Currawalli Street

by Christopher Morgan

  At about the time that he gave up trying to climb onto the bar to marry the barmaid to the owner of a wheat farm down the road, he was coaxed home gently by a quiet man named Robert. Inside the manse, Robert made him a cup of tea and began to feed him slices of dry toast. Soon Thomas was sober enough to realise where he was and what was happening. Robert and he eventually became tasters of an exquisite kind of love. And they have been tasting it ever since. Robert Parsome, a lost man from a strongly Catholic home in Sydney, the place where his mother’s God was cold and his father’s faith was cruel was finally finished with sitting alone in a room above the Choppingblock Hotel and moved into the manse effortlessly. And as if they had always been together, the three became one of those families who aren’t really families. The sermon that was to be about obsession became about finding love in unexpected places.

  But today the weeding isn’t helping to find the subject of Sunday’s sermon; Thomas’s mind keeps wandering off. The orange cat is now sitting by the front gate, still watching him. Robert, deep in his book, has become enough of a comfortable companion to be left to entertain himself.

  Thomas hears the sound of an engine and looks up. A biplane is crawling uneasily across the sky. Thomas watches as it disappears into a bank of cloud and then emerges, going in a different direction. The pilot must have been so disorientated by being inside the clouds that he didn’t know in which direction he was going. Thomas likes the idea of that; it is very appealing. He wonders why he finds it so. The plane quickly returns to its original direction and soon the sound of its engine fades into the distance.

  He looks down at a weed he is about to pull out of the earth and thinks about that plane lost in the cloud. It strikes him that what disappoints him sometimes about the Bible is that it never gets lost in a cloud. The words and the stories are always the same. They always go in the same direction. Sometimes he would like to tell a different story, using different words, and not know what the ending is. Not know where he is heading with it. It’s not about faith. He certainly doesn’t question his faith any more than the next man does. Sometimes that’s a lot. Sometimes that’s hardly ever. What he questions is the validity of the path his faith leads him down. It is well trodden, probably overused. He knows that on this path he will never see or touch anything new because everything has been examined, turned over, patted, crumpled and stroked already. And is new no longer.

  On a whim he decides that he will walk down Choppingblock Road to the field where the planes are kept and see if he can be taught to fly one. He will go right now. The sermon can wait. Robert looks up from his book as the gate closes. He smiles at Thomas’s retreating figure.

  Eric is stretching his legs near the side fence, having a break from carving another silhouette. This one will be Burns the grocer. He is happy to be thinking about idle things, such as how Burns had a withered arm but was stronger than most and able to carry heavy boxes from the carts into his store better than any man who worked for him.

  Eric’s day started out well enough but now this strange cough has come back. He remembers the night three months ago at the Mozart concert in the town hall; that was the last time it appeared. It is a cough like no other he has ever had. It seems to rip the skin from his lungs and his throat each time it comes on. And always in gaggles of three.

  He is leaning against the house with the side fence three feet in front of him. It still smells of the tar that the builders have daubed on it to protect it from the termites. He can hear Johnny moving on the other side of the fence; it sounds as if he is gardening. He must be back from the bush, Eric notes. But then he hears hammering and the fence begins to vibrate. Funny, he thinks, Johnny must be just home from chasing Alfred’s wagons—why is he doing repairs around the house so soon? A sulphur-crested cockatoo sits in a tree above the fence, head turned sideways, looking down at him.

  A paling in front of him is torn away and then the one next to it. The afternoon sunlight bursts in and for a moment Eric is blinded. In front of him is a man he’s never seen before, about twenty-five, with short cropped black hair like an onboard Chinese coal shoveller, unshaven but not bearded. He is wearing a strange red shirt and blue trousers, the shirt so bright it makes Eric blink. What is this man doing attacking Johnny and Kathleen’s fence? They lock eyes for only a moment. Then the stranger quickly replaces the palings where they were and Eric hears him step back from the fence, which appears completely untouched. That strange man certainly wasn’t Johnny but there was something in his face that did remind Eric of him.

  Eric pushes himself away from the house wall and walks inside to find Nancy.

  ‘Is there a man staying with Kathleen?’ he asks. ‘If there isn’t then I think I have just seen a ghost. I might have a brandy.’

  Nancy comes straight over to him, sensing in his voice that something has happened. ‘What’s come over you? You must have seen many, many ghosts at sea.’

  ‘I did,’ says Eric nervously. ‘Plenty. But they all made sense. I don’t know—they were always doing something symbolic . . . something operatic.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  The words come tumbling out of Eric’s mouth. ‘They were wrapped in sails and ropes, being dragged just under the surface of the water. Or rising above the waves of a storm. Or standing at the end of a pier waving goodbye. But never like this. He was just fixing the fence. With a hammer and a red shirt.’ Nancy can tell that Eric has been shaken by this.

  ‘But the fence doesn’t need repairing,’ she says, as she touches his cheek.

  ‘No. And I can’t see where he has been. He ripped off two of the palings but they look untouched now. And the red was . . . so bright. So . . .’ He lifts the glass to his lips and drinks.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ Nancy asks.

  ‘No, of course not. I’m concerned, more than anything. You know how I am with things I don’t understand. I hope Johnny and Kathleen are alright.’

  ‘I saw her before but why don’t you go in there and see?’

  ‘I’d rather not. Kathleen might think I’m a stupid man who has spent too long at sea.’

  Nancy kisses him on the cheek. ‘Too long for me. I’ll go see if Kathleen wants anything from the shop.’

  ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go to the shop together. A walk will be good.’

  Nancy looks at him. ‘Oh, but I’m not going to the shop. It’s just an excuse to knock on the door. Everybody in the street does it.’

  ‘You mean the women?’

  ‘Oh yes. The women. It keeps everybody in touch—I mean the women. Nobody gets lonely. Nobody gets swamped by too many visits.’ She smiles. ‘If Kathleen wants company, she’ll say that she needs nothing and she’ll invite me in for a cup of tea. If she wants to be on her own, she will tell me she needs something inconsequential and I will forget to get it for her. As a system it works well.’

  ‘Does it? Maybe I should try it with the men.’

  She touches Eric on the arm and looks at him seriously. ‘You can give it a try. It won’t work though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The system only succeeds because all the women know what its real purpose is. I don’t know that the men in this street are clever enough to work it out.’

  ‘Really? You might be wrong. Maybe I’ll give it a try.’ Eric looks down at his glass and remembers the face of the ghost. ‘Yes, I will give it a try.’

  Morrie Lloyd looks out the front window of number thirteen. He likes to stand here. The currents of the wind are strangely different directly outside his house compared to anywhere else. It blusters and swirls in all directions, and it is here that the willy-willies gather themselves for their boisterous run down the street.

  He looks down at the rumpled clothes hanging from him like rags on a clothesline. Before, he always dressed well. It was the thing that set him apart from other men. He h
ad suits of fine European material and his hats were just that little bit broader in the brim so as to be noticed but unobtrusive enough that no one knew why they had noticed. He had a figure that a suit hung on well. Not now though.

  He wonders if the willy-willies have anything to do with the funerals held at the church. They could be ghosts trying to escape from the funeral service and the reality of being dead. He shakes his head. It sounds like his father talking. His father. God rest his soul. It was he who taught Morrie to always dress well.

  He turns from the window and looks around the room; it is comfortably full of furniture, but empty. His wife died on that couch in his tired arms.

  Sometimes Morrie thinks that the most profound and immediate debilitation that her death brought to him was that suddenly he had no one to talk to. It’s not talking about the grand things he misses—the things that he thinks long about, clearing his throat before he speaks. He can write to the paper about those things, talk to the greengrocer, speak to someone in the office. It is the idle musings: the lemon tree growing another two inches, an itch on his elbow all day, a new bird’s nest in the tree outside the back porch. They were good at that level of communication; not every couple is.

  There had never been any need for him to go deeper because Gwen understood that when he talked about the puddle in the road or the train being late, the child’s scarf lying on the path or the limping dog that wagged its tail at him, he was also saying he was a little angry. Or a little bit pleased. Or a little bit excited. Or a little bit . . .

  Now there is no one to know what he is feeling, and that’s what is really sad. For a while after she died he always finished the evening by calling out a goodnight to her and hearing it echo down the empty hallway. But the silence that followed became something he despised.

  Then Lazarus came along. As if his wife had sent him to give Morrie someone to talk to. Lazarus is a dog. A stray dog. A dog that no one likes. He took up residence at thirteen Currawalli Street exactly three months after Gwen died. Morrie opened the front door because he had heard movement on the porch, and Lazarus walked straight in and sat himself down on the lounge-room rug. After a while he looked over to Morrie as if to say hello and from then on that was where Lazarus lived. He eats with Morrie, sleeps in the same room as Morrie, walks with Morrie whenever he goes out. They are companions. A dog is good to share things with. Exercise. Conversation. Silence. Out walking, Morrie has stopped lifting his head when he passes people. Instead he pretends to fuss around Lazarus. No one really notices him, when he does this.

  Except for the Italian chook woman, who ignores his funny ways. She speaks easily to him. Her name is Maria. These days, when Lazarus disappears, Morrie will usually find him with Maria, sitting under her table while she does something in the kitchen or out the back keeping an eye on the chooks. When they aren’t in their pen, they peck around Lazarus but he never snaps at them. He likes to put his chin on the ground and follow the wandering chooks with his eyes. The little chicks sometimes walk over the top of him.

  Before Gwen died, Morrie had little to do with his neighbours. Only once did he ever sit around a table with them, at Christmas, next door in the reverend’s house for afternoon tea. He remembers because he had a heavy cold. The religious business was dispensed with very discreetly as if everybody, including the reverend, was slightly embarrassed by it, then the tea was poured. And, as if he was having some sort of attack, or perhaps because he had taken too much brandy for his head cold, Morrie talked freely to everyone and had a contribution to every subject that the conversations covered. Suddenly he became the controlling personality at the table. All interruptions were presented with the interjector’s eyes on his face.

  When he and Gwen went home he had to lie down for the rest of the afternoon. But he remembered something he had said at the table to that map-making fellow from number nine who was tying a piece of string to his fork and then untying it as the conversation washed around him: ‘I don’t want to rust away.’

  ‘What did you mean, you don’t want to rust away?’ Gwen asked when they were having a cup of tea after dinner that night.

  Morrie answered after a long pause. ‘I don’t want us to get old and stop thinking—stop wondering about things, stop doing things, stop being curious. When he retired my grandfather sat down in an armchair and never really got up again. The world changed around him but he didn’t change with it. That’s where he died. In that chair.’

  ‘People have to die sometime.’

  ‘Of course everyone has to die, but not necessarily because they’ve retired from work and think they have no other purpose. In effect, they retire from living. There are plenty of things that my grandfather could have done if he let his mind stay active.’

  Gwen didn’t rust before she died; she didn’t even get old. Thirty-seven. What sort of a life was that? Morrie thought as he watched her coffin being carried from the Currawalli Street church. At first he wondered what he was going to do with all the plans and proposals they’d had together. He expected to have trouble getting them out of his head, and he was right. He couldn’t sit still. And he couldn’t move. These things began to tumble his thoughts around. The long trips on slow ships, going to restaurants in London, the exploration of Tasmanian caves, mountains in the Grampians they were going to climb, where they would live in Switzerland so that Gwen could finally see snow, the camel rides through the outback, the general store they were going to open in that country town they visited once—and of course, the children they were going to have.

  So he was trapped, unable to express his grief because his mind was already filled up with plans suddenly made pointless and irrelevant. And every day it seemed as if one more emerged that he had forgotten about. After a while he wondered if this was what grief really was: a study in frustration, trying to tie up the loose ends of pieces of string that he kept finding.

  But then one night about three weeks after she died, a great pain hit him. A pain in his soul, strong enough to make him stop using any of his senses. Strong enough to make him give up.

  He sat still for two days until someone knocked on the door. And kept on knocking. He struggled over to the door, a little scared at how weak he was. On the veranda stood Maria, the woman with the chooks. At that time he only really knew her to nod to in passing. She held a basket covered by a cloth, and she looked at him for a moment then stepped into the house and escorted him back to his armchair. To this day he can’t remember whether she pushed him aside to come into the house that first time, but he thinks she probably did. He heard clattering in the kitchen and she returned with a hot bowl of tomato soup and some bread. She didn’t talk to him other than to say she would come back in an hour. She did that, and then continued to come three times a day for the next two weeks. Eventually he gave her a key and she came and went as she pleased. She didn’t talk much, which suited Morrie, for he had nothing to say and no strength to listen. The food changed with every day and he assumed he was eating what she fed her family.

  One day she found him in the kitchen, making a cup of tea. Taking it as the beginning of recovery—a sign she had been waiting for—she came over most days and took him back to her own kitchen where there was a chair around the table waiting for him. He and Maria’s husband William began their friendship around that table. Between them on the table there is always food being eaten, a newspaper being read, an atlas being explored, or a chess board being stared at. Theirs is that particular type of male friendship, one that needs a subject or a project. When they are left alone with nothing to do or talk about, the relationship falters. At those times Morrie generally goes home. He doesn’t mind. William wants to talk all the time about geraniums. Morrie gets dizzy when William starts on about them.

  Maria and William have two children, Irene and James, aged thirteen and sixteen. At first James had no time for Morrie. At sixteen, he found grief to be a stupid indulgence,
something it was best not to cater to; instead he felt it should be trampled on and ground into the dirt. Morrie respected that because he sometimes thought along those lines himself.

  Then Lazarus turned up, and started to follow Morrie to the Contes’s house each day. He sought out James with a wagging tail and a long tongue on arrival and picked him as the person to sit below at the table. And that was what finally broke the ice between Morrie and James.

  There is smoke in the air today. Lazarus smells it and looks up at Morrie, who looks to the end of the street. There is a dirty brown cloud on the horizon. It is a long way away.

  Morrie turns out of the front gate and begins to walk fast. The wagons still aren’t back at number nine. He can see Alfred’s legs pacing up and down the front yard. He keeps his gaze downwards and almost walks straight into Maria, who is coming towards him, also without looking, talking to the woman from number ten.

  ‘Morrie, you know Kathleen, don’t you?’ Maria hastens to perform the introductions.

  Kathleen takes a quick step forward. ‘Of course he does. How are you, Morrie?’

  Morrie looks up at the tall woman standing next to Maria and tries a smile. ‘Ah . . . good, yes . . . how are you, Kathleen?’

  ‘I’m very well, thank you, Morrie. Where are you going on such a fine day?’

  ‘I was just going for a walk to break in the day. Although when I smell smoke I don’t feel like going too far.’

  ‘But the fire must be a long, long way away.’

  ‘Of course. But it still makes me want to stay at home.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ says Kathleen. She turns to Maria. ‘I hope Johnny comes home soon.’