Walking slowly, then, even though this day there was a point in Sydney’s geography they aimed for, walking like tourists with all the time in the world; Evie, being used to Sammy, slowing her pace to Nobby’s tread, Noel on the other side bounding forward, pulling himself back, swinging the duffle-bag from his shoulder.
Nobby suddenly touched his hand out to a fence. ‘This was the Kennet place.’ A done-up terrace now, with drifts of maidenhair in hanging baskets, with gums and wattles growing at the front, and clinging native creepers. Nobby glanced as they passed along the lane, but the chook-shed had given way to an aluminium garage hidden behind a screen of more gums.
‘Do the trees make you homesick for the bush?’ Evie said.
‘What d’you think, girl?’ Then Nobby smiled to ease the shock of his voice.
Homesick for the rotten scrub? Give me Newtown concrete any day, and if you must have some greenery, stick some privet in a pot! I’m home.
‘I’m sorry,’ Evie said, getting his meaning wrong. ‘You’ve made me really want to go out there too, one day,’ added Evie, Evie who just a couple of months ago had had absolutely no ambitions.
‘Is that right, girl?’ Nobby said, thinking: Evie. This girl who barely came to his shoulder, a real nice girl with quick darting eyes, a girl who’d have something alive and strong in her for ever more as a result of being mixed up in Lizzie.
‘It’s this way.’ Noel darted left.
‘Teaching your uncle to suck eggs!’ But Nobby stopped now, stepping back out of step to cross over to a corner shop. He’d run out of tobacco.
Noel stayed put. This bad place of the past. But Matt and Tasso ambled out anyway and saw him on the corner here, standing here with Evie.
‘Hey look…’ Tasso started to cross over but Matt tossed his head to show that he was to stay on this side.
‘G’day,’ Matt muttered across at Noel, averting his eyes and hurrying on away. There was something about the shape of something in that bag that reminded him of something he didn’t like to think about.
‘Okay, son?’ Nobby was back, his eyes on the fast-moving figure that he recognized from that night.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Noel laughed, so happy all of a sudden, not quite knowing why Matt and others like him weren’t going to get him down in future, but just knowing that they weren’t. It’s funny, all those years of wishing for an uncle or someone to go backstop for me, and now I get one, for some reason I can suddenly backstop myself.
‘You’ll start sprouting any day,’ Nobby said, as if irrelevantly. ‘You’ve got the same build as me. Year I was sixteen-seventeen, I remember, I went up five inches in that year. God, the hell of that, being a beanstalk!’ Nobby promised himself that, if he could, he’d try to protect this boy; then shrugged. What the heck. You can only grow by growing.
Noel looked at Nobby’s tallness, only half-assured. ‘You stayed skinny, but.’
‘That’s much better than having a beer gut,’ Evie said warmly, and Noel felt good, as if she somehow saw him already as he’d be in the future.
And so they walked on, the three, and caught a bus into town and then another to La Perouse, where on this Wednesday that was the fiftieth anniversary of Lizzie dying they stood in sunshine on a high rock and hurled the gun, and then the letters, and the terror of the past, into the bright blue pounding of the Pacific.
EPILOGUE
The days after that Wednesday settled down into ordinary days. The past was still there, but no longer pressed itself relentlessly through the calendar. A stranger to the story could come into the street and observe a flow of unremarkable activity lapping in and out of the two houses.
First there’d be Ted, at half-past five, setting off to the building workers’ day-hire pick-up in Enmore Road. Sometimes he’d get a start, sometimes he wouldn’t; the days when he didn’t, he’d be back again and out with the ladder, working on the years of neglect that had crept over the despot’s two houses, for the despot had made a deal that Ted could work for the rent.
Round about seven, Nobby would bring him a tin mug of tea, and then Evie’s mum and Noel’s mum would pop out the doors at eight and mag away together as they headed for the station. Noel’s mum was much easier these days, had started to relax and laugh for the first time in years, for with Nobby living there she didn’t have to worry about leaving the despot with Noel.
It was Jodie and Ree’s turn next. Out they’d belt, yelling in their uniforms, yelling up to their dad on the ladder, and then Ree would be off, running like blazes, with Jodie’s stumpy legs chasing after her.
At about nine, there’d be Evie and Sammy, and Noel too; for Nobby made Noel go to school regular these days, but that didn’t mean that Noel didn’t delay the getting there, slowing his pace to match Evie and Sammy as they headed down Noel’s back way to the play centre.
After a bit, Evie would come back with the milk and bread and things for both houses, and then they’d have morning tea, Ted and Evie, Nobby and Nobby’s mother, all crammed onto 201’s front balcony, eating fried scones or brownies if Nobby made it, eating peanut-butter toast if Evie or Ted made it, eating baklava and yoghurt cake if they invited Mrs Maria up too. It took a long time sometimes, morning tea, sitting in the sun with the despot and Nobby telling yarns of Liberty Street, and Mrs Maria joining in with stories from back in Greece, and sometimes Mick would ride over and join them and talk of struggles and strikes on the wharves, and there’d be Ted with his tales of when he was an interstate truck-driver, that would sometimes link up with Nobby’s tales of the track.
‘One night, see, at Brewarrina…’ Ted would start.
‘Have you gone fishing down the Black Stump there?’ Nobby would cut in.
‘The Black Stump?’ Ted would scratch his head. ‘At Bre? Can’t say I know it. Down the weir, now. Caught fish there, heaps a times…’
‘Yeah, the old fisheries, mostly fished out now, no, I mean the Black Stump. A funny thing happened to me, camping there one night…’
And they’d be off then, miles away, their voices bringing to the balcony the places that Evie would get to one day, if it killed her.
Though these days, right now, it was the music shop she had to get to by twelve o’clock to do the afternoon shift, so she’d set off, and everyone would remember the time, and Ted would race back to his tools and Nobby would belt down to peel the spuds for the despot’s midday dinner and Mrs Maria would go home to clean the room of the new lodger who’d taken Nobby’s place, and Mick would pedal into town to some union meeting. The despot would stay there on her cane chair in the sun, her hands in her lap lying at peace now her words had come back, now her son had come back, and there was no longer the need for the desperate writing.
Round about one o’clock she’d go in for a feed and a nap, and then it would be Nobby’s time to potter about with a paintbrush, giving Ted a hand till it was half-past two and time to go and get Sammy.
She loved it, Sammy did, the new routine. Instead of Evie twice a day, taking her there, hurrying her back, there’d be Dad there now at pick-up time in the Kingswood, honking a triple honk on the horn so she’d know he was excited to see what pastings and things she’d bring home today. Or Mr Man would be there, and that was just as good, because his steps were slow like hers and they’d explore back through the lanes. Often they’d find things like a cardboard telescope or a nearly-good thong that she could take up to show Nanna. Sammy loved Nanna because she’d once found her when it was dark.
And then when Maria and Jodie got home it’d be time for afternoon tea. Out on the front porch watching Dad and Mr Man or out the back on the trampoline where they could yell up to Nanna at her window to watch them be a circus. Or they’d run down and have it with Mrs Maria for old times’ sake, or sometimes even, on special rainy days, Nanna would let them have it in her front parlour with a silver teapot and a silver tray and the piano. Maria sometimes got annoyed because Nobby and Mrs Maria weren’t secrets any more and she co
uldn’t plan witch-things about the despot, but Jodie reckoned it was better because now Maria could openly earn money from everyone so she’d get her BMX bike all the faster, and then Jodie would inherit the ancient-history dinosaur.
Round about five the two mums would come back, one a bit before the other, or sometimes both together, Evie’s mum with her neat case of make-up samples, Noel’s mum maybe carrying a parcel of fish from the fish shop near the station because Nobby loved fish.
‘Knock-off time, mate,’ Nobby would yell up the ladder, and he and Ted would sit out on the step and have a beer and admire what a difference their work had made today, while Nobby would gut and scale the fish.
Then it’d be Evie and Noel, back from the music shop. Noel still went there after school to hang around and Evie liked him being there. It seemed okay to be seen with a guy who was still at school, because now she had a job (even if it was only part-time and eighty bucks a week). She could feel as if things she did were her choices, not something foisted on her. She could even move out if she wanted to, because Sharnda had offered her a room at her place for twenty bucks, but now that she could, she didn’t want to. Ted had built her shelves and lined her room, and the girls didn’t come in any more because they had Nobby and the despot to visit.
Besides, there was Noel next door, and something about Noel really grew on you. Evie couldn’t imagine how she’d put up with life at Campbelltown, with Roseanne’s silly giggle instead of Noel’s wild laugh. When things got one of them down, the other one would sense it, and they’d find themselves meeting in the lane and heading for the secret landscape. They’d go there other times too, just when they happened to be around the station; as they happened to be for example on Christmas Eve that year.
On Christmas Eve that year, Noel and Nobby had just bought all their presents in the last-minute late-night Coles rush and were back at the fish shop near the station buying three kilos of prawns as their present for Ted and Evie’s mum, when they spotted Evie laden down with bags from Centrepoint coming out from the station.
Noel and Nobby looked at Evie’s bags, and it was obvious she’d thought up better presents than they had, but it was too late now.
‘Let’s go down the landscape,’ Evie said to Noel without thinking.
Noel didn’t say anything. His uncle was there, and he didn’t feel like sharing it, even with Nobby.
Evie knew, and went quiet herself, wishing she hadn’t said anything, remembering that other time when she’d sort of betrayed it to Roseanne.
So they stood there, the three of them, in the bit of waste land in between Uncle George’s and the station, and Nobby was quiet too, remembering back to that other late-night-shopping night when he’d stood here, in this very spot, listening to the voice of Jack Sylvester and watching Lizzie over there on the other side of the crowd. Lizzie tense as a cat, keeping an eye out down Australia Street to the cop shop, spoiling for a fight. And then that row she’d had with him. The first row they’d ever had. That night, that had been the beginning. The beginning of the end, you might as well say. It didn’t do to dwell on it, but maybe just this once.
Nobby moved past the souvlaki stall and down through the waste land, swinging the plastic bag of prawns to remind himself that he was here, in this time, not following the fierce clatter of Lizzie there before, but here and now, with Noel and Evie close behind. ‘D’you know this place?’ Noel said as Nobby headed up the steps.
‘Do I know the back of me hand?’
Up then, on the stage, dangling their legs down over the criss-cross lights of the suburbs, they could hear the intermittent roar of the trains cutting over the sound of the Christmas carols floating down from the railway pub.
Oh Come All Ye Faithful…
Evie started to hum along without realizing, thinking of Lizzie.
Noel shifted, embarrassed somehow, the Bethlehem side of Christmas not fitting in with his opinions.
As if he could read both their thoughts, Nobby said: ‘There’s nothing wrong with faithfulness, son.’ Thinking of Lizzie. I love forever. ‘You just have to pick the right thing to believe in.’
‘Yeah but...’
‘It’s a bloody damn sight better song than that answer-in-the-wind stuff you play. Answers in the wind! As if any old answer’ll do. You don’t get answers from the wind, son. This is what you get from wind.’ And Nobby farted. He liked to shock them sometimes. Liked to pull himself down to earth too, when these two made the old questions start biting him.
‘So there is an answer?’ Noel desperately wanted one.
‘Don’t you know it, son?’ Letting off a laugh through his teeth. Feeling good suddenly, joy.
Looking down on the criss-cross of the lights of the workers’ suburbs, Botany, Redfern, the backside of Newtown, Alexandria, the houses down there with people living and working and fighting and us up here too, swinging our legs. Us all in a circle that no one can reach to stop, like the mechanical clouds up there that the thinagulla taught me that night beside the river.
Nobby searched up, but there was too much smog, you couldn’t see them here; they were still there, but.
What he could see, what even the city couldn’t blur, was the blaze of the Southern Cross, belting its bright Eureka sign like an ad across the sky, as if up there too people were living and fighting.
‘Live and work, work and fight, live and love life…’ Nobby chanted softly.
‘What’s that?’ Evie said.
‘Something that a woman called Alexandra Kollontai once wrote.’
Evie reached in her bag to feel the silver serviette ring she always carried. She’d never told Noel or Nobby that she had it. The words fitted how she felt but couldn’t say. ‘But why’d she write it, what for?’
‘Ah...well...to end off a story she was writing.’
Noel considered. Up here on the stage. ‘It’s a good ending.’
Evie considered. It was just how she felt. ‘It’s a better beginning.’
Nobby swung his legs still with these silly damn social-worker shoes and said, ‘D’you reckon your mum and Ted would mind if we made a start on these prawns?’
HISTORICAL NOTE
Although this is a novel, the history in this book is real.
In the late 1920s Australia, like most western countries, entered a period of severe economic depression. By 1931 at least a third of the country’s workers had been given the sack—not because of their own inadequacies, but because of the failure of the system.
Unemployment relief was provided by the state governments, and both Labor and conservative parties kept it at a bare subsistence level. In those days, moreover, the dole was not given in cash. At first the unemployed had to line up with a sugar bag at the relief depot, where they would be given the actual goods: meat, bread, tea, sugar, soap etc. By 1931, a system of coupons had been introduced. Unemployed workers would go once a week to their local ‘dole dump’, where they would be given coupons for meat, groceries, and bread. They would trade these with a designated butcher, grocer and baker.
Obviously, with no cash, there was no money for fares, shoes, clothes, doctors’ bills, medicines and other essentials—let alone for a luxury such as a bottle of beer or a bar of chocolate or a bag of oranges. While this made the physical side of life very tough, it also increased the humiliation of unemployment.
Yet the most disastrous aspect of the 1930s relief system was its effect on the housing of the unemployed. With no cash, paying the rent was a weekly nightmare for the jobless. In those days, most working-class Australians rented their homes, so thousands of unemployed workers lived under the threat that they could be evicted for failing to pay their rent. In working-class suburbs it was common to see bailiffs forcing a family onto the street, together with their bits and pieces of furniture and clothing. After being evicted, some families were able to squash in with relatives, who were usually already living in overcrowded houses. Others were forced to shift to the shanty towns of bag and tin
humpies that sprawled on unwanted land along the coast. Sometimes the young adult members of the family took to the track, and spent the years of the Depression moving between the country towns where they collected their weekly rations.
The sense of injustice aroused by evictions was increased because most of the rental property in working-class suburbs belonged to wealthy landlords and investment companies who owned housing on a vast scale. Many people wondered why poor families should be thrown onto the streets, when the rich lived an unchanged lifestyle in their mansions in the affluent suburbs. While the housing crisis highlighted the cruelty of capitalism, it also dramatised the stupidity of the system: in the inner suburbs of the capital cities, there were strings of terrace houses that had been boarded up because no one could afford to rent them. The real-estate companies usually preferred to have their houses untenanted to allowing the unemployed to receive a free roof over their heads.
Given the extent of the economic crisis and the inequities of the relief system, it is not surprising that all over Australia a proportion of unemployed workers formed organisations to protest against their economic and social plight, and to demand improvements in their conditions. While some of these protest groups were confined to a single area or a single demand, in 1931 there was a nationwide body called the Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM), which was made up of hundreds of suburban and country groups. By mid-1931 there were about seventy UWM branches in Sydney alone, with perhaps two hundred members in each branch. Although this was a fraternal organisation of the Communist Party of Australia, in any branch there would only be a handful of Communist members. The platform of the UWM included demands for a 100 per cent increase in the value of the dole, a rent, fare and clothing allowance in cash and the end to evictions.
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