessian bag. He pulled out the newspapers, grunted when he saw the copies of Imprecor, and stuffed them all in the sack. He had brought a short heavy iron bar and he forced this down on top of the papers. Then he twisted the top of the sack and wound a rope tightly around it, knotting it, as only a sailor could.

  I watched his quick efficiency with relief. Years of crises on windjammers and the need for instant decisions had honed his responses. He had a cool head. He lifted the sack and we followed him across the deck. He hurled the sack into the river.

  We saw it float a moment, ballooning as the air inside swelled, then this collapsed and slowly the water consumed it. My father dusted his hands and grinned at me. ‘Goodbye to bad rubbish, daughter.’

  ‘No,’ I said soberly, ‘not bad rubbish, Dad. Freedom of the press, respect for the ideas of others.’

  He patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure Harry will be safe.’

  ‘I hope so.’ My voice trembled.

  ‘He’s a good boy. Far better that he didn’t come home. He’ll be OK. He’s a quick-witted lad. Let’s make her a cup of tea, Eve, and some of those scones you made this morning.’

  My mother, white-faced with shock, had sunk onto a seat at the stub of the old mast, cut down and never now used to fly a sail. I looked at her anxiously. I hadn’t meant to frighten her.

  ‘Judith,’ she wrung her hands, ‘this is sinister.’

  ‘No,’ I said stoutly. ‘It’s just a foolishness, a stupidity. It’ll pass.’

  Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I’d like some peace, Judith, like in the old days.’

  I took her arm. ‘A scone would be nice, Mum, and a cuppa.’ She rallied and managed a weak smile.

  I left after the tea and scones. I needed to get home in case there was some news of Harry. It was dreadful that our home should, today, be a dangerous and threatening place for him. Home should be a haven, or else there was something seriously wrong with the world.

  Although distracted, I cycled carefully. I had enough worries without injuring myself. I let myself in the front door and called his name hopefully. But the house was silent and smelled empty. I went through to the backyard and into the laundry but there was no Harry. I wandered back inside and stood irresolutely in the kitchen. Should I stay home or should I go out and search for him? But where might he be? Where to begin searching? Would my searching seem odd? Might there be police spies watching me, following me?

  Bizarre scenarios of conspiracies, spy rings, people disappearing off the streets, prison beatings, and other imagined horrors all opened out in front of me. My search for him might alert someone, anyone who meant him harm. Memories of Harry’s injuries after Victoria Square haunted me.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, clutched my head in my hands and rocked back and forth in an agony of fear and indecision. Was this how people felt in a police state? Helpless?

  The knock on the door, although a mere tap, seemed thunderous. I leapt to my feet. Should I answer it? What if it were the police? Had I got rid of everything?

  The tap was repeated. Now it was more tentative. The police wouldn’t be tentative. Maybe it was Harry who’d forgotten his keys. No, Harry would call out. I heard a third tap, a rustle of paper and then retreating steps. I waited until I could no longer hear them, then ran to the door. There was a note on the mat, thrust under the door.

  ‘Darling,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve got some business in town. I’ll be home for tea.’

  So he was OK. I sank onto a chair and cried with relief. I needn’t start preparing the tea for another three hours. I tried to work but couldn’t concentrate, so I set about cleaning the house. After this I prepared some vegetables. I looked at a piece of fish in the safe, a good-sized snapper my father had caught, but it was too early to bring it out. At a quarter to six I guessed that he would be home soon. In the main Harry was punctual. I put the vegetables on the stove and set the table.

  Six o’clock came and went. Half past six. The food was cooked. I went to the front door and looked along the street. No Harry. I returned to the kitchen. Should I start my meal without Harry? Serve him right if his was cold.

  I served myself, sat down, looked at the food miserably, and pushed my plate aside. I’d rather wait. It didn’t matter if it were cold. Why did he not come?

  Time went by, minutes became hours, and my anxiety grew. Harm must have come to him. He would send a message if he could. I wished for a telephone but that expense was beyond us. There was no way I could contact anyone. If I left the house Harry might return and find me gone. Then he’d panic about my whereabouts. I couldn’t go to bed. To behave normally would seem like abandoning him.

  I wandered from room to room, my awareness of Harry sharpened by anxiety. His shaving soap was left untidily on the wash basin. His razor strop hung behind the bathroom door. He had just cleaned his dancing pumps and they shone with the smell of shoe polish. His Brilliantine sat on our dressing table where he had left it. No matter how vigorously he applied it to his hair in an effort to flatten it, like Harry it always sprang up again ready for life.

  At last, cold and shivering, I huddled in one of our rocking chairs and wrapped a blanket about me. Eventually, distraught and exhausted, I dozed fitfully.

>   Dawn edging around the curtains on the window awakened me. For a few seconds I couldn’t recall where I was or why. Then memory flooded back again, overwhelming me. I got up stiffly and struggled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

  The small amount of sleep and the new day had restored some of my strength and while I made a hot drink I forced myself to review the situation calmly. Harry hadn’t come home but it didn’t necessarily mean he was in prison. Not contacting me needn’t be sinister, just an insurmountable difficulty. If he had been hurt or detained surely one of the comrades would have told me. After all, Jock had come to warn me.

  Despite my memories of Victoria Square, we didn’t live in a lawless state. But, and I knew this for certain, I couldn’t sit helplessly in the house all day, taking no action, a prey to out-of-control fearful imaginings. I forced down a piece of toast, took a bowl of hot water from the kitchen into the bathroom and stripped down for a thorough wash. I couldn’t face the effort of lighting the chip heater over the bath.

  After a wash, clean clothes, a hot drink and some food, I felt stronger and saner. I would go to the Federation Hall. Surely someone there would have news or if not news, advice. I wouldn’t go to the hulk. My mother had had enough worry.

  I waited impatiently until it was close to nine o’clock. No one would be at the Hall before nine. Then I set off on my bicycle. How bright and normal everything looked in the morning sunshine, how clean everyone in their fresh working clothes.

  The Federation Hall was surprisingly quiet. Given Jock’s panic of yesterday I had expected turmoil, frantic comings and goings, a bustle of people like myself desperately seeking news. I went down the empty passage to the union organiser’s office and knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ he called.

  When I did he looked up startled. ‘Judith, Mrs Grenville, you’re an early bird.’

  He hurried from behind his desk, found me a chair and pulled it forward. He was a burly man with a thick body and short bowed legs. He was new to the job having replaced Matty Gibbs. Recently I had drawn a caricature of him lumping a three-bushel bag of wheat on his enormous shoulders while his legs bowed beneath him with the weight. I had many such drawings, all unpublishable, but together a graphic representation of life at the Port.

  ‘Is something amiss?’ he asked. He was a bluff but kindly man. ‘Your father, is he ill? Does he need some help?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s my husband, Harry.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Your husband? He’s not one of us, is he? Not a watersider?’

  ‘No, he’s a musician.’

  He wrinkled his brow. ‘Then how can I help?’

  ‘He’s missing.’

  He smiled benignly. ‘Judith, Mrs Grenville, husbands often go missing. It’s a usual mishap in marriage. Have you tried the pubs?’

  ‘No.’ I was indignant. ‘It isn’t that. Harry doesn’t drink. Or very little. It’s …’

  He interrupted me, continuing to smirk, and I supposed that many women defended their husbands’ reputations by denying their heavy drinking.

  ‘Mrs Grenville, if your husband is really missing, and you should probably wait a day or so to make certain, you should contact the police.’

  ‘No,’ I pleaded. ‘The police are the problem.’

  He looked stern, then cleared his throat, preparing to give me a homily. ‘If your husband has done something wrong, Mrs Grenville, we can’t involve ourselves.’

  I interjected impatiently, ‘You don’t understand. The police have been raiding the houses of the communists. My husband is a communist. He may have been picked up and taken into custody. Have you heard nothing of all this?’

  He pursed his mouth. ‘A communist? Oh, my dear, how unfortunate. Yes, we have heard something, Mrs Grenville, but we don’t involve ourselves, either in what the communists do or what happens to them. Our responsibility is to our union members.’

  I glared at him. I was beginning to see red at his glibness. ‘But I’ve attended communist meetings in your Hall.’

  He shrugged. ‘A business arrangement. We hire out the Hall to many organisations. It doesn’t mean we support or approve of them. It’s a free country, Mrs Grenville.’

  I mocked him. ‘Is that so? Not if you’re a communist it seems.’

  He looked at me pityingly. ‘I’d like to help you, Mrs Grenville, but there’s nothing I can do.’

  He stood up and held the door open for me. I went out feeling so lonely and isolated I could have wept again. That the communists were an integral influential part of the community was only an illusion. I knew now that in reality they were small, unpopular and vulnerable.

  I rode my bike home and, because I still fulminated from the interview and was now infuriated with Harry for not contacting me, I stopped at a milk shop and bought myself a threepenny double-headed ice cream.

  There was a wooden seat on the edge of the pavement and I leaned my bike against it, sat down, and licked my ice cream in the sun. Nobody took any notice of me and that I thought bitterly is how society really is: all of us individuals intent on our own concerns, quite separate from each other. So what price communism? Or any other messianic ideal to save the human race?

  Sitting in the sun, eating an ice cream, minding my own business was the way to go. I was still hopping mad with Harry for being a member of the bloody Communist Party, for not telling me where he was, for causing me a night of misery and a humiliating session with a union organiser who thought me a deceived hardly-done-by little woman. I was fed up with all this cloak-and-dagger stuff.

  Late that afternoon Harry arrived home. I heard his key turn in the lock and rushed to the door. He looked unhurt. He even smiled at me. He dared to look normal and smiling. He had barely set foot inside when I screeched at him, ‘Where have you been?’

  And I hit him.

  He grabbed my arm. ‘Whoa, Judith, whoa. What’s all this?’

  ‘Don’t whoa me,’ I yelled at him. ‘Don’t you dare.’ And I tried to hit him again.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said, ‘stop it, Judith. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Matter!’ I shouted. ‘Matter? You’ve the front to ask me what the matter is. You’ve been missing for nearly two days. No message to me. No reassurance that you were OK. Jock here in a panic. Your bloody communist papers, Imprecor of all things, and I had to race to the hulk to get my father to chuck the lot into the river. No help from you. My mother sick with terror. All of us frantic about you. And you ask me what the matter is.’

  He was quiet. ‘I sent a note.’

  ‘Oh yes? And that told me a lot. And you didn’t keep your promise. I waited for you all night imagining …’ I choked, ‘imagining Victoria Square.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that. Never dreamed that might occur to you.’

  Suddenly the anger drained out of me, leaving me empty and weary. ‘Where have you been, Harry? Didn’t you know about the police raids?’

  ‘Yes. But we had a more important matter to deal with.’

  ‘More important than one or both of us being arrested?’ Disbelieving, I glared at him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me again, Harry, so that I can grasp it. I can make neither head nor tail of all this. You disappear for nearly two days. I’m distraught with worry that you’ve been arrested and beaten to death. You don’t tell me where you are or why. And now you inform me that there was something more important than all this.’

  He looked uncomfortable but unrepentant. ‘I’m sorry, Judith, that you’ve had a difficult time but the police have put out a warrant for Bernie-Benito’s arrest. And if they catch him they’ll deport him to Mussolini’s Italy and we all know that the Black Shirts will murder him. We had to hide him and spirit him away.’

  ‘Bernie-Benito? Deport him? Can they do that?’

  ‘Of course. He’s not an Australian citizen.’

  ‘But there’s lots of people here who aren’t Australian citizens and no one bothers them
.’

  ‘They’re not communists, Judith.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Oh, Harry, how awful. How bloody awful.’

  ‘Yes, it is awful.’

  ‘Where did you hide him and where has he gone?’

  ‘At my mother’s at first.’ He gave the ghost of a grin and I realised that until now there had been no real humour in his smile. ‘My mother thought he was charming and asked him if anyone in his family were an opera singer. He didn’t fully understand her but he caught the word opera and sang a few bars of Puccini’s ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’ and then he took her hand and looked into her eyes as soulfully as only Bernie can and she was entranced. Actually, Jude, he has a really fine tenor voice and I never knew.’

  He had followed me into the kitchen and now sat at the table while I boiled the kettle and put out some food. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Not recently. I’m starved.’

  ‘And after your mother’s, what then?’

  ‘Pat had brought him to Mum’s in his car and he went off to a saleyard and picked up a second-hand Ford pretty cheaply. The Party paid for it. Lots of cars have been turned in for a song because of the depression. There’s another young Italian in the Party and he agreed to drive Bernie to Mildura where they can lose themselves amongst the Italian fruit-pickers. I waited until they left.’

  I poured our tea and sat opposite him. ‘Was all this raiding and searching because of Bernie-Benito?’

  ‘No. He’s just a part of it. Jock said you got rid of the copies of Imprecor.’

  ‘Yes. Or my father did.’

  ‘Thanks, Judith.’

  ‘Jock came. He helped.’

  ‘Yes, he said he would.’

  ‘You sent him? So he knew about Bernie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And neither of you told me?’

  ‘No. We decided not to. Sometimes, Jude, it’s safer not to know.’

  I took a deep breath but remained silent. I smarted from a feeling of betrayal but put it aside. What he said made good sense. I hadn’t the faintest idea how I would have reacted if the police had questioned me about Bernie and I had known his whereabouts.

  ‘Will he be safe in Mildura?’