A Waltz for Matilda

by Jackie French

  He shook his head, too tired to argue further. ‘Promise me.’ His whisper was urgent. ‘Promise you won’t do anything till I’m outta here.’

  The gong chimed at the nurses’ desk to say visiting hours were over. Matilda leaned over and kissed his cheek, the one that wasn’t burned, and smiled as he blushed. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  Chapter 5

  Dear Mrs Dawkins,

  I am sorry to leave like this. I hope you don’t mind. I am going to live with my father. I am sorry I did not pay you my wages yesterday. I need the money for the train.

  Thank you for all your kindness.

  Your obedient servant,

  Matilda O’Halloran

  The railway platform was almost deserted, smelling of old soot. A woman in shabby black dozed with a child either side of her on one of the benches, brown-paper packages at their feet. Somewhere a train snuffed and snorted, but the big train on the country platform was silent, and even its lights weren’t lit. She hadn’t dared wait back at the boarding house, or Mrs Dawkins might have tried to stop her leaving.

  All she owned was wrapped in the old shawl: her spare dress, Mum’s dresses and Mum’s good shoes too. Everything else had been sold in the last six months, even their hats.

  She’d hoped there might have been a letter from her father, hidden under the mattress maybe, something Mum kept treasured, too secret to be shown. But as Mum had said, men just didn’t like to write.

  The scent of roasting rabbits wafted in from the stand on the corner of the station. Her stomach rumbled so loudly she hoped anyone who heard it would think it was a train.

  ‘You waiting to get on, lass?’ A man in a uniform peered out of the guard carriage.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You all on your ownsome?’

  ‘My father is meeting me.’

  ‘Och aye.’ He had an accent like Mr Macintosh, who’d rented the room below theirs. It was funny to think she’d probably never see Mr Macintosh again. Funny leaving the factory last night, knowing she’d never set foot in it again. She hoped someone else would bring Bruiser a bone sometimes. She’d have to ask Tommy. But at least she’d never see Mr Thrattle’s piggy whiskers again either.

  ‘Old biscuit,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘What was that, lass?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He looked at her kindly. ‘Well, seein’ you’re on your own, you’d better step into the carriage. It’s warmer there. No one’ll bother you, I’ll see to that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He must have seen the relief on her face. The station had been too big, too empty.

  ‘I’ll be makin’ myself a drop o’ tea, afore we set off. I’ll bring one along to you, and a biscuit or two as well. Second-class carriage is the fifth one along.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She picked up her skirts, hefted her bundle more firmly under her arm, and headed toward the carriage. No more mornings hiding from the Push. No more Bruiser or Ah Ching. No more Tommy …

  She felt her breath catch. Impossible to think of not seeing Tommy. But he could come and stay with them. They had machinery on farms, didn’t they? Ploughs and hay balers and things. He could practise fixing things with one hand.

  It was warmer inside the train. She lay on one of the hard bench seats, so unlike the green leather ones she’d seen through the windows of the first-class carriages, pulling her skirts and shawl around her.

  Matilda slept.

  Rented a fence … rented a fence … rented a … rented a … rented a fence …

  She’d slept again after the train had left the station, the guard’s tea and biscuits warm in her stomach, and woken up hours later with the words in her mind. They didn’t make sense — who’d want to rent a fence? But that was what the train wheels were saying. Rented … rented a … rented a fence …

  It was strange to have the world rush past you. She’d never been on anything faster than an omnibus before, the tired horses clomping up the road to Aunt Ann’s.

  Now the nearby bushes outside the train window blurred by, too fast to see. Things far away moved more slowly, as though it was the world outside that was travelling at two speeds, while she and the train stayed still — except for the rattling.

  It was fascinating, seeing things she had read about but never seen. Trees with giant white trunks, not just a small park of them but seeming to go on forever; ragged children sitting on a fence and waving, then they were gone again.

  More trees; trees with rocks; trees with no rocks; trees and a small ferny creek; then trees and grass; then finally hard baked ground, a few trees holding thin limp leaves.

  How could anything live in a land as dry as this?

  Suddenly movement flickered. Those must be kangaroos. She had seen kangaroos in books and seen them close up, but never in a mob like a wave sweeping across the ground. She had never dreamed of a land so big, so flat. Its size and drabness were frightening: so different from the gardens she had known when she had lived at Aunt Ann’s.

  The other passengers in the carriage dozed or stared out the windows like her, except for one man in the corner, thin and intense in his shabby dark suit and tie, who was scribbling something in a notebook, unscrewing the ink bottle every time he needed to dip in his pen in case the rattle of the train tipped it over.

  Even the fat woman with the two small children was sleeping, one child in each arm. They must be hot, all crammed up together, thought Matilda.

  She was hot too. She wished she hadn’t put on all her petticoats, but it was easier wearing them than carrying them. She’d have liked to open the window, but when she’d done it before big smuts had blown in from the train’s smoke, and a cross man with no teeth had made her shut it again.

  The trees outside grew sparser. The grass became dust — brown dust, white dust, grey dust — with a few tussocks and the occasional bald hump of a hill. Grey rocks were scattered across the landscape. It took Matilda a while to recognise that they were sheep, motionless in the heat.

  How long till Drinkwater now? She didn’t dare shut her eyes, in case she didn’t hear the guard’s call. He’d said they’d reach Drinkwater around four o’clock, but no one in the carriage had a watch. She craned her neck, trying to see ahead, but there were still no houses or even fenced paddocks with horses or vegetables or cows, just dust and trees and lumps of sheep.

  Suddenly the train began to slow. A sheep on the line, she thought — they’d had to stop five times already so the guard could shift livestock sleeping on the railway tracks.

  ‘Drinkwater! Drinkwater! All out for Drinkwater!’

  For a moment she thought she must have imagined the call, but then the guard came bustling through the door, a smut on his cheek from swinging between the carriages. ‘You lassie, you’re for Drinkwater, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes …’

  He was already swinging her bundle down from the rack. ‘Come on then.’

  Behind her the thin man stood up too, putting on a battered bowler hat and grabbing his Gladstone bag. The fat woman peered out the window. ‘Why, lovey, that must be your dad, come to meet you.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know —’ began Matilda, then stopped as she saw a white-bearded man in a wagon outside. The train only ran twice a week. Maybe he’d got her letter and decided to come to the station! But surely that man was too old to be her father.

  She followed the guard and the thin man out to the corridor then down the stairs.

  The heat hit her like a slap, then seemed to drag the moisture from her lungs. It had been hot in the train, but that heat had been damp with sweat. This heat would dry a loaf of bread into breadcrumbs in a second.

  The flies followed. Flies in her eyes, flies crawling at her mouth. She shuddered and tried to wave them away.

  She looked around. Why would anyone want to stop here?

  No railway station. No platform: just dust, worn hard by feet and horses’ hooves. A rough wooden sign, with Drinkwater Siding burned i
nto it with a hot poker. Trees that seemed larger than they had from the train. A white track that seemed to lead to nowhere.

  For a moment she thought the man and the wagon she had glimpsed from the train had vanished. But as the last train carriage moved away, leaving gusts of smoke behind, she saw the cart again, across the tracks. Two men stood next to it, both younger than the man in the cart. They smiled and raised their hats to her politely, but made no move to come over to her.

  Matilda took a deep breath, then coughed as she swallowed a fly. She tried not to imagine it crawling around inside her.

  Was one of those men her father? None of them looked like the golden man of her mother’s stories. They weren’t rushing over to greet her either.

  ‘Well.’ The voice beside her was deep and well bred. ‘I do think your Uncle Cecil might have been here to meet us.’

  ‘The train was early, Mama.’

  ‘That is no excuse.’

  Matilda looked around. Besides the thin man who had been in the carriage, two other passengers from the first-class carriage had alighted: a woman in plum-coloured silk, three feathers in her net-veiled hat, and a girl a couple of years older than Matilda, dressed in white, despite the risk of smuts from the train. Matilda was vaguely glad to see a large grey smudge on the back of the muslin skirt, staining the lace and the ruffles. The girl’s hat was heavily veiled too. No flies under those, thought Matilda enviously.

  ‘You Patrick O’Reilly?’ The yell came from the driver of the wagon. He waved the stone jug in his hand, as though in welcome.

  The thin man nodded. He picked up his bag and began to cross the tracks.

  Matilda hesitated. Instinct told her to stay with the woman and the girl, not to talk to strange men, especially ones as rough-looking as these. She didn’t like the way they passed the stone jug from one to another either. She was pretty sure it contained what Aunt Ann called ‘spirituous liquor’ and Mrs Dawkins called ‘rotgut rum’. But neither the woman nor the girl had even smiled at her, and the men seemed friendly, at least.

  She grabbed her bundle and followed the thin man across the shimmering train lines.

  All four men were in the cart now, the thin man and the white-bearded driver, the other two in the back. The three locals were dressed alike: big hats, grey trousers tied up at the ankles with string, stained shirts that might have been any colour once, but now were grey as well. Two of the men had strange bits of string and corks bobbing from their hat brims, so it looked like they were behind a bamboo blind. Only the men’s beards were different: one white, one red, one grey and one brown.

  The old man looked down. ‘What you want, girly?’ His breath smelled like the garbage bins in Grinder’s Alley. She clenched her fists to give her courage.

  ‘I need to get to Moura.’

  ‘You mean Jim O’Halloran’s place?’

  She looked up at him eagerly. ‘You know my dad?’

  ‘Your dad!’

  Three of the men stared down at her. The fourth, the thin man from the train, was checking his notebook again.

  ‘I … I’ve come to stay with him.’

  Grey-beard stared, open-mouthed, showing gaps in his long yellow teeth. ‘Jim O’Halloran’s got a daughter?’

  ‘Shh.’ Brown-beard nudged him in the ribs, not gently. ‘Bloke’s got a right to have a daughter, ain’t he?’ He took a swig from the jug and passed it on.

  ‘Then why ain’t we ever seen her? You mean Jim O’Halloran had a wife too?’

  ‘I had a wife once,’ said Brown-beard reminiscently. ‘Way back when I was working on the Murray. Dunno what happened to her, but.’

  ‘Mum and I have been living in the city. But she … she died.’

  ‘Ah, too bad,’ said White-beard. But there was no real sympathy in it. White-beard sounded as though he’d need worse than the death of one woman to show real sympathy.

  ‘Woman’s got a right to live in the city,’ said Brown-beard. ‘Got a right to live anywhere she chooses.’

  ‘Nah, she ain’t,’ said Grey-beard. ‘She oughtta be at home cookin’ her bloke’s tea. That right, Mr O’Reilly?’

  The thin man looked up. ‘Our fight is for the rights of working men and working women.’

  ‘Women got a right to work, sure enough. But they should be doin’ it in the kitchen,’ Grey-beard concluded.

  ‘Or the bedroom.’ Brown-beard chuckled.

  ‘None o’ that,’ said White-beard. He grabbed back the stone jug. ‘Ladies present.’

  ‘A man’s got a right to say —’ began Brown-beard.

  ‘Please,’ said Matilda. Her head was swimming. ‘Can you take me to my father?’

  ‘No worries, girly. Your dad’s a union man, ain’t he? One o’ our own. You don’t leave one o’ your own in the dust.’

  ‘Got to stand together, arm to arm.’ Brown-beard bent down a leathery hand. One finger was missing. ‘Plenty o’ room in the wagon. I’m Bluey,’ he added. He gestured to the grey-bearded man. ‘This here’s Whitey Gotobed.’

  ‘An’ I’m Curry and Rice,’ said the other man, moving aside as Bluey swung Matilda up as though she was a chicken feather. Matilda shoved a blob of what she hoped was dirt away with her boot, then put her bundle down and sat on it. Could it be as easy as this? ‘You’ll really take me to Dad’s farm?’

  ‘Nah, no need,’ said Mr Gotobed. ‘Take you to tonight’s meeting. Your dad’ll be there, all right. He’s a union man.’

  ‘What’s a union?’

  Mr O’Reilly looked up from his notebook again. His voice was dry as the dust but more precise. ‘A union is a brotherhood of men, joined together to fight the oppressor.’

  ‘The oppressor is them as owns the stations,’ put in Bluey. ‘A man has a right to sell his own labour, ain’t that right? An’ a right to … to …’

  ‘To withdraw it too. To strike,’ finished Mr O’Reilly. ‘A union is where any group of workers joins together to fight for better conditions, whether they be in a shearing shed or factory. The Shearers’ Union formed three years ago, when the men who owned the stations tried to lower the pay rates. Shearers across the country came out on strike.’ He could have been reading a railway timetable. ‘Our job is now not just to force employers to let their men join unions, but to make just laws for the whole country.’ He took out his ink, dipped in his pen, and made another note.

  ‘Oh,’ said Matilda.

  Mr Gotobed scratched his white beard. Matilda hoped he didn’t have fleas. Or worse. The men smelled like they’d never had a bath in their lives or washed their clothes. ‘We didn’t go on strike round here, ‘cause old Drinkwater didn’t cut our pay. But when your dad started a local branch of the union a year ago, the old bast—’

  ‘Biscuit,’ said Matilda firmly. Aunt Ann had warned her that men were inclined to swear if you didn’t watch them.

  ‘The old, er, biscuit said he’d sack any man what joined. He weren’t having no boss on his place but him. So we went on strike, the lot of us. Mr O’Reilly here has come to address us —’

  ‘That means to talk at us,’ put in Curry and Rice.

  ‘A man has a right to free speech.’ That was Bluey.

  Matilda nodded, to seem polite. None of it made sense, except that she’d see her father soon. And maybe … ‘Will — will there be food at the meeting?’

  Mr Gotobed looked at her, as though she’d said something that actually sank in. ‘You hungry, girly?’

  She nodded. There’d been a dining car, but she had only one and sixpence left, and that was for emergencies. The other second-class passengers had brought food with them. The fat woman had given her a couple of the children’s rusks, but apart from the guard’s biscuits that had been her only food all day.

  Mr Gotobed scratched his hair. ‘Give you a drop o’ grog if you want.’ He offered her the stone jug.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Matilda politely. Aunt Ann said that the devil was in spirituous liquors, and anyone who drank them. These men
didn’t seem to have the devil in them, but she still didn’t want to risk it.

  ‘Girl’s got a right to eat,’ said Bluey. He cupped his hands over his mouth. ‘Hey, ma!’ he yelled to the elegant woman waiting on the other side of the tracks. ‘You got anythin’ to eat? This girl’s half starved.’

  For a moment Matilda thought the woman wasn’t going to answer. Then to her surprise she nodded. ‘There are the remains of our luncheon in the basket. You are welcome to them if you want.’

  ‘Good on yer, lady.’ Bluey swung himself down from the wagon and stepped across the rails. He opened the wicker basket at the woman’s feet, then piled the contents into his shirt. ‘You don’t want a lift too, do yous?’

  ‘No, thank you, my good man. My half-brother, Mr Drinkwater, should be here any moment.’

  Bluey’s face flushed with anger as well as drink. ‘You related to that old bast—’ he glanced over at Matilda, ‘biscuit? I should throw this stuff down in the dust and trample on it.’

  ‘And then the child will stay hungry.’ The woman’s voice was calm. ‘If you men wish to dream up new laws for the country, I suggest you learn to think before you act.’

  ‘A man has a right to —’

  ‘Did I say you hadn’t? Now good day to you.’

  She turned away.

  Good for her, thought Matilda. She was stuck up, and hadn’t even smiled at her. But in a way she reminded her of Aunt Ann and Mrs Dawkins: women who met the world face on.

  Bluey brought the food over the train line, muttering under his breath. He passed the bundle up before he levered himself into the cart.

  Matilda took it eagerly. A whole chicken, wrapped in greaseproof paper, with only a few slices and two wings gone. She hadn’t eaten chicken since the Christmas before last! Thin-sliced bread and butter, still soft and fresh, what must be most of a tin of digestive biscuits, three hunks of dark moist fruitcake, an apple, an orange … how much had someone packed for one woman and a girl to eat?