Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  Like a silver locomotive, the massive roller hurtles them towards the sand bank and jettisons them five yards from the beach.

  Alan staggers up to the dry sand, the colour returning to his face, but his arms are trembling.

  “You did well to remember your swimming,” says Brandt curtly, “but next time…” He is on edge to blurt out “you obey me”, but instead he says, “I think we should do things a bit differently.” His own father would have punched him to the ground and thrashed him senseless.

  Perhaps Alan feels the tension of Brandt’s suppressed anger or perhaps he remembers the beatings he received at St Edmund’s, because the boy is almost cowering as if expecting a blow across the head. His limbs are shaking. “I’m very sorry, Otto,” he says “I truly promise I won’t do anything like that again. I…”

  It is one of Brandt’s deepest fears that Alan should ever be frightened of him. He grasps the boy’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” he says. “It is all right, son.” He pulls the trembling Alan to him in a bear-like embrace.

  *

  That night, they go into the city for the last time and buy king prawns to eat on the same wharf where they first arrived as immigrants. Carousel music and teenagers’ shouting drift across the harbour from Luna Park, as well as shrieks from the ghost train – a memory Brandt has been trying to suppress all day, but now it’s back again, compounded by the image of tattooed numbers on bare arms, and all this on the day he very nearly lost his son.

  Instead of walking back from Circular Quay, they take one of the new corridor trams, in which, from the ceiling, the handholds swing to and fro like a row of nooses.

  20

  After breakfast, Brandt and Alan scrutinise the road map, looking for a way home via the Blue Mountains, forty odd miles west of Sydney.

  “The weather forecast says it’s going to be hot again today,” says Brandt.

  “But summer’s over.”

  “Well, that’s what they say, but this is Sydney; it should be cooler in the Blue Mountains, though.”

  “I’ve found out why they call them the Blue Mountains, Otto.”

  “Why is that?” Brandt is out of sorts. He had been shaving with an old blade, and he’d cut himself and the styptic pencil he’s using to stem the blood stings like a wasp.

  “It’s because the gum trees give off an oily haze and the sun’s rays make it look blue.”

  “Good.” Brandt dabs the cut with cotton wool, adjusts his collar and slaps some cologne on his face carefully avoiding the cut.

  “That smells nice. What is it?”

  “It’s men’s cologne, I finally found some in Anthony Hordern’s, that big department store where we bought the presents for Milo and Peggy. I always used this kind of cologne before, but I’d never thought I’d find it in Australia. Ouch!”

  “Why don’t you use a mirror when you’re shaving, Otto?”

  “I’m superstitious about mirrors.”

  “Why?”

  “Never you mind; anyway, I think it’s time we were on the road. Have you got everything?”

  “Yes, it’s all packed. Can I try some of that stuff you were using?”

  “What? You don’t need to shave; not yet, anyway. Now do I need to inspect your room?”

  “I’m not a child, Otto.”

  *

  Down in the foyer they stand in a queue at the desk waiting to settle their bill. Brandt hears Polish voices and a white-haired man keeps glancing away from his wife to stare intensely in his direction.

  Brandt hands Alan his wallet. “You pay the bill.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else? As you’ve told me, you’re not a child.”

  Alan takes the bulky wallet while Brandt picks up the cases. “I’ll take these to the car. Before we go, you’ll need to check the radiator, especially if it’s going to be hot.”

  “I’ll do that. See you outside, Otto.”

  In the car park, Brandt lights a cigarette and faces a new anxiety. Why had the old man been staring at him, and what’s keeping Alan? As Brandt pulls back his shirt cuff to check his watch, he catches on his wrist the scent of Mäurer and Wirtz Number 4711 eau de cologne.

  Of course, it’s the 4711; SS officers received it on issue, some of them smelt as though they bathed in the stuff, and here he is, in Sydney, swabbing it over his face and wrists, oblivious to the stark fact that in Australia few men use cologne at all and anyone sporting the barest whiff of 4711 near a camp survivor might just as well be parading around with a swastika armband, singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’.

  Alan comes out, and hands him the wallet and a folded receipt. Brandt makes a feeble attempt at humour. “I thought you’d taken the money and made a run for it.”

  “Wish I had, I’d be on a ship to England or America, by now – no, I’m only joking, Otto, don’t look at me like that. Anyway, it was a pretty long queue, and after I paid the bill an old foreign lady stopped me and said I had a good-looking dad, then her husband scowled at me. He looked pretty angry and I was glad to be well out of there, to be honest.”

  *

  Rising heat from the tarmac makes the highway ahead swirl like a river of molten silver. They have rolled down the windows, but the hot air from outside the car offers no relief. The truck in front looks as though it’s levitating and even the yellow line moves in serpentine twists in the centre of the road, while fence posts and farm gates fade to a pastel smudge.

  Through the rear-view mirror Brandt takes stock of the other vehicles: bullet-nosed coaches, army trucks, pre-war Chevrolets with their tattered canvas roofs rolled back, smooth new Holdens and elegant but underpowered English sedans.

  He sees a police rider on a motorcycle dipping in and out, trying to overtake everything on the road. He watches him weave out over the yellow line to overtake a caravan, then change his mind as they reach a steeper incline. As the road levels, the bike shoots past the caravan and two small cars, then, finally, as if exhausted, it dips back into the flow and settles contentedly at least five vehicles behind him, and Brandt relaxes into the drive.

  They leave the farms behind as they enter the cooler foothills of the Blue Mountains, with their soaring trees, casuarinas and giant tree ferns. The road becomes a series of steep inclines with a sharp drop to the left. Brandt puts two hands on top of the steering wheel as he negotiates the tight hairpin bends and tries to evade the potholes.

  “You’re driving like Stirling Moss,” says Alan. “Wish I could have a go.”

  “Sorry, but it’s not Milo’s aeroplane,” laughs Brandt as he concentrates on keeping clear of the steep drop barely a yard from the road’s edge.

  They hear a distinct tink-tink from the forest. This is repeated from another direction and soon the trees resound from sweet metallic chimes, like blacksmiths on silver anvils.

  “Bell-birds,” says Alan. They must be. I’ve read about them in a poem by a man called Henry Kendall. They can’t be anything else.”

  Brandt doesn’t reply. His mind is on yesterday’s heaving green sea and a child whom he had vowed to protect, faltering in deep water and calling to him in terror. Yet, right now, as if in collaboration with the ocean, the landscape opens to a vista of tree-clad ridges, one after the other, like hazy blue rollers fixed in time.

  Brandt pulls off the road at one of the viewing sites poised three thousand feet above a wide, forested valley and flanked by immense sandstone buttresses.

  “Cor, they’re worth coming to see,” says Alan, “but I don’t think they’re proper mountains, like the Andes or the Alps.”

  “I think we’ve arrived a few million years too late. They’ve got a bit worn down – they’re probably much older than mountains overseas. Look below us.” Alan peers straight down while holding onto his glasses. The drop is so vertiginous that the trees below merge together to give the effect o
f an endless carpet of speckled moss.

  “Yes, they’re high,” says Alan, “but they’re still really only cliffs. That magazine at the hotel said that a long time ago they were sea cliffs. Think of Sydney totally submerged while we are perched up here with the Pacific Ocean crashing about beneath us.”

  “You’ve a good imagination, Alan; I read something else in the brochure – that we can ride down your cliff on what they call a funicular. Do you know what a funicular is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, come on, we’ll find it.”

  *

  The scenic railway descends so slowly, like a parachute on a windless day. It’s a thousand feet drop at an angle of fifty-one degrees, or so the authoritarian operator tells them on the tannoy. Snatches of what he says reach Brandt’s ears, and even less reaches his consciousness.

  “Don’t stand up… Don’t stick your arms out… Don’t throw out cigarette butts… The steepest cable railway on earth… built for mining coal and kerosene shale… Lot of mines around here… had to close down in the Great Depression… Don’t stand up… Watch for rosellas and cockatoos… We’ve got lots of wallabies in the valley… grey kangaroos… Little red flowers called Mountain Devils… don’t pick them… No end to new species of flora… they find new species every year… Don’t stand up… Don’t stick your arms out… Don’t throw out cigarette butts…”

  The hectoring voice may remind Alan that next week he’ll be back at school. He seems to be absorbing every word, scrutinising it through the portals of his memory, to be ready to write about it in an essay.

  Down, down. Brandt spies something on a far ledge and nearly chokes. It’s a long way off and the sighting is brief. Standing at the dark entrance to an old mine is a woman, her head with its stark-red hair is tilted to one side. Brandt feels faint and grasps the safety rail.

  Still descending, going down, down, down. Did any other passengers see her? No one said anything; no one was pointing. How could anybody be there on that ledge? It’s inaccessible; it wouldn’t be allowed. Surely this journey is coming to its end soon. No? Down, down and the strident voice over the tannoy is still giving orders.

  “When you alight at the bottom, be sure to keep to the path… Don’t light matches… Stub out all cigarettes on the track… Don’t get lost… Keep to the track… so easy to get lost… Last summer three tourists…. Bottlebrush… waratahs… don’t pick the wild flowers… Aboriginals lived here for thousands of years… lived in the caves… Stay in your seats until the vehicle stops…”

  Down, down.

  Stop.

  “Take your time... The scenic railway runs every twenty minutes… Don’t get lost… Stub out your cigarettes on the track… Keep to the path… so easy to get lost… Last summer three tourists…”

  “What a ride, Otto. Not all that scary, though,” says Alan. “Remember that flight in Milo’s plane?”

  “Well, we’ve got the return trip; we’ll be going backwards up the cliff, so that could be scary.” Brandt feels the strain in his voice. “By the way, Alan, did you see that figure on the ledge?”

  “No, but my eyes aren’t as good as yours.”

  But on the side of a cliff? How could anyone have reached there, anyway? But that presupposes it was a human; perhaps it was just a tall tree fern.

  On the way back, Brandt makes sure he is sitting on the right side of the funicular as the cable tightens and they float upwards. He is oblivious to the commentary, to his fellow passengers, even to Alan beside him. Who or what did he see on that ledge?

  The creaking car ascends about another hundred feet. Nothing. A further hundred, two hundred, six hundred; they are almost there. As the funicular stops and the passengers scramble out, Brandt peers through the deep shadows under the tree ferns and spots something red… and then it is gone.

  “Otto, are you coming?” Alan is standing by the exit gate.

  “This is the end of the line, sir,” says a polite young man in a green shirt.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sorry; I…”

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m fine, that’s my son over there, I have to go. Thank you for your concern.”

  *

  Thank God for Milo’s powerful car radio because it means that the haunted Brandt doesn’t have to say anything. Alan is absorbed with a serial about a convict called Burroughs who is running away from a hard-labour gang in the 1820s. Burroughs is innocent, of course, but the troopers are out after him, particularly a sadistic thug called Sergeant Mears. Apparently, it’s the last episode, and the odious Mears has finally caught up with the escapee and is about to shoot him in cold blood, when a dozen or so Aboriginals spear the sergeant to death. Chased by the rest of Mears’s troopers, Burroughs rushes out of the bush onto a beach and swims out to a ship bound for the Californian gold fields.

  Altogether very satisfying, and then, as a bonus, the station will present the Colgate Hit Parade; that is, after a few advertising jingles, telling everyone how easy it is to make delicious Aeroplane Jelly, that Capstan is ‘the Empire’s favourite cigarette’, and a tactful reminder that if you’re ‘only a bridesmaid and never a bride’ it means you aren’t using Colgate, and if you happen to be a man, only Colgate will save you from a lonely life.

  As they pass through Goulburn, Brandt checks his watch; they’ll be home in four hours, but, as before, he’ll bypass Canberra. He wonders how Magdalena is faring in the USA. She’ll be all right, he has no doubts about that; she’s a survivor. And she’s making atom bombs. He bites his lip and squeezes the steering wheel.

  Listening to the hit parade is not such a good idea for Brandt. Kitty Kallen entreats him to remember that ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’, a bit late for that now; the Four Aces drip sentimentality in ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’; and he could certainly do without hearing Roy Hamilton’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. But Alan, humming along and keeping the rhythms of each song by tapping his knee, is enjoying it, and that’s all that matters, and Brandt can remain chained like a prisoner to his thoughts.

  At the Mermaid Roadhouse at Collector, they stop for petrol, and Brandt buys Alan a hamburger, Coke and chips, though Brandt himself has lost his appetite. He feels guilty feeding Alan yet more unhealthy food, but they’re on holiday, aren’t they? Well, Alan doesn’t complain and, anyway, he’s back to Peggy’s nutrition regime next week. As a righteous afterthought, he offers the boy an apple.

  “No thanks, Otto,” says Alan. “I’ll stick with the burger.”

  They sit outside the roadhouse, on a bench under an iron bark tree, until Alan has finished.

  “You’re not having anything?” asks Alan. “Not even a coffee?”

  “Too hot for coffee.”

  “What about an iced coffee, Otto?”

  “If you have one, I’ll join you. You go in and get them.”

  The Buick is the only vehicle in the car park, and Brandt lights a cigarette and listens to the cacophony of magpies and currawongs in the tree above him as he tries to dispel the spectre from his mind. Before long, Alan interrupts his reverie by turning up at his shoulder with two huge iced coffees. He sits down next to him on the bench.

  “I’ve been keeping up with my training, you know, Otto. At Scouts we always have warm-ups with medicine balls and push-ups; I’m sure I’m getting stronger. Peggy keeps me at it too. She bought me a chest expander and a set of dumbbells, and she says I’m definitely looking more muscular.”

  “She’s a very observant lady and she’s right. Splitting logs with me and the other jobs we do on the farm all help. Six months ago, you wouldn’t have been able to swim all that way out in the surf. The important thing is that your bones are developing; look at your wrists.”

  “You put me on to it, Otto; you wanted me to train so I’ll be strong when I’m thirty. That reminds me of something my grandma told me. When I was a b
aby, Dad had said to her that she and Mum must help me to build a strong character before I grow up. How do I do that?”

  Brandt puts down the iced coffee. He won’t drink any more; it’s got too little chicory and too much condensed milk.

  “You’ve got to train extra hard if you want to build a strong character.”

  “More training?”

  “Yes, training; it’s about what sort of man you want to grow up into. Do you want to be an honest man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then train yourself to be honest. Do honest things and be sincere in what you say. Do you want to be a kind man?”

  “Of course, like you.”

  Brandt inwardly winces. “Then do kind things.”

  “That’s not so hard, but what about being a brave man?” suggests Alan.

  “Then you must do brave things and I don’t mean stupid, reckless things.”

  “Like swimming out to sea.”

  “I didn’t say that, but, mind you, if you saw someone drowning, that would be a different matter. Now what about being a generous man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then train yourself to be generous with what you’ve got – including your spare time. Do you get the idea about character training? First, you’ve got to work out the qualities of the man you want to be, then train yourself to acquire them.”

  “Yes, Otto – I’ll try. For my dad, and you too,” he added.

  “I am sure you will. In fact, it’s obvious that you’ve already started, but you’ve got to keep working at it.”

  “Until I’m, say, twenty?”

  Brandt pauses and pretends to be deeply considering this, then he turns to Alan again. “I’d say that if you keep at it, you should have a pretty strong character by the time you’re eighteen – even earlier.”

  After giving all this fatherly counsel, he is rewarded with a broad grin from a satisfied Alan, but, as they return the glasses, Brandt’s personal anguish churns inside him and he is shocked by his own barefaced hypocrisy, and is terrified that if ever he is exposed, Alan will never trust anyone again.