by Gary Crew
Augustus froze.
Out of that dark, out of that murk, that stench, that memory of days gone by, lurched none other than Barkus Hardacre; wasted, thin, too thin, his pale hands outstretched, calling, ‘Rosa? Rosa are you come? Are you come at last?’
‘Barkus?’ Augustus answered. ‘Mr Hardacre, Sir?’
‘I am Barkus Hardacre,’ he replied. ‘But what are you?’
‘Not Rosa, Sir, but me, Augustus Trump.’
Barkus lurched closer, to grasp him (those hands once so virile, now thin and pale), where he stood at the foot of the ladder, too terrified to move.
‘Augustus?’ Barkus called. ‘Not him who was her friend? Not the dwarf? Not the dwarf who sang? Not that Augustus, surely?’
‘Indeed, it is,’ came the reply. ‘But I am alone,’ and reaching up to take the librarian’s death-white fingers, he thought, Absalom, my solitary friend, here is the proof of that pain of love. Ah … Though he chose not to vocalise this; to lie was easier. ‘Barkus,’ he said, his courage quickening, ‘it is good to see you. Our parting was sudden, I am sorry.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Barkus demanded. ‘Did she send you?’
‘No,’ the boy assured him. ‘I am alone. I promise. I was looking for poetry books and stumbled upon this place. But what, may I ask, are you doing here? And where are we? I am confused …’
‘Poetry?’ the librarian sneered. ‘Here? In this place? You joke, surely …’ and led him through the oozy dung. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘There is a pallet of clean straw. The library is old, these stables beneath. I hole up here when I bring the wagon in. It’s foul, but the odour suits my spirits. She is above us, my Rosa. I helped her find work here. And I see her, sometimes – not often –coming and going. Augustus, I am finished. She enticed me and I followed. And I cannot cease to follow. To dream. To wait. Which is the hopelessness of love …’ Weeping, he buried his head in his hands.
‘I am sorry,’ Augustus offered. ‘She was cruel, I know. I warned her …’
‘Too cruel,’ the librarian wailed. ‘I was willing to marry her. I would have given my life for her, and now, I fear, I must. I have …’
‘Is there anything I can do?’ Augustus asked, doubting.
‘Perhaps you could speak to her for me?’
‘She would not listen.’
‘You could carry a note for me?’
‘She would not read it.’
‘What then? I am doomed …’
‘I could sing?’ Augustus suggested, brightening.
‘Sing to her? Yes! The poetry might lead her to me. Might woo her …’
‘No,’ Augustus soothed, ‘I could sing for you. To cheer you.’
‘I am tired,’ Barkus sighed. ‘I am …’
‘Then lie back,’ Augustus crooned. ‘Lie back. Close your eyes now. Lie back …’
And exhausted, Barkus did.
When Augustus saw that Barkus slept (dreaming, was he?), he reached for the ladder, and climbing, sang:
Are you going to Scarborough Faire?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Remember me to one who lives there,
She once was a true love of mine.
As he reached the top, never looking back, the grimy casement below eased open and she appeared: that faery’s child, her hair long, her foot light, her eyes wild, that lady full beautiful, that Belle Dame Sans Merci, and, drifting down, she lifted him, that pale lover, and mounting him upon his steed she called him to her elfin grot where he, all smiling and fulfilled, agreed too gladly to repose eternal in that fruitless dream of love.
Augustus was desperate to escape. Spotting what he took to be the back door, he eagerly stepped out. Before him stretched a muddied pathway and, strutting boldly upon it, three massive crows, their coal black feathers (mourning in bombazine, were they?) all glossy in the foggy light.
‘And what are you three doing here?’ he asked, mocking. ‘Shoo! Shoo! Get off the path. I’m looking for books. Shoo! Shoo!’ but they did not go; indeed, the largest bird turned, and tilting its head, cast its golden eye upon him.
‘Oh!’ Augustus declared. ‘You are the cheeky one, aren’t you? Go on, get …’ at which the bird faced him directly and in a gravelly voice declared, ‘Since when have you turned so rude? I remember you as a nice little fellow, who sang!’
Am I mad? Augustus wondered, staring about, Or did that bird just speak?
‘Of course she spoke,’ the second bird said. ‘When have you known her to be silent, other than out of fear of that Rosa?’
Even as Augustus clapped his hands to his temples, his senses reeling, the third waddled over, as bold as you like, and said, loud and clear, ‘Would you sing for us, Augustus? Something moving, something sad, something of that “Plaisir d’amour”, perhaps?’
And so Augustus knew them: his Moira, his Betty, his Absalom, and he laughed out loud, delighted. ‘What can I say?’ he cried. ‘Why are you here? Tell me, please.’
But with many a golden wink, and many a shiver of those jet-black plumes, they toddled away with here a peck and there a scratch, but never another word among them.
‘What?’ he cried. ‘What have you come to tell me?’ but they would not, those tricksters three, although they strutted purposefully, and he in their thrall followed, until the muddy path passed through a gap in the mullock and he saw them pause and look up, croaking.
‘What?’ he wondered. ‘Is this what you have come to show me?’ And standing among them, unafraid, he looked to see a leafless tree (Salix babylonica, a weeping willow, he knew), the epitome of sorrow; the very metaphor of death. This is the mullock dump that I spotted from the clerestory last I was here, he realised. I wonder, is there a pit? And if there is …?
As Augustus stepped out to see, his feathered guides departed, their voices hushed, their wings a whisper, and confused as he was, what with Gorgons and Silent Stampers and Grey Flannel streaming, and now these three, these Crows in Mourning, he wondered: Am I crazy, or still, after all, that Augustus Trump who sang?
He had seen mullock heaps all about the town, but as he left the willow to wander that puddly path, side-stepping the black ooze, he saw that the rocky waste was not randomly dumped (by some miner or machine, careless), but stacked neatly, like walls, or rocky hedgerows, uniform. Nor were the rocks rough-edged, having been blasted from the earth, but regular rectangles and squares, though drizzled with the slag and slime he had mistaken for moss. Is this slate, he wondered, stacked slice upon slice, slab upon slab? And hesitant, he reached out to discover that what he had assumed to be stone was soft and porous to his touch.
‘Why!’ he gasped. ‘These are books. Piles of books, stacked one upon the other, yet rank and weathered. Stacked here by those Gorgons, I bet …’ Drawing back, amazed, he heard the sound of tearing, of paper being ripped, of pages being torn, and fearful, he found a space to peer beyond, wondering.
Though he knew her at once, Miss la Vie was not as he had last seen her. She sat straight-backed on a shabby office chair, surrounded by the mouldering books. No longer dressed in pink, she wore a suit of grey flannel, buttoned up and square shouldered, her hair cut ragged and rough. But it was her face that moved him most; what had once appeared pale and cadaverous, caked as it had been with powder and rouge, now glowed red, all rubbed and scrubbed: the skin of a drover, or a bricklayer, red and raw. He watched as she scanned the page of a book open on her knees then, grimacing, she tore that page out, crumpled it in her fist, and cast it into the pit beside her.
The books are being destroyed. And by Madame … he realised. Either Rosa does not know, or she is a liar.
‘Miss la Vie,’ he said, stepping up. ‘We meet again.’
She looked up, raising her eyebrows, not especially surprised. ‘So you have found me,’ she said. ‘I was half expecting …’ and she lowered her eyes to scan another page.
‘I wasn’t looking, I promise.’
‘Why are you here?’ she asked, car
eless. ‘I thought you’d be on the stage. One way or another.’
‘I only wanted to make you happy,’ he said. ‘I hoped to do that with my song.’
She chucked what remained of a book down the pit and turned to him. ‘Yes, well,’ she said, ‘you mucked that up, didn’t you?’
‘I had no knowledge of your love life. Certainly of the fact – or so I have been led to believe – that the Blue Butterfly shared a similar passion …’
‘How about you get lost,’ she said, reaching down for another slime-caked volume.
And he would have, gladly, had he not needed an answer. ‘Those books that you are destroying,’ he said. ‘Are they poetry, by any chance?’
‘Naturally!’
‘Unnaturally, I would say,’ he rallied.
‘Didn’t I just tell you to get lost?’
‘I will, when you tell me.’
‘I’m reading, okay? I’m reading every lying love poem ever written. Those dried-out hags in there were chucking them out. Never had a man between them, they haven’t, and wouldn’t know what to do with him if they did. So when I came to this library looking, trying to find some hope, some love, even in print if I had to, after what happened to me, after him that betrayed me, and her, that Blue Butt, I found all these poetry books out in the slag pile. Culling, they called it; culling. Not by me, okay? By them, in there, so I’m reading these poetry books, see, but I haven’t found anything to make me feel better. So I’m getting rid of the rubbish. You done with me now? Go on, get lost …’
‘But I sang you a love song,’ he protested. ‘I sang you a love poem. The very one that you loved yourself. I climbed that mango tree, I sang my heart out. And you ridiculed me. Or tried to …’
‘Are you mad?’ she demanded. ‘Are you loony? What love song? What love poem? I never told you nothing. I never gave you nothing, though you wanted it bad. And for free …’
‘You make yourself cheap,’ he said. ‘And you are wrong. The Blue Butterfly told me that “Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird” was your favourite song so I sang it for you, special.’
‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, a slimy hand flying to her mouth. ‘So it was her who put you up to that. Ah … And you believed! It was her favourite song. And his. Theirs, not mine.’ She sighed, reconsidering. ‘Now I get it. She told you that to spite me. To destroy me. And she did. She did … My house. My heart, what was left of it. Look at me here. Dried up, I am, dried up with looking for love, like them old bags inside. I thought you were having a go at me …’ Covering her face, she wept.
He came to her, taking her hands in his. ‘I am just a kid. Rosa tells me that every day. And I know nothing about love, and maybe never will, not unless I grow. Unless I will myself to manhood.’
‘Ha!’ she sneered. ‘Men!’
‘I will find that perfect song,’ he declared. ‘I will sing that note sublime and I will grow. I will!’
‘Yeah, yeah …’ The Madam had heard enough.
‘And there’s something that I have to offer you. You know that song, that Little Yellow Bird?’
‘No more,’ she wailed. ‘Never again. Leave it. Leave me, please.’
‘I won’t leave you,’ he said. ‘There’s something that you need to hear. That song said, “I’d rather brave the cold, in a leafless tree than a prisoner be, in a cage of gold.” That was her song, as you say, and his. Who would know? But I have a better one. I have a better one to cheer you and promise you the love you are looking for. No leafless trees, no, quite the opposite. And no, you won’t find this poem in those books. It’s here, inside me.’
‘Augustus,’ she pleaded. ‘Go, please.’
But he would not and, planting his tiny feet, and lifting his pretty head, he sang:
Where’er you walk,
Cool gales shall fan the glade.
Trees where you sit
Shall crowd into a shade.
Trees where you sit
Shall crowd into a shade …
Looking beyond him she saw the stark, leafless willows begin to green, and in moments, spontaneously as she would remember, they were leaved all over, crowded with summery shade.
Augustus saw nothing, his head back, content to sing.
When he had finished she said, ‘Augustus, I heard you. And having heard – and seen – I must speak.’
‘I’m listening,’ he said, ignorant of her vision.
‘I am no Miss la Vie,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘Neither am I a whore; not by birth, nor by nature. I am Daphne Fooks, from out Goondi way, and the time has come for me to go back. There’s people out there who love me. Under the red gums, down by the river, back home. You have reminded me. Thank you, Augustus, I will go …’ and stepping through the mud and mould, she did.
Augustus had never been interested in money, having no need for it, but now, as part of his plan, the power to purchase became a necessity. If he was going to gain the victory, to emancipate that library, to enrich those bare shelves with poetry, he needed to present as a man, a powerful man, a military man. No boyish lederhosen would do; he needed a uniform. He was, after all, only following Rosa’s repeated lectures to ‘act like an adult’, and since he didn’t like the clothes she supplied, maybe he should follow her advice and buy his own. But with what?
Though not well off, Rosa and Stan sometimes left change about: the odd sixpence, the occasional shilling, and once – though he waited a day before snaffling it – he spotted a crumpled pound note under the Genoa lounge. Augustus appropriated an Arnott’s biscuit tin, the lid sporting a parrot in red, blue and green, to serve as his money box, not daring to ask for a proper one with a slot in the top for fear of raising suspicion. Thus he began to save, little by little, over six months, nine months, maybe even a year, since life had a certain sameness in that cottage.
He also took to observing what was worn by those who passed by as he sat reading, small and secret, on the front steps. He saw miners in pairs swinging tin lunch boxes, sometimes with a canary (all skinny and terrified), but always black and grim in their sooty grey flannels (was that where those flannel shafts had come from, up there on that cast-iron gallery?). Stan was forever boiling his own filthy clothes, pushing them down in the bubbling suds with a broom handle and a blue stick, but all to no avail other than making them so stiff when they dried they might be used to roof a house. But Augustus could never pass himself off as a miner and besides, that was not the martial self-construction he required.
Nor could he present as a housewife, although there were plenty of them who passed by, lank-haired miners’ wives in droopy florals, so ordinary he wondered how the population grew if bodily attraction was a factor, as Rosa had told him all that time ago in the shed down the back of Miss la Vie’s.
Children came by too, the schoolboys especially interesting to him, particularly those who wore fancy uniforms and went to private schools. Holding his book high to pretend he was reading, Augustus leaned forward to watch.
These uniforms varied. The Catholic schools were usually too awful to consider, being made of materials that looked itchy, and were invariably in colours calculated to repel: brown and yellow, or brown and blue, or brown and mauve (which was the worst). He sometimes wondered if this repellent colouration was intentional, being designed to make the boys less attractive to their teachers. Mary Smokes had warned him about those ‘Brothers’, down there in the dirt. So he ignored the ugly Catholic uniforms and gave his attention to the others. The Lutheran get up was okay, if somewhat restrictive (the trousers looking very tight), but the Church of England uniform really caught his eye. Being mostly khaki, featuring a smart little coat (with epaulettes of burgundy and gold) and complete with long trousers, the outfit had a certain military air that he liked; that suited his mission to conquer the library, so to speak.
But how could he get such a uniform? And how much would it cost? These questions vexed him greatly, especially when he considered his only option: to catch the train and sit close enough to
engage those C. of E. boys in conversation.
That decision being made, one morning he waited until Rosa had left on the 8.05 then dressed himself in his hated lederhosen. To complete his ‘otherness’ (being already othered by size), he chose a heavy-weave blanket (the obligatory travelling rug) and a piece of mouldy cheese (to pass as goat’s), thus completing his construction as Friedrich from the Tyrol, and allowing him with greater alacrity (or less, perhaps?) to ask silly questions, as tourists often do. Next, this Friedrich in lederhosen took himself to the station to catch the 8.32, the train swarming with school kids. He stood at the back of the uniformed horde, watching, and at 8.30, his mark arrived. A boy (possibly a dwarf) in a C. of E. uniform and hardly taller than himself approached, accompanied by his mother. The Tyrolean tourist insinuated himself.
‘Guten Morgen,’ Friedrich said in his very best Tyrolean. ‘The son gotten nice uniform. Where you get?’
‘What a darling child!’ the mother declared. ‘Judging by your own outfit – and that cheesy smell – you must be from the Alps. I did so love Heidi.’
Friedrich gaped, dumbfounded.
But all was not lost. ‘Roger’s uniform?’ she remembered. ‘I do beg your pardon. That was made by a woman in Brisbane Street. Her sign read, “Nice needlework done here”. And will you be going to St Sufferings yourself?’
‘Ach, nein,’ Friedrich squeaked before vanishing into the crowd.
Still clad in the hideous lederhosen (since he had nothing else to wear), Augustus found the shop in Brisbane Street with very little trouble, the average passer-by being only too pleased to move him on, having caught a whiff of that rancid cheese on the sultry Ipswich breeze. And when he pushed at the door, heard the bell and saw the woman there, bending over the treadle-operated Singer, her face as thin as a splinter, her teeth long and yellow, he gasped: ‘Needly! Needly Phyllis!’ and they fell into each other’s arms.
‘I was wanting a favour,’ Augustus began. ‘A uniform to be made, if you would …’
