House That Was Eureka (9781922148254)

by Wheatley, Nadia; Jordan, Toni (INT)

  After a long time of playing and not talking, Noel said, ‘I feel like a chew.’ He disappeared, then was back again a quarter of an hour later with two cans of Coke and two bulging Greek souvlaki-things with meat and salad inside huge round flaps of bread.

  ‘Uncle George feeds me for free,’ Noel said, ‘if I play a few songs for him.’

  So they both sat there, munching slowly without talking, licking off the meat and tomato-juice that tended to run out the bottoms of the souvlaki-things and down their arms.

  ‘You’re very quiet tonight,’ Evie finally said.

  ‘I’d noticed that too,’ Noel said.

  It was good there, peaceful and happy. A change from the tension of the two houses in Liberty Street. Evie and Noel sat for a long time dangling their legs over the suburbs, comfortable for once at simply being who they were, where they were, that Friday night in the middle of May 1981.

  6

  Nobby and Lizzie had been together since the Cruises moved in next door, when Nobby was seven, when Lizzie was six. That was ten years ago. Nobby had virtually moved in next door too that day, for from that day he’d spent every free possible minute there, with Mick and Lizzie, and also Colleen and Maire; and later with Bridget and Kathleen and Maudie and Fiona too, as one by one more daughters were born and the house grew more crowded.

  ‘Bog Irish,’ Nobby’s mother always said. ‘Breed like pigs.’

  Nobby wouldn’t say anything. He’d just kiss his mother on the cheek and slip in to 203 through the hidey-hole, and play with Lizzie. Then when the games were finished, he’d slip home again to roast dinner and piano music, while next door they’d be having a stew. Sometimes he’d feel like a traitor to both sides. But then he’d slip off fast again, to play with Lizzie.

  Lizzie was always the closest, even closer than Mick. Mick was sometimes Nobby’s mate, and sometimes he wasn’t. Mick was older, and much solider than Nobby and Lizzie, and it used to take the two of them together to lick him. Lizzie could fight like a bag of cats, but by herself she didn’t have the weight. And at the beginning Nobby had been a lousy fighter, because of having been brought up by his mother alone.

  Lizzie still fought like a bag of cats. She was on the edge of the crowd now, on the other side from Nobby; standing there tense, obviously only half-listening to the speech, watching the road across Newtown Bridge, the road that the cop waggon would come from, if it came. The cops sometimes came and broke up the Friday-night street meetings. Arrested the speaker and anyone else who got in their way. Last week here they’d arrested Jack Sylvester, the bloke who was up speaking now. And then Mick and big Paddy Cruise had tried to grab Jack back, and they’d been lumbered too.

  Lizzie was angry tonight, Nobby could see. Her face clenched in anger. Spoiling for a fight. Nobby grinned: Lizzie would love to get arrested. It would satisfy her Irish martyr-blood. Her Bolshevik daydreams.

  ‘I wish I was Alexandra Kollontai,’ Lizzie often said, imagining herself greeting Lenin at the Finland Station in 1917, fighting on the barricades.

  And four times now when there’d been a brawl with the cops, Lizzie had wormed her way into the middle, flailing out with tight fists. Despite which, each time the cops had simply picked her up and tossed her out. Like a fish you catch that’s not worthwhile.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Lizzie complained. ‘It’s just because I’m a girl. If I was you, they’d let me fight.’

  If Lizzie was Nobby.

  If Lizzie was a bloke, like Nobby.

  But if Lizzie was a bloke like Nobby then she wouldn’t be in there fighting, because when Nobby saw a brawl with the cops starting, something inside Nobby froze. He couldn’t act.

  He felt his blood as something thin.

  He felt Lizzie felt he was weak.

  Maybe she didn’t know? Probably she did. She’d never understand.

  Lizzie with her wildness flying.

  Lizzie with her flaming soul.

  Lizzie with her anger tonight, clearly busting for another go.

  Nobby tried to get around closer to her, but the crowd was too big. About five hundred head, he calculated. Of course, people always got drawn like moths to light when Sylvester was speaking. Silver-tongued Sylvester, they called him. He was National Secretary of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement.

  ‘...And so, fellow workers,’ Sylvester’s voice flowed out easily over the crowd, ‘I’ll wind up now by reminding you of the main demands of our movement. One, that the dole be doubled. Two, the dole to be in cash instead of these lousy coupons. How can we pay rent, when we’ve got no cash to pay with? Three, any government relief work to be paid at full trade-union rates. And four, the end to evictions…’

  The crowd broke in and cheered. By this year, 1931, Australia was fully in the hold of the Depression, and it was common to see families thrown onto the street for not paying their rent. It was the middle of May now, and with winter approaching it was all the more urgent to force the government to stop landlords evicting people. Nobby was in the Anti-Eviction Committee of the Newtown UWM.

  ‘No more evictions! Down with the filthy landlords!’

  Nobby found his voice bellowing on after the rest of the crowd had hushed. He hoped Lizzie hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Oh yeah? We’ve finally seen your true colours, Sunshine.’ It was Mick at Nobby’s side. He spat on the ground at Nobby’s feet, and walked off.

  The crowd was dwindling fast now Sylvester was finished. Lizzie was still in the same place, still tense as a cat, but she was turned around looking across straight at Nobby. Her face still spoiling for a fight.

  Nobby wondered what he’d done.

  ‘Here, Pa, want a hand?’ He went over to help Lizzie’s father roll up the banners.

  ‘I can manage m’self.’

  So Nobby collected up pamphlets that had fallen on the ground, working his way around to Lizzie.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t make it for tea.’ Nobby always ate with the Cruises before Friday-night meetings. ‘Didn’t get back till just now.’

  ‘And what makes you think you’d have got tea? You’ve a hide, Nobby Weston.’

  Lizzie walked off fast after the half a dozen or so others who were carrying the gear to the Railway Workers’ Hall overlooking Newtown Station. Her shoes had been issued by the Lady Mayoress’s Relief Fund and were three sizes too big. They clattered fiercely on the pavement.

  Nobby stared. In ten years Lizzie and he had never had a row. He trailed after her, then sat on the stage and waited while the others stowed the stuff. It wasn’t just the Cruises. No one was speaking to him. He swung his legs off the edge of the stage and waited.

  ‘Hey, Lizzie!’

  The others had gone. Lizzie was up at the door, about to turn out the light.

  ‘You can stay there long as you like, Nobby Weston. Just shut the door properly when you leave.’

  She flipped the light out, leaving him in darkness.

  ‘Whadda you think you’re playing at?’ Nobby was wild himself now. Jumped off the stage and twisted his leg. Then ran through, hurdling chairs, knocking a bench flying, as he chased the shape he couldn’t see, chased the sound of her quick running breathing. Out on the gravel, over to the fence, then down through the lantana bushes to the back of the hall, and up the stairs of the fire escape. Grabbed her at last on the landing, a thin wild shape panting as it tried to open the door that led backstage.

  Lizzie still didn’t give in. Fought him hard with her fists now, pushing him back against the landing railing. Down there glowed the lights of Redfern and Mascot and Alexandria, and Nobby felt the rusted iron of the rail wobble against his weight.

  ‘For Christ sake, stop girl! We’ll both be gonners!’

  But she wouldn’t stop. Nobby felt the depth of that distance drag them down. Both falling, two bodies clasping stick-arms, both spinning down to death. (Like one day, years before, when the world went whirley and they slipped off a shed.)

  He slapped her then and grabbed her fis
ts, pulling them round behind her back, pushing her down onto her knees. Winning. It was Lizzie who’d taught Nobby to fight. Then let his own body sink down to sit on the landing, holding her fast in case she started again.

  But she was done. Her breath coming out noisily in coughs.

  ‘Give in?’

  ‘Just wait till I get me breath back.’

  But she didn’t try again. The coughing built up and up till she felt her whole body taken over by the huge coughs that started way down in her lungs and skipped their way up her windpipe.

  ‘Hey girl, girl.’ Nobby slapped her back to try to stop it. Sometimes these attacks of hers would go on for half an hour or more. At last it finished.

  ‘I hate you, Nobby Weston,’ Lizzie said. ‘Bloody bronchitis.’ She’d had it on and off since she was a kid, and it always came on specially bad when she was upset.

  ‘Sorry. But I had to find out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you were sour on me. Why all of you were.’

  ‘You know. You dirty traitor. You and your mother. Turning on your own class. Kicking kids out into the street. And then you have the hide to come tonight and cheer your scabby guts out, Big Comrade Nobby Weston from the Anti-Eviction Committee!’

  Nobby looked out over the lights. Alexandria, Redfern, the back of Newtown, Macdonaldtown. Workers’ suburbs full of houses that the workers couldn’t afford to rent. There were strings and strings of houses there, whole terrace blocks in some streets, sitting empty now that their previous tenants had lost their jobs and had to move out. Hundreds of empty houses, and for every empty house there was a family now homeless, or near enough as made no difference. If they were lucky, they’d have squashed themselves into a relative’s house; if unlucky, they’d be out living under bags and bits of tin in the unemployed camp at La Perouse. Families who’d had to move when their landlords kicked them out.

  That was what Lizzie was talking about now. For Nobby’s mother had gone to Court today and obtained an order from the magistrate giving Lizzie’s father a week to pay the back-rent. If he didn’t pay it by next Friday, a warrant would be issued on Monday, 25 May, ordering the bailiffs to evict the Cruises.

  ‘Pay the back-rent!’ Lizzie said. ‘She’s off her head. It’s twenty-five quid.’

  It was five months since the Cruises had paid rent: for it was five months ago that Lizzie lost her job, and for two years Lizzie’s earnings had been the only cash coming regularly into the Cruise household. Paddy and Mick had only had the odd day’s work since 1929.

  ‘No!’ said Nobby. The old girl had done this secretly, without a word to him. ‘I’ll stop her,’ Nobby said.

  He was the light of the old girl’s life, her darling treasure. She was tough as they come, but she’d never denied Nobby anything. ‘She’ll only be threatening, just to get at your pa.’

  ‘To get at me, you mean.’ Everyone in Liberty Street knew that Mrs Weston couldn’t stand a bar of Lizzie. Mrs Weston, who played piano, the widow of a bank teller . . .

  Sucks to you, Ma Weston, Lizzie thought. I don’t want your sweet Sunshine anyway. Not in that way.

  ‘The stuck-up cow,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ Nobby agreed. Then felt dirty inside because he’d said it. There were still things about his mother he couldn’t help liking.

  One day when he was little, Nobby had seen her on the roof, fighting a southerly buster to pull a tarp over while the slates flew off around her head. She was shouting down into the street to stop the neighbourhood men from coming up to help her.

  ‘I don’t take charity!’ She didn’t give it either.

  And she could be funny too sometimes. Like when she played the piano and made up songs about all the neighbours. But she only ever showed her wit to Nobby.

  ‘I’ll get round her, no risk,’ Nobby said.

  ‘And if you can’t?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘But just if you can’t?’

  ‘Then I’ll stick with your side. Our side.’

  Nobby looked down over the houses. One day he and Lizzie would live out there in a house, he said.

  ‘You know I hate it when you go like this,’ Lizzie cut him short.

  I’m a pure red flame, burning only for the struggle.

  The thought of a husband, and love, and kids, and doing the mopping to keep it all clean, made Lizzie feel as if someone had locked her up inside somewhere tiny and airless.

  7

  Evie flunked the job interview she went to that next Monday. It was for a sandwich hand, in a place in the city, and they had other girls with letters saying they’d worked in other sandwich places, so they didn’t even try Evie out. Evie didn’t mind, except for the money. Slap-slop, putting curried egg onto buttered squares, it wasn’t thrilling. Not that anything was.

  As she was all dressed up it was a pity to waste it, so she walked around Centrepoint a bit, then dropped into the local CYSS place on the way to pick up Sammy.

  ‘G’day, I’m Roger,’ said the friendly guy who was good-looking. He still had a video portapak on his shoulder, and the solid girl with glasses was still trailing after him on the end of the sound-lead. There was macrame in one room, and tap-dancing in another, and in the kitchen a whole lot of guys were eating rice and cooking more rice and talking a foreign language and laughing.

  ‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ Roger said.

  (He doesn’t remember me.)

  Evie couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked exactly like someone she’d love to go out with. Really clean hair, thick and the right length and the right colour; a suntan (despite winter!) and blue eyes and clean faded jeans that fitted well and a yellow sweatshirt that said ‘Make The Ruling Class Crumble’. Evie read it and couldn’t understand it. It sounded like apple crumble, that they used to make in Home Science. The girl was obviously his girlfriend. She had on a black T-shirt with the same sort of writing. It said ‘Eat The Rich’. Cannibalism made Evie feel sick.

  ‘Were you looking for something in particular?’ Roger had a really warm voice.

  ‘No.’ Evie felt silly in her best respectable dress and tights and Mum’s shoes.

  ‘There’s things on the noticeboards,’ Roger said. ‘Or come again. Or Di’s probably in the kitchen, go in and meet her. We’ve got to get down and film the demo.’ He smiled again on his way out the door.

  ‘Or come along,’ the girl said, hurrying to keep up with him or the cord might break. ‘We need numbers.’

  ‘What?’ Evie trailed out after them.

  ‘Down at the CES headquarters. The unemployed demo.’

  Evie watched them dump the gear in an old Volkswagen. There were banners on top, and boxes of pamphlets on the back seat.

  ‘There’s room,’ the girl yelled to her. ‘You can sit on my lap.’

  ‘Oh no thanks.’ Evie went to the play centre and picked up Sammy, then went home. Maria and Jodie were already there, because the school holidays had just started.

  ‘You two can look after Sammy today.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Maria said. ‘I’ve got to go somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘Tell me!’ Jodie demanded.

  ‘It’s a secret!’

  Maria liked secrets for their own sake. Secret friends, secret places, secret money, secret food. Morning secrets and afternoon secrets and dark night secrets. Out at Campbelltown, she’d had lots of secrets, but now they’d moved here she’d have to start all over again.

  A few days ago, she’d found her first one. It was an afternoon secret, a food secret, a friend secret, a money secret, a place secret, but mainly a food secret. Like most secrets, it’d started by itself.

  One afternoon around the middle of last week, Maria had been mooching around the street thinking about getting a secret pile of money and secretly buying a BMX bike: that’d show Dad. For all she had now was Evie’s crumby old hand-me-down ancient-history d
inosaur, and Dad reckoned she didn’t need a new one.

  So she was wandering along the far end of the street when she spotted a fat foreign lady dressed all in black, sweeping and hosing her neat concrete front yard.

  ‘Would you like me to do that for you?’ Maria asked.

  The lady looked up, smiling a wide smile, but with a blank look in her eyes. ‘Excuse me?’ she said.

  ‘Would you like me to do that? I could do it for you, and you could pay me, and then you wouldn’t have to get your slippers wet.’

  The lady didn’t seem to get the point. She looked back to an old man sitting on the porch.

  ‘Bob-a-job is it, love?’ He smiled too.

  ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘I just want lots of money, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah,’ the old man grinned. ‘Sheer capitalist free enterprise, is it?’

  Maria didn’t know what his big words meant. She didn’t say anything. The lady wasn’t there now anyway, she’d disappeared inside her door.

  But was back again a second later, with little white crescent-shaped biscuits on a plate.

  ‘Eat, eat,’ she urged. Then fast words in a foreign language. ‘Einai orea, i koritzei!’ With one hand she stroked Maria’s white-blonde hair, while with the other she held the plate right up to Maria’s nose. She smiled, and there were teeth missing, and some of the teeth that were there were gold. It was like a witch story, Maria thought. The biscuits were poison; the lady was doing a spell on her head; propped up against the fence was her broom. Maria looked around for a cat, but could only see a bird in a cage.

  Maria wasn’t scared. She’d always longed to meet a witch. She took a biscuit, and it was covered in white icing-sugar that powdered down all over Maria’s jumper. Arsenic, she thought, biting in. Quite delicious.