The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  He tossed most of the ostriches in the first twenty yards, but one of them had left its weaving companions and kept pace with him as he started up the road past the factory. Johnny really got down to it here. He wiggled levers, crouched low and hugged his bike with love as they approached the hill.

  He was flat out when the ostrich passed him—he was also flat out when he hit the ground. He left the bike like a sprung Jack-in-the-box and began running. He took the stone wall like a hurdler then fell to his hands and knees. The ostrich had disappeared over the hill and after a while Johnny came back and rode his bike down to the blacksmith’s shop where he sat on the anvil and told Mr Thomas, ‘I tell ye, there is a power of strength in them there fat-legged birds. I’ve never travelled faster in me life. I was doin’ sixty when he passed me.’

  Joe wasn’t around next morning; but he turned up about ten o’clock and told me he’d been up to have a look at the place where they kept the ostriches. ‘What I can’t make out’, said Joe, ‘is that there’s only nine of them. What happened to that bloody tenth ostrich?’

  ‘Would it be the one that chased Johnny Melford?’ I asked.

  ‘It could be’, said Joe. ‘Yes, it could be, but then again they might have lost it at the foot of the Mount. They broke up there when they were bringing them in and shot off everywhere. How about asking Mr Goodman?’

  ‘Won’t he be up with the ostriches?’ I said.

  ‘He’s in the pub’, said Joe.

  I went over to the pub and hung around for a while. After a while Mr Goodman staggered out of the bar clutching half a bottle of whisky.

  ‘Hey, Mr Goodman’, I said. ‘Hey, Mr Goodman.’

  He turned and looked at me with lowered head nodding while he backed off.

  ‘Could you tell us what happened to the tenth ostrich, Mr Goodman?’ I asked.

  ‘Whassa matter? Listen, boy’, he said, ‘do you think I’d be on this second bottle of whisky if I knew where that tenth ostrich is. Now shut up and tell me. Where’s the piss-house?’

  Miss Trengrove

  Miss Trengrove was thin like a rush. She moved through Turalla cloaked in religion, a cloak that shielded her from sin. Sin to Miss Trengrove was always associated with sex. She had never married; she was far too fastidious. There had been a gentleman to whom she could have become betrothed but that was long ago, so long ago that the years had misted his memory, leaving only his gentlemanliness like a bleeding heart to strengthen her.

  She lived alone in a house buried under shrubs and trees that in the spring dropped pink and white petals on the roof and clutched her like hands when she walked to the gate.

  ‘You should take a boarder’, Elsie said to her—Elsie is my sister. ‘It’s lonely in this big house.’

  Miss Trengrove agreed that it would be nice to have a boarder—‘provided she was a good-living girl, of course’. But there were responsibilities. She would expect at least one good meal a day, whereas now she only had to cook for herself.

  ‘I eat so little’, Miss Trengrove explained. ‘A poached egg and a slice of toast is all I need of an evening. With a boarder I’d have to cook a roast at least once a week. Then there’s breakfast; I’ve almost forgotten how to make porridge.’

  But the idea must have appealed to Miss Trengrove, for a few weeks later she told Elsie that she had heard that a young assistant teacher at the school was looking for board. ‘She is quite a nice looking girl, well developed figure, carries herself well, is really quite charming.’

  Miss Evelyn Wilson was the name of the school teacher. She was twenty years of age and had long blonde hair neatly coiled into a bun that rested on the back of her neck. She came from Melbourne and when she was told that Miss Trengrove would most likely accept her as a boarder she stood outside the house looking at it for a few minutes before opening the picket gate and walking along the pathway to the front door.

  Both Miss Trengrove and Miss Wilson liked each other, so Miss Wilson became a boarder at the house. She dried the dishes that Miss Trengrove washed and listened with interest to all that Miss Trengrove told her about the people of Turalla.

  ‘Our new teacher’s name is Miss Wilson’, I said to Joe. ‘She’s beaut. I put up my hand to ask to go out and she told me that if ever I wanted to go out I needn’t ask her but just go out and come back quickly.’

  ‘Yes’, said Joe. ‘Some kid’s pissed himself while she was writing on the board; that’s what’s happened. Once you piss yourself they can’t get you out quick enough. It won’t last. Just you wait and see. Every kid in the school’s going to start marking time before clutching his guts and making for the door. There’ll be a crowd in the boys’ shit-house laughing their heads off and arguing who’s to go back first.’

  ‘Bugger them’, I said with feeling.

  ‘You can’t keep a good lurk like that to yourself, pronounced Joe with a gesture of one bowing to the inevitable.

  Joe and I made a welter of it next day. We were both as dry as a bone by lunchtime, but Miss Wilson told us to stay back for a minute.

  ‘You two boys were out a long time this morning’, she said, smiling. ‘I thought you must be sick. Are you all right now?’

  We both agreed we were all right now.

  ‘Good’, she said. ‘Run along now.’

  When we were going out the door she called out to us. ‘Just a minute.’

  We stopped.

  ‘Pass the word round will you—not longer than two minutes. Thank you for listening to me.’

  ‘I tell you’, said Joe when we were outside. ‘I’d piss myself before I’d try to put it over her again.’

  ‘It makes you feel a bit of a bastard, doesn’t it’, I said.

  During the summer months Joe and I were out trapping rabbits most nights. I liked those nights when there was a full moon and I could see the ground quite plainly. The big stones in the paddocks cast domed shadows on the grass and holes were patches of darkness when the moon was full. I rarely fell on moonlight nights.

  ‘It’s better for me, too’, Joe assured me at times. ‘I could break a bloody leg as easy as you.’

  The stone walls were easy to climb over. You could get a grip on them. There were footholes between the stones and you could rest on top of the wall if you were tired. They were better than wire fences.

  ‘Barb-wire is a bastard’, Joe said, remembering triangular tears in his trousers, ‘but stone walls are bloody good.’

  We trapped rabbits along the stone walls. They dug their burrows deep beneath the foundations so that portions of the wall sometimes collapsed, spilling stones amongst the grass.

  One such wall we approached curved away amongst trees. It was patched with shadows and these shadows sometimes moved. If you stared at them for a little while they always moved. A deep shadow made a pathway along the foot of the wall—it was always still and when you were kneeling in it no one could see you.

  We had climbed the wall and were kneeling in this shadow. There was a burrow here, a burrow with a platform of flattened earth at the entrance. Fresh pellets of rabbit shit littered this trodden section. Here we decided to set a trap. Joe was digging the set when we heard voices. A girl laughed and said, ‘Don’t be impatient.’

  ‘God!’ exclaimed Joe, ‘Miss Wilson!’

  We jumped to our feet and stood close together looking along the wall. Miss Wilson’s head appeared rising above it against the sky. Her hands gripped the coping stones and she sat there a moment looking back at someone who suddenly levered himself up and sat beside her.

  ‘Tom Dixon, the bloody blacksmith!’ I whispered to Joe.

  Joe was afraid for some reason. He shrank back and looked quickly around him.

  Miss Wilson giggled and dropped to the ground. She turned and faced Tom Dixon and her head was all you could see. It projected from the wall’s shadow and the moonlight shone on it and on her smiling face.

  Tom Dixon dropped down in front of her. In the same movement his arms went round her and
they fell to the ground with Miss Wilson hidden beneath him. His hands clutched at her.

  ‘God Almighty!’ exclaimed Joe. ‘The bastard’s murdering her. Let’s get to hell out of here.’ He went over the wall like the shadow of a fox. I reached to the top where the stones were wide enough apart to give me a grip and was dragging my crutches up beside me when Joe’s arm came up out of the darkness and went round my neck. He pulled me over like a sack of spuds and I fell on to my hands and knees on the soft grass.

  ‘Get to your feet’, he hissed. ‘He always carries a trimming knife in his belt. He’ll cut all our throats. God have mercy on that poor devil of a girl. She kept calling out, “No, no.” She’s going through hell this very minute. Are you set? For God’s sake don’t fall over.’

  He ran ahead but kept coming back with outstretched arm. ‘Hurry. Hurry.’ I bounded beside him across the paddock. We sped on in silence, Joe suiting his pace to mine.

  ‘It said on the back page of the Union Fack that Jack the Ripper had come to Australia’, Joe went on breathlessly. ‘I read it myself.’

  ‘My father told me that wasn’t true’, I panted.

  ‘By hell! He wouldn’t say that if he’d seen Tom Dixon this night I’m tellin’ you’, gasped Joe. He pulled up for a blow. He lay on the grass and I sat beside him.

  ‘We’ll have to shut up about this’, he said after a while. ‘We don’t want our throats cut.’

  ‘Jack the Ripper only killed women’, I reminded him.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know’, said Joe impatiently. ‘But he’s got to start on men some time. If Miss Wilson turns up alive at school tomorrow—well, that’s all right; she’s got away from him. But if she turns up with her throat cut, well then we’ll have to go to the coppers. If we have to go to the coppers, you’ll have to do the talking.’

  ‘All right’, I said doubtfully.

  ‘We won’t tell any kids about it, will we?’

  ‘No’, I said, ‘they’d reckon we were liars.’

  Tom Dixon did not look like Jack the Ripper to me. Tom was a good-looking bloke who walked like a stallion being led out to a mare. He was a proud and haughty bloke and swung the heavy hammer with ease, lifting it from its blow on the shoe and rising erect with it before bringing it down again. Mr Thomas was very proud of him. He was good to look at and I didn’t blame Miss Wilson, but Joe took some convincing.

  ‘We’ll keep an eye on him’, he said. ‘There’s madness in that bloke somewhere.’

  Miss Wilson came to school in the morning. She seemed very happy for a girl who had just escaped having her throat cut the night before.

  It puzzled Joe. ‘There’s no doubt about it, women are funny’, he reflected. ‘She was on her last gasp last night, and now look at her.’

  In a few weeks we began to get tired of watching Tom Dixon.

  ‘Listen’, I said. ‘What are we supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘Watch how he looks at girls’, warned Joe. ‘Look for the murder in his eyes.’

  It seemed bloody stupid to me. ‘Watching him looking at girls is a full-time job’, I said.

  ‘Wait’, said Joe.

  One day he gave us a cigarette card and after that Joe thought he was a good bloke.

  ‘You’d never catch Jack the Ripper giving you Number 74 of the “Birds of Australia” series’, said Joe with conviction.

  It convinced me. ‘By hell, you wouldn’t’, I agreed.

  Miss Trengrove didn’t mind Miss Wilson stopping out late each Tuesday and Friday night. ‘I don’t agree with girls keeping late hours’, she told Elsie, ‘but Miss Wilson does enjoy the two evenings a week she spends with Mrs Turner. She is very fond of Gladys—though Gladys did get into serious trouble. But taking it all round it was a good idea of yours that I take a boarder.’

  ‘Women that walk in the dark frighten shit out of me’, Joe said. ‘They don’t fit into it like a man. When you meet a man in the dark you know he’s going to the pub or somewhere. But women are always coming home from some place—they’re always in a hurry.’

  Miss Flinders was in a hurry. She had her head down and didn’t see Joe and me. We were behind a stone wall skinning the rabbits we had caught. We kept still and she didn’t hear us. Miss Flinders was a Sunday School teacher and chock-a-block full of religion. To gut a rabbit would be sinful to her and I agreed with Joe that it was just as well to be on the safe side when she was about. She was about sixty—some age like that—and she played the organ at the church.

  She liked playing for God, but she also liked walking about at night. She was always looking for something, I don’t know what.

  She’d pass houses in the dark and the light from the windows would fall on her face for a moment. It was always looking at the windows and the windows were looking at it. They saw a sad face, I think.

  Miss Trengrove received a letter one day and she showed it to Elsie when Elsie visited her. It said,

  Don’t you realise you are harbouring a dirty, sinful girl in your house. Miss Wilson meets Tom Dixon every Tuesday and Friday night and commits a sin with him behind McLeod’s stone wall. You should be ashamed of yourself for encouraging such filthy behaviour.

  ‘Do you recognise that handwriting?’ Miss Trengrove asked and she handed Elsie the envelope.

  Elsie looked at it and said, ‘It is Miss Flinders’s writing.’

  ‘That’s what I thought’, said Miss Trengrove, then added, ‘I hate anonymous letters. I never believe a word of them. I wonder what would be the best thing to do.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d put it in another envelope and post it back to her’, said Elsie.

  So Miss Trengrove posted it back to her and after that Miss Flinders didn’t walk at night any more.

  During the next few months Miss Wilson put on a lot of weight which led Pat Corrigan to remark as we passed her on our way to the factory one morning, ‘That girl is carrying a penalty.’

  ‘Now what the hell does he mean by that?’ reflected Joe when I told him.

  ‘I’m buggered if I know’, I said, ‘but Pat told me it’s an extra weight they put on a horse. I think they get this extra weight after they have had a victory.’

  ‘Now I come to think of it’, said Joe, ‘Miss Wilson has put on weight. She won’t do much more climbing over stone walls, I’m tellin’ ya.’

  Miss Trengrove was sorry when Miss Wilson told her she was leaving to return to Melbourne.

  ‘I understand’, she said gently. ‘Look after yourself, my dear.’

  Miss Wilson left on a Friday. Joe and I caught a rabbit on Wednesday. We skinned and gutted it and brought it down to Miss Trengrove’s. I knocked at the door and when Miss Trengrove opened it I said, ‘We brought you down a rabbit to cook for Miss Wilson. She told us she likes rabbit.’

  Miss Trengrove didn’t know what to say. She just said, ‘Thank you’, but she called it out again when we were going through the gate.

  Joe felt impelled to make some contribution to the conversation before we left. He turned and called to Miss Trengrove, ‘Hey Miss Trengrove, don’t worry over that rabbit. It’s been skinned and gutted; all the dirty work’s been done!’

  Fear

  I’ve always said, and Joe agrees with me; there’s nothing on earth can frighten you more than a man. If a bull charges you, you make for a fence or stand still; if a dog comes at you, you can let him have it in the guts with your boot; but a man—Ah! that’s when you get really scared. He grabs you. You can’t fight him. There’s no fence to run to, you can’t kick him; you’re too small and one hit from him would knock you across the paddock.

  When you’re a kid and a man stands over you, every bit of your skin shrinks in and screams. Men and women are our bosses. They hold us in the dark while their heads are out in the light, then down come their hands and tear at you like crabs.

  It’s sad being a kid in a place of men. Joe and I used to hide when we saw some men coming. I don’t know why. We were just frightened of them, that’s all.


  Joe reckons that half the time they never see a kid. They’d walk over you and not know it. There were others who saw you all right. We used to scrape a stick along picket fences and make a rat-tat-tat sound. It was something to do, no harm in it. But there was a hedge behind one of these fences and an old bloke with a beard used to poke his head over the top and yell at us like as if he was mad.

  ‘Get to hell out of here’, he’d yell. We used to go for our life. It made us feel crook for a while afterwards. We’d breathe deep like horses—you know, you can hear your heart beating sort of.

  Joe reckons it was always the good people who were crook. ‘Psalm-singers’, Joe called them. They seemed to be always frowning or bending down to someone’s ear to say, ‘I’d never have believed she’d do such a thing.’

  Mr Thomas was like that. He had two sons about our age and we’d play with them sometimes, but we didn’t like them enough to keep it up. We began to dodge them and this made them wild and they’d yell out at us, ‘Youse two larrikins are mad.’

  I would yell out, ‘Go to hell’, and we’d walk off.

  Joe and I were walking past the blacksmith’s shop one night, just before it closed. Mr Thomas came to the open doorway and called—‘You two boys, come in here for a minute will you.’

  He stepped back into the shop then, so Joe and I followed him in. We couldn’t make out what he wanted to say to us. He was one of these blokes we’d hide from if we saw him coming, but he was smiling with his teeth when he asked us to come in so we walked in without suspecting anything, though I’ve never liked blokes that smile like that.

  He shut the sliding doors behind us and put up the bar. Blacksmiths’ shops have dirt floors and no windows so when the doors slid together it seemed to be pretty dark in there. Joe and I sort of crowded together like two colts in a branding yard. We looked around us but it wasn’t fences that closed us in but walls. I didn’t like the look of Mr Thomas. The trouble with Joe and me is that we are both frightened of being punched on the nose. We don’t like the idea of our noses being flattened. Mr Thomas was the sort of bloke that would punch a kid if there was no grown-up looking.