by Rodney Hall
– Next time they order us up we’ll euchre them Rose. You just keep on fluking this winning form. That’ll teach them. Good as ever, he declared tapping his head.
While his wife bungled the business of shuffling and dealing, George Swan glanced out of the window and saw pure sky. He sat looking in the direction of Venus, his blood turning to glass. This window he had known all his life, framing the obscure sky, shattered through him and the tallow tree had gone. He had created this blank. Energy surged back, causing his chair to creak. And as he met his son’s eyes he knew the connection.
Billy grew uncomfortable, a meaning in the exchange of looks which he didn’t like and last saw when Elizabeth Macarthur pushed him off his farm and he had to take to the bush as a shepherd.
– Pass.
– I’ll order it up, Bill said because to be passive was to die.
– You sure you know what you’re doing? his father demanded, spurring his horse and marshalling the mistress’s rouseabouts around the only water on the property. One more move and we’ll nail yer.
Suzanne took her teeth out of Warren Beatty tasting her new knowledge of his ankle to glance from Billy to his father and float back on the undercurrents she could smell in their strong male odour. She set Robert Redford beside her fiance-to-be. They were punching each other with vicious whacks. Her admiration of Billy was reduced to momentary distaste by a little roll of snot in his nostril, hanging there among the black hairs. This is silly, she told herself, refusing to let Redford deliver the final knockout, it could happen to anyone. But it showed her things in Billy’s face she wasn’t prepared for. She had the rigours of marriage.
– We’ll euchre them this time for sure Rose.
– I don’t say I can George, she looked very timid and willing.
So the game progressed. Mrs Swan put her side well in front. Her husband’s cleverness became author of the entire game – Your play Bill – Now you Mother – Mother – Hope you’ve got the ace for your sake – Cop a load of this – You’re holding us up Rose – Look lively with a club Suzanne – Isn’t anybody going to take up the trick? – Me is it? – Now you play it! – Your deal Mother – Your lead Bill – How am I supposed to make head or tail of that for a lead? – Stone the crows! – Play up young lady – You youngsters want to be glad we’re not playing for thousands – One more round and then we’ll finish …
So the game was over, the youngsters routed, the blank sky in the window touched with a hint of pink when an eagle floated into that empty frame. More tea was brewed, Suzanne sighed an admission that she’d better go home, Billy at last blew his nose, Mrs Swan sat down every time the others stood up and Mr Swan carried his cold chainsaw to the shed, Bill and the guest went out to look at the ruined tree, some beast bellowed remotely from the direction of Whitey’s Fall.
– See that little house just this side of the pub, said Billy becoming companionable now the visit was at an end. Well that’s where my grandfather lives.
Smiling happily into a haze of shortsightedness, she couldn’t even make out Whitey’s Fall itself. All she could see was the mountain hunching into a pointless blue sky. But she nodded, proud of Billy’s keen sight. Though she wanted to stay she knew what was expected and bounced out to her car, her pretty face, her pretty plump breasts, her eyes smiling through the windshield, her firm little hands on the wheel, she was a creature being hounded to Antarctica, and away she drove, drawn to the glacial loneliness of her own bed, her teeth aching with recriminations, her heart fair set for failure.
They waved till her car ratcheted out across the cattle grid. Mrs Swan said what a sweet girl. Bill said nothing.
– You seem to get on well with her dear, Mrs Swan made another try, her eyes on the fallen tree and her voice suggesting the world was getting out of hand. I always think it’s so unfair that the ones with most to give get treated unkindly, she observed seeming to speak of others.
– Pleasant afternoon that, Mr Swan remarked.
– Is it her father’s farm? said Bill.
Mrs Swan disappeared into the kitchen.
– You listen to me for once, his father counter-attacked. Sooner or later you’ve got to grow up. And that means having principles. You can’t just please yourself and to hell with everybody else in this world and if you try you’ll be sure to regret it in the next so you’ve got to know right from wrong and I’ve been meaning to have a man-to-man yarn with you for some time now about the way you’re going and the life you’re leading hanging around the pub with fellows like those McTaggart twins when everybody knows what’s said about them not to mention young Paul Buddall…
– Maggot!
– Who’s a proper crook caught thieving I don’t know how many times. You see his kind on the news. He’ll end up in court and so will you if you don’t wake up to yourself. You’re nineteen now for God sake. Bloody good thing when that crew packed their bags. As for you you ought to be thinking of the future or you’ll turn out a no-hoper too, you’ve only got to look at your grandfather.
– Uncle!
– Don’t tell me I don’t know about my own father, shouted Mr George Swan. It’s because of him my mother went mad. Cadging drinks at the Mountain, that’s my father and I’m ashamed to say it. Not to mention the punishment in the hereafter. You’ll never have to be ashamed of me.
– If I thought I could be like Uncle I’d be laughing.
– I wouldn’t be in his shoes when it comes to facing our Maker. And I’m not being damned for bringing up my son like that. Me and your mother discussed it.
Billy stared at the wreck of the tallow tree, smelling the fragrant sap. The mountain shaped itself expectantly. He could hear Uncle talking about him a couple of miles away. He could imagine how he’d describe all this to Vivien over a meal of home-shot rabbit.
– I don’t believe you, he said quietly.
– So we’ve come to this! his father raged.
Bill faced adulthood in the clear nothing of a parent’s eyes.
– So we’ve come to this, his father repeated. You’ll spend your life in the gutter, you bloody little drunk.
Mr Swan had gone too far. Billy, fury coursing the hot young blood, the war of Jenkins’s ear, punched him a single jolting smack on the cheek. Mr Swan struck back with the joy of a man liberated from doubt. Poised on the brink of their first communication, at last they were to find pleasure in one another. Billy feared this was an intimacy he might never escape. His bunched fist white with readiness, he saw how easily he could be trapped into love and strove to check himself, stop. Clenching his jaw he mastered his temper, head shrieking with memory, breath hissing in his flared nose. Mr Swan as a matter of principle waited to be hit again so he could have his turn giving him another. But Bill had the curb on and did not crack. One look in his father’s eye and he would lose his advantage, they’d fight to a standstill because neither would give in.
So Bill flung off into the house with a few mumbled words to his mother to say he was going. Then who could imagine he meant leaving, that night, going to live with a foreign whore? Shortly before dawn he went out to his motorbike, filled the saddlebags and strapped a bundle on the pillion. His parents lay in their bed, painfully awake with starlight, the three lumps of furniture leaning against the wall, uncomfortable at a family squabble. Mr George Swan and Mrs Rose Swan his wife, a home-made quilt pulled up to their chins, eyes alert in immobile faces, holding their breath, concentrated on what their singing ears told them; guessing, tensed ready to leap out of bed and stop the boy with promises of chocolates and lullabies. The dark blood of the dead weighed them down. The motorcycle tyres crunched the gravel by degrees, powered by slow footsteps, until they rolled on to the soft dust of the track. Two thousand heartbeats later, quarter of a mile away, the machine kicked into life, revved and sang, a single knife of sound drawn continuously through the flesh, a sibilant screeching that faded into the warm bath of oblivion. The echoes in a stone ear rasped on and on. They lay, rigid
ly alert, ceremonial figures of the futile King Henry VI and his lady wife on a tomb in a forgotten decaying church. Clothed in respectability, naked in grief, embalmed in the perfume of defeat and deserved neglect. Had the cry finally gone? Was the pain past repair? The dying whine of the motorcycle tightened round their necks.
Then a voice broke the spell, shockingly near and human. Mr George Swan’s wife speaking on her own account.
– You were wrong George.
He lay deciding, his stone eyes closed against the starlight. Five minutes later the dawn crept into his hand, her five fingers meshing with his. He would certainly kill her, he said. The years grew green stems and their flowers exploded into nothing. His hand curled round hers gently. And outside, another branch of the felled tree gave under the strain as the trunk settled closer to earth.
Two
The only tallow-wood left in the district was a stunted specimen in Brinsmeads’ back garden. In the late evening its shadow stood fully printed on a blank wall of overlapping timbers. Inside, the imprisoned Fido stage-whispered miserable miserable so he’d be heard in the shop and rescued. He discovered the tallow only when testing the peephole Uncle Sebastian drilled for him. Eye to the hole, squinting and wanting it to be good, his mind filled up with dusk, the purple-stained grass, a feathering of shadows complicated and delicate, a collapsed shed, and one tree burning in dead sunlight.
– That shed, his mother explained intruding as far as the den door, is the whole idea. You’re to watch for something to happen.
He expected a helicopter landing, a squad of terrorists crawling out on their bellies dragging a millionaire tied up and held hostage for ransom.
– You’re to call and warn us, said his Uncle from the kitchen.
Fido stayed silent in his private submarine. The memory of the garden fluttering through him. Then he saw, miraculously printed on his wall opposite the peephole, a play of shadows, tones he recognized, the violet, the musk, and down near the floor the complex tree: the garden world seen upside down. The delicate mirage laid its gauze over every grain of the wood. Fido sat mesmerized inside his camera. His heart stopped so he wouldn’t spoil the photograph. When he applied his eye to the hole again to check, he unscrewed his fountain pen, he wrote in his diary:
Gold is mauve
Green is red.
He winked the peephole-eye to try it out and see if it had turned a different colour. Still the same. Once, lying on his tummy in the shop on a Sunday, he’d seen through the letterflap a boy with one eye blue and one eye brown, which made him afraid. He put the other eye to his new peephole to even things up, so if one changed they’d both change. He was a spy. People with guns tiptoeing round corners. Ha ha. Fido accused the room, even so I could blow you all up the way I hate you. And when he opened the wardrobe too, the crazy mirror cast thirty silver scales around his face. He slammed the door so the little dangling brass handle jittered. He exercised as usual, heaving the heavy cases around, touching his toes and doing some rapid push-ups, the heroic survival of his healthy body in these cramped conditions. He smoothed his pale perfect skin admiringly.
Smell those newspapers. Papers in the passage, papers in here. What you don’t know Mummy is that I’ve been reading them. Love the murders, love the weddings, how people stick the knife in when they can’t bear it any longer, and how they dress up and throw stars on one another and have their photograph taken and their mothers cry.
What if some spy the other side tried looking in through this hole? Would he see the bed? No, I’m glad. Only my train set plus the museum. Got a V.C. for sleeping on a box of dynamite. Bullets in the pillow. Ssh. Must shift that chest of drawers, if the spy fired one shot the whole place might go up when I’m not ready, can’t get a grip on it; that’s better, over here. Three doses of thirty push-ups tomorrow. My muscles are twelve inches but I don’t know if that’s good. I feel strong enough to smash through the wall with my fist. You wouldn’t be able to see the bed no matter how you worked your eye around. No, except the mountain sees. Once I asked my mother for a room that didn’t look out this way, but she was cross and said she had no patience with nonsense and the mountain was the one thing I must learn to see. As if I couldn’t see it all the time. It moves. When I looked before lunch it was like being in bed with my mother, the mountain settling herself to sleep. Sometimes I’ve seen it pink and I remembered Amsterdam and that art gallery, I said to the man in uniform Rubens is the only artist who truly makes me sick. The other day I decided to put people on the mountain but I can’t be sure if this worked. Whenever it moves too close I get scared and ask it to be the usual old thing. That mountain is out to get me.
Pictures of my father’s saints, all face to the wall, spiders sew them there and I haven’t looked for ages. The Tropics painted on their backs by me myself, where I’ll live when I escape so I can feel big butterflies on me and the sun for my museum. Who cares. Two hundred different coloured cockroaches and not enough pins for them. Impossible. Do they want to be caught? Perhaps they fall in love with the ones stuck on my board. Suitcases, awful empty drums, some of these I’ve carried on a Sunday when the foreign people are shut away in churches, cases full of things for the opera and swimming.
One day I’ll tie up my parents and run away while they’re calling for help and they’ll have the bruises I’ve given them. Then I’ll put all my dynamite together and blow up the mountain. We’ll see if it’s made of gold or not. I’m a prodigy. The policeman will come and be my friend, he’ll say they deserve it and let that be a lesson.
I’ve got to find a way under the icecap and this sub can sail for months. It has been done before, it can be done again. Brains. We’ll go down now: submerge the ship, pass me the periscope, sea’s all dark and especially that big shadow under water, that is the flagship I’ll have you know. Ay ay, sir, all ready, don’t move a finger you men till I give the order, action stations, but quiet as a mouse, no one knows we are here, they’re in for a shock, O boy are they in for a shock, we’ve got them in our sights we can’t miss, helmsman hold it like this, on course, there’s a lot of stuff to go up in this bang, I can tell you. Keep your eyes skinned.
Three
One day no one in Whitey’s Fall had heard of the new highway. The next day the whole population crowded up the hill to stop it coming any closer. Jasper Schramm locked the hundred doors of his Mountain Hotel with a hundred keys and set out to join his neighbours. Afloat on a Sargasso known only to the brotherhood of drinkers, rocked by profound depths of bitterness, the green regions writhing where octopuses made tangled love, negotiating obstacles here and there in the empty street, he pursued them carrying his own time scale with him, plus an emergency flask of scotch.
The names of the people there included the Collinses complete, some of the Langs and McTaggarts, all the Buddalls, the McAloons, a few Swans and of course the surviving Brinsmeads with the exception of Fido who did not yet officially exist, to the number of forty-one of the forty-nine residents. The matriarch of the McAloon family, Nell, at one hundred and fourteen, wife of the legendary Paddy and mother of the legendary Bertha, moved to the divan on her porch to declare herself with them in spirit, daft as she was; there she reclined wearing her quilted skin for the great occasion.
News of the highway had caused a calf at McTaggarts’ to be born with five legs during the night and now waiting to be shot. A party crammed on a dray had trembled up across the paddocks: Felicia recognizing the sight as Medusa’s head neck-deep in a green wave, bristling serpents. Men presumed dead emerged from a mineshaft high along the ridge to join the protest. These mountain folk stood in the gap newly gouged out of their mountain, their faraway eyes searching for the familiar horizon. Trees swayed either side of them and crashed into a fresh grief before huge, grinding machinery clanking massive steel plates.
Mum Collins remarked that this was the first time the whole town had turned out since that amnesty for draft evaders and deserters when the population of the district me
t the crown officers halfway, the men eager to be on the list of pardons and their women eager to see them there. Only to discover it was for the wrong war. So impressed were the officials that the amnesty was extended to cover them all. This is how it became generally acknowledged in Country Women’s Association branches throughout New South Wales that Whitey’s Fallers could handle the Queen Elizabeth’s men. These same defiant people exercised their cracked voices despite the angry warnings of bulldozer drivers, like black cockatoos in a storm with the air already thundering around them. Ponderous machinery lumbered in tight circles pushing heaps of dirt, puffing out balls of black smoke, lifting scoops of rock, and stinking of burnt oil. Then, weaving its dextrous passage among them, a blue car came gliding along the smooth foundations of the highway. The driver parked it to one side and got out.
– That’s the Honourable I AM, Uncle sneered as Senator Halloran approached. With a head too big for his Yankee hat.
– Good morning, called Felicia Brinsmead through the din, officially recognizing the visitor. Good morning Senator Neville Chamberlain. Have you brought your scrap of white paper?
The senator stopped, disconcerted.
– We have met you before, continued that lady at the top of her voice, her scabby bundle of hair nodding independently, patting her like a friend. You came here a few months ago trying to sell us paint to prettify our houses and cover the nasty symptoms of death. And now you’ve come to smash them down altogether so we hear.
– Ladies and gentlemen, yelled the senator deciding to ignore Miss Brinsmead rather than argue the point. I am pleased to have arrived in time.
– Last visit you arrived in time, Felicia screamed through the bombardment of noise, motors and crashing trees. To drive poor Mercy Ping off. The road to her death!
So then the locals paid him more markedly unfriendly attention than he might have hoped.