by Tom Keneally
She pulled out and asked him if it had been a good flight, and he said it had been passable – given the time change he preferred to fly by day than by night. But he hadn’t had a choice this time.
Where had he come from?
‘Vancouver,’ he told her.
‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, because all points of departure were equal to her. She liked these conversations, but did not want to take on any of their weight. ‘They say it’s a little like Sydney,’ she remembered to contribute.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is like Sydney, and yet they’re both their own places. They’re like siblings − very much the same and very much different.’
It was what she wanted to hear. Something unchallenging, which still transcended plainness.
‘So you’re pleased to be home.’
‘Proud Australian boy,’ he said. ‘Though I live in Canada.’
She asked when he was going back and he said in three weeks’ time. His mother had a few mobility problems, he said. She was old enough to warrant his coming to see her.
Did he live in Vancouver? No, he said. Ontario, over in the east. Flat country but very pleasant. She asked him what the winters were like and he laughed. ‘Unspeakable. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that any Canadian survived before 1900.’ He shook his head. ‘And yet, when you live there you just take it as it comes. Pretty much the way Australians accept their summers.’
Apart from such superficial issues as geography and weather, she generally left her passengers free of enquiry. It was astonishing, however, how many would offer particulars without her asking. Humans were natural confessors, and she was sure it was this, rather than the sophistication of police forces, that landed many people in the criminal dock.
He said, ‘Things have certainly changed in Australia.’
‘In what way?’ she asked. She wondered if it was wise to ask.
‘Well, it was all freckle-faced Celts and Anglo-Saxons when I was a kid. Now the faces are Asian, Middle Eastern. And women driving cabs. The old crustaceans around me when I was a kid wouldn’t have considered them safe enough drivers!’
‘You haven’t seen it in Canada?’
‘Not particularly. Well, yes. There’s an Ojibwe woman in Waterloo who drives for her husband because he’s got diabetes. You see, I live in a sort of big country town. But also … well, I always thought the Canadians a bit more progressive.’ And then he laughed. ‘In a backwards sort of way.’
She said nothing.
‘Are you driving for your husband?’ he asked.
She did laugh at that, and was aware it wasn’t an entirely kindly laugh. She said, ‘Why would I need a taxi owner for a husband to make it all right for me to drive a cab?’
He held up a hand. ‘You’re quite right; forgive me. I’m a sexist brute. Women in Canada tell me I am all the time.’
‘You can get cured of that, you know!’ she said, a little tersely.
In the silence that followed she wondered idly if he was married. She was not going to ask. He asked her about the present Australian government, but he was treading water and she gave a simple answer, discontented with politicians in the Australian way that expects no prophets ever to emerge from the desert.
She went left beside Hyde Park, reached Chinatown and crossed the Glebe Island Bridge. It was only when she turned into Rozelle that he recognised familiar landmarks on Victoria Road. ‘My father and uncle owned that pub,’ he told her. ‘If I called it an old stamping ground, you’d asked me what I stamped on it. But at least I’m familiar with it.’
He had a weird sense of humour, she thought. She said, ‘We’re close now.’ For some reason she said it for her own comfort. This one was just a notch too subtle for conversation. Whereas she could live with ‘my old stamping ground’, she found ‘I don’t know what I stamped on it’ harder. She wanted clichés, not a smart aleck expatriate who turned them on their head. ‘Not far,’ she said, but again to reassure herself.
She had an opening to ask him what he did for a living, for she still couldn’t guess and she was certain he didn’t own pubs. She had a feeling the answer would be at least mildly interesting, but resisted saying anything because it would allow him the right of a question in return.
The morning beamed down on her windscreen and she put on her sunglasses.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Sydney light.’
‘Isn’t it just like Canadian light?’ she asked.
‘The light there on a bright cold day, twenty below freezing – it’s big honest light, too. The rays doubled up by reflections off the snow. So it’s like Sydney light but without the inconvenience of snow.’
She said, ‘The Canadians must appreciate you telling them that. I don’t think.’
He laughed. A low, short laugh. He was looking out of the window and drinking in what he could see of the suburbs and their shops and pubs, just like a returned, easily satisfied patriot. She took an exit and he was on familiar ground and could guide her.
‘I don’t know what number it is,’ he told her. ‘It’s a big sandstone place.’
They rolled along suburban streets and he watched schoolboys in cricket-style hats, brown shirts and shorts, and the little girls in their checked uniforms. At last he pointed to a nineteenth-century mansion that stood behind a reclusive, high-shrubbed, high-treed garden. She could see the Celtic cross at the apex of the facade and a smaller metal version above the front door. Convents sported such icons. So did monasteries. She felt a pulse of revulsion. The poisoned cross still boasting of its triumph over the suburb. Atop a smug garden and a smug antipodean sandstone mansion.
She punched the meter off and jabbed the button that released the boot.
‘That’s fine. Father, Brother, whichever you are. The trip’s on me. Don’t forget your bag.’ It would have been good to end it there and maintain functional, cold politeness. But she couldn’t. ‘Just get out, will you?’ she told him.
He was mystified. ‘No,’ he said earnestly, ‘the freeloading days for priests are gone. And they gave me taxi money especially for the airport.’
He pushed a fifty dollar note towards her but she would not take it. She sat stiffly and clung to the wheel. He tucked the note into a recess between the two seats.
‘I insist,’ he murmured.
Eyes fixed ahead, she said, with a deliberately chosen profanity, ‘Just fuck off, will you? Just get your bag and go.’
She could see out of the corner of her eye he was examining her face, as she fixed her gaze blankly on a couple of young mothers and their children across the street. She knew he was skimming through a number of options in his head – the job of a supposed general practitioner of the soul. Meanwhile, she both wanted him to react to her so she could unleash truer insults and passionately wanted him to vanish to save her the grief.
He said simply as he opened the door, ‘Just let me get my bag. And … I’m sorry I made you angry.’
It happened that Docherty knew well how ambiguous the Celtic cross, once the symbol of one of the most oppressed peoples in Europe, could be for the damaged. One of the purposes of his journey was to warn Australian clergy of this enlarging rage now loose in the world. If nobody listened, he believed such rage would grow to fill the sky. This woman was clearly one of those damaged in the shadow of that sign. And no Southern Baptist, no Marxist, hated the sight of the Celtic cross with the intimate hostility that he could tell was in her. For he had encountered this before. Symptoms of unutterable harm. She had achieved equilibrium, he understood, driving her cab, but − perhaps to her own surprise − her effort of calm had been disrupted by getting too close to the gate of a suburban monastery.
Quickly, he took one of his professional cards from his pocket, wrote his Sydney contacts on it and dropped it through the window on to the passenger seat. Then he fetched his bags from the angrily sprung trunk and made for the gate without looking back.
2
The Case of Sarah Fagan, Victim
; Early 1970s
Sarah did a remarkably sedate U-turn and set off for the city. She was not fit to drive, and she ignored the hopeful commuters in Drummoyne and Rozelle who held out their arms to her. If she could make it to the Regent Hotel she could wait in the long queue there and compose herself.
Her family was back with her. The sight of the Celtic cross so close had done that. Her mother had been a fervent Catholic, her father and brothers merely tribally so. Their belief was like belief in the stars: it did not endow their lives with any further light for all that. Her brothers were loud, her father watchful for wrongs done him, which the world seemed to deliver in daily doses and for which he frequently blamed her mother or her. That part of Sarah’s life was ordinary and predictable. It was everything else that wasn’t.
Her father and brothers had that awful man-ness. The boys had sympathy for their mother. They mocked their sister’s pretensions routinely. Something in them, or the nature of the household, made them take a sort of glee in the world’s imperfectness, and when it came to imperfectness they had a model in their father.
He was a former seaman who had gone into the navy when he was barely more than a child and had learned there too much about drinking. Offloaded by various captains, he’d sought a discharge and worked as a bricklayer; and the Fagans would have been comfortable had he done the job properly. But he was let go from sites for failing to lay his daily quota, or to excise the cement from between the bricks with the usual stylishness of brickies. It was a craft he could have mastered had it not been for the boozing.
Not that any of this made Sarah exceptional. She knew – she could in some cases read the signs – a number of girls in her class who lived in the same uneasy state of emotional excess and occasional dread that marked drinkers’ households. And so, despite having seen wholesome films about families who blithely resolved all crises in a couple of movie reels, she knew too that the exchanges between her mother and father were bitter but predictable, offering neither the comforts of homeliness nor any hint of exaltation.
It seemed to Sarah there were thousands of men and women caught in this joyless net, though at least for non-believers there was a chance of escape. She got used to spotting at Mass the families who had emerged from an apogee of alcoholic disorder and were now temporarily gusted along on new hope, on the promises of a repentant father, cowed himself by the dimmest memory of his own paroxysms of mayhem; soon an edged, heated insult, a readjustment, one thrown punch would teach that entire family once more how business was really conducted.
She hated the squalor of her home. Her parents rented; if he had not been consumed by ‘that beastly stuff’ (her mother’s phrase) they would have owned their house like other people.
Then there was a supremely humiliating night. The house was quiet and he came home and could be heard shuffling in the hallway as a prelude to … what? His dropping into oblivion, his pissing in a sink, or some new invention of booze-maddened disruption. But he remained silent. He came to her bedroom nearly soundlessly. It was his thunderous breathing, not his shoes, that woke her. She understood so much by that time – she knew the Latin vocative of a swag of nouns, and the neatness of Pythagoras; she could recite the Chinese dynasties and debate the causes of the First World War. She was barely conscious when she found his hand on her breast, and when she drew in breath to cry out, he covered her mouth with his other hand. She could smell brick dust on it, beer, a trace of his own excreta, as if he lacked the consciousness to clean himself properly. She could feel the calluses indenting her face. That was how her mother, suddenly standing at the door, caught him, caught her. Her mother roared like thunder and he lifted his hand off his daughter’s breast, though the act could not be reversed and took all the divine music out of Pythagoras.
Her mother advanced and dragged him upwards by the back of his shirt.
‘Leave a man alone,’ he nearly managed to say.
He was the lucky one. He would barely remember in the morning. Her mother told Sarah that he didn’t know what he was doing. She quizzed her daughter about whether it had happened before, and when Sarah let out a little negative bleat, her mother hugged her and said it was not her fault and she must protect herself as women did, and the best protection was to tell another woman. Me, said her mother. This exchange excruciated and steeled the young Sarah.
She began to get to school early and stay as long as she could. She was always ready to run errands for the nuns; she lingered at netball. The joy of knowing things revived in her. Her father had lost her – she did not want his company and he was chastened, and the chastening remained even in his worst bouts: it was profounder than the base needs alcohol stirred in men.
Much later she realised how nineteenth century her family was: the men the brutes, the women the madonnas, the fathers drinking what they could not afford and taking from that armoury of liquor every implement of imaginative malice, unpredictably cutting and maiming edges. Still, getting the kids to tyke, RC, rock-chopper schools, the schools of the ancestors – for some reason that was essential to her father, automatic to him, and to her mother.
There was by then a modern phenomenon of middle-class, wine-ingesting women, who’d had the time in suburban nullity to digest the promises and defiance of Betty Friedan’s ‘Woman: the Fourth Dimension’, which appeared in magazines in the mid-1960s, and to be drawn up into the anger of Greer and assurances that the old model of marriage was done with. They told their husbands to iron their own bloody underwear and shirts, and, while they were at it, to feed the kids. But Sarah’s mother remained the pietà, the suffering monument. She represented for Sarah what marriage was; her father symbolised sex – and both were piteous and despicable.
Her name was Sarah Fagan. But she intended to change even that. And not through the expedient of marriage.
Sarah was fourteen when she ran an errand to the presbytery, with a message from one of the older nuns to the polished young priest who was curate to the parish priest, himself a monsignor. The housekeeper left her waiting at the door and went to get the younger priest. He bounced downstairs buttoning his cassock. His neat brown hair was brushed flat, his cassock impeccably black, no scurf, no tobacco flakes or ashes.
‘You caught me watching television,’ he told her with a smile. Some priests looked almost as dishevelled as her father, but there was another kind who smelled of soap and some hair preparation or aftershave. Fragrant priests. This man was that kind. And in the presbytery front hall there was none of the dusty, musky smell of the house she lived in, humid with her mother’s unhappiness and her brothers’ imaginings; home, too, of the tropic of shame that she could never again mention to her mother.
The priest read the note she gave him. He looked up. ‘Mother Alphonsus says you are very competent,’ he told her. ‘And that you’ve helped them a great deal with their office work. I’ve been asking for someone to help us – running messages, organising files. I promise it’s not because I’m lazy or watching TV all the time.’
At that second she loved the Church, the sane face of Mother Alphonsus, the ordered face of this priest. Father Leo Shannon.
He led her upstairs to a room with a desk, filing cabinets, a picture on the wall of a saint she could not identify, and a settee under the window. The floorboards were varnished but there was a mat spread as neatly as a little lawn. He showed her how the parish filing was done – letters from the archdiocese, the replies, files on parishioners, references for job-seekers, notices of bereavements and of parish social events, as well as bills paid and donations received. I will not look in the Fagan dossier, Sarah decided. In fact, there was an embarrassing question to which she did not want the answer. What did Father Shannon know about her family?
‘I know I can depend on you not to snoop inside the files,’ he told her as if he had perceived her thoughts. ‘They are confidential, and I keep your mother’s file as secret as I wish to keep the others. That’s why I asked Mother Alphonsus for an entirely reliabl
e girl.’
He further confided to her, ‘To tell you the truth, the monsignor is so busy on God’s matters, and with golf on Mondays, that he has let the church records slip a little. You are going to help me get them under management.’
He said that, about the monsignor not having time, with a kindly irony, but again he had taken her into a secret, as he had when he’d confessed to watching television. She was flattered to be confided in.
Alienated from her own household, the presbytery became Sarah’s vision of home. Everything shone; the carpets were vacuumed; the walls were white and sparsely decorated with portraits of recent popes, reproductions of Raphael’s Madonna and child, bright statuary and photographs of various clergy. She would in time come to see this ecclesiastic decor as sterile, but it seemed to her then to be a space made for devotion and in which good works might flourish. She wanted it because she did not want what was at home: a marriage sacred only in its origins, a venue of unpredictable tears and gestures, and of such low exuberance as her brothers’ farting contests.
Father Shannon and Sarah worked cooperatively. He would give her a letter and tell her which folder to put it in and under what alphabetic listing. Financials – electricity, gas bills, rates – she filed in their own drawer, to be used for the parish’s financial statements by the honorary treasurer. The priest told her she was a fast learner. Passing papers, dressed in his collarless white shirt and black trousers and impeccable shoes, he said like a confession, ‘I just can’t stand things not being in order.’
And it was obvious to her, his hunger for orderliness.
Over time, the monsignor himself asked her to run errands when he was in, to take notes to various parishioners, generally members of his parish council, occupiers of neat brick bungalows, owners of good cars. Men of substance. Or else to the ladies of the sodality who did the altar. But the monsignor was out a lot, and what she did above all was work for Father Shannon.
