The Sunken Road

by Garry Disher

  Poverty

  Always with us, like the poor, her father sighed. It was just an expression, applied equally to droughts, punctured tyres, bad-penny types like the clerk of the council who’d been caught with his hand in the till, but Anna fixed on that word ‘poor’. She pictured an ordained society, clean people going about their business, except that among them were the tolerated poor—ten per cent or so—who could be identified by the dark cast of their faces, their grimy hands, their air of shuffling helplessness—if the people around her were to be believed. Just an expression, yet Anna took it seriously. Did her father mean that the poor could not help being poor, and it was therefore pointless for the rich to help them? What of George Catford, discoverer of the Pandowie copper lode, left destitute and unacknowledged apart from his twenty guineas? She’d heard Grandfather Ison, Great Aunt Beulah, Uncle Kitch and plenty of others say that it was their own fault, the poor. No elbow grease, slack bootstraps and something inborn. But, as Grandfather Tolley observed: You can afford to say that if you’re born to rule. I advertised for a shop assistant when I came here at the height of the Great Depression and over two hundred people applied. You can’t tell me it was their fault they were poor. The Isons and the Showalters, they’ve always had a cushion under them. Anna knew of one genuinely poor family. When the Floods moved into the district, people drove past for a look. The Floods rented a house where the Terowie road intersected with the railway line, a redundant railway ganger’s house a car’s length from the level crossing, so that the thundering goods trains broke in upon their dreams. A dark-haired, thin, unsmiling father, a broad-beamed, lardish mother, and nine torn-skinned, restless, grimy children. They struggled. Grandfather Tolley paid Mr Flood to unload the weekly deliveries and the Showalters paid him to clear weeds and stones from their landing strip. Mrs Flood took in sewing. The boy Chester was composed of fleshless cheeks, hard, angular, dusty bare legs and arms, and hatchet-trimmed straight black hair. The smell of him leaked from his gappy pants and holed shirts. Until he got wise to everyone he’d dive for a dare through the fences at school or plunge impossibly from rail to rail down the monkey bars in sharp, black intensity. The father and the children looked half-starved. The mother’s bulk was the bulk of white bread, child-rearing and possibly cheap sherry, although no bottles were found in the ditches at the end of the town, and the family was never seen in the Bon Accord Hotel. The Tolleys were among the few who saw good in the Floods—Mr Flood might have been threadbare but he was always decently turned out, Mrs Flood finished Anna’s ball dress beautifully, and the children were not deliberately bad or stupid, simply reeling from ten schools and towns in seven years. And those children were fast on their feet: if not for them, Pandowie would have come last in the school sports. But the Floods were lightning rods for calamity. Mr Flood was decapitated by a crop duster’s propeller on Showalter Park, and Mrs Flood died soon after, possibly of a broken heart. The children were suddenly grown-up and wary before their time. The government stepped in and placed them with strangers. Only Chester and Violet stayed in the town, wards of the convent. Anna went through the next few years blind to them, until a department car one day came for Violet, and the district buzzed: She was doing it with shearers and shedhands for a shilling a time. When Grandfather Ison died, leaving Anna’s mother nothing and no house to live in, the Tolleys began to enact a life that was like a rehearsal for poverty. The six-forty acres was no Isonville, and now there was a mortgage to boot. Then a second mortgage. No more casual trips to the city; no more little gifts just to say I love you; a second-hand school uniform for Anna, dry-cleaned but still inhabited by a stranger’s body; a vegetable garden; a rickety desk for Hugo from Pandowie Collectibles. For ten years Anna’s father made do with the little Austin. He patched boards as they broke on the tray, replaced bare tyres with worn tyres, decoked the valves himself, let the registration lapse. Once as sleekly black as the Showalters’ Bentley, the little truck faded to the mossy greys of the hillside rocks. He liked to say, after Anna had run away from her school in the city, that he hadn’t known how he was going to afford her fees anyway. But they were not poor, merely careful, and occasionally living on a knife edge. Anna learned more about poverty from Lockie’s family. She was sixteen when she met them and by the end of the summer knew these things: you stole a little—a sheep here and there, a battery out of a car, a can of petrol siphoned from a neighbour’s bulk drums; you let things ‘go’—fences, bores, engines, tyres; you bought on the never-never; cash deals only, no cheques or receipts to bother the tax man; you shot rabbits and pigeons; you did not read, did not travel, did not hope. But still you knew everyone’s business and were afraid of no one, as you smoked and winked and took the mickey in the thick hours of evening, seated around the gouged pine table where family life was lived. Strategies, in other words, not only for putting food in your belly but for seeing you through times of emptiness, when things are apt to look skewed against you. When Anna married Sam it was not only material poverty that her father-in-law forced upon them—ensuring that they would not fritter away all that he’d achieved by the sweat of his brow—but also a poverty of the spirit. If the Jaegers ever laughed, it was grimly satisfied laughter. They wouldn’t allow themselves to spend much in the way of love. Whenever Anna wrapped Michael and Rebecca in hugs and sloppy kisses, she heard disobliging sniffs high above her kneeling body. Sam had inherited his parents’ emotional thrift, but he tried, at least he tried, snatching hugs and pecks from the children when his parents weren’t around. The Jaegers would have robbed the children of wonder and magic if Anna had not been so vigilant. She sang with them on her knee, filled their heads with stories and nonsense, and encouraged them to step into the pictures in their bedtime books. She wanted richness in their lives. In a recent article for the Chronicle, Anna has written: We must recognise and help the hidden poor in our midst. Now she can’t walk down the street without someone staring hotly: I’m not poor, how dare you. Anna wants these people to see their situations with fresh eyes, but she’s fighting a losing battle. Even the most desperate would rather get behind the 150th Jubilee celebrations than be informed that they need not accept their plight. The old-timers say it’s sad to see an Ison turning her back on the district, as though they believe that Anna thinks she’s better than anyone else, and the kids who hang about on the footpath outside the cheerless Community House seem to thrust their lower jaws at her as if to say: What would you know? When Anna retires to the city she will become accustomed to the motionless shapes of homeless men and women. They will be there in the sand dunes, under the jetty, on the leeward side of the breakwater, in kiosk doorways when she goes on her early morning walks, each one uniformly brown-blanketed or grey, their heads hidden, silent as she passes at a respectful distance. Another of her father’s expressions will come back to her: There but for the grace of God, et cetera.

  Music

  They followed the organ at church, and had a mantel radio, but the children wanted music they could make. They spent the drowsy afternoons in Beulah’s half of the house, where the pianola rolls were stacked in a sideboard so grim that it swallowed all of the light. While Hugo wrote in the dust next to the crystal decanter, Anna opened the doors and rummaged around for ‘The Rose of Tralee’. There was something about that song, but she could not remember what it was. Since the children’s legs were so short, Mrs Mac wriggled her rump onto the stool and pumped the pedals for them. Soon her thundering back and haunches were rocking, her big head tipping like a metronome. She crossed her arms like a potentate. Magic! she cried. No hands! as the keys tocked magically up and down the keyboard and the children bared their teeth. But, behind them, Great Aunt Beulah began to cry. Anna turned, begged: Please, don’t cry. I can’t help it, Great Aunt Beulah said, it’s that blessed song, it brings back memories. At once Anna’s tears began to spill. She had delivered her great aunt a cruel, unthinking unkindness. My true love, said Great Aunt Beulah, forbidden to me by my father. Anna offer
ed to change the roll. No! said Great Aunt Beulah. Let me hear it. Back where the light was warm and strong, the children’s mother said: Of course you may, my darlings, and after school the following day Anna and Hugo enrolled with Mrs Morehead, Pianoforte Instruction To All Levels. Clunk... panicky search... clunk, went Anna’s Tolley fingers, while Mrs Morehead, a raw-nerved woman with feelings close to combustion, hovered at her elbow with a knuckle-rapping ruler. Mrs Morehead, wife of the clerk of the district council, bitterly confirmed in her opinion that fate and a husband had delivered her to a hellhole. Then Mr Morehead’s hands were found in the till, and the Moreheads moved on. When Anna turned sixteen she was permitted to stay out until midnight one night a week, which meant the Pandowie drive-in or the fortnightly dance. She was there when Lockie Kelly and Chester Flood staged a coup at the Wirrabara hall. They were tired of foxtrots, quicksteps, military two-steps, The Pride of Erin. Drive fifty miles for that once a fortnight, fifty miles back again? The Masonic Hall had a fast waxed floor but the dancing couples trudged around it like convicts in irons, as sluggish as the Wirrabara Inkspots, three after-work farmers who plonked themselves on the stage like old labourers at the end of the day, expressionless, immobile, scarcely moving their arms, the music leaking away when it should have been stirring the blood. Mr Riggs on piano, Mr Phelan on guitar, Mick Molloy scratchety scratch on the drums. They counted: One two three, one two three; everyone counted, inducing a mass trance, the same thing every fortnight. But Lockie and Chester showed them, leaping onto the stage at the end of the first bracket, belting out ‘Eight Days a Week’. Anna came awake on the waxed floor. When Mick Molloy emerged from the supper room, a lamington speckling his ruffled shirt, she watched for fireworks, her eyes bright and hopeful, but it was all right, Mick swallowed and joined the boys as though they had delivered him from the dead. They formed a new band. The Wirrabara Dance became sixty-forty after that, a little waltzing bearable if you could stomp and shout as well. Anna became a kind of lead-singer’s moll. She liked it. On the day that Anna’s future husband took her home to meet his parents, she was warned: They’re a bit, you know, fanatical, so we’ll slip away if it gets too much. Anna shrugged. She’d heard whispers about the Jaegers, but clearly Sam wasn’t like them. His mother clasped Anna’s hands and sighed, as if to search her soul: Mr Jaeger and I have found the Lord, my dear. We hope that you may too, in time. Do you sing? A little song around the piano? Sam cut in: Mum, we’d better go. The father rumbled then, black as night: Come on boy, you’ve only just arrived, and Anna saw a side of Sam that she wanted to make better—his hunted, halfway-there rebellion. So they sang, a couple of harmless songs as a polite nod to Anna’s secular self, a couple to sow the seed, clapping hands for Jesus. Afterwards Sam said: Sorry about that. No need to be, Anna told him. But that was the one and only time she sang with them, and the Jaegers came to give her glance-away looks of deep deep sorrow, to lift their noses as though to catch a whiff of corruption, the Devil’s slick tracks, upon her skin. But she could never entirely escape their grim joy in a grim God. Now and then, as she rattled the ice in her sundowner on the verandah and the deckchair canvas creaked to her weight like a ketch at sea, faint voices raised in joyous song drifted up from the stone house below. There were always cars grille-to-grille in the Jaegers’ yard at times like that. Anna liked to train the fieldglasses on them: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland. They were the Logos Foundation. There were not many of them but they reached hands across the miles. Later Sam’s parents formed a splinter group that called itself the Church of the Creator. Later still they joined the Ascension League. Along with every other disappointment that she causes her husband now, Anna puts herself out of reach, loses herself, when she’s at the keyboard of their old piano. Sam complains that she becomes too detached, he doesn’t like it, but it’s more than that—he doesn’t want her to walk where he cannot follow. He doesn’t want her to go the distance. They’ve had a call from Rebecca. She’s agreed to perform a recital during the Copper Festival: Nothing too demanding for you lot. ‘The Four Seasons’, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. No one loves a smartarse, Becky. Anna’s hands will seize up as the years go by. She will rely increasingly upon tapes and compact discs and borrow operas and ballets from a video library. The technology will change and she’ll struggle to keep pace with it. An old woman, laying bare a box of switches and dials on Christmas morning: It’s lovely, dear, thank you. Grandma’s very pleased. If you’ll just show me how to work it?

  God

  If Anna had been a boy, the Methodist congregation might have remarked upon her godliness and not only upon the godliness of her brother. She wore her red Sunday School dress, and she mounted the pulpit confidently, clasped the dark wood, leaned into the stifling air: The word of God is like an auger, drilling out the badness in us all. But Anna had over-reached again. The congregation yawned, ricepaper fans whipped before crepy necks, and fingers tugged at collars and ties, and when Anna saw her father glance doubtfully at his finger, cut off by an auger, the words died in her throat. She felt blood rush to her cheeks—Miss Smartypants, guilty of trampling her clodhopper boots over someone’s feelings again. She stepped down. Hugo took her place. The dear little boy, whispered the congregation. His gaberdine suit, his angelic smile, his voice as clear as a bell: The lesson for today is. Anna suspected that her mother pictured him in a clerical collar. She saw her mother blink, a handkerchief balled in her hand. Every Sunday after that, Anna fought against buttons and bows: Is the Queen going to be there or something? When Anna was fourteen, Maxine urged her to join Youth Fellowship. I can’t stand that God stuff, Anna said, but Maxine said: It’s not like that, just a short prayer, a bit of a discussion, then table-tennis, charades, dancing to records. Reverend Allen leaned forward in his fold-up chair, his freckled, thick and hairless forearms solidly upon his knees, and looked around at the semicircle: Tonight we’re going on a moonlight ramble around the town, but first let’s spend a few minutes discussing what it is we should look for in a marriage partner. Those drones, their sweet voices piped up: a Christian, honesty, goodness, good manners. Anna lifted her chin: Physical attraction. She faced them all down. They hated her, those buttons and bows, but she had an unexpected ally, for the Reverend Allen held up his palms: Just a minute, everyone. Anna’s right, physical attraction is very important. Suddenly Mrs Allen was there in their minds, eight months pregnant. Then they walked in the moonlight. Country towns hug the earth at the fall of night. A distant screen door complained on its hinges, a streetlight hissed and popped, the moon caught the glass shards in the roadside ditches. Otherwise there was only the darkness, their scratchy footsteps where the bitumen became dirt and gravel, and spurts of conversation which faltered under the ear of the stars, the ear of the Reverend Allen. Then the air got to their spirits; nothing could keep them down for long. Anna and Maxine swaggered shoulder to shoulder down the centre of the road while boys drifted across in front of them, slowing, slowing—like Anna and Maxine, those boys were scarcely breathing by now—until there was the unmistakeable poke of superstructured breasts between their shoulderblades. They bounced away again, back into the night. The syllogism was framed like this: A large family is a poor family; a poor family is a no-hoper family; therefore Lockie was the son of no-hopers. Anna’s father did not quite come out and say that Lockie was also a Catholic. Look at that, would you?—the shells of cars rusting in the yard, fences falling down, skin-and-bone sheep panting in the dirt around the scummy troughs. Priest-riddled, ignorant and superstitious. Anna flared: I don’t care, you can’t stop me from seeing him. But God came between the lovers in unexpected ways. Lockie, it’s yours and it’s beautiful, Anna told him. It doesn’t put you off? Of course not, she said. She didn’t tell him that she felt wonder, curiosity and a kind of heat in equal measures. She heard a faint phsst and saw the gluey mass flip and flip out of him, splashing onto his stomach. He groaned softly, turned away, cleaned himself. A little death. What’s wrong? Nothing. Anna p
ursued him: What’s wrong? This, Lockie said, guilt, misgiving and desire heavy in his face. What we just did. In her room at Women’s College he would restlessly pick up and set down one book after another. Arguments For and Against the Existence of God: You’re leaving me behind, he said. Then, blurtingly: Marry me? Lockie, come here, come on. But Lockie lolled in pain against the door. Anna’s children were christened by the Reverend Allen. He muttered automatically under the domed roof of the Pandowie Methodist church and traced a damp fingertip over their foreheads. Their responses were typical. Michael opened his eyes for a moment, closed them, and briefly wriggled his arms and legs, but a drop of water ran cold and unwelcome from Rebecca’s temple to her ear, and she heaved and roared to be free. A few months after Sam broke with his father, Mrs Jaeger wrote to Anna: I felt I must send you this little book, dear, with a sincere desire that it may open your eyes. Mr Jaeger and I were thirtyish before ours were opened. You will probably be bemused, to say the least, if you have never heard what the author has to say. Believe me, it is all one big conspiracy. Mr Jaeger and I were horrified when we learned the true extent of it, which, of course, is never revealed in the popular media. I find the ABC particularly biased and I listen for the alternative viewpoint but it never comes, and never anything remotely uplifting. Even the wildlife programs refer to evolution and the earth’s age as billions of years, when scientists whose work goes unrecognised put it at no more than 10,000 years. It is sad that people have used their own free will and turned their backs on a mighty God. Don’t let this happen to you, dear Anna, for the Lord will have the last say when he says, Enough! My love to my darling grandchildren. When Mr Jaeger died, the cars with the out-of-state plates appeared in the Jaegers’ yard overnight. Those holy rollers, fumed Sam after the funeral. The bastards have been helping themselves to the old man’s petrol and diesel. Anna said: I’m surprised the pumps weren’t padlocked, and got a dirty stare. Those holy rollers also had an eye on the farm, but they didn’t know what Anna knew, that the Jaegers of this world might give up their souls to God but never their worldly goods. Rebecca has begun to attend a little High Anglican church in North Adelaide. Meg affects amusement, but Anna can sense the chagrin under it. According to Meg, Rebecca is pretty well representative of the congregation—a few gay academics, a few yuppies, no one younger than twenty or older than fifty, dress casual but expensive. Meg laughs, a harsh bark in the little house: The new face of the church. I myself haven’t the time for self-examination. Anna doesn’t know her daughter, and wonders if that matters. She doesn’t ask, she doesn’t meddle, but she does wonder what drives Rebecca. She wonders if it has anything to do with that old wariness, Becky’s watchful gaze from the passenger seat. Anna will grow old wondering it. For her part, Rebecca will not forsake her mother, but she will keep a door closed between them.