His thoughts streamed out as he recalled Goodmore’s face, and how Alf Fiddaman and Roy Sleath had shoved him towards the exit, calling him a mooching Turk. These white men and their families were honoured guests at the festivals in the camel camp. Why should Gül and his friends be denied entry to a dance in Broken Hill? Wasn’t this Gül’s town as much as it was Goodmore’s? Didn’t Gül Mehmet and Molla Abdullah have British passports too?
So they raked over old grouses. As the night wore on, their sense of injustice magnified along with their impotence to redress it.
Molla Abdullah still felt utterly dejected by the fortnight-old court case. He had no means of paying the £3 fine by the end of December. The fire that had destroyed his uninsured two-roomed house in Williams Street, while he was boiling a pan of fat, had burned his possessions, including all the money he had. He had lost everything. And in less than a week, Dowter’s strict application of a set of regulations that contravened his religious principles and made no sense to him threatened to take away his freedom.
Both of them should have returned home a long time ago, said Gül with a thoughtful sigh.
Molla Abdullah tugged at his beard and shook his head from side to side in anguish. Even if he could have afforded the passage, none of his family in India were alive. He had nothing to live for – and thanks to Dowter’s unions, he wasn’t even allowed to dig his own grave!
Ever since he had arrived in Australia, nearly two decades before, Molla Abdullah had been cooking his humiliation and shame, rendering it down, and now, sitting in this smoke-filled shed with Gül, it exploded into indignation.
The Turkish Sultan was right. Europeans like Clarence Dowter were an offence to Islam – and Oliver Goodmore and his friends no better. They were cutters of the veins of life. They were unclean pigs.
Neither Gül nor Molla Abdullah needed reminding that Turkey was at war with Australia, and that the Sultan, only five weeks earlier, had appealed for a jihad against the Entente Powers, ‘the mortal enemies of Islam’, obliging all Muslims young and old, on foot or mounted, to support it. Had war broken out sooner when he was in Istanbul, Gül admitted, stretching out his long legs, he would have joined the Turkish army and fought.
Probably it was then that Gül made his bold proposal: they should answer the Sultan’s call to arms, and seek a glorious death by attacking his enemies thousands of miles from home. Branded as Turks, what did they lose by behaving like Turks? Instead of living this persecuted existence in Broken Hill, wouldn’t it be better to die with the guarantee of happiness in the next life – by killing as many Australians as they could? The Australians were doing all these terrible things to true believers, not only in Broken Hill, but in Egypt and no doubt imminently in Turkey. Why not go for them here, in Broken Hill, in the desert?
Molla Abdullah’s eyes sparkled like flames spitting up from a heated pan, catching fire, running across the hessian. So did his house in Williams Street burn down.
But in the morning the heat and light had not diminished.
The decision made, Gül felt serene, weightless. The only person who had treated him well in the community which he now saw as his duty to destroy was Rosalind, and possibly her sister. But he no longer thought of them. He had crossed into an existence, parallel to the one in which he woke up next day and went about his business, that enveloped him in a rapturous calm.
Gül and Molla Abdullah never again smoked hashish, but over the next six days they had conversations. They discussed what form their crusade should take. They made a reconnaissance of the railway line – coming back from this, Molla Abdullah’s camels had collided with Albert Filwell’s milk buggy. And they fixed on a time and a day: the morning on which Molla Abdullah was to be arrested.
Date and location agreed, they acted swiftly. The butcher took charge of tailoring the Turkish uniforms in which they had vowed to fight; the ice-cream seller, because he spoke English, organised weapons and ammunition.
Gül required the rifles for hunting rabbits, he told the publican in Slag Street who sold them to him. He said nothing to Frank Pincombe, at whose store Gül paid two shillings for eighty soft-nosed Snider cartridges, but Pincombe was more than pleased to get rid of such old stock. Across the street, Gül bought two extra-strong cartridge-belts, each three foot nine inches long and one and three quarter inches wide; and two pairs of leggings, which he picked up on New Year’s Eve.
In the same hour of that same evening as Rosalind prepared the mutton and lettuce sandwiches in her mother’s kitchen in Rakow Street, the two men sat in Gül’s humpy and dyed a cotton tablecloth with sheep’s blood. Onto this crimson background, Gül stitched a yellow crescent moon and a star to resemble the Ottoman flag. They folded it away in the ice-cream chest, along with the cartridge-belts, a Belgian navy revolver, a new butcher’s sheath knife, and the two rifles: a Snider-Enfield for Molla Abdullah, which Gül had bought for £5; for himself, a Martini-Henry breech-loader with a long steel barrel.
As the sun fragmented behind the date palms, each wrote out a confession to tuck under their cummerbunds.
In his confession, written in a mixture of Urdu and Dari, Molla Abdullah explained that he bore no enmity against anyone except Clarence Dowter. ‘One day the inspector accused me. On another I begged and prayed, but he would not listen to me. I was sitting brooding in anger. Just then the man Gül Mehmet came to me and we made our grievances known to each other. I rejoiced and gladly fell in with his plans and asked God that I might die an easy death for my faith. I have never worn a turban since the day some larrikins threw stones at me, and I did not like it. I wear the turban today.’
Owing to his grudge against the inspector, Molla Abdullah’s intention was to kill Dowter first.
Gül wrote: ‘I must kill your people and give my life for my faith by order of the Sultan because your people are fighting his country.’ He thought to add that he had informed no one else of his intentions – he did not wish to implicate Rosalind Filwell.
That night, the two men walked back and forth three times through the doorway of the mosque and read from the Koran and said their prayers, in accordance with Molla Abdullah’s instructions. The idea of his death did not frighten Gül, when he considered the glory which awaited and the luxuries bestowed on those who died in the struggle.
With their heads pointing north, they snatched a few hours’ sleep, then rose early to perform a ritual shaving and cleansing. They washed their bodies thoroughly with water from a billy can, massaging hands, forearms and feet with perfumed oils and musk. After scissoring off his beard and razoring his chin, Molla Abdullah put on a collarless shirt trimmed with silk. He wore rings on his fingers and toes, kohl around his eyes, and on his bald head a small blue skullcap decorated with mirror fragments and embroidered with a frieze in the style favoured by the desert tribes around Kandahar. Last, they put on their red jackets, leggings and white silk turbans.
Shortly before 5 am, the two-man army of Allah climbed onto Gül’s ice-cream cart and rode out of Ghantown behind his bay horse, down Rakow Street, following the railway line towards Silverton, to declare war on Australia.
Three
‘Grab your seat for the joy ride!’
‘Don’t push!’
Above Rosalind, the smoke from the Y-class locomotive hangs vertical and motionless in the air, like one of Oliver’s pipe-cleaners.
Almost the last to board is Miss Pollock, who creates a flurry on the platform, in an orange dress down to her knees, high white boots, elaborately laced, and with scarlet and emerald ribbons twisted around her calves in tango style.
There’s a three-note whistle. Jim Nankivell, the driver, leans out of the locomotive and waves. At 10 am, after various jolts, the longest and most crowded picnic train ever to depart Broken Hill pulls out of the station.
Beneath hats and parasols, hundreds of passengers settle down in the forty cleaned-out mining wagons, happily talking and waving; hampers and rugs tucked under the benches, and t
he swings that will be slung up over branches.
Rosalind looks around at her open ore-truck which once carried zinc and lead to Germany for bullets, and now carries Mrs Rasp, who is tinting her mouth with rhubarb lipstick.
Mrs Rasp has given up on Mrs Kneeshaw and is telling the Sanitary Inspector, between dabs, about her friend Alderman Turbill who shot himself in Adelaide two weeks ago – ‘although he had no worries’. She licks her lips. These picnic outings make her talkative. She finds it a comfort to brood on her friends’ failures and to feel exaggerated pangs of pity. ‘He was found unconscious with a wound in his temple and holding a rusty gun in his right hand.’
Oliver is missing all this. Already, he has taken off his jacket and has gone to sit with Roy and Alf; they are bent over in a huddle, discussing the rugby. At least half the rugby union players of the state have joined the war, Oliver says severely. The local league will have to be reorganised for next season, and takes a long swig from Roy’s waterbag.
The talk around Rosalind, who guards Oliver’s place with her hamper to stop Mrs Rasp spreading herself, is of the foot-running at Silverton.
Mrs Kneeshaw from her corner catches Rosalind’s eye. ‘I think I know about Oliver’ – his name becomes rather ugly in Mrs Kneeshaw’s mouth; she suspects Oliver Goodmore of being one of those extremists who hurl stones and insults at departing recruits like Mrs Rasp’s son Reginald – ‘but will you be competing, too, today?’
It’s something else that Rosalind has not decided. She moves the hamper a few inches to the right. The ore-truck has been hosed, but it still smells metallic.
She feels breathless, more than the overheated air warrants.
‘I might do the single ladies’ race.’ And afterwards, while her mother and Lizzie visit a garden in Penrose Park, Oliver will walk her up the creek.
Mrs Kneeshaw is sympathetic. ‘The extreme heat made it difficult for my daughter to reach the tape last year. And today might be hotter, I have the feeling.’
‘Or,’ pursues Rosalind, her breasts itching under her blouse, ‘I could do the ladies’ hammer and nail competition.’
Mrs Lakovsky utters bird-like coos at her newest baby, who smells of sour milk, while trying to stop her three-year-old Ivan from crawling under the bench. Small black flies go on sewing in the air. And Mrs Rasp continues to mourn her dead alderman. She looks very white inside her large dress and new straw bonnet. She could blot out the sun.
‘They say the gun was faulty and may have misfired after he looked down the barrel and poked the live cartridge with a nail.’
‘Something he sure was capable of,’ remarks Mr Dowter, not hiding his venom. Alderman Turbill had been the one hotly opposed to the council carrying the uncertificated Dowter in its arms.
Mrs Kneeshaw is still looking at Rosalind. Thinking: she has a good figure and thick black hair; her face is rather plain. ‘Are you happy at Stack & Tyndall’s?’
‘Oh, yes, Mrs Kneeshaw, I think so.’
‘The Red Cross Society has a vacancy for a nurse,’ and smiles. She has white teeth, some longer than others. ‘Miss Pollock is convinced you would make a first-rate nurse, Rosalind. I am inclined to agree.’
‘Me … a nurse?’ Rosalind could not have felt more inarticulate if she had been asked to summa-rise Cornelius Hayball’s Sunday sermon. Nothing has happened to her, and so she does not know anything. Oliver has his machines and his toolbox. How can she hope to repair anyone?
She looks down at her palms. ‘I’m not certain I would be so good at that.’
‘Well, if you change your mind,’ says Mrs Kneeshaw, and leans forward. She wants to reach out. She has watched Rosalind with Lizzie. With Oliver as well. ‘You know, Rosalind, you must always feel able to speak with me – if there is something you want to say.’
Suddenly, there is something Rosalind would very much like to say, but Oliver is wedging himself back in beside her.
The mullock lies in sunlight behind them, leeched of its shadow and power to intimidate. Oliver in his hat instead lours over her.
Out of habit, he starts packing tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. But it’s too hot to smoke – even Clarence Dowter’s cigarette has been returned with a snap into its silver case.
Oliver sits back, Mrs Kneeshaw too.
Over the low rim of the truck, the morning is a tangle of fences and roofs. The train passes along the houses, past the gardens, smelling a little of manure, slowing down at the Rakow Street crossing.
In the yard, the cows and heifers are lapping at the water trough. Their shadows stretch in puddles of black.
‘That’s your room, isn’t it?’ says Oliver, pointing with his pipe stem at the window, wanting to draw her in.
Her eyes linger on the small hard round shape in his shirt pocket, on the hairs in his nostril, on the mouthpiece of his cherry-wood pipe. Once, toying with it, she had sucked and tasted the bitterest thing, a globule of gungy tar. That had made her scream.
‘Yes.’ She twists her lips; she has not stopped condemning him, the dirty fingernails of her future husband.
Oliver, on the other hand, is radiant. An hour ago, he was buying fruit for the picnic when Alf Fiddaman told him he had a house to rent in Mercury Street. The couple who lived there were relocating to Hobart with their two small children.
‘Would you come and see it with me, Rosalind?’
‘If you would like.’ The words, positive but neutrally spoken, hide her dismay.
‘What about tomorrow?’ He can’t look at her enough, although his uncritical gaze does not suit his face, which the sun is painting red. He moves closer. ‘Alf says it’s perfect for a young family …’ And their shadows join on the floor of the truck, to melt into a rearing, tussling creature.
She looks as though about to turn herself into something sweating.
‘I think …’ The words are too big to get out of her mouth. She senses Mrs Kneeshaw watching as she answers at the second attempt.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ and adjusts her pink hat.
There is a veil between them, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
The train creaks and bumps forward again.
She shuts her eyes to stop him seeing. The sound of the Bosphorus is inside her ear, and white triangular sails are tacking across her eyelids. She looks at herself on the edge of the Red Sea, dressing wounds.
When she opens her eyes again, Clarence Dowter is removing his jacket. He takes out a watch and notes the time, then stares glassily across at her as if he can read what she is all about in a notice under her chin. She remembers the carpet that she denied swallowing, and smiles.
‘Emmy didn’t want me to come, but I have yet to miss an Oddfellows’ picnic.’
Her father’s familiar laugh gives Rosalind an excuse to glance away. Up against the end of the truck, backs to the engine, her family are seated in a row.
Rosalind had not wished to sit with them. She had boarded the train without resolving her argument with her mother about Oliver. But now she doesn’t want it left untreated.
Arm in the fresh sling which she had fitted on him that morning, her father is chatting with a small, cheerful-looking man wearing a large bow tie.
Rosalind leans forward, and waves to catch her mother’s attention; it concerns her that she might still be feeling unhappy. But her mother is engrossed in Lizzie, who is rubbing the fuzz off the peach that Oliver gave her.
Her sister was the sensitive one, her mother believed. Who would sit up in bed, shrieking.
But for Rosalind that was always William.
If Lizzie was all sky, she and William had been earth.
She remembers after her brother’s accident when her father took her into the mine. Hurtling down. Water dripping from a dark rock face, and the terrible heat. The cage stopped. There were lots of lights. And at the end of a tunnel, an office with a man in shirt-sleeves standing over a huge ledger, like the ticket office in the railway station, and men signing in. ‘This is William Filwell’s
sister,’ her father said. ‘She wanted to see where he worked.’
For the first time, the darkness feels thicker where she is. Her brother is behind her and she cannot hear him. As if a bell jar has descended and silenced her.
She’s had her tongue cut out too long, she tells herself. In the passive feminine way which, once silenced, becomes poisonous. And yet here she is, about to choose a man, a good enough man, but one who wants to participate in the cutting of her tongue.
The train builds up steam near the Picton sale-yard, then slows abruptly as it approaches the cutting.
Clarence Dowter volunteers the reason – the sticky-beak has heard it from the driver himself: Jim, he says in his dry voice, has been instructed to take it easy here, since the previous week the express was held up after the wind blew a foot of sand over the rails.
Rosalind twists around and looks down over the side of the truck, but really to escape Mr Dowter and his small grey eyes.
She gazes at the humps of sand beside the tracks, at the intricate lace-like paths of the sandhill beetles foraging for food, and thinks of the wedding dress worn by her cousin Louise, living in a tiny room in Beryl Street while her husband is fighting in Egypt.
Rosalind has exhausted on Gül’s ice-cream the money she had saved up for her dress. And suddenly feels tedious, she who has received a postcard from an Afghan; her parents and Oliver never knew about that.
The designs tremble and fade. She is left with Oliver’s hard arm pressing into her thigh. She sees the veins snaking under the backs of his hands and remembers Gül’s hand, and how she had wrapped it with her handkerchief – actually, her grandmother’s handkerchief – that he has yet to return.
The palms of her hands are sweating. She feels it under her skin. The ingrowing wick of her unlit, and perhaps unignitable, passion for Oliver. Lost in the shadow of his brim, he is not the answer to any mystery.
Her thoughts are running over each other up the bank, and sliding back. The train picks up speed. Soon it will burst out into an ocean of baked red earth, of opalised shells and fish and long-extinct sea-monsters, but already she is retreating into her own tableland of five-inch rainfall, denuded of mulga scrub for miles around, all removed for fuel; a bald and empty region like his sandy-haired head would become.
Oddfellows Page 6