by Mick McCoy
‘How did Petrov come to have that?’ Conrad said.
‘It wasn’t from him. The exhibit was the minutes of the meeting you were at, which could be why Littlejohn advised it be dropped. Plus there was absolutely nothing in it.’
‘Is that it then?’ Ruby said.
‘Unless they unearth anything else, but I’m confident Petrov has nothing, otherwise they’d have tabled it by now.’
‘So we just wait?’
‘Afraid so,’ he said. ‘At least you have today off at the Crown’s expense.’
‘I hope they don’t want a refund,’ Conrad said.
Powell laughed. ‘I’m going back to the office.’ He held out his hand to Conrad and they shook. ‘I hope we don’t meet in this place again,’ he said. ‘And nice to meet you, Ruby.’
They watched him hurry down the steps as Marcus French climbed them.
‘Mr Murphy,’ French said, ignoring Ruby, ‘could I get your reaction to today’s events?’
‘What events?’
Ruby pushed in between the reporter and her husband. ‘I think I can guess who you are.’ French put his hand against Ruby’s shoulder to move her aside.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, swatting at the reporter’s arm. With the advantage of her higher step, Ruby leaned in close to Marcus French, her face inches from his. ‘May lightning strike you.’
He pulled away from her.
Ruby raised her voice. ‘May lighting strike you between the eyes and knock you down!’
French backed down the steps, away from the small woman standing beside Conrad Murphy.
RUBY
The crown of his head was already covered in thick black hair, or so the midwife told her, and she didn’t have to wait long for the proof. It was as if Ruby and Conrad’s second son knew he’d kept his parents waiting so long it was only fair to get everything over and done. With Ruby’s next push he greeted the world. No flailing arms, no screaming, no puffy-eyed squinting. He welcomed his own arrival almost casually, at least until his bottom was slapped.
Peter Conrad Murphy, the natural-born son of Conrad and Ruby Murphy, came into the world on Christmas Day of 1955, nine months after his parents’ night at the Lord Mountbatten Hotel, courtesy of Mr Menzies and his royal commissioners.
Conrad smuggled in warm champagne, the bottle concealed inside his jacket. He popped the cork, spilling a little on the hospital sheets before filling two chipped waterglasses at Ruby’s bedside. The rest he shared with new mothers in neighbouring beds. Ruby had never tasted anything so fine.
Alex, by then three and a half, wasn’t ready to buy into all the hoo-ha. He’d been cagey about the whole thing right from the beginning. No sooner had Ruby’s belly begun to swell than she recognised something in Alex’s face beyond curiosity. It was a wariness, a suspicion of the unknown, like seeing a cloudy sky for the first time. It was as if he felt that she’d already betrayed him and would continue to do so. The nine months of intimacy she shared with Peter but never had with him. The childbirth, the breastfeeding, only ever with Peter. Those first weeks after Peter was born she imagined sometimes she could still feel the cord sharing the blood from her body with Peter; that it still bound them. She imagined that she knew him, knew his soul and his heart, even before he was born, in a way she never could with Alex. Never would.
When Alex came to them they’d agreed to take him without any planning. It wasn’t done on a whim – they’d talked about adopting for years – but the opportunity couldn’t have taken them more by surprise if Alex had been delivered by a white stork. He was three weeks old, born to a couple – university students, unmarried and unready to care for a child – who were members of the local branch of the Party. Alex’s birth mother, Sheila, visited every month to begin with, but less often as he grew and not at all after Ruby got pregnant. Eric Johnson, Alex’s father, never accompanied her. He still attended Party meetings; Conrad told her the boy often talked to him, but only about politics or the next rally. Not once did he ask Conrad about his son.
After Ruby and Peter’s homecoming, Alex wasn’t merely wary – he seemed to know Peter had a hold on Ruby he couldn’t match.
In the new year, Ruby finally decided the oldest of her hens had to go. Pritch had been too long off the lay, and Ruby’s pragmatic country ways, together with the old hen’s growing intolerance for human young, finally sealed her fate. Alex, sitting on the back step, didn’t flinch as Ruby brought the blade down. Minutes later, before the blood had drained from the hen’s carcass, Ruby was cleaning up at the laundry trough when she heard Alex squawking down the hall. She smiled as she picked clean the undersides of her nails, until Peter began to shriek.
When she reached the door to their room she saw Alex standing over Peter’s cot, a tin sword poised above his shoulder.
‘Alex! Stop!’
Peter cried louder at the sound of his mother’s voice but Alex ignored her. Ruby grabbed his wrist – he dropped the weapon and starred angrily at his mother. There were welts across Peter’s cheek and neck.
‘Mummy!’ Alex shouted, stamping his foot as Ruby held his swordless hand high. ‘Cut off Peter’s head too!’
* * *
‘I reckon I look like Dawn Fraser,’ Ruby said. She loved the beach, the sand between her toes and falling asleep in a deckchair while reading a book, but she couldn’t swim and had no time for dirty suburban pools. She didn’t look like Dawn Fraser and didn’t particularly want to, but the mood needed lifting.
Conrad’s head was in the newspaper. ‘I’m a dead spit for Murray Rose, too.’ He didn’t smile. His fingers curled around an untouched cup of tea he’d asked her to make twenty minutes earlier.
The paper’s sports section was swollen with reports of the Melbourne Olympics but try as she might she couldn’t care less about any of it. She’d only sat at the kitchen table to be with Conrad, to see if she could find a story he might be interested in, to get him to talk.
Alex was out the back in the sandpit and Peter was having a nap. She switched on the radio. Olympics coverage crackled out. The final of the men’s kayak doubles over 10,000 metres was being contested on Lake Wendouree, with trap shooting up next. She switched it off.
‘I thought the swimming might be on,’ she said. ‘The paper says it is. The semifinal of the hundred freestyle. Dawn’s race.’
‘Why are you suddenly so interested in swimming?’ he asked, not lifting his eyes.
‘I’m not, really.’
‘Neither am I.’
She ran a fingertip across the puffy bags below each eye. ‘I’m going to check for the mail.’
‘I might see if Brendan has anything for me at the workshop,’ he said after Ruby had left the kitchen.
‘That’s a good idea,’ she called back, continuing down the hall.
Conrad had been unemployed again for only a week. He’d lasted a month and two days at the patents office before they’d given him his marching orders. It was boring work, he hated it, but it was a job and only the second one he’d managed to at least start, not counting the workshop, since the commission almost two years earlier.
But it was losing the job in Hobart that broke him. Half a year earlier in March, with Peter only three months old, Conrad had moved down there after winning a position at Imperial Engineering, a British-owned industrial engineering company. His boss knew about his politics and alleged security risk but hired him anyway. Donald Morrison was a flat-nosed Yorkshireman with an inbred mistrust of any authority other than his own. Conrad was the best applicant. On his first day Don Morrison told him they’d done all the checks and knew about his membership of the Communist Party and his appearance at the royal commission.
‘I got a telegram from some bugger at ASIO advising you not be hired,’ Morrison said to Conrad. ‘But he can get stuffed, as far as I’m concerned.’
Ruby and the boys had been set to join him down there in another week’s time when Conrad called to tell her not to bother with any mor
e packing and to take the house off the rental market, because he was coming home.
‘What’s happened?’ Ruby asked.
‘The board of the parent company over in Hertfordshire told Morrison it was him or me.’ He sounded beaten. ‘“I’d love to keep you,”’ Conrad said, imitating a thick Scottish accent, ‘“but I’m not going to die in a ditch for you.”’
Nine weeks’ work in two years. Two sackings – three if you counted the SEC – and three knockbacks for jobs he’d been offered but then lost. As for the work at Brendan’s foundry, it was charitable, not sustainable, and resuming her nursing was out of the question for Ruby with Peter to care for. They were skint.
Before he went to Hobart, Ruby had extended the henhouse to take up the entire backyard, except for the sandpit and the gulley trap. The flock grew to over fifty laying hens. Conrad didn’t get involved. He didn’t want to know how many eggs they produced per day or who Ruby sold them to for how much. He didn’t consider how much work would’ve been involved in selling off the hens before the planned move to Hobart was scuppered, and she’d never solved that problem herself. At least he was happy to eat eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
When she returned from the letterbox he hadn’t moved an inch. If one of her hens was as broody as him she’d remove it from the flock, lop off its head and sell the flesh. She slid under his nose the only piece of mail to arrive. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
Conrad brought it closer to his spectacled eyes. ‘It must be from Don Morrison’s contact.’
The envelope was tattooed with Russian postmarks. Great big red things, blurred around the edges by time and distance. Official-looking sender details written in Cyrillic occupied the top left corner.
‘Don Morrison from Hobart?’ she said. ‘That’s not in Russia.’
He flipped the envelope over. ‘No, it’s not.’
‘So what is it?’
He picked up a butter knife and slid it under the edge of the flap. ‘Don gave me a contact,’ he said as he took out the letter. ‘In Moscow.’
‘What for? What kind of contact?’
He didn’t answer right away, concentrating on what was written. ‘For work,’ he said.
‘Work? In Moscow? We’re not going to Moscow.’
He folded the letter and put it back inside the envelope.
‘What does it say?’ she asked, sitting next to him. ‘Conrad, what does it say?’
‘It’s a wonder it got through to us. I thought it’d be stopped, intercepted by someone.’
‘So we should be grateful, is that what you’re suggesting?’
‘Take a look.’
Ruby spread open the envelope and peered inside, but then stopped. ‘What does it say?’ she asked. ‘I want you to tell me.’
‘There’s work for me in Moscow. And a new apartment for us.’
‘We’re not living in Moscow,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’
Conrad relaxed into his chair. ‘I didn’t expect a reply.’
‘We’re not going to Moscow.’
He hid his eyes from her when he smiled. ‘Okay.’
‘Damn it, Conrad!’
* * *
That night the local Party branch had booked the annexe behind the Richmond town hall for a lecture by left-wing journalist and pot-stirrer William Barnett about his years in China and his recent move to Moscow. Given the day’s mail, the coincidence unsettled Ruby, but Elaine had already agreed to babysit so Conrad and Ruby joined twenty or so others, all of them familiar from rallies and Party meetings, waiting by the door in the town hall car park, which shared a low fence with the Richmond Union Bowling Club. A cooling waft floated over the fence from the bowling green, as flat as felt, tempering the heat that radiated from the crumbling bitumen under Ruby and Conrad’s feet.
Four old blokes in cream trousers, cream buttoned shirts and cream broad-brimmed hats had the green to themselves. The shadows cast by the clubhouse suggested there was half an hour’s light left. The silent glide of the bowls as they curved through their arc towards the jack held Ruby like she was watching water wash lazily through the bend of a creek.
At her back a commotion had begun. Conrad pressed an elbow into her side as two cars stopped in the lane beside the town hall, blocking the only way in or out. Several men were seated inside the cars but none got out. Engines revved instead, horns blared.
Barnett, two steps elevated at the door to the annexe, cast an eye around his would-be audience, none of whom had made a move. He twisted the handle and rattled the door against its lock.
‘RSL?’ he asked. ‘Maybe you lot have upset them.’ He climbed down from the steps and made himself part of the crowd.
‘Upsetting them isn’t hard,’ Conrad said.
The engines were cut suddenly and the doors of both cars swung open. Five men converged on the boot of the first car and pulled out lengths of rough-cut lumber.
‘You lot should pack up and bugger off,’ Barnett said, as they advanced.
‘I suggest a game of bowls, William,’ Ruby said.
Barnett needed no further invitation. He, Conrad and Ruby, then the rest of the group, stepped over the knee-high chain-link fence and began to walk around the edge of the green. They didn’t rush their escape, and the lumber merchants seemed unwilling to follow them onto the bowling club grounds.
One of the bowlers tried to wave them away. ‘Oi! You can’t do that.’
Ruby waved back. ‘I do apologise,’ she said. ‘I was enjoying watching you play just now and we wouldn’t interrupt unless we could avoid it.’
The bowler gazed past Ruby to the car park fence and the five armed men. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You weren’t gunna play bingo in there, were you?’ He waddled past Ruby to the edge of the green, where he lifted a cream shoe onto the steel pipe that capped the fence. ‘Why don’t you fuck off and leave people alone,’ he said to the five in the car park. When they showed no sign of advance or retreat, he backhanded the air before joining Ruby and the others, placing a hand in the small of her back. ‘Come into the clubhouse, my dear, and have a quiet drink,’ he said. ‘Your friends too.’
Ruby gave Conrad a wink as she let herself be escorted.
‘Clarence Carter, at your service,’ he said. ‘Clarrie, you can call me. Is that tall, skinny fella you were holding hands with important to you?’
‘Ruby Murphy,’ she replied. ‘And yes, my husband Conrad is quite special.’
‘Conrad Murphy,’ Clarence said, ‘sounds familiar. Has he been in the papers? A retired footballer or something?’
Ruby laughed. ‘Not exactly. Although he told me this morning he fancies himself as an older Murray Rose.’
Clarrie signed her in to the visitors’ book. Above the bar of the clubhouse dining room hung a cheap reproduction of the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, alongside a print of King George. It struck Ruby how similar their hairstyles were. The other walls were lined with dark wooden honour boards listing the achievements of club members. Clarrie Carter had a trio of consecutive wins in the club championship dating back ten years, immediately post-war.
‘I’m not that far past my prime, Ruby,’ he said, leading her further inside.
‘What about the others?’
‘Brian can sort them out.’
But whichever of Clarrie’s friends Brian was, he was still hesitating outside with the other two bowlers.
Ruby was only five-foot-four but she had an inch on Clarrie. ‘It was very chivalrous of you to rescue us out there, but I really should get back to my husband and our friends.’
‘Hmm,’ Clarrie said, waddling towards the bar. ‘Leave ’im at home next time.’
Ruby opened her mouth to laugh but made no sound.
Clarrie hoisted himself onto a bar stool. ‘Bring ’em in, your friends, until those lumps of wood pack themselves up.’
‘Thank you, Clarrie.’ She blew him a kiss and returned to the clubhouse verandah, hooking an arm t
hrough Conrad’s. ‘He’s invited us all in.’
‘You’d have been safer in the car park.’
She chuckled.
‘And when the coast is clear, if it’s not too late, we’re continuing back at our place,’ he said.
* * *
At ten minutes after midnight, the bark of a back-lane dog echoed through the open rear door of the Murphys’ house. Ruby paid it no heed. Most nights across those last months the same dog had been drawn down the lane to their back fence by the scent of poultry.
The henhouse butted up against the fence, running its full length except for a narrow gate at one end. When the sun shone Ruby’s hens could be found preening, scratching in the dirt, snapping at flies, dust-bathing, scrapping with each other and maintaining the pecking order. The only remnant of former days was Alex’s sandpit, and despite his earlier treatment by Pritch and her adopted daughters, he still played in it. The new flock of fifty-something hens left him alone. They didn’t like the sand, preferring to bathe in the soft earth. But at night there were only the rows of roosting chickens, and dogs weren’t the only predators. After a pair of huge owls made a hole in the henhouse roof, Ruby scavenged corrugated tin from worksites and derelict houses. Once the chooks had taken themselves off to bed at dusk, once Ruby had had her final chat with her girls to remind them of their responsibilities and encourage sweet dreams and plenty of eggs, the doors were latched shut. A tight fence and a solid roof didn’t stop the laneway dog barking, though.
Ruby took the dog’s arrival as an excuse to rest her legs, leaving the after-party clean-up to perch on the back step while Conrad continued to collect empties. After an hour’s sanctuary in the bowls club, half the audience had accepted Conrad’s offer to come back to Type Street, stopping off at the Royal Oak to buy beer and wine. Barnett had been a disappointment, carrying on like a humourless windbag, giving his lecture in the entirely unsuited surrounds of the Murphys’ living room. He’d finally departed a good half-hour after he’d exhausted the patience of the next-to-last visitor. Ruby would’ve left much earlier if it hadn’t been her own house.