Hill of Grace

by Stephen Orr

  Later he watched from his window as Arthur made up the table with a table cloth and rested the cross up against his rainwater tank. That afternoon he picked out the dead flowers and replanted the ground with calendulas, returning to his cross and the varnish William could smell from his study.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Four times daily: 10.00, 2.00, 4.00 and 8.00, regardless of the weather. Lately there’d been problems with Yolanda, the Sexsational Dancer, who bluntly refused to work if the mercury hit a hundred. Joe Hobson, MC, would go behind the Easter Wondershow tent and say to her, ‘I’m not asking you to cure the cancer, just wiggle your arse.’ One day, when she was being particularly obstinate, he said, ‘We need to get your banner repainted, you’re not looking much like that Yolanda anymore.’ The Yolanda of suspenders and waif-like waistline, glowing white teeth and nibble-me shoulders dripping baby oil and hiding a cleavage (it was said) which moved with the slightest breath off the Semaphore sea.

  Nathan and Lilli stood at the back of the crowd outside the tent, still dripping from their swim in the Semaphore baths, balancing on a gutter to see over a sea of towelling hats. Phil, in one of Bob’s old work shirts, sat down on a bench and started peeling a banana. ‘Yolanda’s seen better days,’ he said, as Joe Hobson paraded her around stage in sequined leotards. Lilli looked at him. ‘You’ve seen her sexsational dance?’

  ‘That I’m not ready for. Apparently people pay, though.’

  A line of them, at a small booth beside the stage, buying tickets and entering the tent in anticipation of Moulin Rouge with cellulite. On cue Yolanda waved goodbye to the crowd and followed them in. Nathan was holding Lilli’s hand but his mind was elsewhere: front row centre in the Wondershow tent, as underwear was tossed from the stage, landing across his face in a wheeze of stale farts. Yolanda with Bible, ripping pages from Hebrews, dipping them in glue and pasting them across her naked body.

  Yolanda suddenly become his mother, hanging her privates across a washing line on the main stage.

  Phil stretched back and munched on his banana. ‘They never found their giant python.’

  Lilli looked at him again. ‘Who?’

  ‘This lot.’

  She sat down beside him as he continued talking. ‘Vanessa Lee from Tennessee, she was Yolanda’s predecessor. Draped a giant python across her shoulders. One year it disappeared. Since it was worth a lot of money, Joe Hobson contacted the paper.’

  Nathan looked back at him, grinning. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Without a word of a lie.’

  Nathan noticed how Lilli had angled her body towards Phil, who bit off more banana than his mouth could hold, apparently disinterested and disconnected from both of them. ‘The story appears and of course everyone’s too scared to come. Semaphore’s deserted. Then they run a story that it’s found. But no one ever saw Mrs Lee from Tennessee, or her snake, again.’

  Nathan watched Lilli lean towards Phil and remembered her words, Not me at my best. His one consolation was that his ability to read people’s characters was still improving. With every smile and grin he saw his notion of eternal togetherness – he and Lilli, a child or two – dissipate a little more, like a sax solo from the Joe Aronson Synco Symphonists fading as it broke over the Torrens. Or were these doubts more of his father, he wondered, the purist, the tester and rejecter of people, the all-or-nothin’, one-winner-takes-all puritan. He knew Lilli’s behaviour wasn’t Phil’s fault, although Phil wasn’t helping. Lilli lacked what William called constancy. But then again, what did William know?

  Joe Hobson was the Aronson of the foreshore, replacing T-bones with Dixies and jazz with tinny, prerecorded Glenn Miller. He straightened his bowtie and introduced Vanessa the Undresser, a grain-fed Betty Grable who made Yolanda look like Stan Laurel. ‘What she doesn’t show isn’t worth seeing,’ Hobson promised, asking the audience to look out for plain-clothed detectives. Vanessa descended into the dim, smoky tent, followed by a string of gents removing their hats in the manner of St Michaels, Sunday morning, nine a.m.

  Nathan looked back at Lilli and Phil and this time Lilli seemed to notice him. ‘Nathan, I was telling Phil about our shot at Sunday School. Remember, pin the tail on the martyr?’ She started laughing, turning back to Phil and elaborating. Phil looked at Nathan and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, What am I meant to do? Nathan smiled, realising that Lilli was completely misreading Phil.

  There were other choices. Zoltan the Fire Eater, there to give the Eastern Wondershow some dimension, bringing skill and artistry to the tent of otherwise smut. Lighting a pair of gruesome-looking sticks and plunging them in his mouth. Throwing a petrol flare over the audience of hatless men with flagging erections. This was Lilli’s choice: to light up the darkness with something remarkable or, as Nathan guessed she would, continue with more of the same.

  As the show continued, against a backdrop of human sacrifices and flying carpets, those who were willing to suspend belief had the best time. Darkness allowed them to believe that the severed heads were real, that Vanessa really got it all off. This was Semaphore’s version of Langmeil, the miracles of Sinbad the Sword Swallower every bit as real as Christ’s, an audience praying in the form of mouths hung open in disbelief. And somewhere amongst them there was a William Miller, convinced that all the trickery was real.

  Lilli, Phil and Nathan walked up to the Esplanade and caught a trolleybus, its two arms reaching up to a latticework of overhead wires suspended from poles. The arms would spark and sometimes slip off the wires, jumping frenetically about until the driver got out to reattach them. Largs Bay grandmothers would moan, ‘Not again,’ as the sun beat in through tempered glass. When an old Scot, sitting three seats in front of them, muttered, ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ,’ Lilli looked at Phil and laughed under her breath. Phil looked at Nathan and raised his eyebrows the same way as earlier, deferring to Lilli’s hand on his arm and giving her an explanation of his Biblical narrative.

  That night, as the two boys lay awake in their beds, waiting for sleep and something that resembled a breeze through their window, Phil said, ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

  Nathan smiled. ‘I felt sorry for you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I dunno. The thing is …’

  Phil turned over. ‘I felt sorry for you.’

  There was quiet for a while, crickets at various pitches and tempos filling the emptiness with an electricity every bit as musical as the Sunbeam trolleybus. Out of this silence Phil said, ‘Vanessa the Undresser,’ and they both cracked up.

  ‘Night fellas,’ Bob said, walking past their door.

  Two replies and then Phil in analytical mode. ‘Maybe it’s the novelty of a new face, in which case she’ll get over it. On the other hand …’

  Nathan jettisoned a pillow and farted. ‘Let’s put it this way, do you think she’d ever try to crack onto you?’

  ‘That’s the question. And more importantly, how would I react?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘How would you like me to react?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  Phil sighed. ‘Sex, yes. Especially in a rugged outdoor location. Relationship, no. Nothing personal, but I’d end up smothering her with a pillow within a month. Therefore, the question is, would it be worth ruining our friendship for approximately thirty seconds of intense nervous stimulation … especially when you consider there are simpler, no fuss alternatives. Therefore, to answer your question, no.’

  Nathan detected a breeze across his forehead. ‘I don’t know if that makes me feel any better.’

  ‘To paraphrase Darwin, eat, root, and root some more … we may only have six weeks left.’

  They laughed. Rose stuck her head in the door. ‘What you two laughing about?’

  ‘March twenty-one,’ Phil replied, ‘put it in your diary.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Second Coming.’

  As outlined in the verses Rose had found on the dining-room table, sitting down with a co
ffee and a dose of Perry Como, reading and laughing as Kavel was upstaged by the gags of Martin and Lewis.

  Rose closed the door, went into her bedroom, dropped her dressing-gown on the floor and climbed into bed. Single sheet, cotton blend tropicana. Fluffing up her pillow she searched for A Man Called Peter and settled in for an agreeable dose of the Messiah via the Reverend Peter Marshall. Every night she got to know him a little better, imagining his thirty-something good looks and brandy-warmed breath, preaching from pulpits the length and breadth of the Americas, animating Jesus in the same way Chips Rafferty had reinvented the Aussie battler. Belief suspended, the reality of Miller and his Revelations lost in a bed-spread of woven marsupials.

  Her husband, meanwhile, sat in the darkness on a stone wall in the backyard. Wiping Ballarat Bitter from his mouth he wondered if the fellas at work had started to notice his changing condition, if they were becoming tired of his weary body dragged from one end of the day to the next.

  ‘It’s not like Bob,’ he could hear them saying.

  Although no one had said anything to him: the ever reliable Bob Drummond, pulling on his jacket and clocking off, crossing tracks without so much as hearing the eight-wheeled cafeteria being towed past. On his way back home, dogs barking at him through rickety picket fences, the lady in the cottage next to the deli saying hello. Replying, but sighing at the same time.

  It was just how he felt. They must have started noticing. Maybe they were just waiting for him to get over it, as he usually did. Arriving at work one morning with a bag of sly grog and his Menzies impression.

  He stubbed out his Garrick filter-tip and blew the smoke into the empty night sky. Rose’s God could sniff it out and apportion blame. No. No God. Just emptiness, and the smell of deep-fried flake from the Kilburn fish and chippery.

  He left his bottle half empty and went in, locking the door behind him, going into the bedroom and laying on the bed fully clothed, his hands behind his head.

  ‘Get them things off,’ Rose said, keeping her eyes on her book.

  ‘You don’t know what it takes to get grease out.’

  He still didn’t move, so she looked at him. He met her eyes like a child and said, ‘I got the cancer, Rose.’

  She lay down the book and stared at him. ‘What d’ you mean?’

  ‘In me throat.’

  ‘Jesus …’

  The night was broken by a group of children squealing somewhere, growing into laughter. Rose stared ahead at a Hans Heysen on the wall, but couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘This doctor reckons it’s the fags,’ he continued. ‘I told him my dad smoked till he was eighty-six, then had a stroke. He says, “Yes, well, it’s like a lottery, isn’t it?” Just like that … it’s like a lottery, you win the cancer.’

  Rose couldn’t help being Rose. ‘It’s just his job.’ She cast her mind back over her book and searched for something to say, something Peter would say (Bob, every man is given a time, and has to make the most of it). But it was just a book. Even Phil could, and would, find better words – sincere and heartfelt things. Although when Phil did find out, the thought that would haunt him most was how science, and his books, had let him down, how there wasn’t a thing in a thousand volumes of pharmaceuticals to help them.

  ‘What are they gonna do?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked up at her. ‘It’s right through.’

  The coughing was something that dated back twenty years.

  Things hadn’t turned nasty until about a month before. ‘I was walkin’ to work and there it was in me hands, blood. Nathan looks and says, “Jesus,”’ as Bob had pretended it was a blood nose. The following day he had gone to see the work’s doctor, taking time off for tests and a visit to the Royal Adelaide, watching out for Lavender Ladies who might give him away to Rose. Then back to the doctor, on the second floor of the Webb administration building, surrounded by wood panelling and antiseptic familiar from Rose’s tunics.

  ‘Throat cancer,’ the doctor said, as detached as a train conductor. Bob sat back. ‘That’s what I thought you’d say. What do they do for cancer?’

  ‘You want the truth?’

  Bob sighed. In those few words he saw his future. He’d had the feeling before, one night on the end of Largs jetty, years before Rose or Phil or the house or anything. Just him and a fella in a six-way coat, saying, ‘You got any money?’ And before he could even check, the stranger pulling a knife. All he could remember was looking out to sea, to a cloudy, moon-lit horizon, and thinking, Well, if that’s it. Saying, ‘Would you use that thing, if I didn’t give you money?’

  ‘Of course I’d bloody use it. What are you, simple? Give me yer fuckin’ money.’

  Fishing in his pocket for change and handing over a wallet empty except for a holy card of Our Mother of Perpetual Help he’d been given by his mum. Who’d promised him the glowing figure would watch over him: at home and work, even at the end of Largs jetty, sprinkling a glitter of arc lights like so much burly into the water, uttering blessings and promising to walk with him all the (remaining) days of his life, watching for locos as he crossed tracks, trucks as he crossed Churchill Road but promising nothing, when his number came up.

  ‘It’s not me I care about,’ he whispered, still stretched out on the bed. ‘It’s you and Phil … and Nathan.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. We’ll get you to a proper doctor, not that Railways idiot. Cancer’s just like, like a cold. Plenty of people – ’

  ‘Rose.’

  In the next room, Phil was telling Nathan about his deep-sea diving at the Semaphore baths; swimming dolphin-like between bodies bulging from Jantzen monochromes, wooden Dixie sticks stirred up in the swell of high divers as somewhere from the surface a voice sang, ‘“Animals crackers in my soup …”’

  Nathan looked at his friend. ‘You go to all that trouble, and yet you didn’t even say hello to anyone?’

  ‘Miller, there’s more to life than a root.’ Loudly. ‘A root.’

  ‘Phil!’ Bob called from next door.

  ‘It’s Miller-slash-Muller,’ Phil shouted. ‘You oughta hear what he’s saying.’

  Phil, quietening, whispered across the room, ‘I go to the Art Gallery to look at nudes. Doesn’t mean I get up and try to root them.’

  Rose had worked out what to do. ‘Lorna, at the League of Health and Beauty, her brother’s a doctor.’

  ‘Rose,’ he replied, half singing her name.

  She sat up. ‘First thing is – ’ ‘Rose, the world is full of doctors, doesn’t mean that people don’t die.’

  Silence. She looked at him. ‘So that’s it?’

  ‘No, it’s not like that.’

  ‘What, twelve months and then – ’ ‘More like six.’

  Rose was confused. What could you do in six months? Plant a few marigolds, go see the Blue Lake again? If he was right it would all be over before spring. The bulbs would still be cold in the ground, the wading pool and barby packed away for winter, and who’d get them out again, Phil? And what about next Christmas, when she needed someone to steal a pine tree from Kuitpo forest? Still, she couldn’t give voice to these thoughts. Things would have to go on, business as usual. Over the next few months, as Bob became sicker and finished work, Phil would accuse her of being in denial. Nonsense, she’d reply, have you put your socks away?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’ she asked, whispering.

  ‘I had to be sure.’

  He’d thought about the open confession around the table, or notes full of inadequate, stumbling prose, but in the end there was none of the drama of A Man Called Peter. He knew that she’d find a way of telling others, of sustaining them, and in the end, after he was gone, cooking the food and washing the oil stains from the drive that used to be his job. She was practical like that, strapping on her lavender apron and pushing the lolly-trolley through the coronary ward of life. And as if to prove this, she called out, ‘Nathan, Phi
l,’ and pulled the sheet up over her nightie as she waited for them to come in.

  It was late when Bob opened his shed and switched on the light. He finished his Ballarat Bitter in a better frame of mind and eventually forgot everything as he got caught up in a confusion of spokes like broken, uncooked spaghetti.

  Nathan, falling asleep, wondered if there really was a God after all, if Phil and Lilli weren’t right. A God that sustained the worst and crushed the best under his size nine heel. A God caught up in the end of everything as the dutifully lapsed and agnostic worked at sustaining life, feeding families, battling soursobs and succumbing to the cancer. There was no way to look at it that made sense. Maybe God just looked after his own, in which case everything he’d been brought up to believe was bullshit. Suffer the little children. Bullshit. Pray for the aged and infirm, the fallen and diseased. Bullshit. Just let them die and go to Hell.

  All at once he felt utterly pessimistic. If the End did come, it wouldn’t be soon enough. Talk about people disappointing Jesus. Jesus was the great disappointment.

  Phil, meanwhile, sitting opposite Nathan in silence, had never felt more helpless. Words, analysis, sarcasm – even the complete and utter honesty he saved for special occasions. There was nothing you could say. The world was just a giant lump of shit hurtling through space. You just had to get used to it.

  The following Friday Bluma dragged a reluctant William to Adelaide, persuading him with an all-Wagner concert by the South Australian Symphony Orchestra, the highlight of which was the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde. William had heard it a thousand times, maybe more, on Robert’s old gramophone, which had since sat unrepaired in the cold cellar for the last twenty years, absorbing the smell of pickled pig and sauerkraut. Every week or so Robert used to fetch it from his study, wind a little handle and put the arm on the Wagner record. When it finished he’d play it again, and again, sometimes describing Isolde’s demise as they all listened, imagining the boat tossed on the waves, the fake beards and creaky scenery. All made real around a Tanunda black kitchen.