by Miller, Alex
I was sitting on the bunk thinking these thoughts when I suddenly realised that for some time I had been hearing people shouting. It was Tip barking that woke me to it. I listened, holding my cigarette away from my mouth and not breathing to hear better. I made out it was Esme’s voice and another. They was yelling at each other. I had no doubt the other voice was Irie’s. I think I knew something right then at that moment. There was a chill in my guts hearing that screaming and shouting going on over at the police house.
I closed up the Bible and wrapped it in my mother’s red silk scarf and put it away in the drawer and I sat and listened to the yelling coming from over at the house. I had never heard nothing like it before coming from the police house. The Collins was not much of a family for fighting with each other, not like some families in Mount Hay who was at it regularly day and night. I heard the back door slam then and I jumped. I got up off my bunk and went to the door and stepped out onto my verandah. Irie was running along the path towards me. She come up onto my verandah and she put her arms around my waist and she pressed her head against my chest. She was crying real hard, her little shoulders heaving up and down and pushing against me. I seen the door open over at the house and the shape of Daniel against the light standing looking my way. I thought, Well this is it then, Bobby Blue, and you had better be ready for it. I felt no fear but only a kind of strange calm that I always felt when something bad was happening. The calm come over me like I was not really there but was someone else watching myself, and I went very still inside. I do not think I ever had no panic in me. Even when I was cornered one time by a wild scrubber bull, I just felt cold and still and ready for it. My mother was like that too. The sky could have been falling in and she would say, Well, Bobby Blue, look what is happening to us, and she would have given me her quiet little smile. I had that from her, that calm. The light was shining out of my open door onto me and Irie clutched together there, and I knew Daniel could see us plain as day, as if we was in each other’s arms. But I did not care. I was for Irie and her trouble, not for myself or for Daniel Collins.
I let her cling for a while then I reached around for her hands and I unclasped her grip on me and I held her off, being as gentle with her as I knew how to be. I said, You had better give yourself a minute to settle down, and we can sort this out. I seen Daniel’s shape go back inside and the kitchen door close behind him. I cannot say why Daniel went back inside just then. If it had been Esme she would have come charging up the path and grabbed that girl and dragged her back to the house. But no doubt Esme was sitting in the kitchen recovering herself and Daniel come out to have a look. Daniel had more sense of Irie and maybe he was giving her the benefit of the doubt to sort things out herself. I cannot say for sure.
I said to Irie, You had better tell me again what you was saying. I did not follow it too plainly, Irie. She blew her nose on her hankie and wiped at her face and sniffed a couple of times. She said with a kind of violence I had not heard in her before, I hate myself for crying. I said, All women cry. There is nothing to be ashamed of in crying. She give a sad laugh at this and said, They want to send me to boarding school in town on the coast. I said, When is this going to be happening? She said, Mum’s going to take me down next week to meet the school people and buy my uniforms and books. She looked at me. But I am not going, Bobby. I will run away into the scrubs. I said, It is better to make a decision when you are calm and have had time to think about it. I wondered if Daniel and Esme had started to get some feeling for how close me and Irie was getting and had decided to take her away from my influence. I did not say this, but it stood in my mind and I believe it was the case, especially Esme. Or maybe Miriam had dobbed her sister in. I will never know. Before this there had never been no talk of the Collins girls going to boarding school. The children of the big cattle stations went to boarding schools but not many of the people of the town ever sent their kids away or could afford the money to do it. The town kids just went away by themselves when they was finished with school. Some went earlier on their own and was never heard of again. Quite a few did that. Our Charley was one of them. Though I was to see Charley again one time in my life. And I will tell about that when the time is right for it.
Me and Irie stood on my verandah in the light of my doorway and we looked at each other. She was still wearing her normal day clothes. She said, I will not go back to the coast. I hate my mother. And my dad is too weak to stand up to her for me. You and me can go to the spring of the wild fig tree and live the way you were telling me the Old Murri people used to live. I said, Hold on there a second. I do not know how to live as the Old Murris lived. There is no one knows that no more. She said, We will ask Rosie. She will help us. I said, Rosie grew up in Mount Hay. She does not know a thing about living in the scrubs. Irie said, You told me you and your dad and Ben Tobin and his dad used to camp at the spring of the fig tree for days at a time. You must have found something to eat there. I said, We had our packhorses and rations, Irie. We was all geared up and ready for that kind of life. We could not have stayed too long without running out of food. Living at the spring of the old fig tree is not something anyone can do. But she was not going to be put off by my reasons. You can tell your friend Ben Tobin to bring us food, she said. She waited for me to say something to this. I said, That is not a plan that will work. She give me a long look that steadied me. You are my only friend who can help me, she said.
I did not feel too good to hear her say this. You promised to take me there one day. Now is the time to make good on that promise. She looked at me like she was suffering. I got out my tobacco and rolled a cigarette and I said again, That is not a plan that makes no sense. I can tell you that right here and now. No one has ever done nothing like that. I licked the paper down and lit the smoke and I looked at her. Only someone from the coast would come up with such a crazy idea. We will have to think of something else.
She said, When my parents see that I’m serious about this they’ll give in and change their minds and let me stay. She stood checking me for a long time, no doubt wondering how she stood with me in this. They don’t want me to be your friend any more, she said. That is what started me rowing with them. I told them you were better than both of them and that I love you. I said, Jesus, Irie, you said that? She said, Yes. That is what I said. And you know it is true. I told them you would take me away and we would live together in the ranges. I said, You are only just turning thirteen. Something like that cannot happen. You promised, she said. I said, I did not promise to go and live with you out in the scrub. I cannot do that. She took my hand and held it and she looked at my hand a while, then she turned up her face and looked into my eyes. She said, very quiet and solemn now, Are you on their side? I said, Hell, Irie! You know I am not on their side. She said then, in that quiet voice that upset me more than if she was screaming at me, You are going to break your promise to me. If you will not take me, then I will go on my own. Or with Miriam, if she will come along, and I think she will. I think she will be stronger in this than you are being. She let go my hand, as if she was dropping something to the ground that she was done with, and she turned around and stepped off the verandah and started walking back to the house.
I swore to myself a couple of times and called to her, Wait up, Irie! My heart was banging in my chest. She stopped and turned and looked at me, standing there on the path for all the world like a grown young woman, and I seen that is what she was, on the doorstep of her womanhood. You are not going to help me, Bobby, she said. I see I have made a mistake about you. I could think of no words to say to her that would not be a lie right at that minute.
. . .
I failed Irie that night and I know I did. I failed myself. The tragedy that was to come on us and the Collins family would not have happened if I had been stronger and had stayed staunch to Irie’s dreams for us that night. Irie’s strength was the second warning I had after the warning of Tip not being on the chain, but I ignored it too. She was more man than I was. I se
en that and I could not deal with it right then. I just could not see how I could run off to the fig tree spring with a thirteen-year-old girl who was the constable’s daughter. It did not make no sense to me at all. Ben might have done it one time, but I was not wild enough for something like that and I never had been. If I took her out to Ben’s place he would think of something. I knew that. But I knew I was not going to do that neither. Getting her mixed up with Ben as a runaway was not my idea of how this should go for her or for me. I seen she was something like Ben herself and was ready to take things as far as she wished them to go and make nothing of the law and how people would think of her. Like Ben, she was her own boss in a way I never was.
She stood on the path waiting for me to speak, it seemed like forever. The thunder was turning over in the black sky and I could smell rain in the air. I felt a deep sadness when I finally said, One day when you have your freedom you will be able to come back out here. I will still be here. I am not going nowhere. In three or four years time you will have your freedom from school and from your parents and you can choose to do as you please then and no one will be able to stop you. I hear myself saying these things now and I know how sad and weak I must have sounded to her and to myself, the dreams and storytelling gone out of my voice altogether. I heard it. She said in that calm sad way that she was accusing me with, It will not be three or four years, Bobby, but eight years before I am twenty-one and am free. Till then they can stop me, and they will if I let them. I am not waiting till I am twenty-one. She had lost the hope of my help and I had no answer for her. I said, I do not see another way for you, Irie. She said in that voice she had, No, you do not see another way for me, Bobby, and you see no way at all for us. I would stay with you if you did see a way. I felt at that moment that she was somehow older and wiser than I was then or would ever be in my entire life and I could not meet her at her level. I felt sick to know it.
Daniel come out at the kitchen door and stood in the light looking our way. He called to her, his call sudden. Irie! Just that. Her name. I felt a strangeness go through me hearing her father’s sharp cry of her name called into the night. He was finished with waiting. Like it was the last time he would ever call his child to him. I felt it and it give me a shiver to hear it and I wondered what it meant for all of us and I wished my mother had been there to tell me the right way of this. The thunder rolled and tumbled in the sky and Irie turned away from me and walked on down the path towards the house and her father, her name sounding in my head. Irie! Sharp, like a cry that was to go on sounding forever after, falling away only in years to come, fading into some great distance I could not imagine, until it was lost in time to me and her both. I watched her until the back door closed on her, and then I stood, not seeing the door but seeing her and seeing something in myself, something proved about myself that I had not known before, something tested and failed, a fear I had no understanding of at the time. But I knew myself to be less of a free man than I had believed I was. I knew that in my place Ben would not have let her go like that but would have taken her out into the scrub and made a run for it, no matter what. And I knew he would have been right to do that. But still I did not do it. I stood knowing I had betrayed her. The best thing that ever come into my life. Irie Collins. Her mark was never to leave me.
. . .
I stood a while then stepped off the verandah and walked down to the horse paddock and climbed through the wire and went on to the back fence and climbed through and walked on into the scrub. The lightning cracked and flashed and I looked back and seen the horses lit up, galloping the fence like silent creatures that was strange to me. I kept going until I got to Irie’s camp. I did not go in the shelter but lay on my back on the ground litter. I looked up into the storming sky, and there was nothing I knew there, the lightning tearing this way and that, the great clouds like a rolling flood torn by the storm winds, the brigalow sticks clacking and chattering in the violent wind like mad women determined on some savagery. I knew myself to be looking into the sea of glass mingled with fire of Revelation, when the world will come apart and we will all burn. A splash of rain hit my face and I heard it coming above the thunder, thrashing through the timber like a crazed old scrubber bull. The rain come down out of the sky like God had decided to wash us all clean of our sins before he burned us to cinders as was promised in the last days for all of us sinners. I lay in the rain waiting to drown or sink into the earth and be forgotten like them Old People was forgotten. I was filled with terror and was despised and found nothing familiar to comfort me, but all was strange about me and was heavy on me with an evil that was a rancid smell in my throat.
. . .
It was breaking day when I woke. The sky was clear, the last of the stars winking out. I got up and walked back to my quarters. I felt nothing but shame. I could not make a cigarette. My tobacco and papers was soaked through and was no use to me. I lay on my bunk in my wet clothes and went to sleep. I did not wake up for some hours. They was all finished eating their breakfasts when I got over to the police house. Esme was not in the kitchen but I seen my breakfast plate sitting on a saucepan with the lid over my eggs and corned beef. The water in the saucepan had gone cold. I felt strange to be there, and knew I should always have felt strange in the police house and should never have tried to make it my home but should have followed my instincts on it. There was a sickness in me I could not deal with. While I was eating my cold eggs Daniel come into the kitchen. He asked me to step around to the office and see him after I was finished and he went out again.
When I come into the office he was sitting behind his desk, his shirt all fresh starched, his hands on the desk fiddling with his pen and the papers that was there. Esme was sitting off to one side of him, her lips tight and her eyes hard and narrowed. It looked like I was to have a police interview. Daniel said, Thank you for coming in, Bobby. As if he thought there was a chance I might not have come in. Mrs Collins has something to say to you, he said. I looked at Esme.
Irie’s mother was looking at me like she wanted to see me hung from that old dead lemon tree which she hated so much. She was breathing deep, her breasts swelling up and down under her stripy dress. She met my eyes and we looked at each other. She spoke at me through her lips, without screaming or nothing, but holding it in. To think I made you welcome in our home, she said. She twisted her lips around with disgust when she spoke. I wondered how long she was going to keep from giving it to me full throttle. We gave you our trust! she said. Our trust! And this is the way you have repaid us. She sat in silence for some time, breathing and looking at me like I was a worm she had found in her cereal. I thought of us sitting together and me reading to her. I heard Fay’s Blitz going by and I listened for it to change down as she hit into the hill. Fay must have had a big load on because she changed down before the motor begun to strain at the hill. I was wondering what was on that load. Esme leaned forward and she looked right into my eyes and said, like each word was a little river stone, I want you to know how much I despise you for this. That is all I have to say to you. She straightened up and looked at Daniel, like she was telling him it was his turn now and to get on with finishing it. Daniel cleared his throat a couple of times. Do you have anything to say to Mrs Collins, Bobby? He frowned at me like he was trying to remind me that I had forgotten something and needed to say it.
But I could not think of nothing to say so I said nothing. It did not seem right to me that Esme had judged me before I had a chance to tell her the way I seen things and how it stood for me. I was not Irie, I was me. Daniel letting Esme have her say like that, insulting me before they give me a chance to speak, was not a good way of going about this. It put me down from the word go and I sat there knowing myself to be a judged man, and found guilty. My guilt, which I did feel with a great heaviness, was not for them to know but was private to me, and was the guilt of betraying their daughter’s trust in me and was not for nothing else. I had a mind to get up and walk out. I seen whatever I said they was not
going to change their minds about me. I was thinking they could go to hell with their questions and I did not defend myself to them. It was a mistake to say nothing but I did not know that until later. I was thinking maybe if I went down to the school I could find Irie and tell her to come on with me to the spring of the old fig tree, and somehow we would make a go of it or perish together out in the scrubs trying. But I sat on there, facing them two, waiting for what else they had in mind for me. I did not believe I had done nothing criminal and was not expecting Daniel to charge me, but I seen he was not done with me yet. I had nothing to fear from them. Their judging of me made me angry and I seen the flames of that fire in my dream again and me snatching Irie from the flames and looking back to watch them all burning, that great fire wind howling and moaning around them. The flames of hell. That is what it was. The flames from that last book in my mother’s Bible that she read to me and Dad so many times over the years, her love of the sacred words of it and their mystery. What she always called the last word. I remembered those words always: His eyes were as a flame of fire and he was clothed in blood. I laughed and Esme turned to Daniel and said, You see? You see? I told you there was no point giving this creature the benefit of the doubt. Creature I was. I heard her say it.
Daniel half closed his eyes. I seen how uncomfortable he was and I pitied him for it. He kind of nodded his head and breathed and shifted himself on his chair so it squeaked, as if his backside was getting sore sitting there. I said, I will be down the shed when you need me, and I stood up. Daniel said, Just a minute, Bobby. Sit down! I have something to say to you myself. I did not sit down but stood where I was. I said, If you have something to say to me you can say it down the shed. That is where I will be. He stood and shouted at me, Just sit down! And listen to me! I looked at him, to see him losing his control like this, and I felt superior to him. I decided to go and get Irie and make a run for it. I said, You should listen to your own mind, not the mind of your wife. She stood up and said, I will leave you to it, and she come around the desk and was careful to avoid touching me and she went out the door behind me. Daniel said, Please, Bobby! Will you sit down. I sat down. He said, Thank you. I said, You have judged me. Daniel said, It’s over. There’s nothing to say. We can’t have you in the house. He looked at me a while. I hope you understand that. What will you do? I laughed. He said, I am very sorry this has happened. I could see he was expecting me to say something, maybe to try to excuse myself to him or get him to see things my way, but I would not say nothing to him. I might have told him that wife of his would get him killed one of these days, but I kept that thought to myself too. My dad would not have stayed so long with these people as I had stayed with them.