by JH Fletcher
Charlie took no notice. ‘I’ll be there with her.’ He grinned at her. ‘I was with you, remember.’
‘I was grown up.’
‘In some ways.’
Alex was too small to reach the wheel, so he fetched a box for her to stand on and stood behind her, guiding her hands on the spokes. It was easier than she’d expected and she felt a surge of excitement that she was in charge of a paddle steamer in the middle of the Murray.
‘Never know what you can do till you try,’ Charlie said. ‘And you know I’ll always be here when you need me, don’t you?’
After she’d tried it the first time, she felt ten feet tall.
Her mother taught her things about the boat, too. ‘Full-time engineer, that’s me,’ said Sarah. ‘Full-time everythin’ else, too.’
Alex sat with feet dangling over the edge of the stokehold and watched as Sarah ran the engine. Shouting above the racketing machinery, she explained what she was doing and why, showing her daughter how to fill the firebox, red hot and howling with flame, how to oil the machinery and manage the pump. Each morning, when they started out, Alex watched as Sarah opened the valves and engaged the engine. Soon she decided she knew everything there was to know about the boat and the river. Got quite cocky about it too, but when he heard her boasting Charlie was quick to put her right.
‘You know enough to know nuthun.’
He took her to the wheelhouse and pointed out where swirls of current marked underwater rocks.
‘How would you get out of a place like that if the engine cut out?’
‘How would you come alongside with a full load against the current?’
‘How would you …?’
‘How would you …?’
So crestfallen Alex learnt to keep her mouth shut. Instead, she worked off her energy on the hapless Elsie.
‘Alexandra! Alexandra! Where is that dratted girl?’
Elsie stomping up and down the decks, hunting in the cabins, exploring the shop and the stokehold, even invading the sacred sanctum of the wheelhouse. While Alex, laughing fit to bust, had worked her way along the sponson beam and now clung to the side of the boat above the paddlebox with the blades trampling the water just below her dangling feet.
‘That’s dangerous!’ said Elsie.
Which was the point.
And another time …
Alex found out that Elsie had an admirer in Niland, a young man who worked in the shipbuilder’s office and used to wait on the wharf, sober suit and starched collar, whenever Brenda arrived. See bashful Elsie, rose-red yet eager, as she waited to warm herself in her admirer’s gaze!
On one visit Alex, who had fallen out with Elsie over the important matter of washing her hands before tea, decided to get her own back.
Brenda edged in towards the wharf, as always. As always, among those waiting to buy from the store was a handful of drovers, hangers-on and drunks eager to see this latest arrival from the outside world. The local cop was there too, doing nothing, like every cop who ever lived, and looking utterly self-important while he did it. And lastly, Elsie’s admirer, all starched collar and cuffs, ardent lips hidden behind the moustache, long and silky, to which he had devoted much attention.
While, at Brenda’s rail, Elsie and her twittering tummy waited.
Suddenly one of the drovers, Arch Bowen, well known for coarseness, laughed. He nudged his neighbour with a meaty elbow and pointed.
Other eyes also saw. The terrible laughter spread. The cop stepped forward on his big boots, thrusting out his belly and looking for someone to arrest. For there, dangling from the funnel stay, was the effigy of a woman, showing a great deal more than she should. All the world was invited to share the sight of Elsie’s stays, bloomers and stockings bulging most fetchingly, stuffed to bursting point with paper, as it blew and twisted in the wind.
At first Elsie, waiting on the deck aft of the port paddlebox, didn’t know what all the hilarity was about. When she realised, blood flooded her face. She fled to her cabin, slamming the door behind her, burying her mortified tears in her pillow. While from the shore the laughter, raucous and hurtful, battered the air.
Alex, who had been eager to share in the laughter, saw the look on Elsie’s face, the tears starting from her eyes, and felt her delight dissolve on the instant. Now she hated the men for laughing and herself for having caused it to happen. She could have jumped under the paddles, she felt so bad.
Instead she went into the store, where her mother was setting out the goods in readiness for the customers who would soon be flooding aboard.
‘Come to give me a hand?’ Sarah asked, putting out an array of dress materials, arranging them to catch the eye, their colours as varied as a rainbow.
She looked up, frowning, hearing the bellows of laughter from the wharf. She looked at Alex, who was not laughing at all.
‘Why are those men braying like jackasses?’
Alex hung her head. ‘I put Elsie’s bloomers on the funnel stay,’ she said.
Her mother simply carried on setting out the goods, but she was frowning, with a red spot blazing in each cheek. Well Alex knew those spots and waited for the thunderbolt. Which, when it fell, was much quieter than she had expected, and the more painful because of it.
‘Shame on you,’ Sarah said. ‘Why did you do such a thing?’
‘Because Elsie was mean to me.’
‘She told you to wash your hands before you had your tea. What’s mean about that? Perhaps we should have you eating in the stokehold. Is that what you’d prefer? And to shame her for doing her duty, in front of all those oafs, with her young man waiting? How could you?’
Alex felt lower than a louse.
‘I only meant it as a bit of fun.’
‘Fun is all right,’ her mother said. ‘A laugh is good for all of us. But to hurt someone who’s done you no harm? I’m sure that’s worth a lot of laughs.’ For the first time Sarah raised her eyes to look at her. ‘Elsie is a gentle soul, easily shamed. If you think it’s so funny, why aren’t you on the wharf, laughing along with the drunks?’
There came the sound of feet on the deck outside. The gangway was down and shoppers were coming aboard.
‘Let me get on and do my work. And you go and take those clothes down. Now.’
The ‘Now’ had a lash to it. Alex ran.
She got a few jeers herself as she took down Elsie’s underclothes, and felt she deserved every one of them.
Later she went ashore, briefly, then came back on board and tapped at Elsie’s door.
‘Elsie?’
No answer. She opened the door and went in.
Elsie was lying face downwards on the bed. Alex stood beside her and put her hand on Elsie’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Elsie.’
Not even a sniff. Yet there was a new stillness in Elsie’s prostrate body.
‘I’ve taken them down. Please dry your eyes. Please? I only meant it as a joke. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please?’
Little by little, Alex won Elsie round. Eventually they hugged each other. Later still, face washed but cheeks still flushed, Elsie went with Alex to the wharf, from which the loafers, their excitement over, had long gone. And where loyal Alfred, alerted by Alex, was waiting.
At the end of March there came an exceptionally hot spell. Day after day, night after night, with never a breeze to stir the stagnant air. Sleeping became an impossibility and Alex was as cross as sticks.
Eventually, one night, she gave up trying to sleep and went out on deck. They had put into a billabong for the night, just over the river from Grandpa Keach’s place and its neighbour Eagle on the Hill, and the interlaced branches of the trees hung over the boat and hid most of the stars.
The heat was more oppressive than ever.
Her parents were on deck, standing at the rail and pointing. Alex went to join them.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Bushfire,’ said Charlie grimly.
Sure enough, throu
gh the branches Alex could see a distant red glow in the sky.
‘Will we be all right?’
‘Of course we will,’ Charlie said.
But the tension between her parents said otherwise.
They stood side by side as the glow climbed higher in the sky. The branches, hanging low overhead, threatened ruin if the fire ever arrived.
‘Have we got time to raise steam?’ Sarah asked. Without steam they couldn’t move.
Charlie shook his head. ‘It’ll be here long before that.’
They collected all the buckets they had and filled them, again and again, deluging the decks with water. There was nothing else they could do.
‘Perhaps it won’t come this way,’ said Sarah hopefully, her eyes fixed on the sky where the red flush was now underscored by the harsh yellow blink of flame.
‘No chance of that,’ Charlie said.
And so they waited.
The fire had a breeze behind it and the flames drew steadily closer. Now the heat was ferocious, with clouds of smoke and ash beginning to rain from a sky where all the stars were hidden. There was the noise and smell of fire. Along the banks of the billabong the bush stirred into life as animals — wallabies and kangaroos, a family of emus, rabbits, snakes and the scuttling, questing snouts of a hundred tiny creatures — fled from the flames. A magpie flew out of the darkness on its black and white wings and perched on Brenda’s rail before fluttering down to the deck. A few minutes later some galahs joined it, strutting and fussing in their squeaky voices.
Flame erupted as, not far away, a great tree exploded into blazing ruin. The flames had got into the crowns of the trees and now began to leap along the riverbank with the speed of charging horses. Heading Brenda’s way.
They redoubled their efforts with the buckets, Alex doing what she could to help, but in the heat the water evaporated from the decks almost before it had been thrown down.
‘Get below, young lady,’ said Sarah to Alex, who would have objected had she not seen the look on her mother’s face.
‘In case the trees start coming down on us,’ Sarah explained. ‘Down in the hold. Run!’
And she chucked a bucket of water over her daughter before turning to face the brazen throat of the fire that now filled the world, and whose voice and heat consumed all other sensations in a swirling, bellowing whirlygig of flame.
The fire leapt up, its flaming fingers probing the branches of the trees directly overhead. Sparks fell like burning hail.
Charlie, Sarah and Elsie were running everywhere with the buckets, dousing sparks before they could take hold on the decks or the waterproofing used to seal the cabin rooftops. Above their heads the branches flared.
From the after-hold hatch Alex watched the three grown-ups running and pouring, running and pouring, while the hours passed and the smoke and flickering fire embraced them like a vision of hell.
All night they worked in the searing heat. The decks smouldered from a hundred places, but mercifully never caught alight. The conflagration bellowed around them. All the world was flame.
It seemed impossible that they could survive, but they did. The fire, praise the Lord, passed. Dawn came to a blackened, smouldering landscape. Ashes and glowing embers extended as far as they could see.
Cautiously, afraid her mother might tick her off, Alex clambered out of the hold and went to join her parents. ‘Is it safe now?’
Sarah embraced her. ‘Yes. The fire’s passed.’
Charlie, Sarah and Elsie looked like blackened scarecrows. Their clothes and skin were burnt in a dozen places and their reddened eyes were rimmed with soot. The air was acrid with fumes, the decks crowded with birds. A tiger snake was coiled around the rail.
‘Will Grandma and Grandpa be all right?’
‘Looks like it,’ Charlie said.
The river had acted like a firebreak. As far as they could tell, everything on the other bank had survived.
Sarah embraced Elsie. ‘Thanks, eh? You were great. Thank you so much.’
Elsie, exhausted, burst into tears. After such an experience, even tiger snakes would frighten her no more.
They were safe, safe. And soon sleep came to overwhelm them all.
1891
CHAPTER 10
It was a year after the fire.
Brenda was moored alongside the river bank just down from the Keach place.
It was midday and Sarah was ashore, paying her once-a-month duty call on her parents. Charlie had gone with her in case her father, who would have a few under his belt by this time of the day, took it into his head to pick a fight with his daughter.
He’d done it once, six months earlier. Sarah had come back to the boat with the beginnings of a black eye and no explanation for how she’d got it. Charlie had gone storming up to the split-log shanty with which the old man, during one of his increasingly rare fits of industry, had finally replaced the hessian and corrugated iron ruin in which the family had lived for so long. When Charlie came back his lips had been tight and angry and the knuckles of his right hand swollen. He, too, had had nothing to say. From that time on Sarah had never gone unescorted into her parents’ house.
Elsie and Alex were alone on board. They were both in the saloon, Alex reading, Elsie busy with some darning. It was a wet, unseasonable day, with skirts of mist clinging to the branches of the trees, and it was cosier in the saloon than out on the deck.
Alex looked up from her book. ‘What was that?’
Elsie listened too. ‘I don’ hear nuthun.’
Neither did Alex, now. Yet a moment ago …
‘I heard something, dammit.’
‘Dammit’ was her latest word. She had heard Charlie say it and liked the tune of it, so said it herself in front of her mother and got a slap. It made her all the more determined to use it again, and she did so regularly, but only where Sarah couldn’t hear her.
‘It sounded like a squeak. Or a cry. Dammit.’
‘Your mother don’ like you usin’ that word,’ said Elsie, for the record, but Alex knew it was safe to ignore her.
Again they listened; again there was nothing.
Elsie shook her head and went back to her darning.
Silence. Alex turned a page. Elsie sighed, pulling on a length of wool. Then …
They both heard it this time.
‘It’s a cat,’ said Alex.
But Tibby Slippers was asleep under the table.
‘You’re imagining things,’ said Elsie.
‘How can we both have imagined it?’
Alex went out on deck. The air was raw, the river ash-coloured except where the paddles of a passing steamer were churning it to chocolate. The steamer’s wash set Brenda rocking and creaking against the bank. From somewhere among the trees came the mewing of a flight of black cockatoos.
‘That’s what it was,’ said Elsie, who had followed Alex onto the deck.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Alex.
And ran past the starboard paddlebox to the foredeck, where sacks of grain were stacked under a green tarpaulin.
The cry, sharp and clear this time, with a hint of terror in it, seemed to come from directly under her feet.
There were no guardrails on the lower deck. Alex grabbed the edge of the paddlebox and leaned out as far as she could. She looked down and saw a face staring up at her out of the water, the eyes round and desperate. It was a boy clinging to the lowest slat of the box.
She gestured to him. ‘Go round the other side,’ she called. ‘Climb out on the bank.’
But the boy took no notice, clinging to the box as though his life depended on it. Perhaps it did.
Elsie was at Alex’s side now, also staring down at the frightened face.
‘I’ll get a boat hook.’ She rushed off.
When she got back she held the hook out to the boy, but even though she almost stuck the iron claw into his face, he made no attempt to take it and was obviously frightened witless.
‘We’ll have to fish him
out ourselves,’ Alex said. ‘Dammit.’
But how? Elsie couldn’t swim and was also beginning to panic.
‘I’ll fetch your father.’
There was no time for that. By the time Elsie had got to the house and back again the boy might have been swept away.
But Alex could swim like a cork. Ignoring Elsie’s shrieks, she jumped into the water.
It was colder than she’d expected, the current stronger. Her skirt clung like a million spiderwebs about her legs, making it difficult to kick. She came to the surface in a fizz of bubbles and looked up at Brenda’s side. Elsie’s anxious face peered down at her. The side of the steamer towered above her. With the cold water lapping at her lips, safety was very far away.
For a moment she was close to panic herself, feeling the current dragging her along Brenda’s side with never a handhold in sight. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to think, dammit, and struck out for the paddlebox to which the boy was still clinging.
She clung beside him but he, teeth chattering, lips blue, did not look at her.
‘Can you swim?’ she asked.
The boy, who looked a bit older than she was, shook his head.
‘How can you end up in the river when you can’t swim?’ asked Alex crossly, conscious that she, too, was getting colder by the minute, that her dress was probably ruined and that it was all this stupid boy’s fault.
Still the boy said nothing, his body shivering with fright and the cold.
‘You can’t hold on for ever,’ Alex said. ‘We’ll never get you out of the water like that. I’m a good swimmer. If you let go I’ll tow you round the stern of the boat to the bank. Then we can both get out.’
The boy shook his head. His knuckles were as white as bone as he continued to cling desperately to the paddlebox.
‘Let go, dammit!’ said Alex, and swallowed a mouthful of water by mistake.
When she’d finished spluttering she seized the boy by the hair and yanked with all her might. For the first time since she’d jumped overboard, he made a noise. More a squawk than a yell, like the sound a drowning chicken makes, but he let go of the box at last.