Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  Now this here’s where some steps end, they go out to a lookout, I expect they’d still be there cut in the slope, Jacob’s Ladder we used to call it though I’m sure I don’t recall why we should of. Wasn’t there anything at Whitey’s Fall when you first went? Nothing. Some of us here can remember it, the beginnings when the real town was London and Whitey’s was a harebrain idea called Main Ridge, gold was mined at Main Ridge and up the way at New Reef too, but nobody hardly living at the place except in a few tents, then Walter Schramm got the idea of taking the beer to the diggers instead of expecting them to come here to London for it, and that was the makings of Whitey’s, a town founded around a pub, a real Australian story, afterwards came the churches and houses and the School of Arts, it was the death of London, our shacks left to fall down as they pleased. Oh yes, there’s them among us as remember pretty much all of it though we’d a been real youngsters back that far. Yes, like the days of big family conferences with grandpa and old Pop, Auntie, Mum and Dad and us all sitting out on the verandah if you can picture it, dropping a word in here or there, and silence around us and us considering what was said and deciding. But we’ve grown apart as people’s been getting fewer. Had to happen. Nothing to decide.

  The more they talk the more they look forward to arriving in the London they knew, yes they knew the way it rested on the north-easterly slope of their mountain, knew it in autumn sleet when the panorama fined down to an engraved sheet of metal and the tired earth gave out erotic perfumes of decay, knew it wreathed in the pink and golden gumtips of spring, knew it on summer evenings when you moved among the luxuries of conversation from opposite sides of the street.

  The umbrella droops and flops along, more evidently useless and hateful by the minute. Vivien thinks of the real London, that’s how she thinks of it too: the real London. Luckily she isn’t given room to speak till she has had time to reflect; they are talking about a place where everything mattered down to the most fleeting association, first occasions, the magical art of naming things, finding the risks, the tricks, the natural forces, the foreign spirit of the place to be placated, and absorbing all this into their own survival. Now she comes to reflect on it, who would care about her reminiscences of the Underground, Bisto advertisements and Guinness is Good for You, the houses of parliament or the black Daily Express, what would a bobby matter or Lyons Corner House or cold pork pies, or the lunch hour crowd in Green Park? None of these things means anything because she has not helped create them, she has known them only as a tourist might. The Real London, a place where everything has a fixed name, is simply another blockage in her mind she must clear away. They’d listen politely, but perhaps they wouldn’t tell her any more of their history. Did anyone ever jump off the lookout, she asks instead. My word they did, one old lady pipes up, two of the blighters together, young scamps defying their families, but that was right back at the beginning and they weren’t people you’d know, they eloped up here to the goldfield where they thought they’d be safe, but a week hadn’t passed before her father come from Sydney with a shotgun and they lit out along to Jacob’s Ladder and off of the cliff, just like that, Lovers’ Leap we called it for a year or two, then it got to be known as the Lookout again because that seemed more local if you see what I mean. Them bastards back there, says Uncle turning round to curse Gomorrah, they’d pull down Westminster Abbey to find the Holy Ghost.

  Three

  CB radios all over the country are jammed with the news; the army gives an impressive display of mobility moving into sleepy Yalgoona to control the flood of prospectors three minutes and forty-five seconds before an unaccountable thunder rises from the earth announcing the mass migration of semi-trailers from all round the nation, driven by night to converge on the mountain, laden with merchandise destined for looting or decay in the roadblocks. Fortunes have already been made; in the first hours of the morning lives are being dedicated to the protection of instant wealth, people joyfully loading their rifles and mounting guard over their nuggets. Imaginative diggers exploring an old water-supply tunnel at the foot of the mountain chip at the rock and discover a wall of solid gold. Japanese magnates in private jets bringing the new Imperial order wait with unflinching patience for their first sight of the colony. Meanwhile the bluff of paper-money is being called, currencies throughout the world, hard and soft alike, slip down the bank exchange ladder. Gold has a heyday. Government accountants in Washington and Brussels predict the ruin of the free world. The Prime Minister of Great Britain in private session with the reigning monarch deliberates on the possible benefits to civilization of dropping a nuclear bomb on Whitey’s Fall. The Chinese ambassador to Canberra calls on the Minister for Foreign Affairs to offer protection against military aggression. Private editions of Das Kapital go on sale by the million in sex shops and butchers. Torres Strait Islanders aboard a navy of canoes invade the continent from the north. Two journalists have already sketched the chapter headings of their instant history The Mountain of Gold: socio-economic stalemate and the ostentatious cheque for advance royalties is this moment being signed by the manager of a publishing firm more used to quibbling over single dollars with down-at-heel novelists. Television cameramen claim the usual exemption from common courtesy, clambering upon car tops and elbowing the injured aside for actuality shots of the new rich weeping over their trophies. The old prospectors who have dedicated a lifetime to the art of subsistence and their faith that the mountain will support them are already fleeing along the London track with their relations. Eggie Schramm has stacked the entire bottled supplies of the hotel, plus a few kegs, on to a resurrected dray which some indignant heifers are pulling in an amateur fashion. The only other dray that didn’t fall to pieces at the suggestion of being lugged out of the undergrowth trundles along under the weight of the bizarre stock of Brinsmeads’ store.

  As Uncle watches this drayload shudder past and chuckles at the corsets on top lolling in straitlaced orgy, he is stopped by a nasty thought. A missing person. He leans on his walkingsticks to puzzle it out. Now who? Who has been left behind that the corsets remind him of?

  – There’s somebody isn’t with us, he calls and Angela Collins cracks her whip so her smart milkcart bowls past with a flutter of glossy spokes.

  – Have you forgotten Bertha then? her voice drifts back to him with mocking cheerfulness.

  How could he forget Miss Bertha McAloon, his own wife during those miserable years?

  – I wouldn’t do this to Bertha, he cries out in distress. She belongs, the old bitch. He hobbles over to the remaining vehicles as fast as his walkingsticks and dead legs will allow. Is there anybody can go back for Bertha? he asks.

  But Bertha has her own resources. She hasn’t been floating in that dam all these years without learning something useful for an occasion. The moment she hears she is wanted she sets out from her barn with its knitted rooms and the knitted world of the mountain in knitted windows. She says goodbye and good riddance to her art and half a lonely life of subservience to an ideal. She lies down on her back and floats. Yes, through the liquid air, her mauve dress no longer angry, fluttering excitedly, lifting to the breeze and filling out to a kite. Using the Bertha McAloon style, that unique backstroke tending towards a sidestroke, she ferries herself around the obstacle of trees, up and over Peter Buddall’s farmhouse and away across the valley. She doesn’t care a fig for the world, not on your life. She’s Amy Johnson come back from the dead, she’s the feminist answer to St Thomas Didymus and D. D. Home, oh glory, she’s the missing link and Cecil B. de Mille is handing her a part, wouldn’t you know, for a million dollars to go on being herself. She swoops across the cemetery with its six new graves, cheekily saluting the entire Brinsmead family under fresh earth and not before time. Serve you right, Rubberlips Brinso. Who’s laughing now? And the brat a spitting likeness of the Pope! Here’s a kiss for you Bessie, though why you deserve it I’m sure I don’t know, but you made a bonzer cup of tea I’ll grant you that. And Jasper, you’ll be pre
served like the Pharoah in your own pickle long after the rest of us is worm-droppings I reckon. As for Georgie Porgie I used up my tears long ago, son. If you’d been a dracula I would have rather that. You never gave me my revenge when I needed it more than breath. At least I’m saved from poisoning you. We should be thankful for small mercies. She floats in the clayey air while an astonished helicopter splutters down to get a closer look at her. Here you are you dirty perv, she screams, lifting her skirt and flashing them a glimpse of what all men are after, gratified by the sudden elevation of the machine, she waves when she can spare a hand from ferrying herself along. Up over the McTaggart fences she goes gliding so close to the soil she could touch the grass of the old showground. And here is the rabble of her kin belting the daylights out of their sluggish cattle, plus Uncle what’s more shading his eyes to stare at her as she swoops upward. Mind your business Arthur, she calls gleefully as she circles him, or I’ll piss in your eye for sure. So you want me back do you? You think I’ll come running? Well I shall let you know me terms when it suits meself. And off she floats, triumphant, mocking the clumsy horse carts, spearing through puffballs of steam from the Queensland plough, blowing a raspberry at that sneakthief Billy, pursing her lips on observing the wowser Mercy Ping back again after not long enough away, and arriving well ahead of them all at the halfway clearing where they’d be taking a break. She floats down steering herself for a soft landing, not sure how to do this without snapping a leg or a rib. She chooses the softest looking place and flops into a luxuriant cushion of stinging nettles. Jesus Christ! she swears in fury. This is no bloody joke! O god it’s killing me. She scrambles out adding another grudge to her personal Domesday Book. However, she saved her back a nasty gravelrash and she has recovered her composure when, some hours later, her grandson eases the Bedford carefully over grassy mounds to park in position ready to lead the way again. Mrs Ping is nowhere to be seen. The other vehicles nose up over the crest and roll down on the flat to stand round shimmering with heat, mirages of themselves, the horse carts solid among them with the horses cropping. Miss Bertha McAloon, waiting to claim her ex-husband and give him hell, assumes command and marches among them with her stick-arms gesticulating, making an art of spreading the rugs, an art of placing the fire and hanging billycans over it. She’s got it in her blood.

  – How’s it going grandma, Billy sings knowing that she’ll hate this.

  – I’ll sort you out too! she promises. See if I don’t.

  Mr Ian McTaggart stands on the runningboard of the Bedford to make an announcement while Billy sounds the horn for attention.

  – We made it this far, says the trembly old man. But there’s them walkers still coming behind. We got to take account a them. You’ve had your turn as a passenger, so anybody here who’s under ninety-five can have a try at walking when you’ve had your cup of tea and a bite. Yous can set off when you’re ready and that’ll leave seats for the worst cases of them behind to ride the rest of the way.

  He is helped down, flushed with embarrassment at having to speak so long. Miss McAloon sniffs at the very idea of orders as she casts a handful of tea into the first boiling billy and hears the leaves hiss among frantic bubbles. Then the next and the next.

  – Ready, she orders (like most artists unaware of her own sins). Take them off the heat and tap the sides to sink the leaves.

  – I’m all shook up, complains her sister-in-law Olive. After being in that rattletrap steam thing of Wally’s.

  – Whose fault is that, Bertha snaps virtuously. All smothered in scarves fit to suffocate!

  – Dust gives me hayfever, but.

  – Hayfever on the knee! Imaginitis is what you’re suffering from Olive. You won’t get sympathy out of me, that’s for sure. Even so she remembers her own hayfever when she first hung up a hundred naphthalene rings to protect her knitted rooms from moth. One thing leads to another. She also remembers this morning: the race against time, dawn already threatening and the job to be finished before she could leave, balanced on a kitchen chair with her big sewing scissors snipping the threads, the pungent white discs clicking and rolling about the floor, then herself sweeping them outside in the dirt, every sherrick of naphthalene cleared out and clothes moths flocking in for the long-awaited banquet. What do they know about suffering, the Olives of this world, emptyheaded geese? Steaming cups pass round hand to hand, some so shaky the tea spills staining the china. They are used to each other, so they sit quiet, mainly thinking their own thoughts.

  (Blades clashing to spark fire, the entire village ablaze, the coat of gold plate sliced apart, the stench of burning fat and split entrails, victims screaming death in the face, houses throwing up flames that can be seen by hiding peasants miles away. The looters dragging heavy treasures through the brilliant flickering shadows. Dead men yell challenges to the marauders who make off for their next victory, while one life-slave of the household, left standing, ignored as a worthless lump of furniture, gazes out at the sacred indifferent river for a sign, witness to the murder of children who could one day grow into avengers.) Mr McTaggart stands, old (useless rag of a man hot with the insult but aware he must not move, that no one suspects his head is his master’s treasury rich with stories, the knowledge of survival and law. Smoke hanging in his hair, his skull packed with a catalogue of peril, an encyclopedia of disillusion. They have gone. He moves, sandals crackling through the shards of broken gods, cherishing in him the most precious instrument: humour, to be warmed back to life at another time. He has been trained in the trade of inscribing characters, so using the stones of the fallen house he carves the first symbols. Patiently he begins the rest of his life, recording what he knows, not for rewards or freedom, nor even for posterity, no one can now read the language he learnt from his masters. He records it as an offering of thanks for what he has known, sensing only some remote scholar touching the chipped stone, reverently poring over his script decyphering for the first time in three thousand years the name of the conquerors in a chronicle that opens with a witty tribute to divine justice, a servant singing with the voice of masters) shakes his head to get the memory clear, Mr McTaggart has nodded off, dropping his cup and saucer. He takes a good clean lungful of smoke from the fire and roams through the memory of his orderly maze, his garden, his celestial model. There will have to be a new garden at London, the circles marked out all over again, and plants fetched over from the old when he has the ground prepared.

  – Remember them two jumping off a Lovers’ Leap, one sentimentalist mumbles through a pat of biscuit crumbs. Well I was the kid who found them. It’s not far, the drop from up there, you know.

  – Far enough, Miss McAloon observes. To get themselves killed.

  Flies cluster to kiss the wet lip-marks on cups.

  – We once had a migration, drones a voice. Across a big wide valley it was. Though I don’t know where, don’t ask me. We sat down to eat some striped kind of meat.

  They believe. Vague recollections stirring among actual memories.

  – Yes, a valley, says one cautiously.

  – There was thousands of us that time, the voice adds more positively. We sat down like this only there was thousands of us.

  Ants now join the invasion of flies, big amber ants and midget black ones, tearing along in lines, their two-way traffic communicating from time to time.

  – I wonder how the gold diggers are going, says Billy watching the ants.

  – The diggers, Ian McTaggart relays the remark to his deaf wife.

  – They’ll have begun the killing, Violet yaps back from the cab of the Bedford where she’s munching lettuce. There’ll be murders common as breakfast from now on.

  – Whitey’s is dead, her husband agrees. Leaving my garden.

  – But nobody’s going to get us, Bertha McAloon declares. All they’ll get is a heap of moth-eaten wool.

  – Good on you grandma, Bill laughs at her admiringly so that she grumbles:

  – Just you get my Irish up and I’
ll sort you out too, now that I’ve got to live where I can smell you. And she strokes her moustache.

  – Is there any back-ups with the tea Bertha?

  – How should I know? Ask them who dished it out. Nothing to do with me.

  – Keep the fire going for the next lot Wally.

  – They’ll be in a proper sweat.

  – Hope the christ it don’t rain tonight.

  – It’d be the first shower you’ve had since churchgoing went out if it does!

  The laughter evokes a babble of concerned birdcries from the mountain. And the first volunteers for the new band of walkers begin stretching and straightening themselves, refreshed, businesslike, and heading for the track, testing their thighs and pumping their lungs, picking up their feet for the championship.