If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  In Sydney and in Melbourne, union green bans mean the workers strike to try to preserve the houses and communities that are the heritage of all Australians. Even our Great Barrier Reef is threatened with oil spills.

  A Whitlam government would create a national heritage register to list places of national significance — places that belong to you, to all Australians. We cannot let a powerful few deprive us of what is truly ours.

  JED

  Jed woke early, despite the late night.

  Sam. She smiled at the memory. A nice man. He made her feel happy. She imagined he made Carol feel happy too. Most people would feel happy with Sam.

  She slid on a 1930s pale green linen sundress, grabbed a piece of toast and the speech she had stayed up to type the previous night, then headed off in Boadicea. If she waited till mid-morning, Nicholas and Felicity might well wander up to the main house with Mah and Andy for a cup of tea, which would mean she’d be obliged to talk with them.

  At Drinkwater she nosed Boadicea into the parking space under the oak tree, and ran up the stairs to the veranda. Someone stood up, a little awkwardly, from one of the shaded chairs there.

  Nicholas.

  No, she thought. I don’t want to talk to you. If I stay away from you, I can’t fall in love with you.

  But she could not say that. She was Jed Kelly, brilliant student, noted eccentric, and she would not humiliate herself . . .

  ‘I hoped you’d come by early,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘I’ve just come to give Matilda some notes.’ Better not say a speech, she thought, or he’d want to talk about it. She continued towards the door.

  ‘Jed, can we talk?’

  Jed Kelly, confident modern woman who made rude gestures at anyone who dared call her a ‘girl’, was helpless. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Nicholas picked up his stick from beside the chair he’d been sitting on. He limped down the stairs. She followed him to the old swing and garden chairs. He sat in one chair. She sat opposite. A bit like an interview, she thought, slightly hysterical.

  Nicholas leaned forwards, his arms on his knees. ‘How are you?’

  It wasn’t a simple social enquiry. ‘Good. Happy. I’ve enjoyed uni.’

  ‘And when you finish your degree?’

  ‘No idea. I think Matilda wants me to edit the Gibbering Gazette.’

  He laughed. ‘Have you called it that to her?’

  She smiled. ‘Matilda doesn’t want to fire the editor, but he’s due to retire soon anyway. But I’m not going to take the job. I don’t mind writing the odd article, but that’s it.’

  ‘They’re damn good articles.’

  She flushed. ‘Thank you. But you’ve found what you want to do, haven’t you?’

  A pause. Then, ‘Have I?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jed. She’d been right. Nicholas was standing as a candidate from duty, not conviction.

  ‘It’s a good thing to do. I do know that. And I don’t seem to have another book in me right now. Maybe I only ever had that one story to tell.’

  ‘You have Felicity.’ There. She had said it.

  ‘Yes.’ And yet, once again, his voice wasn’t certain. ‘At least I do if I get in. I’ll have a proper job then, something to offer her now that my career as an author seems to have gone nowhere. We can buy a house near Rock Farm and Flinty.’

  ‘That’s what Felicity wants?’

  Nicholas nodded. ‘She spends all her holidays at Rock Farm now, and any weekend she can get away. She plans to take over the horse stud as well as build up a veterinary practice. Did you know her grandfather died of pneumonia last winter?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Flinty is managing okay.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘Flinty always manages. But one day she won’t be able to, not without help. Felicity and I want to make it possible for her to stay in her mountains as long as she lives.’

  There was as much love in his voice when he spoke of Flinty McAlpine as there was when he used her granddaughter’s name. More, perhaps. ‘You’re close to Flinty?’

  ‘She’s stubborn as a wombat and about as reasonable. Won’t even go to Sydney for a surgeon to look at her back, though it’s hurting her worse now . . .’ He met Jed’s eyes. ‘And I love her, grumpiness and all.’

  ‘Well, she is your fiancée’s grandmother.’

  ‘That’s not why . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Jed, I haven’t told anyone else this. Not even Felicity. You know you told me about seeing into the future or past?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘I never quite believed you. I didn’t not believe you,’ he added quickly. ‘It was more . . . suspended disbelief. But up in the mountains there is a rock, a huge, flat rock with a view down the valley. And after I . . . went away, I met someone there and I fell in love. The only trouble was that she was fifty years away, in 1919.’

  ‘What was her name?’ Though she knew before he replied.

  ‘Flinty McAlpine. Jed, she had so much courage. Even when she became crippled too, like me. She understood about what I’d been through in the war and what it was like to come back, among people who could never know because they had never been there. Flinty had seen how war had changed Sandy and her brother. She heard her brother’s nightmares. I think she loved me too, though in a different way from Sandy. She’d loved Sandy all her life. We both knew, right from the start, that we could never be together.

  ‘Then one day I wheeled myself out of the fog on the rock, into now, and there was Flinty. Except this Flinty wore jeans and an Akubra and had come to call me up for lunch.’

  Jed shivered. She believed him. Possibly she was the only one in the world who could believe him. Except Flinty. ‘You saw Felicity.’

  ‘Yes. Seventeen, just like the Flinty I had left.’

  ‘And you decided to marry her.’

  ‘She makes me happy,’ he said simply. ‘Felicity is the mountains and riding through the wildflowers. It just seemed . . . meant.’

  ‘Why haven’t you married already then?’

  ‘Flinty is worried I love Felicity because I’m in love with the seventeen-year-old Flinty. Felicity can’t get married till she’s twenty-one unless her parents give their permission. And they won’t because the whole blasted family still do whatever Flinty tells them to.’

  ‘Including you.’

  ‘Including me. This standing for parliament was her idea, and Matilda’s.’

  ‘Try explaining that in a letter to the lovelorn column of the paper,’ Jed said lightly. ‘I can’t marry my fiancée because her grandmother thinks I am really in love with her.’

  ‘I do love Felicity,’ he said slowly. ‘But there’re many kinds of love.’

  ‘And Felicity is a nice safe vanilla. Sorry. That was bitchy.’

  ‘Our lives fit together,’ said Nicholas quietly.

  ‘And ours didn’t?’ She held up her hand. ‘Don’t answer that. I know they didn’t. We’d have been bad for each other. Protected each other far too much. How does Felicity like the idea of being a politician’s wife?’

  ‘Rock Farm is only five hours from Canberra.’ Nicholas grinned. ‘As long as I don’t become prime minister and have to live in the Lodge, it should work out nicely.’

  ‘Not much chance of that with Gough Whitlam,’ Jed said wryly. ‘The only one who could ever challenge him is his wife.’

  ‘Margaret? I’ve met her. She’d make an even better PM than Gough. But no one would ever vote for us with a woman as leader.’ He stood. For a moment she thought he was going to hold out his hand to her. He didn’t. She was glad. She didn’t want to touch him. Or wanted to too much.

  ‘Thank you for the draft speeches,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know they came from you, even if you didn’t sign them. And those articles in the Gazette are going to make a difference.’

  ‘Anytime,’ she said lightly.

  He nodded, smiled, then headed down the garden towards the gate and Andy’s place. Jed watched him for twelve seconds, th
en resolutely turned and walked back to the main house.

  Chapter 15

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 13 November 1972

  The Coward’s Election Date, by Jed Kelly

  Who would force Australians to an election just before the Christmas holidays, when we should be thinking of sun, sand, puddings and family?

  I’ll give you a clue. He is small and balding, and has a glamorous blonde wife. He is hoping that people in holiday mode won’t feel in the mood for bothering about politics, much less throwing out a government as shrivelled as old apples.

  But Billy McMahon is wrong. With due respect, Prime Minister, it’s time for a new Australia.

  Editor’s note: The above is the private opinion of the author and does not represent the views of the Gibber’s Creek Gazette or its editor.

  LEAFSONG

  The woman in all white stood behind her in the queue at the grocery store. Which might mean that some people just liked to wear white.

  Leafsong didn’t think it was just that. There was something similar about the people in white. When you dropped a bag, you never did get every grain. There was always the odd one, crunching unexpectedly underfoot. You never knew where you’d see these people either.

  They were looking for something, even when they seemed to be going about ordinary things, like buying groceries. And every one was slightly . . . wrong. Leafsong knew about slightly wrong. She was slightly wrong too.

  This woman smiled too much. Not the smile of ‘Hello, lovely to see you’ to someone she knew, or one of relief because the shop had finally got in some fresh oranges, flung on top of the grey mouldy ones in the bin. This was a smile that never left her face, a floating smile, not entirely attached to her.

  But there were more important things to think about today. She handed over her list, then waited for the items to be assembled in boxes. Because Prime Minister Billy McMahon had finally accepted that the opinion polls would not change in his favour and had called a snap election.

  Tonight Gough Whitlam would launch the ALP election campaign at Blacktown Civic Centre. And at Gibber’s Creek Town Hall his supporters, the curious, and others who just felt like joining a bring-a-plate party, would watch the launch on TV.

  She and Scarlett were going to bring a plate too. A giant plate. A most symbolic plate — the giant platter Mrs Thompson kept in the dining room on the sideboard. They were going to pile it high with a vast pyramid of profiteroles — a croquembouche, it was called, each small puff of pastry filled with custard and drizzled with toffee to hold it all together. At least two hundred pastry puffs, one for everyone in the hall. As if to say, ‘This is what we can build, if we do it together. Something as wonderful as a tower of pastry and custard and toffee, something we can share, something richer together than its simple ingredients, flour and eggs and cream and vanilla and sugar and butter.’

  Giovanni waited for her outside in the old Volkswagen. When two more young men named John had started staying at the commune, the others had given the three an ultimatum: come up with a way to differentiate yourselves. The Johns had gone down to the river and come back with their solution: JohnandAnnie remained the same, John two was Johnnie, and John three became Giovanni. Giovanni was even building a mud-brick pizza oven to suit his name.

  Theoretically one could make profiteroles in a wood-fired oven made of an old brake drum, but Leafsong preferred the electric one at Dribble. The kitchen felt like hers and Scarlett’s now, as Jed never cooked.

  She grinned. This would be the best croquembouche in the world.

  It was. Perfect, massive, and perfectly massive as she and Scarlett assembled it on one of the benches against a side wall of the Town Hall, layer after layer of custard-filled profiteroles till they formed a vast tower. Then Leafsong ceremonially took the lid off the saucepan of toffee sauce and poured slowly, so it filled the crevices and made decorative waterfalls over the whole, holding it all together.

  And just as she had hoped, people came over to admire it or just to say, ‘What the flaming heck is that?’ And when they did, they looked at her, even clapped her on the shoulder.

  Around them other women were displaying their offerings as if hoping for a rosette for the best plate of pikelets with jam and cream, pikelets with butter and jam, scones with jam and cream, scones with butter and jam, pumpkin scones, date scones as well as sliced quiche Lorraines or asparagus quiches (canned asparagus, thought Leafsong pityingly), cheese and tomato on Sao biscuits, cheese and tomato on Jatz crackers, and skewers of cheese cubes and red cocktail onions poked into grapefruits, like psychedelic echidnas.

  She inspected the benches on the other side of the hall. Someone had made an excellent attempt at chicken liver paté, smelling properly garlicky, though she’d slightly spoiled the effect by spreading it on Jatz crackers. Crustless sandwiches, cheese and tomato, tomato and cheese, ham and cheese, mutton and pickle, cut into triangles or rectangles or, more daringly, piled into a giant construction of layered fingers of curried egg and bread. Three carrot cakes, one sponge cake, a tray of banana caramel slice — an excellent idea that, and one she would duplicate as soon as she had tasted it to discern the exact ingredients — two plates of white Christmas, glistening with copha and coconut and gelatine ‘cherries’ dyed red.

  Boxes of chateau cardboard at either end of the table, with plastic cups to drink it from. Below them, stubbies of beer cooled in garbage bins of ice. The urns of boiling water for tea and instant coffee had their own tables, with the vast CWA teapots ready to pour the first thick china cupful.

  So much food and drink; so many people, all with a strange restlessness, talking of last week’s rain, next week’s possible rain, today’s rain that hadn’t come . . . You knew where you were with rain, too much or too little. But to change the whole direction of a nation, socially, economically? They’re scared, thought Leafsong. Scared it might not happen. Scared it will happen, and how they will stumble into the unknown.

  And yet New Zealand had just elected a Labour government, throwing off the cloak of conservatism, according to the radio commentators, though Leafsong suspected that if there really was a political cloak, then New Zealand had only peered out cautiously from under it.

  ‘And then I asked the alien if he’d clean my gutters.’ Mrs Weaver had found herself a chair and a new audience and sat, feeding the joey handfuls of freshly pulled kikuyu grass from her slightly grubby handbag. ‘He did it beautifully. Aliens are here to help us, you know.’

  The listener nodded, embarrassed.

  Up on the stage, looking indeed like a small alien master surveying its people, sat a TV set, its screen blank.

  No one looked at it.

  Leafsong followed Scarlett’s wheelchair across to the Thompson/McAlpine cluster, the families standing around Matilda, who was seated, her throne an old bentwood chair that probably dated from Federation. More people pressed into the hall, squeezing their way to get a drink, then find a group to talk to.

  Except the man she had seen at the grocer’s shop. He wore white again, but stood in shadows at the very back, almost unnoticed, gazing at the telly. No, not at the telly, she realised, but below it. The man in white stared at Scarlett, a hungry snake again.

  Why? A handsome man like that would have lots of women to adore him. Why was he interested in a girl in a wheelchair?

  Could he be the father Scarlett never spoke of, though she must have had one? No, this man’s gaze was not . . . fatherly. Focused, almost gleeful . . .

  There was a small smattering of clapping. A man limped through the door, followed by a young woman in brown. Nicholas Brewster, the candidate, hand in hand with his fiancée.

  More clapping, then Nicholas was mostly ignored, except by the people he and Felicity passed as they made their way up to the stage. Leafsong bet the locals who touched his arm were either wishing him luck or asking how much rain they’d had up at Rock Farm. Or both.

  Only Leafsong still stared at him. There was something wro
ng with Nicholas’s smile too. People standing for election wanted to be elected. Even for school president, back in Sydney.

  Nicholas Brewster looked as if the work he had to do that night was a duty, like filling in an old dunny hole when it got too full to keep using: something that must be done, that you’d do with a grin and with pride because that was the best way to get you through it. There was no passion here. None.

  She looked back at the man in white. There’d been passion on his face. But he had vanished. There was no sign of pristine white among the crowd in the hall.

  Nicholas looked at his watch. ‘May as well turn it on now.’

  Michael stepped up to the stage and turned on the television. He fiddled with the rabbit-ears antenna that sat on top and then a commentator’s face appeared, voiceless, the sound turned down. Michael waited, the hands on the Town Hall clock, opposite the photo of the queen, slowly turning . . . half past seven on the dot.

  The picture changed. Another audience, another town hall. That must be Blacktown. Michael turned the volume knob up. The Gibber’s Creek Town Hall pulsated to the sound of Blacktown Civic Centre’s cheers as Michael left the stage.

  Leafsong knew Blacktown. People thought she didn’t know things like that because she didn’t talk and rarely read or wrote, because the words danced in front of her and she could never easily work out which side of the page to begin reading or writing. But she listened, including to the transistor radio on their cottage table, powered by their new solar panels.

  Blacktown was on the edge of Sydney’s suburban sprawl. Everyone used the word ‘sprawl’ when speaking of places like Blacktown, as if cities grew so old and fat they flopped instead of staying neatly upright, as Matilda was doing now, with just the smallest effort that possibly only Leafsong and Matilda’s family noticed.

  Blacktown had all the problems Gough Whitlam said he’d fix. Schools with too many kids, too few teachers, books or classrooms. Widows whose tiny pensions meant that at the end of the fortnight pet-food mince began to look better than hunger. Suburbs built with no public transport, and without buses or trains, how could those who had no jobs afford to find one? These were the people the Coalition didn’t see.