Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  The men are not happy. Billy and Jack are the youngest shearers in the shed and have no right to be taking such liberties when the boys are needed. But they let it go and turn back to the oiling of their clippers and their preparations to leave. Perhaps they wonder why Jessica is standing with Jack, and not among the tar boys, but minding your own business is the first rule of any shearing shed and Jack is still the boss’s son. Jessica is shaking like a leaf and Jack is right to hold her. She’s near to panic and she’d have scarpered, running for her horse to get home.

  ‘Come on,’ Jack now says, leading her out of the shed.

  ‘They’ll think I’m marching you out, like Billy’s doing with the others.’

  ‘Please Jack, stop Billy, he’s gunna ruin it for me,’ Jessica cries.

  ‘Leave Billy be, Tea Leaf, he’s old enough and ugly enough to take care of himself. Come on, we’ve got to fix your hair,’ Jack replies.

  ‘No, no, please stop Billy. You said the benzine will fix my hair, that’s all that matters. We can do it later. It was a joke, that’s all. Just a stupid joke.’ Jessica reaches over and pulls at Jack’s sleeve. ‘Your father said he’d fire me if there was trouble. Jack, please, Joe needs the money I make for the mortgage. You’ve got to stop Billy before it’s too late, before he wrecks everything!’ she pleads desperately.

  Jack stops, and looking into Jessie’s eyes sees the panic there. They’ve reached the horses tethered to a stump. He unties both reins and hands Jessica hers as he thinks for a moment. ‘I’ll try,’ he says finally, ‘though Billy can be a stubborn bastard.’ Then, placing his boot in the stirrup, he swings into the saddle. Jessica does the same and they ride to where Billy has collected the six tar boys behind the shearing shed.

  The boys stand in front of Billy with their heads bowed. Five are barefoot and only one wears a pair of heavy boots, which are too big for him. They are all dirty and sweating and their top lips have turned to snot runs. When they’re running around the shed you wouldn’t notice what a bedraggled lot they are. But standing together in the late afternoon sun in their rags and tatters, filthy dirty from the day’s work, sniffing and forlorn, they’re as pathetic-looking a mob as you’d ever wish to see, Jessica thinks to herself. But she knows too that while her clothes are better, well patched by Hester, she doesn’t look much different.

  ‘Righto, here’s what’s gunna happen,’ Billy is saying as Jack and Jessica come riding up.

  ‘Hey, Billy, what say we leave this to Mike Malloy?’ Jack calls down to him.

  Billy turns and looks up at Jack. ‘Nah, it’s our business, Jack. They did it to our tar boy, it’s ours to fix.’ Jack climbs down from the saddle and tethers his horse to a tall mallee stump behind Billy. Jessica does the same.

  ‘Mate, Jessie doesn’t want you to go on with it,’ Jack continues. ‘She says it was just a joke they played on her.’ The tar boys all look up hopefully. Billy fixes his eyes on Jessica. ‘Some joke! Take off yer hat, Jessie.’ Jessica shakes her head.

  ‘Jessie, lift yer hat, that’s a bloody order!’ Billy shouts.

  ‘Lift it, Tea Leaf,’ Jack whispers beside her.

  Her hat is stuck firmly to her hair and she tries to remove it, lifting it gingerly, trying not to show the pain it’s causing her. She winces and gets one side of the hat free so that it lifts like a hinged lid, just enough for them to see that her scalp and short fair hair is completely covered and matted with tar. Some of the men have come out from the shed to see what’s going on, and a couple of them whistle with surprise at this sight. Jessica quickly pulls the side of the hat down again, flushing with embarrassment. ‘Please, Billy, there’s no harm done,’ she pleads.

  Billy isn’t listening and now he turns to the tar boys. ‘You gutless cowards done that to our tar boy and you’re gunna have to pay. You’re gunna have to fight me or have your heads done same as hers,’ Billy says.

  ‘What, all o’ us against you?’ the biggest among them says, smirking, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘All six of us in one go?’ It’s Flats Sullivan. Flats is not his real name, nobody knows his real name, not even him — he is called Flats because when he was a baby he fell out of his cot and onto the stone floor in the kitchen. It broke his nose and flattened his face out a treat. His dad later said it didn’t matter much because he was always fighting and his face would just as likely have ended up that way anyway. Jessica recalls it was Flats who sat on her chest and pinned her arms.

  ‘No, wait on, Billy,’ Jack says again. ‘Mr Malloy will fine them a day’s pay and they’ll get the living daylights belted out of them at home.’

  ‘That ain’t fair!’ one of the tar boys, Fly-speck, yells out.

  ‘Why not?’ Jack asks, surprised. ‘Would you rather get walloped, or go home with a head full of tar?’

  ‘Shit, yes!’ Fly-speck says. ‘Me old man will flatten me if I don’t bring home me pay!’ He points to Billy.

  ‘I’m scared of him, but I’m more scared of me father.’

  He looks around at the others. ‘Some of them’ll get off light, it ain’t fair. We all done it the same to her!’

  ‘That’s a confession if ever I heard one,’ Billy says, smiling at Jack. ‘You heard him.’ ‘We’ll fight yiz,’ Flats decides suddenly.

  Billy turns back to him. ‘Wait on, you ain’t heard the terms. It’s two at a time, one minute by the clock fighting, half a minute rest for me, then I take the next two and so on, till the six of you has learned yer lesson.’

  ‘How many times do we fight?’ Fly-speck asks. Though he’s the smallest of them all, he’s clearly the brains in the group. ‘Just the once.’

  Fly-speck looks over at Flats and nods.

  Jack tries one last time, Jessica egging him on silently. ‘Billy, Jessie thinks she’ll lose her place in the shed. She says my old man told her any trouble and she’s out.’ ‘Bullshit!’ Billy points to the tar boys. ‘They’ve chosen their own punishment. They’ve admitted they did it, you heard the boy. It’s not her that’s responsible, it’s them lot that has to cop what’s coming.’

  By now most of the men have come from the shed and they’ve made a semicircle around the group. There is a hum of approval at Billy’s reasoning. Billy is one of them, a grafter, and while Jack is a good lad who can put in a day’s work, he’s still the boss’s boy. The men like to settle things their way. Billy’s right — the tar boys have to learn they can’t muck about. What’s more, it’s a fair contest. These are all tough kids and at fourteen years they know how to scrap. The men don’t say it, but it’s also a bit of amusement before tea.

  ‘So, what’s it to be?’ Billy asks. ‘A bucket of tar over yer miserable heads, or fight me two at a time?’

  Jack looks down at Jessica and shrugs, then says quietly so that only she can hear, ‘She’ll be right, Jessie. I’ll talk to my father if it comes up. I’ll take care of it — you won’t lose your job.’

  The tar boys go into a huddle. They break and Flats says again, ‘We’ll fight ya, Billy.’

  Billy digs into his pocket and takes out a battered watch together with his rosary beads and hands both to Jack. ‘You’re the timekeeper, mate. One minute on, half a minute off.’ He points to the tar boys. ‘Two of them girlie beaters at a time.’ He pulls his shirt over his head and hangs it on the mallee log where the two horses are tethered.

  Billy now stands bare-chested with his legs apart facing the tar boys. ‘Righto, first two step up,’ he says to the six boys, none of whom has removed the rags they wear for shirts. Billy is a magnificent-looking young man, deep-muscled, huge in the chest with a stomach flat and rippled like a washboard.

  Flats pushes two of the boys forward, the one wearing boots and another with his head clean-shaved.

  Billy grins. ‘You should’ve picked the tar brush, son,’ he says, getting a laugh from the crowd.

  The men form a circle ar
ound the fight. There’s fear to be seen in all the tar boys’ eyes but they can’t back out if they ever hope to make it in a shearing shed. They walk around Billy, Boots to the back of him, the shaven-headed one to the front. Billy slaps the boy in front of him to the side of his head with the flat of his hand, hard enough to give him a thick ear and not much more. The boy jerks his head back as Billy pushes him and the lad loses his balance and falls to the dirt. Billy turns quickly to confront the second boy, but he’s not fast enough. The boy takes a vicious kick at Billy and the steel toecap of his boot connects with Billy’s knee. Billy goes down into the dirt clutching at his knee.

  Then all the other boys rush in, kicking and flailing wildly at Billy, their fists and feet landing anywhere they can find. One of them bites a chunk out of his ear. Billy manages to scramble to his feet, but his knee won’t hold . up. Then three of the tar boys rush at him, collecting him in the midriff, and he careers backwards into the rump of Jack’s tethered horse. The frightened beast tries to move away but finds it is pushed hard up against the mallee stump and rears and begins to fall, its hooves lashing out frantically as it tries to keep its balance. Billy lands sprawling in the dirt under Jack’s horse as its rear hoof strikes out backwards, collecting Billy’s head and cracking his skull open like a pumpkin fallen from a cart. A moment later the horse, still trying to regain its footing, drives a second hoof into Billy’s face.

  In the confusion that followed, Jessica can remember little of what happened next. Jack, it seemed, pulled her away and she was told much later she was screaming hysterically and he had to slap her across the face several times to make her stop. Even now, four years later, she is sick at the thought of that day. She still carries the guilt of Billy Simon with her. She’s told herself a thousand times she wasn’t to know what would happen. That she was only trying to save her job so Joe could get her money. But still the guilt lingers.

  They bandaged the two sides of Billy’s skull together, then wrapped the bandages with baling twine so the sides would hold firm. One of the shearers told Jessica later that the crack down his skull was about half an inch wide, and through it he could see Billy’s brain, a throbbing bloody sponge. Then they bandaged his shattered face. His nose was badly broken and all but the very back teeth smashed out of his mouth. When they’d finished with him he looked like one of those Egyptian mummies — all they left showing were two holes for his nose and mouth.

  Jack rode all the way to Narrandera with Billy Simon, sitting in the back of the horse cart himself to look after his mate. The trip took nearly fourteen hours and the others who’d gone with Billy, following the cart on horseback, told how Jack never left Billy and twice stopped to change his blood-soaked bandages, doing the dressings himself.

  They told how Billy would come round and Jack would talk quietly to him and he would stop moaning at the sound of his mate’s voice. Then Jack would roll a smoke and hold it to the crimson opening in the bandage and make him draw back for the small comfort the tobacco might bring him. Jack also poured brandy mixed with a little water down Billy’s throat every time he regained consciousness, sitting him up so he wouldn’t choke. The men joked that poor Billy was pissed as a newt, feeling no pain, by the time they got him to the doctor at Narrandera.

  When Billy came out of the hospital three months later Jack paid all his expenses and took him home, even though he was brain-damaged and the doctor said nothing could be done further, that he’d never be right in the head again. The accident had left a huge, ugly scar that ran the length of Billy’s skull to an inch above his left eyebrow, a pinkish track through his black curls. Not that you’d ever see it — the day Billy came home from Narrandera he had his hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was never after seen without it firmly on his noggin.

  Folk soon took to calling him Billy Simple, which was a cruel sort of joke. Before the accident, no bastard would have been game to attempt such a play on Billy Simon’s name for fear of having their own features rearranged. Now he was treated as a harmless idiot.

  Billy Simple, when he became well enough, was given a job for life as the gardener at Riverview homestead. All of this was Jack’s doing, against the wishes of George Thomas, Winifred and Gwen, these last two protesting that it was degrading to have a lunatic wandering around the garden.

  Surprisingly, Jack wouldn’t have succeeded in his endeavour to help Billy without the support of his mother. In the beginning, she had sided with the others, but when Jack had threatened to leave home and become an itinerant shearer and to take Billy with him, Ada, besotted with her only son, quickly gave in. Later, though, she and her daughters would wreak their revenge on poor, helpless Billy Simple. Jessica has heard Jack’s angry tales of his family’s mean teasing of Billy, and she certainly knows how nasty those women can be.

  Jessica herself has learned over the past four years to dislike the Thomas women almost as much as she dislikes their father. When she’d been forced to eat at the homestead that first year, every dinner she took with them became a torture. The two girls, Winifred and Gwen, delighted in making fun of her.

  They’d hold their noses when Jessica entered the kitchen. ‘Pooh, you smell of sheep!’ they’d exclaim, even though Jessica always took care to wash her face and arms at the pump before entering the house.

  They spoke about her in French, which they were learning from their tutor, giggling and hugging each other, overcome with their own amusement. They remarked loudly on her awkward table manners and imitated her holding her knife in her fist and resting its end on the table as she ate. They always sat at the other end of the kitchen table, noting loudly that it was as far from her pong as they could possibly get.

  They remarked constantly on her looks, her greasy work clothes and her short cropped hair, and wondered aloud how a woman could sink so low that she’d dress like a man and work in a shearing shed.

  Jessica dared not fight back and learned to take her meals in silence, gulping down her food so that she could make her escape. Winifred and Gwen never ceased delighting in taunting her and seemed between them to have an endless capacity to be vindictive. Ada would sometimes come into the kitchen and sit at the table but even then the teasing didn’t stop. Jessica soon sensed that while she did not join in, Ada Thomas was secretly very amused by their taunts and carrying on.

  ‘You two really are the limit,’ she’d say to her daughters, though there would be a small smile on her lips. ‘Leave the poor girl alone.’

  Jessica used to beg Joe to let her go without her dinner at the homestead, to take bread and cold mutton with her and eat alone. But Hester would never allow it, saying that keeping the family’s relationship with the Thomas girls cordial was a great opportunity for Meg to get closer to young Jack.

  ‘Don’t you ever show disrespect to them, or answer back — you’ll ruin our chances for Meg,’ her mother had admonished her, making Joe promise that their young daughter would do nothing to upset Ada, Winifred or Gwen.

  As Jessica nears the homestead now she can hear the dogs barking, and grins when she thinks how angry they’ll be at being locked up and missing out on the fun. Again, she lets herself feel happy at the thought of a few days without Meg and Hester and their endless pursuit of the Thomas family.

  Her mother and sister have turned posh and become Church of England, taking their example from Mrs Thomas and her daughters, Winifred and Gwen, which to Jessica’s mind is about the worst thing you could do. They clutch their prayer books to their bosoms for all to see as they arrive at St Stephen’s in the sulky. As you can’t go clutching a prayer book to your bosom while looking saintly and, at the same time, hold the reins and talk to the horse, their new-found piety requires Jessica to drive them to church of a Sunday. This means she has to sit on her bum in a hard pew while the Reverend Samuel Mathews, M.A. Oxon., takes an hour of sunlight out of her life to get through the dreary Sunday sermon. It’s a speech which generally seems to
involve the perfidy of mankind, the futility of life and the need to be good and love thy neighbour so that you may reap the reward in the hereafter for enduring a miserable life out here in the bush.

  As Ada Thomas and her thin-lipped daughters are their nearest neighbours, Hester and Meg are determined to love their neighbours, even if they should die in the attempt. Liking, let alone loving, the shrill-voiced Ada and her daughters, Jessica decides, is going to take a whole Bible full of Christian charity on their part. If Jack Thomas isn’t to be the ultimate prize, she doubts whether even Hester and Meg would bother to go the distance with the three Thomas women.

  And if Mrs Thomas and her girls are aware of the plan to snare their only son, brother and the heir to Riverview Station, they certainly don’t let on. They accept all the bowing and scraping and smiling as their due, and include Hester and Meg in their larger tea parties. It is obvious they don’t consider Hester and Meg up to scratch, but this only seems to make the two Bergman women more in awe of the Thomases.

  Hester and Meg admire Ada and her girls blindly, in the way poor people often admire the rich, endowing them with character and intelligence they don’t possess. Money, Jessica has discovered, is a clever way to conceal stupidity and meanness in people’s personalities. Her mother and sister will tolerate no criticism of the three, although Jessica reckons that the more Hester and Meg kowtow to them, the snootier the Thomas women seem to get.

  What’s more, she thinks that the three Thomas women are just plain-looking, plain stupid and plain snobs. It should be said in fairness that Hester and Meg aren’t the only ones who dare not cross Ada Thomas. Nobody in the parish is prepared to speak out against them or put them in their place. This has allowed them to become the arbiters of all that’s good or bad in the district and, with Ada’s money, the major dispensers of its charity and goodwill. Not that goodwill has a lot going for it in the Riverina, if Ada’s an example, Jessica thinks.