Kal

by Judy Nunn

  ‘Come on, Bailey!’ the onlookers urged the man on the ground. ‘Come on, get the scum!’

  Bailey rose and charged, and the two of them once more locked together. But again the first man had the advantage and Bailey was smashed to the ground, blood oozing from his temple.

  The mob didn’t like it. They booed the victor and jostled each other as they jeered at their would-be champion. ‘Come on, Bailey! What are you made of? Show the scab!’

  Caterina felt herself stumble. Any moment she was going to drop Paolo. She grasped the man next to her to steady herself. He didn’t even notice. ‘Get up, Bailey!’ he roared. ‘Get up!’

  The man who was winning scanned the onlookers as he waited for Bailey to rise, wary that a supporter may come to the aid of his adversary. Something seemed to suddenly catch his attention and for a second he remained frozen to the spot.

  Struggling to stay on her feet, it was Caterina who saw the knife first. A flash of silver in the dim light of the streetlamps. She watched horrified as the man, Bailey, slowly rose to his feet. ‘Dago pig!’ he shouted and, knife held high, he hurled himself at his opponent.

  As quickly as the mob had formed its circle, the men dispersed. Any moment the police would arrive. In an instant the street was deserted, except for the combatants. Bailey stood panting, knife in hand, and the man he’d called dago lay bleeding in the street, his face cut open.

  In the melee, Caterina had fallen. She’d tried to support Paolo as she went down but she felt the child’s head crack against the pavement. Then the boot of a fleeing man caught her in the ribs.

  She struggled to sit up, a jarring pain in her side. ‘Are you hurt, Paolo?’ she whispered urgently. ‘Are you hurt?’ The boy was groggy and there was blood on the side of his face but he was conscious.

  ‘Sssh. Do not cry. Sssh.’ Caterina stood up. As she lifted the child to her hip a searing pain cut through her ribs but she took no notice. She ran, as fast as she could, up the hill to the Dockside Arms.

  GIOVANNI HAD NOT seen the knife. He was too busy searching the faces in the surrounding circle, looking for the first sign of attack. Then he saw the girl. Or he thought he did. The girl from the mountain. It was her. It had to be her. But in the split second that his attention was caught, he saw her eyes focus on something. He turned. Too late. ‘Dago pig!’ he heard and the man was upon him.

  Giovanni felt the knife rip his face open. There was no pain but the blood flowed instantly and he fell to the pavement.

  As the onlookers fled, the man Bailey stood for a moment, disconcerted, unsure whether or not he should flee himself. It was all the time Giovanni needed. He flung himself at his opponent. Bailey was no match for him and Giovanni knew it. He grasped the wrist that held the knife and the man fell, the full weight of Giovanni on top of him.

  Bailey still held the knife and, with both hands, he tried to force the blade towards Giovanni’s chest, but his strength did not equal the Italian’s. Giovanni sat astride him, locked his hands around the man’s wrists and slowly twisted the knife until the tip of the blade rested under Bailey’s jaw.

  ‘Vuoi morire, eh? Eh? You wish to kill yourself? Let me help you.’ Slowly Giovanni dug the knife into the flesh. There was a lot of give in the skin beneath the jaw and it was a second or so before blood was drawn.

  Bailey was whimpering and trying desperately to release his grip on the knife, but the grip was no longer his—Giovanni’s hands were over his own, forcing him to dig the knife into his own throat. A thin trickle of blood started to stream down his neck. It mingled with the blood that dripped upon him from the deep gash in Giovanni’s cheek.

  ‘Please. No. Please.’ Bailey begged for his life.

  ‘Basta? You have had enough?’ Giovanni released his grip and the knife fell to the pavement. As he picked it up and rose to his feet he noticed his shirtfront was covered in blood. His face was starting to hurt.

  For just a moment, Bailey lay in the street, surprised that his life had been spared. Then he crawled to his feet and staggered off into the dark.

  Giovanni walked back to his lodgings, a boarding house only several blocks away. He gripped the gash in his cheek and held his head to one side trying to stem the bleeding. How had this happened? he wondered. He had been in Fremantle barely three weeks. He had caused no trouble, he had looked for none. He’d accepted work on the wharves from a subcontractor and when there had been murmurs about his non-union status the boss had assured him that all was above board.

  ‘They don’t like you Italians because you work too hard, that’s all it is,’ the boss had said. ‘You work hard for me and I pay you well, and if they want to complain, let them.’

  Giovanni had thought no more about it until that night, when he’d gone to the Red Dingo to make contact with the timbercutters who gambled there on Sunday nights. That was where the money was, he’d been told. Cutting timber down south paid far more than he could earn on the wharves.

  But instead of the timbercutters, he’d run into a group of wharfies waiting for the gambling den to open. One of them asked him what he was doing there. He answered the man in Italian. That was the first thing that angered them. The wharfies didn’t like Italians.

  ‘Speak English, you bloody dago.’ Then the recognition. ‘It’s the dago scab,’ someone else said. And then it had started. Why? Giovanni wondered. What had he done wrong?

  He did not like Fremantle, he decided, as he opened the door of the boarding house and walked down the passage and up the stairs to his room on the first floor. He would go south and cut timber until Rico joined him.

  He turned on the light and looked in the small mirror above the washbasin in the corner. It was a bad cut. Deep, from the top of his cheekbone to his jawline. It could have been worse, though. Half an inch higher and he would have lost his eye.

  He must stop the bleeding. He took off his bloodied shirt, ran cold water and sponged his face clean with a towel. For half an hour he sat with his head to the side, stemming the blood flow with the cold wet towel.

  There were other scars on Giovanni’s body—he had been in fights before. The mountain boy had grown up quickly on the docks of Genoa. There was still a boyishness in his looks but now, when the hazel eyes flashed brown in anger, it was a man’s anger. The Genoese dockside workers had developed a healthy respect for Giovanni Gianni.

  Giovanni did not like fighting, and avoided it when possible. But he did not like bullies. The tyranny of the De Cretico brothers remained fresh in his mind. It had happened nearly five years ago, but it could have been yesterday. The fire in him burned when he thought of his crippled brother. Never again would he stand by and allow others to threaten him or his own. If they did, he would fight, and if they harmed one of his kin, he would seek vengeance.

  The bleeding had stopped. The wound needed stitching. He took several swigs from the bottle of rough whisky on the shelf above his bed, then poured some of the liquor into the wound, grimacing as it burned the raw flesh. He must find a needle and thread.

  He tore one of his work shirts, making sure it was a seam which could be easily mended—no sense in wasting good clothing. Then he donned his jacket and walked down the stairs and along the passage to the room at the front, carrying the torn shirt and holding a clean cloth against his cheek. He knocked on the landlady’s door.

  When Pat Forman, fat and forty and very lonely, saw the handsome young Italian standing there, shirtless, bare-chested beneath his jacket, her heart quickened slightly. She’d made it evident from the moment he’d applied for the room two weeks previously that she’d be happy to halve the rent for a little companionship.

  ‘A widow’s life is a lonely lot,’ she’d said. She thought that sounded very tasteful. ‘And you must be lonely too. A foreigner. Perhaps you’d like me to cook you a meal every now and then.’ As a rule she didn’t make ‘arrangements’ with foreigners. Particularly not Italians. Dark, swarthy lot they were—always looked as if they needed a good wash. But this
one didn’t look Italian at all. With his fine-boned face and his soft brown curls, there was something quite boyish about him. He needed a mother she’d thought as she patted his arm.

  Giovanni had recoiled. He did not understand what she was saying—‘No capisco, no capisco, excuse, scusi’ he’d said, backing away—but he knew very well what she was offering.

  Pat had been disappointed, but it had happened to her before. And now here he was on a Sunday night, shirtless, at her door.

  Before she could say anything Giovanni thrust the torn shirt at her. ‘L’ago e filo,’ he said. ‘L’ago e filo. Per favore.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your face?’ she asked, pointing at the cloth he was holding to his cheek.

  Giovanni draped the torn shirt over his shoulder, opened his mouth slightly, ignoring the flash of pain as he did, and tapped a finger against a tooth. ‘Mi fa male il dente.’

  ‘Ah, poor boy, come in, I’ll give you some cloves to ease the pain.’ She stood aside.

  ‘No, no,’ Giovanni said and he smiled, hoping that the bleeding would not start again. ‘Is okay. Lago e filo.’ He pointed to the shirt and mimed a sewing action. ‘E forbeci.’ He mimed scissors. ‘Per favore.’

  ‘Oh you silly boy, give it to me and I’ll mend it for you.’ She leaned forward to take the shirt but Giovanni backed away.

  ‘No no!’ he insisted forcefully. ‘Lago e filo e forbeci. Per favore.’

  ‘All right. All right.’ Pat was offended. She was only trying to be helpful. She disappeared for a moment and returned with a needle and cotton.

  ‘E forbeci,’ Giovanni insisted. Again he mimed a cutting action and again he smiled. ‘Per favore.’

  Pat hurrumphed, but disappeared and returned with scissors.

  ‘Grazie. Molto grazie. Thank you.’ Giovanni nodded and smiled and backed off rapidly, feeling his cheek start to bleed again.

  Safely in his room, he once more stemmed the bleeding and then started methodically stitching up the wound.

  As he dug the needle into his flesh, he thought about the girl. It was not the first time he had imagined seeing her. On several occasions, in the streets of Genoa, he could have sworn he had seen her. In the distance. He had run towards her only to discover that it was not the girl at all.

  Giovanni pulled the cotton through his flesh. Keep thinking, keep thinking, he told himself. Take your mind off the pain. He dug the needle into the other side of the gash. The pain was intense. Keep thinking, keep thinking. And now here he was at the bottom of the world and he could have sworn, yet again, that he had seen the girl. It couldn’t possibly have been her, of course. She had become a figment of his imagination, a foolish fixation, and he must put her out of his mind.

  He unthreaded the needle, knotted the cotton and, in the mirror watched the edges of the gash in his cheek come together as he slowly tightened the knot. He dabbed the freshly oozing blood from his face with the damp towel and snipped the thread with the scissors. One stitch done. He must be careful to keep them even.

  He gritted his teeth, dabbed again at the blood, and started on the second stitch. Twenty minutes later he tied the knot of the ninth and final stitch, images of the girl floating through his pain-filled daze. The girl from the mountain had followed him over the years. He’d seen her image in the streets of Milan and again in the dockside lanes of Genoa. Or he’d thought he had. And now she’d appeared to him again, the image of an angel amongst the snarling faces which had surrounded him in the tangled streets of Fremantle at the bottom of the world. Why did she haunt him?

  Giovanni cut the cotton and lay down on the bed, holding the towel against his face. He felt weak now, tired with the pain. He picked up his concertina and played gently to distract himself. The instrument was a little battered now but the sound it made was as sweet as ever. He felt himself start to relax.

  He would not go back to the wharves tomorrow, he decided. He would rest for several days and then he would find a timbercutting job down south. He would leave Fremantle and wait for Rico to send him word as to when he would arrive with his family.

  Giovanni smiled through his weariness. How glad he’d been when news had reached him of his brother’s marriage, and how he’d laughed, when, six months later, Teresa had given birth to a son.

  Soon after he had arrived in Genoa, Giovanni had found out that one of his workmates could read and write, a rarity amongst the dockworkers. For payment of a bottle of wine, this man would write letters for Giovanni and send them to the Santa Lena medico, who would then read them to the Gianni family. Then would come the reply, written by the medico, of course, and Giovanni would sit eagerly by as his workmate read him news of home. He marvelled now that all he had to do was send word to the medico from any telegraph office and his family would know where to reach him.

  Giovanni remembered that final letter his friend had written for him. ‘Rico,’ he had said, ‘have the medico send word to me at the telegraph office in Fremantle, Western Australia. I will be there in six months and I will wait for you to join me.’ He would go to Australia, Giovanni decided, just as they had planned. And just as they had planned, he and Rico would dig for gold at the bottom of the world and they would become rich.

  ‘Giovanni!’

  Above the hubbub of voices and the clatter of passengers disembarking Giovanni heard his name but, try as he might, he could not see his brother. Rico, Teresa, their two children, where were they? He stood on the wharf and looked up at the people leaning over the railings of the S.S. Liguria. His eyes scanned the faces of those jostling to find a place in the queue to the gangplank.

  It was three years since Giovanni had left Italy. Three years before Rico had been able to join him. Teresa was once more with child, the medico’s letter informed him. The clerk in the Donnybrook telegraph office read the letter out loud in the doctor’s halting English.

  Since he had left Fremantle, Giovanni had settled in the southern town of Donnybrook where the timbercutting contracts were plentiful. He had taught himself to speak adequate English and he had a convenient arrangement with the clerk, regularly paying the young man to correspond for him.

  After the birth of her baby girl Teresa refused to travel until the child was two years of age, sturdy enough to withstand the rigours of a long sea voyage.

  But, in early January of 1900, the letter Giovanni had been waiting for finally arrived. The handwriting was the doctor’s but this time the words were Rico’s. Giovanni thrilled to the sound of his brother talking to him as the clerk read out the letter in his thin, monotonous voice.

  ‘The new year, Gio. The first year of a new century,’ his brother said to him. ‘What a time to start a new life, yes? And in a new world. Everything we planned, you and I, everything we dreamed of, it will all come true.’

  Giovanni returned to Fremantle, rented a room in his old boarding house, and waited impatiently for Rico’s arrival. He looked at the telegraph daily, repeating the words he’d memorised and, each time, his brother’s voice spoke to him more clearly. This was the brother of his boyhood speaking to him, the same vital, adventurous, irrepressible Rico.

  ‘Gio! Giovanni!’

  He turned. Rico had been amongst the first half-dozen passengers down the gangplank, a five-year-old boy perched on his shoulders. Giovanni grinned. Of course, he should have known. Rico would never stand back and wait his turn.

  ‘Rico! Teresa!’ He waved and stood back from the crowd, watching as his brother stepped off the gangplank onto the wharf. Behind Rico was Teresa, even taller and more handsome than Giovanni remembered. She had a little girl draped over one hip.

  He tried not to look at his brother’s legs as Rico walked towards him in an awkward, lurching gait, each stiffened leg kicked out to the side. It was a comical walk, the walk of a clown, the broad shoulders and massive barrel of his chest accentuating the deformity. Giovanni concentrated on Rico’s face and kept his smile intact to hide his shock as he embraced his brother. But Rico knew. />
  ‘I walk funny, si? Now I am a fool. Now they laugh at me.’ He kissed his brother on both cheeks, the knees of the child on his shoulders digging into Giovanni’s chest. ‘But only once they laugh, Gio. Only once if they know what is good for them.’

  Rico laughed himself. In his customary loud, bold fashion. But there was no humour in the laugh and there was a glassy warning in his eyes. Giovanni realised in that instant that he had been wrong. His brother had changed.

  ‘Teresa!’ Giovanni embraced his sister-in-law. Her black hair had escaped her scarf and she smelled warm and feminine, reminding him that it had been a long time since he had been with a woman.

  ‘Giovanni,’ she kissed him affectionately on both cheeks. ‘This is my daughter Carmelina. She is beautiful, si?’ She lifted the two-year-old from her hip and thrust her at Giovanni who had no option but to take the child.

  Giovanni was not accustomed to children and he held the infant at arm’s length, but the little girl did not seem to mind at all. She clapped her hands at him and smiled fearlessly. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to hold her to him as her tiny arms encirled his neck and her legs fought for a purchase.

  Teresa refused to come to his rescue. ‘She is a good baby. You see? She loves you.’ And she stood back proudly as the child settled itself upon Giovanni’s hip.

  Rico was obviously irritated by the sequence of introductions. ‘Your daughter, eh? What about my son. Hey, Giovanni, say hello to your nephew. This is little Enrico.’ He leant over and the face of the five-year-old atop his shoulders was only inches from Giovanni’s. ‘Enrico, this is your uncle Giovanni.’

  Giovanni dutifully kissed the boy. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘the sooner we collect your things the sooner we get through the customs.’ He had checked the correct precedure before the vessel had docked and he hurried them through the throng of people. ‘I’ve booked you a room at my boarding house.’

  THEY ATE EARLY that night at a cheap restaurant not far from the boarding house. Little Carmelina dozed in the portable cot which Rico himself had made, and Enrico, exhausted, fell asleep over his food. Giovanni, Rico and Teresa ate with gusto despite the unimaginative meal.