by Stephen Orr
Nathan thought about them, Lilli and Phil, and what would happen if they ever got together. She’d have him worked out in no time – words, words and more words – or would it just be an explosive miasma of smut under the arc lights of the Barr Smith unisex?
At two a.m. the following Wednesday, Nathan was woken by Phil’s alarm – his room-mate turning over, switching off the light he’d left on and kicking an analgesics text off his bed.
Nathan got dressed and had breakfast with Bob, who was busy sucking back a last minute Turf and coughing enough to wake the dead. They walked to Islington, as they did every morning, gathered their tools and boarded the employees’ carriage for their trip to Peterborough.
They emerged from the loco depot behind 523 steam, a heavy engine with all the streamlining of a Glen Miller selection. Passing the tallow works and sheep paddocks of Salisbury, Nathan had to work hard to convince himself he wasn’t headed home. Bob showed him a map of the state rail network, extending out from Adelaide in every direction like lantana, and Nathan knew (as surely as the crispness of the long, black lines) that his choices were becoming almost infinite.
Smithfield and Roseworthy, Wasleys and Hamley Bridge, lines shooting off here and there towards disused copper mines and the crabs of Port Wakefield, here the Nullarbor and via Hawker to the endlessness of the inland. Bob knew them all, having fixed every fridge and cold-store on the network. ‘Once you hit Quorn, things change,’ he said. ‘Saltbush and gibber plains. But apparently there’s things living out there. Country God didn’t bother about.’
Burra to Terowie was an endless stretch of mallee, saltbush and corrugated plains stretching out orange against a sky of cloudless blue. Languorous melaleucas branched at ground level into explosions of purple and white pom-poms, their form reminding Nathan of black and white photos from school atlases, narratives of deluded explorers (megalomaniacal Germans with visions of inland seas) and stories of the big JC himself, talking with wallabies in the form of the Devil.
Peterborough was the last junction before the line headed east towards New South Wales. Beyond the border the world stopped, dropping vertically into a dark chasm of space they’d also described at school, full of half-human, half-dead vampires, lakes of fire and comets smashing into each other, sparks and showers of hot lava and an atmosphere of sulphur dioxide which could dissolve lungs in an instant.
Arriving in the Peterborough yards their carriage was detached and shunted and the loco reversed into an old round-house. Like the Islington loco depot, it was black with the smoke of overworked trains, boilers lit and fed in the early morning ready to pull cattle-full rolling stock and dining cars with farmers off to town in suits that barely fitted. S.A. Railways men oozed from their carriage ready for work: relief crews, track work teams, a couple of diesel apprentices, smug in the railway hierarchy above refrigeration mechanics.
Bob and Nathan spent the afternoon stripping down and re-assembling a compressor full of bulldust. After cleaning up they were fed lamb in the William Webb Memorial Cafeteria and sipped long-necks of West End in the employees’ van. Just after dark they went for a walk through town, looking in the sort of shopfronts Nathan was mostly familiar with. A shoe shop with workboots and casuals, slippers and ladies’ formals. Bob laughing, ‘My mum used to have lace-ups like them,’ as Nathan smiled, ‘They’re still catching up,’ tasting the spearmint milkshake of Sigalas’ as Joe Aronson and his Synco Symphonists echoed down main street, Peterborough, into the front bar of the Commercial Hotel, through into the men’s with its noticeable lack of either profound or filthy graffiti.
Settling into a small park of perfectly manicured Kentucky bluegrass, Bob looked up at the sky and said, ‘That one, I know, is the Big Dipper, and that one the Bear.’
‘The saucepan constellation,’ Nathan pointed, knowing exactly where to look for it.
And God, up there somewhere, perhaps. Bob refused to give voice to these thoughts, although he sensed Nathan shared the dilemma of the bedside drawer – unresolved feelings which Phil had rationalised out of existence. ‘You could form anything out of the stars,’ Nathan offered.
‘How’s that?’
‘Dot to dot.’
Like imaginary weather trees, drifting across the sky, seen by some but not others, portents of rain or disaster, gods with mouths zipped up or not there at all.
To Phil it’s just so much gas, Bob thought. ‘Yes, that’s an area of interest,’ he said. Feeling small. Unable to mention God. (As William couldn’t avoid it, at that moment drafting a speech he planned to read out in church, under the nose of those who’d deny the good news.)
Nathan and Bob walked back via a bakery smelling of pies and pipe loaves and a Christedelphian shopfront promising a public lecture, Did Jesus Look Like This?, a picture of a Neanderthal in Messiah’s clothing. A mechanic laboured late into the night on someone’s new Holden as his dog sniffed stobie poles.
They settled into bunks in the employees’ van. If a star is a million miles away, Nathan thought as he drifted off to sleep, then what is God up to? Some time during the night they were coupled to the loco and taken home. Nathan woke with the world passing by in a dark blur, the certainty of static sleep passing away with everything else. He sat up and opened the window to let the wash of air pass over him.
Bless Dad … I know, but bless him … bless Mum, Lilli, Arthur … bless Bob and Rose, and Phil, give him the ability to sing in tune. Walk beside me …
Through the concourse with its departure times like so many stars in the firmament; and only the big fella in blue having the whole picture.
Chapter Eight
Nathan caught the late train to Tanunda after work on Friday night. He stared into small, weedy yards as his train picked up speed and he felt his mood drop. The smell of diesel and oil wasn’t enough to save him from the thought of Tanunda. Getting off the train, William took him by the arm and said, ‘You have remembered, the children’s devotion?’ And in an instant a cold fog descended on Tanunda Station, weighing him down in a gravity of things he’d tried to forget. Such as Bluma smelling his jacket and asking if the Drummond lady had been washing his clothes and, if so, with what, seeing as she probably had better – Bluma’s leftover slices of Lux compressed together in the eternal drive for economy.
He spent Saturday helping out with the pruning, his mind drifting back to Adelaide, into Bob’s shed and through a forest of cracked footplates and torn upholstery, mingling with stale smoke from the Ardath cigarettes Bob smoked. Going inside early he spent an hour on Ohm’s law and electrical circuits. William arrived to watch over his shoulder, suggesting solutions. But again Nathan was dreaming Co-Co and Bo-Bo diesels, cabbage boiled senseless (avoiding any suggestion of sauerkraut), served up on best china in the Webb cafeteria. Bluma, returning from a quilting-bee in Angaston, brought home flake and vinegar-soggy chips as a sort of consolation prize, but the homecoming was soured by William refusing to eat anything cooked in a hundred per cent animal fat.
Waiting outside Langmeil on Sunday morning (William busy inside with the bells, trying to teach Bluma some rhythm, ‘Now, no … now …’) Nathan grabbed Lilli before anyone noticed and dragged her into the church hall. ‘It’s my turn for Sunday School.’
They switched on lights in the vestry, lit heaters and sat down beneath a framed photograph of Pastor Hoffmann. Lilli smiled, crossing her hands in her lap, laying aside a dog-eared copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and asking, ‘So?’
Soon they’d come up with an idea. As she started scribbling messages on note-paper, Nathan wrapped them in endless layers around a presentation Bible. ‘The Drummonds,’ he began, ‘are very different from the Mullers.’
Continuing with a description of Rose in her kitchen, Bob at work on his wheelchairs and Phil in the Barr Smith dunnies, copying thoughts at least as profound as Lilli’s pass-the-parcel notes: Jesus walks beside you … he’s the one with the sandals and food in his beard … Eventually she looked at him directly a
nd asked, ‘So why did you stay down? You oughta seen your dad last Sunday.’
Nathan shrugged. ‘I don’t care. Honestly. You could always come down, although I don’t think they’d put you up.’
‘I have some other friends, from school. One’s at secretarial college, the other at uni.’ She thought, yes, I’m still here, filling pasties with scoops of mixed vegetable, mixing topping for donuts and sprinkling hundreds-and-thousands on buns – slicing bread, endlessly, and ringing up sales from one end of the day to the next.
‘Maybe I should stay,’ she said. ‘I love smiling at ugly babies and making small talk with drongos. Still, there’s worse I suppose …’ As she thought of the options: sewing up bags at the flour mill, bottling wine, putting blue rinses through hair the colour of talc.
Nathan read her notes and smiled. ‘If these kids blab, we’ll get in trouble.’
‘I don’t care,’ she mimicked, leaning forward and kissing him.
He pulled himself off. ‘I have to think of Jerusalem.’
Taken by an idea, she smiled and started writing. Mary Magdalene. My place or yours. Cheep. A wandering messiah and three children to support.
William’s head poked in the room. ‘Nearly ready, Nathan?’
Lilli sat up. ‘It’s going to be quite a party, Mr Miller.’
William stared at her. ‘Maybe Nathan would be better off running things.’
‘I’m the hostess,’ she replied, cocking her head, straightening her dress and returning her hands to her lap.
William closed the door and she grabbed the pen. Alternatives to Christianity: Buddhism, Islam, Hindu, Pagan (fun, boiling mushrooms in cast-iron pots). She sat back and shared her week with Nathan. The Lawrence she’d found in the Tanunda Public Library, sitting abandoned in the Contemporary Fiction beside Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story. She read him some extracts, underlined in hot, red biro, nowhere near as saucy as rumoured, falling well short of the Advertiser personals. ‘See, Lawrence just skirts around it,’ she explained. ‘A bum to him is all marbled flesh, the schlong, an instrument of love … heaving breasts glow translucently in the moonlight …’
She looked at him and laughed. He lowered his head and muttered, ‘Jerusalem,’ and she threw the book at him. Standing up, she selected The Secret of St John Bosco from a bookcase, and started drawing over the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a priest named Don Cagliero, adding beards and moustaches, horns and elephantine cocks which passed from one page to the next. Nathan tried to grab it off her but she climbed to the ledge of a high window and sat in dust an inch thick. Scribbling. Smiling. Looking down at him and lifting her eyebrows as if to say, What y’ gonna do about it?
William appeared at the door again. ‘Pastor Henry’s starting.
Do you want to come and get the children?’
‘Do we what!’ Lilli replied, jumping down from her ledge.
Mrs Fox entered the vestry, cradling a pile of children’s hymns in her arms. Lilli brushed past and said, ‘We shan’t need those,’ walking out to make her announcement in the church proper.
The Langmeil bells fell quiet and pews creaked beneath the weight of a full house. Arthur Blessitt sat beside William, and beside Arthur, Joshua and Seymour. ‘Join me today,’ William had said, and since he was back in his spot in the front row, no one argued.
Arthur shifted his weight around to test some repairs he’d made: a full Tuesday afternoon, upturned pews and glue and nails and Pastor Henry fixing him coffee as he worked.
‘William has finished his harvest?’ Henry had asked.
‘Yes.’
‘This year he seems, preoccupied.’
‘He has his dates. We’ve decided that it’s inevitable.’
‘He has.’
‘We have.’
Henry rearranged a collection of Arthur’s lisianthus on the altar. ‘The thing is, if William’s wrong, he stands to look silly.’
‘Christ isn’t coming unless we want it hard enough. That’s what William says. Fixing pews is one thing, but there has to be an end to it.’
‘You know what the Bible says about that.’
‘Just the same.’
Henry had left him with his hand-drill and cold chicken sandwich, and retreated back into the vestry.
Henry looked out across the congregation. William’s face was blank. Henry had no idea how many people William had got to. Joshua and Seymour probably, both prone to a bit of wand-waving and fireworks. Joshua had gone through an astrology phase, guided to horoscopes and star charts by a new stenographer in his office. For a while he carried around a satchel with maps, books and tables of dates, pulling them out at the slightest suggestion to check the best day for William to start harvesting or Arthur to pot up his carnations. It was a rhythm of nature which God had set in motion, he claimed, but no one was convinced. Henry visited to talk to him, to discuss the concerns of his friends. ‘Who, which friends?’ Joshua had asked.
Eventually he came to his senses, brought down to earth by Harry Powter, his boss, who didn’t accept ‘the stars’ as a reason for missing three days work. ‘Something terrible could’ve happened,’ Joshua said, as Harry explained how it already had for the stenographer, newly replaced by his sixteen-year-old niece.
Henry looked about for the support of Gunther, Ron and Trevor and the others but guessed he was all alone, preaching a Jesus firmly stuck in his sphere.
Back in the hall, Mrs Fox started playing and singing, ‘“Jesus, friend of little children, be a friend to me …”’
Lilli, sitting in the middle of a ring of children, stood up and began talking over the music. ‘Mrs Fox, Nathan and I were given the responsibility of organising today’s devotion.’
Mrs Fox stopped but didn’t move her eyes from the sheet music. ‘It’s standard practice to have a children’s hymn.’
‘Stand up children, musical chairs. Mrs Fox, do you know a tango, a foxtrot?’
Meanwhile, Henry worked his way through a standard mass, watching how William refused to drop any coins in the offering. The congregation stood as the offering was presented to the altar, all except William, who sat with his arms crossed, smiling. Bluma looked over and knew what was coming. During the offertory, Arthur bowed his head, burning Henry’s words into the wood of his cross: What shall I render to the Lord, For all his bounty to me? William was unfazed, watching how Henry kept looking down at him.
In the hall, Mrs Fox was doing her best to improvise a dance tune from Gott ein Vater, stopping on Lilli’s cue. One of Lilli’s cousins lost her chair and started crying. ‘Don’t be a sook,’ Lilli said, dismissing her with a twist of the ear. Mrs Fox turned around. ‘Lilli … is there a point to this?’
Lilli smiled. ‘Survival of the fittest.’ Raising her eyebrows.
‘I mean, how is this a devotion?’
‘For goodness sake. Alright children, as you’ve been taught:
“Our Father, who art in Heaven …”’
Mrs Fox bowed her head and joined in but as Lilli’s speed became supersonic she looked up again. ‘Are we finished here?’
‘No, the fun is just beginning.’
Lilli produced a box of donkey’s tails cut out of butcher’s paper, and removed a half-sized portrait of St Sebastian from the wall. ‘Pin the tail on the martyr. Who’s first?’
The children eagerly lined up, even though there was no prize on offer, leaving tails on shins and elbows and ear lobes. Halfway through, Mrs Fox gathered her music, closed the piano and left.
Climbing awkwardly past legs and over bags she reached Bluma, sat down and whispered, ‘That Fechner girl is causing trouble.’
Bluma looked over at William but there was no point worrying about it now.
Back in the hall, Lilli got the children in a circle and said, ‘When the Schoenberg stops, take off a layer and read out the message.’ She began banging away on Mrs Fox’s piano, picking random notes and clusters and narrating ad lib sprechstimme. ‘Round and round and round it goes,
where it stops, nobody knows.’
The first child unwrapped the present and read out his message: ‘“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna …”’ Lilli encouraged the group to join in, ‘“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna …”’ She returned to the piano with gusto, using her forearm percussively to explore new sounds.
Back in the church Henry looked up, smiling, ‘Sounds like a different sort of devotion.’
But William didn’t smile, choosing his moment, clutching his speech in his sweaty hand and finally standing up. He cleared his throat. ‘I have something to read to you.’
Henry looked down at him. ‘William.’
‘It’ll only take a moment.’
‘Wait for the benediction.’ The pastor looked around for the support of the Elders but they were willing to sit back and let things take their course. After William had dug a big enough hole, they’d just have to fill it in. Henry sighed. ‘Go ahead, William.’
‘I, and a few friends of like mind’ – he indicated the length of his pew, unclear of where his following stopped.
One of the Linkes, sitting towards the end, said, ‘Who?’
‘Mr Blessitt, Mr Heinz and Mr Hicks.’
Mo, Larry and Curly, not disputing William, but hardly vocal in their support. ‘We have come to an understanding of things as they stand. Of how the present business of the world is about to be wound up.’
Silence. ‘This is best left for some other time,’ demanded a voice from the back of the church. ‘Who agrees?’
Mixed responses, but then another voice. ‘Let him finish.’
William flattened his speech against his chest, held it up and started reading. The slight trembling of the paper was almost audible above the silence, which was disturbed only by the clatter of improvised Schoenberg through a thick, plaster wall.