The Sunken Road

by Garry Disher

  Dancing

  Grandmother Ison loved to dance. She was more spirited than the Isons, who were dour, pessimistic and hectoring, the slow flame of grievances nudging their hearts along. Even though Great Aunt Beulah wore her down, cruelly pleased to have someone at her beck and call, Grandmother Ison danced to remind herself of who she had been before she married into the Isons. For a start, she was not born to be a Methodist—she liked a sip of sherry and she loved to dance. Try to imagine that these crossed sticks are swords, Anna dear, she said. Hands on hips, back straight, on your toes, knees high, this is how we do the Highland Fling. Anna wore a heavy pleated tartan skirt, white socks, black shoes; her ribboned hair bounced against her spine. The skirt flowed, divided, lifted and fell, and for the first time in her life she sensed her body, its grace, ease and arrogance. Bravo, Grandma Ison said. Anna’s mother confided: She used to teach me too, on the quiet. It’s not that my Dad was against dancing, but he’d grown up in a very strict household and never really approved of it, so Mum and I used to practise in the woolshed when he wasn’t looking. I would love to have gone to balls and dances when I was a girl. I’ll take you dancing, Anna’s father said, and he whisked the children and their mother off to the Woolshed Dance at Showalter Park. The woolshed, a dark, echoing, six-gabled stone chamber the size of half-a-dozen houses, with stands for sixty shearers, was on the National Trust register. Nothing would ever crack or shift it. As two hundred pairs of feet stamped upon the hardwood floor, and dust and cigarette smoke gauzed the air, Anna and Hugo dangled their legs over the edge of a wooden platform and watched the women spin their skirts, the men their glossy shoes. Behind them the band sawed and thumped. Anna itched to dance. She rocked on her haunches, bobbed and swayed, then stood, and felt her feet begin to move. She danced through the evening, a solitary figure caught in the repeating rhythms of the greasy night. She turned thirteen and was not convinced of her beauty. Long, angular, small-handed, composed of hipbones, ribcage, elbows and ankles—who would want her? Besides, there was the question of her luck and of her unlucky age, thirteen. But she did not want Mr Wheelwright to pair her at the last minute with a boy who had a pocked, milky face and hadn’t had the courage to ask that singsong question: Will you be my partner for the Polonaise? She reasoned that if no boy was going to ask her, she would do the asking. Six weeks before the high school ball, she asked a boy from the schoolbus on the Bitter Wash line, and he blinked, sidled past her, side-mouthing: If you like. The school’s tennis courts were weeded and swept, a record player was set up in the corner, and the Head quivered upon a wooden chair above the snaking line of couples: Remember, your parents will be there, Mrs Showalter and her son will be there, the mayor will be there. I’m counting on you not to let the school down. The Polonaise is a stately march, children. Flow with it, heads high, bodies graceful. At the mid-point of a long winter, when the women of Women’s College seemed closed-in and crabby, the street rallies futile and Lockie touchy and easily hurt, Anna sought to clean and sharpen herself. The leotard folded into almost nothing. None of her friends ever went near the draughty back streets of the city, where poky shops dispensed tattoos and fast haircuts, and light-stepping, big-bellied, beehived women ran first-floor dance studios, classical and modern. Anna dipped, whirled, leapt, and heard her bare feet slap convincingly on the varnished floor. It gave her courage; it gave her shape. Connie said, as they showered and changed after class: Coming for a drink? It was an unlikely friendship. Hard knocks had scored lines on Connie’s face and a wry, dry rasp in her voice. She smoked and drank and took taxis. Anna was not long married to Sam Jaeger when the town council voted to bring the Mechanics Institute up to ballroom standard. The floor proved to be fast; crystal chandeliers distributed the light. Now there was a reason for a Tennis Club Dance, a Football Club Social, a Cricket Club Hop, and a New Year’s Eve Ball to outmatch the one in Yarcowie. Anna had not seen Chester Flood since the old days. His white dress shirt looked very white, his black suit very black. The old, assaying stillness and concentration were still there, and she saw that he was better looking than she’d remembered. He drew back his head to smile at her, witty, courteous and shrewd, his hand firm in the small of her back when they danced. Complicated feelings of loyalty, luck and dishonour made her feet fast, her colour high, her eyes alive, her body half-yielding. She floated home, and Sam said to her at the wheel, as the headlights played over stone walls and foxes on the prowl in the starlight: I saw you, don’t go thinking I didn’t. You and him and that bloke who got killed, you were pretty tight in the old days. There are not so many opportunities for dancing any more. The policeman has given up on the Blue Light Disco, for the kids want booze, amphetamines, video clips and something to sharpen their hopes for a job. The Bowls Club Social is coming up next week. Anna has promised a potato salad. She likes to dance with Sam, his slow, sturdy, regular beat, and with her brother, who is jokier, clumsier, a familiar slice of herself. The 150th Jubilee Committee has pledged a Gala Ball for the Year 2000 celebrations, maybe an Olympic athlete to present the Belle and Beau of the Ball. In the years to come, stiff, creaking gentlemen will sometimes take Anna to a supper dance, where the music will tinkle obligingly. Her granddaughter will enrol in a Saturday morning ballet class, but, soon after managing the splits, lose interest in favour of horses and charms for her bracelet.

  Reunion

  Teeth-staining tea in bone china cups, Anzac biscuits, service medals clanking on Grandfather Ison’s dark suit and on their father’s sports coat. Even their mother wore a tiny red and gold cloth badge in her lapel. Waiting, in the house in Burnside, until it was time to take a bus in to the Cross of Remembrance. Parking will be hell, Peter, Grandfather Ison said. He had the bus timetable open upon the table. Pom, pom, pom. The children’s father stretched his legs, leaned back in the little kitchen chair, clasped his hands behind his head. Smoke wreathed about his sun and smile-crinkled face, and his cigarette bobbed: Good to catch up with the blokes again. Grandfather Ison stiffened. His spine seemed to say: No slouching, not in this house. No talking around a cigarette. Remember who you are, remember it’s the Isons you married into, remember what this day represents. It was a day of reunions, but Grandfather Ison wanted it to be a day of mourning. Even Eleanor, his daughter, was going off with her pals from the munitions factory after the ceremony. Anna saw her father snap forward in the chair, swing around to the sideboard and silence the radio: That’s better. Couldn’t hear myself think. Grandfather Ison swelled: Good God, man, that was a Bach mass. Behind her husband, swirling in her apron, the cake tin in her hands, Grandmother Ison twinkled, a silent message directed at Anna: Your dad likes winding your grandpa up, doesn’t he? It’ll be a relief when they’ve finished their tea and left the house so we can have the place to ourselves. The only gift that mattered on Anna’s twenty-second birthday was unexpected and unintended: Hi, Anna. Coming home at last, April sometime. Be good to catch up with you. Guess what—they gave me a stripe. Yours etc., Corporal Lachlan Kelly, esq. She turned the card over. Rice and misty saw-teeth mountains, and a kid with a water buffalo. A flicker of outrage: Vietnam’s being torn apart by war and they’re still making postcards? Not Lockie’s fault, though. They’d be reunited soon and that’s what mattered. They would start anew. He still wanted her, didn’t he? He’d written to say he was coming home—that had to mean something. And he hadn’t needed a lucky wound to bring him back. On the morning of the reunion of the Isons, Anna made a potato salad, sorted, weighed and packed fifty dozen eggs, filled the car from the bulk fuel tank, cleaned the children’s shoes, got herself and the children ready, and read to them until Sam came in from the paddock. She imagined her way into her mother’s skin, walking through the big house on Isonville again. I’ve been there a few times in the past year, you know, helping Kitch get his facts right for the reunion book and writing letters to far-flung Isons, that kind of thing. I must say I feel better about the bad blood between us. But I’ve never been invited further than
the kitchen. Lorna’s a difficult woman. Did you know yours is an old family name? Anna. Hugo’s another one. Rebecca. Michael. Old Mrs Mac’s been invited. And a million Isons. Kitch has been marvellous. He actually dug up an old photo, it had on the back ‘Ison’s Field, Berkshire’. Makes you think, doesn’t it. That’s how Anna’s mother had been babbling on for the past few months, and Anna could see now that it was simple excitement. Her mother was a forgiver. So long as Kitch doesn’t have a go at me about not checking Chancery records for him, Anna told herself, then maybe I can forgive, too. Anna stared around the heads of her children, beyond the verandah railing, focussing on a flash of windscreen glass in the Jaegers’ yard below. Sam and his father, back from the paddock. The father saying something, laying down the law, Sam turning his back, stamping up the track toward the house. The sooner we find somewhere else to live, the better, Anna thought. Sam stormed up the verandah steps: That’s the last time I talk to my old man, the last time I work alongside him. I’m cutting myself free. As of now, I’m a separate person. We’ll never be reconciled. But then Michael was killed. Sam grieved. He looked accusingly at Anna: What were you doing on that part of the road, anyhow? He wanted his mother and his father around him. He was away for most of the day. Anna and Rebecca heard the thin slam of the Land Rover’s door just as the sun irradiated the clouds behind the Razorback and died. Rebecca ran to him and he swept her up. Anna remained where she was; she knew that she must seem cold and staring to her husband and her daughter, but she had no light left in her. Sam hesitated in the doorway, finally bursting out: I had to come home. I couldn’t stand it any longer. They had their holy rollers there. Wanted me to sit around in a circle with them, holding hands. Said we were going to thank God for taking Michael. And his voice cracked. Rebecca’s arms went tight around him. At least Sam had the love of a daughter in his life. Reunions, anniversaries, get togethers. Anna was reunited with Maxine, but not with Lockie. On the twentieth anniversary of the Hammersmith house, she was not at the base of Nelson’s Column, and nor, she supposed, were the New Zealanders who had taken her in. Tonight Anna is on the telephone to North Adelaide: They’ve even planned a high school reunion. I tell you, Becky, I’m getting tired of the word Jubilee. You’re a cynic, mother. I liked that school. I wouldn’t mind catching up with everyone again. Becky, you hated school. No I didn’t. School was an escape. Anna swallows. She wants to cry. She doesn’t know what the truth is about some things, any more. She doesn’t know if Becky’s being tactless or intending to wound. Anna’s frame will shrink and her bones grow brittle, and she’ll wonder, when the time comes: With whom, in death, shall I be reunited? Will Michael still be five years old with a smiling dimpled chin, or will he be middle aged, as I am old? Will my grandmother bear the wounds of those tearing teeth? Will she like me? Will the other one want to dance?

  Drunk

  Mrs Mac was shickered again. The signs were her rousing laughter and the ebb and flow of poorly remembered songs at the other end of the house. The children’s mother confirmed it: Shickered again. She would never apply so hard a word as ‘drunk’ to Mrs Mac; nor would it occur to her to mislead the children. Mrs Mac sometimes had a little too much to drink—a sad, sad affliction for poor Mrs Mac. The single bottle of Southwark Bitter in their own fridge and the decanter of visitors’ cream sherry on their sideboard were not the same thing at all, for these bottles were scarcely ever opened and the children had better remember that. Their mother’s giggling two glasses on Christmas Day didn’t count, either. Anna kept to the winding path between the hollyhocks and lavender, listening to Mrs Mac, listening to the satisfying crush and snicker of the white pebbles beneath her sandalled feet. She rounded the corner, where the subsided ground had sucked the glassy cement of the verandah with it, and found Mrs Mac planted unsteadily in carpet slippers outside Great Aunt Beulah’s bedroom window. Mrs Mac’s eyes were glittering discs, her lips wide and wetly open over her shifting dentures. She bawled: Now Jim poor soul’s got a belly full of coal and he corfs up lumps of coke, oi! Come on, youngster, with me now. La, la, la et cetera, oi! Anna watched, closed-in and silent. She wanted some sort of showy disaster. She couldn’t see any bottles nearby. They would have been inside the house somewhere. The evidence was all in Mrs Mac: Bad-tempered old cow, your Auntie Beulah. Thinks her shit doesn’t stink. Whoops! Pardon me, your highness. One year the children of the primary school were enlisted by the returned servicemen of the district to collect empty bottles for Legacy. Remember the widows and fatherless children, the RSL president cried above a blustery northerly, and grades five, six and seven were waved through the school gates with chaff bags upon their backs. Anna and Maxine paired off to search the grassy ditches and thistly culverts behind the Stock & Station sale yards. They came back with eight bottles, a wheel-less toy and a mud-and-horsehair bird’s nest dislodged from a tree by the high winds. They sniffed at and upended each bottle before placing it in their sacks. They giggled, fancying that the sharp stale beer whiff had unhinged their senses. Anna staggered in the roadside gravel, bawling: He wears gorblimey trousers and he lives in a council flat! She roamed the back roads behind Isonville and Showalter Park on her bicycle, the pannier hooked to her handlebars so full of bottles that she had to fight to steer a safe line between the potholes, sleepy lizards and heat-snapped fallen branches. The mail contractor slowed to pass her, then accelerated grimly away, his springs creaking, the dust of the sunken road wreathing about her head. She saw him stop at the Park’s massive stone gateposts, lodge the gaol-sewn mailbag in the box, whine off down the road again, and, just as she drew adjacent to the curving drive, Mr Showalter himself was there to collect the mail. He didn’t see Anna at first. His hand went in, came out with the mailbag. Again he reached in, and this time he had a bottle of whisky, a handy pocket size. Anna saw a flash of glass and then the bottle was inside the concealing folds of his jacket as her squeaky wheels betrayed her on the road. He knew that she’d caught him. He winked, his puffed, rubbery features bunching like a glove, then grinned, his bloodshot eyes disappearing. It’s our little secret, he said. Just you, me, the mailman and the gatepost. But his drinking was not a secret; nor was the fact that his friends and acquaintances delivered bottles to him on the quiet; nor that he could be a menace at the wheel of a car when he’d been drinking. For a time at Women’s College Anna drank until she lost consciousness. They all did it. A kind of drinkers’ club existed and they might play poker, and smoke and swig down beer and cheap wine, for twelve hours at a stretch. Anna fell in slow, sleepy, smiling, good-natured stages toward oblivion. She was not an argumentative, bitter or lashing-out drunk. But then one of them pitched head first to the ground from a second floor balcony and was paralysed for life, so they disbanded the club and nobody spoke of it again. Anna learned to pace herself. Two drinks were generally sufficient to relax her clenched jaws, her tight stomach muscles, and drive the demons away. Two sundowners on the verandah, watching Sam, her husband, dust-scribbling on the tractor in the valley below. She almost loved him then. Wesley Showalter was clearly three sheets to the wind before lunch on the day a stud breeder from Dubbo wrote out a cheque for thirty-four thousand dollars to buy Pandowie Showalter Lustre 6. The women of the Ladies’ Auxiliary kept their distance from him behind the trestle bench in the refreshment tent—he was very fumy, very noisy, and rough with it. It was the same every year, the biggest field day in the state, let down by Wesley Showalter himself. His movements during the afternoon left gaps of an hour or so unaccounted for, but a sharefarmer from Yarcowie remembered seeing him fishtail away from the big house in the dusty Bentley at about four o’clock and disappear on to the sunken road, probably bound for the Bon Accord. Anna’s Jubilee history is thematic, not chronological, in structure. She’s found this in The Park: the First Hundred Years, privately published by Mrs Showalter in 1950: