I’d deliberately moved aside, and when I spotted two photographers coming down the road I slipped outside the gate and sat on the stump of a tree with my legs crossed. I was pleased that it all worked very well. I’d been shot five times, and by the time the Minister’s car rolled slowly down the road I’d left them to it.
‘Who would she be, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Bloody cheeky, whoever it is.’
‘She’s a model,’ called someone who knew.
‘I don’t care if she’s the Holy Mother! The cheek!’
When I left it was like walking a gauntlet, of pointed white-gloved fingers, brims of straw hats, unreal flowers, hisses and whispers.
I walked back to 19B Edward and was greeted by the Hanora ‘tableau’. Rosy was still in self-imposed solitary confinement. I hoped she’d had the sense to open a window.
‘How was it, love?’
‘Maggots under the rissoles, ants in the cordial, women all dressed up looking as though they were waiting for the second coming. I didn’t know a lot of them. But I had five photos taken – I hope they use at least one.’
‘Of course they will: you look beautiful.’
I left my nice outfit on just in case, and poured myself a cool drink. I took one out to Hanora.
A woman passed by on her way to the ditch near the boundary to empty a bucket. I think it was the woman with the spectacles and the cauliflower hair. She moved so quickly it was hard to tell, but she cut through the air like a knife so I was pretty sure.
‘Mad as bats, the lot of you!’ she screeched like chalk on board.
Act 3: The curtain rises to a continuing warm and sunshiny day with flowers and white gloves despite the dust. Male peasants who have trampled the dust underfoot have forbidden it to rise. The ‘praise be’ singing of peasants has dwindled to a trickle of hums. There is a dramatic scene in which the Minister’s car, parked too close to Mrs Bentwick’s chrysanthemums without the handbrake on, ruins an entire row. There is, at once, a Greek-like chorus of consternation. On stage right, women weary from their labours in the kindergarten stand by the tables for lunch duty. Mrs ‘Bloody Up Herself’ Glass speaks for all, the little girl curtsies, and Mr Sparkle goes to pieces and drinks half a bottle of gin. His song is one of lament. He sends one of the peasant washerwomen to fetch Aria Sparrow.
*
‘Is this 19B Edward?’ a woman asked Hanora, who was sunbaking very nicely. Around her was a strong smell of vinegar and oil, her homemade tanning lotion, and lemon-scented gum.
‘Yes, it is. Did you want to borrow a book?’
‘Who the hell’s got time for books? No offence. Is Aria Sparrow here?’
‘She’s inside. Please go and talk to her if you want.’
‘Aria?’ shouted the woman. ‘Kelly Sparkle says you’d better get back to the kindy again.’
‘What on earth for? Why me? What’s gone wrong this time? You all know what to do.’
‘We did when it was the butcher – when it was the butcher, who didn’t get stuck into the gin halfway through!’
‘Oh, God! I’d better go, then. I’d be pleased to give a hand.’
I was still dressed, but it didn’t matter now. I’d achieved what I’d wanted.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Grace. He might be good with a gun, and maybe ferrets and pies, but he’s gone to pieces up there,’ she said, pointing in the direction of the ‘happening’.
Nothing much had changed inside the kindergarten. Someone had sprayed flyspray everywhere, which wouldn’t have done much for the flavour of the food, I thought.
‘What has to be done, Mr Sparkle?’
‘They’re still up at the school . . . I don’t know – I don’t know.’
‘I suggest you drink a lot of water, Mr Sparkle. Could someone make a pot of tea?’
‘I’m no good at this sort of thing.’ He looked around at the ‘staff’. ‘And they know I’m no good at this sort of thing.’
‘I’ll pop up to the school and see what’s happening.’
*
I was just in time to hear Mrs ‘Up Herself’ Glass still speaking ‘on behalf of us all’. It seems the tree had been planted in the playground. A hole had already been dug and the roots unwrapped, so the Royal and the Mrs wouldn’t have to muck around for too long, but Father Beale missed out on its blessing. All the Royals had to do was shovel a pile of dust around the poor dying sapling.
During Mrs Glass’s talk ‘on behalf of us all’, she gave the Minister a sort of album, a record of the Camp since his last visit, and its inmates, and the little girl gave the Mrs a posy of roses with the thorns left on.
‘You don’t have to curtsy to me, dear,’ said the Mrs.
‘I know,’ said the dear little thing.
A little way down the road I heard Elsa Bentwick saying a few well-chosen words of her own to the Minister’s driver.
The privileged peasants – that is, the parents of the schoolchildren – held printed programs. I touched a woman at the back of the line on the arm, and asked how long she thought it would be before lunch.
‘It’s you again!’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘I’m helping with the lunch.’
She held the program a long way from her poor-sight eyes, and lowered her voice. ‘If Mrs “Up Herself” ever stops talking, I’d say a good twenty minutes, handshakes included.’ She looked hard at me. ‘The cameras aren’t here!’
‘I know that. I used them earlier,’ I said.
‘They had a pretend tree-plant early. They couldn’t wait around forever.’
‘What have they photographed so far?’
‘Apart from you? The Minister and her.’
Lunch was naturally cold, on paper plates with hired forks. We had cut the pies into manageable portions, and I’d had a quick look under the rissoles. I’d brought pickled onions left over from our party, and had bought a bunch of parsley from the store on the way. With more garnish here and there the tables looked almost presentable. The sheets had been hidden in a corner.
It was at least half an hour before the Royal party was ushered into the room. Mrs ‘Up Herself’ had taken charge. Her little niece in the princess dress and blue satin sash was allowed to join the lunch crowd. She was very sweet, and kept her head down and her hands clasped behind her back.
‘You speak very nicely,’ I said to her.
‘I’ve had execution lessons,’ said a six-year-old voice, high and innocent.
‘Good for you, girl!’
*
Pre-school paintings and drawings were thumb-tacked and pasted all over the place, and the kindy teacher took the Royals on a tour of the gallery. Balloons brushed against faces red from the sunshine of Mrs Glass’s speech. There were butterfly mobiles to duck under, and star things stuck to square things stuck to round things in free form. Most of the paintings were of houses with red doors and chimneys and birds, with the usual tree, sun and cat – nothing like the Camp huts.
‘I imagine these houses are what they hope to live in one day,’ said the teacher. I thought it was clever of her to say that on the spur of the moment. And I told her so.
‘And what’s this one about?’ asked the Minister.
‘Oh, my goodness. Sorry. I meant to tuck that little one away.’
‘Is the child who did this quite normal?’ asked the Mrs.
‘Donald had to have his nosebleeds fixed, but he’s fine now.’ Donald and his parents were thankfully not present.
Donald had done a very clever drawing for his age, I thought. It depicted the masked nosebleed doctor as a sort of mass murderer, standing over little Donald with what looked like a machete.
When Mrs ‘Up Herself’ invited the guests to ‘partake’ of their ‘luncheon’, I began to help by putting slices of pie and salad onto plates, and filling glasses with cool cordial while Father Beale said grace. I have to say that Father Beale’
s grace seemed a bit overlong, but when he realised there was no media left to record it he abruptly stopped. I kept a weather eye out for a maggot I might have missed.
Not all of the ants had been removed from the cordial, but they could have been mistaken for passionfruit pips, I supposed, so I’d left them there. The Mrs helped herself to a rissole, causing a nervous hush from the ‘staff’, and when she took another Mr Sparkle’s eyes were like saucers, and without thinking he clamped his hands over his mouth.
‘These are very good,’ she said, and I smiled at Mr Sparkle, but he was so nervous he had to use the ‘littlies’ toilets – again.
I stayed at the table and sliced and doled and filled, and at one stage I saw the Minister glancing at me. Not smiling. Not openly. But sneaking a look, in the way of Eli Boston when he was well aware that Naomi was not far behind. I’d received a message of sorts, but chose to ignore it for the time being. I did, however, file it away for future use.
The ‘luncheon’ came to an end when Mrs ‘Up Herself’s’ paper plate collapsed under the weight of its food and all but ruined her best dress. I helped her by taking her aside and sponging off as many stains as possible. Her good dress was in a terrible state – its pretty pink rose petals had dipped themselves in tomato sauce, the delicate posy trims of cream and buttercup were drowned somehow in rabbit sauce, and from her belt hung a stalk of parsley – but, bad as things were, Mrs Glass kept bravely smiling while I wiped, and she held her gloves to the elbow high up in the air as though being robbed at gunpoint.
In the end, the kindy ladies said they would do the washing up and didn’t need me. I sensed they wanted to gossip about the whole disaster, and anyway I’d had enough. I wanted to go back to 19B Edward. I was particularly interested in the Royal tour of the estate that was to take place following ‘luncheon’. A Royal Walkabout – it was on the program.
The peasants remained in a state of hope and expectation, excited to be in the ministerial presence. It was a huge event for them – all dolled up despite their tensions and anxieties and unanswered questions, not one of them knowing how long they’d have to live in a Camp of iron cells, and, in the end, too nervous to ask. Peasants bobbing around in hats and gloves and oiled hair, only too happy to serve, and only too willing to kow-tow to the ordinary mortal they’d convinced themselves would be their saviour. And the ordinary mortal? He ponced about and loved every minute of it.
Oh, Rosy! The real theatre of this place is so ugly. Just look at the stage, all bare now, and the drops covered in dirt-poor dirt already. See how the flowers have been put back in their bags and boxes, and see how the birds have been unhooked from their strings with their beaks shut, and the peasants who have run out of tune. Listen to the sounds of weeping for lost chances, Rosy. We’ll bloody well change the cast and the sets, you and I! We will demand that the Minister re-write this bloody play. The whole bloody thing must be changed.
Act 4: The curtain rises to a scene of the Camp in all its terrible reality. No more posies and curtsies and pretty dresses, no more pies and rissoles and a half-dead tree is planted in its grave in the playground. Gloom has settled over the huts, and the sounds are not of birds or a breeze through leaves, but of slamming doors and hot, cranky kids and parents who thought they’d caught a glimmer of hope only to see it was all nothing more than a fool’s tableau. Next to nothing at all.
In the atmosphere is the air of awful truth, and it is old and stale and smells of dirty dishrags and greasy iron. The still dust shakes itself into gritty life. Tussocks of grass, the colour of chaff, dying, finish themselves off. In an anticlimax of hopes and dreams, the peasants remove their white gloves, no longer white where they had shaken the hand of grubby lies. They are told to go home to allow the Minister to walk alone. He wants to meet the locals, he says, and to invite himself (and the Mrs) into one of the cell blocks, where he will be politically polite for five minutes, then get the hell out of there into his nice government car and forget about the whole sordid place. After all, this day was organised by the local Member – the next State election is too far away for him to be particularly bothered. The visit is merely a gesture.
At this stage, an audience still watching the dregs of this drama observe a dreary hopelessness emanating from the stage, and they feel they are free to put away their hankies, for they can tell there is to be no happy ending or sad ending. There is to be no ending at all. And they don’t care a hoot if the lights come on early or late, because their eyes will be as dry as the stage’s dust.
*
Hanora was still reading in the deck chair beside the tree when I returned from the sickening farce of the school ceremony and the lunch. It had been shattering to see women, and the odd man, practically throwing themselves at the feet of a politician – and a State one at that! It had been soul-destroying to see desperate families doll themselves up in clothes they could not afford just to impress a man who couldn’t have cared less if they’d all worn hessian bags, for the focus of the event was on the man and nothing at all to do with the peasants. I was truly sickened by it.
‘How was the lunch, love?’
‘Pretty much a disaster. Mr Sparkle was so terrified he was practically drunk. The food was unspeakable. The only bright spot was when Mrs Glass’s paper plate collapsed and spilled everything down her dress. The program says the Royals are doing a walkabout around about now.’
I did not tell Hanora about the Minister for Housing’s sly glance in the kindergarten, or that I had filed it away. And I wondered if sparrows sometimes took crumbs to their nests to mature into something of more substance and promise before they made use of them – like bower birds and beads.
‘You’re getting a bit burnt, Hanora.’
‘I’m all right, love. It’s beautiful out here next to the dear little tree, and I’m beginning to enjoy the book. Do you think they’ll walkabout down this way?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. You would make a very nice picture for their scrapbook.’ The photographers would be like pins to a magnet, I imagined. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they strolled down here.’ I was not to know at that time that the Minister’s driver had warned him about Mrs Bentwick and her chrysanthemums, and that the Royal party had by-passed the Bentwicks and the Biddles and the Gardiners and were indeed slowly walking towards Edward Street with the car rolling a few paces behind them. I presumed Queen Street had been avoided, too.
‘I would so much like to ask him when we might be moved, love.’
‘Everyone wanted to ask him when they might be moved. They all went to so much trouble, sucking up to that man – and he looked so patronising and so bored! And so did she. I felt sorry for the inmates. If I hadn’t as much to do, I think I would have cried for them, and you know how much it takes to make me cry. Has Rosy emerged yet?’
‘Only briefly – once or twice to the toilet.’
‘Then I’d better not tell her the Royals might be coming down this way. With photographers.’
‘No, love, I think you’d better not. I hope she has enough air in there. I don’t think the window has been opened.’
‘Don’t sit in that deck chair too long and get a chill on top of the sunburn, Hanora.’
‘I’d die if I missed something, love.’
Unexpectedly, the first person to emerge from the shadows was poor Tom Gardiner. He shuffled past Hanora and me without turning his head, and as usual he seemed not to hear or see a thing, but we knew now that he was aware of our presence. He shuffled through the dry grass to his lonely, dead place near the far boundary and the imaginary pit of his nightmares, and squatted, with his knees under his chin, as usual, and rocked like a baby. He turned his back on the Camp – as usual.
I had a sudden thought.
‘Mr Gardiner is going to get a fright if the Royals come down here, with a crowd and a car behind them.’
‘Perhaps I’d better warn him.’ Hanora struggled out of the deck chair.
‘How? No one’s
ever spoken to him.’
‘I have.’
‘When?’
‘Once or twice. When it was quiet.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, he doesn’t say anything. I just sit at a distance and I speak to him very gently. He doesn’t seem to mind.’
Hanora walked slowly through the scrubby ground and sat down at a respectable distance from Tom. She didn’t stay very long.
‘What did you say?’
‘I just told him that the Housing Minister might come near here with a car, but he was not to be afraid. I told him they meant no harm.’
‘Do you think he understood?’
‘Yes. He said, “Krak! krak! Here comes another one!” At least he heard me.’
‘Good for you, Hanora. I’m going inside for a cuppa. Do you want one?’
‘I’d love it.’
*
There was a murmuring of movement when I gave Hanora her tea. The sound came from the area of the laundry. A child, who was supposed to have the measles in his sick bed, ran down Edward Street, fit as a fiddle.
‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’
Two or three doors were opened and curtains were pushed aside from windows. Suddenly there were eyes and ears everywhere.
And indeed, the Minister, his aide, the Mrs, their photographers, and a car flying a flag, came sidling down Edward, slow as a funeral.
I hoped they would see Hanora decorating the earth to the right of our steps with her deck chair, book and teacup. And they did. Of course they did! I thought of warning Rosy, but instead stayed inside, near the door, where I could peer out and listen.
The government car came to a sedate stop. One of Elsa Bentwick’s chrysanthemums was still embedded in a tyre.
The Minister and the Mrs stepped over the whitewashed stones and shook Hanora’s hand. The Mrs smiled, but only with her teeth. The expression of her body from head to toe quite clearly indicated that she had suffered a very long and uncomfortable day.
The Sparrows of Edward Street Page 15