by Mark O'Flynn
Running from the Ruined Castle over the trees to the start of the Incline the aerial railway was, so the premier of the day informed the parliament, the most impressive engineering achievement in the colony. It was of German design and quickly erected. The premier and Mr John Britty North, the mine’s owner, certainly danced sweetly together, according to the cartoonists of the Sydney Morning Herald. The rail track carried the shale across the valley on vertical poles before the more arduous task of lugging it to the top in the skips of the funicular. These rails stood on timber stilts way up in the air. North boasted that not one injury had occurred in its construction. However, it had only been in operation for a few months when the upright supports and struts split and the most impressive engineering achievement in the colony toppled into the bush, where it lay for many years. I believe bits of it are still there to this day. My father said that the cracking thunder of it woke the whole village. John Britty North and the premier, Henry Parkes, snubbed each other for the next dance, at least in the cartoons. In reality they were on the same side. The side of progress. Parkes bemoaned the shoddiness of foreign design. North had to think of another way to get the coal out of the valley. He devised a tramway hugging the contours of the talus slope with a team of ponies pulling a string of coal skips. So far so good.
Why were we called the Shadies? Because each day, not long after our dinner – a bit of colonial goose or possum stew – the sun would slip behind the escarpment and we would be cast into the shade of the cliffs. Every afternoon was a lingering dusk. However, the mornings, as my mother said, were as long and golden as a God-soaked picnic. I guess the people who lived at Nellie’s Glen on the western side of the cliff wall had the opposite arrangement. I don’t know what they called themselves, but that was why we called ourselves the Shadies. As I’ve told you, those who lived topside took to calling us different names, taking for their authority the referred splendour of the Carrington, the mighty building which cast every other structure around it into a starved, penurious shadow.
Clancy and I shared our mothers. When we were infants, if one of the sisters was ill or busy the other would feed us both, although if Clancy saw me suckling at his mother he would scream and wail and make a mighty fuss. As a result I was weaned first and Clancy behaved as though all the world was his. He gorged, then spewed, then gorged again. I sat on the floor and sucked my pap. Once, alarmed by my silence, my mother caught me with the tail of a mouse protruding from my lips. She screamed and snatched it out. Of course I don’t remember any of this and was humiliated each time Emma or Ann later took it into her head to remind me. Clancy would laugh at the legend of his own greed.
And so we grew. In the evenings my mother and Aunt Ann held their whispering heads together in giggling, domestic conference. They were sisters in conspiracy. Emma was like a bolt of sunlight through a grey fog, whereas Ann was more tempestuous, weather-wise. If she spied a wayward rodent she would upturn furniture in her pursuit of it. If a rusty nail hole let water drip on her pillow then look out, Moses. She was always plugging the leaks with gummy, the blood-red drops of angophora sap. The sisters were bright and happy together, especially after Mary Jansen had gone, but in my father’s presence there was sometimes a feeling of humidity in the room that he couldn’t decipher. Stormy weather coming.
Clancy and I may have had the same father, but we were different in build and complexion. I was dark and nuggety, like Douglas. Clancy was lean and fair, more like his mother. There was a similarity to our faces, streaked with dirt and freckles and flickering candle shadows. Our hair stood up alarmingly, like the combs of startled bantams. On washing days we were dunked in cold water and scrubbed until our skin was red and sore, our mothers sick of the sight of us.
One evening after we had finished our ox-tail fly-swisher stew, Clancy and I were sorting through our respective collections of dried cicadas. He had Black Diamonds, Chocolate Soldiers and Whisky Drinkers, whereas I owned Green Mondays, Bladders and Black Princes. We both had Tom Thumbs and Washerwomen. We would sort these different types by colour, by size, by value. Sometimes we would trade. Sometimes, if I was distracted, Clancy would take my most precious Black Princes. If I accused him he denied it, and someone would have to shake him till he reluctantly gave it back. At such times Douglas wasn’t above simply crushing to dust one of Clancy’s cicada shells to see how he liked it. Clancy’s jaw would drop and set in sullen resistance.
The mist on the tin roof continued to liquefy and drip into the hut. The resin Ann painstakingly packed around leaks would harden and drop out. She placed a quart pot beneath the leak before it should turn the floor to mud and breed wrigglers. Mosquitoes were another of the things she was always mizzling about. Ann could snatch a mosquito out of the air faster than a willy-wagtail on the wing. Douglas had scraped a dish drain around the perimeter of the hut to direct water away, but all it did was fill up with rain in the manner of a little moat, much to his sons’ distraction. Plumbing was one of his ongoing headaches.
After a time our mothers turned to our father, who looked like he had gum leaves growing out of his ears, so stonkered was he after a day’s digging. It was all he could do to pull off his boots and salt the leeches from his feet. That became a job for Clancy or me, who would throw them on the fire and watch them pop.
‘Douglas,’ my mother announced, ‘it’s time these boys went to school.’
That got his attention. Mine and Clancy’s too. We looked up from our cicadas. Our father raised himself on his seat. ‘School, is it? I never thought of that. Hang on, though, down here in the valley, where we are living, I have noticed that there is no school.’
‘You’re right,’ said Ann. ‘For all their talk of building one, they have spent nothing but a lot of wind.’
‘That settles that, then.’
‘Not quite.’
‘What do they need school for when there is ready work out there beckoning to them?’
‘That is not so clear-cut as you may think,’ Emma said.
‘Is it not?’
‘Look at them, popping leeches on the fire, squabbling over those insects. They need to meet a few books,’ said Ann, ‘apart from Emma’s Bible.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘One book in the hut is not enough. That is why Ann and I will take the boys topside and put them in the schoolhouse.’
My father was outnumbered. The paleness of his bare feet made him vulnerable. The sisters had a subtler plan. His questions were but token resistance. Nevertheless, he tried to put up a fight. ‘Where will you live?’
‘In a house.’
‘In a house with a door,’ Ann clarified.
Douglas scratched his head. ‘Who will feed and clothe them?’
‘You will come there every Sunday with your wages.’
More scratching. ‘I see. And who will feed me?’
‘Mrs Auld.’
‘I only receive one pound zack a week.’ That was a sign of desperation and surrender. The blood from leech bites dribbled down his legs.
‘More than enough.’
‘You have given this a little thought, then,’ said Douglas.
‘All the thinking is done.’
I looked at Clancy. He had the husk of a cicada clinging to his nose like a thistle. He looked at me and shrugged.
This is how, after our early years in the valley, Clancy and I came to leave it for a time, for the duration of our schooling. We must have been about seven years old. The two sisters, aunt and aunt, found a small cottage in Ada Street with a rent they could manage. My father had to knock a few planks back into place to seal out the draughts, but he saw to it that the house was comfortable. At least the roof didn’t leak. At least there was a little privacy without the women of the valley marching in at any time to borrow something. The Salvation Army, remembering the sisters’ parents, provided us with a few welcome sticks of furniture. Perhaps the Salvationists assumed that we were fatherless, that we were in some wa
y pitiable. They wanted reassurances, however, that that business with the Fisherites was all over and done with.
‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ Ann told them. ‘I’ve had it with that fellow.’
Aunt Ann set about looking for work, which was an unusual thing for a woman with a child to do, but there were two of them to share the load, as they had shared the suckling in previous days.
It didn’t take James Cowley Morgan Fisher long to find out that the sisters had come back to the surface. He sniffed them out. One day, along with his wives, he came a-knocking. He had come to inspect the house for demons, seeking out some penitents he might reclaim. Ann opened the door. She was wearing a shirt of my father’s in order to engage in some dirty work with a broom.
Fisher glared at her. The tusks of his beard hung down to his chest and he spoke with his old authority. ‘I told you I would return.’
But the sisters had grown in confidence since he had last laid eyes on them. They were not penitent. They wouldn’t let him past the door. Fisher took a step up. The broom persuaded him back down. Ann then swept some dust off the top step at him. Emma quoted some more conventional scripture to show that Fisherism was not the be-all and end-all of it all. They would not stand for this talk of demons.
Clancy and I looked out from between the stumps of the house where we had made a hidey-hole. The wives all stood on the street, hymning, dressed in identical headscarves. One of the wives was a familiar figure. Mary Jansen, now Mary Morgan (Fisher liked to share his names around), had a child of her own that she kept shoving to the fore beneath the verandah of her bosom, as though in some display to the sisters, our aunts, our mothers. The hymns got louder.
‘Mary immaculate, star of the morning,
Chosen before the creation began …’
‘Is it not a sin,’ Fisher called from the street, miffed at their rejection, ‘for the wives to reject the husband, and live themselves as though married? Is that not an affront to God?’
‘You may call it that, but you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ replied Ann, who was the braver. She held the broom like a pitchfork. Emma’s apron was ghostly with flour. If Fisher had been a bit more civil about it they might have invited him in for a cup of tea, but no, the Fisherites stood in the street calling out rude imprecations.
‘Out, devils, out.’ Mary Morgan was the loudest. Above us the sisters laughed. They could remember the night noises Mary had made between them in her sleep.
Clancy whispered, ‘I could bean her if I had my shanghai. She’s a big enough target.’
‘Am I not the godfather of your offspring?’ demanded Fisher.
‘No,’ called Emma. ‘You only declared that you would like to be.’
‘The devil take this house,’ cried Fisher, who was frankly used to getting his own way with women.
‘And drop it on your sonky head,’ called Ann.
There were gasps from the wives. Under the house, Clancy and I laughed. Some of the neighbours had come out to listen, too. They approved of the way Emma and Ann were dealing with the Fisherites. Clancy wanted to throw stones at Fisher’s wives, lined up like a queue of ducks, but I restrained his elbow. Fisher held out his arms as if to gather all his wives, who quacked about him. They said a short prayer on the road. Hallelujah and amen. Fisher and his bescarfed flock then turned and trudged off, Mary dragging her child by the arm. We could see that child had far too many parents for its own good.
As my mother had decided, Douglas worked in the valley during the week and came to us on Sundays for a bang-up home-cooked tea, usually a concertina of mutton and flybog on his damper. Dutifully he handed over whatever of his wages he had not already paid to Mrs Auld for his dodger down in the valley. A few bob he kept for grog at the Centennial – Emma and Ann couldn’t begrudge him that. There was little else to keep him warm at night, he moaned.
‘Don’t harp on about it,’ the sisters replied. ‘Weren’t the three of us enough for you, you greedy goat? Doesn’t the thought of Mary’s bosom keep you warm?’
‘No,’ he said sadly.
They made Douglas leave a pair of his pants on the clothes rope in the hope that their presence might keep the likes of Fisher at bay. They did not. Fisher was good at divining, pants on the rope or no, whether Douglas was actually in the house. This weekly arrangement was one Douglas eventually came to enjoy. The benefits of family without all the hullabaloo. He never had the nous to do elsewise.
FOUR
In the weeks following our move to the top, Clancy and I had our first sour taste of schooling. In the weatherboard schoolhouse on Parke Street we recited our letters and our numerals. We learned how to hold our chalk. Being the newest members of the class, Clancy and I were still trying to sort out the sheep from the goats in the power struggle of the playground. A boy called Angus Lovel seemed to rule the roost and taunted us with bitter names, Shadies being the least of them. When Clancy arrived one day with the marks of ringworm on his neck and arms, Angus Lovel said they were the signs of illicit congress with ponies. No one knew what illicit congress with ponies actually was, but none of the children wanted to sit near Clancy. Some of them picked the raisins from their cowyard cakes and flicked them at us. We were not welcome. We were intruders.
Emma and Ann dismissed our complaints. They said we had to sit up and pay attention to what Miss Husband, the pupil teacher, had to say.
‘But her bustle smells of camphor,’ I mizzled.
‘You can keep your nose out of Miss Husband’s bustle,’ my mother chided, while Ann guffawed.
We didn’t feel like laughing. There is nothing more real than the terror in a school lad’s heart. I can only say how much more frightening I would have found it if Clancy had not been with me.
‘You have to stand up for yourselves,’ said Ann, ‘and look out for each other.’
Two plus two was four, four plus four was eight. Thinking of apples might make the equation easier. Or lumps of torbanite. It seemed pretty straightforward.
C-o-w spelled cow. It had a rhythm and a logic. But Clancy’s gaze kept drifting out the high windows to the stringy wisps of cloud wafting in the sky like the spore of thistles. D-o-g spelled dog. I imagine he thought he was floating there, drifting on the wind, instead of being anchored at our desk. Clancy could never sit still for long, and he disliked the fact that I, apparently, could. I was always warding off his elbows aimed at my ribs in the cause of distracting me. Draughts blew up through cracks in the floorboards. The roof was of corrugated iron that heated up in summer like an oven. On still mornings you could hear the individual talons of parrots skidding across it. During hailstorms the noise was deafening. Sometimes we could not hear the teacher speak. This was when Clancy shouted out his answers the loudest, when no one could hear. He loved noise. Sometimes I would have to tell Clancy to keep his voice down, stop shrieking, but all I got for my concern was a thump on the arm.
Miss Husband rapped out the rhythm of the alphabet on the board with a ruler, cooing her vowels like a pigeon held under water in a bucket. ‘I-c-e: ice. A-c-e: ace. U-s-e: use. D-i-m, what does that spell, Joshua?’
‘Don’t know, miss,’ said Joshua Morgan.
Miss Husband (sad name for a spinster) was a shrill, thin-lipped woman, an artichoke with spectacles, although now that I look back on it she was probably no older than nineteen. She tied her hair in a high bun as if to balance the camphor-smelling bustle. Clancy and I were wary of her, although the boy called Angus Lovel made contorted, fearless faces when her back was turned. The other children dared not laugh. Mostly, when she spun around, every head was down over their slate. A piece of chalk launched from her fingers flew with impressive accuracy. When she bounced a piece of chalk off Clancy’s skull and its distracted contents, it made a sound like a pencil rapping on a coconut shell. Each day we were made to pick up our slate boards and write. C-o-w: cow. C-a-t: cat. D-o-g: dog. In time we advanced to four letters.
Unprompted, Clancy s
houted out, ‘C-o-l-e: coal.’
‘Shut up, Ringworm,’ growled Angus.
But school was never about the lessons.
Angus Lovel loved to fight. He would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. He always won. It became clear that he wanted to fight me because I didn’t know how to spell the word r-i-g-h-t. I didn’t know which one, right as in right-handed, or right as in the opposite of wrong. Miss Husband hadn’t made it clear.
‘Both the same, you gig,’ said Angus.
The main reason he wanted to fight was because I was a Shady. I didn’t want to fight Angus. He was a bigger boy with a strong jaw and hair as red as a king parrot’s throat. His ears stuck out and had wax dribbling from them.
‘You have to fight him,’ said Clancy one lunchtime. ‘They’re calling you Possum Guts.’
‘At least they’re not calling me Ringworm.’
But I couldn’t avoid it, and so one day I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to barney with Angus behind the tin shed that contained the stinky bucket the boys made piss in. I suppose the girls had a stinky bucket of their own. Hidden from the schoolhouse windows we faced off against each other. I took up my pugilist’s stance as Douglas had taught me. Angus quickly had my arm twisted up behind my back so that I was on my toes. It was a fearful embrace. I had hot tears in my eyes.
‘Shady, Shady.’
‘Look, he’s cryin’.’
I tried to elbow him in the stomach with my free arm, but it only waved feebly like a bird’s broken wing and Angus laughed at me. All the other kids laughed, too. His breath was in my ear. He jiggled my arm even higher. The pain seared. Even to this day, if I must think of it, I have never felt anything the like. My own weight was my enemy.
