The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories

by Cameron Raynes

  Now, thirteen months later, he felt as if he was just beginning to paint the way he always knew he could.

  Vanessa could see him through the open sliding doors dividing the living room from the kitchen. Around her were dozens of large sketches, on the walls and on the bare wooden floorboards, mainly landscapes. A couple were rendered in charcoal and pencil in broad, fluid strokes that reminded her of a Brett Whiteley her father had owned. The others were fine-grained studies in watercolour and ink.

  A portrait caught her attention. Vanessa raised an eyebrow and stopped breathing for a second or two. ‘Tea,’ she called out distractedly to David’s question as he clattered around the kitchen.

  The subject of the portrait was a woman of indeterminate age with a slight tummy. She was sitting on a kitchen table, her body square on to the viewer but with knees demurely together. Wearing a grey jacket, undone, her left breast exposed and the nipple aroused. The woman’s hair was black, cut into a bob, curling up onto her face on the right. It was herself, unmistakeably.

  ‘I thought you did landscapes,’ she called out at last.

  ‘I do,’ came the voice from the kitchen.

  ‘So what’s this then? Time out?’

  David walked into the living room, avoiding her gaze. He moved to the table in the centre of the room and began straightening it, putting brushes into pots, a litter of crayons into a biscuit tin, a faint blush on his cheek.

  ‘Or is this a new type of landscape?’ she suggested, gesturing at the portrait. His hunched shoulders emboldened her. ‘The secret geography of the body, perhaps.’

  She waited for him to answer, half expecting him to talk of the body as a landscape, perhaps something lyrical of mountains, valleys, denuded hills, unexpected lush hollows.

  ‘I’ll get the rent,’ he said, and disappeared back into the kitchen. She could hear him opening a drawer, rummaging through it.

  Her phone rang and when she looked at the screen she knew she’d be hanging that Jeffrey Smart in her living room within a week. She let it go through to message bank. Apart from the table and the clutter of art, the room she was in was bare but for a two-seater lounge in a drab purple fabric and a knotty pine coffee table that spoke of Centrelink and debt. David was almost her age and yet, looking around, she knew she could buy his life a dozen times over.

  Vanessa reached into her purse, pulled out three fresh fifty-dollar notes and put them on the table. She picked up her portrait and walked through the room, into the hallway, and out to her car under a sky daubed with colour.

  The Dress

  I

  Ruth Anderson stood before her dresser mirror and cast a critical eye over her reflection. Dark hair; a squareness to her face that suggested hardness; still slim-waisted at thirty-four. From outside came the thud and crack of wood being chopped in the yard below. She moved to the window and watched as Harold, her husband, sundered a piece of red gum. To be reduced to this! she thought. Niggers’ work.

  From her upstairs bedroom in the Royal Mail Hotel, Ruth could see the mangrove-lined port. In the distance, pale blue as if all the earth’s colour had been sucked dry by heat, the Flinders Range. Nearer, on a vacant half-acre of dirt and low scrub, crisscrossed by trails running from the harbour to the hotel and back, Grace Williams was returning from the butcher’s.Thank God for Grace, thought Ruth. Without her to help … Port Augusta had lost many of its men and women to the armed forces and the munitions factories in Adelaide. Ruth turned away from the window.

  Downstairs, Harold leant on his axe, a sheen of brandied sweat covering his bare torso, and stole a glance at Grace in her faded hibiscus dress as she walked across the hotel yard, carrying a parcel of meat.

  ‘Morning missy,’ he said. Thin lips split his face into a straight, hard line. A mouth like a vice. Once or twice, within the darkness of the hotel hallway, he’d caught sight of her on the back doorstep, the light streaming through that thin dress, making it all but transparent against her dusky skin. Each time the image stayed with him for days.

  ‘Morning, Mr Anderson.’ Grace nodded and walked quickly past him. She put the parcel into the meat-safe, then went to the washhouse. She set to work, building a fire to heat the water. The smell of burning eucalypt took her back to the mission on the outskirts of town where she’d grown up. During her mother’s last days at the mission Grace had done all their washing in a kerosene tin over an open fire.

  On the staircase, on her way to strip the beds, Grace paused to listen. She could hear Harold in the front bar now, stacking glasses. She had been wary of him ever since he’d cornered her once on the upstairs landing and backed her against the wall, his meaty hand on her belly, his thick sausage fingers angling down. As she began stripping the first of the upstairs rooms, she kept an ear out for him.

  Mid morning and heat had cleared the streets. On her way back from the post office, Ruth walked past the stone-walled grounds of the church. A poster advertised the upcoming gala concert – a fundraiser for the troops overseas. One bright thing amid the dreariness of wartime Port Augusta. For Ruth it was as if the people left here – the shop owners, railmen, clerks, the aged, mad and ill – had been left to their own devices. Forgotten about.

  Ruth’s father had once all but owned this town – several hotels, the bakery, the iceworks and nearly a dozen properties. Ruth’s mother had been active in the church and on every committee that mattered. She had raised her children up to believe in God, in the sanctity of property, and in the self-evident truth that there was no such thing as the deserving poor; that behind every family down on their luck was a character study of profligacy, dullness or apathy.

  But the Great Depression had stripped away more than half of the family’s fortune and they had abandoned the town in 1931, retreating to the eastern suburbs of Adelaide. Only Ruth had stayed, marrying Harold, her father’s ex-accountant.

  All they had at the moment was the lease on the Royal Mail Hotel and two hundred pounds in the bank in Adelaide. She dreamt of the day she’d own the hotel, become a matriarch of this little town and undo what had been done.

  Back inside the Royal Mail, Ruth drew the blinds against the sun and sat down in the dining room with a cup of tea. Grace had already cleared away the remains of breakfast but, Ruth noticed, had yet to sweep the floor.

  A hesitant knock sounded on the dining-room door and a woman, dressed in overalls, edged into the room. Anne Hargreaves.

  ‘Are we still on for this morning?’ asked Anne.

  The way the woman tried to round her vowels irritated Ruth to the point of distraction. But she steadied herself.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, standing and picking up her half-finished drink. What choice did she have? When Anne had approached her the previous week for the use of her dining room for her camouflage-net-making group, Ruth had searched for a reason to deny her, but it was useless. Anne’s work was for the war effort. And the past was the past, wasn’t it?

  Anne walked into the room, followed by her little group of earnest women. Half a dozen of them, the wives of doctors, businessmen and bankers, they affected the clothing of the Women’s Land Army – overalls over plain, long-sleeved shirts. Some of them had never before set foot inside the Royal Mail and they came in quietly, perhaps mindful of history and gossip.

  The last two women carried nets and tools stretchered on a piece of canvas. Ruth leant out into the hallway and hollered ‘Grace’, and the girl came at a good pace. While Ruth helped Anne and the women arrange themselves at tables, Grace made tea.

  When the women began to busy themselves with their nets and needles, Ruth retreated to the front bar. The men had gone quiet at the sight of the silent procession of women. The travelling salesman, the sandalwood cutters, the puffed up alderman and the dentist were all staring into their beers, wishing themselves somewhere else, doing something useful for the war effort.

  Ruth left Harold to run the bar and found refuge upstairs, dusting rooms that had not been let for several wee
ks. Occasionally she wandered downstairs and stuck her head inside the dining room to see how the women were going.

  ‘We’re all fine,’ Anne would say, looking up from the net she was working on.

  Later, Ruth ordered Grace into the kitchen to begin preparing lunch. When she came back into the dining room, the women had finished packing their equipment into the wooden crates Old Charlie Farquhar, the yardsman, had dragged in from the storeroom.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Anne. ‘For your hospitality, and for making this room available.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ruth, surprised by the satisfaction blooming inside her. This was surely a conciliatory gesture on Anne’s part and it would be churlish to not accept it.

  The following morning, Anne was again effusive with her thanks. ‘Why don’t you join us?’ she asked.

  Pleased with the attention she was getting from the women, Ruth smiled but shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I have far too much work to do.’ Then, partly to keep Anne in her place, she added, ‘Perhaps I could let Grace do a little each day,’ thinking that the woman would recognise the slight and say ‘no’.

  But she didn’t.

  ‘Thank you, Ruth,’ Anne said. ‘That would be lovely.’

  Grace sat with Anne and Mrs Townsend, the bank manager’s wife, as Anne showed her how to make a net. The Aboriginal girl quickly got the hang of it and Anne praised her dexterity.

  ‘I heard that your people were good at this sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But I would never have believed how good.’

  Grace kept working on the net, careful not to draw attention to herself.

  Ruth bustled around with a dustpan and broom in the hallway, just within earshot. The women were largely oblivious to her presence now, talking excitedly about arrangements for the gala concert in two weeks’ time and the dresses they had ordered from Adelaide. Anne was on the gala concert committee. She had been chosen to welcome and introduce the dignitaries and military brass from Adelaide.

  ‘It’s such an honour,’ said Mrs Townsend, as Ruth came in to rattle knives and forks at the dining room dresser. Murmurs of agreement from among the women. Ruth glared across the room at Anne and Grace, then stomped out. Made to feel like a servant in her own hotel. And by Anne Hargreaves. What would her mother say?

  Later that week, Ruth invited one of her mother’s old friends, Mrs Patterson, for morning tea. This was the quiet time of the day for Ruth, in between the breakfast and lunch guests, and not many of either in these days of rations and decrees. From the doorway of the dining room came the front bar sounds of men hiding from the heat, glasses in hand.

  Mrs Patterson had seen Anne Hargreaves talking to Miss Shadforth, the slender missionary, outside Taylor’s Emporium. ‘I don’t trust those two,’ she said. ‘Hargreaves and that stick insect. They’re as thick as thieves.’ She coughed into her handkerchief. ‘And we know who they’re trying to steal, don’t we?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ said Ruth, dabbing at her brow with a napkin.

  ‘They probably think she’s too good to work in a hotel,’ said Mrs Patterson. The older woman had a knack for saying things like that. Things that were true but which hurt.

  At the sound of voices coming from outside, Mrs Patterson stood up and went to the window. ‘I think you should see this,’ she said, not turning around.

  Old Charlie and Grace were sitting side by side near the woodheap. Grace was laughing at something the old man had said, balancing her lunch – a plate of beans – on her lap.

  Ruth got up from the dining table and walked over to where the older woman stood. She groaned at the sight. ‘Right,’ she said, striding out of the room.

  Grace stopped eating, her fork in mid air, when Ruth burst out of the hotel. Mrs Patterson edged out onto the back step, taking it all in.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Ruth said, her voice so husky and low with anger it was all she could do to force out a sound. ‘How dare you!’ She stopped, five yards away from the old man and the girl. ‘How dare you eat on the woodheap like a station nigger! Get to your room this instant.’

  Grace sat there.

  ‘Go to your room and eat your meal!’ squawked Ruth.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ said Grace. She put down her plate, spilling beans on the ground. She didn’t move.

  Mrs Patterson’s eyes bored into the back of Ruth’s head, and Ruth knew the older woman was expecting her to crush the girl. ‘You are forgetting yourself, miss,’ Ruth said and stood there, wanting to sling Grace to the ground. Impossible. She turned away, bustling Mrs Patterson in front of her.

  When she had gone, Grace picked up her plate and took it back to her room. Charlie kneeled on the ground, placing a shard of red gum on the fire beneath his billy. He remembered working at Erinlea Station; how the blackfellas there would eat their dinner on the woodheap at the back of the kitchen after having put in a long day’s work, the equal of any white man. He had taken his meal out there to join them. They had sacked him after his fight with the foreman the next day. Had to really; he’d bitten off half the bastard’s right ear. Still, he knew better than to interfere in the affairs of women.

  On the morning of the sixth day of The Occupation, as Ruth had come to think of it, she told the women that she was sorry, but their presence was interfering too much with the running of the hotel. Ruth looked Anne directly in the eye when she said ‘interfering too much’ and held her gaze until Anne looked away.

  II

  Even after months of living rough with the blackfellas north of Ooldea, the heat was almost unbearable. Hot air blasted from a ragged hole in the engine well as Peter Dingo turned off the northern road and headed for the centre of town. As he passed the hospital he remembered his last day in town, three months ago. He had carried Grace’s mother from the hospital, her kidneys useless, and propped her up with pillows in the cab of his truck. Before they reached the mission, she had put her hand on his arm and told him of the street in Port Adelaide where Grace could find her uncles, aunts and cousins.

  ‘They wouldn’t do this to a white woman,’ he had said to the missionary-in-charge as he carried Mrs Williams into the mission’s sickbay. Grace was at his elbow, fussing and distraught. Miss Shadforth had put a finger up to her pursed lips. Peter had looked right through her.

  Peter Dingo pulled up outside the police station, climbed out and threw his hat on the seat. On the tray of the Whippet Buckboard lay two sets of scalps, threaded on fencing wire, writhing with flies. Each had a loop of wire at the end for a handle. He picked them up and walked to the station, swinging the scalps as he went.

  Inside, Sergeant Armstrong sat at his desk at the back of the room, wiping the sweat from his face with a rag. Constable Johnston sat in one corner, typing a two-fingered report. Peter walked to the front counter dividing the room.

  ‘Got something for you,’ he said. He held up the scalps and smiled.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dingo,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Take ’em round the back.’

  Peter laughed, then walked back into the hammering heat and down the laneway that separated the station from the Sergeant’s residence. He laid the scalps near a listless lemon tree, unbuttoned himself and let out a yellow stream at the base. Constable Johnston emerged from the back of the station.

  ‘Trying to finish it off?’ he asked, jutting his chin at the tree.

  Peter grunted and buttoned his pants.

  ‘How many?’ asked Johnston.

  ‘Two hundred and sixty.’

  Johnston gave a low whistle. ‘You’ve done well.’

  Peter grabbed hold of the makeshift handles, lifting the scalps off the ground. They flicked around his legs, sending up thick black clouds of flies. His forearms danced with muscle and Johnston thought of the hawsers used to tie up the fishing boats in the harbour. You had to hand it to him, thought Johnston, the dogger earnt his money. Shoulder-length hair, torn trousers and a filthy shirt; covered in dust from heel to crown. Spending mon
ths at a time in marginal cattle country between Ooldea and Marree, trading with the natives for the scalps of the pups they ate as a delicacy in spring.

  With close to a hundred and sixty pounds stowed away safely in his swag, Peter turned into Church Street and parked outside the Royal Mail. Four shillings a day bought him a room upstairs and the use of a tiny, windowless bathroom at the end of the hall. He gave a week’s keep to Harold Anderson, then dragged himself up the stairs to a tub of tepid water that turned to madeira with dust by the time he had finished. His first proper bath for weeks.

  In his room he changed into a fresh set of moleskin trousers and red serge shirt, combed his hair, unpacked his bags and sat for a minute on the narrow bed to take in the room. A wardrobe, one chair and a pockmarked, red cedar writing desk. A door opened onto the darkened first-floor balcony. He rolled up his dirty clothes and placed them neatly outside his door, in the hallway. He hadn’t seen Grace yet. He hoped she was still here.

  Downstairs, in the bar, Peter Dingo felt hemmed in by the low ceiling and strained joking of the men from the railyards and the iceworks as they talked of Hitler and Hirohito. When Harold Anderson began blustering about Spear Creek, Peter walked out and into the yard, clutching a bottle of beer. Old Charlie sat near the woodpile, a seven-ounce butcher in hand.

  ‘Mind if I join ya?’ Peter asked the old man.

  ‘Free country,’ said Charlie, motioning with a chin like a knob of cucumber at a log alongside him.

  ‘For the time being it is.’ The evening was still, the smell of mangrove heavy in the air. Behind them, the Flinders Range reared up like the last wave on earth. ‘Still working then?’ Peter asked the old man.