Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  Rose, busy cutting recipes out of the Weekly and sticking them into a scrapbook, was so surprised to see him she knocked over a vase of white geraniums. Phil, giving up on a drug text, wondered aloud how anyone could’ve had enough of Tanunda. As Rose put on the kettle, Nathan started explaining himself, using Bruegel as a descriptor of lesser hells in which his father became the ogre of Goat Square. Ending up with an edited version of his argument with William and a description of the night at Wohler’s.

  ‘So Dad says, Nathan, don’t you think I’ve heard about this whore – sorry, Rose – this girl you’ve been going out with? And I say, What have you heard? And he says, She’s the local …’

  Rose looked at him and smiled. ‘“Bitch.”’

  Phil covered his ears. ‘Mother.’

  ‘She’s the local bitch,’ Nathan continued, modulating his voice into tones of fire and brimstone.

  ‘Maybe you should introduce them,’ Phil said, continuing an assignment.

  ‘I know,’ Rose smiled, cutting outside the lines, ‘rumours multiply like bugs in a small town.’

  ‘Like bacteria, mother.’

  ‘Bugs.’

  Phil ran his finger over the page of the text, smiling at Nathan.

  ‘Lithium. Just perfect for your dad.’

  Rose turned the recipe over and started gluing. ‘Phillip, it’s none of your concern.’

  But he read anyway, grinning, ‘“Taken to treat and prevent mood swings, either up or down, mania or depression …”’ Continuing until he found something to support his argument, reading it slowly and loudly, ‘“People with manias are liable to destroy relationships and jobs in bouts which may last for weeks, followed by even longer periods of depression. They may be talkative, sleepless, irritable, egocentric and prone to flights of fantasy …”’ He looked up at both of them, ‘I could arrange for some.’ Checking. ‘“Dosage: slow release tablets …”’

  Rose didn’t look up from a diagram of a whiting skeleton.

  ‘Phillip, would you talk about your own father that way?’

  ‘If he started a cult.’

  ‘Phillip, people disagree on things, doesn’t mean they want to do each other in.’

  Phil couldn’t see the problem. ‘It’s an option.’

  ‘Nathan might be angry, but I’m sure he doesn’t hate his father, do you, Nathan?’

  Nathan looked back at Phil and smiled, ‘… no.’

  In her head Rose was filleting, a skill she’d never properly developed. Taking a knife she opened the flesh down the spine and started removing bones. No matter how hard you tried you’d still miss some and Bob would just about choke, coughing and spluttering and gurgling cold tea as he recovered from another brush with death.

  ‘If my dad doesn’t sign,’ Nathan continued, ‘I will hate him. He can see it’s something I want to do. If you do that to a person they’ll never forget.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ Rose said, searching the fillet for stray bones. ‘After the first war they said it’d never happen again. Lessons had been learnt. Then came the League of Nations. Then came Hitler. So …’

  Phil looked up. ‘What’s Hitler got to do with an apprenticeship with the Railways?’

  Rose sighed, obsessed with a single bone, somewhere, that she’d missed. Realising that humans never quite got it right, fussing over things which probably didn’t matter anyway.

  ‘I think hate could be the word,’ Nathan concluded, ‘if it came down to it.’

  Rose started to feel the weight of other people’s problems – this time, not things she could leave behind in the Coronary and Surgical wards. It could have been worse. Nathan was a good kid, but when they took him on they took on his father. There were some things the extra money couldn’t cover, like the stress from so many Weekly sagas made real.

  The sun tumbled in the window, settling across a lace tablecloth full of bread crumbs and gravy stains. Rose found the recipe for an Asian soup and started clipping. Chances were that Bob, with his pockets eternally full of antacid tablets, wouldn’t let it past his lips, but at least now it was three onto one. And anyway, she guessed, if he played up, there were still cans of chicken noodle dating back to before the war.

  Phil’s eyes lit up again and he looked at Nathan. ‘I think this is what you’re after.’ Reading. ‘“Pentobarbitone. Barbiturate sedative used to relieve anxiety and promote sleep …”’

  He looked at Nathan again and lifted his eyebrows. ‘This is the good bit. “Accidental overdoses are common and characterised by a loss of consciousness, shallow breathing, weak pulse and low blood pressure. Shock and kidney failure follow …”’

  ‘Phillip.’ Rose looked up, brandishing a stick of glue.

  After tea Rose washed the dishes and settled in at the phone table with her best friend Lorna. Lorna had introduced her to the League of Health and Beauty, Prospect branch, a group formed by and for the betterment of Christian women in their ‘post-motherhood phase’. Rose was telling Lorna how much she’d enjoyed their eurhythmics on the floor of the Presbyterian church hall. Stripped down to their black satin briefs and undershirts they’d moved their bodies about like ‘wild flamingos in a dying frenzy’ (Rose’s words), combining ballet and gym in previously untried combinations.

  ‘Is it every Wednesday?’ Rose asked, as Nathan listened impatiently from the lounge. It was nearly nine before he brought it up again, looking at Bob and saying, ‘Do you want me to speak to my father first?’

  Bob stood up and took the phone from his wife. ‘She’ll call you back, Lorna, I’ve got a business call.’

  Arthur stood on the porch of the Miller house shaking off rain, which was coming down torrentially, and scraping mud from the soles of his slippers. He knocked and Bluma told him William was riding Shanks’ pony.

  ‘Who is Shanks?’

  ‘The toilet, Arthur.’ Smiling.

  Arthur tightened the cord on his dressing-gown and sprinted down the side of the house. Knocking on the toilet door he called over the rain, ‘William, a phone call, from Adelaide.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nathan.’

  ‘Tell him to ring again … no, wait …’

  Arthur hung his dressing-gown over the back of a chair and placed it in front of his stove. William came in, wiping clusters of wet hair from his face. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Arthur.’

  Nathan heard the voices from the kitchen and breathed deeply.

  When his father came on he said, ‘Mr Drummond said he would explain, how the indentures work.’

  ‘Nathan, I don’t – ’ But Nathan had gone.

  Bob took the phone from him. ‘Mr Miller?’

  ‘Mr Drummond?’

  William’s voice was colder than Bob had imagined. ‘Nathan has asked me to explain the legal aspects of his uh, apprenticeship.’

  Nathan sat down on the arm of the lounge and listened eagerly.

  Arthur sat down on his own chair, leaning into the stove, reading a volume of Steinbeck he shared with a nest of curious mice.

  ‘I understand,’ William replied, ‘but sixteen’s too young for a person to decide their future.’

  Bob paused, not wanting to agree, not wanting to disagree. ‘Everyone’s different, Mr Miller. The thing is Nathan – ’

  ‘The papers are asking me, do I think he’s ready? No. That’s why I haven’t signed.’

  There was no other way to say it. ‘Mr Miller, I’ve worked with Nathan – ’

  ‘And I’m his father.’

  ‘Other supervisors I’ve spoken to – ’

  ‘The papers ask me, I say no. If you think he is, all well and good.’

  ‘But Mr Miller, he can’t continue without your consent.’

  ‘Mr Drummond, I didn’t draw up your contracts.’

  Bob looked at Nathan and shrugged. Phil, laying back on the lounge with his eyes closed, whispered, ‘Barbiturates,’ but this time Nathan couldn’t laugh.

  ‘Mr Miller, I keep copies of Nathan’s wor
k from trade school.’

  ‘I have no doubts they’re good. Nathan was drilled in maths and science. It’s not a question of marks.’

  Or dates. So many numbers, meaningless in some cases, profound in others. Cleaned from the collective memory like graffiti from a cubicle. From thirty-foot dicks to the Apocalypse.

  ‘Mr Miller, if you don’t mind me saying, there seems to be a separate issue – ’

  ‘Nathan has told you this?’

  ‘No. I’ve gathered.’

  ‘You’re wrong. You’d have to know everything about us. And anyway, to say I can’t keep things separate … if it’s the girl he’s mentioned, he’s wrong. I look at everything. That’s something you can’t do from Adelaide.’

  Bob knew there was no point arguing. After a few, empty moments he said, ‘Maybe I’ll send you the results anyway, and get his supervisors to write something down.’

  No reply.

  ‘Mr Miller?’

  ‘It’s up to you. Apart from this, I’d like to thank you for looking after Nathan.’

  The strangeness of this comment struck him; William was just as Nathan had described. After he hung up he said to Nathan, ‘There’s always a way.’

  ‘How?’

  But he just looked at him as if to say, Innocent child.

  After the commiserations of a shared, communal cuppa, Bob went out to his shed, coughing from a cold he said he couldn’t shake, and Rose returned to Lorna and the League of Health and Beauty. The boys stretched out on the lounge-room floor with Phil’s doctored version of Monopoly, the Strand becoming Syphilis Street, Westminster Herpes, Bond Gonorrhoea …

  William left Arthur buried in Steinbeck. He went home, peeled off his wet clothes and stood completely naked in Bluma’s black kitchen. ‘Telephones,’ he whispered. ‘Who’d have ’em, bringing bad news into your house.’

  On Friday, Nathan had the Drummond house to himself. He rose early and cooked everyone breakfast, burning bacon in a frypan Rose had picked up for a steal in the Harris Scarfe basement. After he’d waved them off at the door, he attacked the dishes, scrubbing with a rusted, limp Steelo; he cleaned the WC and hand-washed Bob’s overalls, the familiar smell of kero, turps and everything diesel in his nose.

  Just before lunch he sat down with a clean, white sheet of paper and tried to summon words. Dear Dad … no, too familiar for his purpose … Father … melodramatic … William … he’d never called him William, that denoted an equality they didn’t have. Eventually he left it out all together, starting simply: Regarding our conversation, and the phone call Mr Drummond made on my behalf …

  He finished the letter and found an envelope in Rose’s drawer of everything that doesn’t go anywhere else. After feasting on a lunch of stale bread and jam, he locked the door and headed south towards Churchill Road. Stobie poles stood rusting silently in the half-sun, their foundations overgrown with capeweed or tarted up with geraniums and asparagus fern, either way, a compendium of dog piss as unknowable as the Enigma code. Turning into Churchill Road, he stopped to look in the window of an old funeral parlour turned whitegoods showroom. It would never happen in Tanunda, he thought, imagining the guts of Langmeil church full of grocery-lined shelves or agricultural chemicals, the spirits of the dead retreating from the rafters in horror.

  He bought a stamp at Wagner’s deli and licked it, positioning it geometrically in the corner of the envelope, as if this might impress his father. Eventually he took out the letter, sat at a bus stop and re-read it. I can see that you’re determined to have me home. Why, I don’t know, as there’s nothing for me there. I could never go back to school now and our farm, as it is, could never support us both. And anyway, it doesn’t interest me …

  Going on to explain that a compressor was no less profound than a bottle of shiraz, one set of skills no more important than another, but how it was the way you spent your days. And what he meant was, the people around you, their way of talking, of kidding you, of seeing you not as a son, eternally driving through life on a set of learner’s plates, but as a complete and fully formed person, reliant, derived or reminiscent of no one else. If it’s a case of having me around to help fulfil your prophecies, forget it. Christ is coming, maybe, but God’s quite content to let us go on running railways …

  And Hoovering rugs, growing orchids, entering lotteries we’ll never win (Rose was religious with her Tatts), repairing wheelchairs, making conversation with patients too deaf or nutty, or both, to know what we’re saying, but continuing anyway, sure that something will get through. A God content to let us go on eating chow mein, share memories of relatives no one had seen for thirty years, take the wrong job or marry the wrong person; to let us go on living until an artery blocked or a bus swerved somewhere.

  … the thing being, Dad, I won’t come home until you come to your senses. I know you’re probably cursing me, but there it is. I could come home, but I’d be full of resentment. I don’t want to be. I don’t feel that way here. And anyway, why should I give up what I’ve worked for? You wouldn’t …

  A bus pulled up and the doors flew open. The driver looked at him strangely. ‘It’s an hour service.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  The driver shook his head and, revving the engine, pulled out in front of traffic. Nathan opened out a near-perfect electronics test and checked the answers, knowing it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  There was a hand-written note from his lecturer and a brochure on the benefits of working for the S.A. Railways. Nathan knew that superannuation, sick pay and a job for life would mean nothing to William compared to the promise of March 21.

  Anyway, Mr Drummond says there are ways. Failing that I can wait. There are shops to be cleaned. I will find money. I will continue. Please make it easy and sign my papers. Sincerely, Nathan.

  So be it. He sealed the envelope and dropped it in a post box. Walking back into Wagner’s deli, he bought a pack of Craven A and started off down Churchill Road towards the city. At five o’clock he met Phil and they managed to sneak into the Imperial Hotel. By six they were nearly pissed, chatting up a pair of twenty-something office girls in search of a reliable man. ‘I’m nearly a chemist,’ Phil said. ‘Chemists hold people’s lives in their hands.’

  He cupped his hands, anticipating something more than Bex, and they laughed at him. ‘Where do you ladies stand on the 38th Parallel?’

  The manager rang a bell. ‘Time, gentlemen.’

  As the girls climbed the stairs to King William Street, Phil called after them, ‘Let me shout you some whiting.’

  But they both knew communism and youth were no match for a solid income, even when Angelakis’ Fish Cafe was involved.

  ‘How would you have afforded whiting?’ Nathan asked, as Phil lead him towards Rundle Street.

  ‘I would’ve improvised,’ Phil replied, going on to explain how they were probably private school girls, beyond pre-marital corruption. ‘What we need are a couple of girls like us.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Unbound by … moral considerations.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  Phil smiled at him as they paused at the Beehive corner. ‘Nathan, dear boy, five minutes horizontal beside the Torrens and you’d forget your Proverbs.’ As Phil imagined giggling voices and wet, hungry tongues, as Joe Aronson drifted across the water. ‘The Beehive is where they meet.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Girls. Before the flicks.’

  Phil was a collector of human refundables, thrown into the bin of his good fortune. But tonight was a quiet night. After twenty minutes Nathan said, ‘This is useless.’

  Phil persuaded him to do one circuit of Hindley Street. Eventually they returned to the train station and the consolation of new-season bikinis in Rose’s latest Weekly.

  The next day, as the Millerites sat on Arthur’s ark in a lukewarm pool of gemutlichkeit, involved with Mary’s pretzels and Catherine’s lighter-than-cumulus potato salad, Bluma asked Mary what had happened to their s
on-in-law Joseph.

  Mary shrugged. ‘He has work.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’ William asked.

  ‘This is what he says,’ Mary responded. ‘What about Nathan?’ she asked, as if in retribution.

  ‘Study,’ Bluma replied.

  Instead of Revelations, Bluma felt like their time was becoming a salad of half-truths and bluffs, things people didn’t want to discuss. And at the centre of it was William, the Anubis of Tanunda, weighing up souls and finding them wanting. It could be anyone next. The best you could do was bring a salad and keep your mouth shut.

  After lunch they gathered in the shade of William’s myrtle, kneeling before a cross Arthur had built them and erected in place of Nathan’s old swing.

  ‘See,’ Bruno said to Edna, staring out of the window at them.

  ‘This is how those cults start in Africa. Should’ve closed them down.’

  ‘Who should’ve?’

  ‘The government.’

  ‘What can they do?’

  Bruno was thinking how they should’ve put William in Loveday, and thrown away the keys. ‘Not a proper religion. Shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘Y’ sound like the Russian fella, with the mo.’

  ‘Stalin? So?’

  ‘Down to Korea, be here next.’

  Bruno parted the venetians, raising his voice. ‘Eh, William, keep it down.’

  Edna pulled him away from the window. ‘Bruno.’

  The Lord’s Prayer stopped and they all looked up. William saw Bruno moving around inside but said nothing, bowing his head, ‘“… Thy Kingdom come …”’

  The following Tuesday, William stood beside Arthur’s cross, a can of varnish in one hand, a brush in the other. Bluma approached him, holding Nathan’s letter. William, knowing what it was, continued painting as she read the letter aloud.