The next time we went to the township, Joe spent longer in The Travellers than he usually did and hiccupped as I helped him back into the truck. ‘Oops a daisy!’ He was overcome by a fit of giggling. He hit his head on the dashboard, then fell backwards into the front seat.
‘You’re drunk!’
‘Just a tinsy, winsy bit. Shellibratin’ my good fortune.’
‘Where are Fergus and Murray?’
‘Gone. Flown away like little birds. Fly, fly, fly!’
‘So, why did you stay at The Travellers on your own?’
Characteristically, Joe tapped the side of his nose. ‘Had bushiness to do, my son, important bushiness.’
‘You’ve been money lending, haven’t you?’
‘And other important thinsh.’
‘I can’t believe you wasted your money on booze. You’ve always said it’s a mug’s game.’
‘Just thish once, ‘cos I’m goin’ to be very rish, very rish.’
Back at the homestead, Jack and I hauled Joe out of the truck, as we used to drag Fergus from the Bedford after his trips to the township.
‘Silly young fool, but I suppose we’ve all done it. Part of growing up,’ Jack said.
Peg wrinkled her nose, but Joe only murmured a soft whimper as she began stripping his clothes from him outside the back door. ‘I won’t have him reeking the place out,’ she grumbled.
For the next few days, Joe was unusually quiet. When he wasn’t working, he was skulking in his bedroom. To Peg’s chagrin, he skipped breakfast twice. It was the worst nutritional sin a person could commit, according to Peg. ‘Sheepish’, she said. He was acting very “sheepish”.
It was several days before I got a chance to speak to Joe. In all the time we’d been together, I’d never known him to withdraw but Joe had changed since we’d left Downston’s. A year or so ago, he’d never have said what he had about using the Millards. I didn’t know if Joe had detected it, but I knew that somehow our relationship had become fractured. I didn’t share Joe’s desire to be wealthy. I probably never would. My dreams were rooted in my past, while his rested very much in the future. The crack was bound to widen. There was nothing else for it to do.
‘You don’t have to feel bad about getting drunk,’ I said, sidling closer for fear he might walk away.
‘Why should I feel bad about it?’ He leant on a fence, gazing at the homestead paddock.
‘You’ve been a bit quiet lately. I thought …’
‘It’s not got nothing to do with getting drunk.’ Joe brushed his sleeve across his face and to my dismay I realised he’d been crying.
‘What’s the matter? Have I done anything to give you the pip?’
‘I ain’t got the pip with you. Never have and never will.’ He made a sobbing sound. ‘If you must know, I’m leaving the Millards.’
‘Why?’
‘Ann’s old man’s opening up a farm machinery place. He’s offered me a job.’
‘And you’re going to take it?’
‘I’d be a mug not to. Could be the manager in a year, own it myself in a couple.’
‘What’s the matter then?’
‘It’s us, that’s what’s the matter. We’ve always been together, you and me. I can’t hardly remember a time when we haven’t. It’s bad enough having separate rooms, but at least we’re next door to each other. I managed to get through not having Murray around ‘cos you were here. Now, I … ’
‘You’ll be right.’ I didn’t know if either of us would be “right”. I didn’t feel anything. I had no idea how it would be for us. I patted Joe’s shoulder in an awkward way and Joe sniffed up the mucous that had been frothing from his nostrils, but I couldn’t forget what he’d said about using the Millards.
On the morning Joe left, Peg hugged him several times and cried, all the time reciting a list of what he should do to keep himself healthy. Jack shook his hand. He said he’d been a damn good worker, and wished him luck. It reminded me of the day Fred and Lori left Blountmere Street.
We stopped a few miles from the township, and ate the slices of bacon and egg pie Peg had packed for us. Joe took his time over it, wanting to defer his departure, I suspected. I ate mine a lot quicker. For me, the sooner we got it over, the better.
‘We’ll be able to meet in the township once a week,’ I said, although I didn’t want to spend too much of my day off in The Travellers.
‘Too right, we will.’
‘Have a drink at The Travellers, take a bit of a stroll along the beach.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It won’t be much different from now.’
‘Hardly any difference at all.’
‘We just won’t be living at the same place.’
Ann smiled coyly when we arrived at the Epsley’s place, while her mother sat knitting on the white picketed verandah.
‘I haven’t got much, only my … only the one case.’ Joe placed his orphanage suitcase between his feet. These days, it probably held a lot more money than it had when he’d left Downstons.
‘That’s it, then. Keep your pecker up.’ He slapped me on the back and picked up his case.
‘Come on, Joseph,’ Ann threaded her arm through Joe’s and led him away. ‘Mummy’s got afternoon tea ready. She’s using her best bone china tea set.’
On the day I heard I had passed all my examination subjects, and eight months and two days after I’d posted my letter to Paula, the letter was returned, marked, “Gone Away”.
It was impossible to imagine the flat downstairs in Blountmere Street without the Dibbles. I wouldn’t try. I needed to keep my memories intact.
There was still something I could do. I could make more of an effort to find Fred and Lori. When I’d saved enough, I’d buy a car and travel round a bit. I couldn’t imagine them living in the country, even somewhere like the township. Lori wouldn’t have liked it at all. She needed people around her. No, they probably lived in one of the cities. There weren’t too many of them in New Zealand. And it would be good for me to see more of the place. After all, this was where I was going to have to live the rest of my life. The pain under my heart was as acute as the day I had arrived here.
As for my examination results – I had passed. It would please the Millards.
‘Jack and I are keen you do your Sixth Form Certificate, and then get your Bursary. You’ve obviously got it in you to get to university.’ Peg clasped me to her, crushing my face against her bosom. She didn’t mention anything of the other letter I’d received that morning.
‘You do still want to carry on with your studies, don’t you?’
‘Yes … Yes. Of course.’
‘That’s it then. I’m sure Jack will give you as much time off as you need.’
‘She’ll be right,’ I assured her, a pool of guilt eddying somewhere under my rib-cage. I was using the Millards, not in the way Joe had suggested, but, nevertheless, I was using their generosity simply because I had nothing better to do. I was excluding them from my own inner theatre, where the characters constantly played out the past against a backdrop they were no longer a part of. Just as long as the curtain didn’t drop. Keeping the curtain lifted was where my best energies had to be expended, not in the classroom.
Fergus stood outside the community hall and wiped the perspiration from his top lip. ‘Holy Mother of God, but I’m pleased to see you, Tony, me lad.’ He wiped away the moisture with a grey handkerchief held in a shaking hand.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’ll be better when I get into the library, out of sight of The Travellers. The temptation is almost too much for a man to bear.’
We walked through the community hall where Fergus gulped in the stale beer fumes of the last dance. I pushed open the library door. Consciously, we lowered our voices as we entered.
‘I’m needing some distraction, I’m thinking. It’s funny how I manage to keep off the grog back at the hut, even when the shearers are there throwing it back to all hours. As soon as The
Travellers comes into view, well now, that’s different.’
‘So you’re not going to the hotel today?’
‘I’ve got the Missus with me doing a bit of shopping, so I’m a-needing to keep sober, added to which, I’m wanting to save the pounds, shillings and pence.’
‘What’re you saving for?’
‘I’m thinking of taking myself back to Dublin.’
‘But you’ve never wanted to return.’ We moved into a row away from the librarian.
‘That was when I thought Eryn wouldn’t want to see me.’
‘Who’s Eryn?’
‘Eryn’s my daughter.’ From his inside pocket, Fergus took a photograph prematurely crumpled around the edges. ‘Here she is. Isn’t she a beauty? As fair as her mother.’
‘How did she know where to find you?’ I studied the photograph of a smiling girl who was probably about eighteen.
‘Because, by St Patrick himself, one morning I woke up and realized time was too short for all my shenanigans, and I wrote the letter I’d been too afraid to write for years. No more agonizing over the words. I let what was in me come out. Then before I could change my mind, I posted it and waited. Holy Mother of God, I can’t tell you how long every day was until I heard.’
I didn’t have to be told what it was like to wait for a letter.
‘Then one day, there it was: a letter from my daughter saying her name was Eryn, and that she was so happy to have heard from me. Imagine that, now will you! So happy to have heard from the father who didn’t stay around long enough to give her a name!’ Fergus ran the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘She sent me this photograph and told me all about herself. She’s training to be a nurse. To be sure, it would take a blind man not to see the compassion in those eyes.’ He took Eryn’s photograph from me and gazed at it.
‘When are you going back?’
‘As soon as I can.’ Fergus replaced the photograph in his pocket. At the same time Noeline Stott, the librarian, appeared at the end of the row with a warning finger pressed against her lips.
‘No compassion there, lad, none whatsoever,’ Fergus whispered. ‘Let’s sit outside the church awhiles. We haven’t had much chance to exercise our jaws together since you and Joe left Downston’s. And we can’t do it here with that dragon, Noeline, breathing down our necks.’
A plaque on the seat in front of the church read, “In memory of those who fell in the First And Second World Wars”. So many young men from the township and surrounding farms had gone to war and never returned. The air smelt of roses, Grandma Witchery’s steak pies and loss.
‘Tell me. How’re you getting on without that young leprechaun, Joe? I hear he’s moved in with the family who own the farm machinery place. Works for them by all accounts. To be sure, you must miss him. I’ve always thought of the two of you as brothers.’
I nodded, agreeing how much I missed Joe, though I didn’t miss him in the way I missed Mum and Angela. Not in the way I missed Paula and the Dibbles and the Gang and Fred and Lori. Not in the way I missed Blountmere Street. There wasn’t room on my stage to miss Joe like that. But I harbour a sadness born of everything we’d been through together.
‘We still see each other once a week,’ I said.
‘Not the same, is it, lad?’
‘Not really. After finding out what we’re up to neither of us can think of anything more to say. It’s as if he’s a different person now he works at Epsleys.’
Joe had even begun speaking differently, prefixing every word he possibly could with an ‘h’. I presumed he did it to make himself sound upper class. ‘We get interrupted by customers a lot. And when he comes into the township he usually brings Ann with him.’
‘Or maybe Ann, if that’s the young lady I saw him with last week, brings him, judging by the way she holds on to his arm. That’s the way of a man and a woman. You’re powerless to stop it.’ Fergus sighed. ‘I suspect the reason Murray doesn’t come into the township much lately is because he fair misses Joe not showing up at The Travellers. Fergus turned to look fully at me. ‘Indeed, the light faded for Murray when Joe left. Not that the pair of you shouldn’t have gone. It was for the best. But you and Joe brought us a lot of pleasure.’ Fergus’s voice caught. ‘I often question if we should have done more for the pair of you. Whether we should have called in the authorities and been stronger with the Boss, but we did what we thought to be right at the time. We looked after you as well as two old rouseabouts could. We did our best to keep you safe.’
The sound of gulls and ocean mingled, while I remembered the shearer with more hair on his body than his head.
Fergus picked up on my thoughts. ‘Men’s desires can be dark and young boys can seem sweet pickings. We couldn’t keep you from a few nights in the bush, nor the back lashings of the Boss, but, the Holy Mother herself be praised, we did keep you out of the clutches of a few depraved souls.’
Above us, the squawking gulls severed the stillness. I thought of the children who had been on the ship bringing us to New Zealand. I wondered how many of them had been the victims of “depraved souls”.
‘To be sure, now we’re getting maudlin.’ Fergus felt in his pockets for his handkerchief. ‘Let’s go for a stroll. Nothing like a saunter for banishing the miseries.’
We walked towards the sea sounds, away from the smell of roses and pies. We talked of Fergus’s dreams for himself and his daughter.
With less enthusiasm, as far as I was concerned, we discussed my education and my almost non-existent plans for the future.
‘You’d make a good teacher, young Tony. Give it time,’ Fergus assured me. ‘Speaking of time, I think I’d better be getting back. Thank you for keeping me away from the wiles of the hotel.’ Fergus grinned, causing the corners of his mouth to lift and his face to look ten years younger. ‘I’ll have just enough time to revisit the library for a book or two before picking the Missus up outside Witchery’s. It’s a rare day indeed when the Missus comes into town, so I’d best not be late.’
The Missus was already waiting outside Witchery’s. Her eyes were like those of the gulls circling above. They darted over the window display, just as they had taken in everything in the men’s quarters when she had occasionally brought the daily boil-up. She was dressed in grey, and looked as drab as a mid-winter tree.
‘I’ll come back into the library with you.’ I had no desire to see the Missus, or that the Missus should see me.
We’d walked half-way through the community hall when we heard a woman’s voice, strident and fierce.
‘The caterwauling seems to be coming from Witchery’s. By the saints, it sounds as if there’s murder happening.’
Outside Witchery’s, to my astonishment, Peg was confronting the Missus. Peg’s breasts in their Sunday best twin-set were rising and lowering. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows. ‘You’re disgraceful! DISGRACEFUL!’ She advanced on the Missus, who edged backwards.
‘Peg must have persuaded Jack to bring her into town after I left. She likes to get dressed up sometimes.’ I whispered to Fergus.
‘You need locking up. You and that good-for-nothing husband of yours,’ Peg screamed. Her hat had slipped forward and she pushed it back. It looked like a dish on top of her head. ‘You starved those two boys. Starved them!’ Peg was close enough to dig a finger into the Missus’ chest. ‘Not just of food, no. You starved them of education, care - everything. Two orphans, and what did you do?’ Her finger kept jabbing. The Missus attempted to turn away, but Peg took hold of her shoulders and swung her back towards her. ‘What’ve you got to say for yourself?’ she demanded.
‘Tried …. tried.’ The Missus held her bag in front of her to protect herself from Peg’s jabs.
‘Rubbish! Sheep dung! All you tried to do was make money out of them. You took advantage of two vulnerable children.’ Peg’s chest lifted precariously.
‘Go … way. Go …way.’ The Missus’ voice had risen to a shriek.
‘I best go break it up. Though
‘tis a pity the Boss isn’t here to get a walloping, too,’ Fergus said.
‘So Peg sticks up for us and gives the Missus a shiner. I can’t get over it,’ Joe exclaimed the next time we met at The Travellers. The tension between us had immediately dissipated with the news. ‘Tell me what ‘appened.’ He seemed to have forgotten his recent efforts to talk posh.
‘I’ve already told you half a dozen times.’
‘Just once more. What happened after Peg walloped her?’
‘The Missus fell and hit her head on the wall.’
‘And?’
‘As she slid down, her coat and dress got caught up somehow and I got this view of her suspenders and brown knickers. Anyway, at the same time as Fergus ran across the road, Jack came sprinting from The Travellers and dragged Peg away.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing much, except that Peg was the last person he’d expect to get herself into a fight. At the same time, he laughed a bit, as if he was sort of proud of her. He called her his “good lady” a lot.’
‘What d’you think Eleod’ll do?’
‘Jack doesn’t think he’ll do anything. Too scared the Millards will report him.’
‘And will they?’
‘Peg wants to, but Jack says, where’s the point? The Downstons will lie themselves out of it. Anyway, it’s over now.’
‘It’s not the issue, though.’
‘That’s what Peg says, but Jack doesn’t want to get involved. He thinks it’ll take too much out of Peg. It already has.’
Joe edged closer in his old conspiratorial way. ‘The Boss’s got a woman in Christchurch, so I hear. She’s years younger than him. That’s where he goes when he says he’s on business. Dirty old sod.’
A week later, Peg still looked strained as she climbed into the truck, ready for Jack to drive her to the bus. It had taken all Jack’s persuasion and my assurance we’d eat every crumb of her baking, before Peg agreed to spend a week with her son. She hadn’t seen him or their daughter-in-law and grand-children for a while. It would be good for her, Jack said. She’d be able to help out, too, what with Jenny’s hands full with the four kids, and Roger’s partner away with his elderly parents again. The poor old couple had never settled. They were still homesick for the Old Country, Jack said. I knew how they felt.
He Called Me Son (The Blountmere Street Series Book 1) Page 25
