Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  No. Ellen was more than reasonable. It was just a matter of time. Patience. Patience and the dull thud of the harness racers training in the distance.

  Nathan had spent the afternoon diagnosing sick fridges, testing the pressure inside evaporators to see if sulphur dioxide was evaporating in the coils, absorbing heat and cooling the cooling box. Other times the problem was in the motor, or the pump, or maybe just a faulty seal on the door. Like a doctor he had to recognise the problem instantly, taking in the symptoms with a look of confidence, shaking his head and reaching for his tools.

  He knocked off at three o’clock and walked towards the main gates with a hundred others: grease smeared through hair and over work clothes wives wouldn’t let them wear inside, dropping them on back porches and throwing them into laundry troughs. Men snapped satchels onto the back of old bikes and rode off down Churchill Road, fresh air in their lungs and light in their eyes, stopping to buy stamps and ciggie papers at the deli. Men who’d left brushes soaking in turps until tomorrow, until the continuation of the endless cycle of broad-gauge axles and boiled cabbage.

  Nathan felt one of them now. A work-experience student and a veteran all at the same time. He knew what they meant when they talked about the Garratt 409 or an eight-wheeled compo brake, knew the smell of ammonia better than a wash-house full of freshly pressed shiraz, the taste of cafeteria stew better than bratwurst.

  As he walked through the gates he heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Nathan.’

  Looking around there were just overalls and lunch-pails, the sweet ether of body odour and the din of men moaning.

  ‘Nathan.’

  Lilli fought her way through the slow tide of bodies and stood before him. ‘Guess who?’

  ‘Christ.’ He grabbed her arm and pulled her towards a bus stop of waiting men. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I live here,’ she replied.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Prospect. Just up the hill.’

  He stopped to let it sink in. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Two weeks, just over.’

  The first thing he thought of was the night in the ruined farmhouse, but then the threat she would pose to his new life – uncomplicated relationships with uncomplicated people, resurrected wheelchairs, the smell of antiseptic on Rose’s tunic and sleepouts in the Church Avenue reserve. A few men at the bus stop looked at him. So what, she could be his sister. He turned away and faced a peppercorn tree. ‘How did you know where I’d be?’

  ‘I rang.’

  She turned back and fixed the men. ‘Five quid, the full hour.’

  ‘Christ.’ He took her arm and dragged her along as she laughed. ‘How about a simple hello, how y’ been?’

  She reclaimed her arm and stopped in the middle of the footpath. ‘I’ve come to apologise.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Which way?’

  He pointed up the hill and they crossed the road, Lilli stopping to smell unfamiliar plants. ‘It’s obvious, what happened in Krautland,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t me at my best.’

  He thought of their final meeting at the railway station. ‘You’d rather impress, what’s her name?’

  ‘As I said, not me at my best.’ With an I-shan’t-say-it-endlessly tone of voice.

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Now I’m a city girl. I’m not out to impress anyone.’

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye: head down, thoughtful, dragging her feet as usual. If it took six years to prove yourself to the Railways, perhaps he could try again. Faith. Maybe even a little of William’s grace. It would end disastrously, of course. Lilli couldn’t stop being Lilli, there’d be someone else, a time she could get a laugh at his expense. Then again, maybe one day she’d be an asset, a good mother, feeding him through an old age of dementia and wet nappies. Faith: like God promising to reveal the scheme of things to William, but only if he worked at it, studied, invested time and love in the satellites which orbited him.

  ‘So where are you living?’ he asked.

  She stopped to study a stobie pole. ‘My cousin Nerida, the forty-one-year-old teenager. She wants us to go out together. Apparently this will enhance our chances of finding a man.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  She walked on, avoiding dog shit. ‘Maybe she thinks I’ll make her look younger.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  They sat in the reserve and she took out a pack of Craven A.

  Lighting up she stretched out on the bench and blew smoke into the air, talking like Bette Davis. ‘Yes, quite frankly, the Fechners were sad to see me go. Like you, I’ll be sorely missed in Tanunda.

  An artist has been commissioned to render a likeness which will be placed in the Town Hall foyer.’

  They laughed about Goat Square – and council workers pruning carob trees to within an inch of their lives, Mrs Fox and her flying fingers, Edna and her rheumatic Bach. Nathan detected a slight fondness in her voice, but certainly not a longing to return. ‘You should hear how people talk about your dad,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What do you think will happen, afterwards?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘He’ll find some way of explaining it. The dates were off, or maybe because people didn’t believe him.’ He raised a fist in the air, William’s fist, shaking with the knowledge of every verse from Hebrews. ‘But it won’t be his fault. That’s why everyone thinks he’s a nut. My dad the nutcase.’

  She smiled. ‘Do you think this could be inherited?’

  He stood and walked towards number seventeen. His new home. ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you.’

  Rose’s note explained that she’d be back late from the hospital.

  There were chops ready to go, if they knew how to turn on the grill. Lilli sat at the kitchen table and he made her a milky coffee.

  ‘This kitchen is very … chrome,’ she observed.

  ‘Courtesy the Islington Depot. You’d never guess, eh? Better than Wohler’s. Anything you want, they’ve got someone who’ll make it. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers. Sometimes they make trains.’

  ‘And what about fridges, you like fixin’ fridges?’

  ‘It’s like selling bread.’

  ‘Really?’ She lifted her eyebrows, but then backed off, and Nathan could sense small victories.

  ‘You working yet?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What y’ gonna do?’

  She shrugged. ‘Next year I’m going to study. Till then, I’ll find another Apex somewhere.’

  Nathan smiled. ‘What you gonna study?’

  ‘What do you mean, what am I gonna study? Something smarter than you, dumbo.’

  ‘I got to Matric.’

  She laughed, gagging on her coffee. ‘Almost.’

  ‘Very funny. And look how things have worked out.’

  Again she retreated into her corner. ‘True … and d’ you know, you put the thought in my head.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That y’ gotta get out of that place. Five years too late. But …’

  She picked a pile of papers from the table and started reading.

  The Revelation of Phil Drummond. Chapter 1. B. Grable was in the form of God, and God was good. Grable sat in a cubicle in the law library toilets and scribbled, Beware the Prophet Muller, for Muller is the devil incarnate. Muller rises from the earth with scrotums hanging heavy like watermelons.

  ‘Is this yours?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s Phil’s.’

  ‘It’s fantastic.’

  He shrugged, sipping his coffee. ‘He reckoned he could do his own Revelations, better. One that made sense.’

  Chapter 2. There were seven singers singing and one of them was Nat King Cole. Unforgettable, he promised, spreading the prophecy of the End of Days as related by Muller-Satan. Perry Como and The Chordettes sung for Grable-God. Let’s get back, to the track where it all beg
an … The forces of good and evil battled until they became a cacophony, filling the sky with white noise which sent people scurrying to their closest League of Health and Beauty meeting.

  She looked up at Nathan. ‘What an imagination.’

  And then he knew he’d got it wrong, introducing Phil to Lilli. Now there was no turning back. Still, he thought, Phil would probably see right through her. Or more likely it would be a case of nitro and glycerine, exploding, spreading human debris the length and breadth of Kilburn.

  She continued reading aloud. ‘“Chapter three. Two angels came out of the sky. One was called Lewis, and one Martin. One fed lines and the other got laughs. They hovered above Grable’s cubicle and Lewis asked, What message shall we give the people? Martin clunked him on the head: You don’t talk to God like that. How then? Lewis asked. You say, Mrs Grable, your Holiness … Eventually God got them to shut up and said, Spread the word, the world won’t end, and all those who believe it will are klutzes. Furthermore, the Bible itself is a second-rate story, B-grade every word of it. Where in the Bible do you get a decent kiss? God was cut short by Phil Drummond entering her cubicle and dropping his pants.”’

  The story continued over four pages, describing a heaven carpeted in Axminster. Hell, meanwhile, was brimming with evangelical preachers who nightly burned large piles of Golden Voice radios on bonfires. Through all of this the angels Lewis and Martin travelled, pleading with the fallen to see their latest movie. The saved were warned not to get smug, sharing their Bush biscuits around a fire of sing-alongs.

  ‘“Chapter twenty-eight,”’ Lilli continued. ‘“The seven seals were cryptic toilet graffiti. As Grable explained them to her prophet Drummond, he wrote them down in a big, black book. Later he planned to spread this message far and wide. When she got to the seventh seal she trembled and refused to speak.”’

  She looked at Nathan. ‘Have you read this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it doesn’t bother you?’

  Nathan shrugged, reaching over to the valve radio and switching it on. ‘You’d have to know Phil to understand.’

  She read again as Mick Harrison’s Music from the Archives emerged from the static, Karajan wrestling with Orff’s O Fortuna, filling the lounges and sitting-rooms of the suburbs with thunder.

  ‘“Chapter twenty-nine. What is it? Phil Drummond asked. Grable looked at him. I was wrong, she said. With the seal cracked, the heavens opened up. Agnostics and atheists levitated, becoming caught in a vortex which sucked them into a heaven of bookshops and jazz clubs. When only the pious were left, a giant monkey appeared with its own box organ, turning the handle and grinding out choruses from The Whitehorse Inn. The voice of August Kavel thundered across the sky, saying, The seventh seal explains how we will all be punished, for being so gullible.”’

  As the last chord of Orff’s music thundered and finally crashed to earth, she flung her head back and her arms out in a perfectly timed gesture. ‘Nearly as good as being there.’

  They sat listening to Mick Harrison’s well-oiled voice introducing Dame Nellie Melba singing Puccini’s Donde lieta usci. Violins, muted through time and static more than anything else, cut through the emptiness of the airwaves to tempt Melba to life – a sweet, single note, then others, unfolding into a tapestry of increasing orchestral density. A cough in the background, a bassoonist turning the page, and then Nathan and Lilli were both involved, the key suddenly modulating to indicate some drama they couldn’t see. And then a single note hanging, and another, another unexpected change of key as the flutes and piccolos jumped about pizzicato. Silence. Melba musing, the low strings finishing her sentences with a single, dotted note. A clarinet following her voice, renewed and optimistic, into another sprawling verse of musical dementia.

  Lilli stood up, faking the words, her left arm floating in front of her. She was a Lady Macbeth in polyester, caught up in other worlds, a little of the B-grade romantic lead laced with a dimly remembered high school understudy opportunity which never came off. But that was the power of music, to make her Mimi, or at least stop her from being Lilli.

  As the flutes and clarinets joined forces to rehash motifs from the opening arias, Lilli approached Nathan and knelt at his feet. He smiled, and as the violins rose chromatically, she put her arm around his belly, resting her head above the gurgle of a near-empty duodenum. The music stopped and started again in another key, and Lilli stage-coughed her way down centre towards a hall table of Rose’s Aboriginal artefacts. The violins threw her back towards Nathan with such force that they both went flying across the Drummond rug, settling beside a carpet python made real in late afternoon shadows. She kept mouthing the words, stopping to kiss him and move her hand down over his chest, pulling at his Railways shirt and seeking access to his grey, cotton-blend work pants.

  There was little of the operatic to what followed. Shirts torn off, pants down around their knees. Mick Harrison, recovering from his own swoon, returned to the airwaves dispensing endless praise, corny but at the same time heartfelt. Mick said he’d only ever felt this way about one other woman, Callas, in whom he’d come to see utter perfection. He moved them onto Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro overture, violins buzzing like frenetic termites before a series of drum-beating climaxes, settling in for another go, and another, louder and faster in the hands of Karajan.

  This time there was no rubble to contend with, only a few disinterested flies settling on the rims of coffee cups. Apart from that the choreography was the same, Lilli clawing at chair legs in anticipation of kettle drums and cymbals, unsettling one chair, oblivious to it crashing across her legs; Nathan returning to a warmth and wetness which seemed simpler the second time around. He felt proud of his ability to keep going, to play out a whole scene where he had most of the lines but few of the laughs. After he’d finished he rolled off of her to the tune of Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor, more cerebral than anything they’d heard that day, but not enough to stop her climbing back on top of him.

  Timing. Nathan heard the letterbox clatter and sat up. ‘Shit.’ Grabbing their clothes and switching off the radio, he led Lilli to his bedroom and closed the door. They waited in silence, pulling on their clothes as quietly as possible, listening as Rose pushed the front door open, entered cautiously and called, ‘Hello, Phillip?’

  Lilli started laughing. Nathan covered her mouth with his shirt.

  ‘It’s me, Rose,’ he called, ‘I’m just getting changed.’

  ‘Good-o.’ A clatter as she picked up the chairs. ‘You alright, Nathan?’

  ‘Fine … thanks.’

  Lilli laughed harder, muffling her face in Nathan’s pillow as she stretched out on his bed. He walked across the room and opened the window, checking outside and whispering, ‘C’mon.’

  ‘What would you rather for tea, Nathan, chops or veal cutlets?’

  Rose called, looking at the two cups of warm, half drunk coffee on the table as a pair of flies fucked.

  ‘Chops,’ Nathan said calmly, as he crawled out of the window, imagining Rose with her ear to the door. As Lilli passed her body out of the window without a word, he stuck his head back in and called, ‘Might have a quick snooze, if that’s okay?’

  ‘Fine, I’ll call you when tea’s ready.’

  Rose stood listening to the window close, and then silence. She returned to the kitchen, clearing the cups and thinking, Stupid woman, too much time with my nose in other people’s business. Smelling the antiseptic on herself she pulled eight potatoes from a box and started peeling them.

  A few minutes later Phil came home, carrying a bag of books, trying the door to his room. Rose looked up from laying out chops on the grill. ‘He’s asleep.’

  Phil smiled, ‘Yeah?’ and went in anyway. Looking out of the window he could see movement behind the pittosporum hedge behind Bob’s shed. He could see a pair of ankles highlighted in front of the compost heap. Smiling, he settled in to watch, whispering, ‘You dirty little bastard,’ filling in the blanks he�
�d learnt from a gallery of Barr Smith graffiti.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Warm, but with breezes off the Southern Ocean, laying waves across tall, dead grasses, stirring dry leaves on carob and plane trees the length of Murray Street, sounding like sea shells strung on fishing line, bouncing off of each other like atoms in a piece of hot copper.

  Early February, momentary relief as people opened windows and stretched out on parched Buffalo, sprinklers hissing valiantly in the early afternoon sun. The scent of freesias and jasmine sustaining parched gardens. William walking along, carrying a pile of hand-written handbills, stopping to clear lavender from the mouths of letterboxes, folding and depositing them. Passing on with satisfaction, with the knowledge that it was the only way they’d listen.

  Word had got around. Doorknocking had become a comedy of slammed flyscreens and hidden resentments, people fleeing half-pruned hedges as he approached. And even if they did listen, they were just being polite, excusing themselves to save burning sausages he couldn’t smell. Eventually he started keeping a tally in a notebook: over three days he averaged a five per cent strike rate (people who had actually listened) – zero if he counted follow-ups. Still, when the Lord asked what he’d done to prepare for the thousand years, he’d be able to say more than just stockpile groceries and plant vines.

  On the corner of Homburg and Cochen Court he folded his last handbill and deposited it. That was the last of last night’s batch of fifty, hand-copied at his desk as Bluma kept him in coffee, eventually settling in beside him, taking a piece of roughly torn A4 and copying.

  I, Wilhelm Muller, have lost several followers. People no longer able to hear the Word. The only one who stays with me is Seymour Hicks. The flower man has gone, the insurance seller. The mail-sorter, who I’d never seen pick up a Bible. None of this deters me, for the time is close at hand. I have proof if you’ll only come see me, talk to me. At the End I won’t be able to help you. Can’t close the gates after the horse goes.