An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Father,’ said Fratelli without sarcasm, ‘I think you might hang me yourself.’ And he held his hands up palm first. ‘We can talk more about it. Tomorrow night. Are you free tomorrow night?’

  Darragh tried to perceive some notional calendar of his coming activities. He saw only vacancy. He said, ‘Yes, tomorrow night.’

  Here, in the broader night, Fratelli was in command. ‘Okay. I want you to dress like a normal Joe. My style. You got any civvies, Father? There’s a pub in the Cross, Greenknowe Street. Open all hours to us and our friends. We’ll find a quiet corner. A corner with walls behind us. Will you come, really?’

  ‘I tell you to surrender yourself tonight. I don’t want a drinking session with you.’

  ‘It takes time and a bit of moral support before a guy can do that, Father. And I’m on duty tonight. So will you come tomorrow?’

  ‘You’re not in a position to order a priest around.’

  ‘No, but you’ll come. We’ll settle everything that needs to be settled then.’

  Darragh thought himself further into the meeting Fratelli proposed. There was something about those ‘walls behind us,’ Fratelli had mentioned that alarmed Darragh, who harboured a primal desire to live longer than Fratelli. No Moldava River for me, he pledged.

  ‘I’ll bring someone with me though,’ he said. He could not imagine who it would be. ‘Just someone to keep an eye on me. He can drink in another part of the bar. He won’t know what we’re saying.’

  ‘Who will you bring?’ asked Fratelli, sniffing the air, suddenly irritable. ‘I don’t want another guy. Another guy mightn’t know that what I told you is sacred. I don’t want eavesdroppers.’

  ‘I can assure you, this fellow won’t eavesdrop.’

  ‘But he’ll know you don’t trust me.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Says very little for the absolution you just gave. And all that grace you talk about.’

  ‘I’m a human being, and I’m scared. I’ll tell this …’ Darragh was going to say friend, ‘… parishioner that I’m afraid you’re such a sociable man I might get drunk, that he’s there to get me home safe. I’ll tell him we’re talking, privately, about Private Aspillon.’

  ‘It all comes back to niggers,’ said Fratelli. ‘You’ll wear civvies …?’

  ‘Yes. Out of positive shame for the company I’m keeping.’

  Fratelli sighed at this. ‘I’ll meet you on the corner of Macleay and Greenknowe, eight o’clock. Is that set?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Darragh assented. He was suddenly delighted that he would see Fratelli again. The more time he spent with the man, he believed, the closer he was to the necessary end, the punishment.

  AS SOON AS HE entered the presbytery hallway, Darragh could hear the radio—a relayed BBC broadcast about the Afrika Korps and the British and Australian Eighth Army. He found, as he took a breath and went into the dining room, that the monsignor was eating chops with mint sauce and Worcestershire.

  ‘Frank,’ he said, looking up. He wore his usual cardigan and his black pants, was well-shaven and his thinning hair slicked. ‘Sit down here,’ he said, as if Darragh’s sins had now been expiated. He called to Mrs Flannery, and Frank’s meal was brought. It was touching, it was the affectionate gesture he so needed, and yet, seeing the glisten of fat on the meat, Darragh’s gorge rose. He fought it, knowing that over-delicate sensibility must be conquered if he was to go drinking with Fratelli.

  ‘Would you mind turning down the radio before you go, Mrs Flannery?’ the monsignor asked, and the housekeeper did it and vanished.

  ‘Frank,’ said the monsignor, who had clearly examined his conscience about his curate and come up with hopeful resolutions, ‘I’m sorry you went through the mill last Sunday. Thank God you weren’t here. You’ll have enough ghouls turning up at tomorrow’s Mass just to see you. But now you can understand the points I was making beforehand, points I made only for your sake. How were our friends the Franciscans, by the way?’

  ‘They were very kind,’ said Darragh. An instinct told him that he would do better with the monsignor if he gave fuller and more detailed answers, and he struggled to clear his head of Fratelli so that it could be done. ‘My retreat master was a wise old priest. A former digger they told me. The fellow who runs the dairy down there, Father Matthew … Well, he broke the story to me very gently last Sunday.’

  The monsignor seemed gratified. He nodded a few times. ‘I rang him too. But you were not there at the time. I couldn’t wangle two trunk calls in a day.’

  ‘That’s all right. You buried Mrs Heggarty.’

  The monsignor made a pained face. ‘I was harsh on her the day Kearney was here. I was somewhat shocked, Frank. When I buried her, I was aware of her neighbour weeping, and I had a suspicion, for what it was worth, that a woman who could be so mourned might attract the divine mercy.’ The monsignor coughed. ‘For what such a suspicion is worth,’ he explained quickly.

  Darragh was close to tears, of loss and hope both, so said nothing.

  ‘You know,’ said the monsignor, ‘just let me say … be careful at Mass tomorrow. Don’t do anything designed to satisfy the curious. Do you promise me? I know you’re a good preacher. I hope that this Sunday you’ll give a sermon no one will remember. A boring, boring sermon, Frank. God knows there’s plenty of them. You could get one out of a book.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Darragh. ‘But I must—for my own honour—mention the thing, without going into details.’

  The monsignor sighed. ‘We’re all hoping it’ll be plain sailing for you from here on, Frank. It’ll be a good thing when they catch the fellow, too. Excuse me now, I’m playing whist at the Gardners’ tonight. I’ll see you before the nine o’clock Mass.’ He said a moment’s grace after meals, knitting his brows, and stood.

  ‘Monsignor,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Yes, Frank?’

  ‘Thank you. A lot of men might have wanted to vet my sermon tomorrow.’

  The monsignor laughed. ‘Don’t think I didn’t consider it myself, Frank. But I think you’ve got to trust fellows. Even young Turks.’

  Darragh ate his chops automatically and without the relish the ration coupon which had gone to buy them seemed to justify. It was considered that sermons should deal with the mysteries of faith in the abstract, and with biblical tales or events from the lives of saints. Many priests thought it best to avoid the individual, the anecdotal, the concrete. It was considered dangerous to talk about local illustrative cases, to use the suburban instance as a parable. The rule was sometimes broken to permit a priest to denounce a particular book, generally one he had not read, or a film—one he had not seen, or had seen and left at the end of the first reel. A politician might be denounced, although that had become more dangerous recently, since the war seemed to have driven people’s opinions in various directions and produced in them an electoral wilfulness. But beyond that you stuck for your examples to the citizens of Christ’s Aramaic-speaking locale. The prodigal son, the wedding feast at Cana, Christ walking on the water. And, of course, the woman taken in adultery.

  When the monsignor was vanished to his whist, Darragh went to the church for Benediction and to hear evening confessions. Though he encountered anxious souls, souls who thought they were damned for some lie they had told, some theft of a few pounds of steel or timber or food, some lunge driven by lust, he gratefully absolved them all. Their sins were human ones and radiant with absolvability. The last of them had been absolved, indeed, by half past eight. An idea about a protector, a bodyguard, had come to him as well. He went back to the presbytery, changed out of his soutane into his suit, his stock and clerical collar, and set out down Homebush Road towards the railway line. He wondered if observant policemen were already on his track, but could see nothing much happening. Pedestrians were rarely thick on these streets, and the genuinely cold Saturday night air hung slackly over the wide pavements. If, before the encounters of the Coral Sea, there had been a lack of ele
ctric fear in the air, now there was a lack of joy at partial salvation. It all felt as it did before—ageless, and unimpressed by events.

  In The Crescent he looked for the police car waiting under the railway embankment. He did not see one. Had they given up the watch? He entered the gate of what he thought of, even though she was now gone from it, as Mrs Flood’s house. Ross Trumble answered the door, which was what he had hoped. He wore a woolly jumper and, hulking and good-looking, did resemble a revolutionary. It was impossible to believe that he was 4F. He seemed to Darragh acutely muscular. And he was sober tonight.

  He was taken aback to see Darragh.

  ‘You’ve come to see Bert?’ he decided.

  ‘No, Ross. You.’

  ‘Me? Jesus, you’re a game one. The scandalous priest, eh? Did the police spot you on your way past?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re there tonight. I don’t know.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ said Ross Trumble, his face cracking into a smile, a feature he had not yet displayed in any of his past meetings with Darragh, ‘this’ll confuse the buggers, won’t it? Two suspects meeting. And what a two!’ The idea tickled him. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘they had to separate us last time.’

  He laid his eyes in comradely amusement on Darragh.

  ‘Come in then. Bert’s out at a World War I get-together.’ People had now begun to call Darragh’s father’s Great War that. World War I. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. Or pour you a beer.’

  ‘I’d like a beer, in fact,’ said Darragh. He thought of it as training for the next night, and as a consolation for the harsh day just past. They went through to the kitchen where Trumble switched off a radio. It had been broadcasting from the Trocadero in town, Andrews Sisters-style performers singing patriotic songs. ‘It’s a brown slouch hat with its side turned up, And it means the world to me …’ Ross Trumble seemed embarrassed to have such trite lyrics emanating from his radio, or Bert’s. He switched the instrument off and went to the ice chest, from which he took out a half-drunk bottle of beer. He found a clean glass in a dresser, held it up to the light, considered it adequate and poured.

  ‘Beer, the working man’s religion,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Just a thought. Not trying to rile you.’ He laughed again. ‘Given that up as a bad bloody job since the other night. Sit down.’

  It seemed that the blows thrown and the attention of police had by some mysterious formula made them friends. Trumble’s gibes were comradely now, for which Darragh was grateful. He half-smiled and began to drink the oaty dinner ale, tasting the gracious grain in it, and feeling a normal fellow.

  ‘Did you get into much trouble with bishops and people like that?’ asked Trumble.

  ‘They sent me on a retreat.’

  ‘A retreat?’ He obviously and with some justice thought of the term in a military sense.

  ‘You go away to a monastery, keep silent, pray and have sessions with a spiritual adviser.’

  ‘And you were in the middle of that when the story came out in the papers?’

  Darragh said yes.

  ‘So it isn’t all beer and skittles, this feeding people the opium of religion.’

  ‘I don’t mind admitting it’s been pretty hard lately.’

  Trumble himself had sat now. He lifted his own half-drunk glass of beer. ‘I’m supposed to be happy when things go a bit bad for servants of the system. Priests and coppers. But it’s different when you get to know somebody.’

  Darragh thought that Trumble the revolutionary must, in fact, be a kind of sentimentalist, since he considered having a police-interrupted tussle with another man to be a valid form of getting to know him. There was a sort of innocence in this, and Darragh was surprised but strangely cheered by it.

  ‘We’re just ordinary blokes, you know,’ said Darragh. ‘Some of us very ordinary. And we don’t see ourselves as you see us.’

  ‘How do you see yourself?’

  ‘As a servant of the people.’

  ‘That is interesting,’ said Trumble. ‘When you bloody think about it.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Darragh.

  ‘Well, you see, it makes you a poor bloody exploited sod as well.’

  ‘I don’t feel exploited,’ said Darragh, though the temptation was there. ‘I became a priest of my own free will. No one put a gun to my head.’

  ‘No. I bet they just told you you’d go to hell if you didn’t.’

  ‘I had a profound desire for it,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Yeah. But they conditioned you, you see. They raised you to want it.’

  ‘And did they raise you to want to be what you are?’

  ‘My father bloody did, though I didn’t see so much of him. He was without a job five years. Travelled round region to region by foot, and riding the rattler. They kept them on the road, town to town, but they didn’t give them the means to travel. Railway police hunted them out from under the carriages. A great system, eh? Some fathers said, “Become a lawyer or a doctor, boy, because you’ll never be hard up.” But my father said when we met up again: “Change the world so that you can be a worker, and don’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer to be safe.” That was my education. It made some damn sense.’

  ‘Everyone’s childhood makes sense when you’re in it,’ Darragh said. ‘That’s when the world is simple.’

  ‘And my world was simply bloody awful,’ Trumble told him with a grin, but without the note of accusation which had marked their earlier discourses. ‘If you blokes are the servants of the people, where were you? You were living in your presbyteries, weren’t you, and we were lining up at the kitchen door.’

  ‘I was at high school. My father was out of work too. He told me the Church didn’t always act well. Some priests locked themselves in against the poor. But the Sisters of Charity were handing out tea and soup to anyone in the side streets. Just for the pure humanity of it.’

  They were getting deeply into Kate Heggarty territory—social justice, Rerum Novarum, Marx, dignity. As much as these matters interested Darragh at normal times, they could not be permitted to dominate this kitchen conversation. Darragh took a long sip of the beer, and felt the first onset of deceptive, effervescent brotherliness in his blood. The thought struck him that men drank to achieve this platform of goodwill. The impulse itself was noble if benighted. His father had had a few episodes with whisky during days of unemployment, hiding it in the cistern of the toilet. It was his attempt to mould the world down to a graspable state. But spirits made Mr Darragh sad and aggressive, and broke down the coherence of his character. He became an unshaven stranger with a gap-toothed slash of a mouth who threw an inaccurate punch at Darragh’s mother and told Darragh to fucking grow up, that his mother was making him a lily-fart. Darragh had especially noticed his own liking for liquor on the tennis Mondays. I’ll have to be careful, he thought, or I’ll become one of those red-nosed priests with the broken facial capillaries of the boozer—or, as they called it, the Tipperary tan. But none of that was as pressing an issue as Fratelli.

  ‘Look, Ross,’ Darragh said, leaning forward, getting down to business. ‘I’m not a soldier because I’m a minister of religion, exempt. I believe you’re 4F. I’m not saying this in any jingoistic way—I don’t want you to go and get killed or anything like that. But it’s just, you seemed so strong the other night, when we were having our … our little scrum … down the street.’

  ‘I am 4F though, fair and square,’ said Trumble. ‘Had tuberculosis. And bad. Part of a lung gone. That’s where I met Rosie. Up in the Boddington sanitarium in the Blue Mountains. It’s easy to die in a place like that, but I thought: Build yourself up, son! I even chopped wood to the limit of what breath I had. And I wanted to live. Because wars always bring on a revolution, so I knew this one would too, if I could just stick around.’ Darragh was tempted to say, ‘Perhaps it’ll be a revolution against Stalin,’ but he didn’t want to get into that argument.

  ‘So I can hold my own,’ Trumble concluded.

  ‘I think you ca
n too.’ Once more a polemic urge surfaced in Darragh to ask, ‘Can you really imagine the whole of Australia Communist?’ But that would take the conversation in an unfruitful direction. He said instead, ‘I came because I want you to do me a favour.’

  ‘Here we go,’ said Trumble with a broad smile, but again it had a jolliness to it.

  Darragh told him about Private Aspillon. At least Trumble believed in the universal brotherhood of men, said Darragh. He and Darragh had that in common.

  ‘But,’ said Trumble, ‘you’ve got to ask whether it’s wise for a black man to strike up an acquaintance with a white woman. It’s all bloody right in theory, but …’

  ‘But society doesn’t like it?’

  ‘Bloody right,’ agreed Trumble, suddenly like a gatekeeper of the known world.

  Darragh expanded on his experience with Aspillon, leaving out the more pious aspects. Aspillon was now in a military prison, and Darragh claimed to be interested in his welfare. So he was to meet an American MP in a pub in the Cross, and he wasn’t sure about the fellow, not after the events in the backyard in Lidcombe. He wanted to make sure he got home safely. Would Trumble consider coming? Except, said Darragh, he wasn’t asking Trumble to take part in the dialogue. If he wouldn’t mind sitting across the room, and just keeping an eye on things. They’d go into the Cross by train and bus. ‘And I don’t want to come home too late,’ said Darragh. ‘I always have the early Mass Monday.’

  ‘Sounds like exploitation to me,’ said Trumble with an enthusiastic grin. But the invitation had fascinated, and as far as Darragh could tell, delighted him. ‘Look, not only will we have a good night out on this Yank, and not only will I keep an eye on you, we’ll get a cab home. It’ll be easy to get a cab home if a Yank’s with us.’

  ‘Well, I’ll pay for it,’ said Darragh, in a rash burst of gratitude to Trumble. It would make a massive dent in his savings from the one pound ten shillings the archdiocese paid him a week.