On Currawalli Street, these people are slowly forging the type of friendship that only neighbours can have.
It is the tenth of April. This year the summer came late, later than ever before. Currawalli Street lies in the sun like a sleeping lizard. The heat pushes down gently at first, but after a few hours the trees, the bushes, the dirt and the houses with their unpainted corrugated-iron roofs will be brutalised by its fierceness. And by the end of the day they will look beaten. There are a few weeks in the height of summer when even the birds stay still in the branches all day, hidden from the hot rays and only venturing out at first and last light. And these are hardier birds than any Kathleen has known in England. They are tougher, brighter, louder.
When she first heard the sulphur-crested cockatoo call out it sounded like someone screaming in pain, but Johnny explained to her where the sound came from. And when one of the builders working on the house two doors up was crushed by timber that fell from an overturning dray pulled by an ox, she knew what a scream of pain really sounded like. She arrived in the front yard of number fourteen at the same time as Maria from number sixteen. The other workmen were trying to move the load of timber from the man’s bloodied body and had just lifted the dray off him. The ox had fallen down dead, a victim of the heat. The man screamed as each piece of timber was lifted. Both women knelt beside him and Maria held his face in her hands as Kathleen wiped the perspiration from his forehead. She kept one hand on the timbers that still sat on his abdomen and legs, hoping that she might be able to stop them from falling further across his chest. As each length of timber was removed the smell of fresh blood grew stronger. Eventually enough timber had been taken away that she could see that the remaining lengths closest to his body were soaked in it.
As the load on his body lightened, the man’s screams became fainter. He began to tremble and suddenly his eyes focused on something behind Kathleen’s head. Then he slipped away. At exactly that moment, a strand of her hair freed itself from the bun it was tied in and fell, touching him on the cheek. She brushed it away. Maria told the workmen that there was no need to rush anymore, and those words were more devastating than the man’s screams had been.
Kathleen has since come to be fond of the sulphur-crested cockatoo and its shriek. No bird has ever made her laugh in delight before. Cockatoos fly together in a large gang like drunken wharf workers and they live to cause trouble. They pick orchards clean in a day, bite through veranda posts, slide down iron roofs until the inhabitants inside can’t take the noise anymore. Twenty could be slaughtered but forty would be back tomorrow with the very knowledge that the dead twenty had learned the day before. There is in these birds something at play that walks in step with the land. Some communion that doesn’t make sense in the way Kathleen knows things. There are stories of some cockatoos living for over two hundred years and so they may have seen the first white settlers coming ashore, struggling with wooden barrels that smelled of the pickling oil inside mixed with sea water that had soaked through the wood; seen the ropes from canvas tents fanned out like the legs of a thin octopus that was uncomfortable on the land, and wondered at the pathetic scratching in the dirt into which frail seeds were tossed, destined to rot away. No wonder cockatoos scream wickedly like they do.
If Kathleen is to be honest, this country scares her. The darkness here belongs to someone else. And it is at night that she feels it the strongest, that she is a stranger in a strange land. A few times late in the evening she has seen something indistinguishable moving in the distance among the currawalli trees; occasionally too she has smelled a strangely beautiful aroma in the air first thing in the morning. Something beyond what she knows. Sometimes she feels what might be the soft feathers of bulrushes touching her arm. When she first arrived at the farm to take up her teaching position and she was standing a little away from the house, trying to comprehend a sky so big, a local Aboriginal woman appeared in front of her, holding out her hand curled up in a ball. When she was sure that Kathleen was looking at the hand, she uncurled her fingers and revealed a ball of white bulrush tops. She leant forward and lifted Kathleen’s hand, guiding it onto the top of the bulrushes so that both women were enclosing the flowers. They held that clasp for two minutes until the moment was broken by a gang of cockatoos landing a few yards from them.
And though they spoke no words, Kathleen was suddenly sure that this woman was offering to help guide her through this strange world. And although she never saw this woman again, Kathleen still feels the same. In Currawalli Street she found a pink and grey galah feather in a small ball of mud and grass on her front path. It looked as if it had been constructed by hand, not by nature.
Kathleen looks up from the half-moon table where she is rereading a letter from her younger sister. She knows just where Louisa will have written this: at the mother-of-pearl table by the piano where the warmth of the fire comes across the room and makes the velvet curtains tremble slightly. She remembers the view that is behind those curtains.
As she looks out her own front window now over the honeysuckle that is growing along the front fence she can hear the apostle birds calling to each other in the tree next door. Across the street at number nine, Rose Covey is looking at her flowers, one hand reaching up to idly caress a leaf on the apricot tree. Kathleen decides to walk over and say hello.
Many different things have made Rose a stronger woman and a sadder woman than she wanted to be. She says she has been beaten by the sun and hammered by life, and she looks already to have begun the steep descent into old age. Her voice cracks when she speaks and a small hump has appeared between her shoulder blades; when she leans forward she looks as if she is trying to get away from it. As she bends over a flowerbed you can see that her hair is silver in the body and black on the tips. It is striking enough for some children to be frightened of her. Her face is lined in the way of someone who has grown used to not having much sleep and she constantly looks to have a haze of bother floating around her. She is always mildly troubled by something that runs deeper than any normal concern. Whenever she stops moving, a cloud of some kind of abstract desperation catches her up and shadows her face. Sometimes the cloud of desperation will be thick like smoke swirling around her legs as she walks. The reflection of it is in her eyes. That is when she falls silent and her face looks drawn as if she has just witnessed something unpleasant.
Rose Covey was eight years old when she had her first vision. She was looking up and, in the dirty thin clouds that always blew across the sky on windy days, she saw a picture of the man who lived down the road falling off his roof. At that moment the only thing she thought was that his scream sounded funny and so she smiled. But as she was alone she could share it with no one and so she forgot about it until three days later when her father, who had been fixing the front gate, burst into the kitchen and yelled to her mother that Jack had fallen off his roof and was dead.
The second vision happened when she was sixteen, on the very last day of her school holidays. She was sitting on the back step trying to attract the magpies to the crumbs of bread she was holding when she saw the river rise over its banks very quickly. The water dislodged all her father’s work sheds, the house cow was carried away, the flowerbeds and the washing line with her new yellow blouse disappeared into the muddy swirl. But above all she heard the noise, a roaring as if a giant was bellowing mightily over the hill. When she blinked, the water was gone. There was no noise other than the sound of the magpies coming tentatively closer. Her blouse was still blowing gently on the line in the morning wind, the flowers were bending their red and pink heads, the sheds were untouched, Daphne the cow was at the fence gazing into the distance, and the river looked to be as lazy as it always did. She kept this vision to herself. She locked it away with the other things she was beginning to lock away.
In the afternoon she returned reluctantly to boarding school. That night a big flood raced down from the hills and the river broke its ba
nks. Contact with her parents became irregular for a while. When she returned home for the Easter break, things felt the same even though they looked a bit different. There was only one big shed now where there had been three smaller ones. The flowers had gone, as flowers do, but the bed looked to have been freshly dug; the clothesline was strung up between different trees but Daphne the cow was still standing at the fence, staring into the distance. The debris of the flood remained in the lower branches of all the trees: long strands of sapling bark, clumps of bush grass, torn leaves from trees far away, all packed and squeezed into tight elbows of the branches just above Rose’s head.
And now, at fifty-one, she is having a third vision.
After wiping away the dust that has accumulated overnight on the side table Kathleen walks from her front room, thinking how sad Rose looks most of the time. It occurs to her that maybe Rose hasn’t had worse experiences than anybody else; maybe she is only cursed with remembering them better. Kathleen shakes her head at a thought so sad.
She has not known Rose for long but she has heard her vividly recount incidents from her childhood. The taste of apples from her uncle’s tree, the colours of wool displayed in a shop window one Christmas, the smells of the bush after a strong rain that washed away the dust and dryness the day her grandfather left on the drove he didn’t return from, a childhood visit to the city and the sound of a tram loaded high with vegetables being drawn up the main street outside her bedroom window on its way to an early morning market: Rose remembers everything.
By the time Kathleen has closed the front door and reached the gate, Rose is standing up straight, looking down at her feet. Kathleen begins walking across the street, calling hello. Rose takes a moment before she looks up. She begins to respond, and Kathleen sees that her face is like a stone mask of sadness.
As Kathleen walks out of the shadows that fall halfway across the street, the morning sun slaps her and its warmth brings a freshness into her body. The currawalli trees that grow behind her house look best in this kind of light, when the sun is not yet hot enough to burn, and the leaves look as if they are trying to reach out towards it. The wind is picking up. The breeze carries the scent of the gum trees and as the breeze gets stronger so does the perfume.
Concentration spreads across Rose’s face as she says, ‘I was just thinking about you, Kathleen.’
A gust of wind, suddenly cold. Rose waits until Kathleen has walked in through the gate before she comes over and puts her arms strongly around the younger woman. Kathleen is taller than Rose by a head and does not normally embrace anybody other than members of her family. Rose senses her discomfort and tells her that she wanted to hug someone; she apologises for making Kathleen uneasy.
‘Still hot,’ Kathleen says, to change the subject. It is an unneeded observation.
‘Too hot for this time of year. It should be gone by now. Or at least showing signs of going.’ Rose touches the dry brown leaves of a plant. ‘But it’s not showing any signs at all.’
‘What do you think it means?’ Kathleen asks. Rose looks at her seriously for a moment. Then she smiles.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
They walk over to a bed of yellow foxgloves and talk of the condition of the soil and how it affects the colour of the flower. Rose knows about these things and Kathleen is eager to learn as much as she can about this strange dry soil that she lives and walks on, digs, sweeps out of the house and plants vegetables in.
Rose leans down as they talk and turns over the dirt with an old bent fork from the cutlery set that Alfred’s parents gave them as a wedding gift. She sinks to her knees as she sifts through the clumps of dirt. Kathleen can’t make out all of Rose’s words and so she drops down next to her. Rose smiles at her. The clump she is holding breaks up under her thumb and leaves a large red worm lying on her palm, exposed and wriggling. She puts it back on the ground and covers it over with the dirt.
Her daughter, Elizabeth, has never shown any interest in her garden. Rose knows that Elizabeth can live easily without Alfred and Rose but they can’t live without their daughter. And now that Elizabeth has fallen in love with a man up north, Rose also knows there is a chance that once she has returned from this trip she may not stay for long. All Rose can do about it is dig her garden and grow her flowers, so she works at the dirt with the fork, turning over each clump, working her way along the bed.
‘Hello!’
Kathleen and Rose know without looking that it is the reverend’s sister. Her voice is husky, with a night-time echo, and it makes Kathleen think of someone talking through a curl of perfumed smoke. When they turn they see her looking down at them from the fence.
Rose invites her into the garden; as always, Janet walks with more confidence than she rightly should for a spinster in her twenties, looking after her reverend brother. Her auburn hair is set as if she is about to leave for the races; a Chinese shell pin holds a sweep of curls in place. Her dress makes her look broader in the shoulders than she really is and has the effect of highlighting her long and elegant neck. Her soft Italian shoes have clearly never been near freshly turned soil before; they were made more for dancing than walking. She steps onto the stone path and stands between the two married women, who are still on their knees. Looking at the foxgloves, she tells Rose that they are too good to pick. Then she bends and picks one.
Kathleen stands up, dusting her knees; as she helps Rose to her feet, she asks after the reverend. Janet waves her hand as if she is dismissing the question and says that Thomas is always fine. Then she adds that he is relentless like a machine. Neither Kathleen nor Rose know what she might mean by this and their faces betray their confusion.
Janet smiles to herself.
Rose steals a look at Kathleen as Janet tries to explain. ‘It’s as if he turns it on at the start of the day and then turns it off at the end of the day. Like a machine.’
‘Oh, I understand. Turns what on?’ Rose asks.
‘His faith.’
‘Ah,’ Kathleen and Rose say at the same time. Janet turns away from the two women for a moment to look down the street. They wander away from the foxgloves to the apricot tree. Janet mentions that she saw Johnny riding out of the street this morning, looking as if he was going on a long trip.
‘Yes. I was just about to talk to Kathleen about it,’ says Rose. ‘He has gone on behalf of Alfred to find his wagons and see if they need any help.’
Janet looks at her. ‘Alfred is still sick?’
‘Yes. I think he’s worried that Elizabeth is not back by now. Not that he says anything. And you know how men get. Like a machine.’ The other two laugh.
If ever there was a time for Rose to openly talk about her marriage, this would be that time. But she is not going to. She doesn’t even consider it, although she has spoken of it in her head plenty of times.
At first, Alfred never worried about anything. He was so happy and content and always had fresh ideas in his head. Then about ten years ago he started to brood and mope around the house. He wouldn’t say what was wrong and he hasn’t offered any explanation since. Some men are good at hiding what they are thinking about. Some, like Alfred, aren’t.
And marriages don’t need physical distance to separate. The house and the necessities that come with it may be shared but interests can go in opposite directions. More often than not these separations aren’t sudden; they grow and grow over the years as more things fall into the tiny cracks of a marriage and open them further.
Rose looks over at the rose bush she and Alfred planted when they first moved here. Its flowers are still as beautiful as when it first bloomed but it is now untended and its thorns turn inwards and scratch its own strangled branches. She comments, as if to herself, ‘I have been meaning to prune that rose for two years. Now I will have to wait till August.’
The wind has turned around; it is now coming in fr
om the north and carries with it strange scents. Janet looks at the line of currawalli trees in the distance.
Rose stands up straight and stretches her back. She invites both women to dine with her tonight. Alfred is going down to the pub, Johnny has gone into the bush. Janet will be alone because Thomas is attending a dinner at the bishop’s house. On the strength of their new communion and because they accept that Rose is more at home in a landscape like this than either of them are and because they have their own dread for the night’s isolation, both the younger women accept the invitation. All three are mildly surprised by what they just agreed to.
‘Are you not invited to the bishop’s house?’ Rose asks.
‘Of course. I am always invited. But I choose not to go.’ Janet shakes her head slightly as she speaks. ‘Do you know the bishop? No, of course not. How could you? He is a strange little man. Quite horrible.’
She turns again to watch a willy-willy dance down the street. This bishop, whom Thomas has to rely on for so much, makes depraved suggestions to her without using any words, his leering eyes, his overly wet mouth, his lifted eyebrows proposing retreats into the shadows. Holding a spoon to her mouth or wiping her lips with a napkin seems to give him some kind of perverted pleasure that he barely conceals.
She turns back to the others and they see that her cheeks have reddened. She shakes herself and tries to smile. Kathleen and Rose don’t smile back.
‘The bishop has made inappropriate suggestions to me,’ she finally says.
Currawalli Street Page 5