Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement knows he will never enter the Wallaces’ aviary

  Clement Killeaton searches all day in his backyard for marbles or small toys that might have been forgotten beside back roads through the weeds and rubbish. Just before tea-time he walks around the yard once more and drags his feet through the dirt so that not even a single one of all the stones that used to stand for horses in the neat paddocks of stud properties is left standing near another in a way that might suggest to a stranger days or weeks afterwards that someone had put it there on purpose and start him searching around the yard for other signs of the pattern that was once laid out across it. He goes inside satisfied that the next boy to live at 42 Leslie Street will never discover anything to tell him what sort of games the boy Killeaton used to play there, although he suspects that deep under the soil there may still be some things hidden from the days when the boy Silverstone used to play there. After tea Clement’s mother sends him to Mr Wallace’s shop. Mr Wallace says he hopes to be moving to another part of Bassett before a month is up. Clement tells him that the Killeatons will be gone long before then. The birds in the aviary are settling on their roosts for the night. Margaret Wallace cannot say what will happen to the birds after the Wallaces have shifted. Clement asks whether Mr Wallace has thought of taking them all to some patch of bush north of Bassett and letting them go so they can find their own way to the places where they belong. Clement admits that some of the birds might take a few years to find their way home, but he reminds Margaret that birds are able to find secret routes away from roads and towns and that if the birds from the aviary don’t live long enough to reach home again they will build nests along the way and have young ones and bring them up so that they or their young ones will one day find their proper home somewhere far away in the heart of Australia and recognise it because it reminds them of a place that a man once built for their parents or grandparents because he believed he could make a landscape so pleasant that a family of birds would live there contentedly for years thinking it was their true home. Clement tells Margaret that he will be leaving Bassett for good in a few days. She says – wasn’t there some part of the aviary you were always dying to see and you’d still like to see it before you go? He says – there’s something else I’d much sooner see than the aviary. She picks up a tin half-full of conversation lollies and says – I’ve found a new way to get lollies from the shop without my father knowing. Clement starts to open his fly. He says – I’ll go straight and tell your father you’ve been pinching stuff again unless you pull down your pants for me. For the first time in all the years that Clement has known her, Margaret Wallace seems almost afraid of the boy who has tried for years to convince her that he is just as strong and manly as the boys in her brother’s gang that she follows home from school along McCracken’s Road and sometimes through the bulrushes near the creek where the State-school boys will not allow Catholics to trespass because that is where they pull down the pants of all the girls who walk home with them, and who has always stopped talking about the birds in her father’s aviary as soon as he suspected that she thought he was a cissy who wanted to cuddle the soft feathers of birds or finger their downy nests or admire the colours of their eggs because he always hoped that when she admitted at last that he was no different from the tough Shepherd’s Reef boys she would let him do to her what the State-school boys must have done hundreds of time. She tries to dodge past him towards the door of her playhouse, but he moves quickly to block her. He grabs at her dress. She knocks down a long shelf stacked like the shelves in her father’s shop with jars and tins and boxes. Out of one tin a heap of broken biscuits spills down onto the dirt floor. She says – give me time to pick up the bickies and I’ll let you have a handful. He says – I suppose you pinch them from your father too. She says – no I’ve just been saving them. He says – I’ll give you fifty to pick them up, and starts counting aloud. Then, while she is bending down with her back to him, Clement pins her arms against her sides with his left arm and with his free hand struggles to tear down her thick white pants. He and she roll over together on the floor, upsetting the flimsy shelves and tearing down the grubby white curtains. She kicks and punches him silently and savagely, but for just two or three seconds while her knee is lifted to aim a kick at him he sees clearly among the biscuit crumbs clinging to her thighs and belly a low white ridge split by a narrow unpromising fissure but with nothing else to distinguish it from the pale slopes around, so that any man or boy who chanced on such a place after years of searching would probably still go on looking for the strange shape that he was really after. Then she escapes and crouches in a corner out of his reach with her knees pressed tightly together. A sign that once stood in her father’s shop lies beside her, and Clement sees, beneath a picture of a beautiful dark-haired woman, the words YOU TOO CAN HAVE THE FLAWLESS COMPLEXION OF THIS HOLLYWOOD STAR. He says – now I’ve seen what I always wanted to see when I used to ask you to take me in and show me the secret parts of the aviary. She says – you must be nuts – I’ve got things hidden in there that you’ll never see as long as you live. He asks her will she take those things with her when she shifts or do they have to stay inside the aviary. She tells him that he’ll never know what happens to them because he doesn’t know what they look like and it doesn’t matter if he comes back to look for them every day after she has gone and searches for them in every corner of the aviary, he’ll never know whether he just missed finding them or whether he was looking at them for hours and didn’t know it. She pulls her pants up tightly under her dress. He says – goodbye Margaret and if I ever come back to Bassett again I’ll come and visit you because then we might be old enough to do grown-up things with each other. Clement walks home wondering why he waited for so long to look at Margaret Wallace when all he had to do was twist her arm behind her or push her over backwards. Then he remembers that somewhere in a country that is almost a perfect copy of Australia there are places where even a stupid helpless girl like Margaret Wallace can leave things out in the open exposed to the sunlight and yet know that no one might know what they mean because even the ordinary hills and plains in that country are not really what they seem to be.

  The Killeatons rest on their way to the Western District

  During their journey back from Bassett to the Western District, the place that they think they belong in, Mr and Mrs Killeaton decide at last to stop for a rest. They ask the driver of their furniture van to pull up in the town of Skipton. In a scanty park beside the main street they sit beneath English trees and look out across the plains where the oldest and wealthiest families in Victoria live in sprawling bluestone mansions out of sight on their huge properties. The husband and wife think only of the journey ahead of them across the plains towards the coast, but the boy Clement sitting between them remembers the empty rooms of the house in Leslie Street, Bassett, and the last few minutes before the Killeatons climbed into the furniture van, when his parents were looking into every room to see if they had forgotten anything and he suddenly looked behind the kitchen door and found the St Columban’s Calendar hanging there with the outermost page still headed January 1948 because no one had remembered to turn the pages for several months. He lifts the calendar out of the basket on his mother’s knees and stares at the nameless place somewhere between Palestine and Egypt on an afternoon when the Holy Family are already miles away from their true country. While his parents believe he is watching only Jesus, Mary and Joseph resting on their journey thousands of miles away the boy Clement wonders at which point in his journey the child scans a region of the plains so far ahead of the family that even a large city there might seem only a vague pattern of streets or rooftops and yet so like the colour of many an afternoon or a street that he has known that he knows clearly what a child there might see when he looks to where a family wanders and knows what another child would see if he looked across the distance towards him.

  The Gold Cup race is run

  A boy suspects all along that he may onl
y be pushing a handful of marbles without knowing where they might finish while a rider lifts his arm again and again and brings the whip down savagely and the horse Sternie who was once the hope of the Jew the shrewdest punter of all goes on slowly improving his position in a field of plodding country gallopers he sees a racecourse where silks of a certain red promise a man that he might soothe at last the restless cock between his legs when he looks out above the roof-tops of an inland city that he has never understood while he spends years training for the day when he comes from behind to win a famous foot-race in the straight now it’s still anybody’s race Lost Streamlet is the leader but Passage of North Winds is coming out after him studying pictures in the Sporting Globe of horses a few furlongs from home in races that have already been decided while people in the crowd gape at their fancies bunched indecisively near the rails and the horse Clementia comes down the outside rail alone and almost unnoticed and his owner wonders why he never guessed that he was training a champion where white silk may stand for the soul of a man with God on his side far across the great northern plains that he has never ventured into he tries for years to discover a place where Protestant and pagan girls walk naked and never care who sees them Hills of Idaho is looming up suddenly Veils of Foliage is not to be denied shoving stones along a dirt track between crude fences of chips of wood while a woman stands with her ear pressed against a crackling wireless set and the horse Skipton that her husband has backed for hundreds of pounds leaves the rails and begins his run from absolute last in the Melbourne Cup field where orange reminds someone in the crowd of the gritty footpaths and yards in the city that he always returns to past the heart of Australia that he admits he has no claim to he searches for years for a backyard where a pure girl knows an innocent game that he and she will never tire of Hare in the Hills is coming into the picture Proud Stallion Den of Foxes is in the thick of things and Captured Riflebird is trying to get through straining his muscles and gasping for breath trying to come from last in a foot-race while the filly Mishna draws clear at the furlong and two or three men in the crowd glance at each other but so discreetly that no one would guess they were about to bring off one of the greatest betting plunges ever planned in Australia where every shade of blue hints at the awesome mysteries of Our Lady and the Catholic Church over the woods and fields of England filled with birds that breed and nest without fear in sight of the people there he sees for years above his calendar a land of sombre colours where saints and holy people go gracefully past on journeys of their own past the furlong and Hills of Idaho shows out in front but challenges are coming from everywhere listening through the wall of his bedroom to learn what his parents are planning while the horse Silver Rowan with a few huge strides asserts his claim and a man whose ancestors once built a stone castle with a tower that looked out over miles of green country that they never wanted to leave knows that Ireland is about to be avenged at last where pale gold is meant to be the colour of a delicate freckle hidden beneath a woman’s dress on a secret part of her body between the dark hills of Europe that the gypsies found their way out of at last he reaches the very borders of a land where great herds of cattle graze on shining prairies and men return across great distances to find their sweethearts Lost Streamlet is refusing to give in Veils of Foliage Hare in the Hills is swooping on them wandering through a maze of streets in a city whose map he could never draw while the people of Melbourne are talking about Bernborough a mighty horse from the north who is on his way down from Queensland winning race after race and Augustine Killeaton solemnly tells his son that a greater horse than Phar Lap has appeared in the land where the least glimpse of a certain pale green may mean that a man has discovered a country that no one else will ever see beyond the enormous prairies of America that will be remembered forever in films and hillbilly songs he comes as near as he dares to a green-gold land where creatures set out from intricate cities over plains that may take a lifetime to cross or may suddenly close over the travellers and all trace of their journeys a mighty wall of horses Hills of Idaho is about to be swamped and Springtime in the Rockies sees daylight at last watching plains and hills and more plains rushing past the window of a train or a furniture van while the professional punter Len Goodchild and his inner circle appear in the crowd on yet another provincial racecourse and a knot of people follows them to see what they fancy where a rare silver sometimes appears like the rain above a coast where a man first dreamed of following the races even further than the desolate lands between Palestine and Egypt and he believes he has reached for once a different city although it still seems familiar Veils of Foliage Hare in the Hills Springtime in the Rockies emerges from nowhere and never able to foresee the end of it all far out on a plain three or four horses are bunched together about to take up the positions that will be preserved for years to come but their riders jerk their arms or thrust with their heels or raise and lower their whips with a graceful action as though they cannot hear the screaming crowd and know nothing of the thousands of pounds depending on them and do not realise that any one of them with a last desperate effort might lift his mount and himself into the one position that will make them famous but are already figures in a faded photograph showing the finish of a great race in which one horse triumphed and the rest were soon forgotten by all but a few faithful followers and where a colour that no one has yet been able to copy onto any silk jacket the colour of the most precious milk-stones might tell of a traveller who can find his way back from lands it is hopeless to try to cross in the direction of the district of Tamarisk Row he sees what may still not be the last place of all yet he knows at last that he will never leave Tamarisk Row and Tamarisk Row is coming home when it’s all over.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.