This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  And here is the Coogee Bay pulling up to the tram stop on Elizabeth. It must be the 6.17, and I’m going to miss it. No, I’m not. I’m changing direction sharply for Oxford Street, to catch it.

  Bang on the left shoulder as something heavy slams into me, as my feet leave the ground and I’m caught around the waist with a man’s voice saying: ‘Oof. I’ve got you!’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ Automatic reflex, I push the arm away from my person. ‘Get off me!’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the man says and even his smile is somehow a rounded vowel. Tall, dark and catalogue-exclusive handsome. Incredibly blue eyes. ‘But I believe it was you who careered into me.’

  ‘Do you?’ I retort, straightening my jacket. ‘You should look where you’re going.’

  He ignores that, bending down now to pick up some books he dropped. One’s fallen open at the title page: Cardiac Failure and Hypertension. He’s a doctor. The rubber tubing of a stethoscope sticking out of his suit-coat pocket is also a giveaway. And he now looks up at me with those blue eyes he seems to well know the effect of: ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ He stands, giving me the full blinding dazzle of his catalogue-exclusive teeth. ‘Because, if you don’t mind, I’d like to invite you to join me for dinner this evening. Allow me to introduce my–’

  ‘Dinner? For Pete’s sake.’ I feel the cold-fish contempt fall across my face; automatic reflex. ‘No. Thank you.’

  I know I’ve missed the 6.17, but I run for it anyway. Is this all I’m good for? Attracting male attention? Arrogant young doctor sweeps girl off feet in public park. My life is a six-penny romance gone wrong. Good grief. Hughie save me.

  ‘Oh, but miss! Please. Wait!’

  Oh please. Please leave me be!

  GORDON

  ‘She is very late now.’ Mrs Zoc is watching the street through the flyscreen, hand at her throat. She’s more nervous than me, if that’s possible. She comes back into the lounge, goes over to the side window and shrugs at Mrs Cooper, who shrugs back from her front verandah, hands in the air. Ordinarily I might laugh that they both then reach into their apron pockets for their beads.

  An hour ago, I was excited, I was ready. I’d just told Mrs Cooper that I’d come back to ask Bernie something, Oh yes, Gordon, yes! she said without me finishing the sentence, Go and have your bath, dear. I did. Then I asked Mrs Zoc if I shouldn’t ask Mr Cooper first, formally, when he got in from the garage, and she said, You are stupido? And then she told me Mr Cooper wasn’t here. Told me all about it, that he’s rejoined with the Second AIF. I don’t know what to make of that, something to think about when normal brain function returns.

  ‘Did you get Bernadetta a ring, Gordon?’ Mrs Zoc is trying to make conversation again, none of which is helping.

  ‘No.’

  She looks nervous again. Even the cat, Piccolo, looks worried.

  ‘No ring …’ Mrs Zoc pushes the beads through her fingers a bit faster.

  But then I remember, I did get Bernie a rock. ‘Hang on,’ I tell Mrs Zoc and go and grab it from the pocket of my swag. It’s a little piece of jasper I found among the scree at the top of the Hartley Vale stock road on my way here. I only went that route to avoid the possibility of having to walk the bike all the way up Victoria Pass, and there I was, stopped for a billy, having a bit of a fossick along the bottom of cliffs, when I found this beauty. It’s speckled red and tan, with a pink mist through it, in the shape of a B, sort of.

  Mrs Zoc approves of it; she cries: ‘Ah Gordon, molto romantico!’

  ‘You think she’ll like it? It’s jasper,’ I say. That’s sounds insane now. I’m going to give Bernie a piece of jasper I found on the road?

  But Mrs Zoc says, confident now: ‘It does not matter if she likes it or not. It is a jasper stone. It has magic powers, to bring many bambini, to bring the rain, and to send away the snakes and the spiders.’ She puts it down on the telephone table and nods at it.

  ‘I must take the fish from the heat,’ she says now, apologetic at having to tend to tea, as if not watching the street will somehow delay Bernie further. Maybe it will. Where is Bernie? She’s just tied up at work and hasn’t telephoned her mum for some reason, that’s probably what’s occurred. That dropkick of a boss of hers keeping her back. I wish she’d give away that job at Chalmers; it’s beneath her intelligence anyway. She can say goodbye to it shortly, can’t she. Please.

  Geez, I could do with a beer.

  What am I going to do if she says no?

  ‘Gordon.’ Mrs Zoc comes back into the lounge, and the slow way she rolls the r in my name indicates she’s got something important to tell me. ‘I was mean to my Marco, in the beginning,’ she says softly.

  ‘Oh?’ Marco is her husband – was. I look at his photograph behind her, above the mantelpiece: happy face, thick black moustache. She still misses him. She still barnies with him sometimes, slamming things around in the kitchen. I never met him. He died of nephritis a few years after they emigrated, and she blames the war for it. She’s been through a lot, Mrs Zoc, ending up here with her Marco and their three sons, because America didn’t want any more Sicilians, and the Fat Head, as she calls the Italian dictator, only wanted her boys dead. They’re all up in North Queensland now, her sons, making a fortune in pineapples and mangoes, making their mother lonely. That’s why Mr Cooper’d thought it would be good for me to board here, when Dad wrote to him asking for advice. By mutual need Mrs Zoc is the closest thing to a mum I have, but I don’t know what she’s telling me now about being mean to her Marco, and I don’t know if she’s wanting me to ask or not. Is she telling me she told him no the first time?

  She goes back to her post by the flyscreen telling me nothing. Instead, she lets out cry: ‘Ah!’

  I’m about to find out for myself.

  Bernie. I hear her heels on the footpath before I see her. The shape of her waist in her suit. The shape of those legs, up on the crest of the hill.

  I grab her jasper B off the telephone table, and then I freeze, before Mrs Zoc pushes me out the door: ‘Pronto!’

  BERNIE

  I’m so cross. Fuming cross. With myself. I’ve lost my bracelet. It must have flung off somehow running into Young Doctor Keen On Himself, and could just be why he chased me halfway across the park, calling, Miss, wait! I lost him hopping on the Bondi tram to Taylor Square. And I’ve lost my blooping bracelet. Something else for Mum to be overjoyed about. It’s not an expensive one, only a little nine-carat chain, and the catch was always a bit loose, but Mum and Dad gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. Why didn’t I get that catch fixed? I could cry, but I’m too cross.

  It’s almost dark, moths around the streetlamp just come on, and it’s starting to sprinkle as I pass the flats up on the corner, past the old half-dead frangipani that looks like a great big witch’s hand. It used to scare me when I was little; now I’d like it to strike me, blast me off the face of the earth in a puff of smoke. Whooomp! Bernadette Cooper: gone.

  ‘Bernie?’

  Oh, that’d be right. Now I think I can hear Rock calling up to me from the house. Yes, of course. According to this six-penny, he’s come back from Nyngan to sweep me off my feet.

  ‘Bernie?’

  Rock calling up to me again.

  Oh.

  But it is him. The set of his shoulders. His white moleskin trousers, striding, purposeful as ever, towards me.

  My feet seem to go from under me. I’m still walking towards him but I have no feet.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he sounds out of breath, and worried.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I hear myself say. He hasn’t come home to propose to me, has he. Something dreadful must have happened for him to come all the way back to Coogee like this.

  But he says: ‘Nothing’s wrong. Um …’

  He reaches for my hand, and then –

  Oh.

  At the first touch of his lips on my cheek I fold into him, and the rest of my pers
on takes off to wherever my feet just went.

  He breathes into my neck. ‘I love you, Bernie.’

  Stars are exploding across the sky, through my body and into my soul. It’s true, the universe is expanding. It’s terrifying, and he hasn’t even kissed me properly yet.

  He says: ‘Will you marry me?’

  And I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second, but I do. He is holding me to his chest and his heart is asking me too. Please, Bernie.

  What should I do? Stare into the concrete footpath between our feet. ‘Mmmm.’

  He pulls away and holds me by my shoulders. ‘What did you say?’

  I look up into his eyes, lovely grey eyes promising perfect weather for anything, anything for me.

  What else can I do? Everyone will be so happy if I …

  I nod.

  ‘Are you saying yes?’ His incredulity is so pure and plain.

  There is nothing else can I say but: ‘Mmmm, that’s right.’

  Before his lips touch mine for the very first time, here in the street, in the sprinkling rain, pulling me back to earth, back to him, arms firm around me, making it real, real as the shushing of the surf in the bay below us, and I knew it, didn’t I. Soon as I let him kiss me, I’d be gone. This has to be as right as it feels, doesn’t it? The right thing to do. For everyone. If this is all I’m good for, then make it good. I’m going to marry Gordon Brock. I’m going, going …

  He pulls away again, hand in his pocket, and says: ‘Here, I got you something.’

  Puts it in my palm. It’s a piece of rock. And I am gone. Not a lot of maybe about it.

  Still, he has to double-check. ‘You did say yes, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Gordon,’ I tell him. ‘I said yes.’

  I did. Didn’t I?

  GORDON

  She said yes. Yes, she did. Bernie Cooper said yes. And she called me Gordon when she said it so I know she meant it. I can’t do anything without thinking it, three times a second. She said yes and she let me kiss her.

  She lets me kiss her and then tells me to go away. Go to bed, go for a surf, go away so she and Mrs Cooper can organise a surprise party for Mr Cooper for Friday evening. I am obedient. I go away and sign my contract at the George Street offices of the Southern Star Oil Company, in town. My hand is still that sore I can hardly hold the pen, but it doesn’t matter; nothing else matters because Bernie Cooper said yes.

  ‘A young man confident of his decisions, that’s what we like to see,’ says my new boss as I hand him back the document. He is the chief of exploration and at this moment I can’t quite recall his name. Doesn’t matter, does it. Bernie Cooper said yes.

  BERNIE

  ‘I am the proudest man alive,’ Dad cries, wiping his eyes. He can’t stop shaking Rock’s hand, which is bringing a tear to Rock’s eye too: great black bruise across his knuckles, got it caught in the door of a ute, he said. Still, he doesn’t let go of Dad’s hand in a hurry either. My fiancé . Gordon Brock. Gordon James Brock. Mrs GJ Brock I’m going to be. A geologist’s wife. A company wife, no spud-crisping for me unless I want to make a hobby of it, in New Guinea. New Guinea? That’s going somewhere, isn’t it. It blooping well is. Going somewhere married to Mr GJ Brock, who rode all the way home from Nyngan with his hand like that to propose to me. Mental.

  ‘When? When’s the big day?’ Dad is asking us.

  And Mum is quick and even prouder to tell him: ‘Seventh of December, Bill, next December. The seventh of December 1940. That’s the soonest Gordon will be able to return from New Guinea, and it’s lucky number seven. Isn’t that a marvellous date?’

  ‘Marvellous, Peg,’ says Dad, wiping another tear. ‘Marvellous.’

  Marvellous. Mum’s just about got the whole thing arranged already. St Brigid’s is booked and we will have lilacs and hydrangeas, and Father Gerard will let us know on Sunday what sort of offering might be sufficient to overcome the groom’s state of Presbyterianism. Mrs Zoc will make the cake; Mum will make the dress. The reception will be held in the dining room at the Coogee Bay Hotel. And I don’t have to worry any more about what I’m doing. I’m fulfilling my parents’ hopes and expectations for me. With a life free from worry, free from work. Rock’s going to do that, taking this job in Rabaul for the money, for me, looking for oil in the jungle, to set us up with a deposit on a house, on the harbourside, my future assured with electrical appliances. I’ll never light a copper on washing day. I’ll have the best agitating spin wringer there is. That’s what the whole parish will know by Sunday afternoon: Bernie Cooper, she’ll never have to lift a finger again.

  Dad raises his glass of beer over our kitchen table: ‘Bernie and Gordon!’ and can’t wait for Saturday afternoon, to shout the bar of the Bay, all Saturday afternoon so that my father and my fiancé have to take turns pushing each other up Heartbreak on the way home, they are so thoroughly skunked.

  ‘Oh, get inside, Bill, disgraceful man,’ Mum pretends to rouse on him, and as we watch Gordon trip up the front steps next door before falling into the hibiscus, she says to me, not for the first time: ‘I hope you know how lucky you are, Missy.’

  I do, Mum, I do. I’ve got a romance full of promises that will come true. Practically guaranteed. Who wouldn’t be happy with that? So, I didn’t quite get to the end of maybe. So what? Small sacrifice. Maybe this is the end of maybe after all.

  When in doubt, let him kiss me again. Let him kiss me too long, longer and longer, so that as soon as Dad is on his way back to Ingleburn, my Rock is through the curtains of my bedroom window, kissing me in places that make me want to scream. My Gordon. I can feel him strange and firm against my thigh and I push him away. I have to ask: ‘Have you done this before?’

  And he says, embarrassed: ‘No. No, not with a girl.’

  And I say, with the creeping terror of everything I don’t know about what we’re doing here: ‘What do you mean, not with a girl?’

  Mortified. ‘Oh. No. I didn’t mean, I–’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I tease him, keeping my terror to myself. ‘You know what they say about shearers.’

  And we laugh ourselves silly, till I think I’ve spoiled it for us, till my cheeks hurt, till we’re kissing again, and my terror becomes wonder against his skin, and then something else altogether as he fills me so that I am the vast warm ball of melted rock that he says is inside the earth. And afterwards, safe and sleepy in his arms, I look up at the stars through my window, wondering how it is that a man so strong and heavy in the chest could be so light upon me, and I ask him: ‘What did you really mean when you said not with a girl?’

  And he says: ‘I meant only in my dreams, and I only ever dream of you, I only ever will.’

  And then there is silence, except for the shushing of the sea.

  And a Qantas Empire Airways flying boat for him to catch to New Guinea tomorrow. The eighth of January. It seems too soon, too real now. I don’t want him to go. The girl who couldn’t bear the thought of getting married now can’t bear the thought of him leaving. Who wrote this storyline? I don’t want to wait a year to see him again. Eleven months – near enough a whole year. I want to get married now. A lot can happen in a year. A lot can happen in a month, don’t I know it. He could get eaten by head hunters, or thrown into a volcano, and I might –

  Need to pull myself together. All day I’ve been getting caught up in this agitating spin wringer of nonsense. What’s the matter with me?

  ‘You be careful of the Japs up there, Gordon,’ Mum squawks over our last Sunday roast with him, as if the Yellow Peril is poised to swoop down through the islands this second. Where do I get it from? Nonsense. Panic for nothing, for selling copies of the tabloid papers. Prime Minister Pig Iron is maintaining it’s far-fetched, and he should know, big chief imitation rubbish salesman that he is, half-a-dozen plums stuffed in his mouth to prove it: Britain has nothing to fear from Japan. The war is in Europe, ladies and gentlemen, or will be when it actually starts; inference being: wha
t would anyone in their right mind want with Australia anyway?

  ‘Don’t worry about any Japs, Peg.’ Dad’s gentle laugh is the answer, the assurance. ‘They’ve got their hands full in China, love. Even if they weren’t busy, they’d have to get through Singapore to get down this way, and the Brits’d never let that happen.’

  Of course they wouldn’t. Singapore: Jewel of the Empire Crown. Rock’s going to take me there one day, take me shopping for sapphires and silks. And now my mind sloshes between the fantastic excitement of that idea and the idea that the Japs seem to have been at it for a long time in China. They did some terrible thing in Nanking not so long ago, didn’t they?

  ‘Bernie?’ I feel Rock’s hand on mine. ‘You’re not worried, are you?’

  ‘No, not really, I …’ don’t know what’s the matter with me.

  But he reassures me anyway. ‘You know the Japs won’t go further than China, don’t you?’ His eyes telling me: Of course you do. ‘It’s only logic, Bernie. You know, economic.’ He explains to Mum: ‘If they want to keep going with selling us all their cheap-and-nasty manufacturing, they need lots of oil for that, Mrs Cooper, and as the Yanks supply almost all of that oil, there’s no chance the Japs would want to upset them in the Pacific – nor us, if we can find our own reserves and sell it to them even cheaper. The only thing that will happen then is a bidding war between us and the Yanks for the Jap contracts.’

  ‘Well, there you have it, you can’t argue with sense like that, can you,’ Mum’s convinced, and she looks at Dad. ‘Isn’t our Gordon the most intelligent boy, Bill?’

  ‘He is, Peg, he is.’

  Their Gordon. Their boy. At last they’ve got their boy. I paste one on. What am I? Not even a swimsuit model. I pulled out of the Summer Sensations parade last Saturday and no one died. Rock said I shouldn’t stop doing all that, shouldn’t stop doing anything fun that I might want to do. In fact, he demanded I give up the proper job and wear a swimsuit for the rest of my life, which Mum thought was just about the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard. If Gordon thought it was a good idea for me to parade naked down Pitt Street, Mum would agree, but still I didn’t feel right about going in the show. I felt a bit off-colour anyway, stomach cartwheeling with I don’t know what when I told Yoohoo she’d have to find another pair of pins for the white Jantzen. I feel a bit off now.