Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  He shook himself violently to dispel this memory of a world which, at the whim of an evil wizard, had disintegrated into a heap of ashes.

  He made a strange sound, which might have been a groan or a sob, and forced his attention back to the advertisement. Even in this remote corner of the world, performers were emulating the feats of the great magicians in the never-ending quest to surprise their audiences and enjoy the hollow triumph of eliciting gasps of wonder and amazement. For that moment of suspended disbelief, that victory of illusion over reality, they were prepared to risk their reputations and even their lives.

  ‘Never again,’ he muttered as he pulled the rough collar of his coat higher against the wind that blew up from the beach.

  He walked on, past blocks of red-brick flats, until he found himself facing the famous curve of pale sand, photos of which he’d seen in travel books back in Germany. He sank onto a wooden bench, breathing in the sharp, salt smell of the sea, and listening to the crash of the waves as they hit the shore. A scruffy dog ran around a nearby lamppost, raised its leg and a moment later left a dark stain at its base. A couple strolled past, their arms around each other, whispering and laughing.

  Alone in the darkness of the May night with the relentless boom of the waves in his ears, he didn’t know how long he sat contemplating the immensity of the ocean. With the taste of salt on his lips and the dull roar of the rollers resounding in his head, he walked away from the beach but, lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the kerb and tripped. When he looked down, he saw that the sole of his right shoe had come away from the upper. He cursed under his breath. These were the only shoes he had.

  By the time he hobbled back to Wattle Street, the bonfire had gone out, but the smell of smoke and cordite still hung in the air. Some of the adults were talking in low voices by their front gates and stamping their feet against the cold.

  ‘I reckon it’s been a good Cracker Night, don’t you?’

  Startled, he turned in the direction of the voice. It was Kath, the woman next door. She was watching her son, the red-headed boy they called Meggsie, whose face was smudged with soot. He was running around helping the men clean up the street, picking up the paper wrappers ripped from the fireworks, gathering bits of wood and scooping the ashes into a dustpan.

  Emil could see that she would have liked to chat, but he gave her a curt nod and looked down at his shoes.

  ‘It’s gone cold now,’ she said, and pulled the woollen cardigan closer around her full breasts. ‘I’m just waiting for Meggsie. The others are already in bed. At least they’d better be!’

  He was still looking down, and she followed his gaze.

  ‘Your shoe! What a shame. Hang on a minute and I’ll go inside and get you some Kromite. That’s how I fix the boys’ shoes.’

  Emil knew that Kath was bringing up four sons on her own, and that she worked as a barmaid in one of the pubs in Bondi Junction, but whether she was widowed or divorced he had no idea. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to become involved with these people. He made a noncommittal sound and started moving towards his gate, but she was already hurrying out with a flat piece of black rubber and a tube of adhesive. She handed it to him and explained how to repair the sole.

  ‘Don’t forget to give it time to stick down,’ she called, but he’d already disappeared inside.

  Men were a strange lot, that was for sure, Kath mused as she leaned against her fence and watched Meggsie rushing around. But there was something about this foreign bloke that aroused her interest. He was like a ghost doomed to roam the world searching in vain for a warm corner to rest.

  She was used to silent men. Her father had hardly uttered a word for years. That was during the Depression, after he’d lost his job and they were evicted from their house. Her throat still closed up whenever she remembered sitting on the pavement beside their rolled-up mattresses and bundles of pillows and blankets, like a mob of gypsies. Her baby sister screamed and her little brothers kept nagging that they were hungry and tired, but she was too shocked to speak, terrified in case any of the girls from her class saw her and found out that they’d been thrown out for not paying the rent.

  All the stuffing went out of her father after that. He grew increasingly demoralised by having to join the long queue at Circular Quay every week for their food coupons, then trudging over to Central Railway to collect the rations and walking all the way home again because he couldn’t afford the tram fare. He’d started pilfering from the metal box under the bed where her mother kept the shillings she’d so carefully saved, and spent them at the pub.

  Her grandmother had taken the six of them in, although she was on a widow’s pension herself and lived in two rooms over a shop in Randwick. But her hospitality came at a bitter price: a diet of bread and dripping, and a never-ending litany of complaints about no-hopers bludging off others. Kath’s mother took in washing and ironing from the mansions on the hill to earn a few coins and railed at Kath’s father night after night. After a year or so she started coughing, a dry, rasping cough that left her gasping and exhausted.

  ‘He knows how to make babies but not how to look after them,’ Kath’s acid-tongued grandmother used to mutter, flashing Kath’s father dirty looks. But Kath loved her dad. He scoured the neighbourhood for things more affluent neighbours had discarded, and sometimes brought little presents home for them. She still remembered her joy when he gave her the music box with the spinning ballerina, which she’d kept to this day.

  He cobbled together a billycart for the boys out of bits of wood and some old pram wheels. At night, his tongue loosened by the drink, he’d tell fanciful stories about Irish leprechauns, Scottish hobgoblins and Celtic wizards and he’d call her his mavourneen. She had no idea what it meant but it made her feel special.

  When her father died, the doctor said it was heart trouble, and her grandmother said it was the drink, but Kath knew he drank because he despised himself for being weak and useless. By then her mother had started coughing up blood, and a year later she was dead.

  ‘You’d better come in now,’ Kath called to Meggsie. ‘You know you’ve got to be up early.’ The boy was up at five every morning to do his paper round, and the few bob he brought home came in handy. She knew the other women in the street looked down on her for being a barmaid, but if she had a job they approved of, like standing all day in a neat black frock at Attwaters department store, selling yards of ribbon and bias binding, she wouldn’t earn enough to feed and clothe her boys.

  Anyway, she didn’t care what the old biddies in the street thought. But what did hurt was the way her gran kept muttering that ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’. It wasn’t just that she worked in a pub. Ever since she’d married Jack, Gran had never missed an opportunity to have a dig at her, because she’d committed the unforgiveable sin of marrying a Protestant.

  Becoming a barmaid had not been a career choice but a solution of last resort. She’d been good at school, proud of her neat copperplate handwriting on the slate, and the columns of sums that always added up. Her teacher had said she should go to secretarial college, but her education ended at thirteen when her mother died and she’d had to leave school to help Gran look after the younger kids. She met Jack when she was sixteen, and by then she couldn’t wait to escape from the misery of life with her grandmother.

  Ten years later Jack shot through, and she was left with no money, no training, and four kids to look after, so drawing beer was the best job she could get. The tips weren’t bad, especially after Mick Kelly, one of the regulars, started calling her Rita.

  ‘Hey, cop a load of this sheila!’ he shouted soon after she started work behind the counter. ‘Rita Hayworth’s pouring our beer!’ The others craned forward, saw the thick auburn hair parted on the side and falling in waves down to her shoulders, the hourglass figure, and the look that warned them not to get fresh, and the nickname stuck.

  But even with tips, it was a struggle to put food on the table for four b
oys who were always hungry, and to find twenty-five shillings for rent every Monday. Cyril Aldred, the publican, had often hinted that nothing would make him happier than to give her a raise, if only she were more friendly. He wanted her to stay back some evenings after six, when the pub closed, but she figured her best bet was to treat his suggestions as a joke. ‘Now what would Mrs Aldred say about that?’ she’d quip, but instead of cooling his ardour, her flippant remarks had the opposite effect, and she noticed that lately he was finding more opportunities to corner her in the cellar or behind the stairs.

  A clanking sound roused her from her reverie and she smiled as she watched Meggsie help Bill Noble drag a rubbish tin into the middle of the road. He was laughing as if it was the best fun he’d ever had. That kid was halfway there and back again, she chuckled to herself. But he had his serious side too, and sometimes she forgot he was only twelve and talked to him as though he were an adult, confiding in him about her worries.

  ‘Come on, love,’ she said. ‘Come inside, I’ll make you some Milo.’

  ‘I won’t be long, Mum,’ he called. ‘I’m just going to help Uncle Bill take the bin out the back.’

  She nodded and went inside. She sat down at the small kitchen table and took out the lined exercise book in which she kept a tally of every penny she spent, alarmed at the speed with which the money melted away, even though she economised as much as she could. From her grandmother she’d learned to make bubble-and-squeak from leftover potatoes and vegetables, and she knew dozens of ways to cook mince.

  That was one good thing about her job. Blokes were always coming into the pub with stuff they reckoned had fallen off a truck. Spuds were still scarce, but they often managed to get hold of a pound or two for her, and sometimes they brought in a chook as well. They sidled in, and by the way they winked and gestured, she knew they’d brought in something ‘on the QT’, as they called it.

  Only the week before, Mr Aldred had held out a ring, which he said was an emerald. ‘It’s for you,’ he whispered, pushing his face against her cheek so she could smell his beery breath. ‘It matches your eyes.’

  ‘Now where would I wear that?’ she had said lightly, pushing past him to avoid his puckered mouth, which was always moist at the corners like the slimy trails that snails leave behind.

  The blokes hadn’t been in with chooks for a while, and it was time for the rabbit-o to come around to Wattle Street again. Rabbits were much cheaper than chooks, and the man always skinned them on the doorstep, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat them, though the boys had no such qualms. She turned her attention back to her exercise book and made a shopping list.

  Her boys were growing fast, and not in chronological order. Alan was already taller than his older brothers. She darned their socks until there was more darn than sock, and mended the holes in their shoes with Kromite, but Ray had outgrown his and she wondered where she’d find the money to buy new ones.

  Kath dozed off with her head on the exercise book, the pencil still in her hand. She dreamed that she was buying Ray’s shoes at Gardiner’s shoe store when a policeman grabbed her. ‘You’re under arrest because those shoes fell off a truck,’ he shouted. She tried to tell him she couldn’t go to jail because she had four kids to look after, but he pushed her into the back of the paddy wagon and slammed the door behind her. She woke with a start, relieved that it wasn’t the paddy wagon but her front door closing behind Meggsie, who’d just come home.

  Chapter 3

  Ted Browning tightened his grip on the leather strap as the tram swung around the corner of Elizabeth Street, past the mannequins decked out in woollen suits and coats with big padded shoulders in the plate-glass windows of David Jones department store. Suddenly the tram lurched to a halt, narrowly missing a 1948 Austin that had tried to overtake it, and Ted almost dropped the Daily Commercial News and Shipping List with its notification of migrant ships arriving in Sydney. He’d circled the SS Napoli which had left Genoa seven weeks before and docked at Circular Quay that morning, bringing another six hundred migrants from Europe.

  The tram rattled towards the Quay, and the conductor walked along the running board, calling, ‘Fez pliz’ in his nasal voice. As the passengers handed him their threepences or fourpences, he bent down to tear the tickets from his scuffed leather pouch and the metal badge on his cap glinted in the morning light.

  Ted slid into a vacant seat and felt in the pocket of his jacket to make sure his shorthand notebook was still there. For the tenth time he went over the questions he wanted to ask the new arrivals, to avoid another tirade from his boss.

  ‘Your last story was shit, and if you file another one like it I’ll push it up your arse and make you eat your words,’ Gus Thornton had roared the previous week, and from the smirks of the other reporters in the newsroom, he knew they’d heard every word. Gus made no secret of his contempt for young reporters whom he described as untrained, unintelligent and unemployable.

  Although his dream of becoming a reporter on Sydney’s most popular daily tabloid had come true, Ted had a sneaking suspicion that he’d gone after the wrong job. Not even in the American pulp novels he liked reading did editors behave like dictators, caring only about sensation and circulation. And since the Daily Standard had now outsold every other paper in the city, its editor had become an absolute monarch.

  ‘Are you sure you want to work on that paper?’ his mother had asked the night before, pointing at the sensational headline above a photo of a girl flaunting her large breasts in a low-cut blouse.

  Ted shrugged. ‘People want to be entertained as well as informed, you know.’

  His mother didn’t reply because just then an unpleasant odour wafted in from next door. She sniffed. ‘Is that garlic?’ she murmured, wrinkling her nose. ‘Our foreign neighbour — I can never pronounce her name — seems to use an awful lot of it.’

  Despite Gus’s intimidating manner, Ted loved the adrenalin rush of working on this paper. He didn’t expect his mother to understand the lure of being right in the centre of exciting events, of being part of an exclusive group of people the public admired and despised at the same time. He wanted to reveal facts that crooks, standover men and politicians wanted to conceal, and to write articles that exposed crime and corruption. And you could do that working on a tabloid as well as on a broadsheet.

  As the tram swung around towards the Quay, the office buildings and department stores that cast long shadows and blocked the light from the narrow city streets were replaced by an expanse of grey water which splashed against the harbour wall, spraying foam onto the pathway. Wooden ferries painted green and yellow squatted at the jetties, and in the distance the triangular white sails of small yachts bobbed in the waves, framed by the great iron arch of the ‘Coathanger’. Although it was sixteen years since the bridge across the harbour had been completed, whenever Ted saw it he remembered how, as a small boy, he’d watched the two parts of that arch coming together in slow motion until they finally met.

  He jumped off the tram at Circular Quay. An unshaven man in baggy trousers held up with string threw something into a rubbish bin, missed, and seagulls screeched as they swooped down on the remains of his greasy potato scallops.

  A gust of wind from the harbour blew off his grey felt hat and ruffled his light brown hair, which fell across his forehead. As he pushed his hair back with his hand, he wished the barber would get rid of the kink that made him look like a schoolboy even though he was twenty-two. He chased the hat along the waterfront, rammed it on his head, and hurried on.

  Past the pier, three old men sat on the seawall, empty buckets beside them, reeling in trails of slimy seaweed.

  ‘There’s a young bloke in a hurry,’ one of them said, tossing a cigarette butt into the water. ‘Slow down, son,’ he called to Ted. ‘Time always catches up with you in the end.’

  ‘I’m hurrying so it can’t catch me,’ Ted retorted, and heard the men laughing. ‘Cheeky bugger,’ one of them called out.

  H
e found the SS Napoli moored near Bennelong Point. It was a grey hulk with rust stains showing through a sloppy paint job. Probably another of those cargo ships that had been hastily converted to carry human cargo: displaced Europeans. Looking up, Ted saw passengers wandering around the deck or leaning over the rail, looking anxiously for familiar faces on the wharf below. He was relieved he’d got there in time, before they disembarked.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ one of the wharf officials barked, blocking his path. ‘Can’t you read? No unauthorised persons allowed.’

  Ted was on the point of explaining why he had come when he changed his mind. They mightn’t be keen on reporters snooping around.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, flashing a confident smile. He held up his press card in front of the man’s face and whipped it away before he had time to read it. ‘I’m a security officer. Where’s Captain Karamanlis?’

  The man looked uncertain and glanced around for someone in authority to check Ted’s credentials, but there was no one in sight. He shrugged and waved him on. ‘Ask one of the officers when you get on board,’ he said. ‘That’s if you can get those dagoes to understand anything you say.’

  Ted ran up the gangplank and slipped into the lounge to mingle with the passengers before any of the officers noticed him. The room had the sour smell of mould, overcooked vegetables, and stale sweat, and the air was charged with tension. The passengers were impatient to disembark but some problem on the wharf had delayed the unloading of the luggage. Children chased each other around the deck, shouting, and adults made ineffectual attempts to control them while their eyes darted towards the portholes to see if anything was happening.

  Some passengers were pacing around, taking nervous puffs of their cigarettes and talking excitedly, while others were staring anxiously at the Quay and the tangle of crooked streets rising from it as they tried to read their future in the red-tiled roofs of their new country.