A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  Dot had been ladling food from three large saucepans on the range. She put the plate down in front of him and sat at the other end of the table. It seemed an age since she had had a conversation with someone she didn’t know.

  “Now isn’t that the best Irish stew I’ve had since I left me native shores.”

  “I think Jack took a plate of stew to you in the barn when you were here before,” said Dorothy.

  “Did he now? Then your cookin’ just gets better and better!”

  Dot giggled again.

  “I think you remember perfectly well coming here before,” she said. “We do try to be hospitable to…people like you.”

  “Sure an’ I know you do. We men of the road, we do remember folks who are good to us, but we don’t bring it up, in case they think we’re going to make a habit of callin’. For myself, I just put on a friendly face, because that’s what folk like to see, and where’s the harm in that?”

  “Is that why you put on an Irish accent too?” asked Betty. The man stopped in his tracks.

  “Sure that’s a razor-sharp mind the young one there has.”

  “Not much gets past our Betty.”

  “Joey O’Hara at school has an Irish father, and your accent doesn’t sound right,” explained Betty. “I didn’t hear you talk when you were here before, because me and Mum just watched you and Dad from the window.”

  “Then like I said it’s a clever soul your dad is, if he keeps you both locked away, because it’s a gracious lady you have for a mother, and you’ll be a bobby-dazzler breakin’ men’s hearts in a few years’ time, that you will.” He paused again in his eating, which was as enthusiastic as good table manners would allow. Then he went on in an ordinary voice. “I’m sorry for the accent. I do it all the time when I’m with strangers, and it becomes second nature. People do like it. Most Australians have a relative who’s Irish, and as often as not they’re favorites—an uncle who’s a bit of a card, or a gentle sort of fellow who’s in the church. So it…works.”

  “How did you come to…do what you do? Did you lose your job?”

  “Not as such, no. The fact is, I went to war.”

  “Jack went to war too,” put in Dot. “My husband.”

  “I know. I remember him telling me. He was under Monash, but he didn’t get there till sixteen. I—mad bastard that I was—worked my passage to England as soon as the war broke out, and I was in France by late November. I dunno what made me do it. I had a brute of a father, but I really went from the frying pan to the fire…You’ll know from your man that it’s not a thing to be talked about…Like a hellish dream…It took all of us different. When your man came back he obviously wanted to settle down, put it behind him, get back to normal. That meant having a family, being his own boss. I tried normal, but it didn’t work for me: job, promotion, house, children—I couldn’t face getting into that kind of rut. It was all a cheat, a con, from my point of view. And that’s why I’m a sundowner, young lady. The only thing that’s real for me is where my next meal is coming from, and where I lay my bed. That’s all my poor brain can cope with.”

  Betty nodded. The man shook off his mood in a moment.

  “And you meet some types on the road, I can tell you. Last week in Moree I was talking to some children in a little park near the church there, telling them stories of the road, of some of the dogs travelers have, some of the wild animals that make friends with us (I made a lot of that up, but the littlies loved it), and we were having a famous time, and the kiddies were laughing and gurgling, when up comes this police constable—seventeen stones if he’s an ounce, all beer belly and blubber, and he says, ‘Here, you can’t entertain in a public place without a license!’ ”

  “Entertain,” said Betty, outraged. “Just telling stories to children?”

  “You hit the nail on the head, young lady. He has his brains in his boots, that one. So I said to him, ‘I might need a license if I were collecting money, but how much do you think I could get from this lot? A couple of farthings at the most, and then I’d give it back to them because I don’t rob wee things like they are.’ Anyway, he wouldn’t see reason, and he tried to break up the meeting or move us on, and the children got so angry, because I’d never finished a story I was telling them about being woken up by a goanna and a funnel-web spider having an argument about which was the uglier, so things started to get nasty—not really nasty, you know, but funny nasty, because they were angry kids, even though the eldest was no more than seven, and there was this great fat representative of law and order—”

  The sundowner was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and Betty’s father coming home. One look at his face told the women that the talk with the bank manager had gone well.

  “Well, if it isn’t Al Cousens!” said Jack Whitelaw, coming into the kitchen. “Have your travels brought you here again?”

  It was typical of Betty’s father that he’d found out the sundowner’s name on his last visit, and remembered it until this one. He sat down and they began talking about the year that had just passed. Betty, a child again, was bursting with a natural storyteller’s curiosity.

  “But who was the uglier, the goanna or the funnel-web?”

  Al Cousens screwed up his face in thought.

  “Well now, young lady, I’m not sure I’d made up my mind about that. I think it was a case of ‘How happy could I be with either, were the other ugly-looking b—brute away.’ ”

  They all laughed, and Dot put on the kettle to make another pot of tea.

  Going to bed that night Betty’s head was filled with thoughts of a sundowner who said “uglier” rather than “ugliest” for a comparison between two, and could quote from—well, she wasn’t quite sure what from, but she knew that “How happy could I be” came from literature of some kind. She thought Al Cousens was a lovely man, and she knew her mother thought so too.

  And, quite suddenly, there came into her mind the thought that her mother would have liked to go to bed with the sundowner. And also the complementary thought that, even if a safe opportunity presented itself, nothing in the world would have persuaded her to do it.

  Chapter 9

  Heatwave

  Now we’re getting there, thought Bettina, as she settled down at her desk. She had thought of little else all night but the approach of the day that cut her off forever from Bunderoo, and the world it represented. There were so many other things, better things to think about: her pleasure in Ollie’s company, yes, and Sylvia’s too, and anticipation of the approaching trip to Edinburgh. But no: she was back in that sweltering summer of 1938, as November melted into December, the Leaving-Certificate exam was taken in enervating heat, and the night approached of the Leavers’ Dance.

  In the morning Betty heard her mother singing from the kitchen.

  I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut

  For you-oo! For you-oo!

  She wondered as she dressed whether the words had any significance, then decided that this was one of only three or four songs that her mother launched into when she was in singing mood, so they couldn’t have.

  Before setting off for school, Betty put her competition entry into a large brown envelope she had begged from Miss Dampier (the Department of Education was very protective of its stationery, but Miss Dampier was rather excited about the competition, thought it could redound to the school’s credit, and made an exception “just this once”).

  It was the day for the dunnyman to collect the cans from the little hut at the back of the house (“Dig ’em deep and dig ’em wide,” her father always said, but on his deathbed, in Ollie’s house in Melbourne, he said that being shot of dunnies was the best thing that had happened to him in his last years). Normally Dot welcomed the dunnyman as another face to have a chat with. Today he made the mistake of pushing his face against the wire grill on the kitchen window.

  “See you’ve got one of those no-hoper travelers to fix yer fences.”

  Dot fired up at once. “He’s not a
no-hoper. He’s one of the nicest, gentlest people.”

  “Have it yer own way, lady. But don’t say I didn’t warn you if yer rams get out and eat all yer pretty flowers.”

  “Jack’ll make sure his work is up to scratch. I expect he’s done fences scores of times. He doesn’t want something for nothing. He’s fought for his country.”

  “There’s plenty has done that,” said the dunnyman. And he turned back to his odiferous cart and began the three-mile journey to Bundaroo.

  When Jack came in for a bit of early breakfast, Dot recounted the conversation to him.

  “You shouldn’t have said that about fighting for your country,” her husband said, slicing into his sausage. “Syd Southern was at Gallipoli.”

  “Yes…Well, I’m sorry. But he shouldn’t have said what he said. A lot of the sundowners are old soldiers.”

  “Too right,” agreed Jack. “It takes you like that sometimes. And you’re right about Al being a good worker. I know that from last time he was here, or I wouldn’t have given him work now. He’ll be here for a couple more days.”

  “You’re a good man, Jack Whitelaw. Better than that Syd Southern—I can’t do with him.”

  “You can’t do without him,” Jack pointed out.

  “No, well…You should have asked Al in for breakfast.”

  “I did. He said he didn’t want to bludge.”

  “There you are then. That’s the sort he is. I’ll put a sausage and some bacon in a bag for him, and a few slices of bread.”

  Walking to school, Betty decided that her parents were kindly people—like Bill Cheveley, or the vicar, or Mr. Blackfeller, who had a word for everyone and never took offense. She contrasted them in her mind with Mr. and Mrs. Naismyth, or Bob at the café, or the horrible Sam Battersby. They were always needing someone to look down on, sneer at, or pick a quarrel with. She thought too about Al Cousens, who was a sundowner, yet one of the most charming people she had ever met. And he spoke—when he was not putting on an Irish brogue—the most beautiful English. He’d said his father was a brute, but perhaps he was one of those civilized brutes, or one of those who used their religion to justify their cruelties. She shivered. Like Mr. Murdstone, she thought. But mostly on that walk she thought of her competition entry, going over many of its phrases, wondering if they were the best she could have chosen, rather glad she had sealed the envelope so she could indulge in no further indecisions.

  When the midday break came, Betty went and bought a stamp from Miss Dampier in the staff room.

  “Would you like to put it in with the school mail?” she was asked.

  “No, that’s all right. I need a walk.”

  As she walked into the blazing noonday sun toward the postbox near Mr. Won’s fruit and vegetable shop she wondered why she had refused the offer, and decided it was because she didn’t want her participation in the competition to become a school thing. It wasn’t—it was her thing, done entirely by her, its opinions her own responsibility. Yes, her friends had made suggestions, but it was she who had decided which ideas to accept, which to forget about. The article had her stamp on it, and hers alone.

  When she had let the big envelope fall with an exciting plop into the box she bought a quarter of cherries from Mr. Won and began to walk back to school. Suddenly, all responsibility for the competition entry having passed on, a new realization struck her: the Leaving Certificate was in three weeks’ time. She had told her parents and her teachers that she was still hard at work preparing for it, but in reality the competition had taken over most of her spare time. If she was going to do what was expected of her she needed to use all the hours left to her to revise, revise further, then re-revise. With a sudden swerve she changed course and headed for her friend Alice Carey’s home.

  Alice went home for her dinner at midday. She was one of the few high school pupils who were in a position to do that. She was eating, in fact, when she opened the door to Betty.

  “Alice, I’ve just had an awful thought. It’s Leaving Certificate in three weeks’ time.”

  “Well, you must be the only person in the school who could forget that.”

  “Not for get, I mean…well, just with the competition and that…I just wondered if I could have a loan of your geography notes, just for the night.”

  “Oh, those,” said Alice, who knew they were perfect. “Steve Drayton’s got those.”

  “Well, when he finishes with them—?”

  “Oh, he’ll be a long time. He’s not as quick on the uptake as you are, Betty. Must go.”

  And she shut the door. Other times Betty had called on her at lunchtime she had been invited in, just to talk with Alice and her mother while they were eating, perhaps to have an orange squash. No longer.

  Alice, clearly, after three months of neglect, was no longer Betty’s best friend. She now had no best friend, unless it was Hughie—and best friends, almost by definition, were of the same sex.

  Betty squared her shoulders. She could do without friends, and she could cope with the Leaving Certificate without help from anyone. Part of her said that how she did in the Leaving was no longer of any great importance.

  That evening she said to her parents, “I’m going to have to put my head down to work for the Leaving.”

  There were a couple of sharp glances at her.

  “I thought you were keeping up with your school-work,” said her mother.

  “Well, I was…But there’s revision, loads of revision. I’ll just have to go into purdah, like a nun.”

  “I think that’s a sultan’s missus does that,” said her father. “Or missuses. We thought you were set to do really well in the Leaving, darl.”

  “I’m sure I’ll do well enough to get into Teachers’ College.”

  “That wasn’t what we had hopes of,” said Jack Whitelaw. “That’s just high-grade drudgery, the sort of job you get from there. We believe in you, Betty. We believe you can be better than a small-town teacher. What about repeating final year? Maybe going to Armidale, where the schools are better. You could live with your auntie Shirley. She’d be pleased to have you.”

  It was the first time Armidale had been mentioned. And the first time anyone had raised the possibility of her living with Auntie Shirley, of whom her recollections were very dim. Dear old Shirley, as she later proved in the crisis: a bit slow on the uptake, but sturdy and trustworthy in her support. Shirley, who had helped to relieve her of her baby, when eventually the time came.

  “I don’t know,” said Betty. “Maybe it won’t be necessary…Maybe I’ll do really well in the Leaving.”

  But doing well in the Leaving wasn’t what she’d been thinking about, dreaming about, at all.

  “I’ve heard rumors about your Hughie,” said Clare one day, when she called around to discuss whispers of interest from BBC Television in one of her later London-set novels.

  “He’s not my Hughie any more than I’m his Betty,” said Bettina in a mock-tired voice. “What sort of rumors?”

  “That he’s got himself a new romantic interest.”

  Bettina considered this.

  “I’m not altogether surprised. It’s a while since the last one. It’s something that Marie has had to put up with in the course of her marriage. And to be fair to her, she has put up with it. She knew about it before she married him. She’d been one of his dolly-birds. I think his affairs give her a handle, something to use to get the upper hand in all the things that really matter.”

  “And what are they? Money?”

  “Of course. If you’ve seen Marie you’ll know that money is something she sets great store by. She uses a lot of it. And who is the lucky girl?”

  “I didn’t say she was a girl, but I suppose you know your Hughie. She is. She’s a librarian at the South Kensington Library. Distinctly glamorous with peach-painted lips and a South African accent. That’s how she was described to me. She’s working her stay here, after graduating from the University of Cape Town.”

  “I see.
Well, lucky old Hughie.”

  “Of course she’s in it for something or other.”

  “Of course. Maybe he’s her entry key to Fleet Street. But all the same, lucky old Hughie. I might go and take a look at her when I get back from Edinburgh.”

  Clare sparked up at once.

  “Edinburgh? Is that decided? When are you going there?”

  “Next Monday, with Ollie and Sylvia. For five days.”

  “Will the flat be empty?”

  “Of course it will.”

  “Couldn’t you get someone to flat-sit for you?”

  Bettina pondered.

  “I suppose Peter would do it, if I slipped him a few twenties.”

  Clare paused for a few moments, in thought.

  “I notice,” she said, “that you don’t pooh-pooh the idea and say I’m out of my mind. Why not, Bettina?”

  “Well,” said Bettina carefully, “it may be my imagination—” She pulled herself up. “No, it’s not my imagination. I found that my desk had been—I don’t know—searched, investigated, mucked about with. The tape recorder had changed position. And my cleaners hadn’t been in, or anyone else that I know of, who would have been in the place legally…If only I still had Mr. Growser. He was worth a hundred pieces of modern electronic surveillance.”

  “Amen to that. A Jack Russell beats laser beams any day. But you could hardly have left Mr. Growser in the flat while you were in Edinburgh. So get Peter.”

  “I’ll see what he says. It was probably some burglar who didn’t know what he was looking for.”

  “And didn’t take anything? Or even disturb anything while he was searching?”

  “He certainly didn’t take anything—but then you can’t expect a burglar to be up in Australian art. Why should he trash things and make his visit obvious if he’d no need to? He wouldn’t want to leave more traces than he could help.”