The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  No woman in Hometown came close to her for care with costume, and Tom was aware that, as a result, she was widely despised by other women for going posh when simpler attire would do just as well.

  Not by everyone. Bev Clissold would call in at the shop to say hello to Tom, and if Hannah were there she would step back and admire her garments and face and figure. ‘Puts me to shame,’ said Bev. ‘Here I am in my pinny.’

  The conversation was mostly on Hannah’s side. Partly because Tom was determined not to bore her, as he’d bored Trudy. Partly because Hannah had accepted Tom’s expertise in establishing the shop’s architecture and there was little for her to do but talk until the time came to unpack the books and fill the shelves. She hung about watching him at work, her back against something that supported her, hands clasped in front, feet crossed. She seemed transported by admiration. ‘And those holes, Tom, so that you can change the height of the shelves? So clever! You are using that—what do you call it? A spirit level? Using that spirit level so that each shelf is straight? Tom, you take such care!’

  Tom knew that Hannah was offering flattery in place of the contribution she was untrained to provide with a hammer and a screwdriver, bench saw and buzzer. And he knew that the flattery was sugar. But Hannah was so candid in her way of going about it that he couldn’t help but smile. He said, ‘Hannah, this is all easy stuff. It’s not magic.’

  When she wasn’t admiring Tom’s carpentry, she chatted about anything at all. Often about politics. She followed the whole business—policies, scandals, disasters—and she was the first person Tom had ever known who took any of it seriously. In the Tramways Union, political talk was just tribal abuse or encomiums for Red Clarrie O’Shea, the union secretary.

  ‘This fellow Henry Bolte who looks like Khrushchev, who would vote for him, Tom? Who? A little thug. Can’t they see? You know what I read in the newspaper? He has a farm, and the road is paved up to his gate, after that it is dirt. Just to his gate. Who do you vote for, Tom? If you vote for this Henry Bolte, I have to leave you.’

  Tom—not sure if Hannah was joking but glad that he could reply in the way he was about to—said, ‘Labor. Like Uncle Frank.’

  And books, she spoke about books. Solzhenitsyn. Tom suffered with grace an account of The First Circle, just out; she’d finished it in three days. And then she started in about a new book by ‘your Thomas Keneally’.

  ‘Can’t say I’ve heard of him,’ said Tom.

  ‘He trained to be a priest, you didn’t know? Madness.’

  She studied him bevelling the front of the cedar shelves with a hand plane, the timber held securely in two vices on the workbench.

  ‘I want to choose you a book. A novel, for you to read.’

  ‘A book? Rightio,’ said Tom, remaining cheerful in the way he’d practised while eating Hannah’s sandwiches.

  ‘Well, I have chosen,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Good-o.’

  ‘Would you like to know the name of the author?’

  Hannah, whose plans to make Tom a reader were apparently well advanced, produced a green-covered Everyman edition of the book from behind her back. ‘Charles Dickens,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of Mister Charles Dickens?’

  Tom laid the plane on the bench and frowned with the effort of recalling.

  ‘You know, I think I have, Hannah. Yep, I have. Charles Dickens. Uncle Frank was a bit of a reader. He read me something by Charles Dickens. Couple of pages. I was, what? Eleven? Twelve? Did he write a book about Christmas? Charles Dickens, about Christmas?’

  ‘So he did,’ said Hannah. She was delighted. ‘A Christmas Carol. So he did, Tom.’

  Tom nodded, pleased that he’d heard of Charles Dickens, pleased that he’d pleased Hannah. He stood beaming.

  Hannah held the spine up to him to read. ‘Great…Great Expeditions. Expectations! Great Expectations. Good-o. What’s it about?’

  ‘Being alive,’ said Hannah. ‘Being a human being with hopes and fears. Tom—what a treat you have waiting. I am being honest with you. What a treat you have waiting.’

  ‘Right you are. I’ll get stuck into it. Great Expectations. Good-o.’ He returned to the bevelling.

  Hannah interrupted him by placing her hand on his shoulder, caressing the muscles there. She put the book on the workbench, among the shavings. She held herself against him, her body entering the contour of his back, her hands crossed over his heart.

  ‘I adore you,’ she said. They had been lovers for five days.

  =

  It had begun like this, at Harp Road, Tom with his pocket knife scraping away at the flaking blue paint on the railing of the back verandah. There was no need for him to trouble himself with the paintwork of a rented house. It was just his habit. See it, fix it.

  He no longer wore his wedding ring, Hannah noticed; not for a week now. His left hand, free of the ring, rested unoccupied on the railing. She reached out and closed her own hand over it. Tom, for a minute, less, gave no indication of what Hannah had done, had declared, but then ceased scraping with the pocket knife and became still.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Hannah.

  She undressed him in the bedroom, first kneeling to remove his boots while he kept balance, holding on to the tall chest of drawers. Then stood to unbutton his twill shirt, the top of her head at chin height. Unbuckled his belt, freeing the tail of the shirt. Negotiated the buttons of his fly, slipped down his khaki trousers, disposed of socks and Y-fronts, leaving him in his singlet.

  ‘This is a new singlet?’

  Tom attempted a spoken reply, but some occlusion in his throat obliged him to settle for a nod.

  ‘You wanted to impress me?’ A smile in her voice. ‘Take it off.’

  His chest, its sparse fair hair, the symmetry of the nipples wrenched her to him in a greedy browsing over his face and mouth. Then the surprise, as Hannah—expecting to lead from go to whoa—was overtaken by Tom’s initiative, an avidity in disrobing her, shaping her, that belonged to a more emphatic man, one she’d never met. Hannah wanted to say, ‘Where does this come from?’ but also: ‘Don’t stop.’

  Raised above her, filling her, smiling, he whispered endearments, kissed her face. She said, ‘Don’t make me come too soon, I don’t want to come too soon,’ but she did. Then gave herself over to a breathless babbling in a language Tom wasn’t equipped to understand—Hungarian? And tears, too, a continuous stream.

  She wriggled free and took a Kleenex from a box on the bedside table, dried her eyes, her nose. ‘You see? You make me too excited. Did you know?’

  ‘Han, I was taking it slowly.’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s me. But Tom, you didn’t come? I want you to come. Is something wrong?’

  ‘When you’re ready,’ he said.

  ‘I’m ready. Ready ready ready.’

  She straddled him, bent low and kissed him.

  ‘This is the sweetest thing, Tom, the sweetest thing in my life, I promise you, Tom.’

  Hannah had left music playing on the radio, string quartets. ‘You like this music?’ She was tracing the features of his face with her fingers.

  ‘A bit mournful,’ said Tom.

  ‘A bit mournful. But not you. You are not mournful. Smiling Tom. Why are you smiling?’

  ‘It’s so good, Han.’

  She took a deep breath, cried out, collapsed on Tom’s chest and they were back with the babbling and tears. And then—more. Took more, had more, wanted more, skin slick with sweat, monsters in their need to go too far.

  Hannah said, ‘If you leave me I will kill you. No, I will never do that. But I might.’ She said this as she strove above him with an expression far too tender for her threats.

  A man with land to tend in bed at midday was sinning. Tom was surprised at how little it bothered him. Beau would keep the sheep from the worst they might attempt; the morning milking was out of the way. It was as if he’d become aware of a feature of nature hidden from him all his life; a second sun, a mountain range that dw
arfed the familiar hills.

  Hannah said, ‘Tom, you are wonderful for me, I promise.’

  What Tom believed was that Hannah loved him, and for that reason, was likely to say anything. But he smiled. He had never once smiled in bed with Trudy. A warm, happy mystery was in attendance. This, then, was ‘making love’.

  Scrambled eggs, toast and coffee in the kitchen at one in the afternoon, sunlight bathing the table, softening the butter in its crystal dish. Hannah had slipped her red silk dressing-gown over Tom’s frame, too much of him to cover, like a present wrapped in paper that won’t quite join up. They spoke in sentences of one or two words.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Stay, please?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Back to the bedroom, sprawling sex that moved them up and down the bed, onto the floor, into the living room where, at the window, two crested robins that Hannah fed watched with curiosity.

  The cows, the Ayrshires, the everlasting cows. Tom dressed without showering, kissed Hannah and promised he’d be back. He roared down the highway forty minutes late but had to stop to haul the aged Sally Morse out of the ditch she’d failed for the hundredth time to avoid on the Moon Hill bend.

  The cows were complaining at the dairy gate; Beau walked in circles with a reproachful frown. After the milking—and the cows could sense his resentment—Tom fed Beau, took a half-dozen loin chops from the fridge and raced back to Harp Road.

  Hannah was tutoring two evening students in piano duets, the Hilary twins, Denise and Delilah: ‘Alouette’, ‘William Tell’. The girls were distracted by Tom in the kitchen grilling chops and boiling cauli, carrots and potatoes. They knew Tom well, and not as a man who ought to be occupied in their piano teacher’s kitchen. They were old enough to imagine sex, too—but Tom? Mrs Babel? Mysterious, fascinating; also disgusting.

  He slept at Hannah’s house in Harp Road three nights in a row. Her bedroom frightened him a little. The walls were hung with what appeared to be rugs, richly coloured and patterned. On the walls? Did people do that? And paintings, one of Hannah naked that shocked him. (‘My husband who is dead. He painted me fifty times maybe. Two husbands, Tom, both dead.’) On the third night, Hannah left the bed to strike a pose beneath the painting identical to the one portrayed. Playfulness in the bedroom startled him. He had slept with only one other woman apart from Trudy—an episode of mutual consolation with one of Juicy’s castoffs—and that with a demeanour more determined than inspired on both sides.

  Two husbands, both dead. Tom, in bed at the time questions are asked, questions that have been saved up (his head next to Hannah’s on the same plump pillow, twice the size he was used to), allowed his face to be caressed in silence. But he asked his question eventually.

  ‘One went to the gas chamber,’ Hannah said. ‘One was shot.’

  ‘To the gas chamber?’

  ‘In Auschwitz, Tom. In Auschwitz.’

  The room was lit by a lamp in the corner with a fabric shade of creamy gauze. Tom’s leg rested across Hannah’s midriff. He felt the muscles of her abdomen become tense and saw the same sort of tension stiffen her face. It would be better not to ask her anything more about these two dead husbands. But a gas chamber?

  ‘Auschwitz?’ he said.

  ‘Then you haven’t heard of Auschwitz? Okay, who needs it? A horrible place, Tom.’

  ‘In the war?’

  ‘Yes, my love. In the war.’

  In some distress, so it seemed, Hannah turned away from Auschwitz, shrugged Tom’s leg off her stomach and raised herself above him.

  ‘Do you know what we have to do?’ she said. Her smile had returned. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  She studied Tom’s face, pushed his hair back off his forehead. But just for the moment she didn’t say what she might have said.

  ‘In this light,’ she said, ‘your hair is fair. Blond. Do you know?’

  ‘It was blond when I was a kid.’

  ‘When you were a kid. All those many, many years ago.’

  ‘Well, it was a while ago now. I’m over thirty, Hannah.’

  ‘I know, my darling. I know exactly how old you are. I know everything about you. Everything important.’

  She settled back on her side, her face next to Tom’s.

  She said, ‘Dear God, don’t die. Three times, I couldn’t bear it, Tom Hope.’

  ‘I’m not going to die, Hannah. Nobody’s going to shoot me.’

  It appeared for a few moments that Hannah might give way to tears. Then: ‘Nobody’s going to shoot you, Tom Hope,’ she said. ‘Come inside me again. Make me happy.’

  On the fourth and fifth and now this sixth night, Tom had to leave at ten. He didn’t want to, but the woollies were being stalked by town dogs that had gone bad. He’d lost eight sheep over the space of a week, bellies torn open, the dogs frantic for blood. When dogs go bad, they give up the whole structure of a future; blood in the mouth is all that matters. The five-dog pack that had been killing sheep for a fortnight had been reduced to three by Alan Henty. They’d started on his flocks first and he’d recognised two of them—a mangy Labrador with a bit of collie and a one-eared mutt with a bit of everything—without being able to get a clear shot. He went to the homes of the owners, hauled the dogs out and displayed the crusty blood on their muzzles: guilt written all over their hairy faces. Henty was given leave to shoot them but even if the owners had protested, he would have tethered the dogs and shot them anyway. In a town that relied on grazing, vigilante justice prevailed.

  This time Bobby Hearst was with Tom, camped on a rise upwind from the northern paddock. Beau was left home. If he’d seen the pack he would have charged in and been ripped to pieces. Bobby was Hometown’s Dead-eye Dick, sixteen years old and jumping out of his skin to get to Vietnam. He used a Mauser 98 stamped with its Wehrmacht serial number, its date of manufacture (1940) and the eagle and swastika emblem. Bobby had traded a modern Anschütz .22 and a wartime Webley flare pistol for the Mauser, which was modified with a long-range flip-up sight welded to the barrel halfway down. The sight required you to take aim above the target: the bullet’s trajectory, if your judgment was reliable, would take it smack into the target a yard below your point of aim.

  Strictly speaking, he was too young to carry firearms, but the person you had to please if you were underage and wanted to tote a Mauser about was Kev Egan at the station, and Kev didn’t mind.

  Tom and Bobby were up the hill before midnight, but hoping the dogs would come closer to dawn. Hard to hit a target seventy-five yards away without a little light. The flock had separated into four untidy groups spread across the big northern paddock, each group loyal to a particular ewe. The sheep suspected that Tom and his offsider were up the hill, but they weren’t curious. Whenever the moon escaped the clouds it revealed the woollies in each flock unaltered in their sleepy positions by so much as a turn of the head. Now and again, a soft bleat.

  Tom smoked drowsily; Bobby sipped from a bottle of warming Melbourne Bitter, commenting in his chirrupy way on the local footy and the VFL and the over-fastidious girls of the town who wouldn’t come across for love or money. Tom would have preferred a silence to fill with thoughts of Hannah, but if the dogs were going to be shot, it would have to be Bobby’s Mauser that did the job.

  Tom, maybe as good a shot as Bobby on his day, had no relish for killing dogs. He was likely to pass up a target—as he had the past two nights—unless he could be sure of hitting the head. Bobby could get off three rounds in ten seconds with a bolt-action rifle, each shot insanely accurate. He went for the gut.

  Long before dawn, Beau, half a mile away on Tom’s verandah, let out a plangent howl. He’d picked up the scent of the pack—what remained of the pack after Henty’s intervention—and this was his combined protest and lament. The sheep, all four groups, set up a panick
y bleating. Tom and Bobby stretched themselves out full length and scanned the paddock along their sights. Everything was shadow, the huddled sheep a lighter shade of dark than the scrub and the ironbarks. But it was possible to make out the dogs streaking towards a clump of isolated woollies between two closely packed groups. Tom could see no prospect of a shot.

  Bobby could. The big mongrel, who must have been the boss, reared in its frenzy and Bobby hit it twice while it was still on its back legs. The second dog leapt sideways when it was struck, then collapsed. Tom shot the third dog, the fool of the three, when it propped at the sight of the big mongrel licking its own innards.

  ‘Did you see that big bastard up on his back legs, Tommy?’

  Bobby was on his feet, excited and happy. His voice was shrill. Tom stood and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

  ‘But did you see that big ugly bastard up on his back legs, Tom? Pop, pop! Hit him twice while he was rearing! Fuck me!’

  He was ecstatic. He stomped around in small circles, the Mauser clasped in one hand.

  ‘Jesus, Tommy. Did you see that big bastard rear up? Hoo-eee!’

  ‘I saw him, Bobby. Great shot.’

  ‘Two shots, fuckin’! Two! While he was rearing!’

  ‘Two shots. Terrific.’

  The woollies had backed well away from the dead dogs, but once they caught sight of Tom their alarm faded and they drew closer. But not too close. It was as if they were tugging their skirts back from something unseemly, although interesting.

  The mutt Tom had shot was good and dead, pretty much intact except for the small hole in its head. Tom’s rifle was a .22—a kid’s gun, really. The red kelpie, Bobby’s second kill, was pulling itself and its guts along the ground as if towards some imagined sanctuary. Tom shot it through the skull. The big mongrel, hit twice, was still licking its intestines. It stopped every couple of seconds to growl futilely at Bobby, leaning over it with a long-bladed Japanese bayonet.