House That Was Eureka (9781922148254)

by Wheatley, Nadia; Jordan, Toni (INT)

  For the first time in her life, for this fugitive beneath her bed, Mrs Weston is partaking of an act of charity, but it is too late.

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

  Many years before this, standing on her roof under the bruised sky of a southerly buster, with all the slates flying off around her head, she’d defied the heavens who had given her a bank teller then taken him away, leaving her with just a sickly son and a piano and a parrot. ‘I don’t believe in you!’ she’d screamed into the sky. Throwing off five generations of Methodism in one sentence, she’d defied her God to prove he was there by making her fall, taking her up to heaven to be with her bank teller, whom she’d loved. But nothing had happened.

  After that, she expected nothing, gave nothing.

  But wanted to give a soup now at least with the three shillings she’d hoarded in the piano stool (she was too much herself to keep it in the tea caddy like the rest of Liberty Street), wanted to buy with her last money in the world some food for the fugitive, whoever he was.

  He looks a nice boy, Mrs Weston thinks.

  Over the hills and far away in dizzy hunger.

  Her mind sent far away too by the children’s feet upon the street, by the effort of being a traitor.

  (‘May we come through here?’ the nice Police Inspector had said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she’d said, making her first betrayal.)

  ‘I must tell my son,’ Mrs Weston stepping says, ‘I must tell him that I’m hungry.’

  But he’s most unsympathetic these days, her son. Argues late through the night, tells her to get the widow’s pension, then she won’t need next door’s rent. Take the pension. That’s charity. And socialism too, brought in by that man Lang. She’d rather live off the rent from the Irish bog. He’s no son of hers. This last week, he hasn’t even spoken to argue.

  Mrs Weston steps but her feet seem to take her nowhere, she still hasn’t reached 203.

  203, Lizzie, hussy. The way she jumps around the street with her safety pins flying. I’d rather see him dead than let her have him.

  But my nice fugitive.

  …‘May we come through here?’ the nice Police Inspector had said.

  ‘Oh certainly,’ had answered the betrayer.

  …On her first night in Newtown, Evie had worked one thing out: if a gang wanted to break into 203, this is how they’d do it: in the kitchen door, but if they can’t do that, over the scullery roof and/or through the balcony partition (though that would mean that they’d have had to break into 201 first; unless the owner of 201 was an accomplice of the gang)…

  After the battle was over, Mrs Weston walked down the street that was dead quiet now the battle was over. 203 was a mess. Barbed wire, bits of sandbags, blue metal, bricks. Over the front door, half-swung-down, was a flimsy wooden sign.

  THE EUREKA STOCKADE

  Ah yes, remembered Mrs Weston stepping off to buy a lamb shank, that was in the past, the Eureka Stockade.

  BOOK THREE

  Facts

  Have you ever been to Crazy Land

  Down on the Loony Pike?

  There are the queerest people there,

  You never saw the like!

  The ones who do the useful work

  Are poor as poor can be,

  And those who do no useful work

  All live in luxury!

  ANON, THE TOCSIN, 1930S

  1

  On the day after the gun-dawn, Evie went to CYSS. There were new big signs up on the wall:

  FIGHT CUTS TO

  CYSS FUNDING

  STOP GOVT ATTACKS

  ON NEWTOWN CYSS

  The only person who seemed to be around was that project officer girl who wore glasses.

  Sharnda watched Evie come in. It’s that medium girl, she thought. The girl of medium height and medium build, with in-betweenish, brownish hair cut medium length with a fringe. Sharnda had noticed her a few times lately but had never got around to talking to her because Evie was always busy having the video camera explained to her by Roger.

  (‘Another of Roger’s little groupies,’ Sharnda had grinned to Di.

  ‘He can’t help his looks,’ Di defended him. ‘He doesn’t really lead them on.’

  ‘I know,’ Sharnda said. ‘I only hope she keeps coming, that’s all. The sooner he finds someone other than me to hang around after him with the sound stuff, the better.’)

  On this Friday, though, Sharnda did talk to Evie.

  ‘G’day. Roger’s around somewhere, out the back maybe. What’s your name again?’

  ‘Evie.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Sharnda.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sharnda. It’s sort of short for Alexandra.’

  ‘Oh,’ Evie said vaguely. ‘Like Alexandra Kollontai.’

  Sharnda stared at Evie. She would hardly have expected Evie to know of Alexandra Kollontai. Sharnda had noticed that except when Evie was with Roger and the camera she tended to look dull and blank, or even somehow peeved. Sharnda was suddenly interested: Kollontai was one of her heroes.

  ‘Do you like Alexandra Kollontai?’ Sharnda asked.

  ‘Who?’ Evie looked blank.

  ‘Alexandra Kollontai.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ Evie was looking past Sharnda: looking for Roger.

  ‘The woman whose name you just said. You just said that my name was the same as Alexandra Kollontai’s.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of her.’ Evie’s bored look had changed to her peeved look. She felt that Sharnda was pestering her about something she didn’t want to know about.

  ‘But you just said her name.’

  Then Evie looked straight at Sharnda, suddenly interested. ‘Did I really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Evie paused, confused. ‘Well, who is she?’

  ‘Was, not is. She’s dead. She was one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution. An early feminist. And she wrote stories too. She was around in Russia in 1917.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything about any of that!’ Evie wailed. ‘I hated history at school!’

  Sharnda didn’t say anything. She felt she’d upset Evie somehow, and the whole issue seemed to have blown completely out of proportion. Then Evie took her by surprise again. She looked at Sharnda very seriously and said, ‘Do you ever think you’re going mad?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Is that true, or are you just bulling me to make me feel better?’

  ‘Why would I tell you bull to make you feel better?’

  ‘Because you’re a social worker. Because that’s your job.’

  ‘Fair enough. But still, I do sometimes think I’m going mad.’

  ‘I do too.’ But Evie felt more cheerful now. It’s nice to know you’re not Robinson Crusoe. ‘Just lately,’ she added. ‘Since we moved here.’

  ‘What sort of mad?’ Sharnda asked, because Evie seemed to want to talk. Underneath the sullen top layer of this kid, Sharnda thought, there was some sort of bright interesting spark.

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’ Evie was uneasy. ‘Stuff like what happened just then. I think something, or I say some-thing, or I do something, and it’s like someone else did it, or sometimes it’s like I did it a long time ago.’

  She was quiet, then abruptly talked again. ‘Like, there’s this old woman, a real old witch, I have to get her lunch for her, anyway, soon as I met her I really hated her, hated her guts, but it was like I’d known her for ages and knew why I hated her, but I don’t know why I hate her.’

  ‘There’s other weird things, too,’ Evie added; then clamped up.

  ‘What, you only moved into Newtown lately?’ Sharnda was just trying to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Liberty Street.’

  Sharnda was interested again. ‘What number?’

  ‘203.’

  Sharnda did something then that, more than all her kind inquiry, made Evie feel comparatively sane
. For she repeated ‘203!’ at the top of her voice and gazed at Evie as if Evie had just said something really clever.

  ‘Hey Roger!’ (He’d just wandered in.) ‘Evie lives in that house in Liberty Street, the one I told you about.’

  ‘Good one.’ Roger had a really warm, quiet voice that always made Evie feel as if he was listening to her. But when he said this, he sounded especially warm, and he too was looking at Evie as if she’d just won an Olympic medal or saved someone’s life or something.

  ‘When can I come round,’ Sharnda said, excited, ‘and have a look around your house?’

  ‘What?’ Evie said. ‘What’re you on about?’

  Sharnda was bad at explaining things. She tended to start in the middle, talk in a rush, and expect people to know what she meant. She collected herself now, and tried to go back to the beginning.

  ‘When I was at uni,’ (she was a bit embarrassed, felt she was sounding like a schoolteacher) ‘I wrote a history thesis about how unemployed workers in the 1930s Depression got together and organized and fought for more dole and for jobs, and against evictions and stuff…It’s what they’re going to have to do again now,’ she added, suddenly eager.

  ‘Anyway, in 1931 there was this long campaign in Sydney against evictions, and as the unemployed kept winning, the authorities kept using more and more force against them. The biggest battle of all happened in your house…’

  ‘There’s even a song about it,’ Roger cut in. ‘ “At Bankstown and at Newtown, we made the cops feel sore…”’

  Evie felt her stomach turn over, as if she was going up too fast in a lift. It was as if Sharnda was telling her about some secret thing Evie had done, that she’d thought no one knew about. ‘What happened?’ she said, to make sure.

  ‘Cops came with guns,’ Sharnda said, feeling her voice straining a bit as it always did when she talked about the battle. ‘They came with guns and they shot at the unemployed. One guy was hit in the arm. Cops came with guns with bullets in them, and people were shot, just like in the Eureka Stockade, except that Eureka has got into the history books because it happened long enough ago, and the Liberty Street battle has been left out of history books, because it’s too recent, and the knowledge of such truth could be dangerous…’

  ‘Danger…’ Evie said slowly. Tasting the word like an ice cube that you take into your mouth: too large, too square, too cold to be comfortable, but you can’t spit it out. ‘I know what you’re talking about.’

  It was the sound of the footstep first, treading stealthily across the roof above her, only one foot, then two feet, more feet; and more feet too, a new set of feet, six more feet, ten more feet, running fast down the side passage in rhythm with the feet above. But only the sounds; she couldn’t see anything.

  Then it stopped; then it happened again.

  But visually this time, and soundlessly, she saw the shape of a foot plant itself silver-ly above her. Not a naked foot, with toes, but a boot-shape, rounded at the front, a heavy heel at the back, heavy though soundless the footstep now grew above her till it seemed to cover the ceiling, silver first, then changing to black.

  Then time pressed, meaning something, happening too fast, drawn out like ages; time that pressed, just as space pressed, as danger pressed, for the room now had shrunk to the size of the diagonal cupboard and Evie was in it, standing up, balancing on top of the copper, holding back her dreadful coughing, holding back her fear, trying to straighten the rusting old tin chimney that Noel has dislodged in his crawling and as she shoves the chimney, the thing falls out pat into her hands.

  ‘Guns,’ Evie said. Sharnda thought she seemed in a daze.

  ‘So can I come round,’ Sharnda said, ‘and have a look?’

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted. Partly to look for evidence: old scrape marks of a ricochet along a wall. But mainly it was just that it’d be an honour for her, to go where her heroes had fought. Others feel the same way about the battlefields of Marathon, or Culloden, or Gallipoli. Or Eureka.

  ‘Roger, you’ll come too won’t you?’ Sharnda threw in a bone to draw Evie.

  ‘Come?’ Roger said sweetly. ‘Sure. But we won’t just come. We’ll film it. We’ll do a re-enactment: get all the kids from here, they can dress up as the cops and the pickets and the crowd and stuff…’

  (Sharnda thought: Let Roger loose with a video portapak, and he thinks he’s the guy that made Gone with the Wind…)

  ‘Okay, Evie?’ Roger said sweetly.

  But the way Roger said it, there wasn’t a question mark at the end.

  ‘Okay,’ Evie said. ‘Okay.’ Secretly worrying about Ted. About a lot of things.

  2

  Noel was sick. Must’ve caught flu or something, running around that gun-dawn in his pyjamas and no duffle-coat. Running? no, crawling, crawling down the stairs…

  The other day upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there…

  Noel’s head whirled. Spun him back to desperate green eyes that looked into his own as he crawled through the diningroom, holding his terror close to him like something real to ward off night.

  Then Evie’s face yelling, You’re a creep, why can’t you leave me alone, Evie’s face swam above him, way above; then she reached out a hand but he was quick through the hidey-hole. In the safety of his bed, Noel pulled the blankets right over. I’m not here, I don’t exist. In his flu, his brain soared far above his forehead as if he was up high in an aeroplane.

  Pelting down the stairs though in his mind like the other night, he encountered in half-darkness a beast that scuttled through the legs quick…a cowardy custard…no, a cowardy cockroach…

  I’d rather be dead.

  Dramatizing then, like an actor in a movie, he pulled the rifle out from beneath the bed and held it to his brain.

  Playing games.

  ‘Russian Roulette…’

  Playing nothing.

  ‘You are familiar with the rules?’

  A jaded gentleman he was, in his white tropical pyjama suit, dying of dissipation; or perhaps thwarted in love…

  ‘You’re a creep!’ yelled Scarlett O’Hara, words flying out her mouth as Roseanne in her pastel jeans giggled…

  It was better before.

  A jaded gentleman he was, in his white tropical pyjama suit, and he’d shamed the family honour; or perhaps been thwarted in love…

  ‘Piss off!’ Noel remembered.

  Then the fever took him over.

  So rolling again into dark as I scuttle through the hole, but the hidey-hole now is down the barrel of the gun, and my finger here pulls the safety catch back, and as the trigger squeezes in the bullet moves up, and the coward that is me has bravery in me yet, for there’s a bullet in the gun and I know it’s certain death; and now the bullet comes out Bang! and lodges in my brain: ‘I’m dead, real dead, got a bullet in me head! Look Mum, look Evie, look Nanna!’

  Noel laughed. A wild violent laugh beneath the blankets that made him burst out of his warm hidey-hole, spluttering for air. Who’re you kidding, Noley-Poley? For the gun was lying beneath the bed like it always was, his brain was lying in his head like it always was, and the bang of the bullet was a knock on the door that he nearly ignored but didn’t, it might be Evie. Noel snuck out on the balcony in his dissipated pyjama suit but no such luck, it was only Ted down there, big Ted.

  3

  Evie picked Sammy up and took her home. It was only three o’clock but Ted was there already, sitting in the loungeroom with his eyes glued to Sesame Street.

  Evie felt nervous, coming in the front door, seeing him there, knowing she had to ask him about the film.

  ‘G’day Ted!’ She was extra friendly.

  ‘Hello Daddy!’ Sammy threw herself at him. ‘I made you a lovely pasting!’ She presented Ted with a big bit of paper with old Christmas cards and bits of wool and coloured macaroni stuck all over it. ‘A lovely lovely pasting. Lovely lovely,’ Sammy smooched.

  Ted said nothing. Ignored the
lovely pasting. Ignored his lovely Sammy.

  ‘Would you like me to get you a beer, Ted,’ Evie said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s no trouble.’ (It was a lot of trouble, being so nice to Ted.)

  ‘No.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Look, if you must know, Miss Stickybeak, I’m off the grog, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was odd. Ted was hardly a drunk, but Evie had never known him to go off the grog. He had four cans of KB every night: two when he got home, one with tea, one after tea: regular as a clock.

  ‘Shitty-beak!’ Sammy giggled. ‘Daddy, you said a rude word!’ She tried to climb onto Ted’s lap.

  ‘Just get her out, will you!’ Ted snapped at Evie. ‘Feed her or something. Or take her out to your bloody trampoline!’

  Evie hauled at Sammy, who started howling, and the pasting tore, and Sammy howled more. Ted jumped out of his arm-chair, slammed out the front door.

  ‘Just think,’ Evie told Sammy, ‘now you’ve got two lovely pastings.’ It didn’t stop the tears. Evie hugged Sammy. ‘Isn’t Daddy mean!’

  Sammy pulled out of Evie’s arms. ‘He is not. And he’s not your daddy anyway. He’s my daddy. My daddy and Jodie’s daddy and Ree’s daddy. You haven’t got a daddy.’

  Evie shrugged and let her go. That was one thing that didn’t worry her. If fathers could be judged by Ted, and by Roseanne’s dad, and others that she’d met, the fact that hers had cleared out just after she was born didn’t worry her in the slightest. She and Mum had managed all right, before Ted came along.

  Evie heard Ted knocking next door. Friday: Rent Day, she thought. But he was being a bit eager, the old Ted. Mrs Cavendish wouldn’t be home yet for him to pay her. Even Noel mightn’t be home. Though he probably would be. Evie thought he probably hadn’t gone to school again today. She’d heard a sound like him walking about this morning.