by JH Fletcher
‘Look like bloody fish before we’re through,’ said Hoss, but it would have taken far too much effort, and money, for them to have changed to anything else.
After its victory at Caulfield, The Trump won the Melbourne Cup: that was news. The following year it was the Kiwi gelding Catalogue that won at Melbourne: that was news. The year after that …
War.
For a time it looked as though the eggshell tranquillity of their lives was about to be shattered, but Charlie had been through a go of pleurisy back in thirty-seven, and when he went to register, following in his father’s footsteps with a rueful yet stubborn determination completely at odds with his inclination to lie back and let life wash by, he was told he wasn’t fit. While Hoss was too old anyway.
‘Bloody marvellous,’ Hoss said. ‘They reckon we’re not in good enough shape to be killed, let ’em get on with it.’
Yet tragedy still loomed. The sacred turf of Caulfield became an army camp.
‘Is nothing sacred?’ Hoss demanded of the world, when he heard the news. But gained sweet revenge on bookies and other enemies of the people when he backed the winner, anyway, when the race was run at Flemington. Which, one month later, saw the Melbourne Cup won by Old Rowley, a hundred-to-one outsider on which Charlie had ventured a quid.
‘A hundred quid,’ Hoss exulted. ‘Bound to win the war, aren’t we, blokes havin’ luck like that!’
While Charlie, growing a tad morose with the years, cursed himself for not having made it a fiver.
There were other ways in which the war, and the outside world, did its best to break in on them. In the early days blokes in uniform came snooping, wondering audibly whether the two men might be spies. Charlie’s suspiciously foreign accent did not help.
‘Spies?’ Hoss was incredulous. ‘Git outa here!’
By and large, despite the aggro, they got by, but the world had changed and, like it or not, it was not going to leave them alone forever.
Petrol rationing came in, which would have been a bugger if they’d had a car.
A year later, the Japs also came in. Charlie spared a thought for Ito and Nakamura who, it seemed, were enemies now. He also thought of his mother in a France occupied by the Germans, but to remember her was like remembering another life, unreal and peopled by ghosts. There was nothing he could do about any of them and soon managed, more or less, to put them out of his mind.
The government began to evacuate people from Sydney into the Blue Mountains. Two bloody chances, the friends agreed. For one thing, there was no fish there.
‘Any case,’ Hoss pointed out, ‘who’s goin’ to tip off the Jap subs if we’re not here to do it?’
Right.
Nineteen forty-two brought the blackout. The bossy bastards came back in the form of Brendan Bracket, a git from Kurnell, who presumed on his clerk’s experience in the previous war to doll himself up in uniform and march around, warning people about blackouts and regulations and the penalties they would suffer if they failed to obey them. Had he dared, he, too, would have wondered about spies, but they saw the question in his eyes and offered to drop him out the window before he had the chance to put it into words, so he decided to skip it. They watched him scurry away, all outrage and wounded dignity, bruising the air with threats he had not dared utter within the house.
‘Maybe we shoulda done it, at that,’ Hoss pondered. ‘Spruce him up a bit. Doubt he’s had a bath in a month.’
Not that they could talk.
Rationing might have hurt them but did not, or not much. Thank God for fish, which had not been informed there was a war on.
‘Must be the only buggers who don’t know,’ Hoss said. ‘Makes you wanner be a fish yourself.’
They were left alone then, for so long that there were times when they almost forgot the war. Then, one day in 1944, they had a visitor.
2
It was Hoss who spied the slight figure coming along the walkway towards the house.
‘It’s a sheila!’
They looked at each other uneasily. There were no sheilas in their lives; the way they lived precluded women and other exotic creatures. This one carried a slim case: very official. Ominous. In their experience, officials meant trouble.
‘She’s got a grouse on about somen.’
Hoss was not an optimist where the outside world was concerned. He was right, though. Their caller, a woman in her twenties called Linda Callaghan, was with some government department or other and had questions about Charlie’s ration book.
‘What have I done wrong now?’ Charlie wondered, ready to hate her and all bureaucracy.
While Hoss, mind on other things than ration books, eyed her appreciatively. ‘Gonna lock ’im up, are you?’
‘Nothing like that,’ she said and tried to laugh to show them what a good sort she was, but was clearly uncertain about these weird blokes who chose to live on a cliff.
‘Do me a favour if you would.’ Hoss was determined to embarrass her, if possible. He jiggled about: all part of his campaign. ‘The way ’e snores … Haven’t had a decent kip for weeks.’
‘We would need first-hand evidence from a member of the department,’ she said, and gave Hoss a good look-over. ‘I don’t see much chance of that, do you?’
So stick that up your nose.
She turned back to Charlie. ‘It’s been a muck-up at the office. Not your fault at all.’
She dug a clipboard and pencil out of her case. Lucky she had it; there was nowhere else to write, every corner of the table piled with milk bottles, fish hooks and other junk. Not that she seemed to care, or even to notice. ‘We’ve got you down at the wrong address …’
It was soon sorted out. Linda put away her papers and pencil and got to her feet. She walked over to the window and looked out at the sea, which was putting on a show for her: blue waves and white horses, and a brilliant sky streaked with cloud, high up. Charlie watched her slender back, the clean freshness of her summer dress.
‘What a wonderful place to live!’ she said.
It might have been, certainly. Might have been a lot better, too. Not having noticed the mess for months, Charlie was using his foot to shove things into corners.
She turned. He froze, but perhaps she hadn’t seen him. At any rate, she smiled. ‘I envy you.’
‘They talked about moving us at the beginning of the war,’ Hoss told her, who had not forgiven her talk of first-hand evidence. ‘But we weren’t having any of that.’
‘Lucky they didn’t make you.’
The message was plain: if They had wanted to, They’d have done it.
‘Lords of bloody creation,’ said Hoss, belligerently. ‘That what you think, is it?’
Again she stood up to him. ‘You better believe it. And it doesn’t matter what I think.’
When she’d gone, Charlie glared at his mate. ‘What was all that about?’
‘Comes here, showing off …’
‘She was okay.’ After his initial doubts, Charlie had been impressed, not only by her manner but her looks. More than impressed: he thought she’d been a bit of all right.
‘Yeah? If she’s so smart, why ain’t she rich?’
‘Maybe she is.’
‘And working in a government department? No way!’
‘Even the king’s daughter’s registered for somen, so it said in the paper.’
‘London …’ Hoss said. Like it might have been Mars.
‘I thought she was okay.’
‘I could see you did,’ Hoss said angrily. ‘Your tongue was hangin’ out so far, we could’ve eaten our tea off it.’
‘Don’t talk crap.’
Crap it was, but not altogether. Linda Callaghan remained in his mind, the fresh young woman in the frowsty house, looking out of the smeared window and saying how she envied them for living there. He wondered where she lived, and what it looked like. Not like this pigsty, you could bet on that. He stared about him with new eyes, not only at the room, or the house, but the
whole way in which they lived their lives.
‘You ever think about the future?’ he asked.
Hoss was suspicious of such questions. ‘Why should I do that?’
‘Just wondered.’
It was so long since Charlie had thought about the Cloud Forest but now it came to him again, the image of what might be. Or might have been, because he sensed that it was too late. Ever since the devastation of Wendy’s death, he had lost the path. His life was here, where he knew in advance what each day would bring and what would be expected of him. He was still only in his twenties, plenty young enough to make a move, but he knew he would not.
He’d thought to find the Cloud Forest in Broome, and failed. He had imagined it might be here, in a life without responsibilities or care. Had he? After all, he was happy enough. Yet somehow he knew that he’d got it wrong again. His present life had come to him too effortlessly to be what Wally Bart had called the realm of ultimate desire. That was what he had come to Australia to find. Once again he had failed; he was beginning to comprehend that work, and even suffering, might be part of the deal.
He thought of his father as a young boy, struggling up the steep slopes of the unknown mountain into the forest. It would have been hard for him, a kid, alone. Hard for his body, hard for his mind. It would have been so easy for him to turn back. Yet he had not. He had gone on, and so reached the place he had not even realised he was seeking. Afterwards he had known.
Charlie, on the other hand, had chosen an easier path and so missed out. He had failed both the task and himself. Because he now understood something else. He had been to Broome, and had not found it. He had come here, and had not found it. Yet still he retained the warm brightness of the forest in his imagination and his heart. If he went to Queensland, if he sought out the mountain and climbed it, how could he say what he would find when he reached the top? Would it indeed be the promised realm of ultimate desire? Or would he find that there was something wrong about the place, or about himself? Perhaps there, too, he would not find it; in which case he would be left with nothing. The dream would no longer be of a place towards which he was progressing, somewhere ahead of him in his life, but a fantasy that did not exist; that, perhaps, had never existed. It was better by far to have the dream than to discover that from the first it had been no more than a delusion.
3
Hoss remained suspicious. One day he found Charlie making a half-hearted attempt to tidy the place up.
‘What you doin’ that for?’
‘This place is like a rat hole!’
‘Never bothered you before.’ Hoss was at home with rat holes, had never wanted to live in a starched and prim environment. ‘What you plannin’ next? Lace doilies and afternoon tea?’ And cricked his little finger contemptuously.
‘All I’m doin’ is clearing up some of the mess.’
‘I can see what you’re doing. What I ask myself is why.’
‘Just thought it’d make things easier.’
‘That’s not why you’re doing it.’ Shadows of anger and contempt chased each other across his face, while his needle nose twitched suspiciously. ‘It’s that woman who come here. She’s unsettled you. Why doncher go look for her, if that’s what you want? Give ’er a bang, get ’er out of your system.’
Charlie was startled by Hoss’s squirt of anger. He had fantasised about it, but doing anything had never crossed his mind. He didn’t know Linda Callaghan from a bar of soap, had no idea of her circumstances or anything about her. She could be married, or engaged. She could have a boyfriend in the army. She could hate men. Yet — yes — he had fancied her, and thought that maybe she’d liked him a bit too.
It wouldn’t be hard to find her; she’d said she worked in an office in Brighton, which wasn’t that far away. He hesitated, wondering whether Linda Callaghan, like the Cloud Forest, was best kept as a daydream, not to be put to the test in case he lost whatever he was hoping to find. Yet he knew that the Cloud Forest was an altogether different case: abstract, almost mystical, something far away and, possibly, for the future. Linda was alive now. She was real and only a few miles away. He decided he would go and look her up, see what happened.
4
Lots of sour looks from Hoss as he scraped off his three-day beard and generally spruced himself up.
‘I swear that bloody woman’s put the evil eye on you.’
Although it wasn’t the evil eye that was troubling Hoss so much as the idea that their easy-going life might be coming to an end. Resentment, too, and perhaps even jealousy that Charlie seemed so willing to go along with it.
Charlie ignored the snips and snarls, the twitching of limbs agitated by the slightest prospect of change. He was going to see her, for God’s sake; no more than that. He doubted very much that anything would come of it.
He got to Brighton. After half an hour’s search he found a government office that looked promising. On the doorstep he hesitated, wondering what he was doing. What if she was offended or — worse — laughed at him? What if she didn’t remember him? What if …?
Bugger it. He couldn’t go on forever, living his life in a bottle.
He shoved open the door and went inside.
He saw her at once, sitting bent over a desk covered with papers. There was a long counter, with someone with an axe-blade face glaring at him over the top.
‘Can I help …?’ In a tone that showed how alien the idea was.
He ignored her, walked around the end of the counter and crossed to Linda Callaghan’s desk.
‘There is a queue!’ Indignant squawks, which he also ignored.
‘I have not come here to stand in a queue,’ he said to Linda’s downturned head, his French accent working overtime.
She looked at him across the desk and he saw the flush climb into her cheeks. That was one question answered; she remembered who he was, all right.
She looked furtively about her at the other desks and the people sitting at them, heads buried as deep as ostriches, all making a show of not looking at Linda and the man who had marched in on her like this. What could he be thinking of, this scruffy member of the public presuming to intrude on a public servant’s space? Did he not know that the laws of the universe decreed that some things were sacrosanct? Did she not know?
It seemed that she did. ‘It’s my lunch in ten minutes,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll meet you outside.’ And buried her head once more in the papers on which she was working.
He turned and walked out, smiling at the axe-blade woman at the counter, who was not in the least placated.
5
The world, motionless for so long, was rolling again. He waited, they walked down the road to look at the sea. He could feel the world moving, moving.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. But I came anyway.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
That was all.
Just before they walked back together to her grey office, the grey people who would be eyeing her like hunters, he took a deep breath and decided to risk it.
‘See you Saturday evening?’
‘All right.’
They fixed the place; she disappeared into the building; he went home dancing as lightly as Hoss Widdecombe himself.
Except that Hoss wasn’t dancing. Sour as sick, when Charlie came in.
‘’Ave a good time, did yer?’
‘It was all right.’
‘Gunna see her agen?’
‘Saturday.’
‘Girls’ night out, that it?’ Vitriol would have tasted sweeter.
‘Something like that.’
‘You wanner watch out. You’re not careful, next thing you know you’ll have your neck in a noose.’
Could be, but he wasn’t going to let Hoss shove him around, however ill-used he might fancy himself. A man had to move on, and now might be the time, but not until he knew where he was with Linda Callaghan.
In one sense Charlie knew exactly what he was getting into; in other ways, not at all. To hell with it, he thought as rising heat swelled his throat.
Three months later, in the self-same spot — our place, she called it now — she told him she was pregnant.
TWENTY
1
Hoss had warned him he would end up with his neck in a noose. Now he had, and found that he didn’t care.
‘We’ll get married.’
Linda’s parents were dead, but there was still the family. They did the round of her rellies, who were not at all sure about this stranger from France, with no doubt all the nasty habits of the French. At least he was Catholic, sort of, even if he didn’t go to mass.
An aunt, whiskery chin and beady eyes, asked the question that all of them were thinking.
‘Got to, have you?’
Linda put on a fine show of outrage. ‘How can you think such a thing?’
Positively prancing, galloping her high horse all over the town, while Charlie smiled and felt a fool.
So much for Aunt Chloe, but the rest of the family had decided that, for all his French blood, Charlie would do, or would have to do, in the absence of anything better.
As far as the practical problems were concerned — a job, money, a place to live — Linda had already worked everything out.
