Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – This isn’t a bloody game, Uncle roared furiously, a murderous vengeance in him. He fired the elephant-killer, you could hear the huge bullet take to air before it smashed through the glass cab of the grader, you could hear the old man sigh – That’s what I meant to do. But you couldn’t tell if anybody had been hit. The machines gathered speed making thunderous progress out of harm’s way, the smoke from Egmont’s mortar bomb having taken wing for Canberra. Billy was shouting jubilantly (though his memory flashed up the scene of himself at Mr Whitey’s ruined house hurling a rock and the senselessly flattened face of a verdigrised clock). Beauty! he shouted.

  No one was left to shoot at, the only person in the cutting being that youth hiding against the cliff, clutching his bleeding thigh, and they didn’t know about him, nor that he had been wounded. Uncle looked grim and shaken when he faced his men, surprised to discover some of them lying stunned on the grass and Vivien busy with a cold sponge and spirits.

  – Now they know we mean business Sebbie, he growled, his anger ebbing. What have I got to lose? he asked. Bastards wouldn’t listen when they had the chance. I’m too old for peace at their price. A single tear of tiredness gathered to rest, heavy in the corner of his eye. His body a cave of ice that crazes with cracks … no warning, a sudden freezing shower of irreplaceable shards, his gut rattling loud as a crate of milkbottles… he stood upright and took the yoke of the world’s survivors on his shoulders. The barrel of the elephant gun scorched his hand. His huge ears had grown to solid flesh at the blast.

  – Get a load of this Uncle, the lookout called four times to get through. He passed the binoculars across. There’s no doubt about them ladies of ours.

  Uncle adjusted the focus and saw for himself the confrontation at Whitey’s Fall, the cars full of officialdom, their doors slammed shut; and the wives, mothers, daughters and aunts of his troops defiantly bunched together, hands on hips, elbows clashing, a conference of hats. Distant car horns could be heard. A folded sheet began flapping from the balcony of the hotel.

  – Mary says they’re holding out, Uncle reported. No worries. At that moment he felt terribly sorry for the women still carrying on, not knowing the real battle had finished. Yet he felt somehow apprehensive about his victory. The fear remained that if he took the binoculars away from his eyes he’d find he was weeping. He saw the side door of the pub swing open and a solitary figure run out into the street then stop, momentarily lost, standing alone looking down towards the barricades. Poor Felissy, he said, there’s so much we don’t know, there’s a lot we’re better not to ask. The cruel silly woman, too clever to love her own boy. Education is a terrible thing, he concluded. And travel never did nobody any good that I ever heard neether. He lowered the glasses and sure enough he was weeping.

  – Billy, he commanded. You go down and see what can be done back home. No need for that barricade now. Viv can stay here for the ones who’re shaken up. Who’s for the journey back? We won, outright. Now perhaps they’ll listen to what we say.

  The barricade was being dismantled, individual chairs restored to their domestic function. The uniforms (a policeman, two forest rangers and the Yalgoona Volunteer Fire Brigade) were sweating downhill into Whitey’s Fall in single file, bearing stretchers on which lay the stunned and exhausted old men brought back from the battlefield, released from Vivien Lang’s amateur care. The ladies clucked and crooned over their victorious menfolk. Senator Halloran, exuding cleanliness like a poison gas, confronted two ancient smelly wrecks barely recognizable as Sebastian Brinsmead and Uncle Arthur Swan. His hands squelched together disapprovingly as he complained to them that, had they only curbed their tempers and waited for his arrival, he could have spared them the trouble of turning criminal.

  – And what about the moral question? the senator challenged them passionately. Terrorizing the innocent?

  – All questions of morality finally mean only one thing, Sebastian informed the wind. War.

  Frank Halloran grimaced dismissively. He opened his briefcase.

  – I’ve brought a letter I’d like you to read. It’s from the Minister himself, as you’ll see, authorizing me to appoint members of your own community to sit on a committee. The committee to be set up immediately will discuss the entire regional scheme, the highway, the facilities, finance, services, everything; and you’ll have your chance to put your view in a lawful and peaceful manner, he gave his verdict on their guilt and added with satisfaction, nothing could be fairer than that I’m sure you’ll agree.

  So now the proposals were passing between them: representatives of Whitey’s Fall to include the ‘two community spokesmen Mr Sebastian Brinsmead and Mr George Swan’ and three others to be appointed; also one representative each from the Australian Historical and Aesthetic Resources Commission, the Department of Main Roads, the Ministry of Tourism, the Department of Justice, and the House Committee on Land Titles; this meeting to be chaired by an independent and disinterested citizen, to be a retired magistrate whom the Chief Magistrate’s office would name in due course.

  – Oh I blame myself, the senator muttered recalling the day he lost his dog and went back to Vivien Lang’s house dripping wet, in time to surprise the Swan boy crowing I’ve got the gelig nite and I’m going to blow it up. The police should have been called then and there.

  The two-way radio now began gabbling its travesty of Hugh Milliner’s voice and one of the rangers was droning back various calming sentiments, plus assurances that law and order had already been restored and medical attention was on its way to treat his wounded workman. This was the sort of anticlimax nobody expected, the uniforms wandering round on their weekend off as if they weren’t spattered with congealed egg. Senator Halloran taking charge spoke as the leader who’d won the battle. Foreman Milliner’s voice on the radio assessed the damage at two days’ extra clearing work for the machines.

  – What does it mean? whispered Mrs Collins as if finding her house locked.

  The terrible exhaustion of attempting murder now shown to have been futile, Uncle gazed back at the mountain, back where he’d come from. He offered no answer. He’d become a boy inside an old walnut shell.

  Eight

  Fido lay waxen in his coffin while his wax mother hunched over an open book. She might always have been there, not daring to move, her pendulous body ready to fall apart into fatty pieces, the fusing flame of an ordeal too recently survived, her soft grieving forms held together only by her dress. Though in fact she went outside once; hearing shouts and feeling the ground tremble at the impact of an explosion, a gasp of dread filling her body which was found to be a nest of bats whistling and whirling madly with the shock of a boy thrown into the garden again, his side blown away. So, leaving him dead as he was, Felicia ran out into nothing. An empty street where her painful heartbeat suffocated in solid air. She saw, uncomprehendingly, the road blocked off with chairs, ladies shouting so you couldn’t recognize their voices for the words, and cars full of men facing them, facing her. She stood alone reliving yesterday’s horror, unaware of the tidal dust tearing a door open and slamming it flat back against a wall, nor hearing the regular moans of a loose sheet of roofing metal, nor appreciating the supple television antennae bowing to the blast as resilient as saplings. Lost boys’ faces and voices played in the street, but her own son was never among them. She must not be distracted. To protect her grief she strutted back inside the lopsided Mountain, intent on keeping her balance and reaching God for Fido’s sake. Once safely through the door with its frosted glass PARLOUR and settled in her chair beside the last angel, she took up his diary and turned the page. Presently her veins began to set. Words swam in a glassy frame of tears, only her lips retained the power of life, trembling so violently her whole mouth became helpless to express anything.

  I’ve been spying into the shop like I do and whispering how miserable I am so somebody might hear and come to my rescue. Today I began specially saying the date because it’s against my mother’s rules and regu
lations and it is my birthday. I have been getting excited and at last it is here but nobody says anything. If you’re wondering what I’ve got to cry about, it’s because I’m waiting for my mother and my uncle to say Happy Birthday Fido. I’m twelve and I might as well be nothing. No one remembered how old I am but me. I’m so …

  Felicia habitually told those who asked her, of course I can tell what’s about to happen, it has all happened so many lives before, but this had not and took her wholly by surprise. Oh yes, there were premonitions, the character not yet fully armed against hurt. She tried to protect poor Fido, pretending the year was not yet a year. Felicia turned the pages.

  MOST SECRET. Maybe I have got enough dynamite to blow up the mountain so I’ll never see it watching me again. Signed Fido.

  Another time she might have laughed. But now it simply made no sense. She shut the diary as any mother would, seeing the irony of the dead youth among the aged, accepted by them. Alive, Fido would be a scandal, yes she knew. The cruelty of man is unchanging. As Felicia put down the diary she recalled noticing somebody else out there in the street, standing apart from the barricade; Rupie Ping in his doorway, Rupie who had never been to school and grew to marry a schoolteacher, ah she knew his history, how he’d been brought from China at nine to perform in Melbourne and Ballarat where, suddenly possessed by a vision, he had begun walking away from the perfectibility of movement, out of his appointed place in life, exchanging the stylized order of art for a chaos of pedestrian experience, and for ten years walking till he discovered Whitey’s Fall in the heartland of the barbarians. Rupie was a man of the world by the time he reached Fido’s age. Who could imagine Fido making his way up to Wit’s End, let alone across the State? I’m so unhappy, he had written. She gazed at the boy’s face for longer than she’d dared when he was alive and awake; she gazed struggling to imagine how his mouth might have spoken these words, how his pale hand held the pen to write them. What if, like Rupert Ping, he had simply walked away from her? The treacherous thought presented itself that at least this could never happen now. But her grief flowered, too intense to be affected by whimsies. She realized his hands ought to be crossed on his chest for the reason that this is how dead bodies are always arranged in their coffins.

  Felicia took hold of the lifeless hands and pulled them so they’d meet, the resistance of the flesh more dreadful than anything she had known. Once, nailing rubber strips from car tyres across the bed base when the springs rusted through, with Sebastian gravely hammering at the other end, the rubber wobbled heavy against her will, exactly as these young arms wobbled now. They would not stay, but slithered with ugly persistence across his belly. Couldn’t he see she had suffered all she was able to bear? Defying her still. Morning glinted on his tentative moustache, hints of what was to come. The fine gold hairs, barely visible in direct light, unnaturally prominent in these slanting rays of stale beer. She saw him as a young man. Who knows what it cost her, but she faced the vision, the recognition of lost hopes. Had he ever seen himself like that? Had he felt the stirrings of manhood in him? She resented the thought. Fido as a man would not be her Fido. And how had his little sex thing grown? She thought of him as a small boy: all these betrayals. It was so long since they’d been free with one another. She had never, of course, wanted him to be born, her pregnancy an extravagance of fears: mongoloid, malformed, idiot, siamese twin. She remembered undressing her mistress who married the unfortunate King George III and how a servant opened the curtains on the far side of the bed and she had glimpsed his majesty naked, his white chest shapeless as a boy’s, his soft hibernating arms, rebellious hairs disfiguring him in ugly clumps. No, her Fido would have grown like his father, a splendid figure of a man. But she had been tempted to throw the baby out of a train window because she was sixty-one and grotesquely mocked by her fertility. Once she found a Russian widow willing to adopt him but, with all the papers signed, she snatched him back and abused the poor woman for a kidnapper. Twelve years this boy had ruled her life. Everything she did had to accommodate the secret. She fretted for him and his imprisonment yet she always came back to Whitey’s Fall, she always brought him home with relief and shut him in, as once she would have liked to shut Sebastian in when she feared he was casting eyes, especially on a certain farmer’s wife in Quebec Province. She feared the farmer’s wife as she’d never feared any woman before, not even the young repetiteuse of the Paris Opera whose legs he’d so salaciously lusted after in 1952. He wrote the farmer’s wife a poem if you please, which Felicia found and committed to memory

  A pure white stitch in the tapestry

  Your soul the highlight of God’s own eye

  Let nations burn themselves in rose

  Green and gold – without your thread

  My dear their histories decompose.

  Yet now she respected Sebastian for it. With the death of Fido she knew what it meant. Fido’s pure thread might indeed stand out in the universal design. And the decomposition of histories was precisely what she felt in herself. Fido’s dead body leeching her of power. She would not be herself again.

  At this moment she knew.

  She had stopped falling. Felicia Brinsmead, the child’s mother and aunt, old enough to be his grandmother, his great-grandmother even. She observed her own arms with surprise, the puffy flesh; her legs so sturdy; the homely largeness of her breasts. The person she recognized was a mother, a countrywoman and a mother. Already she couldn’t quite recall what she’d been suffering. Fidelis, she said, the name coming to life at last. She reminded herself of the way he dipped his buttery knife in the honey, how he longed to practise his whistling out loud, how he bared his lower teeth when angry, how he ducked his head to meet the fork while eating rather than trouble to lift his forearm from the table, how he drummed his fingers to the point of maddening her, how he smashed her Spode teaset one piece per week with innocent churlishness, how wildly he kissed her as if possessing this flesh at least. She made another attempt to arrange his hands decorously. Your wicked father! she wailed. Oh she had no illusions. God help those who had. There’s no doubt she wanted Fido to be normal, Fido who’d given her almost what she craved. And with his flowing blond hair in a curious way he looked wholly in keeping with his glamorous generation out there in the world where he never went. Miss Brinsmead looked up; somebody watching. And yes, in the doorway stood her own cat, hypnotizing her, reducing her to a calculated slit in his eye. Rastus was here to demand loyalty. He advanced as only cats can, seeming not to have noticed the floor. And before she could stop him he launched himself into the air, landing softly, with an elegant switch of his tail, on the rim of the coffin. Faintly perfumed with eucalyptus, fresh from his bed of sweets, he stepped down on to Fido’s feet. The cat advanced one plush exploratory step at a time, whiskers humming with surprises. He showed no sign of recognizing Fido. He advanced towards Felicia, treading lightly, unfeelingly on the dead boy. With one forepaw on the mouth, one on the eyebrow, he stopped to count to ten for the benefit of who might be watching. Miss Brinsmead woke up. She screeched and swept the cat off, sending him flying out over the side of the coffin to where he twisted mid-air as an acrobat and landed on his feet none the worse for a chance to show his skill, leaving behind a tiny bloodless scratch among the hairs on the corpse’s upper lip. Rastus wafted up on the windowsill; he was a framed model of a cat, putting on his sphinx eyes and square jowls, he was gone, the heavy curtains swung mustily in the open frame. Miss Brinsmead gasping for breath now noticed a picture beside the window, a print of an old painting, and beside the print a notice MEN CAN ONLY USE THE PARLOUR IN THE COMPANY OF LADIES. This did surprise her. And it had hung there so long unread.

  She looked at the print too. She went right up to it and noted the caption Birth of the Virgin S.Maria Novella at Florence. Then she granted her eyes respite from watching her dead son, permitted them to take her right into the illusion of the painting, that cool ornate chamber, in among the women with their expressions of self-ass
ured innocence, the pouring of water into a cold brass pot, the laced bosoms and coiffed heads, the propriety and seemliness of standing round not looking at the miraculous baby, except for her seated mother. Yes, among those solemn figures (the young ones conscious of their beauty, the old ones of their wisdom), the mother and her child quietly laughed into each other’s eyes. Observing them like that and knowing they were destined to be the grandmother and the mother of Jesus, Miss Brinsmead’s sadness was infinite.

  When the neighbours came they knocked at the hotel door, filed in and stood about not looking at the corpse yet paying their respects. Only Felicia looked at him and would not raise her eyes. The parlour filled with summer perfumes. Just about everybody attended, the old and the very old, Swans, Buddalls, McAloons, McTaggarts, Langs, and Collinses. Also those without issue: the Schramms. Then the town elder, Mr Ian McTaggart, shaky from the early morning battle, made his way in. His weary eyes looked up at the curtain rail, seeing perhaps the vision of a garden of circles, of endless bounty. Though a man of few words, it was his privilege and duty to speak for them all.

  – This is the last child of Whitey’s Fall, he said. This youngster we never knew. We want to give you a good send-off, fellow, because we’re old, he said empty of pride. And it makes us sad in our hearts to see you like this.

  Sebastian let out a sob as terrible as his anger had been the day before. That one sob filled the room with all it meant. Mum Collins felt for Sebastian’s hand, realizing the strangeness of the occasion, that she had never touched him before, not since he had become a man.

  – We would like to have known you, Mr McTaggart went on severely, addressing the corpse on behalf of them all. I spoke at your grandfather’s burying, poor man who hung himself.