‘They don’t make them like this...’ he said and Tom finished for him.
‘They don’t make anything like this anymore.’
The old bloke’s eyes looked liked sucked plums. Terry dropped his empty stubby into the esky.
‘Gotta go, Tom.’
As Terry drove off, he watched the old bloke wave at him and touch the peak of his cap.
Terry’s mobile rang, again. He turned up the car stereo and let it ring out.
Christ, Nifty, you’re the boss.
They’ve got no idea, Terry thought. They don’t know a steering wheel in your hands can feel like it’s on a tall ship. They don’t know it’s a long way to anywhere worth going. Terry gunned it all the way to Melbourne, and by the time he came out of the stadium after the concert, covered in sweat and tossed beer, there was a stream of missed calls and voicemails waiting for him.
He’s in the FJ. He won’t get out. Fire’s comin in. Keeps raising the shotty every time we get close.
The crowd left the stadium singing and whooping, but Terry sat on a kerb near a taxi rank and rang Nifty back. He heard all about the flames growing round Tom until everyone stopped screaming and looked away.
Terry was gutted. He could have saved Tom. Maybe. But he felt most gutted because, instead of Tom, he saw Ron in that FJ. Grinning like a chimp.
13. Joe, Penny, Molly and Lee Stevenson
They were the ones, Peter remembered, that the extended family had always whispered about. If a member of the Stevenson clan lost a job or lucked out with some illness or other, they’d soon be reminded that things could be worse. They could be one of the Nutter Stevensons. A knowing silence would descend on backyard family gatherings, and only the sound of sizzling barbecue meat would remain. One after the other, Stevensons would raise stubbies or wine glasses to their lips and wonder how one family, those religious nutters, could stuff their lives up so entirely.
‘They take it too far,’ was Jules Stevenson’s pronouncement on Joe and Penny Stevenson’s approach to religion. ‘And involv-ing the kids like that! It’s a disgrace.’
For more than twenty years, Jules and the rest of the Stevensons had based their understanding of Joe, Penny and their two kids, Molly and Lee, on half-substantiated tales. Because that’s all there was.
When Peter was in his mid-thirties, divorced and just moved into a flat on his own, he’d contracted an illness that doctors could neither diagnose nor treat. He’d taken a desperate punt and allowed an old school friend turned born again Christian to bring a scrappy looking grey-headed man to his hospital bed. That man had laid hands on Peter, shouted various incantations to the heavens, and healed him. That very hour. Doctors had put Peter’s recovery down to a mixture of penicillin and bed rest, but he wasn’t sure. His friend hadn’t left any contact details and he hadn’t been told his healer’s name. It wasn’t until several years later, when Peter saw the news story about the discovery of Joe’s dead body, if that was the right term for what was found, that he realised his healing had been all in the family.
He managed to track down Lee Stevenson, living in Hoppers Crossing. What Peter thought would be an hour-long catch up, at best, became a friendship. And as much as Peter’s idea for initiating contact had been to try to authenticate his healing, he couldn’t push the issue. In fact, he forgot about it. Because he was dealing with a man who was still grieving deeply. With a hell of a story. Or a heaven of a story. Lee seemed never sure which. Or whether he loved or hated his father. Peter sat and nodded at that one.
He thought he’d moved around a lot as a kid, but Lee’s family had, from his earliest years, moved from one house to another. They had been billeted by Christian families who’d wanted to support Joe and Penny’s work. Which was nothing more than trying to emulate, as a married couple, the monk St Francis of Assisi and his female counterpart, the nun Clare of Assisi. Those two ancient saints had lived in voluntary poverty and cared for the poor as they’d roved around. Enjoying ecstatic nights of prayer and fasting. Preaching with actions, rather than words.
Lee told Peter that when he was a toddler, Joe and Penny had come across a relative, Nick Stevenson, living rough in
Melbourne’s CBD. Always a caring couple, they’d tried to help
Nick. But he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I have to be about my Father’s work,’ he’d said, smiling like an idiot. ‘I’ll pray for you both. You’re both so, so poor.’
They never saw him again. But within a few days of each other, Joe and Penny had religious conversions. That had involved nothing less than visions of spinning crosses light-ing up the night sky. They had decided, quickly and simply, full of euphoria and, Lee told Peter, surely a dose of madness, to commit their lives to voluntary poverty. They would live as mendicants, helping the poor and preaching a Gospel without words. And doing it all regardless of the fact that they had children.
After all, didn’t the Bible tell them that nothing should get in the way of sharing the Gospel with the world?
But after ten years of living at different people’s houses, being billeted on the back of Christian charity was too cushy a lifestyle for Joe Stevenson. It took him several weeks to convince Penny that their logical next step was to live on the streets like those to whom they ministered. Eventally, she had given in.
‘We can try it, okay? But we can always go back...’
‘Of course we can,’ Joe had said in the lean-to of a couple’s house in Bentleigh. The Stevensons were sleeping together in the room, on mattresses their hosts had hauled from a large shed, and Lee had heard it all despite the sleeping bag hood with which he’d covered his head.
Joe’s idea was to keep schooling the kids while living near railway stations. It would allow them, he thought, reasonably quick getaways if authorities poked their nose into the Stevensons’ business. If they decided to put him and Penny away for not looking after their kids properly.
Later, Lee wished they’d been found. Perhaps his father would have lived.
They were living near West Footscray train station, just before the major upgrade that brought lifts and a covered walk bridge, when the Stevensons’ lives changed. And to this day Lee can’t decide if it was for better or worse.
He was twelve at the time and he was first to see the plans for the upgrade. Two blue and black promotional advertisements next to the ticket machine and it wouldn’t be long before work started on their side of the tracks. Behind a partially demol-ished brick building and a collection of empty petrol drums were the two shopping trolleys, three tattered picnic blankets and several cardboard boxes that marked his family’s territory. Not that anyone else would have wanted it.
‘The Met will have the yellow earthmovers here soon,’ Joe said.
Lee didn’t know why he mentioned the colour; everyone knew what they looked like. But maybe the luminescence hurt Joe’s eyes. He’d always said he should be wearing glasses.
‘No home, no glasses,’ he’d laughed once on a train to somewhere.
Joe brushed long grey hair from his eyes one night and gathered his family on the narrow and decaying walk-bridge. In the late summer air’s quiet he told everyone to prepare for another move. A regional train rushed past and lit them up for a moment. Lee’s elder sister, Molly, played with one of the holes in her denim skirt and her mum told her to stop. Lee watched the city lights busy themselves. So he wouldn’t start crying.
They’d been at West Footscray for a couple of months. It was a good station. No one bothered them. Not like Dandenong. Molly couldn’t sleep after the sword gang had tried to rob them, before realising they had nothing. Then the gang had fled, curs-ing them and laughing at the Stevensons’ stupidity. As they’d run, Joe had said, over and over, ‘No one got cut.’
There were gangs around West Footscray, plenty. But it seemed they had better things to do than wave swords or fists at the Stevensons. Maybe there were more drugs to sell. They never saw a Human Services car either, not even a worker. Le
e was allowed to cross the back road, hardly ever used, and watch the Western Bulldogs train. With an AFL team so close he’d started to understand football. He loved to watch the players run, especially Matty Boyd. He was tough as a jackhammer and just as consistent said the old men in faded scarves.
Dandenong had been a rodent zoo minus the cages, but there weren’t as many rats at West Footscray. And it was a shorter ride to the station Joe would never let them name, in case they got caught riding for free. The station they’d all jump off at after they’d passed through Flinders. Then they’d walk back to the Clocks.
The city lights were a sparkling treasure behind Joe as he spruiked the Stevensons’ next station. Wherever it was going to be.
‘It’s an adventure to move.’
He kept on with his talk: life was a movable feast; rolling stones and moss; Jews trooping the wilderness with Moses while Jehovah led the way in a puff of smoke. There was smoke on the horizon, out beyond the Dandenongs. Bushfires, maybe under control, maybe not. Hot there and hot here. West Footscray was much warmer than Dandenong. Because, according to Joe, the diesel fumes got trapped.
‘When it’s time, kids, you’ll fold up the cardboard,’ he said. ‘Neatly please.’
He twisted hairs on his salt and pepper beard. Told them their mother would manage the cutlery and he’d load the garbage bags full of clothes and books, then pile them into the shopping carts. But before all that, he and Lee would have to find them a new station.
‘Well, not a new station,’ Joe smiled. ‘They’re useless.’
Too much surveillance, too open to the elements. And not enough long grass or nooks or crannies.
Lee told Peter about this time so vividly that Peter could picture it for himself. When everyone was asleep, Lee stripped off and stared at the greasy clouds. After the thick cardboard got damp beneath him, he put his shorts and t-shirt back on. It was the only way to get an okay night’s sleep in summer. The cooler air passed over his sweaty clothes and train engines ground and shunted in the yards. He imagined their sounds were elephants crying on an African savannah. They were caring for their calves, keeping them cool by blowing water all over them.
Lee’s father had read him plenty of books about Africa. Joe had read him and Molly plenty of books about everything.
Lee’s skin cooled and he watched hamburger wrappers and newspapers catch in the cyclone fence. They fluttered, a band of misfit angels, some of them floating onto the porch of the abandoned and boarded up station guardhouse.
Railway workers often came to the platform to smoke and waste the last few minutes of their shifts, but they never looked inside the guardhouse. If Joe had allowed it, the Stevensons could have made that paint peeling wreck into a three-bedroom house. It would have been prime real estate. Close, very close, to public transport. And, yes, ample city views.
But his father, on his life-on-the-street mission, wouldn’t have considered it.
‘The Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head!’
Beneath their heads every night were clothes bunched together to form makeshift pillows.
Lee stopped worrying about where their next station would be and allowed the rustle of papers in the wire fence to carry him off to sleep. He dreamt his family were still living at West Footscray, but had leather chairs to sit on, brown and squeaky. A giant TV was set up in the long grass at the back of the guardhouse. An advertisement came on for a shampoo, and a man showered on the top floor of a house that didn’t have any walls. Then Joe came on the screen, shouting, ‘The Son of Man has no head!’ A jagged knife flew towards the screen and Lee woke to the sound of a dawn train tearing the morning open.
It was another hot day and Molly and Lee wandered the edges of the storm drains until they came to the creek bend where Geelong Road met the Westgate Freeway. It was a Sunday and the traffic was quiet. They trod carefully down the steep embankment and sat at the creek’s edge next to a supermarket trolley without any wheels. They stripped down to their underwear and hung their clothes on the trolley. The creek was still running from a recent storm, but when they paddled in to their waists the current wasn’t strong enough to worry them. They splashed each other in the murky water, but after a while Lee didn’t want to play. A heaviness sat in his chest.
‘What is it?’ Molly asked, shaking her wet hair on him.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Nothing’s always something.’
‘That’s what Dad would say.’
‘Shut up,’ Molly groaned, and she splashed cool water onto his chest. It didn’t shift the heaviness. She swam away and left Lee to his mood.
‘I don’t want to move, that’s all.’
They were sitting on the creek bank and letting the sun dry them. Lee kicked a crushed soft drink can into the water. Then he rose and pulled it out again. Why make everything worse? He sat next to his sister.
‘We’ll move one day,’ she said and touched him briefly on the shoulder.
‘What do you mean? Of course we will. A new station, real soon.’
Molly looked away to the other side of the creek, its high embankment and the top of a service station sign.
‘I don’t mean that. I mean really move.’
She dressed and shook her hair as dry as she could get it. Lee thought she looked beautiful. The last thing he’d tell her. They walked silently along the storm drain’s edge and back to camp.
Peter was facinated to hear about Lee’s life on the streets. Lee told him how he used to watch dinner broil in the pan and listen to the singing coming from the back of the Potter’s Wheel Church. It was only a few roller doors away. The church’s door had a huge cartoon of a red pot being shaped by a gust of wind. The music was full of busy drumming and off-key guitar, and the words, My God is a great God, a mighty God is He. Their songs never made any sense to Lee. If there was a God, which his father said there was, why did He need to be told He was great and mighty? Didn’t He know that already?
‘People like to praise God. And God likes it, too,’ Joe said. ‘Do you praise God?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘All the time.’
‘I don’t hear you.’
His father laughed.
‘You mustn’t be listening.’
Joe stirred the tomato and beans. Penny and Molly mushed a dessert out of some fruit they’d found. His father threw a sprig of thyme into the pan. He’d asked a man in a tracksuit that afternoon if he could take some from his garden. The man had looked at Joe and his family suspiciously. Then, as if something strong had wrestled him, he’d handed Joe three branches.
‘I’ve never heard you praise God.’
‘Lee, you don’t have to make a song and dance about praising God.’
His father told him again about the Great Nick Stevenson. Who’d marched through the Little Desert and survived when he shouldn’t have. Who’d taught Joe more about God in a few minutes than a thousand churches could. Who was the reason Joe and his family lived the way he did. And blah and blah.
The church music stopped and applause started up.
‘You do believe in God, don’t you?’ Lee asked.
Joe raised an eyebrow.
‘Haven’t I just been telling you—’
‘—why don’t you go to church? At least sometimes?’
‘I do... I just don’t go in the buildings.’
‘What?’
Joe stirred the contents of the pan. Harder than he needed to. When he spoke again, he didn’t seem to be addressing Lee.
‘I’m worried about what would happen if I went to church. And, anyway, do you think church people would be happy to have us?’
His mother had dust all over her cut-off jeans. Molly’s hair was sideways and her face was dirty. Lee didn’t dare look at his own cut-off jeans, but he got a good whiff of them. Even in amongst the thyme, tomato and red kidney beans, he caught the smell. Like mouldy bread mixed with rotten apples. Washing day was tomorrow.
<
br /> ‘There’s enough God out here,’ Joe smiled, waving at the starless sky. ‘There’s enough God in you, young man, to keep me busy thinking good thoughts for years!’
Lee waited for him to ruffle his hair, but he didn’t. He just served beans onto the white plastic plate Lee was holding. The middle of the plate was warm where the food gathered. His mum and Molly took their servings, and Lee bent his head and sniffed. The smell of his jeans was gone. There was only the mighty aroma of vegetables and herbs. Joe gave thanks for it all and they sat in a circle and ate.
‘This tastes good, Dad.’
‘It’s the same as always.’
‘No, it’s better.’
‘If you say so.’
The hot sun clung to the horizon for a while then gave up and a V-Line train thundered its way to Ballarat. Lee often wished they could ride one and leave the city, but that night he didn’t.
The sun had gone to bed angry and its mood hadn’t improved. It was going to take it out on everyone, all day. The Stevensons sweated through a breakfast of dry bread and warm water. Joe read to Lee and Molly as usual; this time an essay by Orwell. Lee had loved Animal Farm when Joe had read it to them a few weeks before they’d give up their billeting. The morning’s essay had an animal in it, too. An elephant. Orwell wrote about working as a policeman in Burma. He’d had to shoot an elephant that an Indian immigrant had owned. Orwell hadn’t wanted to shoot it, but it was either that or the elephant would destroy a village.
So he did it. The shot flew, the elephant’s face seemed to sag, and the beast’s life disappeared into the humid air. Joe said Orwell had felt conflicted about the killing. He’d believed he’d done the right thing, but he hadn’t felt right about doing the right thing.
Joe closed the book and stood.
‘So that, my charges, is the way it was. Let’s see how it is, and get on with today’s business.’
We. Are. Family. Page 13
