Somewhere around the Corner

by Jackie French

  Young Jim looked embarrassed. He gestured around the upper part of his chest. ‘Because what you’re wearing—’

  Barbara looked down at her T-shirt. It had a V-neck, but was perfectly ordinary. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You can see your you-know-whats through it, that’s what’s wrong! I mean, your trousers are bad enough and we don’t want people staring at you. We need to be—what’s the word—inconspicuous, that’s it.’

  Barbara blushed fiercely and fumbled as she untied her sweat-shirt from around her waist. She pulled it on roughly.

  Young Jim slung his swag over his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, we’d better get a move on.’

  ‘But where are we going?’ Barbara stumbled as she tried to catch up. Young Jim took her arm to steady her.

  ‘Home—don’t know what else I can do with you.’

  ‘But I don’t have a home, even in my own time.’

  ‘We’re going to my home. Ma will know what to do. At least she’ll give you a skirt or something decent to wear.’

  ‘Your home? But where is it?’

  Young Jim stopped and grinned. ‘Poverty Gully. The best darn dole camp in the whole of New South Wales.’

  Young Jim walked fast, dodging women in high-heel shoes and shiny-seamed stockings, and men in funny hats. He had an easy lope that seemed to stretch forever. It was hard to keep up with him. It was all so small and drab and strange. It was hard not to stop and stare. The strange-looking people wearing strange clothes, the old-fashioned cars, with horses plodding among them, on funny-looking roads, the sparrows darting at the droppings, the strange signs along the street:

  Depression Prices! Great bargain sale! £2000 worth of drapery and crockery!

  Gents Tailor Made Suits To Measure!

  Victor Player Pianos. For Your Entertainment and Convenience!

  It’s Always Winter With Our New Refrigeration System!

  Barbara turned her head away from the small corpses, all in rows, in the butcher’s window. They were too red for chickens—rabbits maybe? There were too many questions, and no time to ask. Even the smells were odd, as if this world had never heard of underarm deodorant or the sweet cold scent of air-conditioning floating into the street.

  Young Jim paused. He looked at her with concern. ‘Going too fast for you?’

  Barbara nodded, out of breath.

  ‘Sorry. I’ll try to go a bit slower.’

  ‘Why do we need to hurry?’

  ‘Well, we want to find a train round dusk, and—’

  ‘But it won’t be dark for hours.’

  ‘Shut up and listen will you? Your mouth is robbing your ears. Poverty Gully’s three to four hundred miles south of here. We can’t walk all the way. Well, I could I reckon, but I bet you can’t. So we’re going to have to jump a train.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Cripes, where have you been all your life? No, don’t tell me.’ Young Jim put his hand up as Barbara tried to speak. ‘From somewhere round the bally corner.’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  Young Jim looked at her.

  ‘No,’ he said frankly. ‘I reckon you got a crack on the head back there and can’t think straight. But it doesn’t matter. Either way you’ve got nowhere else to go. That means it’s up to me to look after you. Ma would have my hide if I did any less.’

  Young Jim took her hand and began to walk more slowly.

  ‘Jumping a train is when you hide on a goods train or something,’ he explained. ‘It’s what you do when you don’t have the money to pay the fare. You got any money?’

  Barbara shook her head. Even if she did have money, she realised, it wouldn’t be worth anything here.

  ‘Well, I’ve got fourpence ha’penny. That’ll buy us two tuppenny tickets to out past the goods yard. We’ll hide in one of the rattlers heading south.’

  ‘The train’ll take us all the way to Poverty Gully?’

  Young Jim shook his head. ‘The nearest station’s about fifty miles from there. We’ll hail a lift if we’re lucky. Otherwise it’s shanks’s pony.’ He caught Barbara’s startled look. ‘We’ll walk, stupid. Shanks’s pony is your bally legs.’

  ‘Fifty miles?’

  ‘We’ll get a lift,’ Young Jim reassured her. ‘You hungry?’

  Barbara nodded. Suddenly she was starving.

  ‘Me too. I could eat a maggoty horse as long as it had sauce on it. But we’d better save that fourpence ha’penny for the tickets.’

  chapter three

  Young Jim

  The goods yard smelt of soot and coal and the hot metal of iron rails and trains. Young Jim glanced up and down the line. The girl stumbled at his side. What was her name again? Bubba, that was it. By cripes, he hoped she was all right. If only he could get her home to Ma. Ma would know what to do. Ma always did.

  ‘Here, in this one. Quietly. I’ll give you a leg up.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘Shhh, they’ll hear us. Up on to the tarpaulin on top. Think you can make it? All right, one, two, three, heave!’

  The girl scrambled onto the tarpaulin. Her hair looked like a cap around her head in the moonlight. A weird way to cut a girl’s hair, thought Jim. She thrust her hand down to help him up.

  ‘I’m right,’ he grunted. ‘There, we’re up.’ He felt around the tarpaulin and thrust his swag inside. ‘Here, we’d better crawl under if we can. It’ll be warmer. Less chance of being seen, too. Depends what’s underneath the tarp.’

  He lifted the flap and peered down. ‘We don’t want to be crawling in with a load of coal or superphosphate. No, it’s soap. I bet there’s a thousand boxes there. Sunlight, I’ll bet. We’ll stink like Friday night at the bathhouse by the time we get home. Come on, you get under first.’

  They snuggled under the tarpaulin side by side, propping up the edge with the swag and packets of soap so they could breathe. It felt warmer immediately, though it was stuffy with the smell of soap. They lay quietly for a few minutes, listening for voices or any sign that they’d been seen.

  ‘Jim?’ Barbara’s whisper was uncertain in the darkness under the tarpaulin.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘What’s a dole camp?’

  ‘Don’t you know anything? It’s where you go when you don’t have a house of your own and you don’t have money for the rent. There’s a big one out at Happy Valley and one up Newcastle way. We were there for a time. Cripes, it was crook. Everyone feeling hopeless and kids crying or playing in the dirt and everyone bitching at each other all the time. We got out of there real fast.’

  ‘Is the place we’re going like that? What did you call it, Poverty Gully?’

  ‘Nah, the gully’s not like that. It’s different.’

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘Mmm? You can ask questions, can’t you!’

  ‘When do you think the train’ll start?’

  ‘Beats me. They weren’t handing out timetables at the gate, were they? Maybe soon. Maybe not till morning.’

  ‘What’ll they do if they find us?’

  ‘Make us get off. Might be different if we were grown up. Some of the railway dicks are supposed to be a bit rough.’

  She was silent again. Young Jim shook his head in the darkness. He didn’t think he’d ever been so scared as before when she’d fainted back there, with her face so white and her forehead all covered in sweat. He’d thought she’d been hurt for sure. Who had she been living with, anyway? Didn’t they at least have some girls clothes to put her in? Didn’t she have anyone to look after her except him?

  ‘Jim? How do you know how to do this, jumping rattlers and everything?’

  ‘Because that’s how I got up to Sydney. Me and my Uncle Bill. Ma gave us money for our fares, but Uncle Bill said why waste it. So we jumped the rattler out of town. Ma would have had our hides if she’d known.’

  ‘Where’s your Uncle Bill now?’

  ‘He’s heading north with Aunty Eva. He thinks there’s a chanc
e of work up there. Maybe cane cutting, if they can get that far. I couldn’t stay in Sydney by myself. I was living with them so I could go to school. There’s no school in the gully and Dad wanted me to get on. Ma says I’ve got to get the Intermediate. Uncle Bill was going to pay my fare back to the gully, but they’ve hardly got tuppence to rub together, so I said I’d find my own way home.’

  ‘He let you—’

  ‘Well, no.’ Young Jim grinned in the darkness. ‘I left a note. He’ll be as mad as a hornet when he finds I’ve gone, but there’s not much he can do about it. He’ll know I’ll be all right. I can look after myself.’

  There was a clanking up ahead. Young Jim stiffened, wondering if the train was going to start.

  ‘What’s happening? What’s that?’

  ‘Getting a full head of steam. Don’t they have trains where you come from?’

  ‘Not steam trains.’

  She seemed matter of fact. Young Jim craned around, trying to see her face in the darkness. Surely her story couldn’t be true. Nah, she’d hit her head, that’s all. Or maybe she had rats in her attic, although she seemed the full quid apart from that. Young Jim wriggled back in the boxes, trying to find a comfortable position.

  ‘Can’t your uncle get a job in Sydney?’

  ‘You kidding. What bally jobs? It’s a depression.’

  Barbara’s voice was thoughtful beside him. ‘I’ve heard about the Depression. Nearly everyone was unemployed, weren’t they?’

  ‘Nearly everyone is unemployed. You’re in the middle of it now.’ For a moment Young Jim wondered if she really could have…Nah.

  ‘About one in three, one in four, don’t have jobs, they reckon. I dunno though, it seems like most people to me. That’s why we’re down in Poverty Gully. Dad had a job in Sydney, a real good job in a shoe factory, then it closed down. He got another job as a nightwatchman, then that place closed too. Dad thought he might have a chance panning for gold. Poverty Gully used to be a real boom town in the old days, gold mines all over the place. Dad was going to try his luck all by himself, but Ma said no, where he goes we all go.’

  ‘Did he find gold?’ Her voice sounded sleepy, nestled down in the boxes of soap.

  ‘Nah. Not yet anyway. I reckon most of the gold was all worked out years ago. Just about everyone who comes to the gully thinks they’re going to find gold. Doesn’t take them long to realise it’s all worked out. Only one who thinks he’s going to find gold now is Gully Jack, and he’s as nutty as a fruit cake. But Ma reckons there isn’t much use moving on. Not till things get better. Dad put up a shack, and he’s got a vegie garden going: tomatoes, cabbages like you wouldn’t believe—you should see the soil down there—and there’s water and all the rabbits you can trap.’

  ‘What do you do with the rabbits?’

  ‘Eat them, of course. Haven’t you ever had a rabbit? Cripes, what I couldn’t do to a roast bunny now…and you can sell the skins, too. Poverty Gully’s a real beaut place in summer, though it can be cruel in winter when the wind blows off the tablelands. I told you, the gully’s not like some of those other susso camps. I wouldn’t go near those with a ten-foot pole. Poverty Gully’s different.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Barbara drowsily.

  ‘What do you mean?’ It had never occurred to him to question it before. ‘I dunno—maybe because we’re all in the same boat. I mean the farmers round there are living on the smell of an oily rag too, what with prices down and everything. They’re not going to stick their noses up at someone else who’s down on their luck. Maybe ’cause it’s just easier living in the valley. At least there’s always plenty to eat, even if it’s stewed eel and tomatoes and bread and scrape…’ Young Jim paused. ‘You know, I reckon it’s different because we all work together. I mean, it’s not like the other camps where people went because they had nowhere else to go. We all came to the gully for the gold, even if the gold isn’t there. Last year when the Briars’ shack blew down everyone got stuck in to build them a new one. You wouldn’t see that at the other camps, I bet. Then there was last year, when Ma and Mrs Hooper made doormats out of hessian bags on Dulcie’s sewing machine, and Gully Jack sold them up in town, till the machine went bung. I mean, there’s always things like that going on in the gully.’

  Jim waited for her to ask another question. She was always asking questions.

  There was no sound beside him. She was asleep.

  Suddenly the train jerked and shuddered. It began to move backwards, clang, then forwards, clank, and stopped, then began again. Shugg shugg-u shuggu, straining at first, as though not quite convinced that it should start at all, then gaining speed. ‘What!’

  ‘Shhh, we’re off, that’s all. Go back to sleep.’

  He reckoned she must have been exhausted, she dropped off so quickly. He listened to her quiet breathing in the soap-scented air under the tarp, a gentle sound with the wind on top and the furious rhythm of the wheels underneath. Finally, Young Jim slept too.

  He awoke at the first station, and peered up over the tarp. It was still pitch dark, the moon not yet risen. It’d be morning, he guessed, before they needed to get off. Young Jim pulled the tarp back over his head. The girl was still out to it. The train huffed like a dozing dragon. Finally it began to clank again.

  Clang…Clank…Shugg shugg-u shuggu…

  The rhythm of the train rocked him back into an uneasy sleep, buffeted by curves and burps of smoke and the faint hiss of cinders on the tarp. The girl muttered in her sleep.

  The train wheels seemed to chant her name…BUBBA bubba BUBBA bubba BUbbubbbubbbbaaa—

  Exhaustion crept over him and his breathing deepened.

  ‘Hey, you lot! You up there! What the flaming heck do you think you’re doing?’

  A sharp and angry voice woke him. A hand shoved the tarp back from his face. Cold air rushed in.

  The train had stopped. A man’s face peered over the edge of the wagon. It was grubby, angry and dark with yesterday’s whiskers.

  Barbara gave a small sharp cry. Young Jim rolled in front of her to protect her. He tried to clear his head.

  ‘Struth, it’s only a couple of kids.’ The anger in the man’s face softened. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Come on, out with you, you can’t stay here.’

  Young Jim sat up.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Wingalooma.’ The man held out his hand. He wore overalls that were black with soot and a grubby badge on his chest that proclaimed ‘Lang is Right’.

  ‘Come on, down with you.’ He gave Young Jim a hand, then lifted Barbara over the edge.

  Young Jim tried to calculate, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. A good two hundred miles still to go and not even near the main road. They’d never hail a ride from here.

  ‘Are you the guard?’

  ‘No fear, mate. I’m the fireman. There isn’t a guard on this train. You should have wriggled down further, then I wouldn’t have noticed you. I saw your shapes poking up under the tarp. Don’t know how someone didn’t pick you up before now.’

  ‘I’ll remember next time,’ said Young Jim seriously.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’ The fireman shook his head. ‘Train jumping’s not for kids. Don’t you know it’s dangerous? A bloke got killed jumping the rattler just north of here the other day. Two other blokes got suffocated in a load of wheat last week. It’s a mug’s game and if you’d any sense you’d know it. Where do you think you’re going anyway?’

  ‘Home,’ said Young Jim.

  His voice was high with weariness. Home seemed very far away.

  ‘Where’s home then?’

  ‘Poverty Gully. It’s down from Binoweela.’

  The man looked them up and down. They could see the pity spread across his face.

  ‘Susso camp eh. Fair dinkum? That’s where your parents are?’

  Young Jim nodded.

  The fireman rubbed his whiskery jaw. ‘That’s crook, that is. That’s real crook.’

  Yo
ung Jim glanced at Barbara. Her eyes were wide and frightened. He turned back to the fireman. ‘Please don’t put us off. I have to get my…my sister home.’ His voice cracked.

  The fireman was silent, looking at them. He scratched his head. ‘Struth, I dunno. A couple of kids. How long since you’ve eaten?’

  ‘Yesterday…I mean, the day before.’ Barbara whispered.

  ‘Struth! Hungry and shivering…why couldn’t you’ve jumped someone else’s blooming train?’

  He placed his big arm around Young Jim’s shoulders. ‘Come on lad, up this way. And you too, girlie. You’ll be warmer along here.’

  The man led them up the siding and stopped by the engine. ‘Hey Charlie, get the sausages out, will you?’

  The driver’s head poked out, as whiskery as the engineer’s, ginger streaked with grey.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Couple of kids, trying to get home to that susso camp down past Binoweela. They’re hungry.’

  ‘I don’t care what they are. You can’t bring them up here!’

  ‘Just for five minutes to warm them up.’

  ‘You know the regulations as well as I do.’ The angry voice was weakening.

  ‘You can take the regulations and…look, what’d you feel if they were your kids, eh?’

  The driver looked at them sharply, then turned his back. He rummaged behind and unwrapped a thick parcel of newspaper. There were sausages in it, fat and glowing pink in the red light from the fire box. The fireman hauled himself up, grabbed the shovel and shoved it into the coals.

  ‘Give it a minute in there and she’ll be right. Come on kids, up you come. There, that’s the ticket.’ He flung the sausages onto the hot shovel. They wriggled fiercely and spat fat.

  They smelt incredible.

  ‘Best smell in the world, isn’t it?’ said the fireman. ‘Nothing like it to keep you going through the small hours. Couple of snags, a bit of bread, a billy of tea and the king’s your uncle. Hey, Charlie, speaking of tea…’

  The tea was hot, strong, and very sweet. The sausages were wonderful, three each, so rich they dripped into the bread. They leant into the warmth of the engine and watched the stars mingle with the sparks from the chimney overhead. Charlie ate beside them, watchful and wordless.