Leila hung her head.
‘Men!’ murmured Mabel occupied with some assessment. ‘Men!’
‘How’s your affair going, Mabel?’ asked Biddy.
‘Oh Les! He’s all right.’
‘How often do you meet him?’ asked Sadie.
‘Every Wednesday night.’
‘Doesn’t he see you any other night?’
‘No.’
‘Then he’s married.’
‘He is not.’
‘Did he say why he doesn’t meet you oftener?’
‘He said he’s working.’
‘Oh yair! That’s what they all say.’
‘I’m sure he’s not married.’ Mabel was troubled.
‘How old is he?’
‘About thirty-three.’
‘He’s married all right. That’s the chap I saw you with last Wednesday, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looked married to me. He’s worn. He wants a haircut and he’s wearing out his wedding suit. Does he ever take you to a show?’
‘He doesn’t like pictures.’
Sadie laughed derisively. ‘Married men never do. They are frightened of being seen. Where does he live?’
‘Footscray.’
‘Do you know the street he lives in?’
‘No, I never ask him. He’d tell me though.’
‘You ask him for the street and number. Tell him you might like to write to him one day. I’ll bet he puts you off.’
‘I’ll bet he doesn’t.’
‘You try him.’
‘All right, I will.’
The bell rang. In five minutes it would ring again but then the girls had to be standing before their machines ready for the released bay of pulleys and belts that would jerk them into action.
They rose and began walking towards the doorway. They crowded the entrance, hands on the shoulders of those in front of them, shuffling forward like convicts while staring ahead into the gloom of the factory where the waiting machines stood silent.
I stood back from the group beside Leila Hale who had paused to search her handbag.
‘Into it again,’ I said gesturing resignation. ‘I was enjoying that sun.’
‘Yes, it was nice, wasn’t it!’
‘You haven’t been working here very long, have you?’
‘No, only four days.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Well …’ She hesitated, wondering whether to tell the truth but uncertain how I would react to it. ‘Not very much.’
‘No,’ I said, then added, ‘I feel a bit that way myself.’
‘It’s work,’ she said as if that were the answer to all doubt, to all dislike of one’s job. You were working and others weren’t; you were lucky.
‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘but I’d sooner be doing something I liked. Say you had a chance to take on something you really liked, what would it be?’
‘Ballet dancer.’
‘Go on!’ I exclaimed. ‘Fancy that! It would be wonderful. Have you ever been to the ballet?’
‘No, but I’ve got a book about it; pictures of it an’ that.’
‘Some of those pictures are very beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, they are nice. They look like they had no weight an’ that. They look different to ordinary people.’
‘They are trained,’ I said.
‘Yes, mother said that.’
‘Why don’t you learn ballet since you like it so much?’
‘It would take too much money. I dance at home though. I’ve learnt a lot like that. You can follow the pictures.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Follow them! Leap like them!’ I waved my arms in the air. ‘Whoo! Like as if you had wings. I can dream over pictures of ballet dancers. I feel like them some-times—light, like you say. I go floating across a stage to music.’
She faced me quickly. She looked surprised and happy. An eager smile had transformed her face. ‘I do that!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m like that! Isn’t it funny! Fancy you feeling like that! I feel like that too.’
She giggled in confusion. ‘I suppose it’s silly.’
‘It’s not silly at all,’ I said.
‘No-o-o,’ she murmured doubtfully then added with determination, ‘I’m going to save up to learn.’
She paused a moment thinking then added, her animation gone, ‘But then I might be too old. It says in this book you must start when you are a kid.’
‘You get 12/6 a week don’t you?’
‘Yes, but mother lets me keep half.’
The last of the girls were pushing through the doorway.
‘I must go.’
She joined them and disappeared into the building.
I went into my office and sat at my desk. My eyes moved over columns of figures but the voices of the girls remained with me, resting behind my thought and action like a conscience, not only on that day but for all the days that stretched ahead.
Beneath the roofs of the factories that conceal the earth of Melbourne’s industrial suburbs sat the girls. Into their minds knowledge was fed scrap by scrap until it became a testimony for guidance. It was knowledge gained from whispers in school-grounds, from the confidences of bench mates, from lunch-time stories, from the calculated try-outs of hunting men in cars and sheltered doorways, from books handed from one to another with a few thumbed pages to guide them to the flame.
The knowledge thus gained did not flood the mind with light that encouraged the growth of talent, that inspired worthy purpose, established truthful values. It lay in its totality like a breached fortress within them, claimed as a defence but vulnerable under the urgings of loneliness, of dreams, of the necessity to conform, the compulsion to compete, the desperate need to be loved.
O you are handsome, Ron Hughes. You are full of strength and your arms will protect me. You will not hurt me in the dark, will you, Ron Hughes? You will not leave me crying in the dark, alone with my crying, hearing your voice with another.
It is not true what they say about you, is it, Ron Hughes? I believe what you say. I believe you. I want to believe you. I have to believe you.
The knowledge they needed should have come to them in the nature of a song so that it inspired the spirit without conflict from the body. It should have come in spoken words of mature wisdom and understanding.
But those who could sing the words were not available to them, the songs never came their way. What they were given for their lives’ fulfilment was a spurious knowledge that prevented the translation of dreams into action, perverted aspirations and killed the talents awaiting birth.
Some of the girls emerged fortified and strengthened by experiences from which in the future they would strive to guard their children but a contribution to life of all the beauty of which they were capable was not for most of them.
‘Yah hoo, ya lair.’ They stopped there. In some, the image of ‘lair’ became life itself.
That which had happened to my mind amongst these girls brought life into my stories and I won a number of competitions but could not get the stories published. They were not what the public wanted, editors told me.
I sent my notebook story, based on ‘what the public wanted’ to Smith’s Weekly, a Sydney newspaper. I wrote it under an assumed name, feeling ashamed.
It was published, the first story of mine to appear in print.
13
Most of the employees of the Modern Shoe Company were working part-time. The wage envelopes of the men that even in times of full employment contained barely enough to support their families now contained half their normal wage.
The staff was reduced and those that remained had to work harder. The girls from the machine room sent a messenger down to the office several times a day for aspirins. A large bottle was kept in an office drawer for their use. It usually lasted a month; now it was being emptied in less than a fortnight.
Creditors became more persistent. Manufacturers with worried faces entered the offic
e and left thwarted. They had ceased to ask for full settlement of their accounts. Conditions were such that this request roused stubbornness and resentment. They asked for payments on account, thus establishing themselves as worthy of a cash tribute to their understanding.
Some of these were wealthy men and they were often the ruthless and demanding ones, their wealth being the result of such qualities. Others had backyard factories and were tottering on the brink of bankruptcy as we were. They pleaded their cause.
Each day I had to face them. I had to evade and dissemble. I was fighting for my own security as well as that of the firm upon which I was dependent.
Knowledge was coming to me scrap by scrap, as it did to the girls. It was in essence a related knowledge to that acquired by the machinists and cleaning-room hands. It was knowledge we imagined defended us from a type of defeat no human being should have to face.
‘Anyone ask for me while I was out?’ I asked the typist one day.
I had returned from a visit to the bank where a stern manager justifying his job had faced me as if I were one who was now jeopardising his position instead of consolidating it.
‘Yes. Did you see a man on the street when you came in? He said he would wait for you.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘I’ll see if he is there now.’
When she returned she was followed by a pudgy man with a red face. He was wearing a worn suit much too tight for him. He had assumed an air of confidence and good fellowship in the belief, I had no doubt, that such an attitude was necessary to placate opposition.
‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘How are we going?’
‘Not too good,’ I said.
‘I was wondering if I could have a cheque,’ he went on, striving to appear casual. But tension was in his voice and he realised it and dropped his gaze.
‘Look, we just haven’t got the money. I’d let you have it if we had but we just haven’t got it. I’ve just returned from the bank and they’re demanding we reduce our overdraft. I may be able to let you have something next week.’
The man’s confidence left him. His face fell into hopeless lines. He gazed at the floor and said heavily, ‘That’s what comes of relying on your word.’
‘I am the mouthpiece of a firm,’ I said.
He was silent. He stretched his neck to ease the grip of his collar and looked out on to the street where his car stood opposite the doorway. The celluloid in the side curtains was broken, the tyres were worn.
‘I was promised it,’ he said doggedly.
‘That’s right; you were.’ I paused then added, ‘When I made that promise I thought I could keep it. We are also owed money and we can’t get it. When we get it I’ll let you have some.’
‘It’s all very well for those who can afford it, but that money meant a lot to me.’
He made no attempt to go. Leaving the office would be an admission that he had accepted the situation. While standing there he was registering something—protest. And he wanted final and absolute proof he wouldn’t get a cheque.
I reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
The words released him. They were the proof. He drew a deep breath and smiled.
‘I’ll just have to wait, I suppose.’ He held out his hand. ‘Goodbye.’
We had other visitors to the office besides creditors, well dressed men taking advantage of the desperation of employers unable to prevent their slide to bankruptcy.
These men were criminals. They had not emerged from amongst the unemployed who tramped from factory to factory in search of work and to whom a descent to crime was most unlikely. They were slick men with unblemished hands and they revealed the purpose of their visits to factories while looking straight at you with hard, expressionless eyes.
One such man asked to see me alone. He had thin lips held closely together and a swarthy skin, smooth from a razor. His suit could have been taken from a wax-faced model in an exclusive clothing store. It was clean and uncrushed and he paid his respects to it when he sat down on the chair I offered him, by straightening the folds of his trousers before crossing his legs. He was about thirty years of age.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘I suppose, like the rest of the shoe factories, you’re up against it?’ he began, and in his expression was a faint contempt.
‘Yes, we’re all in the same boat,’ I said.
He took a card from his pocket and tossed it across the table to me.
‘There’s my card.’
Upon it was the name, ‘J. R. Frederick’. Beneath the name were the words, ‘Waxes and Polishes’.
‘I can’t help you,’ I said. ‘We’re overstocked as it is.’
‘That’s not what I want to see you about,’ he said with a wave that dismissed the information supplied by the card as being unimportant.
‘I want to discuss other matters. I suppose you’re well insured here, are you?’
‘Well, we’re insured,’ I said, concluding he must be representing some insurance company.
‘Look!’ he said, his voice changing to a more confidential tone. ‘I happen to know this firm is in a very bad way; it’s my job to find out these things. A fire would give you the ready cash to sit pretty till times come good again, not a save by the fire brigade mind you, but completely gutted. And records burnt too, if you want it that way.
‘And that’s why I’m here. This is the proposition. I’ll do the job for a couple of hundred quid provided I can lift what stock’s lying around. Do you get it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’d go up over the weekend—no trouble. You could all be down at Frankston somewhere. There’d be no worry over the insurance. It’d be done properly—no evidence. I do a perfect job.’
‘Look,’ I said after a pause in which I subdued a quick, unreasonable surge of fear. ‘You’ve come to the wrong place. There’s still a chance we’ll come through. In any case we wouldn’t have a bar of any job like that. If we go out we’ll take it as it comes. Fulsham runs this place. You know him, do you?’
‘No, I’ve never met him. I’ve seen him around. He’s taken the knock, I could see that.’
‘I don’t know whether he has or not,’ I said.
‘Don’t you think he’d come at it?’
‘No. He’d be dead crook on it. He’s not that sort of chap. He’d probably go for a copper.’
‘I am dealing in waxes and polishes,’ he said suavely.
‘That’s okay with me,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard nothing but you can take it from me we won’t be in it.’
‘Righto,’ he said after a moment’s adjustment. ‘Have it your own way. But I’ll be back. A few more months of this and you’ll be doing business with me. In the meantime here’s something to think about.’
He named a number of factories he had burnt down over the last year, most of them furniture or shoe factories, trades badly affected by the depression.
‘Their owners came out of it all right,’ he assured me. ‘So would this firm. If you work it right, of course. You practically clean yourself out of stock the week before; let it go at half price. The insurance should cover a fairly heavy stock. If it doesn’t, you’re bloody fools.’
I smiled at that. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s just about it.’
I walked with him to the door. The car he drove away was a new one.
The man whom I confronted in my office a few weeks later was a different type. Upon his face was written the signatures of those destructive circumstances to which life had introduced him. He probably regarded his development as the only answer to the forces that opposed him. It was an inevitable answer, I thought, though I felt repelled by it.
He was a tough man with puffed cheeks and furtive eyes. He was wearing a polo-neck sweater the collar of which had been so stretched that it hung away from his neck revealing, at the base of his throat, the button of a grey flannel. He had dirty hands the fingers of which in
repose folded naturally into the position of a grip.
The deep lines on his forehead, born of past worries and never to be erased, gave him the appearance of a man striving to comprehend.
He stubbed a cigarette butt in the ash tray on the table while considering an approach that fitted the impression he had gained in his first suspicious glance at me.
He pulled a piece of sole leather from his trousers pocket and handed it to me.
‘D’ya want to buy some crop?’ he asked.
I looked at the scrap of leather while flexing it in my hands to gauge its quality.
‘I can let you have it cheap,’ he continued and named a price half the amount charged by manufacturers.
‘It’s Halberg’s crop,’ I said. I knew all the brands. ‘It’s hot, isn’t it?’
‘What the hell d’ya expect for that price? Course it’s hot.’
A few weeks before, thieves had broken into Halberg’s factory. They had stolen over two hundred pounds’ worth of crop according to a newspaper report.
The Modern Shoe Company was in debt to Halberg’s and Mr Halberg had been using the loss of so much valuable leather as an excuse for demanding we pay him cash for all further purchases.
‘We’re set for crop,’ I said. ‘We don’t need any.’
‘I’ll let you have the lot for fifty quid.’
‘Nothing doing.’
‘Thirty quid.’
‘We wouldn’t take it at any price.’
He thought a moment, his gaze concentrated on the ash tray.
‘What’s Halberg’s telephone number?’ he asked drawing a breath of decision.
I flicked open a record of telephone numbers and gave him the number.
‘Can I use this phone?’
‘Yes.’
He rang the number then sat waiting.
‘Halberg’s had it all insured,’ he said to me. ‘It’s not putting him back any.’
Someone answered his call.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Is Mr Halberg there? I want to talk to him. What? That don’t matter. I’m a friend … Righto. I’ll wait.’
He held the receiver between his cheek and shoulder and lit a cigarette. He suddenly grabbed the phone.
In Mine Own Heart Page 12