by Mark O'Flynn
After a while Emma emerged from behind the canvas flap. She looked tired and dirty, as if she had been in a fight with Mrs Garbutt. She saw me on the far side of the clearing with my billy pot of hot water, and came over to me. ‘You’re a fine boy, Byron, but it’s all over now. We don’t need any more water.’
Those words made me feel warm as damper.
‘You don’t want no more tea?’
‘Tea? I’d love a cup of tea, but I need you to do one more thing.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a fast runner, aren’t you?’
‘Not as fast as Clancy.’
‘It’s a big thing,’ she said, wiping away the hair pasted like string to her cheek. ‘I need you to go topside to fetch the doctor.’
‘Why?’
‘Take this note. Gertie’s too weak to go anywhere herself, and you remember Cyril Jones.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. She just needs to rest now.’
‘It don’t sound like nothing’s wrong,’ I said.
‘Byron,’ she put a heavy arm about my shoulders and steered me away from the humpies, ‘you have to go for your quoits – you know what that means?’
I nodded. ‘Go fast.’
‘It’s the baby,’ she sighed. ‘The baby has fifteen toes. Now scoot.’
So off I ran. I knew that it was up to me, because when Cyril Jones broke his leg falling into the tippler it took sixteen men thirteen hours to carry him out. To carry out Mrs Garbutt with a baby – which, as everybody knows, are wriggly things – would have been no easy task. The track was well trodden and I nipped through the forest like a jackrabbit, past the Golden Stairs, past the man ferns and pink angophoras and great turpentine trees so wide you couldn’t put your arms around them even if there were five of you with hands joined. When I got to the tramway the ponies were lined up ready to haul the first full skips along to the endless cable. Cloudy, Fluffball, Mule, Dusty. The towpath beside the rails was smooth and flat, the talus slope below me denuded and barren where the trees nearer to the coalface had been felled. I sprinted the last half-mile around the Dog Face Rock to the Incline and the steps. Some of the miners, out in the air for a moment with their loaded corves of ore, called to me, ‘Is it a boy?’
‘No.’
‘Is it a girl?’
‘I think so.’
‘A girl is good.’
I didn’t stop running until I reached the foot of the Incline. I paused there a moment to get my wind back, but there was no respite. I had to climb. I think I must hold the record for quickest climbing of the escarpment, but there was no one to time me.
At the top I still had the streets to negotiate. Peckman’s Road and Neale Street were the quickest route. There was now a mist in the air, which was refreshing after the heat of the climb. My face was hot and dripping. I ran, then walked, then ran some more. What was wrong with fifteen toes? When I got to the rooms on Waratah Street I couldn’t get the words out at first.
‘Take a seat,’ Mrs Spark, the doctor’s wife, told me. ‘You look like you could use a glass of water.’
It wasn’t until near midday that Dr Spark finished what he was doing, cancelled his afternoon appointments and deigned to accompany me. I spent a couple of hours in his rooms dancing from foot to foot in agitation, examining the wallpaper, trying to get his attention whenever he poked his head around the door. Fifteen toes! Even after he’d read the note the doctor dawdled about his business, tying and untying his tie, preferring one hat over another. I never did meet a doctor who didn’t dawdle.
Dr Spark packed his Gladstone bag with iodine, crepe bandages, various phials and unguents, and a set of silver pliers that reminded me of an eagle’s beak. He selected a coat and combed his whiskers. Outside, we climbed aboard his trap, which had been made ready by the ostler. I think the doctor was enjoying the drama, and I certainly enjoyed not having to puff my guts out on the transportation of my own pony shanks. It was a decidedly different view of the town from up on the seat of a trap.
On the Government Road we passed Angus Lovel and his gang. I suppose they thought they were now too big for school. They positively gawped at us like goldfish.
‘Do you know those youths?’ asked Dr Spark.
‘Not happily, sir.’
‘I’d steer clear of them. At least one of them has ringworm.’
At the head of the funicular railway we climbed down from the trap and the doctor ordered the driver of the train to take us to the bottom. Baldy Baldock, the master at the engine house, told him he’d have to wait until the coal was unloaded, unless he’d care to take the long trot down the steps. Baldy wasn’t really a master, more of a pannikin boss, but the power in him went a long way and everyone did what he ordered. It was said he could strike a match off his own noggin.
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ said the doctor. ‘There is an emergency in the valley requiring my attention. A medical emergency.’
‘An urgency, is there? Well, I’ve a train of coal to unload and until that urgency is satisfied my skips ain’t moving.’
I had never before heard anyone talk like this to someone wearing a dress suit and coat; not that I spent much time around people dressed in such clobber. It gave me an inkling of the artificial divisions between men and how they might be torn down. Of course, it wasn’t until many years later that I had this thought in any clarity.
The doctor paced the unloading staith, examining the cables and winches and skip-wheel sprags with interest. He smoked a pipe. The misty air was bracing, blowing high into the sky, and I shivered in my thin shirt, still damp with my exertions, and now chill. Eventually the empty skips returned from North’s siding where they had delivered their load, and we clambered into one for the descent. The doctor’s side-whiskers ruffled in the breeze. Baldy Baldock gave him a hessian sack to sit on so he wouldn’t dirty his nice duds. Me, I got nothing. I saw that in the artificial divisions between men there was something to be said for nice duds. The cable gave a jolt forward and we tipped over the edge.
Our descent, through moss and rock, leaned to forty-five degrees from the vertical, or so my father had told me; fifty-two at the steepest. The doctor’s knuckles were white as he gripped the sides of the cart. His Gladstone bag slid about in the bottom of the skip, and he had to try to stabilise it with his foot. His face had a funny look of terror on it as we tipped through a split in the massive rock.
When we came out of the darkened crevice and saw the valley open out before us the doctor gave a gasp. ‘My goodness.’ I had to look up to see what had impressed him, but I guess it was just things in general. I was too busy thinking this was so much easier than walking; you would pay a halfpenny for the ease of this.
Six hundred feet further down, at the bottom – as if I had planned it – an empty tram cart was just leaving to return to the Ruined Castle. A team of ponies was in harness, led by one called Dusty. Dusty had a dainty walk, like a lady trying to avoid puddles. The doctor clambered aboard. He was in a much better humour after getting out of the cart. I could have walked faster than the ponies, but there would have been no point in me arriving back at the village without the doctor, empty-handed as it were. The dramatic entrance of that would have been lost. Besides, I was stonkered.
After half a mile of slow, rattling progress, Dr Spark asked my name.
‘Byron Wilson,’ I said.
‘Byron, eh? She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. When I later told people wearing dress coats my name they would sometimes say things similar.
There was nothing to give the ponies other than a scratch behind their ears when we’d disembarked. We walked from the end of the tramline along the bush track. I had the feeling Dr Spark was enjoying his outing. He gazed about at the giant ferns and the view as it appeared between the trees. I looked around too, suddenly seeing it as if through fresh eyes. When at last we arrive
d at Garbutts’ hut, Mrs Thornycroft ushered him inside then cast a glance at me. ‘More water, boy.’ The canvas curtain fell behind her and the importance of my role in the event vanished like mist in the sunlight.
From the hut I heard my mother singing:
‘O I’m climbing up the golden stair to Glory.
O I’m climbing with my golden crown before me.’
I cut myself some tripe from the tin pot and ate with a sense of hungry justification.
Dr Spark came back to the valley the next three Tuesdays to change the dressings on the baby’s feet. I was obliged to take these days off school and escort him along the towpath. I think he liked his excursions into the bush away from the daily plagues and malignancies of Katoomba. After he had administered to the podarthra, as he called baby Garbutt’s feet, he strolled back along the path at a leisurely pace, swinging a stick he had fashioned into a cane. Once he allowed me to carry his bag. He questioned me about the piles of torbanite along the line awaiting the coal skip, and also asked the names of the pit ponies, which I was able to supply.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked of the ponies, who were standing quietly at the entrance to the Daylight Tunnel.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘They don’t seem quite right. Listless somehow.’
‘They’re blind, sir.’
‘Blind?’
‘Going blind. From being in the pit all day.’
‘Oh dear.’ Dr Spark moved on, making no further comment on the matter.
As I accompanied him he would quote strange sentences to me from the poet Byron.
‘You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only Blackbird in the dish …
‘Do you know, lad, it has been many a year since I’ve laid eyes on a blackbird.’
‘There’s a black bird, sir,’ I said, pointing out a currawong. Its gargles were all about us as it called to its mates.
‘I mean an English blackbird. That is this country’s attempt at a vulture.’
It felt a little strange for me to be named after someone I knew nothing about. I don’t believe my father knew anything about Byron either, unless he had been trying to spell Brian, but I think my mother liked the idea of a poet in the family, if only in name.
As we parted, the doctor turned to face the valley. ‘All once under the sea, my boy,’ he said, waving his hand grandly at the expanse. ‘Hard to believe this was all once the great wide ocean.’
‘A sea of trees, sir.’
‘Well said.’
On the last Tuesday, Dr Spark brought in his Gladstone bag apples for the ponies. They crunched them juicily from the flat of his hand. I think he was sorry he could not have carried more.
The village heard the squeals of delight coming from the Garbutts’ humpy. After the doctor had gone, with much praise heaped upon him, Mrs Garbutt came round to each hut to ceremoniously unwrap the bandages and reveal to us her baby’s perfect feet. I was amazed at how tiny and pink they were, like a couple of fresh-born rabbits. There were several little patches of even pinker, newer, softer skin where the extra toes had been snipped off, like rose thorns pruned. Mrs Garbutt announced that the baby’s name was Agnes. She was as proud as any new mother could be, singing the virtues of Dr Spark. If anyone needed a toe, or any digit for that matter, to be lopped off then he was your man.
‘Too late.’ Douglas tried to make a joke of it, waggling his stumpy finger. Speaking of which, it never struck me as a polite question to ask (although I am sure Clancy would have asked it), but whatever happened to the extra toes?
SEVEN
The contrast between what the doctor described as our ‘umbrageous habitation’ and the topside was pretty distinct. Quite apart from the difference in altitude there was also the nature of the people, who were quick to judge and quick to fight, at least in relation to wild boys from the valley. As for the weather, sometimes it might be clear up in Katoomba but we could be shrouded in fog so thick you couldn’t see a tree until you bumped into it. Or else we might be basking in milky sunshine while the ridges and tableland and the town itself were lost in mist, as under a conjuror’s kerchief.
Sometimes the fog rolled off the edges of the cliffs into the gorge in what they called a phantom cascade. In winter, snow settled on the cliff tops, the trees all white like the hoary eyebrows of old men, while down below the flakes melted as they landed on our out-thrust tongues. August brought terrific winds to the plateau above, from which we were largely sheltered. Sometimes the swirling winds were so strong that they took the tumbling-down water of Katoomba Cascades and blew it up like smoke.
More vivid was the difference between the lushness of the valley rainforest, except where it was disrupted by the pony tramway and the mining activity, and the barren hill that was the town of Katoomba. Every tree there, it seemed, had been felled and milled for timber. Houses and stores went up rapidly, due, in no small part, to the wealth generated by the mines. Commerce was thriving. And amid it all, like a palace atop the highest hill, perched the fabulous Great Western Hotel, recently renamed in honour of the Governor of the State himself as the Carrington. It appeared as though every building in the town paid homage to the hotel. Its opulence was legendary, its landscaped gardens a nostalgic reminder for those old enough to remember an English garden.
In its initial construction, every shrub, every green thing on the hill, had been uprooted in order to accommodate the business that would soon follow the trail blazed by the hotel. And now along the length of Katoomba Street the makeshift tents were being replaced by weatherboard shopfronts and signs that spoke of permanence and prosperity: Joseph Bennet, General Printer. Joseph Nimmo, family grocer. Geo Davies, Butcher. P. Mullany and Co., Universal Emporium. Chandler Furnishing Arcade: cabinetmakers, upholsterers, French-polishers, undertakers. Mr Frank Goyder, the Carrington’s new owner, was known to stand on the observation deck surveying the commercial activity of the street below. Goyder, the town gleaned, had come a long way from his squatting days on the Warrego River in Queensland, where he had made a fortune in cattle. It was said that he was a crack shot, and so people felt uncomfortable having him up on the widow’s parapet, squinting down at them through a telescope.
Goyder had a vision. He spoke at public meetings on the importance of running water and a sewerage system, not only for the hotel but for the whole town. The current water-pumping system by means of a Blake’s Hydraulic Ram would be insufficient for the town’s needs in the future when it would, inevitably, become a municipality. In this respect Goyder made no secret that he had his eyes on the mayoral robes. No one believed his talk of a telephonic system could possibly be true, here, in the mountains – even though the premier, Sir Henry Parkes, who lived twenty miles away at Faulconbridge, had endorsed its plausibility, nay, its necessity. Goyder invited guests to the hotel who could help him in his civic ambition. But, came the objections, how could this be so? This was Katoomba; not even Sydney had electricity. There were people without shoes, and with chilblains to prove it.
For long periods of time Clancy didn’t have shoes in cold weather. He’d grown out of them. His possum-skin slippers had fallen apart, too, and his feet were tough as leather. Although the red sores on his toes were painful. Ann finally took him to Dr Spark.
‘I hope he ain’t gunna lop my toes off,’ said Clancy fearfully and we all played in jest to this fear. Dr Spark prescribed a new pair of shoes, and some ointment for the sores. Aunt Ann, humiliated, had to save for a long time. Douglas gave her a few extra shillings towards the shoes, but Ann was becoming increasingly reluctant to accept money off Douglas. She had to scrimp and scrounge. My feet had grown too – ‘Great clodhoppers,’ Emma called them – but I already had new boots from Mullany’s emporium.
Topside, Clancy was an urchin. He was the scourge of local business, and repeatedly had his ears boxed by shopkee
pers who caught him with their goods in his pockets. At first it was humbugs and aniseed balls, treats for his sweet tooth. Once the hardware store caught him with new nails in his pockets for which he could give no reasonable account. What he wanted with nails he wouldn’t tell me. The police were alerted. Sergeant Brownrig was too lazy to get up from behind his desk and so left the dirty work for his constable.
Barnaby Clout was well known to the urchins and delinquents of Katoomba. He was also well known, for different reasons, to my Aunt Ann. Constable Clout dragged Clancy home and reprimanded him in front of his mother as a youth who had new nails without a valid explanation, warning him of the slippery slope he had started on. ‘You mark my words, boy, if you do not heed the law of your mother then it’ll be the long drop for you.’
This gave Ann cause, when the constable left, to tear strips off him. ‘Clancy, how could you?’
He shrugged. (He told me he shrugged.) She was his lovely mother and that was what he demanded she be. Not herself – his. Clancy couldn’t stand it when she yelled. He clapped his hands over his ears. He sang loudly to block out the sound of her voice. This made her even angrier.
When she yelled and chased him with a mop, Clancy would monkey up the tallest tree in Ada Street and sit there, seemingly in conversation with the gang-gangs and other parrots cracking seedpods beside him. Once she had calmed down, his mother would stand at the base of the tree and call up to him. ‘Clancy, you come down this instant.’ He would simply ignore her until she went away. Sometimes, if it was misty, he climbed until he disappeared from her sight.
If I ever arrived for a visit during these fraught domestic moments she would send me up the tree to talk him down. I would end up sitting on a branch well below Clancy, clinging to the trunk, the butterflies swirling in my head. ‘I don’t like it up here, Clancy, let’s go down.’