House That Was Eureka (9781922148254)

by Wheatley, Nadia; Jordan, Toni (INT)

  CROWD WATCHES BATTLE

  A large crowd watched the battle from a safe distance. News of the encounter spread round the neighbourhood like wild-fire. The noise of the conflict could be heard a quarter of a mile distant. Glass in the windows was smashed by the flying missiles hurled by the besieged and returned by the police vanguard. After the battle, the cottage presented a battered appearance. Not a window was left intact, and a side door had been smashed in during the conflict. Inside there was devastation. Scarcely a piece of furniture remained. The floors of what had once been bedrooms and living rooms were littered with dirt, blue metal, broken glass, and the crude weapons which the occupants had used. Bloodstains marked the floor, and the sandbags on the front verandah.

  MEETING OF COMMUNISTS

  More than 300 Communists attended a meeting at Bankstown to protest against the actions of the police during the riot in that suburb later this morning. Wild speeches were delivered, one speaker declaring that what had happened today was only the beginning of a revolution, and that further developments would take place at Newtown.

  Wednesday 17 June 1931. The Liberty Street pickets are crowded around Nobby in the kitchen, reading the afternoon paper that Nobby-the-runner has just brought them.

  ‘I was there!’ Nobby is saying. ‘I was out there!’

  A picket called Isaacs slaps him on the back.

  ‘Good on yer, lad,’ says Mr Dacey. So glowingly that Nobby doesn’t mind being called ‘lad’.

  Mick Cruise envies him.

  A young bloke called Williams asks him how much blood there was.

  ‘I saw the pistols. I heard the bullets. It was like the war, so many guns. And then I saw Eatock limp out with that bullet in him. They were all handcuffed.’

  To be a hero, Nobby feels. To know things and do things and lead things. Everyone is slapping him on the back, though all he did was stand in the crowd and yell.

  ‘All right, comrades,’ Paddy’s voice is booming over. ‘We’ve all had our read now and there’s nothing we can do about what happened today, so I vote we have our tea and bag up the gap and settle down for a good night’s sleep in case Lang’s Larruppers pay us a visit tomorrow.’

  The pickets drift off from Nobby’s newspaper. Isaacs and Murchison and Nicholls and Johnnie Kennet sit down on the floor and play euchre. Mr Dacey pulls out his tin whistle. Murphy lights the two kerosine lamps – for the electricity has been cut off and the pickets live by candlelight and lamplight at night. Paddy gets out his penknife, sticks his feet up on the table, and starts to cut his toenails.

  ‘Aren’t we going to do something?’ Nobby says.

  Paddy moves onto the second foot. Says nothing. He’s got enough trouble keeping all the pickets nice and steady without this lad with his nerves strung tight like piano wire.

  ‘I was out there!’

  Nobby saw blood drawn, and he feels he’ll never be the same. For Nobby, it was like the Russian Revolution or the Easter Rising, that Lizzie is always spouting about. The police use bullets, so shouldn’t the people use bullets back? It seems only fair. Tit for tat. The way Mick and Lizzie had taught him to fight, you never let no one beat you. If a kid gets the better of you in a scrap one day, then you go back the next and do him. If he moves on from knuckles to rocks, then you pelt rocks back.

  Nobby can’t stop saying it: ‘I was out there!’

  ‘And out there,’ Paddy nods towards the backyard, ‘you’ll be in a minute, soon as you’ve run up and got us our tea. Ask Ma to give you all the bread and jam she’s got, we’ll eat cold tomorrow, because from now on I want you out there all the time.’ Paddy’s got a feeling the cops may come tomorrow, and there’s no way he wants Nobby in the house.

  Nobby protests. But you can’t budge Paddy. Paddy is sweeping his toenail clippings off the table.

  2

  That evening, Roseanne came down from Campbelltown. Her father was going to some club in town, and Roseanne had nothing to do so she said: ‘Drop me off and I’ll have a look at Evie’s new place, and pick me up on your way home.’

  Evie was pretty boring, but she was better than sitting out at Campbelltown and doing nothing.

  Ugh, Roseanne thought when she arrived. The house-paint outside was coming off in strips, like peeling sunburn, and the little front yard was just weeds. Roseanne didn’t like to imagine how many people must’ve died here over the years.

  From his balcony, Noel shot her. Then stood up to watch her live body go up to knock at Evie’s door. Roseanne looked up and saw a creep of a boy looking down a mouth-organ at her from the next-door balcony. Noel hated girls who looked like that, in smart-coloured jeans.

  ‘Gee it’s dark and pokey,’ Roseanne said when she got inside.

  Evie didn’t say anything. When Roseanne arrived, Evie was feeling funny.

  She’d just had a fight with Ted, and for once she’d fought.

  Not sitting in her Evie-Peevie sleep but alive and fighting.

  ‘You reckon…the way you talk…anyone can just go off and get a job, easy as that!’

  Ted sat there with his can of KB. He didn’t say anything, but Evie knew what he must be thinking. There was fight and anger then in Evie. A redness flying behind her eyes. Better to be awake and struggling than the nothing she’d always felt before.

  Bang, I hate you, Ted.

  Hate, a feeling. Like what we’ve got next door, you and me, Mrs Oatley.

  ‘I think I’d like to have a baby,’ Roseanne says. She and Evie are in the scullery. Mum and Ted are out.

  Roseanne smokes, and drinks some beer from one of Ted’s cans that Evie has got her from the fridge. Evie doesn’t care if Ted notices.

  ‘If I can’t get a job I might as well do something,’ Roseanne says.

  It’s still all airy-fairy in Roseanne’s mind but Evie doesn’t know that. It all seems too old for Evie, full of things she can’t work out.

  Evie talks about Roger. He’s her boyfriend. Not in real life maybe, but in the mind of Evie these days the thin membrane between real life and some other world is disappearing.

  ‘He’s got lovely hair,’ says Evie. ‘Really clean, and a really good suntan. He goes surfing a lot. He often takes me, weekends.’

  ‘What sort of car’s he got?’

  Evie falters. They don’t travel by car. They’re just suddenly there, alone on a beach with no other people, sitting high up on a rock, dangling their legs down over waves and waves of bright blue freedom; feeling good. ‘A Kingswood. Same model as Ted’s.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Roseanne is impressed if it’s true, but she’s not sure it is. How would someone like Evie get someone like this? ‘What’s he do?’

  ‘He makes movies,’ says Evie. ‘Only little ones so far,’ she swings back closer to the truth. ‘On, you know, video, and I help him, and do the sound.’ Evie’s ambition: to supplant that fattish girl with glasses and trail around after Roger like a puppy on a lead.

  ‘One night we took a camera to the beach and made a film of all the lights.’ It didn’t sound so exciting, when you said it like that.

  ‘Chris doesn’t like movies,’ Roseanne interrupts. Roseanne doesn’t like it when Evie talks: the point of Evie is to listen. ‘Chris is into music.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Evie leaps in quickly. ‘Noel’s into music too.’

  ‘Who’s Noel?’

  ‘The guy I’m telling you about.’ Evie hasn’t yet realized her mistake.

  ‘I thought his name was meant to be Rod or something.’ Roseanne doesn’t care. Rod or something, or Noel, he doesn’t exist anyway.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You just said Noel.’

  Jump jump. Evie’s mind keeps making sudden jumps these days and she gets muddled.

  She’ll have to keep calling him Noel now, when she talks to Roseanne, to cover her mistake.

  ‘He plays mouth-organ,’ Evie says. ‘Real well.’ Making in her mind a picture of Roger playing mouth-organ.

  ‘One night he
was playing in this big place up at Newtown and he got me this free ticket to go and watch.’

  3

  Lizzie’s out in the street when Nobby runs past down to Kennets’ to get the tucker. She’s not talking to Nobby. Hasn’t spoken to him for over a week.

  Thinks he’s smart, Nobby Weston. Hanging around in the house all day while she’s stuck out on the street, keeping the picket going. Her and baby Fee all day, her and the other girls when school gets out, her and a couple of dozen grown-ups too in the daytime, but the grown-ups change, come for a few hours and then go. Only Lizzie is there all the time, making the signs, leading the chants, making it tough for the scab to walk through if she wants to walk into the street.

  Lizzie’s lonely, split from Nobby. He’s been there, always beside her, for ten years now, her best friend. Her only friend. Following her lead, doing what she does, doing what Mick does too but only if Lizzie does it first.

  But now it’s just Nobby doing what Mick does, or even doing things first.

  Sometimes now, it’s as if she’s at war with Nobby. Lined up against each other, like Saturday mornings with the invading armies. She much preferred it when they were both Crusaders together. Lizzie shivers. I’m cold as silver.

  For some reason, there flashes into Lizzie’s mind the bright memory of that helix of a spinning silver serviette ring that disappeared that Saturday morning into thin dark air. That last free silver-Saturday morning, long ago now. That morning was the first time she realized Nobby’s mother’s hatred for her. And now the hatred had led to this. In Lizzie’s memory now the silver spins faster and faster till the spin of the movement turns red as a flame. I’m warm, I’m a flame. No I’m not, I’m cold as silver.

  Lizzie gets cold out on the June street, so she skips to keep warm. Skips to get Fee to skip with her, to keep Fee warm.

  Fee Fee

  Here with me…

  Fee, my baby sister, only four. You shouldn’t have favourites, but I do.

  Lizzie grabs Fee’s hand with the automatic action of a big sister and skips her up and down, Fee with me…It makes the loneliness sometimes warmer, holding Fee.

  Lizzie’s out on the street with Fee when Nobby runs past down to Kennets’ to get the tucker.

  ‘Hey Nobby!’ she yells. She’s not talking to him, but her voice yells out to him.

  Nobby runs past. Lizzie with her brigade of kids. They throw old tins over his mother’s fence at night, and Nobby hears them through the night as he and his mother lie in their beds, not sleeping in the silent house.

  Mother, Mother, Lizzie, Girl, don’t split me like a piece of firewood.

  Lizzie yells out, but she’s been playing not speaking. Nobby can play that too.

  Nobby runs past; Lizzie skips and chants. Secretly Nobby feels that Lizzie’s being a bit childish. Lizzie playing revolutions. Nobby saw one today.

  4

  Noel was playing his mouth-organ in the outside dunny. It was a nice private place to be. Lots of people would think he was a creep if they saw him sitting in here with his mouth-organ, with his new music propped up on the toilet-roll holder, with his candle. Mum had given Evie’s mum the bulb from here the night Evie moved in, and since then Noel has used a candle. People would think he was a creep, but they did anyway, and anyway they wouldn’t see him here because it was a private place. A line of poetry from school went through his mind.

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.

  Embrace. The word made Noel feel embarrassed somehow, and clumsy. He imagined putting his arms around someone and giving them a hug, and kissing them, but the kiss missing them and Noel feeling stupid. Noel had never tried that, and that was another reason why he never hung around with the guys at school.

  He tried now to imagine embracing Evie. He could faintly hear her voice talking to the voice of that other girl that he’d shot from the balcony as she arrived. He’d been going to ask Evie tonight if she felt like going down the landscape again but he couldn’t now because that other girl was there. Noel felt vaguely jealous of Roseanne. Noel hadn’t been down the landscape since the time he took Evie. And Evie was really cold to him now, ever since she’d started doing despot-duty.

  Noel went back to picking out a tune in the new music he’d got up the music shop today. He helped out there sometimes in the afternoons, while the boss went out. The boss didn’t pay him, but he let Noel play the instruments and he gave him things. Like this music book called Dole Days that went with some new record of old Depression songs that some group had just released. It wasn’t Dylan, but maybe he was going off Dylan a bit: Dylan made him feel cold and lonely.

  Noel couldn’t imagine having his arms around Evie. She kept slipping out of them and went running off down the street.

  So he sat there playing this stuff he’d been given for free. He had some vague idea that he might play it one day to torment the despot, if she started tormenting him again.

  ‘Cruel it was then…’ Noel quoted. The theme-song of his childhood.

  Cruel it was, Evie’s loneliness. She’d had something, and thrown it away, and now she missed it terribly, but she didn’t know what it was she’d had. The not-knowing made her cranky, gave her headaches. She swung her legs in time to the music and didn’t hear a thing Roseanne was saying.

  Next door, the despot heard the music too. Lonely in her room she lay, looking out from her dark room onto the dark roofs, the dark backyards.

  We belong to the doley-oh mob,

  The doley-oh mob are we!

  We never fight or quarrel,

  We never disagree…

  The sound of that tune floating through the long dark night, the sounds they made to mock her. Evie’s laugh. The flicker-flicker shadows she saw, of Noel’s candle.

  The despot leaned out her window and rang her bell: loud.

  Noel jumped. Evie jumped. They were trained to the despot’s call.

  5

  Lizzie’s out in the street when Nobby runs off to Kennets’ to get the tucker.

  Lizzie’s heard by now about Bankstown, wants to ask him – ‘What was it like?’ – but he’s in too much of a hurry for her as he goes down and as he comes back past with the hot stew going slap-slop inside two billycans, and a sugar-bag of bread and jam slung over one shoulder.

  His mother watches from the window. Watches the billycans as well as her son. It’s three days now since she’s eaten, for she won’t walk out the door now to go to the shop. Her son comes in late at night, never thinks to bring her a little food. Her son doesn’t speak to her. He’s no son of hers. She feels the hatred in the house at night, the coldness of her son lying awake in his room, she lying awake in hers, the hatred of the men who sing next door…

  As I was walking down the street,

  A copper said to me…

  Nobby disappears into the lane. Lizzie wants to run after him. But yer think yer smart, Nobby Weston. They think they’re smart, him and Pa, but she’s got a plan.

  After what happened at Bankstown today, Lizzie is more dead-set than ever not to miss the action here. Lizzie plans to hide in the cupboard in the scullery. The scullery isn’t fortified, so she can creep in there later tonight and hide and wait.

  Lizzie grabs Fee’s hand and runs off down to Kennets’ to bathe Fee and Maudie and have her tea.

  Nobby’s mother watches Elizabeth Cruise’s too-big shoes thudding down the pavement, and she feels jealous, and she feels hungry, and she feels vengeful.

  6

  ‘Chris is really lovely,’ Roseanne says again. ‘A really lovely guy. Much nicer than Kim.’ Kim was her last love.

  The sound of a mouth-organ drifts in faintly from the next-door toilet and makes Evie lonely.

  It makes her lonely, Lizzie’s love, that thin white face makes Evie lonely. The face like Noel’s, but older; and with his hair short instead of long like Noel’s, the ears stick out a bit and the long thin white neck looks somehow vuln
erable.

  She wants to skip and jump, to cheer him up.

  She wants to skip and jump, to cheer herself up.

  The loneliness without him.

  7

  In the kitchen the pickets eat the stew. Only three shanks between the eighteen of them, but the broth’s filled out with lots of spuds and chokoes and pumpkin. Better than a lot of them would get at home, for everyone from round about has been giving what they can for the pickets’ rations.

  ‘Don’t wait for the billies, son,’ Paddy says. ‘We’ll toss them down from the balcony in the morning.’ The sooner this lad’s out and the gap bagged up, the better.

  ‘Righty-oh,’ Nobby says cheerfully.

  Too cheerfully, but Paddy’s got too much on his mind to be suspicious.

  Nobby shuts the kitchen door on the pickets.

  Nobby has a plan too.

  Nobby crawls through the gap in the diningroom window and creeps into the scullery, then pulls a big old tin trunk out from the bottom of a pile of other trunks and tea-chests and suitcases. He fiddles with the lock, presses it upwards, then sideways, carefully, holding his breath and praying, up and sideways, and it opens.

  Inside are books, old photos, a moth-eaten coat, and the thing in the old soft brown bag, the thing that Nobby pulls out now as reverently as if it was a Bible. He pulls out the old tobacco tin too and sticks it in his pocket. Then Nobby locks the trunk and – quietly now – rams it right in again at the bottom of the pile, and creeps back in through the gap.