Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  The true story of Mishna’s race

  On the Sunday morning after Mishna’s win at Flemington, Augustine tells his wife that he can’t go into hiding forever and it’s only Stan Riordan that he doesn’t want to see so he’ll go off quietly to ten o’clock Mass just like the old days and hope he doesn’t run into Stan. He takes Clement with him. After Mass the Killeatons are walking across the gravel yard towards Fairbairn Street when someone calls out – look at him sneaking home to count his winnings. Augustine looks around and sees the little group of racing men in the shade of one of the date-palms. He strolls over to join them. Frank Hehir says – no wonder you’ve been lying low Gus – admit you were the brains behind this Mishna business. Hehir has a Sporting Globe in his hands. Augustine leans across and reads the headline – Filly Lands Australia Wide Plunge. A man says without smiling – you can tell us at least whether you had something on it Gus. Augustine sees them all looking at him expectantly. Another man says – someone in Bassett must have backed her – they say Horrie Attrill got hit for nearly a thousand. Augustine says quietly – well gents I won’t deny that I was mixed up in it in a small way. Someone says – good luck to you anyway Gus – no one can say that you don’t deserve a break – I wouldn’t mind having a few friends like your Melbourne mates to put me onto an eight to one winner. Augustine tries to hide his surprise, and asks Hehir to show him the paper. He begins to read the story on the front page Illegal S.P. operators in all Eastern States are believed to have paid out a fortune after the shock win of the filly Mishna in the Acorn Stakes at Flemington today. Caulfield-trained Mishna, whose form before today’s race had been very mediocre, had a little support on the course, firming from 12s to 8s late in the betting. But while few punters at Flemington wanted to back the bay daughter of Caithness, an army of well-informed commissioners, apparently working to a carefully rehearsed plan, swamped S.P. men all over the country with a deluge of bets. While off-course operators were trying frantically to lay off their bets, supporters of Mishna had few worries as the filly looked the winner from barrier rise and scored by two lengths in fast time. Trainer Cec. McGarvie denied after the race. Augustine feels a hand on his shoulder and hears Stan Riordan saying – Gus please don’t forget to have a word with me before you go home. Clement sees that his father is preoccupied with his racing friends and says politely – Dad can I have the money for a milk-shake please? One of the men says – spend up big son and tell the lady in the shop Mishna’s paying for it. Augustine gives his son a two-shilling piece and tries to laugh. Clement hurries across the road and buys a chocolate malted milk and an ice-cream. He takes great bites from the ice-cream to finish it before he leaves the shop. Then he wipes all traces of it from his lips and goes back to the churchyard. His father and Stan Riordan are talking quietly together apart from the others. Clement slips the change from the drink and the ice-cream into his father’s pocket before Augustine can count it. Stan Riordan says – so I did a little investigating on my own around the town and rang up a mate of mine in Melbourne and put two and two together and realised they must have pulled the filly up at the last moment at the Valley – then when I saw she was entered for Flemington I kept my ear to the ground and heard the faintest whisper and worked out the rest for myself – I waited for you to get in touch with me Gus but I didn’t dare ask you – after all it was none of my business and I guessed you were waiting till the last minute for the right information about her at Flemington – anyway the long and short of it is I took a risk yesterday and backed my judgment and had quite a decent bet on the little filly and I want you to know that you don’t owe me a penny now – I’ve more than cleaned up your little debts with what I won from Horrie Attrill – tell me now Gus did you have a good win yourself? Augustine marks out a long aimless road through the dusty gravel with the toe of his shoe. He says – I’ll be honest with you Stan – I had a very modest bet – I’m too far under these days to get out with a single bet anyway – but I’m very glad to hear you did so well yourself – and I’ll never be able to thank you for all you’ve done for me in the past mate. Riordan sees that Augustine is anxious to get away from him. He pats Augustine on the back and says – keep up the good work Gus. Then he goes over to join the men in the shade of the date-palm while Augustine and Clement set out for home. When he reaches home Augustine says to his wife – the Master has pulled off the plunge of his life – yesterday was the day he and I used to dream about all those years – the Jew must have helped him of course but the Master was the brains behind it. Augustine waits for his wife to ask him what he is talking about, but she does not even look up from her work.

  Clement follows the creek through Bassett

  On what may be the last Saturday morning that he spends in Bassett, Clement Killeaton listens carefully while his father explains that he has an important message for the boy to take to a man on the other side of the city. Augustine hands Clement a sealed envelope and tells him to guard it carefully. Then he writes on a scrap of paper the names of the streets that the boy must follow to reach the house where the man is waiting for the message. Clement goes down McCracken’s Road then into Cordwainer Street, which is the same route that he follows to school. Not far from St Boniface’s school he enters a confusing system of streets that he has never seen before. A mob of strange boys follows him for a few yards and he remembers the story that a nun once told the First Communion class of the little saint Tarsisius who was sent by a priest to carry the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of Rome to a Christian dying in prison but who met a gang of pagan boys on the way and refused to tell them what he was carrying under his shirt and against his heart and ran for his life when they threatened to grab his hand and find out for themselves but was caught in a dead-end street because he didn’t know that suburb of Rome very well and was beaten to death by the boys but died with his fingers locked together still protecting the body of Our Lord, and prepares to run. He finds the house and delivers the message to the man who opens the door. The man says – I suppose you know your way home youngster. Clement says – yes thank you – the main streets of Bassett are over there aren’t they? and points. The man says – no bloody fear they’re not – they’re over that way – you must be bushed. Clement shows the list of streets that his father has written down for him. The man only glances at them and says – look it’s a lot easier than that, and then describes streets that Clement has never heard of and landmarks that the boy cannot remember passing on his way to the house. For the sake of politeness Clement agrees to set out for home along the streets that the man suggests. But soon after leaving the house he tries to find his own way by following streets that seem to lead back towards home. He soon finds himself in a set of streets that neither his father nor the man in the house has mentioned and that he himself suspects are leading him the wrong way. Then at the end of the most perplexing street of all he sees a sign reading NO ROAD and looks down over a post-and-rail fence at a narrow drain, walled with cement and open to the sky, that must surely be a part of the creek that flows through his own quarter of Bassett and then heads vaguely northwards, although he has always supposed that the creek passed on its way through places far different from the jumble of streets where he now finds himself and led in the end to a place quite different from any part of Bassett. He climbs through the fence, slithers down the grassy embankment and starts to walk beside the drain in the direction that he believes will lead him home. After he has rounded the first bend in the creek, he no longer knows which part of Bassett he is passing through. Above him, on both sides of the gully or cutting that the creek follows, are the back fences of yards behind strange houses. At one point he scrambles up the slope and looks through a gap in the palings. He sees a backyard with a parched lawn and a few stunted fruit trees and no place where a child could mark out a road or a farm that might lie hidden from the adults who walked across the yard from the back door to the lavatory, but the sight of a few shrubs leaning together and partly blocking the view
from the street at the front towards the backyard suddenly suggests to him that he may be looking at last into the backyard of Barbara Keenan’s house – the same yard that he used to wonder about on all the Saturday afternoons when he played alone among the weeds and dust in Leslie Street and in which he believed that the girl he loved built out of broken glass and flowers and scraps of satin, or drew in her own purer dust, or simply arranged from the leaning boughs of ample shrubs something that a boy would only have to see once to understand what it was that girls knew about or hoped for so that they had no need to bother about boys like himself who believed, despite all the scorn of ordinary boys and the anger and incomprehension of their parents, that they were in love with girls of their own age. The sight of a few tree-tops in the street beyond the shabby house and even the roofs and chimneys of the houses around makes him even more sure that this really is Barbara Keenan’s house. He looks all round the yard but sees nothing to suggest how Barbara might have spent all her Saturday afternoons. Then, as he clambers back down the slope to the creek, he looks up again and sees half a dozen wide gaps in the fence and realises that on any Saturday during the past few years any boy or gang of boys who knew how the creek wound its way past hundreds of backyards could have climbed up from the drain and watched for hours any secret things that the girl tried to make in her yard. Walking further he discovers what he has never even suspected – that the creek follows a course through Bassett which seems, to anyone looking along it from one of its bridges, to confine itself to the obscure parts of a few suburbs but which in fact finds its way through almost every quarter of the city by a route which could almost be that of a journey which Clement has always wanted to make through all the places that he has only seen beyond strange patterns of streets or at the ends of fenced yards thick with shrubs, and during which he could have paused again and again and looked towards a certain street or the front of a certain house and known that he was looking along a vista that had often troubled him but this time at last from the remote distance back towards the place where he had stood so often and only stared and wondered. At one place, where the embankments are steep and the houses above seem a long way off and where an untidy weed has spread all over the flat ground beside the drain and formed a jungle of greenery taller than a child and cut through by a maze of narrow pathways leading to hidden clearings at its centre, Clement believes from a few signs that he sees in the direction of the nearest road that he may have discovered the place where the boys of Barry Launder’s gang used to take their girlfriends after school. He follows a few paths into the green stuff and sits down in the first clearing that they lead him to, although he knows that there are probably many other clearings still further in and more secluded. He looks up and finds that the green fronds around him are so tall and the place itself is so far beneath the level of the streets nearby that all he can see is a green wall around him and the blue sky above and, where the two merge, a few grey panels of iron roof or wooden palings in some backyard behind a house that he would probably never recognise if he saw it from a street in Bassett. He stands up, then sits down again, and finally throws himself onto his back on the ground to learn what is the last thing that a girl would see after she had agreed at last to follow some swaggering boy from Launder’s gang down from the street to the place where, so he had told her, she would find out some of the secrets that adults kept hidden from children and before she realised as he fell on top of her and snatched at her pants that he had tricked her into showing some of her own precious secrets and that afterwards, even when she was alone in some dark private place in the depths of her backyard she would have to admit to herself that somewhere in Bassett was a boy who had seen and touched her naked. He seems to have penetrated to the bottom of a green well or tunnel in a place far different from Bassett yet, because a hint of a backyard is still visible far above him, whose entrance lies among the ordinary houses and yards of the city, he decides that if only he could have persuaded some girl to come to such a spot with him he might have proved to her that what he had always believed was true after all and that there was deep within their city a much stranger place whose green entrance could be reached from its streets. Farther still along the creek, which is the first pathway he has ever followed through Bassett that seems likely to disclose the things that any traveller may see all round him on the long roads through the country towards Tamarisk Row, Clement Killeaton finds in front of him a huge shaggy pepper tree which he decides must be the true hide-out of the Protestant gang from Shepherd’s Reef State school that he went in fear of for years although he met them only once and whose hide-out was supposed to be in a remote secret place safe from discovery and well protected against Catholics. He walks boldly through the curtain of foliage and sees that the place has been abandoned for a long time. He searches for some trace of the secret non-Catholic lore which Protestant children share and which enables State-school boys to do whatever they like to almost any girl they choose. In a hollow where the lowest bough joins the trunk of the tree, at a height that he can reach without any trouble, he finds a a rusted tobacco tin. He opens the tin and spills out some broken lengths of a rosary. He leaves the place wondering whether the Protestant gang tortured Catholic children to make them give up their religious treasures or whether they might have stolen things like rosary beads because they had after all few mysteries and rites of their own and wanted to copy from Catholics and might even have envied boys like himself because they could go whenever they wanted into buildings with altars and confessionals. He expects to walk a long way further before he reaches his own part of Bassett, but around the first corner past the abandoned hide-out he notices a familiar row of streets beside a street above the creek. He climbs up the embankment and finds that he has already reached Cordwainer Street and is only a few hundred yards from home.