by Ashley Hay
He’d always thought it would improve. Now, in the autumn sun, it occurred to him for the first time that it might not. I might go to the grave with their spat. He shook his head, as much at imagining the end of his own life as anything else. Surely Elsie would do better than that. Surely one day she’d see how to make it right. Straight and true: you could depend on her for that.
‘Time for another cuppa, Clem?’ Elsie called, coming onto the deck and pulled up short by the sight of the crow. From the corner of his eye, Clem saw her stop, and in front of him the crow tilted its own head to take her in its sights. ‘You did give me a fright,’ she said to the bird, and Clem knew what was coming next. ‘Do you remember that morning we walked down to see this house? Remember the baby crow after its breakfast in the backyard—I’ve always wondered where it went. I’d’ve fed it the scraps, you know, watched it grow up.’
‘You had the twins,’ said Clem, and it sounded a little too abrupt. ‘What more watching did you want?’ Because it ate at him, the memory of how frail it had felt under the heel of his boot. It ate at him that he hadn’t told her fifteen years ago, and couldn’t now, no way. ‘And what’s with these omen things anyway?’
If we’d come down half an hour earlier or later; if we’d come down the day before, we’d never have seen the bloody thing—would she have wanted to buy the house then? Or if I’d come with the tub in the afternoon instead; that dog would’ve finished it off and probably eaten it as well. She was a practical woman, his Elsie, but she could invest a lot in small, strange things.
He knew perfectly well why crows made him nervous, and it was nothing to do with that tiny death in the sticky grass. He watched Elsie watch the crow as he finished his tea and held out his cup towards her offer.
‘Fill this up, love, and I’ll tell you a story about crows. From back when I was a kid.’
The bird shuffled along the rail, first one way, then the other, as Clem heard the noise of the kettle and the tea canister from inside.
‘You can’t have a new thing left to tell me,’ Elsie called, and Clem sensed an accusation in her tone.
‘’Course I can,’ Clem said as she set the tea on the table and leaned towards his words. ‘I’ve a secret tale or two.’
She was smiling at him, her pretty smile, and he could smell her hair like flowers. It still astonished him sometimes, to be close to her, to know her. We’re still young, he thought, even with a grandkid turning up.
‘When I was a boy,’ he began.
When he was a boy, his dad had taken him shooting, out near Lightning Ridge—he was only six or seven, and he’d spent his days fossicking in dust and gravel, pulling out tiny flecks of opaline stone, their colours fired like rainbows. He was a quiet boy—nervy, his dad said—and wanted nothing to do with the shooting. The sound of the rifle and the way it jumped back against your body when it fired; the way an animal’s eyes dulled down to horrible, blank milkiness: these things terrified him.
His dad had dropped a wallaby; the mate had dropped two more; and Clem had inched further and further away, busying himself with getting water, or sticks for a fire, or folding swags—anything to avoid the gun’s weight, its sudden jerk.
On the last morning, with the mate leading the tally by a couple of points and starting to boast, Clem’s dad had looked up from the tea he was stirring and smiled. ‘There was no warmth in it,’ Clem said to Elsie, ‘just something nasty, and hard.’
Clem’s dad set the billy on a rock, set the spoon he’d been using alongside it, and reached for his gun. Propping it, adjusting it, he’d pursed his lips into something like a kiss. Then he’d pulled the trigger, shooting a single crow—‘a big one, huge’—out of the top of a silvery gum.
‘So fast,’ said Clem, ‘I didn’t have time to cover my ears.’
The crow dropped to the ground. Clem could still hear the thud. His very body seemed to shake now, so that Elsie, across the table, reached to take his hand, as if to quiet it.
And there it lay, a tiny pile of darkness against the soil.
‘I was seven years old, and I couldn’t hear a thing. Thought the bloody gun had deafened me. Then it started, this angry sound. All these crows were flying in, diving and wheeling. They damn near covered the whole tree, and they yelled and they wailed and they howled. Must’ve been a hundred of them in the end. I remember when I learned the word cacophony at school. I knew what it meant; it was heartbreaking. Most mournful sound I’ve ever heard.’
Crouched by the fire, he’d watched the black shapes swoop and settle, more and more from as far as he could see. ‘Then a dingo came too—after the body, you know; Dad hadn’t scooped it up the way he did with pigs and roos, the stuff he called “real game”. And blow me down if these crows didn’t go after the dingo, swooping it and pecking until it slunk off and left them to their funeral.’ Ululate: another word he’d learned at school. The wailing of mourning women, his teacher said. And crows, he’d thought. And crows.
In front of Clem, now, the crow started and took flight as a truck clattered around the corner, its tray laden with ironwork and scrap metal.
‘The pigs, they were one thing, even the roos—and Dad would never shoot one with a joey. But a crow; they’re magnificent. I dunno why he did it. It seemed so mean, so unnecessary.’ He sat a while saying nothing, staring into the middle distance of the yard.
‘My dad drove home without a break—petrol here and there, I suppose. I can’t even remember whose truck we were in, but I was glad of its noise. Didn’t want to have to say anything. Didn’t know what to tell Mum either. But I was terrified of being taken on another shoot after that.’ He’d even wished his dad dead, so he wouldn’t have to go again.
‘Then I was eight years old, and he did die—pneumonia in the middle of winter. It was just me and Mum, and then it was boarders, and people’s mending coming in, and the typing she did for one of the university blokes, me going to sleep to the clicking of that ruddy machine. Still,’ he rubbed Elsie’s hand in his, ‘she made me a good life, and she gave us a good home till we got sorted here. Never told her about the crow, neither. But I always wondered if it’d marked Dad somehow—’
Clem cut himself off, pulled his hand away. It was an enormous thing to think, an enormous thing to say. He drank the fresh tea and watched a kookaburra balance on the garden wall. He’d always wondered if it was his wishing his dad gone that had done that too, the pneumonia. But that was even less sayable.
They sat in silence, each with their cup. Across the table, Elsie set hers down and clasped her fingers together as if in prayer.
‘Oh, Clem,’ she said at last. ‘Oh, love.’ So soft.
He drew in a breath and blew it out. ‘Anyway—’ while she reached out and patted his hand.
He couldn’t remember his mum and dad just sitting together like this. He couldn’t remember their laughter or their jokes or their smiles. They were two tall and silent people in his childhood, and then one of them was gone. When he met Elsie, when he set his cap at her, as his mother joked, he determined to make her talk and make her laugh.
‘There’s no one like you for blarney, Clement Gormley,’ Elsie had said to him at the quiet end of one of their first long days together.
‘I’ve got years of stories to tell you,’ he’d replied. More than twenty years of talking he’d done now.
‘Does he still work over there, that professor your mum used to type for? Did you ever think to find him over there?’
If her tangent surprised him then his own next words surprised him too. ‘I used to wonder if he was sweet on her—he’d bring her chocolates sometimes, and a card once for her birthday: that made her blush.’
A different life, he thought suddenly, if your dad was one for learning. Maybe Clem would have gone to the university instead of just polishing its floors and fixing its window sashes.
He shook his head and stood up, passing the empty cup back to his wife as she reached for her own. And done what? He was never
able, really, to see things other than the way they were, he believed, and he took some pride in that.
‘I’m off then, up the hill. Shouldn’t be late tonight, if you want to wander up and meet me.’ He liked it, cutting through the cemetery as he walked down over Highgate Hill, seeing her there among the trees, her brown hair lighter than the foreshore’s shadows. They’d head home together, the river turning and lapping alongside them.
‘I’ll do that then.’ Elsie smiled. ‘And something nice for tea—a bit of lamb, or some steak, if you like.’ She paused in the doorway, watching as he stretched. ‘Maybe he was showing off, your dad. Maybe he thought it’d impress you, taking a great bird like that when it could just as easily have risen up and flown away.’
‘It was never me he wanted to impress,’ said Clem, shrugging his arms into his coat. ‘Just his mates, always his mates. Might’ve been different if I’d been older and he’d thought I could shoot things myself. But I don’t think he really minded what I thought about him—don’t think it occurred to him I thought anything. I never saw my mum cry when he died, you know,’ he said, checking his pocket for his wallet and starting down the stairs. He’d sometimes wondered if his mum had wished his dad dead too.
As the ferry headed for its wharf, Clem wedged himself against its railing. He loved the river, its twists and curves, and the quietness of it. If he wanted anything, he thought, it was a little boat—get himself over to work faster, and he could go rowing on the weekends, too, maybe throw in a line. Wonder what Else’d think of that? Probably pack up a picnic and want to come too.
Him and Elsie: twenty-three years now, he figured. He could remember the first time he saw her, the day war was declared in 1939. He was stomping through Brisbane trying to feel like a grown-up and wondering if he should enlist. A tram slowed on Adelaide Street and she’d swung out before it fully stopped, bright and young in her pale green dress. The sun caught her hair, the wind caught her skirt, and she’d looked so impossibly pretty that Clem had paused and without thinking put out his hand to help her down. That was that. At twenty, he’d just scraped under the age for the militia call-up, and then he found work with the city’s electricity department.
‘Safe and sound,’ as he told Elsie. ‘Out of harm’s way.’
They were married in 1940, and she’d worn that same green dress prettied up with some kind of lace. His mum had loved her—thrifty enough to make do with a frock she had, and alive enough to stop Clem from hankering for the war.
They’d had good times, the three of them—and then the five of them, with the twins—in the old house on Highgate Hill. He still missed it, and his mum; he used to call in for a cup of tea with her on his way to work. She’d been dead now for a decade.
The boy threw a rope out to the jetty, and Clem braced again as it tightened and held—he liked to feel the decking shift as everyone else rushed off before him. His first job today, he knew, was in the Physics Building, a dodgy door on one of the lavatories—shouldn’t take more than half an hour, and if he got to it while there was a lecture on, he shouldn’t inconvenience anyone about the convenience. He smiled at his play on words and set off for the caretaker’s house, where he gathered his tools. Cutting into the Great Court, the morning sun against its sandstone dazzled him.
Scoping the halls of the Physics Building, he saw students hurrying towards a class and stood a moment in the foyer, his eyes adjusting to the low light as the crush passed.
‘Mr Gormley, is that you?’ Clem recognised the quiet voice of one of the physics lectures, and nodded. ‘You’re here about the lavatory? Because when you’ve dealt with that, I’d appreciate your having a look at my office door as well—I’m teaching now, but you’ll see it’s left open, down the hall. If you could pop by, when you’ve got a moment. I would like to make it secure.’
Clem turned in the direction the man indicated, and turned back to see him disappearing into the lecture hall. ‘All right, all right,’ he heard the man bark—such a different tone from his polite request to Clem—as he carried his kit to the bathroom.
They were always cold, these buildings. Clem shivered as the men’s room door swung behind him—the smooth cold floor, the tiled walls, the stall doors that clattered. He saw the problem, rescrewed the hinge, and was done in ten minutes, washing his hands at one of the basins and smiling as the hot water came through.
The physicist’s room, and then he’d get into the sun.
He pushed at the office door, feeling the way it sagged from the weakness of its upper hinge. Clem pressed at the rectangle of metal, feeling in his back pocket for his screwdriver.
He glanced at the desk behind him, taking in the papers, squared with each other and the desk’s edge, the pot of pencils, the half-drunk cup of tea set neatly on a mat. There was a typewriter too, pushed to one side—no women tapping away for this man—and at the front of the desk, a dome of glass on a varnished wooden stand.
Inside was a funnel full of black stuff—tar, thought Clem, or maybe pitch. When Clem was a boy his uncle had built a boat, and Clem had spent weekends by the river, smoothing over the joins in the little craft’s hull, proud to be involved with something that sounded as grand as caulking.
Uncle Perce: he hadn’t thought of him for years—and then what? The boat finished, the man had kissed his sister—Clem’s mum—goodbye, and prepared to set off, across Moreton Bay, and on towards New Zealand.
‘But how do you know how to sail her, Uncle Perce?’ Clem, pleading, desperate to be taken for a turn. ‘Oughtn’t you to take her out for a run before you try for the whole horizon?’
‘It’s in my bones, Clem, the wind and the water—ask your mum about growing up on the shoreline with such a bad influence for a brother. Once I go, I don’t turn back.’ He’d named the boat for Clem’s mum too: the Pearl.
‘She sounds like a pirate ship,’ breathed the boy.
There might have been a Christmas card from New Zealand that first year, Clem thought now, but nothing after that, and he’d never asked his mum where Uncle Perce had gone, or why. How funny, he thought, that his uncle had been so disposable: if Donny upped and moved to another country, he thought, and then smiled. Elsie would never let her children get away. She’d know where they were, and what they were doing, until the last life left her body.
‘My babies,’ she still called them sometimes, though they were twenty-one, the pair of them. She swore it was accidental.
Maybe he would see about buying a little boat—call it the Pearl II. Clem bent down to gather his tools. Straightening up, his leg knocked the desk and something moved. He turned towards the glass jar and saw the pitch that had been dangling down into the funnel, thick and heavy, snap so that the new drop lay in the beaker below.
No, no. Clem stared at it—had he done this? Had he damaged this thing? All the possibility he’d felt—the lovely idea of a boat, a day on the river—shattered and dissipated. Just get out: he grabbed his bag and reached for the door, fumbling in his haste. The physicist was standing outside, his own hand reaching for the knob.
‘All done? Grand, thank you. I’ve just come for my book—’ He stepped around Clem, stopping as he saw the jar. ‘Well,’ he said quietly. ‘Well, well.’
‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Clem stammered then. ‘I was rescrewing the hinge and when I turned, it was . . .’
‘So you didn’t see it?’ The man was holding his arm now, and leaning in quite close. ‘You were in the very room, and you didn’t see it?’
Clem blinked, swallowed—this was worse than being hauled up and asked to spell cacophony in school. He took a guess at the right answer.
‘No—no, sir, I didn’t.’
The physicist laughed and inched the jar towards the window. ‘Eight years since the last drop—and it was only the fourth since Parnell began the experiment. And you know the mad thing? No one’s ever seen it happen. Ever. I’ve had it here on my desk for a year now, waiting. And the blessed thing waits till I
’m talking to a bunch of student—and waits until your back’s turned and you’re busy with the wretched door. Then off it goes. An historical moment. Unseen by anyone—pah!’
He grabbed at a book, so fast that Clem jumped aside. ‘Shut the door on your way out, would you?’ the physicist called, rushing back to his class.
‘But should I wait? If it’s going to happen again, I could wait and watch for that? If it matters that I missed it this time?’
From deep in the hallway, Clem heard the man laugh. ‘Come back in seven or eight years,’ he said. ‘When the next drop is ready to taunt me.’ And he disappeared into the gloom.
Outside, in the elegant loggia of the Great Court, Clem stopped a moment, visualising the pitch’s drop again. Maybe he’d tell Elsie as they walked home together. Maybe he’d tell her as they had their tea. Or maybe it’d take him as long to tell her about the silly pitch as it had to say something about his dad and the crow. There was something sweet about a story you kept to yourself.
But the physicist was standing behind him on the ferry back across the river that evening, and Clem heard him talking to a colleague—in his polite hallway tone, not the rousing bark for students. ‘And blow me down if it didn’t go today—I was giving a lecture. Parnell’s pitch gave way, and there wasn’t a blessed soul there to see it.’
Alone at the handrail, Clem saw his knuckles grip to whiteness. No, he wanted to call out a correction. And: Hang on! There was a blessed soul—and he did see it. But the man had gone into the next part of his conversation, and Clem knew he’d missed his moment to say a thing.
He let go of the rail and shook his head, seeing himself as the physicist might—a plain man with ginger hair and stubble, pushing through his forties; worked a bit too hard and living a bit too little.
All these moments, he thought as the boat eased away from the river bank. They added up to something, but he could never quite see what.
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