by Alex Miller
The station attendant took him out to the gate and he pointed. ‘Go on up here till you get to Dandenong Road. You can’t miss it, son. She’s got double tram tracks running down the centre of her with trees along each side. Alma Road and the house you want is just along to the right.’
Robert thanked him and headed off along the busy street.
He kept the newspaper folded so he could check the address of the house. The streets were full of people and every so often he asked for new directions in case he’d taken a wrong turn. He kept his sheepskin jacket on, but he didn’t put on his hat with Frankie’s fancy plaited band around the crown, as he did not wish to be stared at. The hat he carried in the same hand as the newspaper. The swag he had swung over his shoulder and he held it by the strap. The sun was shining and the morning chill soon wore off and he was sweating in his jacket, but he kept it on for the comfort it gave him of a close and familiar thing, the smell almost the smell of home.
He stood on the footpath in front of the broken gate for some time looking along the driveway at the house. He was checking for signs of dogs before venturing in. The place looked to be abandoned, the garden overgrown with weeds and half-dead shrubs, the foliage wilting and dry, the iron gate swung half off its hinges. It was a mansion out of a story book, old and grey and rundown, with elaborate cast-iron balconies and a tall square tower. The glass was broken in one of the tall downstairs windows, the gap boarded up with a length of ply, stained and warped from exposure to the weather, newspaper stuffed in along the warps to keep out the rain. He went along the drive and rang the bell. The deep porch stank of cat’s piss. No one came to the door, so he rang the bell again.
The door was opened by a fat woman in her mid-fifties. She was short and square, her red hair—the grey growing out along the roots—hooked up in an untidy pile on top of her head and held more or less in place by an elaborate arrangement of combs and pins. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled above her elbows. Her breasts were massive, straining the material of her blouse out the sides of her apron. Robert was glad to see the woman’s apron was clean. His mother had always kept her aprons fresh.
The woman said, ‘So what are you staring at?’ Her accent was Irish.
He apologised for staring and said, ‘I’ve come for the room. I haven’t got the money for the first week’s rent, but I’ll pay you as soon as I get a job.’
‘You will, will you?’ Her thick fleshy lips pushed out, her fat cheeks glowing, tiny rivers of veins like worms crawling under the skin of her nose and her cheeks. Her eyes had a shrewd judging look in them as she examined his clothes and his swag. She said, ‘You think I haven’t heard that one before? Are you going to introduce yourself or do I have to guess who I’m talking to?’
‘I’m Robert Crofts,’ he said.
‘Well, Robert Crofts, are you coming in or are you going to stand there gawping all day?’
He followed her along the dark hall and past the stairs and into a back kitchen. She told him to wash himself at the sink. He set his swag and his hat down behind the door and took off his sheepskin and hung it over the back of a chair and he gave his face and hands a good soaping and dried himself with the piece of damp towel that was hanging there on a rail beside the sink. The faint smell of gas and the white stone sink with little cracks running all around gave him the feeling he had returned to something familiar, a place he’d known or dreamed about a long time ago, and here it was again.
While he was eating the eggs and bacon and the two slices of toast and drinking the black tea, the Irish woman sat across the table from him smoking a cigarette and studying him, not saying anything, her elbows on the pale scrubbed wood, her thick fingers playing with the cigarette packet and the brass lighter she had, swapping them back and forth from one hand to the other, as if it was a nervous habit she had got into to help her think. She kept the cigarette in her mouth, giving it a puff every now and then, screwing up her eyes against the sting of the smoke but not taking the cigarette out from between her lips. She turned aside to blow the ash off the end.
He finished eating and thanked her and set his plate to one side. She leaned across the table and offered him a cigarette from the packet then lit it for him with the brass lighter. She stood up, leaning her fat hands on the table and grunting, butted the remains of her cigarette in the sink and lit a fresh one. ‘Come on!’
She went ahead of him up the stairs, sighing and wheezing. She paused to breathe then opened the door to a room off the first-floor landing. They went in and stood. It was a big room, the air stale and musty, as if it had been closed up and unoccupied for some time. A narrow single bed was pushed against the wall in the far corner over by the window. An upright wardrobe with a mirror door stood along the wall next to the bed, the mirror door swung open. At the end of the bed there stood an easy chair with frayed red upholstery. It looked like a cat had been using it for a scratching post. Beside the chair was a small dark wood table, on it a brass ashtray and an empty milk bottle holding a withered hydrangea. The only other piece of furniture was a straight-backed chair against the far wall over to the right, like a child that has been told to stand in the corner and wait to be forgiven.
Robert and the woman went over and stood by the window and looked down into the garden. Below them a disused tennis court surrounded by a copsing of English elms. The early summer leaves of the elms catching the sun, pale and green and not in their full strength yet, the sunlight shining through them. A memory stirred in Robert of the stone barn on the farm in Somerset where he’d worked before leaving England. They had wintered the bullocks in the old barn, the gypsies setting their camp there in the autumn. A pair of giant elm trees growing out of the hedge by the barn. Trees two hundred years old. A pair of owls nesting in one of their hollows. And the winter morning when Robert went down to feed and bed the bullocks, those two great trees lying on the ground, the sky empty where they had stood, the bank and the hedge torn up where their roots had ripped out of the ground. There had been no wind or storm that night to bring those trees down. They had come down for no reason that he could see and he was greatly impressed. He remembers his thoughts then, spoken aloud in the solitary silence of the trees: ‘Those trees came down because it was their time.’ Big powerful trees like that in their prime, felled by something unearthly and beyond him. He was moved by the sight of them lying in their silence. He went up to them and touched their shattered branches with a feeling of concern and trespass. After he had fed the bullocks, he explored among the freshly exposed red loam where the bank of the hedge had been torn up, opened to the light of day by that wound for the first time since those trees began to grow there. He found a heavy coin and when he rubbed it clean he saw it was gold and was minted in the time of William and Mary. How long had it lain in the dark soil under the elms, waiting to return into the light? He pictured to himself the horseman who had lost it; in his imagination he saw the gold piece glint as it fell from the man’s purse while he was looking away, distracted by a shout from the barn. Robert could have gone on with that story if he’d bothered to. It was a beginning. A little offering he had not taken up. The mystery of the people lying lightly covered in that country, scattered and broken and lost to the present day, just below the surface of things. He had felt it, their presence, and had loved the feeling that his own history was mingled briefly with the secret life of that ancient place. Would anyone ever know he had passed that way?
He’d not seen an elm tree since he left England before his seventeenth birthday. At the sight of the copse in the Irish woman’s garden he felt a touch of nostalgia for the farm and for those magical innocent days of riding second horse to the hunting farmer, old Master Warren, days which had passed in a kind of dream for him. And the thought came into his mind, as he stood beside the Irish woman at the window looking down on the elm copse, that death might come to him as it had come to those two elms by the Norman barn. And it seemed to him to be a terrible possibility that he might exist to no
purpose.
When the Irish woman spoke, he was off with these thoughts and he jumped at the sound of her voice.
‘And will this suit your majesty?’ she said.
Without thinking at all, but wanting to please her, he said, ‘It’s wonderful.’
She snorted. ‘Wonderful, is it?’ She looked at him, considering. ‘You’re an odd one.’ She shook out another cigarette from the packet. He took it and thanked her.
‘You’ll be all right up here, son,’ she said. ‘The bathroom’s down the hall. There’s plenty of hot water. Don’t be afraid to use it.’ At the door she turned around. ‘Breakfast’s from six till eight.’
After the door closed behind her he took off his boots, got the ashtray from the table and lay down on the bed. He held the ashtray against his stomach and smoked the second cigarette. The last time he had slept in a real bed was in the stockmen’s quarters on Augustus Downs station, far away in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He thought about Frankie and their last camp, when the muster was over and they were back at the homestead and separated, him in the men’s quarters and Frankie out in the family camp with the women and children. The day before Robert flew out to the coast, the two friends met up by the river on neutral ground. They sat side by side high up on the bank, smoking and looking over the waterhole. There was a sign of the coming wet season in the air. They could smell the gidgee trees, which they called stinking wattle, as the leaves gave off a stink like a septic tank when there was humidity in the air. They kept still and quiet, the two of them sitting on the high bank, waiting until the freshwater crocs came creeping out of the water again to sun themselves. When the crocs had arranged themselves on the far bank—there must have been a couple of hundred of them—Frankie threw the stone he held ready in his hand. When the stone hit the water the crocs were gone in a furious flash of threshing and tumbling, panicked to get into the seething water. The smell coming up to the young men, the stale animal stink of the stagnant water at the end of the dry, the crocs swarming with hardly room to move around and nowhere to get away to from each other. Hundreds of them crowded up together and shitting in that green sludge of the dying river.
Frankie said, ‘So what are you going to do now, old mate?’
Robert did not answer his friend at once.
Frankie picked up another stone and lobbed it into the water.
Robert said, ‘Well, I’ll go to Townsville and see what’s happening out there on the coast.’ He felt guilty saying it. Frankie could not offer to go with him and he could not invite him to, even if they had both wished for it. Frankie resented not having the freedom of a white man. The two of them had talked about it often. Frankie and the other black stockmen were on their own tribal country out there. They were the kings of the Leichhardt River, but they had no birth certificates and could not travel without a permit from the police, and they were not able to get a permit from the police but only some sarcastic response if they ever asked for one. Robert was paid four pounds ten shillings a day while the black stockmen were not paid anything for their work. Frankie had told him their pay was supposed to be held in trust for them at a rate of four pounds ten shillings a week. ‘We never see it,’ he said. He turned aside and spat. He was bitter. Frankie and the other young men felt the humiliation of it keenly, but the older men said nothing about it. Robert had known nothing of how things stood with them and was shocked to learn these things from his friend. In his ignorance, he had believed that in Australia everyone was free to come and go as they chose. To learn that this was not so troubled him and made him thoughtful. ‘Maybe you could just ignore the rules and come out to the coast with me anyway.’
They were two young men of the same age and Frankie was as interested to know Robert’s story as Robert was to know his. Frankie said, ‘I would like to go and see England for myself one day.’ His resentment and anger burned inside him that he was not free to make such a journey. Robert was silent. It was a fearful thing to think Frankie was not a free man and he feared that with the passage of time his friend would become a man of anger and hatred. The hate was already there, the helpless bitterness of it.
The moment was awkward for them both and they were silent for some time. Robert had seen the way Frankie looked at the eagle and the wild dog and how he admired the solitariness of those creatures, and he saw something of himself in Frankie and had learned to love his friend and to admire him. They sat in the burning silence together up on the river bank, each knowing they would never meet again once Robert caught that plane out to the coast.
It was at this moment, and without a word, that Frankie took off his hat and passed it to Robert. Robert took off his own hat and handed it to Frankie. Neither spoke. Their hats were to them as a badge is to a soldier, or a flag. Frankie’s hat had a fine plaited band around the crown. Robert had watched him make it one time at a lunch camp. They were sitting in the thin shade of some red ash trees and Frankie had his legs stuck out in front of him and he worked the fine grasses and creepers he’d been plucking from the bushes they rode past during the morning, making a nice little collection for the hatband he had in mind. He was like a scrub bird collecting for its nest. He knew just what to take and he took things Robert did not even see. Robert admired the plaited hatband and Frankie showed him how it was done. They had laughed together at the clumsy results of Robert’s efforts.
Robert lay a while longer on the bed thinking of that life he had left behind and wondering what lay ahead of him. He butted the last of the landlady’s second cigarette and got up off the bed. He set his swag on the bed and undid the strap and laid everything out. It was all he owned lying there on that boarding house bed. There was nothing else, except the saddle and gear that he’d needed out in the cattle camps. He had given his saddle to Frankie. Seeing those few things lying on the bed, he knew he would never be going back to Frankie’s country. It was done. He did not know why. But knew himself to be more alone in that boarding house room in Melbourne just then than he had ever been before in his entire life. He was there to no purpose that he could see.
There was a brass hook behind the door. He hung his leggings and spurs and Frankie’s hat on the hook. As he was putting up Frankie’s hat he held it to his face and sniffed the inside of it. They were both there, the deep smell of their sweat mingled together, Frankie’s dry and sharp with a touch of cinnamon, Robert’s own a little sweeter to his idea of it. He smiled thinking of it and how the distinctive smell of their sweat was something they got so used to they stopped being aware of it.
He hung up the hat and went back to the bed and unfolded the two spare shirts and another pair of moleskins. The red paisley silk scarf his mother gave him the day he left home. He shook it out and held it up against the light from the window. It was a sudden gift which she brought out of her bag at St Pancras station as they were about to embrace for the last time. She didn’t speak but handed it to him. There was in that scarf still something of his parting from his mother. He set it beside his sewing gear, the needles and awls and hole punches for working leather and repairing the gear, the scarred ball of hard wax and the bobbin of twine. He could feel these things in his hands and was not ready to toss them out just yet. His clothes were stiff with dirt and sweat and when he shook the moleskins out he smelled the camp and the cooking fire and the horses.
He wondered then if having his freedom was such a great thing after all. Maybe he would have been better off bound as Frankie was bound, to his piece of country and his people. Frankie might not be free and equal before the law as he was, but he belonged in a way Robert knew he never could belong. Standing there in that musty old room, thinking these thoughts and looking at his things laid out on the bed, Robert felt as if the purpose of his life had come to an end. There was a nervous alertness in him, a tension that made him pause at the sound of a door closing downstairs, then a man’s voice calling, the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs. Maybe this disturbance was meant for him. Maybe there would be a message from so
meone. But the silence fell again.
The wardrobe had a narrow hanging space and two drawers. When he swung the door he saw himself in the mirror, his hair long and all over the place, his cheeks unshaved, his eyes reddened with a startled look in them. He had not realised how beaten down he was looking and was surprised now that the Irish woman had not turned him away from her door. The inside of the wardrobe gave off the smell of some old familiar place or thing that he could not name, a smell from childhood with the mystery of adults in it. It was too remote to pin a particular image to. He folded the paisley scarf and set it in the top drawer and thought of his mother giving it to him on the platform at St Pancras station. It struck him for the first time that it had been a strange gift from her, and he wondered what she had been thinking as she handed it to him that day. He had never worn it. It had always seemed too fine a thing to wear and he did not understand his mother’s meaning in giving it to him, unless she had imagined her son looking like John Wayne in the Australian wild west of her imagination. So it had kept something of the question that lay between the two of them, mother and son, and was to lie between them till her death. And then on into the bigger silence after her death. That silk scarf a talisman concerning some meaning or duty he did not see but would no doubt come to see one day. That was how he thought of it. A portent of something that was yet to unfold in his life. He laid his palm on it. The silk was warm to his touch. Silk, keeping its own warmth.