Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  He shrugged, glanced at Lilli and back at Thea. ‘That’s okay. Something better came out of it. In Adelaide.’

  Thinking, not that you’d care, being caught up in the centre of the universe.

  The Apex universe. A budget Sigalas’ without spearmint milkshakes. A universe of pot cakes floating about in snowdomes.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Thea continued, looking back at Lilli.

  ‘How?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘So close.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Don’t get defensive.’

  ‘Well say what you mean …’ He looked at Lilli; she was trying to smile, but it was a smile for Thea. He thought, Fuck you, and all at once felt like Lilli’s hobby again. What he needed was Phil, speaking his mind. He’d demolish Thea in a minute flat.

  ‘I don’t mean anything. You’re paranoid.’

  But he knew what Lilli had said to her. She’d described how this little sixteen-year-old had followed her into the hills the day before his exams. Like a puppy. After twelve years of school, like he didn’t realise what he was doing.

  But he did. And that’s why he felt so let down, again. Alone, like his only family was his Adelaide family.

  He stood and walked off towards Murray Street. Lilli didn’t follow him. He heard them laugh as he went and felt so angry he could have thrown the yeast against the platform.

  But he didn’t, the warmth and smell, signs of better things to come. He heard Thea calling, ‘See you, Nathan,’ but didn’t stop. When he was on the other side of the station he lowered his back down against a wall, putting his head on his knees, unsure of his thoughts.

  After a few minutes he saw Lilli walking alone, coming in his direction. All of a sudden he knew how she saw him: pot-bellied and stiff-dicked, pallid, sweaty hair glued across his forehead, red cheeks and the lips of an angel, and teeth so white he had to be using All-Glo.

  She walked past without seeing him, on towards town. He didn’t say a word. He could do better. Whether it was in the dressing room of the Union Theatre or the shade of a Moreton Bay fig in Botanic Park. She was as surplus as the broad gauge axles the Railways had left around to rust.

  William rested on Nathan’s swing, watching individual drops of rain falling out of the sky, as if in slow motion, following a trajectory whipped up by the southerlies. Drops growing bigger on the leaves of Bluma’s agapanthus, until they had enough weight to roll, exploding into shit-rich earth, reacting with nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and moving osmotically into the roots of yellowing tomato plants, ready to be green-mulched when he found some time.

  The bells of Langmeil rang softly, but there were no clues. They didn’t have the urgency of a Doms or the randomness of a Hermann. Maybe it was Henry himself, with a few of his young nephews: one two three, and pause, one two, and pause …

  Nathan, sitting at the kitchen table, looked up as his father came in and sat opposite him. ‘Would you like to help me pick lemons?’ William asked.

  ‘I suppose so.’ Sighing. Caught up in Lilli’s pants, two sizes too big, hitched up every minute or so, unconcerned that the elastic from her knickers showed or her cuffs had frayed beyond repair. A fine silver necklace and a ring she’d never explained. Clips holding back black hair she claimed was entirely natural, although he’d never seen a black-haired Hermann or Fechner.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ William continued.

  ‘I will.’

  Nathan had spent half of the night awake in his loft, staring up at rafters planed by Anthelm and bolted by Robert, thinking how he just needed to get her alone, how he’d seen her as a follower for the first time but how everyone had their moments of indecision. Still, he wasn’t about to go chasing after her, and if she appeared under his lemon tree …

  ‘“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …”’

  Bluma sat down and they bowed their heads. Nathan was busy running his finger behind Lilli’s elastic, applying words such as grace and forgiveness and sin to his own situation, making Lilli the whore on the hill of fish and loaves, gathering up what she could carry to sell later. Held down by the faithful and stoned, but absolved by the wandering Messiah.

  Grace. The promise of constant forgiveness. This is what still sustained Nathan. No one else promised and no one else delivered. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. If you stepped back beyond that there was only darkness. You might be okay without the Bible for a day, a week, a month – but what about the times when you were tested? When you needed your faith? How would Bluma have sustained herself, lying in bed at Willow Hospital sixteen years before, blessed on one hand by the baby in her arms but cursed by the scar on her abdomen, where one of Mr Scholz’s best had cut to find her uterus, bleeding from a haemorrhage three days after Nathan’s arrival. Carried away in a stainless steel dish covered by a tea-towel as William watched them, up to their elbows in blood, threading and sewing and asking for surgical sponges. Whispering consolations from Hebrews chapter thirteen, ‘“Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight …”’

  Nathan was a blessing, it was as simple as that. Bluma would forever curse the gingham tea-towel, but that was God’s word and the word was with, and was, God.

  And his son. William’s devotion passed onto a celebration of Jesus, describing moments of healing and miracles such as water into wine. Jugs and jugs of the stuff. No one sure if it was cabernet or grenache, but wine nonetheless.

  Nathan looked across at his father and frowned. William shrugged. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If it was meant so literally.’

  William looked confused. ‘If what was?’

  ‘Like Jack and the Beanstalk, no one actually believes – ’ ‘Nathan,’ Bluma smiled, trying to stop him before it was too late.

  William sat forward. ‘But that’s a fairytale. This is the Bible.’

  ‘True. But they were still stories. Stories with a message. It was a better way of getting it over.’

  William looked at him. ‘These are not even your thoughts.’

  ‘So what?’

  Bluma shook her head. ‘Nathan.’

  But Nathan wasn’t finished. ‘Apparently, in Jesus’ time, only the rich could afford wine. So what the Bible was suggesting, was that Jesus wanted them all to share.’

  William shook his head. ‘The Bible says that water was turned into wine.’

  ‘Perhaps, but the Bible’s full of this stuff. The burning bush. There’s this shrub in the Middle East that produces a flammable vapour. Like petrol fumes. And every so often, on a hot day – ’ ‘Nathan, none of this is true.’

  ‘It is. Doesn’t mean it’s … all, wrong.’

  William sat back, defeated more by Nathan’s insolence than his facts. ‘It’s this Drummond boy, isn’t it? He has books – ’ ‘So?’

  ‘Written by whom, eh?’

  ‘People. Scientists.’

  And as he always did, William resorted to the Bible, licking his fingers and flicking pages. ‘What good is science if it sets out to destroy our faith?’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘Why doesn’t science cure disease?’

  ‘It has, it will, what were your seven plagues?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if you’d worked these things out for yourself.’

  ‘What about …’ His father pointing at his Bible, slamming it shut, sliding it in front of him. ‘Pencil, paper, the wash-house.’

  Nathan pushed it back. ‘I’m not going to keep coming home to this.’

  ‘Who pays for your board?’

  ‘I earn my own money now.’

  William stood and pointed at the door. ‘The wash-house!’

  Nathan took the Bible and pen and paper and walked out.

  Bluma took William’s hand but he stormed into his study.

  The next morning Nathan rose early, s
lipping on his boots and overalls and taking breakfast with his mother. ‘Think of your father,’ she said, packing his clean washing. ‘All you have to do is keep the peace, I’ve been doing it for years.’

  On the train on the way down he found a pure-maths text someone had left behind. In the jumble of scribbles and formulas he guessed there was even more his dad would reject. The conservation of angular momentum was apparently going on at that very moment: vectors and parabolas – all ways of describing Creation.

  Arriving at Islington he dodged a Bo-Bo diesel and made his way to Bob’s office. He put the cake on the desk and Bob looked up smiling. ‘What have we here?’

  ‘As promised. To make up for last week.’

  At smoko both slabs were demolished in minutes flat, passing from greasy fingers into mouths of smoke-yellow teeth. Washed down by tea in tin mugs. Returning to copper pipes and solder and flux. Small things real and knowable.

  Chapter Eleven

  Bluma said very little as her hair was set. A girl, an apprentice with the surname Steinbusch, rolled the curlers too tight and sprayed on a fixative which smelt like William’s sterilising agents. Then a hair-net full of other people’s hair and a dryer which hummed quietly to the accompaniment of Edna Hermann getting her weekly trim, her hairdresser, a girl named Keane, struggling to find anything out of place. Edna was all for a short and practical cut, although she wouldn’t trust Bruno with a pair of scissors, fringe lines like line graphs of GDP in some African nations.

  ‘Leonie Munzberg,’ she said, looking at a copy of the Oracle. ‘Don’t you remember, Bluma, she used to do the accounts for Chateau Tanunda?’

  ‘No, though there was Mrs Fielke.’

  ‘She’s still there. Leonie Munzberg left years ago. I’d barely heard her name till now.’ She straightened the paper and read: ‘“Mrs Munzberg was apprehended by police at West Terrace cemetery after the caretaker noticed her regularly placing flowers on the grave of the Somerton mystery man. His body was found on Somerton beach on 1 December, 1948 and, despite extensive investigations, never identified.”’

  Edna looked up and smiled. ‘See, our own bit of intrigue. How exciting.’ Continuing as Miss Keane tried to steady her head. ‘“Mrs Munzberg claimed she believed the body to be her father-in-law’s, washed ashore after a boating accident.” Likely story.’

  The apprentice adjusted Bluma’s dryer and said, ‘Wasn’t there something about The Rubaiyat?’

  Edna lifted her eyebrows. ‘Yes. His clothes were found in a locker at the railway station. They found a torn page in the pocket.’ She found the place in the article. ‘“The fragment carried the words Taman Shud, meaning ‘the end’ or ‘the finish’.”’

  Bluma reached out for her cold coffee and finished it in two gulps. The end of what? William would be interested … no, he’d read all manner of things into it: Bulgarian sailors throwing themselves off freighters, suicidal angels as characters from Revelations, a spy, a Russian dancer, a frustrated local ending it all with untraceable barbiturates.

  ‘So spooky,’ Edna concluded, turning the page. Eventually Miss Keane finished and brushed her off, summoning a cloud of baby talc to engulf and sanitise the mystery man of Somerton beach. Edna set off for the Apex to check on Lilli. After she’d gone, the Steinbusch girl swept an almost hairless floor as Miss Keane removed Bluma’s dryer, unrolling curlers and teasing her hair with a brush. ‘You’ll feel all fresh, like Doris Day,’ she laughed, but Bluma felt as stale as an old Arrowroot biscuit.

  Standing at the door, the rain came down in buckets. Miss Keane handed her an umbrella and, putting up the CLOSED FOR LUNCH, helped her down the steps, locking the door behind her. Bluma walked quickly down Murray Street, pausing to shelter under a carob as she fought to open the umbrella. She ran on again, stopping under the Oracle’s verandah. She resorted to brute force and the umbrella opened out in front of her, immediately blowing out of her hands and down Murray Street towards the hotel.

  Pulling her coat up over her head she ran, cursing William as she went. Where other ladies had their menfolk to pick them up in Oldsmobiles and Austins, hers just sat at home in a haze of Hebrews and things as they’d always been. No thought of how it affected others. Like the lino she was sure would save her lungs from an old age of wheezing and spluttering. But no, lino was not necessary, inasmuch as anything was not necessary if March 21 was right. The End. Taman Shud. Although what Omar Khayyam meant as poetry, William took as revelation. The end to what? Meanwhile she had to feel guilty if she had her hair set or bought a block of Cadburys chocolate.

  William, I sacrifice a lot, she’d say.

  But he’d reply that the Last Days were a test, sin and vice everywhere, temptations laid out to lead the unwary into the bargain basement.

  She rushed in the back door and stood dripping, hanging up her coat and kicking off her shoes. William sat at the table in candle light.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  She shrugged. ‘To have my hair set.’

  ‘Set? What’s that mean?’

  ‘A permanent wave.’

  He looked at her wet hair, clinging to her head, her perm ruined. ‘What did they do?’

  She took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself.

  ‘You wouldn’t read about it.’ She rushed to the linen press, took a towel and wrapped it around her head. ‘They had to close right then.’

  ‘When?’

  And with that the rain eased. ‘Curse them.’

  She removed the towel and teased her hair with a comb, staring into the mirror. There it was, a full head of hair sitting flat against her scalp. ‘Ruined!’

  William was walking around her, staring at the top of her head.

  ‘A permanent wave? How much money was this?’

  ‘What’s it matter?’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ll want your money back.’

  ‘I can’t ask for my money back.’

  ‘You can. You will. What made you even think of a …

  permanent wave?’

  ‘I wanted something … fresh.’

  The only word she could think of. Fresh like Doris Day. More like the photo of the corpse on Somerton beach, Edna holding it up and saying, ‘There was a fella at the Strathmore. They found a bag of hypodermics in his room. But he’d checked out the day before.’ Everyone hushed. The face of the corpse lingering in Bluma’s head. As lifeless as the hair that clung to her scalp, even after it’d dried. ‘Their chemicals weren’t strong enough,’ she said, teasing it vainly.

  William sat down, scanning his papers by candle light. ‘A permanent wave, eh?’ Thinking how he’d stick it in his scrapbook if he could. She fixed him firmly in her gaze. ‘I don’t get much, William.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to spend money on.’

  ‘It is. I’ll go back, they’ll fix it cheap.’

  ‘They’ll fix it free.’

  ‘William!’ she pleaded.

  ‘You pay money, to look like a … monkey?’

  She sighed, dropping her head.

  ‘Check the bank book,’ he continued, ‘there’s not a lot spare for … perms … like we were movie stars.’ He started cutting the paper.

  Bluma put on her shoes and stood up. Pulling on her coat she opened the back door and stepped outside, her husband not even looking up. She walked up the front path and out the gate, and as she started along Langmeil Road, the rain began again. Soft at first and then showers, spreading out into a squall. Soon she was soaked to the skin. She kept walking into the wind, head bowed, purse dangling, not in the slightest bit rushed. If anything she went slower, wondering where to go.

  Meanwhile, Mary Hicks moved around her lounge room, dusting, listening for her daughter. Whispers. And then Joseph laughing. She paused by their closed door, calling, ‘Anything I can get you?’

  ‘No, Mum, we’ve nearly finished … cleaning up.’

  Two o’clock on a Monday afternoon, locked in their room, what was a mother supp
osed to think? How do you clean up an already clean room?

  Joseph moved his plastic glasses (with Groucho Marx nose and mo) down to the tip of his nose, ‘Let me see,’ he whispered, ‘what have we got here?’ Slipping Ellen’s blouse up over her head. ‘Just as I suspected, they’ll have to go.’ She giggled and he hushed her.

  ‘What do you care?’ she asked.

  ‘She’ll find some reason,’ he replied, imagining his motherin-law standing in the open doorway as his pants dropped to his ankles.

  ‘These are always in the way,’ he continued, unlatching her bra with an expertise he hadn’t learnt at the PMG.

  Just as Joseph was getting serious, the front flyscreen rattled and someone turned the bell. ‘Ellen, could you get that?’ Mary asked, right outside their bedroom, earlobe touching their door.

  ‘I’m just getting changed.’ Joseph rolled his head on Ellen’s chest, dragging his mouth over her breasts, his tongue leaving a snail trail of curried egg and lettuce.

  Mary opened the front door. ‘Bluma.’

  Bluma stepped in and stood dripping on her rug. ‘Thought I’d pop in. You’re not busy?’

  ‘No.’ She marched Bluma into the bathroom and covered her in towels. ‘Don’t you have an umbrella?’

  ‘The wind took it.’

  Mary fetched dry clothes and left Bluma to get changed. Passing the door she listened again and said, ‘I’m putting the kettle on for Bluma. Who wants coffee?’

  Joseph put his lips to Ellen’s ear and whispered, ‘Yes, thanks.’

  Ellen laughed and drew close to his ear. ‘She won’t barge in now.’

  Joseph, smiling. ‘No?’

  ‘Could you imagine, Oh, Bluma, they’re working on their next.’

  ‘Coffee?’ Mary harped.

  ‘No thanks, Mum.’

  Joseph bit her ear. ‘So?’

  Bluma appeared from the bathroom wearing one of Mary’s old work dresses. They sat down at the kitchen table and Mary made chamomile tea. ‘Best for your immunity. Getting around in wet clothes could trigger a cold.’

  Bluma stretched her hand out over the table and Mary took it. ‘This is my new perm.’ Teasing her hair.