by Robert Drewe
She paused. ‘And if you ignore it, what happens is that the iron will build up in your liver, heart, joints, pancreas and sex organs and eventually kill you.’
Glaring at her, Hugh stepped forward, but Thea held her ground, swivelled away, and retained the microphone. Everyone was frowning at this unwelcome messenger. The bossy schoolmarmishness of her!
‘I call it the H-bomb,’ she continued. ‘You can detect the more serious cases of haemochromatosis in the appearance of your skin. It might turn orange or ruddy from cirrhosis. It’s more noticeable in men, of course, because until menopause women rid themselves of iron during their periods. But being pale, thin and female like me doesn’t mean you haven’t got it.’
Determinedly she pushed on. ‘You have to ask yourself the important question: what are my chances?’ What’s the likelihood? Considerable in our case.’
The murmuring grew louder. She’d better lighten up. She tried a smile. ‘As my favourite childhood author Georgette Heyer’s characters used to ask, “Lies the wind in that quarter?”’
What? Bemused faces frowned up at her.
‘You remember Georgette Heyer’s historical romances? “Lies the wind in that quarter?’ mentally ejaculated Captain Carstairs.” They don’t write sentences like that any more.’
Is she trying to be funny? What did she just say? Something disgusting? Georgette who? Captain what? Is she completely nuts?
Thea gave a self-conscious laugh and lectured on. ‘Genes rule us, of course. So I urge everyone to have a blood test. Your kids, too. The thing is, haemochromatosis is easily treatable, without taking any drugs. You just flush it out. Depending on the amount of iron in your system, you only have to give blood regularly, just like donating blood to the Red Cross. I have a venesection every three months and, touch wood, everything’s hunky-dory.’
The muttering grew louder and some younger women hugged their babies tightly to them. Ruddy men, and there were plenty of them after a day in the sun drinking wine and beer, and with numerous redheads among them in any case, turned ruddier with embarrassment, especially when mischievous relatives began nudging them.
From deep in the crowd a female voice, indignant and elderly, cried out, ‘Too much information, Thea!’
‘Yes!’ called another older woman. ‘Bad form!’
‘Very unpleasant,’ another voice said.
The first voice continued: ‘Menopause, periods, sex talk and frightening suggestions at a family gathering! The H-bomb! Goodness, there are children present!’
‘It’s your children’s future health I’m thinking about! May I remind everyone I’m a doctor.’ And the family firebrand grimly passed back the microphone.
As if they needed reminding. People were shivering and muttering as the breeze strengthened. Picking up on the crowd’s mood, Hugh sighed theatrically. ‘Thank you, big sister, for sharing your medical ailments and favourite authors with us. Everyone please heed Thea’s valuable advice and race off to the doctor before your innards rust and you turn orange.’
He waited for the supportive laughter, which trickled in. ‘And don’t forget wife number three, despite the fact that from all accounts she was an old boiler when she married into the family, had no children, and so has no blood link to us whatsoever.’
He paused. ‘Luckily for her iron levels, as it turns out.’
A few more laughs accommodated the barrister as he resumed his speech. ‘What we all do have in common is our great, or great-great, or great-great-great grandfather, Conor Cleary, the distinguished veteran of the Eureka Stockade. Whose genes. . .’ Here Hugh paused and dropped his voice to the sombre timbre that he enjoyed deploying in court, ‘. . .are responsible for our very existence.’
He waited for this to sink in. ‘And, I might say, whose courageous example has been followed by Cleary descendants fighting in two world wars, in Vietnam and Afghanistan, where our own Father Ryan has recently served. We’ve also always been immensely proud of Conor’s son Frank, my great-great-uncle, who died at the Somme.’ He did the serious voice again. ‘Major Francis Cleary who was awarded the Military Cross.’
Checkmate Thea, Hugh thought. Grandstanding as always and throwing a damper over the whole bloody weekend.
Raising his chin manfully, he added, ‘Military service has always been part of the Cleary family’s make-up. How could it be otherwise with an ancestor like Conor Cleary leading the way. Conor Cleary, who became Officer in Charge of Victoria Barracks, the Australian military headquarters back in colonial days.’
He hadn’t intended to go this far. He’d overstated the evidence, and he hardly ever exaggerated in court. No hyperbole except in extremis. But Thea and four or five wines had driven him to strive for significance.
‘While some of Conor’s descendants might have erred in choosing a different path, like the law. . .’’ He gave a wry but modest grin.
‘This military record, I’m proud to say, is continued in these uncertain times by Christine’s and my son Liam. As well as being appointed a prefect, Liam has recently attained the rank of underofficer in the Scotch College Cadet Corps.’
There was no audience reaction. Then several old ladies clapped and someone, perhaps facetiously, murmured, ‘Well done.’ Down by the creek, crows groaned and grated back and forth. Children were beginning to strain impatiently away from their mothers’ legs towards the bouncy playground. A couple of dogs yelped optimistically and surged towards them.
Hugh paused awkwardly. Suddenly fatigue, alcohol and the snatched-away silk made him go for broke. ‘Perhaps it’s not sufficiently appreciated what service our family has given this country,’ he said. Fuck the Bar selection committee. ‘Service and sacrifice.’
He looked out on a sea of blank faces, noncommittal jurors’ expressions, impossible to read, but which in the case of a handful of older adults, unquestionably including Thea, were thinking, Service? Sacrifice? Give me a break! Is he drunk?
‘I’m grateful for my Jesuit education – what Melbourne barrister wouldn’t be? But as you know, when Xavier dropped its cadet corps we had little alternative for Liam’s education.’
What? Was this mawkish nonsense intended as a sop to the Catholics massed in front of him? To his father and sister and a handful of Melbourne relatives with long memories and fewer dollars than Hugh and Christine, it was especially jarring.
Mick and Thea knew that Liam had ended up at Scotch for the same reason that Hugh Cleary and Christine Campbell had been married in Scots’ Church. And that after the wedding Hugh’s Catholicism had well and truly lapsed. Part of the deal with Christine’s father.
Thea was snorting indignantly now, and Mick looked uncomfortable. Murky memories surfaced. As good as Hugh’s professional fees were (though only a fraction of what he’d command with the elusive letters QC after his name), they knew Whipbird, for example, owed its existence less to his barrister’s income than to public-toilet fixtures.
Hand dryers, particularly. Mick knew all about these bloody things. The Campbell Titan TouchDRY, the Campbell VICtory Acclaim, the Campbell SUNray High Speed, the Campbell Zephyr HOT-Air, the Campbell TRIumph Autospeed, the Campbell Hi-VELocity and the most recent model, the Campbell Tri-Temp AirJET.
As it happened, Mick had always had a thing against both Gavin Campbell and hand dryers. He’d disliked Gavin’s patronising arrogance from their very first meeting, lunch at Gavin’s club, the Athenaeum, to discuss Hugh’s and Christine’s wedding. And he hated all hand dryers, not just Campbell models. Quite simply, they didn’t do a good drying job. How many times had he ended up wiping his hands on his pants or his tie, or tried to shake them dry? Not a good toilet outcome, in his opinion.
By no means a fresh gripe. Back at Yarraville he’d argued against head office’s intention to switch from paper towels in all its branches. Maybe it was just coincidental that the plan surfaced shortly after his lunch meeting with Gavin Campbell. The bank had swallowed the Campbell company’s claims that hand dryers c
ut costs by 90 per cent. Less maintenance. No waste collection. No towel replacements. More hygienic. Better for the environment, et cetera, et cetera.
But he didn’t want Gavin Campbell to profit by a single cent from the State Savings Bank’s Yarraville branch’s Ladies and Gents. As he warned head office, ‘Because hand dryers represent a large initial investment, our Facility Management Department must undertake a careful cost analysis to determine whether they’re cost effective.’
The added electricity cost must be considered, he stressed. ‘The only way to accurately compare paper-towel and hand-dryer costs is to work out the energy consumption and divide it by the number of hand-dryings the individual hand dryer is capable of performing back-to-back in one hour. This will give the energy consumption per hand-dry.’ Management showed no inclination to make Mick’s test.
At the same time he was still simmering at Gavin Campbell’s Athenaeum Club remarks about the upcoming wedding: ‘Of course I’ll be paying for everything, Michael. Honeymoon and all, whatever the kids want. I’ll let you off the hook. But let’s keep Rome out of it, eh? No smoke and bells and fancy dress. No simpering virgins with downcast looks. No offence to you RCs but I’m a stickler for religious dignity.’
On the hand-dryer question, Mick persevered with management on a basic, personal level. ‘It’s my experience that if a potential customer comes into the branch just after you’ve been to the toilet, you’re forced to shake his hand with your moist, just-washed and inefficiently dried palm. It gives a very bad business impression for a branch manager to have a handshake like a wet herring.’
Clammy herring fingers or not, management went with the claimed 90 per cent savings and installed Campbell hand dryers. To Mick’s disgust so did the rest of the nation’s offices, public buildings, hotels and cinemas.
It was clear that Australia’s public toilets had enabled the purchase of Whipbird. After Gavin Campbell’s fourth heart operation he’d offloaded 51 per cent of Campbell Industries to Bio-International Engineers (UK), and then died four months later. As his only child, Christine had inherited the bulk of her father’s hand-dryer fortune and a directorship. His earlier conditions (or as he’d put it, preferences) – a Presbyterian wedding ceremony and Presbyterian private-school education for the children of the marriage – had prevailed into his will and her inheritance. Catholicism had to be kept at bay, indefinitely.
Christine had blithely gone along with that. ‘What’s the big deal?’ she’d asked fiancé Hugh back then, in the old openly affectionate days. ‘You only go to church at Easter and Christmas. You’re not much of a Roman Catholic.’
‘Australian Catholic,’ he corrected her. And not just Easter and Christmas. He never missed the Mass for the opening of the legal year.
Now a gust of wind blew up from the creek and dislodged his hair. Hugh lifted Prince Charles from his ear and brought his address to a close. ‘Thank you, everyone. A warm welcome again to Whipbird. Now let’s enjoy ourselves.’
From the crowd’s midst, as people dispersed and shuffled back to the alcohol, came a drawn-out and sardonic version of the call of the Gosse’s Mottled Whipbird.
15
I never liked wine. More a whiskey man. And I enjoyed a cold beer on a hot day. I’m standing here beside the dais and everyone can see me, and try their best to avoid me. As people return to their drinks and chatter they avert their eyes from raggedy, crazy Sly. The family mental case.
Yes, I’m him. He’s me. Head peering out from his homeless man’s overcoat like a ghost in a tent. Vagrant’s lank beard and hair strands fluttering, he’s staring vacantly into the vines as if he’s mesmerised by their parallel lines and wondering where their dry, brown geometry leads to. His thoughts easily become Conor Cleary’s – and mine his – and we’re both wondering where on earth all that Cleary soldiering bullshit came from.
First in a line of gallant military heroes? Thanks Hugh, but you’ve got me all wrong. Officer in Charge of Victoria Barracks? Seriously? NCO in charge of Blanco and Brasso, more like. Top man to see about Barracks rats and sewage. OIC kids.
No hero. Cautiously level-headed perhaps. Not a type to volunteer. Keen to keep his head down. Considering the physical nature of my love for Mary and Bridget and my affection for our fifteen children they birthed, I counted myself lucky that on a certain wintry afternoon in Taranaki I departed the proceedings. At speed.
Hardly a secret around Victoria Barracks that I enjoyed a chat. Any excuse. The whereabouts of the trenching tools? Delivery date of the new puttees? Anyone seen the Lee-Enfield .303 bolts? Great time-wasters, soldiers. Was there ever a profession that spent so much time standing around? Hurry up and wait. While they were waiting they’d stop me for a chinwag and a laugh.
So everyone dobbed in, and there’s a fair-sized audience for my retirement speech on my sixty-fifth birthday. ‘Thanks, boys, for the silver fob watch,’ I began. ‘Not gold but still acceptable. And for the bottle of Bushmills, which you’ll notice is already opened and savoured!’
Yes, a good turnout in the sergeants’ mess, and none sober by speech time. Everyone’s waiting keenly under the cold froggy eyes of the monarch. Even though she’d carked it three years earlier, there’d been no sign of a replacement portrait. Maybe I forgot to fill in the requisition form for the Edward VIIs. (Form 17A. 1B: Portrait Regal For the Loyal Observance and Admiration Of.) Anyway she’d been grimly glaring down for so long in the several versions of her dotted around the Barracks that she seemed a permanent fixture. Never a twinkle out of her in my half-century under the baleful gaze. She was never one for the Irish, the Famine Queen. Never a smiler, Victoria Regina. No looker either, poor dumpy girl.
In any case I had the floor. My audience were all ears and nudging each other. Drink up! Here he goes! Good old fucking gossipy Conor, with lots of beans to spill. Fifty years’ worth of scores to settle and scandals to air.
But did I? No, I held things back. Well, the big events. In reminiscing about my career there were episodes I was still cagey about. My part in the Maori Wars, for one. Just say it slipped my mind.
Best to forget any discussion of the Taranaki flight. And my relative fortune in collecting the enemy’s shotgun slugs in the backside and not my balls. In a war there’s no way of putting a favourable slant on running away. So not a word about the terrifying bass chants rumbling down the hillside that afternoon, the throaty growls and war cries confirming the deepest fears of our officer. And triggering his yell: ‘Christ! Run like bloody hell!’
He’d been a bundle of nerves ever since the Maoris beheaded his immediate superior, Captain Theodore Adams, and eight of his men. Even before the war chants came over the hill our young Lieutenant Peter Jacques was suffering nightmares from the nine severed heads they’d arranged in a pyramid outside our camp, Teddy Adams’ on top, buzzing with flies.
Three consecutive nights under New Zealand canvas Jacques woke us with nightmares of his own decapitation: his head in place of Teddy Adams’. He was like a mad hen, flapping and stumbling about the camp and falling, weeping, into tents. Massaging and moulding his head with his panicky hands as if it was wet clay, disbelieving our yells: ‘It’s still there, sir! Good as bloody gold. Still in situ.’ We had to hold a mirror to him as proof. Three nights in a row he shared his dreams with us soldiers, thanks very much.
‘My loyal boys,’ he sobbed. ‘I saw my goggling dead eyes, my rictus mouth was locked in a scream, my hair spiky with congealed blood. My head was displayed all around North Island on a Maori war shield.’
Soldiers hate to see a whimpering officer. Our sergeant had to slap him sensible. Then what could we do but give the lieutenant the camp’s medicinal brandy? A bottle each of the three nights. It’s a wonder he could bolt down the hill as fast as he did.
Running away from battle. The way he tried to justify it later to the big brass in Melbourne, our ten-man band of light infantry, caught unawares and separated from the main detachment, did not flee in terror
from the Maoris. Not the 40th Foot. We’d ‘prudently withdrawn from a numerically superior force to surer ground from which to mount a counterattack’. A superior force, I’m ashamed to admit, though they were indeed large meaty warriors covered in menacing tattoos, numbering no more than six.
Apart from the Argus correspondent’s brazen report of a ‘rumoured rout at Taranaki’, the incident wasn’t mentioned again outside the regiment. But the Argus’s five paragraphs were quite enough, and the lieutenant’s quiet court-martial was settled with an approved out-of-uniform suicide under a wattle tree on the Yarra bank two days later.
Prudent military withdrawal wasn’t acceptable in our company. My God, we were the 40th Regiment of Foot, dispatched with bugles, drums and rousing speeches across the Tasman from Melbourne two months before. With a proud record a century-and-a-half long in such punishing locations as Nova Scotia and Afghanistan. In climates freezing and torrid, and against other fierce native fighters. And the French, of course.
Fighting ferocious Indigenous warriors was the regiment’s specialty. The Foot’s reputation wouldn’t be easily demolished by rumours of cowardice under fire. Or under Maori war axes either.
All very well. But recalling the pyramid of grimacing heads speeded my heels, too. This young corporal took the lieutenant’s scream of terror as definitely a military order and joined his sliding, leaping progress down through the alpine moss and tussock grass back to the regiment.
Frankly, when I say ‘joined’ I mean ‘preceded’. Being younger and, though hard to believe these days, skinnier, I soon overtook my fleeing officer. With the shotgun pellets of the tattooed demons lodged not dangerously upwards or frontwards, but peppering my bony arse, I beat the lieutenant home by at least 50 yards.
They stung like a cloud of hornets but I kept running. A pitted bum for sure, blood streaming into my boots, but none in my spine, thank God. Or my testes. The satisfactions of my wives, and the existence of my ten children still to come – and I’ve always included in my prayers the dear three who died in infancy – were secure.