by Gary Seeary
I stayed silent.
“Look, you’re probably a good kid and feeling bad about what’s happened. I can show you a path that will take you out of the grounds, it’s just nearby …”
The woman hesitated. “But, I think it would be better if you cleaned yourself up first and then moved on. You won’t attract as much attention on your way home.”
I should say something to her. I need to stop acting like a child.
“You need to make a choice,” she said firmly before turning around to walk to the smaller building, going inside and shutting the door behind her.
My Aunty May thinks she can read people. I wasn’t too sure about that. She’s always telling me to be wary of people, especially overly friendly ones. “They’re probably trying to fleece you out of everything you’ve got.” She should know, she’d had a few smarmy types fleece her before. I can’t be like Aunty May.
I snuck over to the building and knocked quietly on the door. There was no other sound except the door slowly opening. A middle-aged woman stepped into the frame of the doorway, one hand on her hip the other holding her well-worn dressing gown tight. Her features were pale, almost non-existent outside of her dark-brown eyes securely fixed on me; fine hair floated across her forehead in the gentle breeze. She looked me up and down as if I was something that the cat had just left on the mat, making me wait on the porch so that anyone, including the people still looking for me, could see the poor unfortunate that was in need of her help.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I said close to tears. “I only made one mistake tonight.”
“You are a young man, too small to take on the Englishman,” the woman stated, opening the door fully. “In one way you did well.”
She stepped back for me to walk into her lounge room. A blanket thrown over an old leather couch was the only seating in the room, a small bookshelf and a low table, the only other furniture. She walked down an unlit passage without saying a word. I followed cautiously and then joined her in a room with a table and chairs in the middle. I presumed it was the kitchen, but with only a small amount of reflected light from the lounge, it was difficult to tell.
She told me to sit down, while she fumbled about in a drawer, finally lighting a candle, before sitting next to me at the table.
“Do you work at Gennons?” she asked. “You definitely have a sheep smell about you?”
Strewth! Does everyone know what I do for a quid?
“No, I work at a fellmongers in North Melbourne. They’re only small.”
“You don’t have to tell me the name of the company if you don’t want.” Her tone softened.
“They’re called Cooks,” I replied, starting to feel a little more at ease with this woman. “We push through a lot of skins each week.”
“Put your head back,” the woman said suddenly. “You have something hanging from under your chin.”
I felt immediately under my chin, surprised to find a good-sized piece of skin hanging free, although I could barely feel it. Before I could say no, the woman had pulled a pair of scissors out from a drawer and told me to hold still. I felt only the slightest sting as she cut away the offending skin and my eyes started to water.
“Sorry, I should have said something outside,” I mumbled to myself. “I just froze. My name is Sebastian. I live with my aunt in Carlton. The rest of the family are in the country.”
“Your aunt will be worried then.”
I could make out her face now, as the candlelight flickered over it. She had quite a pretty face for an older woman. I watched her loose, mousey hair fly in all directions as she moved, strands floating in front of her face as she pulled out a towel from a nearby cupboard and handed it to me.
“Head out the back, Sebastian. You can wash yourself in the gully trap.”
I didn’t like the idea of going outside yet and it must have shown on my face.
“Don’t worry, you won’t be seen from the grounds unless you’re silly enough to stand on top of the trap. Give me your shirt. I’ll sponge some of the blood out of it. I’m sure it gets messy most days at work, but not as much as this.”
I had hesitated for a second before the woman jumped in.
“I have three younger brothers,” she snapped, holding out her hand.
I undid my braces, pulling the shirt over my head in a slow painful movement. She snatched my shirt, before leading me out a door at the far end of the kitchen. Outside, she pointed me in the direction of the gully trap, and gently closed the screen door behind her as she went back inside. I started cleaning the sticky layer of blood and muck from my face, neck and arms, the cold water bringing me back to the here and now, and also soothing a well and truly bruised and battered body.
When I returned to the kitchen, the woman was sitting in front of a stove. She had made a pot of tea, placed a cup and saucer in front of the chair where I had been seated, and was now slicing into a small chocolate cake. She told me that if I wanted to eat, I had to sit down first.
I wanted to ask her name, but I thought it might be wiser not to. After all, she was hiding someone in the grounds that staff from her own college were looking for. If I didn’t know her name, how could I possibly dob her in.
She had made me so comfortable that I momentarily forgot that the police, and perhaps some of the boys from the Magenta Push may still be outside looking for me.
I hoed into the tea and cake, not believing food could taste so good.
“I thought you might be famished,” the woman said kindly as she sat down next to me.
“You’re not the first person to come into the college grounds in a spot of trouble. The Depression has been going on for quite a while now,” she explained, looking at me with tiredness in her eyes. “A lot of people camp rough in Princes Park. Sometimes their disputes spill over onto our campus.”
“That’s not me, and the bloke that hit the Pom is no mate of mine,” I jumped in, defensively. “He’s probably an ‘obo from Princes Park, but I’m bloody glad he came along when he did. I’m just a fellmonger, which is nothing, but I didn’t come down from the country to be a burden on anyone, and I won’t be.”
I shivered, before remembering I didn’t have my shirt on. It was hanging over the metal handle of the oven. The woman felt the collar before handing it to me, without saying a word.
It was hard to tell what this woman was thinking, her face didn’t give away a thing, and that included whether she believed a word I was saying.
Our little tea party came to an abrupt end with the sound of knocking on the front door.
“Get out to the trap,” she said sharply, pointing me towards the rear door of the kitchen, and then quickly snuffed out the candle.
As I sat on the wet gully trap, I suddenly felt waves of exhaustion come over me, relieved at being well sheltered from prying eyes; on my left, a solid wooden screen blocked the main college buildings, two yards in front of me a thick hedge. But, the longer I stayed outside, the less concerned I became if I was sprung or not. It was the middle of the night and I was freezing.
I was also busting for a wee, right here, right now. So, I snuck around the hedge and found a tree large enough for me to hide behind, while praying that the woman didn’t come outside, not quite yet.
As luck would have it the woman stuck her head out the screen door whispering, “Sebastian, you’d better go now, the police will be back in a half an hour to do a full sweep of the grounds. Go right away. Take the path on the left, don’t mind if it becomes overgrown, just keep going.”
Before I could say anything to this woman who had done so much to help an injured stray, she was gone, closing the door quietly behind her, leaving me in the stony silence of the college grounds.
I wanted to go home badly and I knew my aunt would be beyond herself with worry that I didn’t turn up for her special dinner, but the route home was too close to Magenta Lane. To stay as far away from its notorious Push was the most important thing I could do tonight. I would m
ake my way back to Cooks and then wait for my workmates to turn up in the morning. I could suffer any consequences, later.
Fortunately, the only soul on the streets of Parkville at the moment was the milko doing his rounds. I kept my head down as I waved to him while I crossed over Royal Parade, before heading down Gatehouse, over Flemington Road and then worked my way through the back streets of North Melbourne until I reached the industrial area.
Once I reached Cooks, I collapsed against a light pole in front of the factory, not even aware when I fell asleep.
*
“Carmichael!”
I woke with a jolt and the sight of my foreman sneering down at me.
“Do you know the state your aunt is in?”
“What …?” I managed to mumble “What’s happened?” I couldn’t focus or think clearly. I tried to stand, but my right leg didn’t want to do what I told it.
“Are you drunk?” the foreman yelled. “Is this the gratitude you give your aunt?”
“I’m not drunk. I haven’t had anything to drink,” I said finally managing to stand myself up.
“I couldn’t make it home last night, that’s all. I had to come back here to sleep.” I wished more than anything that this mean bastard hadn’t taken a room at my aunt’s boarding house. He thinks he owns the bloody place.
“Bullshit!” the foreman snarled “You’ll pay a pretty penny when you get home tonight … you little shit,” he said throwing me a brown paper bag, which I hoped to hell had sandwiches in it.
“Your aunt thinks way too much of you, Carmichael,” the foreman scoffed, before pushing open the corrugated iron factory gate to let the workers in.
I followed grudgingly, shoving my right hand deep into my pocket, surprised to find at the bottom, an unusual object; too large and light to be a penny. I pulled it out quickly, knowing it wasn’t mine. On closer examination, it turned out to be a large brown button, on the outer side it read ‘Food for Spain’.
2
* * *
Aunty May
From somewhere deep inside the Leidgen Drum, an annoying scraping sound was repeating every five seconds, much like fingernails running down a blackboard. I moved closer to the ugly beast of a machine, and then further away from it, trying to locate without any luck the source of this relentless noise. It didn’t seem to bother the other blokes in the de-woolling shop though.
The shop seemed completely different to me today, maybe it was the night I’d just had. I wasn’t sure. But this factory with rotting sheepskins lying everywhere and no fresh air to breathe, seemed more like a stinking prison than the wonderful opportunity I thought it might have been six months ago. At least in prison, your wages aren’t docked if your ‘task’ isn’t met.
Instead of the Leidgen Drum, I should have been thinking about which quiet back streets to take to avoid running into the probably livid Magenta Push on my way back home — and then everywhere else for the rest of my perhaps short life. Or, how many strips my Aunty May could possibly tear off her very tired nephew before he could make it upstairs and crawl into bed, in the cramped little room at the back of her doss house tonight.
More than anything it was the young man who took down the Pom in the college, who I couldn’t figure out. Who was he and why had he helped me at all, or was he just another thug from another push evening up an old score? Also, why would a woman go against the police and her own college to hide a stranger and then help them escape? I don’t think I would have done the same thing in their place. I looked at the button again to see if it offered a clue, but the more I tried to make sense out of it and last night, the more confusing it all became.
“Hello, Sebastian. How are you?” the foreman asked, standing to the left of me with a stupid grin on his face. “Enjoying the view? Is there anything I can get for you? A chair, perhaps.”
I knew I would be in for some sort of treatment today; better to get it over and done with.
“No, I think I’m fine. Thanks, just the same,” I said knowing he would have put some serious thought into humiliating me after witnessing my pitiful appearance this morning.
The foreman had brought out a chair from his office and a small worktable covered in a white tarpaulin from the skin-dressing room. He directed the table and chair to be placed in front of me and then, just like a waiter, the foreman held back the chair for me to sit down.
With this sort of thing, it’s best to play along with their childish games; it annoys them if you don’t.
One of the old boys brought out a dirty vase with a frizzled Scotch-thistle stuck inside, placing it on the table in front of me, before bowing as he moved to the side.
The foreman really has put a lot of thought into this.
The leading-hand came out of the dressing room with a small white towel over his left arm, a dusty wine bottle in his grubby right hand. His idiot off-sider Lenny followed close behind, carrying a tray with God-knows-what hidden under an old towel.
“Would you like to taste it first, Sebastian?” asked the leading-hand, ready to burst.
“No, I’m sure it will be fine, just the way it is,” I replied, closing my eyes in anticipation.
I waited for about twenty seconds and then another twenty seconds.
What the hell were they up to?
I opened my left eye to take a quick peek.
Thwack!
They all let loose with handfuls of wet sheep dags, hitting me squarely on my screwed up face, some directed at my defenseless crutch, laughter breaking out all over the factory floor.
“Go on, Sebastian. Go home,” shouted the foreman. “You’re making the blowies look good.”
The foreman was almost wetting himself with laughter, along with the rest of the crew, as he lifted me up and shoved me gently towards the exit door. Lenny threw me the old towel from the tray, so I could give myself a rough clean down before I left, maybe feeling sorry for a young lad who had to walk home with little bits of dirty wool stuck all over him.
*
I decided to see if last night’s plan to take the northern route back home really was a good way to whip around the Magenta Push and reach the relative safety of Aunty May’s. I went back through Parkville, over Royal Parade and then skirted the College Crescent next to the Melbourne University, almost tempted to go back into the grounds again, so I could say thanks to the woman who had helped me.
Most likely, she would be working and the last person she would want to see, or anyone else involved for that matter, is the young scrapper who kept them up half the night, coming back in the middle of the next day, looking like no-one owned him. When fellmongers send you on your way, you must be in a bad state. So, perhaps the less people see of me, the better.
Against my better judgment, I began to walk down a section of Lygon Street I had only ventured to a couple of times since I made the big move down to the city, surprised to see how many people were out and about at this time of day.
For some reason, I thought most people had to work in similarly horrible jobs as me during the day, but after watching harassed mothers dragging their bratty kids along behind them, while lugging brown paper packets in cane baskets and manoeuvering around mobs of men in tatty clothes, hanging about on street corners, factory work seemed a smidge less terrible.
During school holidays years ago, my sister Lettie and I were often sent up this way by our Aunty May, on a mission to the grocer, to get the flour or sugar she seemed to run out of regularly in the kitchen. Lettie and I eventually worked out that it was a pretty good ruse to get us out of the house, when we were beginning to get under her feet. We definitely got the better end of the deal, as she often gave us a penny each to buy whatever we wanted, which was usually a huge bag of lollies or a double cone ice-cream.
The old Jewish grocer loved to play tricks on the kids who regularly came into his store. When Lettie and I dropped in an order, he would weigh the sugar or flour, wrap it up and hand me the packet, pretending to forget about the ice-
creams or lollies we had ordered. I would go to leave, carefully watching the look on Lettie’s face as she began to panic, thinking that the grocer had forgotten our treats. At the point when her bottom lip started to quiver, the grocer would call out, “Did anyone order ice-creams?”
Lettie’s arm would go up in a flash. She fell for that for years.
As I approached the old grocer’s store, a small army of workmen were pulling the shop apart. I looked through the dust and rubble into the shell, but couldn’t see the old fella anywhere. He must have moved on.
After passing the Albion Hotel, I realised was getting too close to Magenta Lane for my liking, thinking it wiser to cut across to Drummond Street at Faraday, to avoid the Magenta Push’s stomping ground.
I turned into Drummond, glad to see only a couple of people on the street. One was a shabbily dressed man in a long black crumpled coat who must have been boiling under all his garb, while the other was a young boy. They were both a long way ahead, walking in the same direction as me.
The man looked like a lot of other blokes wandering the streets, down on their luck, all their belongings in a hessian bag slung over their shoulder. The young boy in shorts and a grubby singlet seemed happy enough, a few steps behind, poking his stick at rubbish in the gutter.
I was more than a little intrigued when the man suddenly motioned for the boy to follow him quickly into a laneway.
I poked my head around a rosebush to look down the lane, and there they were, standing under the swaying branches of a weeping willow tree. As the unkempt man leant his hessian bag and himself up against a fence in the shade of the tree, he appeared nothing more than any other unemployed man travelling with his young son, only wanting a quiet spot to rest out of the sun until the cool of the evening.
I was about to move on, when the man walked over to the paling fence opposite and bent down low in front of it. The next second the young boy ran at him like a miniature acrobat and in one leap and a bound cleared the fence, vanishing into someone’s backyard.
