This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  Not that kind of pain. It’s just in my head. Splitting apart.

  Bernie sees it at the door when I get in. She says: ‘Unfortunately the universe doesn’t stop expanding just so you can take a breath, does it. You need to rest.’

  She is so much smarter than me. I love her so much. But I’ve got a chemical resistance going on here. I say: ‘I don’t want to rest.’

  She says, not taking any bullshit: ‘Go back to bed. Now.’

  I go and sit on the edge of the bed. She sits next to me, and she holds me as she says: ‘Grief, it’s like sinking down into the bottom of a gluepot some days, isn’t it.’

  It is: that’s exactly what it’s like. How am I ever going to get out of here?

  Errol turns up on the Wednesday, for the wedding we’re not having this weekend. He says to Bernie as he belts in from Broken Hill: ‘Well, hello there Mrs Not Brock. That was a good call – I wouldn’t marry him either. He’s too odd.’

  I can’t even smile, never mind shake his hand. He knows what’s going on. He says to me as soon as we’re alone: ‘Brockie, mate, it’s not the end of civilisation as we know it, crying shame that is. Trust me. It was going to be discovered eventually, wasn’t it? It just happens to be now, and you and me, we just happen to be lucky, don’t we. Could even be a good thing, you know, and I don’t just mean for cheap electricity. Keep the bastards peaceful.’

  ‘Yeah. I know,’ I tell him. But I only want to listen to the wireless. The reports about the radiation poisoning coming in now. People who were otherwise unharmed by the bombing, several miles outside the field of destruction, are dying of some type of anaemia caused by the gamma rays. Doctors and nurses that have gone there to help, and those just gone for a look, they’re dying too. Blood transfusions won’t stop it. It’s destroying their bone marrow and their skin. They’re dying at a rate of a hundred a day.

  How can I understand this as a reasonable result? I can’t. I keep thinking: my rifle is out in the back shed. That could be a good thing. Some type of equilibrium. Fine line between guts and suicide.

  Bernie turns it off. ‘Go to bed. Now.’

  Yes. That’s probably a good idea.

  BERNIE

  ‘Come on, Gordon, get up.’ I throw the blankets off him in the morning. ‘I’m not cancelling life for your nervous breakdown.’

  There’s no light, no light at all in his eyes as he says: ‘No. I’m not coming. I can’t play tennis.’

  True, he can’t hold a racquet at the moment, but that’s irrelevant. I say: ‘You can play left-handed. It’s not a competition match. It’s a picnic. Get up, Rock. Abe’s expecting us, and Errol didn’t travel across the breadth of the State to watch you unravel, fascinating as that has been.’

  ‘I’ll look after her when you’re gone, mate,’ Errol calls out from the kitchen.

  In your dreams, mate. Errol Flynn is exactly as his moniker suggests: a moustachioed, rum-swilling chaser of adventure and skirts. Who’d do anything for Gordon, and has done.

  I tell him: ‘That’s right, Dozy, I’ll have to marry Errol – you don’t really want to condemn me to that life, do you?’

  He says, seriously: ‘My racquet needs restringing.’

  ‘You don’t need your racquet, darling, I was only joking about the tennis.’

  He grunts. But he gets up. So defeated he’s breaking my heart all over again and more. I promise his back: you’re not going to die of this. I'm not going to let it happen. Not without a fight. This is the work of the Devil and there’s only one way to deal with him, according to Mrs Zoc: stare him down. Give him a few hard truths.

  I say: ‘There’s someone Abe wants us to meet, someone from New York.’

  ‘Oh?’ That gets his interest, thinking this is all about my stories. But it’s not. He’s up for some much harder truth than that today.

  ‘Geez, I wouldn’t have thought there was that much money in books,’ Errol says, pulling the eyesore up outside the Jacobs’s new Bellevue Hill pile.

  I say: ‘There’s not – unless you’re a publisher. A good one.’ Abe and Ellie have done well for themselves, had a good war. Wonder Publications six-pennies grace every newsstand across the nation, and Angus & Robertson have just made them an offer for their nice little literary list. A clever pair, getting in before British Best Penguins flood the market again. Even this house was a post-Jap-invasion steal.

  Ellie makes a dash for Gordon, dragging him inside with Errol, as Abe kisses me hello and whispers: ‘The editor loves it – he’s only waiting on the publisher to give the go-ahead.’ In New York. My heart skips a beat, or thirty-seven. The Americans, this Fantail Paperback Company, are really going take The Ending? But Abe adds: ‘They’re going to take both books.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ My hand flies to my belly with the surprise, and I start to cry, wild crashing dump of emotions.

  Abe hides me in his big bear arms and growls: ‘Rough week, eh?’

  ‘Yes. And you’re horrible to ambush me like that with this news.’ I look up at him and smile, and marvel, not only at Abe, but at whatever made Hughie decide to send us such good friends.

  ‘Couldn’t keep the burden of it to myself,’ he smiles back. ‘Come on,’ he takes my hand: ‘Come and meet Clara.’

  By the time we’ve got through the house and out onto the lawn, Gordon’s already met her. Clara Jacobowitz. She’s fifteen, tall and skinny, with a smile so wide it’ll take a few years for the rest of her to catch up with it. She’s Abe’s niece, from New York, via Poland and London and a chain of good friends. She’s missed a lot of school the last few years and before the Nazis took her books and her school and most of her family away from her she loved mathematics.

  Ellie’s wasted no time getting onto the business end of it, instructing Gordon now: ‘The exams for Sydney Girls are in October – you can tutor Clara for it, can’t you?’ Does our Gordon have a choice? No.

  He laughs, as if the world has just returned to technicolour; he knows he’s been had, and he turns to Clara: ‘Sure. Where were you up to before?’

  ‘Some calculus …’ she says, uncertain and awkward and then quickly talking about things with him that will never make a dot of sense to me. Such as nuclear physics.

  But I do know one thing: when it comes to new world orders, I prefer the one where America has a big bomb, to the one where children of a particular religion are forced into hard labour in prison camps, or gassed to death. That’s what the Nazis did, apparently. Murdered little girls with chestnut plaits and little boys with big blue eyes. Abe thinks it could be several million killed that way, all the Jews of Poland, including his eldest brother, Clara’s grandfather, a story that will come out one day. Just as one day Gordon will see he did the right thing, the only thing. Everything’s just as it should be because it can’t be any other way.

  While Gordon and Clara talk about mathematics, Errol Flynn is chasing Nerida Wesley around a tennis court in this back yard in Bellevue Hill, and I’m mouthing: ‘ No! Dangerous!’ at her, to no avail. Nerida’s gone for him after five minutes: she can write about him. Someone should.

  GORDON

  It’s January and her bathers are straining around her belly. She’s six months gone, but she still won’t marry me. She says: Who cares and who’s going to know but us? No one, if you don’t include most of the country. It’s embarrassing.

  It’s beautiful. She is. More beautiful every day. In her white sandshoes and her white bathers, she’s walking across the rocks of her Forget-Me-Not Gordon Bay and she’s caught a bream for her tea. Holding it up. ‘Ha!’ Showing me. She is a different species of human.

  The shapes of her that say I’m going to be a father make me that happy sometimes I don’t know what to do with the feeling. She wants as many kids as we can have: it’s going to be expensive. Probably not financed by her writing. But who would know? The Americans want a third one from her. And Afterwards, she’s thinking of calling it. Realistically, though, I’m going to be the pr
imary financial contributor, and I have to make a decision, about work. I have a choice, between two desks. Get back into soil analysis at the CSIR in Canberra, or continue with chemical mineralogy in Sydney. Not much of a choice, but I can’t take on any field work now, can I. I can’t make Bernie live in Canberra, either. So I suppose it’ll be Sydney. If I buckle down and get a doctorate, in Christ knows what, I’ll get on permanent staff, teaching, job for life, good holidays. As many kids as Bernie wants. That’s a plan.

  Something else might come up, anyway. There’s plenty of work around. A lot of rock and metal needed to rebuild the world. There’s a lot of money going into industrial research. It’s a good time to be in science, of any type. Unless you’re into haematite. We do have a continent full of iron ore; I’ve seen the survey data. It’s strange that it’s not being dug up like there’s no tomorrow. There’ll be a racket behind that decision somewhere. Not my problem, though. It can stay in the ground forever for all I care. I’ve got nothing against mining: we’ve got nothing without it. I just don’t want to be a part of it myself. I want to give more than –

  ‘I’m hungry now, darling, can you … ?’ Bernie hands me her fish. Wanting me to scale and gut it. She won’t do anything like that any more; and she won’t eat any meat other than fish. I want to give her everything but she only wants cake, ice cream, peaches and fish, often on the same plate.

  I’m just about to ask her if she’ll share some of it with me, it’s a good-looking bream, when I hear what I think is a tremor. The rock groans. It’s coming from the cliff face above us.

  Bernie didn’t hear it, though. I must’ve imagined it. She says: ‘What’s that funny look for?’

  But then I hear it again. She does too. She turns around. ‘What was that?’

  ‘That’s rock moving,’ I say and I drop the fish as I pick her up and run for it, fully prepared to be embarrassed if I’m wrong. I’m moving fairly quickly, across the rocks with her over my shoulder. I don’t stop until we’re on the sand, almost up to the dinghy ramps at the back of the bay.

  I’ve just put her down when it groans again, louder, and then it cracks. I look across the rocks: no one else fishing this side of the bay this arvo. That’s good. And then it comes down. A slice of the cliff comes away from the face and smashes into the sea. Right where Bernie was sitting not two minutes ago. The spray of dust and water shoots higher than the cliff top. That’s not something you see every day.

  Bernie’s fingernails are digging into my ankle at the sight, and I’ve come to my decision.

  I’m not taking any job in a box. Life can be too short. There’s too much else I want to see. Things I have to do. To know.

  I look down at Bernie. She’s still staring at the fresh-cut sandstone face and she’s saying: ‘Oh my God.’

  Then she laughs. She sees it too: the power of it. This earth wasn’t made for us: it makes itself. It just said so. Everything creates as much as it destroys.

  That’s it. I help her up and I have to say: ‘What would you reckon if we went bush, the pair of us?’

  She says: ‘What, now?’ squinting at me. I think she’s going to tell me that’s a new type of mental. She’s going to have a baby sometime in April. She’s not in any state to be going bush, not anywhere much at all.

  But then she smiles. She presses her belly against me and puts her arms around my neck. And then she says: ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  BERNIE

  Monday, the twenty-first of January and the jeep is packed, the bills are paid up, and we set off, stopping first at Taylor Square for a formality at Darlinghurst Court of Petty Sessions on the way.

  I seem to need a bit of a shove getting back out of the jeep for it, though. Somehow over the past fortnight I’ve gone from manageably plump to the size of a small planet. Baby is as excited as I am about it, kicking and tumbling inside, and I grab Rock’s hand so he can feel it too: ‘There it goes.’

  ‘Yeah, good, Bernie.’ He can’t wait to push me indoors. I have far too much fun teasing him with it.

  ‘Darling, I don’t know what you get in a knot about – every­one’s having a baby. Look.’ Two, no three, getting on a Bondi tram right now. There have never been more pregnant women in a bunch at any one time. Can’t open a newspaper or a magazine without a free pinny pattern. Every woman in the country is going to give birth in the next three to six months, and we no longer wear trousers because we can’t fit into them.

  He says: ‘Yes, and they’re all married, aren’t they.’

  ‘Oh don’t–’

  ‘Bernadetta! Gordon!’ Mrs Zoc waves as we come through the doors of the court, and she rushes over to kiss us, as though we didn’t just see each other half an hour ago in Arcadia.

  She’s lit up from the inside, so excited but trying hard to contain herself in these sombre surrounds. She’s a little girl waiting for Christmas for a present she mightily deserves. Mrs Zoc is becoming an Australiana today.

  Once she’s had a good public go at our belly herself, and called her soon-to-be daughter-in-law Gabriella over for go too, and they’ve both agreed it’s a girl, again. While Manny and Gordon, hands in their pockets, pretend they don’t know us.

  ‘What names are you thinking of, Bernadetta?’ Mrs Zoc asks the baby.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  As a man calls out from a door in the vault: ‘Zoccoli – female. Z-O-C-C-O-L-I.’

  Won’t be that name. But Mrs Zoc jumps at it, her hand in the air: ‘This is me!’

  She darts across the foyer; this is her moment, her naturalisation ceremony is about to begin. She’s so proud about all this she’s even kept the notice the solicitor had to place in the paper, put it in a tiny frame on her mantelpiece: I, Emilia Maria Giovanna Zoccoli, of Italian nationality, born at Palermo … intend to apply for Naturalisation under the Nationality Act 1920. Any objections, speak now, Australia, or forever hold your peace.

  ‘Come,’ says this court-clerkish man, directs her towards the door, and I’ve already started to cry. Hopeless: I’d cry at two flies walking up a wall these days.

  Rock holds my hand as we follow her, our Mrs Zoc. Her back is as straight as an iron rod as she steps towards the desk, proud and elegant, black crepe and white hair. But she looks so small against all the imposing oak around her, my hand goes to my throat with a last moment fear: I’m sure the clerk is going to say the forms have been filled in incorrectly, or they’ve brought in the blasted English test they’ve been threatening to introduce to keep out the Continental Hordes and all the Italian POWs that want to stay, and she’ll have to start the application all over again.

  But he says, in his bored and harassed clerk’s voice: ‘Are you prepared to take the Oath of Allegiance?’

  ‘I am,’ she replies: just try to stop this train.

  ‘After me: I swear by Almighty God.’

  ‘I swear by Almighty God.’ I swear she’s even been working on flattening her vowels.

  ‘That I Emilia’ et cetera.

  ‘That I Emilia Maria Giovanna Zoccoli …’ Will forever have a name that is music itself. Maybe Emilia would be a good name for baby … Emily … Emma? It is a girl, isn’t it … ‘Will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Sixth, his heirs and successors, according to law. And that I will faithfully observe the laws of Australia and fulfil my duties as an Australian citizen.’

  ‘Sign here please, madam. You are now a naturalised Australian of the British Commonwealth.’

  That’s it? Sign the paper, on your way. For King George who? I don’t like that. We’re not British anything, not these days. But Mrs Zoc doesn’t care. She turns from the desk, beaming, waving her certificate in the air.

  And she stamps her foot: ‘Bravo!’

  ‘Come on, Mum.’ Manny ushers her out before she starts dancing.

  And Rock says: ‘Come on, Bernie, we’d better get going, too, if we’re going.’ Already loosening his tie.

  Oh, we’re g
oing all right.

  ‘Bella,’ Mrs Zoc holds my face in her hands, ‘you telephone me every Sunday or I will die.’

  ‘I’ll call, don’t worry.’ If there’s a phone, wherever we find ourselves on Sundays.

  ‘Ah well,’ she sighs, letting go, ‘it could be worse, I suppose. At least you are not going to New York.’

  No, we’re not. At least not yet.

  ‘Bella fortuna, bella,’ she cries as she waves us some beautiful luck. ‘Bella fortuna.’

  As beautiful luck would have it, it starts raining as soon as we turn on to Parramatta Road. It rains all the way up the Great Western Highway and through the mountains to Blackheath, where Gordon frowns as if he might see into the Western Plains through solid cloud. ‘Flaming trumpets, Bernie. You’d better phone Mrs Lockhart and check on the roads that way.’

  ‘Oh my darling,’ she says, ‘you just caught me packing up. The levee’s been breached at Wagga and we’ll be next. The road’s underwater at Narrandera,’ and she couldn’t be more thrilled about it either: Hughie’s in town. The flood has finally come and there’ll be pasture again over Hell this year. ‘How are you carrying?’ she says.

  ‘I couldn’t be better or rounder,’ I tell her.

  ‘Good girl,’ she tells me. ‘Come to us on your way back through, my darling, and please be married when you get here.’

  ‘Hm.’

  She says: ‘I’d better rush, I’ve got Mitch lugging the settee into the attic.’

  Of course you do.

  ‘Bye bye, darling.’

  ‘Bye bye.’

  Rock says: ‘What did she say?’

  I say: ‘She said no-go that way.’

  Setting our course: we’ll go northwest from here instead. To Nyngan. Tomorrow. Where the word is Gunningbar Creek breached all over Still Waiting last Wednesday, for the first time in living memory. And no one could be happier. Than me. At last I’m going to see the red earth that made the man I love.