“She likes you.”
“Oh yes, very mildly. I’m not a good mother, Grey. I’m not a companion to your father, either. You know that too. Though I try, with my limited abilities. I was pretty once,” she repeated sadly. “Once I could’ve had anyone. You want to know something ridiculous? I thought since at least one beautiful girl had loved your father, well–that he would look after me.”
Grey did not say that marital happiness was as foreign to their house in the time of his mother as it was now, more so; so foreign that neither he nor Irene knew what gestures it made, only that it was absent.
He wished he had remembered Irene tonight. He wondered what she was doing. Probably mopping out the kitchen of the restaurant, tired by now with the work and with trying to understand Minh Quy’s broken English.
All at once Angela became embarrassed by what she had said. They fell into a long unbroken silence. Grey looked out the window and lapsed into a desultory gaze over the outskirts of town. The grass and sorghum, the iron pylons …
“I can take you home if you like.”
“What time do you finish here?”
“Not till twelve, but I can shut the place up and drive you.”
“No. Thanks. I’ll walk.”
“It won’t take two minutes to close up.”
“Could you?”
On the drive he thought about going to get Irene, but guessed she was asleep at Amy’s.
WHEN GREY RETURNED, the service station was enveloped by silence. The clock lost its power to describe time, and the shapeless hours of time out of time were coming. Those hours came falling in the dark outside to isolate the roadhouse from the world of sleeping men and women awaiting tomorrow.
He sat on a step of concrete at the back of the service station and looked up at the Milky Way. Sirius burned brightly in the northeast. He could not name the other stars without Irene. There was no point watching the road. Nobody else was stopping. He lay against the wall beside the back door to observe the vigilance that at this hour became absurd. There was no one coming and no one to watch him waiting for no one to come and so no reason to stay.
He did not know he had fallen asleep when her voice perforated his dreams.
“You forgot me.”
“I’m sorry. You should have asked Minh to take you home.”
He rubbed his eyes and looked inside at the clock. The restaurant would have closed long ago. He knew now she had gone to Amy’s house and stayed up with her in order to make him worry. And he had fallen asleep.
“Let’s go. I can get up early and come back. I wonder should I leave the truck here, in case old Bizzell comes by in the morning. I can get Ook to drop me back.”
“Leave it here. I feel like walking.”
So he left the floodlight on and left his truck parked out front as it should be and they walked home in the dark.
IRENE TIED HER hair and walked barefoot on the asphalt. She carried the new shoes Grey had bought her that had given her blisters. He took a squashed packet of cigarettes from his jeans and lit one. No cars passed them. At the bottom of Solitary Hill they looked up and saw the giant white drive-in screen. Then came the plain and glistening crops. Then they were home.
ANGELA WAS DRUNK and asleep and their father was at the railway. Grey and Irene lounged in the living room in a breeze that ebbed and flowed through the house. The walk home had more excited them than made them sleepy. It was half-past two. Irene lit a kerosene lamp. The house had electric light–and electricity when Grey or Angela remembered to pay the bill–but the girl had grown up with firelight.
He knew he should send her to bed as tomorrow was another school day. But they talked of their mother. As always he was disappointed at how little he remembered. He wanted to tell his sister stories from his own experience, but most of what he had, that formed any kind of narrative, were second-hand accounts. And his own few stories she had heard many times. He had used them up. He possessed fragments now, flashes of isolated detail.
He told her that their mother could speak Irish.
“She spoke it to me sometimes.” Ish misha Grey, he remembered. That was all.
He stood up and went to a red-painted tin chest in the room where Angela lay insensible between a bottle of bourbon and the same magazine full of aristocrats, film stars and business people she had flicked through at the service station. He returned to the living room and handed his sister a leather-bound quarto.
“Here,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s our mother’s. Grandma said this is her writing–a few poems and notes, but mostly lessons in Irish.”
Irene’s dark eyes ran across her mother’s handwriting. The writing was made at the same age she was now. She palmed a photograph that fell out of its place in the pages and onto the floor. The photograph was the same Grey always kept, that he had used as a bookmark since he began perusing the notebook without comprehension a fortnight ago.
“Do you think I follow her?”
“Grandma saw a resemblance.”
Irene ran her fingers around the rusty edge of the photograph then placed it back in the notebook.
“You have her smile,” Grey said at last. Then he felt he must be dreaming. As she knelt on the floor before him in the attitude of study, he realized that mother and daughter were all but identical. She shifted her feet beside her, raised her face and furrowed her brow to ask what he was looking at. The vision did not vanish.
How had he not seen it before? Were he asked to describe their common features he would have been at a loss; besides the polarity of their hair colour, their mother’s eyes were blue where Irene’s were darkest brown; and where their mother’s skin was golden and perfect, Irene’s was pale and her cheeks were wind-burnt red. Yet for all that, he saw now there were certain habitual gestures–the eyes-closed smile, the furrowed-brow frown–gestures that recalled his mother perfectly.
She was attempting to pronounce the letters her mother had written as though they were Australian English letters. Then she affected an Irish accent. Grey was sorry that there was no one to teach her. He might have learnt once, but he had been lazy; when his mother had spoken to him in that language he had pretended not to hear her. Now he wished he had not been lazy. He imagined what it would be to speak with her in a language no one else, not Angela, not the town, not even their father, would understand. Such could never be a dead language. Irene looked up at him and made her mother’s frown.
“You’re laughing at me.”
“No.”
SHE WENT FOR a bath before bed and Grey sat on the rise behind the house. He had not slept and there was no point going to sleep now. He would walk soon to get Eccleston to drive him. The wind came through the leaves of the stringybark and lemon tree. He looked away, but then looked back through the glass where the orange bathroom lamp lit his sister. With her back to him she took off her dress. There was nothing without the window but sorghum fields and grassland and so no reason for shame and she never drew the blind. She coughed and let go the tie in her hair. He watched her undress and run the shower. Her body glowed in the lamplight. Her body that had so long resisted time–as though informed by her innocent spirit–tonight was not quite the body of a little girl. She coughed again into her hands. Was she getting a cold, even in summer? With the thought an unaccountable tenderness came over him. He had allowed her to stay up too late. She stepped into the water.
He laughed at himself. He watched the night until the lights of the flats and hills gave no more perspective and he was sitting in a box of floating ornaments, earth and sky and he, all floating as in the fancy of a childish mind. Then came the dawn.
VIII
GREY SLEPT LATE INTO THE MARCH AFTERNOON THEN set out for the big highway and the Helidon freight yards for a night’s work.
After two hours loading and unloading seed, poison and a few cars of cattle and horses, he pencilled KL142, the last car of the penultimate train of the night, into the logbo
ok and took it to his father who was talking with the train driver.
“There you go, old man.”
“Did you get em all right?”
“Yep.”
Grey sat down on the bonnet of his truck and watched thirty-three cars of freight squall into the east. It was half-past eight. The night had become cool with the promise of rain. Bill North came to sit beside Grey and though he was silent, Grey could tell the prematurely old man had something to say. He rolled a cigarette with nervous hands, and his pale-blue eyes, that always seemed to betray some deep inner weakness, skittered about the night. He picked at the stained calluses on his hands.
“You know, boy, I’ve been thinkin you might be better off goin to work in the city, or somewhere else other than Mary Smokes. Gettin yourself a proper job.”
Grey nodded.
“You’re young. I reckon you must know what kinds of jobs are out there for young men. Somethin you don’t have to work too hard at. Somethin where you’re somebody … So you don’t end up like your old bloke.”
Apart of Bill North’s heart had been missing or was twisted and he had been incapable of loving his children as a father. But he had come to respect Grey as a man. And the man’s sincerity moved the son. It upset Grey to hear his father confess to him like this, but he could not object. To have told the man he was doing all right in the world would have been such an obvious lie as to make the shame of it greater. All Bill North’s hopes for the future now lay in a change to the government’s pension laws and a doubtful claim that had not come through in six months since it was lodged.
“You must have thought of it,” Bill North said. “Of gettin out.”
“I have, old man. I spose I have.”
“Seriously? You’ve thought seriously about it then?”
“Yes,” Grey lied.
“I’m glad to hear it. You don’t have to tell me what you’re thinkin. Work it out for yourself, then just get up and go. Nothin’d make me happier.”
“All right.”
“There’s no future in a town like this anymore, boy. You stay here, you don’t make somethin of yourself now, and people less than you will be treadin on you all your life.”
“I know it.”
“You’ve got to think about providin for a woman one day too. There’s always that. Women don’t want to be poor.”
The night before Angela last left for her sister’s, she and his father had fought. It was late and they were shut in their room, but Grey could hear plainly through the walls their fighting over things that marked the narrow limits of their affection.
“I did go to the doctor,” Bill North had said with as much force as unvoiced speech can have. “He’s ordered pills that will work better.”
“And your drinking all night, do you think that’ll help?’ she said with perfect hypocrisy. “You know, I don’t feel like a woman anymore!”
Grey knew the things they fought over did not become serious if there was enough money and material comfort to atone for them. That night he had gone into Irene’s room and found her lying awake in the dark. He sat down on the end of her bed and told stories to keep her from the argument. Eventually he fell asleep beside her.
“You’re a bright boy,” Bill North said. “Even the blokes here at the railways give you a natural respect they never give me. I don’t pretend to talk to you as a clever man, but I’ve seen things. I’d talk to Irene too, only she’s young. That poor girl.” Grey watched his father’s hands tremble. At any other time he would have put the trembling down to want of drink. Bill North clenched his fists to make the trembling stop. “Damn it, I should do better.”
Grey stood up and put his hand on his father’s shoulder to end the talk.
“Don’t worry about me, old man. I’m workin somethin out.” He lied again for the sake of peace.
WORK AT THE freight yard meant driving through Haigslea, past Vanessa’s. Most nights nothing came of that, he would finish too late. Tonight he called her from a public phone box on the roadside and told her he might be around.
“Last train is late, boy,” said his father when he got back. “You go if you like.”
Grey was happy. He was bodily tired, fifty dollars up and free of obligation. He was not concerned about leaving his father now. The train to come was just a handful of cars.
HE STOPPED BY the Sundowner bottle shop on the way. He hid his truck on a dirt road behind Vanessa’s house.
“I didn’t expect you for another hour.”
“I got off early. Here.”
He handed her a bottle of ten-dollar sparkling white wine. She put the bottle in ice on the coffee table. She took two crystal glasses from a cabinet.
Vanessa’s house seemed very fancy to Grey. Leather lounge chairs, polished teak cabinets and carpeted floors.
“Come sit down,” she said.
She folded her legs beside her on the lounge, revealing much of her tanned thighs. She wore her white frilled cardigan, and a gold crucifix hung around her neck. Her church clothes. When she was home Vanessa was a regular at the Friday night service at the highway’s boxcar Presbyterian Church. There the travelling minister spoke his excited sermons after the manner he had seen on television to a gathering that was outnumbered three to one by the crowd across the asphalt at the hotel. Vanessa smelled of church. Grey had not been in years but he remembered the smell. He wondered was it beeswax candles, or the starched clothing of the elderly, or the varnish on the pews.
“Irene’s got one of these,” he said, touching the crucifix where it rested on Vanessa’s bare skin. “A nun gave it to her. Hers is Benedictine.”
Vanessa smiled doubtfully. She did not know what Benedictine meant. In that country, expressions of orthodox faith were almost non-existent. Those who did not remember Grey’s mother and the old Irish and Russians of the district thought Irene’s religiosity uniquely childish and fantastical.
“This?’ she caught his hand. “It protects me.”
“From what?”
“Those who would cause the innocent to sin.”
He smiled.
“You know, I admire you–going to church when your folks aren’t here to force you.”
“They have spies. If I hadn’t gone tonight they would have heard about it. Anyway, you don’t admire it. Everyone who says that says it condescendingly.”
“You’re wrong.”
She smiled provocatively. “How come you never go? You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”
“I have belief. My God is present late at night, in silence, in running water, with people in pain.”
Vanessa looked at him with bemusement.
“Churches these days are different. The one I go to in the city draws four or five hundred to every service, most of them under forty, and there’s even a stage for a band, and a café. It’s fun. You should come one day.”
Grey sighed.
“Don’t you sometimes think we’re meant to suffer–that we’ve brought it on ourselves? The sin is in us and it’s just a trick of time that means we must wait to commit it.”
“How awful!”
“Yes,” he said.
He lent across her body and took the wine from the table.
“Drink?”
“Sure.” She picked up a glass. “Tell me something, Grey.”
For a moment he thought this was going to be something serious. He did not feel like speaking seriously tonight.
“How did Flagon Norman get his name?”
Grey smiled and took his knife from his jeans and unfastened the file and levered the cork. He filled Vanessa’s glass.
“On the night of our school graduation he stole a flagon of goon wine and disappeared into the woods. The police found him the next day asleep on the creek. And his mother had dressed him up so nice in his father’s old tartan coat and green tie. I spose he got scared. He wasn’t used to so many people. Once he left the hall he would have just walked till he fell. He’s got bad eyes. He’s near blind at nigh
t. But he hung onto the flagon. He was nursing it when they found him.”
Vanessa could not stop giggling.
Then Grey told her the story of when Raughrie Norman drove his first and only car into the ground:
“No one told him you had to put oil in it. He was between Mary Smokes and Toogoolawah when the bearings blew and it seized up. He just got out and left it on the road and walked.”
So the night flowed away, with talk of inane local things and of ill-defined future plans of escape that Grey did not believe. Worn out with the night’s work and pacified by the wine, he fell asleep in Vanessa’s arms before anything they had wordlessly planned had happened. The call of a freight train woke him. It was after eleven.
Vanessa’s parents were at a government function in the city and they would not always pay for a motel. They might be back any minute now depending on how late the thing ran.
“I spose I’d better go.”
“I guess so,” Vanessa said, rousing herself from sleep.
“You know, you can come home with me if you like.”
“How?”
“Tee it up with a friend. Give someone a call and get them to cover for you. You can say you stayed at their place after church. Say you felt lonely.”
“I couldn’t. I’ve only got one girlfriend here and it’s too late to call her now.”
“It’d be good if you could.”
“Really, I couldn’t.”
The Mary Smokes Boys Page 9