Table of Contents
Praise for Patrick Holland
The Mary Smokes Boys
The Darkest Little Room
Riding the Trains in Japan: Travels in the Sacred and Supermodern East
Dedication
ALSO BY PATRICK HOLLAND
Title Page
Epigraph
One
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
Three
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
Praise for Patrick Holland
The Mary Smokes Boys
Longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year
A 2011 Australian Book Review Book of the Year
A 2011 Adelaide Advertiser Book of the Year
A 2011 Readings Book of the Year
The Mary Smokes Boys is a gem. The writing is absolutely terrific and the characters distinct and deftly revealed. This story is a heart wrecker.
BARRY LOPEZ, author of Light Action in the Caribbean
Patrick Holland’s beautiful, beautiful novel is a tale that transports you through its realisation of place and its genuinely affecting story of love (for brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers). And yes, for a language as pure and magical as I have read in a long time … A major work.
MARTIN SHAW, Readings newsletter
One of those books, one of those straight-to-the-heart, life-changing books.
KRISSY KNEEN, author of Affection
Barely a scene or image is wasted … He weaves Hemingway’s blunt sentences and carved dialogue with the old fashioned storytelling of a folk tale imbued with the dark romance of a Nick Cave ballad.
JO CASE, The Age
The Darkest Little Room
Pulp Curry’s Top 5 Crime Books of 2012
This both a stunning page-turner and an investigation into the dim caverns of the human heart and soul that bears comparison to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Holland is, quite simply, one of the best prose stylists working in Australia today.
MATTHEW CONDON, author of The Trout Opera
Patrick Holland has joined the ranks of the adventurer novelists and enhanced his growing reputation.
MICHAEL ROBOTHAM , author of Say You’re Sorry
In many ways, The Darkest Little Room is the perfect 21st-century Australian novel, exposing the cruel underbelly of life in the Asia-Pacific region while also managing to be a cracking read.
CHRIS FLYNN, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald
Patrick Holland will be one of Australia’s greatest writers of the future. I can’t say you heard it here first because everyone is saying it.
KRISSY KNEEN, The Sunday Mail
This is a wonderful book, destined for the shortlists.
LISA HILL, ANZ Lit Lovers
Wonderfully drawn characters, acute and often painful observations about the expatriate condition, a vivid depiction of Vietnam, and a breakneck plot make this a mesmerizing read.
ANDREW NETE, Pulp Curry
The Darkest Little Room … is as gripping and thrilling as it is effortlessly artistic and lyrical. Many titles these days are billed as literary thrillers but this one truly fits that description. Book Rating: The Story 4/5; The Writing 5/5.
BOOKLOVER BOOK REVIEWS
There is a directness and spareness to the prose that beautifully balances out the action and the more traditional elements of the plot, and the slow, meditative tension easily calls to mind the dark romance of Greene’s The Quiet American.
JESSICA AU, Readings
Riding the Trains in Japan: Travels in the Sacred and Supermodern East
Shortlisted for the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards, Best Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the 2012 Courier Mail People’s Choice Award
Riding the Trains in Japan succeeds in the difficult task of offering the reader a fresh vision of places and histories, of catching the impression of distant voices and also of offering the kind of insight only acquired through travelling.
THE AUSTRALIAN
The Source of the Sound
Winner of the 2010 Walter Scott Price Shortlisted for the 2011 Steele Rudd Prize
Beautiful and bittersweet … written in tough lean prose, its denouement leaves a lingering impression.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
The Long Road of the Junkmailer
Shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Winner of the 2005 Queensland Premier’s Award, Best Emerging Author
A quite brilliant debut.
THE AUSTRALIAN
His imagination is unrivaled.
GOOD READING MAGAZINE
Quirky, magical, melancholic and utterly readable.
BOOKSELLER +PUBLISHER
This book is for Racheal
ALSO BY PATRICK HOLLAND
The Darkest Little Room
Riding the Trains in Japan
The Source of the Sound
The Long Road of the Junkmailer
Tarry ye here, and watch with me.
MATTHEW 26:38
One
I
GREY NORTH LOOKED DOWN TO THE LIGHTS OF THE CITY’S winter exhibition. Mechanical rides flung children and lovers across the dark, and their delighted squeals could be heard even from the hospital. A pair of nurses crossed the corridor between rooms. One whispered “poor boy” and vanished. Grey’s newborn sister took her troubled sleep in a room at the end of the hall. His sister was always to be called Pia, but now would be called Irene after her mother.
A rocket was launched at the exhibition grounds. The rocket slithered high into the sky and burst in a brilliant gold spider’s web. Grey followed the falling embers to where a procession of cars’ red tail-lights meant the end of the night.
His father came into the corridor and smoothed his thinning hair with his hand.
“Come see your sister, boy.”
But Grey did not shift from the window.
“It wasn’t because of her. Your mother wouldn’t stop bleeding.”
She had been only twenty-six years old. He had come home from school and she lay bleeding on the floorboards.
“Her heart gave out, boy. It was just–terrible luck.’
Grey was ten years old and did not believe his mother’s heart would give out on its own. Something could have saved her.
“William North,” a nurse called down the corridor. The man acknowledged her with a nod and the nurse took his arm and led him to a room where he would speak with the doctor.
Grey watched the last of the fireworks bloom in the window pane.
THE INFANT IRENE was kept overnight for observation and Grey and his father stayed at one of a row of northern suburbs airport motels. It was a franchise motel with clean standardized rooms for people who had been somewhere and would soon be going somewhere else. A place between the places life was. At the motel you could be exempt from life. It was impersonal and soporific. They spent two nights at the motel and Grey did not cry. Out the motel room’s one window were waterlogged flats, the flare of a distant oil refinery, a long and lighted bridge proceeding into
the dark.
THE NURSES AT the hospital tried to impress upon Bill North some rudiments of infant care. They suggested a home-calling nursing organization and a pediatrician whose names he would not remember. They gave him pamphlets and wrote names and telephone numbers in his notebook.
Grey and his father spent another night at the motel where Grey did not cry.
WITH HALF THE money he had in the world Bill North arranged for his wife’s body to be returned to their home.
On the evening of the drive home Grey did not speak. The infant Irene sat between her brother and father in a bassinette in their truck.
Grey watched the brilliant city dissolve into the industrial western outskirts. Neglected parks. Commuter tract wastelands. Concrete brothels bearing names of flowers in neon–Tiger Lily, Lotus, Sakura. Colossal empty shopping centers whose monotonous geometry invited vandalism. Wisps of juvenile gangs at the edges of shadows and inside dim culverts. A degraded passage through which Grey admitted the consoling dream of the world broken.
After the outskirts, Highway 54 ran through rolling country, ever emptier, until the dark was broken only by spare dots of light adrift on the horizon. Then came the family ’s home in the Brisbane Valley. Mary Smokes was a town surrounded by blowing fields. In the west was a broad corridor of flatland before the Great Dividing Range before immense inland plains. North and east were lakes and a filigree of rivers and the D’Aguilar Range.
Wide and empty country in which the world had no interest.
Bill North turned his truck north off Highway 54 and drove across a rail line onto the Brisbane Valley Highway. A half-dozen men were loading horses in a yard close to the road. Grey’s father stared out his open window but did not slow the truck. The truck’s headlights brushed the man Grey had heard his father call Tanner. Grey looked back at the obscure shapes of men working in only the deck-light of a bodytruck. He wondered if the horses were stolen.
Further north along that road, a mile south of town proper, was their house, a weatherboard cottage beached by an ocean of plain. Grey got out of the car into the cold and looked up at the stars. Silence and darkness made the stars fierce. A sleepless horse walked the fenceline, rattling the wire as it brushed and leant across it to the green pick in the Eccleston houseyard next door.
BILL NORTH LIT a wind-guttered candle on the kitchen windowsill. Without its orb of light, without the window, were the hills that channelled wind like water and the emptier plain and the silence that the wind tore into, and there all human attempts to reassure the eye and know the dark were swallowed. He lit the potbelly stove with rolls of newspaper and mixed powdered milk in a saucepan on the stovetop. He took a block of boxwood from the pile beside the stove and pushed the block into the coals.
There were three people beneath the roof before and three people now, but the house seemed utterly empty to Grey. One wall was darkened by the smoke of a lamp that the first Irene North burned beneath a print of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. Grey saw the stained wall and he burst into tears.
His father filled a glass baby’s bottle from the stove, but Irene did not suckle as the milk was too warm.
GREY WENT TO sleep in his room lit blue by the moonlight that flowed through the window beside his bed. Before he lay down he looked out the window at the boys both he and his mother called the wild boys. They were walking across the haying grass to Mary Smokes Creek from Eccleston’s. When the wild boys disappeared he slept. But late in the night he woke with terrible dreams and realised that his mother was dead, and he went to his father’s room.
Bill North was exhausted and did not wake when Grey climbed in and lay down beside his sister. He put his finger in her tiny hand that gripped it. For the first time in his life his hand seemed large, someway closer to the hand of a man. He whispered in her ear that he hated her. Then he cried. Then he kissed her cheek. He fell asleep with her hand in his, tears running down his face onto the pillow.
II
GREY’S SCOTTISH PRESBYTERIAN GRANDMOTHER DRESSED him in corduroy pants and a black felt jacket. His grandmother stared at him with unyielding cold blue eyes.
“And this is the best coat you own?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
Bill North pretended he did not hear. He busied himself whittling a pencil with no intention to write.
“You poor boy. You must remember your mother did her best with what little she had.’ Then to the man, ‘You never can trust a priest, can you? When will Cooney be here? It’s Saturday, so I suppose he’s hung-over.”
“I’ ve got no more love for papists than any of the rest of’em,” said Bill North. He squeezed his temples and ran his hand over his weathered face that had lately begun to smooth with the retained fluid of a drunk. “I’m only doing as she would have wanted.”
The old woman affected a sigh and telephoned the district Women’s Committee about catering for the wake.
Grey looked into his father’s eyes that were dull and defeated.
GREY STOOD IN the drafty timber church, uncomfortable in his clothes. Tears made his face red and hot despite the cold that whistled in through gaps in the wallboards. Through the service he wept until he could not breathe. He heard snatches of Father Cooney’s arid and assuasive sermon on the resurrection of the dead, and he did not feel God was in the room. Outside the church, people made apologies for death. If there is a God, Grey thought, then He is something wilder and fiercer than this.
THE CEMETERY WAS at the southeast edge of town below Solitary Hill. The wind blew rusty eucalypt leaves to bank against the fallen wrought iron fence. Beyond the cemetery was rolling yellow grassland where felled and windthrown timber was scattered amidst spare, ringbarked trees. Buffel and feathertop grass grew out of cracks in the gravestones. In the northeastern distance the hills darkened under a sweeping cloud, and mist pooled high in the mountains.
Grey stood before everyone, isolated as an object of pity, in a rare, cold spitting of winter rain. His jacket looked even shabbier after it was wet. Black dye ran from the sleeves into his palms. His over-long hair was pasted to his forehead. He wished very much to be away from the crowd. Men he vaguely knew came to shake his hand. Chalk-faced women he did not know at all kissed his cheeks. The women stroked his wet head and looked very sorry. His grandmother wore a wrathful expression with no certain object. At finding themselves accidentally near her the other mourners shuffled away to a safer distance. Bill North looked stunned and held his head and his hands.
A FEW OF the chalk-faced women began singing “Abide with Me,” but like a too-delicate candle, the song faltered and was extinguished by the wind. The singers left along with everyone else for the wake at the town hall.
Grey crept away. He did not want the others at his mother’s grave and was glad when he saw they were leaving without him. He sat alone in the grass outside the yard. He was nauseated by the thought of the wake, that empty formality he had witnessed when his grandfather died.
At her father’s funeral Grey’s mother had told him of the vigil over the dead in the early Irish Church, on terrible islands of rock where anchorites went to be alone in the presence of God. Now, despite his few years and no history or remembrance of anything but a story told him by his mother, he dreamed of that ritual, though he could give it no certain shape, merely commingle symbols of solemnity: candles; heaving dark song; hooded faces; a howling wind that somehow did not put out the candles. But this afternoon there would be a polite and nervous hour of tea and cake before the townspeople hurried to their houses, where death would leave them be. This rather than an all-night watch with eyes in the shadows: men watching for … He did not know.
I will stay awake, Grey said to himself.
He watched his grandmother and three women in conference. They looked about the cemetery for him. They looked across the plain. A Mary Smokes school teacher cast her eyes in his direction. The woman would think he had run off for attention. She would offer him some tranquil consolation. He did not
want to be consoled. He stood up against the grey sky and thought of running to the west, where the emptiness seemed interminable and offered infinite escape. But the concerned, pitying look on the woman’s red face arrested him.
III
IN THE NIGHT HE LEANT AGAINST THE HILLS HOIST IN the houseyard. He watched wet oats and feathertop glinting in the broken light. He looked across Eccleston’s to the paint-stripped white house on stilts. The valley wind tore at the rusted corrugated-iron roof. A dappled mare stood at the gate. The wild boys were there now.
The undulating Eccleston grassland was intermittent light and dark and the wild boys trod across it.
Grey went to the edge of his yard and put his hands on the barbed wire that trellised wild jasmine. The Eccleston boy carried a kerosene lamp and the others followed, hooded in their duffel coats.
He wondered should he go to them.
He let them disappear over a shoulder of the earth into the places they knew.
If he went to them his grandmother might wake. She slept lighter than his sister. She might wake if Irene cried, or wake with her bronchial cough and walk past his room to the bathroom and see him gone. She might have done so already. If he was to be scolded anyway then he should have gone.
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