You feel false, talking through gaol bars. Even to your own brother. Even to your only brother, Mick.
My brother, Mick. So strong, so big, so much bigger than Nobby and me. It was real good, moving in to Liberty Street, having Nobby’s weight to hurl in with me in a fight against Mick. Any fight against Mick. Mick has green eyes and wild hair like mine. The identical mirror to me except he’s always been a boy, and bigger and older. Pa always let him do things that he wouldn’t let me do, and Ma is always telling me to plait my hair, do something with it girl, while Mick runs around with his shirt out round his bum and Ma just makes cups of tea for him and puts iodine on his cuts.
But Mick: he’d lie in wait for us up there where Crockford Lane runs into Mercy Street. Hide high up with Johnnie and Cec Kennet on top of Kennets’ chook-shed, pelting poppleberries as we ran past. Nobby and I dared him down one day and took him on, and he gave Nobby a black eye. Any time, though, anyone else picked a scrap with me and Nobby, Mick would lay in fast to back us up.
‘Skinny Lizzie,’ they’d say about me.
‘Weakie Weston,’ they’d say about Nobby. ‘Sobby Nobby, mummy’s boy.’
‘Hey that’s my sister!’ Mick would say.
‘That’s my brother!’ Mick would back Nobby up.
Anyone who spoke a word against Nobby or me, Mick would get them.
Mick has green eyes like mine and I stare into them and see myself there. It’s scary, recognizing yourself in someone else’s eyes. He’s me, except he’s game and I’m not.
I look at Mick through the grill of the gaol bars. I feel real shy, and proud of him because he’s in gaol, and angry because it’s not me there, and I wish I was Alexandra Kollontai.
‘Hello, Mick,’ I say. ‘How is it? Do you need anything?’ There’s nothing I can give.
But Mick’s just happy to see me.
I look at Mick through the gaol bars. That night in the cupboard, too scared hearing the crashing to step out and look, when it came to the barricades I was not Alexandra Kollontai, I stopped in there standing up on the copper wishing for help, till Nobby found me.
I tell Mick I was scared that night.
‘That makes two of us.’
He whispers now, ‘What do you know about the gun?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you know about Nobby?’
‘Nothing.’
Nobby. Nothing. I know the loneliness now without you.
Mick’s face is my face, we stare like mirrors through iron bars with police listening and watching and there’s no way we can tell lies to each other.
‘If you should happen to run into him, like,’ Mick says (real careful, there’s warders around), ‘tell him hooray from me.’
‘I was a coward,’ Lizzie says, her mind on something else. ‘Mick, I love him,’ Lizzie says. She’s tight, her white hands gripping the bars towards Mick’s hands as she spurts out something that is very embarrassing.
‘Yeah, well tell him, Sis,’ says Mick, embarrassed.
‘It’s too late,’ says Lizzie.
5
It was the gun dream he was dreaming. Collapsing after five decades in the sun of the track, the red sand beneath his eyes like powdered blood, not far away there were suddenly bullet-bangs, and he was scared and seventeen.
Distant voices then too outside the criss-cross shadow of a bunda-bush, gun bangs, the scream of a girl, her shoes flashing past, then more legs, legs in white walking around him saying words he couldn’t make out, and still the bangs that he couldn’t know were simply the Bourke rifle club having its monthly target day, and then it was dark for weeks and he was seventeen. Caught inside a frozen block of movement till he came to in late April and read his name upon his arm.
Years of fear made him jump then, expect the troopers at his bedside, one two three. He never gave his name to no one, but there was only the nice nurse.
‘Feeling better, Mr Weston?’
‘How’d you get my name, girl?’ asked the pale thin man with sunspots on his cheeks.
‘You kept saying it in your sleep.’
No troopers came, and the nurse said he was in Sydney, in Prince Alfred no less, a hop and a jump from his old stamping ground.
There were a couple of days then, and talks with the social worker, who arranged for him new shoes and a pension, for he said he was going home.
One day then in late April he walked out in the clothes and hat they’d found him in, but in new social-worker shoes, for they’d taken his boots away; a coathanger-thin man who caught a bus down King Street, got out at Newtown Bridge, stared at Uncle George’s souvlaki stall, then walked slowly like a sick man or a man in a documentary, looking at the sights as he automatically followed the back route to Liberty Street.
There he made his camp.
Seeing as he came into the street a house with a Room To Let sign with a distant view of 201, he went to the door and rented the room and then began to spend his days deciding.
Deciding what, he wasn’t sure.
Sitting in the winter sun on the gas-meter box watching Noel come and go, observing Evie, letting the days walk past as he’d walked past the years, walking backwards now through time till he felt the pain of seventeen.
One day, when Noel was out, this man saw the despot step onto the balcony and look down into the street. He felt sympathy.
Mother Mother, Lizzie Girl, don’t snap me like a dried-out stick.
To hasten the past, he purchased a parrot. Gave it lettuce and taught it the rhymes of decades ago while he made up his mind.
To what, he didn’t know.
In the daytime, watching the boy that could be him running down the street in his old black coat, with the winter air making bright warm spots on his pale cheeks, watching Evie, he planned to go away.
In the night-time, dreaming nightmares, he’d wake a coward, but his gut full of hate.
It was easier, out there on red soil, to ward off the question of Lizzie, a happy housewife with someone else as her husband.
6
That Sunday night, Evie did something strange. She stole the silver serviette ring. After it went flying off her thumb and rolling across the lino she politely picked it up, and thought she put it on the table, but when shortly afterwards she went home to her room and got undressed to go to bed, she found she’d put it in her cardigan pocket.
N…She traced the engraving with her fingernail, the flamboyant arching scroll.
Spin the ring and start again.
N
I love 4 ever, Noel Noel.
But that was wrong.
‘It’s Noel. Your boyfriend. Remember?’
‘Lover Boy.’
The quick eyes of Ted. The smart voice of Roseanne. Evie shuddered.
Then through the quiet of a Sunday night the feeling told her again. I love for ever Nobby Weston.
Evie opened the cupboard then and had a good look at what she hadn’t been able to look at since the dawn of the gun. Since that dawn, there’d been no scrabbling. Since that dawn, the girl had gone. Not far, but just not here, her wild fear no longer running through the blood of Evie, though there was worse now, now she was gone.
Evie opened the cupboard that was empty now, she’d cleaned out all the junk, and Evie studied the heart. They were old, the scratches of the heart, aged by air into the paint. But the eight in the 1981 didn’t quite match. The right-hand bumps of the eight were old, but the left-hand ones were new. Evie looked, and worked it out. That was how you’d draw an eight if you’d done a three first, and wanted to change it.
Through the quiet of a Sunday night, Evie sat quiet, spinning the ring.
Through the quiet of a Sunday night Sammy screamed. A wail of terror, like police through the night.
Evie ran into the house and up and turned the light on. ‘I’ll stay with her,’ she whispered as Mum poked her head in, sleepy-eyed. Then Evie held Sammy, held tight to the sobbing body that bucked inside her arms as the sobs wo
uldn’t stop. Evie felt the tears plopping down onto her arms, wiped the tears from Sammy’s face, but more came fast as rain.
‘What’s up, baby-girl? Did you have a nightmare?’
Sammy shook her head from side to side, and the tears came more.
‘Are you frightened of something?’
Sammy nodded. Hiccoughed, and the sobbing dropped a bit. ‘Where do you go to,’ Sammy sobbed, ‘when you die?’
Evie didn’t know. It had never occurred to her. She held the four-year-old body in her arms and looked out the window and thought: I wonder if I wondered about that when I was four. There was darkness out there, no moon, no stars; shadow swallowed the roofs and deepened down into darker blackness.
‘I don’t know,’ Evie said. ‘What makes you think of that all of a sudden?’
But Sammy just bucked against her breast, the fearful sobbing jerking out. ‘Where will I go to,’ Sammy sobbed, ‘when I’m a dead lady?’
So Evie told her something, not believing her own words, but just to give Sammy something to stop this. A blue place, a huge blue and white place like the sea, Evie described, where dead people fly free, like silver flames in the wind.
‘Is that where she went to,’ Sammy asked, ‘the lady?’
‘What lady?’
‘The one you were telling me about.’
In the end the tears ended and Sammy slept. Evie lay there under Sammy’s quilt, feeling the need for Sammy’s warmth to stop her aloneness.
Through the quiet of a Monday dawn Evie heard the bell next door: ring ring. The ring-hand summoning her. Evie woke.
TELL
Evie remembered. But the despot’s writing never told her what to tell.
In the darkness, she pulled out the serviette ring.
N
N for Noel.
N for no one.
N for Nobby.
The bell rang again. The ring-hand, Evie remembered. The weight of those six rings upon the finger, but six rings, not three, and two of them were gold. ‘The despot’s a widow, tell me something I don’t know.’ I’ll tell you something, Noel. Something so obvious you’ve always missed it. The despot was married twice. And Nobby was the son of the first time. Your mother, the daughter of the second. Evie didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She knew another thing though: that she wouldn’t tell Noel. Why tell him that the gunman was his uncle, when the whole thing already made him sick?
TELL, said the despot. But tell whom, tell what?
Tell Nobby, Lizzie told Evie, I love 4 ever.
BOOK FIVE
Confusion
I went to the door
And I asked for some bread,
But the lady said, ‘Bum Bum—
The baker is dead.’
Hallelujah I’m a bum.
Hallelujah bum again.
Hallelujah give us a handout
To revive us again.
ANON,
TRADITIONAL SONG, EARLY 1900S.
1
Karl Marx says that history repeats itself: occurring the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. As a general theory, it’s probably wrong, but as far as the Liberty Street battle went, it would’ve seemed right, to an outside observer. For what happened in the CYSS centre’s re-enactment of that battle seemed like full-blown farce, except to a few, who sunk back into the tragedy of the first time. It was Evie, or maybe fate, who’d appointed when it would happen.
On Tuesday night, sitting at tea, Evie’s mum had said: ‘It’s the 26th this Friday, darl. Your birthday. Why don’t we go up the club at Campbelltown and make a night of it, see all our old friends, have a real celebration for once. God knows, it’s been long enough.’
‘You know I’m trying to save money,’ Ted said, looking gloomily at a glass of lemon cordial.
‘But it’s my shout,’ said Evie’s mum.
‘I’ll look after the kids,’ Evie offered fast, seeing the opportunity. She was serving up the steak and kidney pie and cut Ted the middle bit, with the pastry rose, and scooped him out his mashed potato and pumpkin with the icecream scoop, to make it look nice.
‘I’d still rather we saved the money,’ Ted said.
‘But I want to shout you, darl.’ Evie’s mum touched his hand and she smiled at him.
‘It’s not fair,’ said Maria. ‘Why can’t we come?’
‘Yeah, let’s just take the girls out for a barbecue on Saturday instead,’ said Ted.
‘Yeah!’
‘No!’ said Evie. ‘It’s your night, Ted.’ She looked hard at Maria and bumped Jodie as she handed them their dinners. ‘I’ll take the girls somewhere on Saturday, to make up.’
Maria gave her a weird look. Sniffing a secret. But knew enough to shut up.
‘Where?’ Jodie demanded. ‘Can we have pizzas?’
‘Will there be swings?’ Sammy said.
‘There’ll be everything,’ said Evie.
‘See, darl?’ Mum said. ‘It’s all settled.’ She looked really young and happy, Evie thought, when she smiled like that. Ted still looked as if he didn’t want to go, but he made himself smile back at Mum, and then Evie’s mum looked even happier.
Over the washing up, Mum thanked Evie for being so thoughtful to Ted, and Evie felt a rat inside, Might as well go the whole way, though.
‘Mum,’ Evie said, ‘why don’t you take Noel’s poor little mum next door with you? She’s real nice, Noel’s mum, and she never gets to go out, she’s probably never been to a club in her life, and Noel and I can fix tea for Noel’s grandmother.’
‘I thought you didn’t like her, love.’
‘Noel’s mum? She’s really nice,’ said Evie, deliberately misunderstanding.
‘No, I meant the old lady, love.’
‘Oh? I guess you get used to her.’ That was one way of putting it.
Evie’s mum looked pleased. ‘You’re growing up at last, love,’ she observed.
Evie felt dreadful. Mum was so nice, she never suspected anything, so it made you feel bad to cheat her.
But it was settled. Ted seemed to think it was a good idea to ask Mrs Cavendish – ‘Might as well shout her too,’ he said. ‘I don’t ’spect she’ll drink much, and who knows, seeing as how it’s m’ birthday I might win the cost of the night back on the pokies’ – and Noel’s mum was hard pushed by Noel till she finally agreed.
‘Yes, Mum. No, Mum. Of course Evie and I can fix nanna. You should go, Mum. Nanna’s used to Evie. She likes Evie. No, don’t ask Nanna, don’t even tell her, just go. Of course I know the doctor’s number.’
So at half-past six on the Friday night Evie and Noel waved the three of them into the Kingswood, Ted in his suit still worried because of the money, Evie’s mum looking great with a henna rinse in her hair, and Noel’s mum in grey silk, as excited as a child off to its first party. At the last minute, Ted turned to Evie. ‘Thanks, Evie,’ he said, a bit awkward.
‘No, you sit in the front,’ Evie’s mum told Noel’s mum, and at last they drove off, Ted hooting the horn and grinning and the two mums waving like mad.
‘Now tell us,’ Maria demanded. Something secret was happening. She could smell it.
‘Nothing,’ Evie said, feeling bad about Ted. ‘Noel and I are just having some friends around, that’s all, and I don’t want you lot in the way.’
‘Oh, let them,’ Noel said. He felt jittery. I must’ve caught it from old Mum.
‘Yeah, okay.’ (How could you stop them, anyway?) ‘But just don’t go blabbing off to Ted and Mum, okay? You either, Little Miss.’ She grabbed Sammy up and hugged her.
‘What makes you think we’ll be around anyway; Smartey-pants?’ Ree said.
‘Will there be swings?’ Sammy asked Evie.
A feeling of dread suddenly hit Evie. ‘I told you, there’ll be everything.’
2
Evie wasn’t far wrong.
At half-past six, Newtown CYSS was fuller than it had ever been, for the word had got around that Roger was making a vid
eo. So now there were fifty cops dressed in blue jeans and blue jumpers, and eighteen pickets dressed in long white underpants or old trousers, and a hundred or more others dressed in raggedy gear, to be the crowd. There were two video portapaks loaded with fresh batteries, and there were two buses borrowed from other CYSS places ready to take everyone to Liberty Street.
The plan was: Roger and Di and Sharnda would go with the equipment and the pickets in the Newtown CYSS truck and set everything up, and after a while the ‘police bus’ would roar up and the cops would jump out and it would start. A couple of minutes later, the second bus would let the rest out at the Liberty Street corner, and they’d all run up and start booing and cheering and acting like an unruly mob.
At six-thirty, then, everyone was organized. Or as organized as an unruly mob will ever be. Roger and Di hadn’t got there yet, they were due any minute.
The phone rang.
‘This is Noel.’
‘Hi, this is Sharnda.’
‘I know.’
His voice sounded a bit odd. Distant and high and wavery. ‘Is something wrong?’ Sharnda asked.
‘No...’
‘What’s up, then?’
‘Nothing...’
‘Then why are you ringing?’
‘Oh, just to say, it’s all okay.’
‘We’ll be over in ten minutes,’ Sharnda said, but Noel had already clicked off. There was something odd in his voice, as if he was miles away.
3
In a room down Liberty Street a man who was miles away sat gazing down at his shoes. They looked strange, he thought; like someone else’s feet were stuck to the ends of his legs. For years there’d been boots down there, boots to tread the miles in, boots that were always old to start with for they’d be given to him in exchange for a bit of weeding, a couple of days fencing, boots that had been someone else’s until the someone else had no use for them, and gave them to that chap without a name. These black shoes, though, were new. Came from the social-worker girl, up the hospital, shiny black city shoes with cardboard soles. They looked more like they belonged to someone else than all those boots over the years that really had been someone else’s.
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