by Peter Kocan
There was a flash of headlights as a vehicle turned into the lane. The youth jumped up, afraid it was the paddy-wagon. The vehicle came on quickly and pulled up in front of the warehouse. He was still a bit blinded by the glare of the headlights and could not tell whether it was the coppers or not. He thought of running.
“Hello there,” came a woman’s pleasant voice.
The youth’s eyes were adjusting and he saw a heavy-set young man getting out of the passenger side of the van. The woman who’d spoken was getting out of the driver’s side.
“I’m sorry the place was closed,” she said. “We didn’t expect to be gone longer than half an hour. Just give us a minute to get organised and I’ll put the kettle on. Do you fancy a hot drink?”
“Okay,” the youth replied.
She led the way inside and the young man came behind carrying a big cardboard box from the back of the van.
“Thanks, Rodney,” she said. “I’ll help you with the others in a moment.”
“Can I help?” the youth asked.
“Oh, that’d be so kind of you,” she replied.
So the youth helped Rodney bring several more cardboard boxes inside. Rodney was about twenty, the youth reckoned, and had a slack-lipped expression and a slightly shambling walk. If he and the youth got a bit in each other’s way with the boxes, Rodney would lurch aside, keeping his eyes lowered.
“That’s marvellous,” the woman said when all the boxes were inside. “Thank you so much, Rodney. I can’t think what we’d do without you.”
She smiled at Rodney and he looked down at the floor bashfully.
“And thank you so much,” she said to the youth, beaming a smile. “Let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Debbie Lambert.”
The youth said his name.
“Pleased to meet you,” Debbie Lambert said. Then she seemed struck by a thought. “Why does that name ring a bell?”
“I don’t know,” the youth replied.
“Well, it’ll come to me, if it’s meant to,” Debbie Lambert said. “I’ll plonk the kettle on. I could do with some tea, and I know Rodney never knocks back a lemon cordial. What do you fancy?”
The youth said tea would be fine.
Debbie Lambert led the way to a large kitchen at the back of the building. The youth took a seat at a big table and watched her set out mugs while an urn heated up. He had a chance to look at her now. She was in her early thirties, he thought. She had a pretty face and curly reddish hair. She wore a red tartan skirt and brown jumper and brown shoes. A pair of glasses hung by a cord around her neck and rested on the curve of her breasts.
Rodney was gazing at her from the other side of the table. You could tell he adored the ground she walked on.
When she had made two teas and a lemon cordial, she brought them to the table, then handed Rodney a packet of chocolate biscuits and asked him to open them. She said it as though it was such a piece of luck that someone as capable as Rodney was there for that particular task. A phone rang somewhere in the building and she smiled an apology and excused herself and went to answer it.
Rodney opened the biscuits with infinite care, his big hands picking at the sealed paper and his tongue lolling out of his mouth in concentration. When he’d got the packet open he pushed it delicately into the centre of the table with his finger. It was plain he wanted her to see it and be impressed, so the youth resisted his urge to grab a biscuit straightaway. An empty space in the row would spoil the effect. He sipped his tea instead. Rodney kept looking to see if she was coming back, his breathing heavy. Then he reached for the glass of cordial and lifted it with both hands. He took a mouthful but it went down the wrong way, or maybe up his nose, and he began to snuffle and gag and the rest of the cordial spilt into his lap. The snuffling, gagging noises were like the sounds Mr. Coles’s pigs made. The youth felt alarmed. Then Debbie Lambert hurried back in and patted Rodney on the back and said soothing words to him. He started to recover and to breathe evenly again. Debbie Lambert leant over him and put her arm around his shoulders, making the soothing sounds close to his ear. Rodney seemed overcome with emotion.
Just then a group of people walked into the room.
There was a tall, good-looking man, then three shabby old blokes, one of whom was the chap from the Apollo Cafe with the new jacket, and a girl of maybe ten. The tall man looked at Debbie Lambert comforting Rodney and seemed to frown for an instant before he spoke: “So, what’s happening? Any worries?”
Debbie Lambert gave Rodney a last pat and explained that he’d been distressed but was alright now. The tall man frowned again, but then shrugged it off. He asked one of the old blokes to do the honours with some tea or coffee, and then he turned to the youth.
“And how are you?” he asked.
Debbie Lambert introduced them, saying how helpful the youth had been earlier, carrying the boxes.
“That’s the ticket,” said Pastor Pete. “We’ll have a chat later, if you like, and see whether we can return the favour and be of help to you.”
The tea and coffee were poured and Rodney was given a fresh glass of cordial. The chocolate biscuits disappeared rapidly. The Lamberts talked mission business with the three old blokes, who were regular helpers it turned out.
The little girl had made herself a cocoa and sat at the table reading a book called The Water Babies. There was no doubt she was the Lamberts’ daughter. You could see both of them in her face and colouring. She seemed a very composed child. When she saw Rodney trying to wipe the spilt cordial from his lap, she fetched a cloth and helped him, gravely explaining that you should dab, not wipe, otherwise you made the stain worse. Then she went quietly back to her book. The youth figured her composure was due to her knowing she was loved and looked after, and yet was accustomed to coping without fuss, like now, in a kitchen full of strange or needy people. He felt a sharp pang of envy. He wished he could be her brother and have the Lamberts for parents. A sense of longing welled up in him and there were tears in his eyes.
He became aware that Debbie Lambert was speaking to him.
“You’re the boy Alan Eccles mentioned to us! I knew it would come to me. I’m sorry it didn’t click straightaway. You do know Alan Eccles, don’t you?”
“Pastor Eccles, yes.”
“We have a letter for you, forwarded from the Blacketts’ property. Alan said you’d promised to call in and say hello to us, so they forwarded it here. I’ll just get it from the office.”
She went away to fetch it.
“So, you’re down from the bush?” said Pastor Pete.
“Sort of,” the youth replied.
“And how are things with you right now?” he asked in a lower voice. “A bit grim, eh, by the look of it?”
The youth nodded, embarrassed.
“Broke, Baffled and Bereft. We all know how it can be in this world. Our Lord certainly knew what it was like, and if He had to go through it, none of us should think any worse of ourselves for having to.”
The youth could not speak. The little girl had lowered her book and was looking across at him. So was Rodney.
“The first thing we can offer you is a chance to get freshened up. We have shower facilities here, which you’ll no doubt be glad of when you’ve finished your tea.”
So he did stink. He felt himself flushing hot and red. How polite they were not to have let on. He’d been ponging the place out all this time and Debbie Lambert had gone on being sweet and considerate.
She came back into the room and handed the youth his letter. “There we are. Safely delivered!” she said brightly.
The youth stuffed the letter into his shirt pocket and mumbled that he had Pastor Eccles’s note of introduction somewhere. He opened his bag and began rummaging in it. He heard Pastor Pete say that the note wasn’t all that important now that they’d got to know each other anyway, but the youth was thankful t
o have an excuse to keep his face lowered. He knew the note was crumpled somewhere at the bottom of the bag. He pulled a couple of bits of clothing up roughly and saw something white emerge and realised too late what it was.
The brassiere flew through the air and landed on the floor. It was perfectly spread out with the two cups and the shoulder straps in position. There was no mistaking what it was.
The youth stared at it. Everyone in the room stared at it. The youth heard Pastor Pete murmur, “Ah.” Then Rodney began to bellow. He was pointing to the bra and making a noise like a bullock in distress, over and over.
The youth grabbed his bag and went to the door and through it. He thought he heard Debbie Lambert call, “Don’t go!” but he wasn’t sure with Rodney’s noise filling the air. He couldn’t work the latch of the front door of the building, but then it clicked and he was outside. He heard a last bellow from Rodney as the heavy door swung shut. He ran to the end of Alison Street and turned the corner and kept running for two blocks, then turned into a lane and then into a smaller lane that led off it. He stopped and listened. There was no sound of anyone behind him.
The moon had come out from behind clouds. The youth looked around and saw that the lane went on, so it wasn’t a dead end that he could be trapped in. He put his bag on the ground and sat on it with his back against an iron fence. He stared at the moon while he regained his breath. He pictured the brassiere in the middle of the floor, with all eyes fixed on it, and Rodney pointing and bellowing like a beast. Maybe they were all still there, frozen in that moment.
He began to giggle. It was funny, no doubt about it. The giggle grew more intense and turned into a kind of sobbing and he knew he had to get hold of himself. Diestl had come up beside him and was speaking in that burnt-out voice of his: “Good. You can laugh. You understand that it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the ending, when all the accounts are paid.”
AT FIRST light he left the lane. He was so stiff from lying on the ground that he could hardly drag himself along, and his sore arm and shoulder were throbbing. He went to the railway terminal and sat down and read the letter he’d been given.
It was from his mother. She said it was the second letter she’d sent him care of the Blacketts. The first one had come back marked “Not Known.” She’d tried to phone Mrs. Hardcastle to confirm the correct address but Mrs. Hardcastle’s agency had closed down. She’d then phoned the postmaster at Munnunwal and been told that there were Blacketts all over the district and that the best bet was to try the ones near Bells Creek. The letter had reached the property the day after he’d left. The woman said she was anxious to hear from him and gave the number of the old lady she was looking after in the northern town. She said he could reverse the charges.
He phoned at nine o’clock from a booth at the terminal. A rude old voice answered.
“Will you accept the charges, Madam?” the trunk-line operator asked.
“Who the devil’s phoning?” the old voice demanded.
“I don’t know, Madam.”
“You could try asking them, or are you a complete fool?”
“Will you accept the charges, Madam?”
“Don’t be stupid. Why should I? Ask them what their business is!”
“You could find that out yourself, Madam, just by saying you’ll accept the charges.”
“What if I don’t want to know their business, Miss Impertinence?”
“The caller sounds like a juvenile,” the operator said patiently, as though making a last effort to get the call through.
“Juvenile? I don’t know any juvenile! Let me speak to your supervisor!”
The youth heard his mother’s voice come onto the line and say that the charges were accepted, and the old lady shouting, “Get the supervisor! Get the supervisor!” in the background.
He explained that he was back in the city and didn’t have any money. The woman said she would wire some to the GPO. He should get it within a couple of hours.
“You’re alright though, basically?” she asked.
“Yeah, basically,” he replied.
After the phone call he went to the park to wait for the cash to be wired through. He wandered the paths by the flower beds and drank lots of water from a bubbler to keep himself from feeling hungry. He thought about the question: Are you basically alright? Is anyone ever basically alright, he wondered. Superficially alright, yes. Lots of people are superficially alright. He was superficially okay himself some of the time. But basically was a whole other thing. Diestl had taught him that. And King Harold. And the Bushranger shot with a hundred bullets. The youth knew that being alright wasn’t the point. The point was whether you made a fight of it, whether you hit back, whether you made your enemies bleed a bit before you went down under the hopeless odds.
He was stopped in the park by two policemen. They looked him up and down and asked him what he was doing and how old he was. He tried to look them in the eyes and not let his voice go too trembly. He said he was sixteen and was down from the bush and was due to go back that day. He was afraid they might ask to see a train ticket, or some money. He’d heard it was in the vagrancy law that the cops could ask to see some money, and if you didn’t have a certain amount on you—enough for a night’s accommodation—they could run you in. The two cops looked him up and down a final time, and one of them muttered that a bit of soap and water wouldn’t go amiss, and they went on their way.
The youth hurried out of the park. He felt too exposed there now. He went into some narrow side streets and hung about for an hour or so. He felt shaken and humiliated, but gradually overcame it by thinking of Diestl being stopped by those cops on a lonely road somewhere. He could visualise every detail of them sprawled in a ditch with bullets in their heads.
8. PEONS
The youth was sitting on a stool made of a block of wood, in a circle of about a dozen men, staring into the flames of a campfire. Other men moved about further off, and the fire cast their long reeling shadows onto the sides of huts and caravans.
He had replied to an ad in the paper: “Cotton Chippers Wanted at Weegun.” He’d phoned the number given, deepening his voice to make himself sound older, and his details had been taken. He’d been told to report at an address in Weegun by three o’clock the following Sunday. It was already Friday then, so he went and bought his train ticket straightaway. He had just enough money left to cover it. Weegun was a country town about four hours journey northwest.
The train arrived on the afternoon of the Sunday and the youth found the address in the dusty main street. It was a shopfront with a sign that said “Continental Cotton Corp.” A group of glum-looking men stood outside. The youth approached the fringe of the group and listened to the talk. They’d not been allowed to sign on for the chipping work.
“They’re not givin’ any poor bastard a start,” one of them was saying, a man with a red, bulbous nose.
“Friggin’ Yanks,” someone else snarled.
The youth’s heart sank. There’d been some mix-up and there wasn’t any job here after all. He was flat broke and had no idea what he would do now.
“We heard they was takin’ blokes on, so we come,” said Big Nose. “Jeez, a bloke’s gotta believe what he hears, don’t he? I mean, where’d we be if we can’t believe what we frigginwell hear?”
“I s’pose we’d be standin’ here like gigs,” said his mate. “Just like we’re doin’.”
A woman in a white American cowboy hat came to the door of the shop and asked the men not to block the entrance. They meekly moved back. The woman saw the youth among them and raised her eyebrows to him in a silent question: “Yes?”
He said he had phoned about the cotton-chipping and been told to report here.
The woman beckoned him inside. She had a name-tag that said “Rita.” The shop was bare except for a small table with some papers on it. Rita asked him his name and ran
her finger down a list. She found the name there. She looked him up and down and asked him how old he was. He said sixteen. She looked dubious for a moment, then put a tick beside his name and had him put his signature beside the tick. Almost all the names on the list had been ticked and signed. She told him that a truck would be outside at five-fifteen if he needed a ride to the property. The youth went out.
The group of men was crossing the road towards a pub on the next corner, so the youth tagged along behind.
“Won’t give a workin’ man a start,” Big Nose was complaining. “But they’ll take on a half-arsed kid. He ain’t got a family to support.”
“Well, neither have you,” replied his pal.
“No, but I might have, for all them friggin’ Yanks know!”
“Yeah, and I might be the Queen o’ flamin’ Sheba. So what?”
“Jeez yer an argumentative bastard!” Big Nose sighed.
“Comes from spendin’ too much friggin’ time round you!”
The men turned into the door of the pub and the youth walked on past. It was quiet in the street. A stray dog came limping along and stopped just out of range of the youth, its tail low. It looked thin and neglected. He would have liked to give it some food. He felt in his pocket and found an old peppermint lolly which he unwrapped and threw to the ground. The dog sniffed at it, then turned and loped away. The youth wished he’d kept the lolly for himself. He was hungry. He had just enough money to buy a packet of Perkins Plain Assorted biscuits if he could find a shop open. He’d got into the habit lately of living on biscuits, and Perkins Plain Assorted were his favourite. Biscuits were so convenient and they tasted good. And if you had a cup of tea to dunk them in, it was a feast. He found a corner shop and bought a packet, then wandered back to the railway station and sat on the platform, savouring the biscuits and gazing at the expanse of sky.
