She walks along Little Road to the station. Two streets run off to the left: the first, closest to Currawalli Street, is Borneo Street and the next is Battlefield Street. It has a few shops perched awkwardly near the corner. She can’t see what they are. Her grandparents used to live in Borneo Street. Not this one, but in a suburb on the other side of town.
By the time she is standing on the platform, the train is pulling into the station. She is quickly gone, transported away, thinking about the honeysuckle man rather than Peter.
*
Jim watches the young woman leave number thirteen. She walks quickly to the gate. He sees her notice the sign on the church and thinks for an instant of the letter T now on his mantelpiece. She is dressed like a hippie girl going out for the day. Her hair is brown and long. She looks like she is wearing combat boots, but they are probably not. They don’t have the right heels for the jungle. He looks down at his own. They are the only shoes that fit him at the moment. His feet grew so used to being wet and swollen that they are now a half size bigger than before he left.
He has been struggling with the honeysuckle growing across the front fence. It is old, grows bark like dried-out leather. But it is the smell of his childhood and represents his life in this street. The strongest memory he got of home while in Vietnam was when his unit walked through a deserted village and he caught the fragrance of honeysuckle on the wind. That was the day before Brent stepped on the mine.
Over there he was surprised how often he thought about this honeysuckle. Going away, he had discovered, is all about thinking of where you have come from. It wasn’t number ten Currawalli Street that he remembered specifically, but rather the smell of gum trees and bushfire smoke, the big empty sky, the sound of his feet on the footpath, the magpies calling out to each other, someone laughing in the distance, radio sounds rolling across a front lawn, the knowledge that the heat would go away at the end of the day. And the sweet smell of this honeysuckle.
The young woman is wearing a pair of jeans that look new. He sees her lips move but he doesn’t hear what she says. He concentrates on her face and forces the echoes of Brent’s scream to go away.
‘I love honeysuckle!’
So that’s what she said. What do you say to that? Brent’s one scream is like sonic glue on the back wall of his mind as he tries to find an adequate response.
She is abreast of him now on the other side of the street. If he doesn’t say something then she will think he is mute or, even worse, uninterested.
‘Good for you!’ That’s it? That’s the best you can come up with? What’s wrong with you? No wonder she’s still walking.
Quickly he picks up a few trimmed stems of the honeysuckle and as he walks across the street, ties them together into a spray. He knows that she hears him coming up behind her; he is making enough noise so that she won’t mistake him for a sandshoed assassin.
As she turns he holds out the honeysuckle. ‘There you are.’
All of a sudden he realises that he doesn’t need this. He wants to be inside. He doesn’t need to be handing out flowers to strange girls like he is a pimpled teenager. He turns and walks back across the street to number ten and goes inside.
But for the next hour, he struggles to remove from his thoughts the picture of that girl’s brown hair moving towards him as she accepted the honeysuckle. It is a long time since anything good has stuck in his head. It brushes away the thought of the strange look on Brent’s face when he put his foot down and heard the mine click.
Lance Barron lives at number sixteen. He has lived here for ten years. He likes his house. He likes the colour of it, he likes the trees that shelter it, he likes the creaking sound the corrugated-tin roof makes when the sun heats it up, he likes the ruined chook sheds that have grown over with geraniums, he likes having to cut the grass in the backyard, he likes the train line at the back, he likes the house two doors down with its face silhouettes supporting the eaves, he likes living next door to an almost-famous footballer, but most of all he likes Debra, inside his house.
He is known in the street as Lance From Up The Street or Upper Lance. He doesn’t mind: they are better nicknames than some. The reason for the nicknames is so that Lance From Up The Street or Upper Lance is not confused with Lance From Down The Street, also known as Lower Lance. The two men are of roughly the same age, but of vastly different temperaments. Lance From Up The Street is calm, and happy to talk to people. Lance From Down The Street is reclusive and tense. They share the name and the street and the neighbours but that is all.
Upper Lance walks to his front gate and checks the letterbox. It is empty. He sees Jim from number ten run across the road and give something to a girl who is walking on the other side of the street, then turn and walk quickly home.
Jim must be a tortured young man, Lance assumes. He was a nice boy before he went to the war. He might still be a nice boy; Lance has not spoken to him since he was brought home from Vietnam. He remembers him as a kid who rode his bike a lot and sometimes sat out on the footpath and looked at Lance’s house. He was good to talk to, kept Lance informed about things that he didn’t know he was interested in. Football. Rock and roll music. The World Surfing Championship.
Lance also assumes that Jim is suffering because he has not come home like a returning soldier should. Not that any of these soldiers will. According to Debra. The war in Vietnam has made everybody uncomfortable; rather than being grateful, the community hopes that if they ignore the soldiers they will disappear back into the streets and lanes where they came from. And the war can be forgotten.
Lance is forty-two years old. Debra is thirty-eight. They have one child, Pam, who is twelve. At the moment Pam is on holiday in New South Wales with her grandparents.
Debra comes to the front door. She calls to Lance, ‘Has he been?’
Lance shakes his head without turning. Debra doesn’t move away from the screen door. She keeps looking at Lance. ‘He’s late some days. He’ll be here. Why don’t you come inside and get ready for work?’
Lance turns to see her framed by the door like a painting. ‘I’ll come in a second. I just want to look at something first.’
‘What?’
‘The apostle bird tree. They should be back by now.’
‘They are. I saw them yesterday when I went to see Val. Come in.’ She smiles at him gently. That is enough to bring him up the path to the door. She holds it open then closes it behind him. Into her arms he slips and sinks away to another place. She knows this is what happens to him sometimes and she understands. She holds him until he takes a deep breath and sighs.
‘The day continues. Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For everything.’
Just then they hear the postman’s whistle down the street. They look at each other. They don’t have to say anything but what they both think is as loud as a shout. They step back outside and walk to the gate just as the postman reaches their letterbox. He hands them a duck-egg-blue envelope. He lets the whistle fall from his mouth.
‘G’day. Sorry I’m late. We’re short three men down at the post office. Nice weather. They probably went to the beach. Looks like it’ll stay like this for a while.’
‘It does. Although this is Melbourne—it might start to rain in a moment,’ says Lance.
‘That’s true. I’d better push on. Off to work soon?’
‘Yeah, soon. Just got time to read this letter. From my daughter. She’s on holidays.’
‘Still? It’s been six weeks now, hasn’t it?’ he asks. Debra smiles because the postman remembers.
‘Six weeks, four days.’
‘Miss her?’ It is the postman’s turn to smile.
‘A little. We’re both used to there being three people in the house. Two makes it feel . . .’
‘Empty,’ Debra finishes.
&
nbsp; ‘I understand,’ the postman says. ‘My boy has gone to New Guinea with the church. My wife and I have trouble finding things to talk about. Just the two of us.’
‘New Guinea is a long way away. Our daughter has just gone to Sydney.’
‘Coming home soon?’ he asks as he looks into the sack on his handlebars.
‘This letter will tell us. Your boy?’
‘Next week.’
‘How long has he been gone for?’ Debra asks.
‘Six weeks. The same as your daughter. Have you got relations up there?’
‘My parents,’ Lance says.
‘Are you a Sydney boy, then?’
‘No. I come from Albury, about halfway between both cities. I went one way, they went the other.’
‘Right. I must keep on. Cheers.’ The postman cycles towards the church.
‘He didn’t seem very interested in where I came from,’ Lance says, scratching his chin.
Debra has torn open the blue envelope and is reading quickly. She looks up. ‘Two days’ time. She’s coming on the train. She wants to see the house as she goes past. No, he wasn’t interested at all in where you come from. He was just being polite.’ They walk back inside.
‘Two days. Better see if I can get some time off work. Speaking of which, I’d better go.’
Debra turns to him and smiles. Her mind is miles away. Lance doesn’t notice. He kisses her on the cheek and walks quickly into the kitchen to pick up his bag and the dinner that he has made himself: cold lamb sandwiches. He looks at the clock on the wall. Five past six. He had better go or he will be late for night shift. He’d rather go to bed early with Debra. Tomorrow night will be their last night apart for this month, he decides. He will tell the foreman not to expect him for the next three nights after that. The thought makes him feel better.
As he walks out the front door, he imagines he can see the smoke from the factory’s chimney in the distance. He walks out the front gate, down Currawalli Street and waves to Rodney up in the apricot tree. ‘Hello, Rod. Anything been happening?’
‘Two fire trucks went up Choppingblock Road at three twenty-five. They both returned at four oh nine.’
‘Trains on time?’
‘Yes. You catching the six eighteen?’
‘Yep. Have I got time?’
‘You’ll have to hurry. But you should make it. Bye bye, Mr Barron.’
‘Bye, Rod. Say hello to your mum for me.’
‘Okay.’ Rodney settles back down on the branch.
Lance thinks about Rodney and his mother Eve all the way to the station. Rodney is three years younger than Pam. Eve is the same age as Debra. Rodney spends most of the time he is not at school up in that apricot tree keeping a record of everything that happens in Currawalli Street and its surrounds. Lance feels for the boy but can’t find any way to connect with him other than by discussing train running times. Some days that makes him feel sad. Rodney’s dad was killed in a car crash five years ago. If Lance died, he would not like Pam to be so isolated, so unapproachable. Up in a fruit tree all day.
Eve is nice when she has the time to smile but more often than not she is being harried by tiny demons demanding her time, making her eyes sting, her nose runny, her breathing fast. But when she is allowed to stop and look at you, it is as if you are giving her a gift. Lance would like to hold her in his arms for a while. His intuition says that that is what she would want; not for any other reason than to feel the warmth of another body. But he is not capable of explaining that to Debra or of dealing with whatever after effects there might be. No one believes a man can be an innocent when it comes to anything intimate.
As he walks onto the platform he sees the train coming. It is red and dirty at the front. It looks as if it has been going all day, which of course it has. As it stops, he pulls open the closest carriage door. Before he can step aboard, a woman steps out. It is Eve. Speak of the devil. Lance looks at her. There is something different about her. Lance notices that but cannot think what it might be.
She looks at him. ‘Hello, Lance, off to work?’ She touches him on the arm. Her hand is warm.
‘Yes, I am. I just spoke to Rod. Asked him to say hello to you.’
‘I just waved to him from the train. Have a good night, Lance.’
Lance closes the door and the train moves out of the station. He sees Eve smiling to herself as she walks to the gate. She looks suddenly happy, Lance thinks. That’s good. Something nice must have happened.
Rodney turns around in his apricot tree and looks up the street. He can see the pub and the path that runs behind his house. A lot goes on. He keeps a journal, a logbook of what planes fly overhead, who walks along the path, when trains go past, who goes into which houses. Eve has talked to a few different medical people about Rodney’s obsession with statistics and his reluctance to engage with children his own age. He is liked by adults but ignored by other children. He is happy to keep his records and prefers not to be disturbed.
His record keeping is well known in the street. It is now commonplace to see him sitting high in his apricot tree, checking his watch and writing something down in his logbook. These days, whenever someone in the street does something or stops to chat with a neighbour they habitually glance over at the apricot tree to see if the boy is up there. It is a harmless thing for a boy to do. But like any type of observation it is only as harmless as the event being observed.
Rodney knows at what time each family in the street has dinner; he knows that the Hendersons always close the front curtain on the left and then the one on the right at six thirty every night whether the sun is still shining or not. He also knows that Mr Oatley used to have visits from a lady in a green car when his wife was away on holidays. And that the five police cars arrived at Mr Oatley’s within a space of twelve minutes and that he had heard the first gunshot at sixteen past ten, the second at twenty-one past.
His records show that three days ago he saw Val’s orange cat, whose name he thinks is Thomas (he put a question mark after the name), leaving her yard and walking up the footpath, going past the church, past the bowing soldier statue, past the reverend’s house and into Peter Alexis’s front yard. It is not the first time that Thomas has gone in there. He does so most days. Rodney watched until Thomas’s tail disappeared behind the Chinese lantern bush.
Once Rodney saw Thomas arrive just as Peter was standing at the front gate. They showed such affection for each other that you might think that Peter was the owner of Thomas. That time they immediately went inside together.
But Thomas the cat is now missing. He hasn’t been seen for three days.
Sally Domak, feet sore from the marching, throat sore from the chanting, stands at the back fence of the manse. She is not a keen gardener. She feels no affinity whatsoever with the soil. Her husband seems to walk more easily on this ground than she does, even though he is from the other side of the world and she was born here. Jan is in his office doing his records, as he does every night at this time. She picks up the spade and laughs. Her husband. Only once has she broached his . . . office work. Two hours a night on church records? He is not running an insurance business. There surely isn’t that much written work to do. When she did say something, he replied by pushing a Bible across the table at her. Bibles! She hadn’t realised that being married to a man of the cloth would involve so many Bibles. Sure, she expected some, but one in every room? One in the car? The garage?
If she was a jealous or a highly strung woman, she would march right over there and burst into his office. But she already knows what she would find, she just doesn’t know who. And it would be harder to smile on Sundays as she is forced to if she had a face to recognise.
She will never tell her classmates about Jan’s affairs. She will never tell them about his genuine need to conduct them. Not only does she not want them to think less of her f
or putting up with it, she doesn’t want anybody to see her husband as another example of chauvinism run rampant. He isn’t that. She is not sure what he is, but it isn’t that.
She looks down at the crepe myrtle bush that has been blown over in a recent storm. Its roots have come out of the ground. She looks closer, between the roots. A small box lies newly exposed in the soil. She bends down and picks it up. It is covered in red embroidery that must once have been of great beauty but dirt and water have faded it. There are initials sewn across the top in pale gold thread. JT. It opens easily.
Although Currawalli Street is generally a peaceful place, Lower Lance is in the middle of a strange little war with Upper Lance: each of them tries to put out his rubbish bin ahead of the other. And the two men are the indicators for everyone else of when garbage day is; both Lances know that no one else in the street puts their bins out until either of them does.
Even though they have never discussed the war they are engaged in, both men know the rules. Bins must only be put out on the afternoon of the day before. Anytime after noon on the day preceding garbage day is allowable. In the morning is not permitted, and leaving them out on the nature strip all week is strictly prohibited. Touching the other’s rubbish bin is not allowed either. The conflict is waged like a cavalry war of the seventeenth century, with a time and a field agreed on and battle only starting when each army is ready.
On one occasion, both Lances were carrying their bins out at the same time when they noticed that Craig Henderson, who had just moved into number eight, had already placed his bin on the nature strip. Both men stopped in mid stride to look over at the Henderson bin. At that instant they both had the same thought: ‘New player in town.’ That was the closest they have ever come to acknowledging that they are in a war on opposing sides.
Henderson was new in the street and eager not to miss out on bin day. The next week he was more relaxed; he put out his bin when he noticed Upper Lance’s sitting out the front of number sixteen.
Currawalli Street Page 18