Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  The fathers threw themselves into organising the games as though they were state championships, while the mothers stood on the sidelines, cheering and clapping the winners, and Hania again found herself envying these children their playful parents. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t recall anything about her own a father whom she’d last seen when she was two and a half years old. She knew that he’d been taken to a labour camp at the beginning of the war and had never come back, but her attempts to find out more from her mother had been fruitless. Just once her mother had confided with a sorrowful look, ‘Your father adored you. I never saw a man so besotted with a child.’ Hania had repeated those words to herself like a magical incantation, as though they might have the power to evoke some memory of her father.

  Talking about him upset her mother too much. It was another forbidden subject that Hania had learned to avoid, but at times like this she wondered whether he would have understood her, and whether he would have been as fun-loving and affectionate as Beverley’s dad.

  When the games were over, the girls brought out their skipping ropes and chanted ‘Bluebells, cockle shells, eevie ivy over,’ as they skipped, while the boys tore around the lawn with bats and balls, playing cricket.

  Hania was sitting on the grass beside Beverley when Meggsie ran towards her, swinging an empty thermos in one hand and clutching sixpence in the other. ‘My mum wants me to go across the road to the tearoom to get hot water for the tea,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

  He was hopping from foot to foot, and he spoke so fast that the saliva sprayed through the gap in his front teeth.

  He was a funny boy, Hania thought, with his skinny legs, freckled face and the carroty hair which stood up at the back of his head like a porcupine. She was about to shake her head when she remembered he’d given her a sparkler on Cracker Night.

  On the way to the tearoom, she asked, ‘Why do they call you Meggsie?’

  He looked at her in astonishment. ‘After Ginger Meggs, silly. You know, the kid with red hair in the Sunday comics.’

  As they waited for their hot water, she remembered hearing some of the boys at school calling him other names, too, and a couple of times she’d seen him fighting in the playground with boys bigger than himself. Beverley had told her that the other boys often teased him because his mum was a barmaid, and that’s when he lost his temper and punched them.

  Hania would have liked to ask him about that, and to tell him that she thought those boys were nasty, but she was too shy to raise a subject that might upset him, and they walked back to the beach without speaking.

  While the adults were sipping their tea, Beverley took hold of Hania’s hands and pulled her up. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go over to the sandhills.’

  Meggsie sprang up. ‘Last one there is a rotten egg!’

  Exhilarated at having the hills to themselves, the three of them made whooping noises and pranced around in a circle, mimicking the Red Indians they’d seen in the cowboy flicks at the Saturday matinees.

  ‘Race you to the top!’ Meggsie shouted. The girls panted as they clambered behind him, clutching clumps of spinifex to stop their bare feet from sinking into the warm, soft sand. By the time they reached the top, they were out of breath.

  They weren’t alone. Sitting with his back to them, leaning into a hollow, his legs stretched out in front of him, was a man. Beside him lay a small olive-green hat with a feather sticking out of the narrow brim.

  ‘It’s the weird man that lives next door to you,’ Beverley said to Meggsie in an excited whisper. She caught Hania’s arm. ‘What’s he doing?’

  They craned forward. The man was moving his hands so fast that their eyes couldn’t keep up with their speed. It looked as though things were being twirled and tossed, not by human hands but by some machine.

  ‘You’d think he had dozens of balls up in the air, but I can’t see anything,’ Hania whispered, while the others watched, too mesmerised to speak.

  Just then, he turned around. He stared at the children with an unblinking expression of such intensity that they bolted down the sandhills as though the devil was after them with a pitchfork.

  Back at the beach, they flopped onto the grass, confused by what they’d seen.

  ‘He’s creepy,’ Beverley said. ‘My mum reckons he’s always hammering and banging at night, and never talks to anyone.’

  She turned to Meggsie. ‘You live next door, why don’t you watch and see what he does? I reckon he’s up to something, and the police are probably after him. If we find out what he’s up to, maybe we’ll all get a reward.’

  Meggsie nodded. ‘I’ll watch him. It’ll be our secret. We won’t tell anyone. Cross your heart and hope to die.’

  Hania went home feeling elated. This was like the stories in her favourite magazine, The School Friend. Every Monday after school she and Tina rushed to the newsagent’s and spent the afternoon reading exciting stories about schoolgirls who solved mysteries and brought criminals to justice, and wishing that they could find a mystery to solve. Well now she’d found one. And she wasn’t alone any more. She was part of a secret society.

  Chapter 8

  Kath sat on the rug shielding her eyes against the sun as she watched Meggsie running down the sandhill ahead of Beverley and Hanny. Despite his sunny nature, she knew that his life at school wasn’t easy. He often came home with bruises and although he never admitted it, she knew that some of the boys made fun of him because she was a barmaid and his father had shot through. She scolded him for fighting but she was glad he wasn’t a sissy. A boy growing up without a father had to learn to stand up for himself.

  The younger boys were playing cricket and she heard Alan shouting, ‘You dropped it, you mug!’ Ray tackled him and they were both on the grass, punching and kicking.

  She usually regarded their fights as normal skylarking, but sometimes she wondered if Gran was right and they were growing up wild. ‘Those boys need a firm hand. You want to send them to a Catholic school before it’s too late,’ she’d said accusingly. ‘You’ve made a mess of your life but don’t make the kids suffer for your mistakes.’ In a more conciliatory tone, she’d added, ‘If you send them to St Joseph’s, they probably won’t charge you, seeing as how you haven’t got a husband.’

  The idea of asking for charity, especially from the Church, made Kath’s blood boil. There was no way she was going to send her boys to a Catholic school, even if they paid her. The last time she’d been inside a Catholic church was a few months after Meggsie was born. That was twelve years ago, and she’d sworn never to go back.

  She had wanted him baptised in the Catholic Church, but Jack wouldn’t have a bar of it. He always listened to 2CH, the Protestant station that broadcast anti-Catholic propaganda, and whenever she heard it, she switched the dial to 2SM, which threatened non-Catholics with hellfire. Jack was adamant his son wasn’t going to be a little tyke and, sick of the arguments, she finally gave in. To her grandmother’s horror, and the disapproval of her sister who had married a Catholic, Meggsie was baptised in the Church of England. She named him Kevin after her father, which upset her grandmother even more as she’d wanted him named Francis after the saint.

  Meggsie was only a few weeks old when two nuns came to the house and told her off for not baptising her baby in the Catholic Church. A week later, the priest arrived.

  ‘You’ve committed a mortal sin, and because of you, your child is doomed to live in perpetual limbo,’ he thundered, pointing an accusing finger at her. He was an old man with a craggy face and white hair that seemed to stand on end as he spoke, and she felt she’d been cursed by a Biblical prophet.

  Shaken by his words, Kath took the baby to St Xavier’s to be christened, but the priest refused to perform the ceremony because the child had already been baptised elsewhere. He told her she was a disgrace to the Catholic Church, which would no longer have anything to do with her. She’d run out of the church clutching the baby and sobbing in humiliation and fury
. That’s when she’d vowed never to return, and she had kept her promise.

  In the eight years Kath and Jack were together, they had four children. Jack never wanted so many kids, but although she’d turned her back on the Church, Kath couldn’t bring herself to use birth control. One day when she was pregnant again and still changing nappies, a neighbour told her she’d seen Jack at the races with another woman. They fought constantly after that and their arguments sometimes ended with her screaming at him, and him lashing out and giving her a swollen lip or a black eye. The following day he was always contrite and brought her flowers, and she tried to hide the bruises from the kids. With four boys under six to look after, she felt she had no choice but to stay with him.

  Gran had been right about Jack, but Kath was determined not to allow history to repeat itself. She wasn’t going to land on her grandmother’s doorstep as her parents had done. Too proud to ask for help and too humiliated to reveal her situation to anyone, she concentrated on looking after the boys while she racked her brains for a way out. But one day Jack took the decision out of her hands. He said he was fed up with her, the kids’ screaming, the chaos and the never-ending bills. He’d been gone a month before she could bring herself to tell her grandmother that her husband had deserted her.

  With a sigh, Kath looked around to see what the boys were up to. Alan and Ray had stopped fighting and were weaving among the picnickers, kicking a ball, while Pete, her youngest, was sitting near Verna, contentedly stuffing another piece of passionfruit sponge into his mouth. She lay back on the grass under a cloudless sky, the sun warm on her eyelids and the light breeze rustling the leaves overhead.

  Chapter 9

  Ted was sitting at his desk in the newsroom, doodling. All around him, typewriters clattered, doors slammed and chairs scraped against the wooden floor. Every few moments Don Fraser, the sportswriter, let out a curse, and then, seeing the stiffened back of the reporter who wrote the women’s pages, he apologised for swearing in front of a lady, which provoked loud belly laughs from the men.

  Don turned around and saw Ted hunched over his typewriter. ‘You’re a bloody conchie!’ he called out.

  Ted shrugged. The old hacks did as little work as they could get away with, and ridiculed the young reporters for being too keen.

  Another week had passed, and he was supposed to be writing the story about teenage crime, but his heart wasn’t in it. He couldn’t get the immigrants and the murdered callgirl out of his mind, but he hadn’t had any luck following up either story. No one had been charged with the murder, and his calls to Detective Sergeant Mitchell had gone unanswered.

  Just then a message boy ran through the newsroom looking for him. Gus wanted him in his office immediately.

  Guiltily Ted grabbed his sheaf of papers about juvenile crime to show that he was on the case.

  ‘Off to see God, are you? Hope it’s not bloody Judgement Day,’ Don joked as Ted rushed out of the newsroom. ‘Don’t forget the first commandment — I am the Lord thy editor and thou shalt have no other gods before me!’

  Gus’s mountainous figure was silhouetted in a nimbus of light from the late-afternoon sun pouring in through the window. Ted stifled an urge to laugh at this bellicose Buddha with the cigarette-holder stuck in the corner of his mouth. Gus stubbed his Sobranie Black Russian into the marble ashtray before acknowledging Ted’s presence.

  Poking his index finger at a letter on his desk, he said, ‘It’s for you. Seems this bloke read your story about the migrant ship last week. Reckons he can tell you something,’

  ‘Does he say what?’

  Gus ignored the question. Leaning forward, he jabbed his finger at Ted. ‘Listen. Anyone who volunteers to give you inside information, or expose somebody, you can be bloody sure they’ve got an agenda, and if you don’t find out what their agenda is, they’ll use you like a ten-bob whore.’

  He pushed another black Sobranie into his cigarette-holder, lit it with his monogrammed lighter and, with an imperious gesture, waved Ted away.

  Written in exemplary copperplate handwriting on quality notepaper, the letter was signed Mr George Addison.

  I hope I’m not being presumptuous, Mr Addison wrote, but I was encouraged to contact you after reading your excellent interview with the passengers of the SS Napoli in the Daily Standard, a paper I must admit I rarely read unless someone leaves it on the tram.

  Until a month ago, I taught English at Bonegilla, a migrant camp near Albury.

  Ted read on with growing interest. Bonegilla. So that was what the New Australians had been discussing so heatedly at the California Café. But after the promising opening, Mr Addison meandered for two pages. He listed his qualifications, explained why he’d applied for the job, and went on to enumerate the difficulties of teaching English to people from so many different countries and of such varying levels of education. Finally he came to the point.

  It came to my attention on a number of occasions that there were irregularities in the running of the camp and I have good reason to believe that among the migrants there are individuals who should never have been allowed to enter this country. I started to make inquiries about the screening of migrants, and I am convinced that it was my attempt to uncover the truth and to expose these undesirables that led to the termination of my contract.

  Mr Addison indicated that if Ted was interested in pursuing the matter, he’d be willing to divulge more information to him in person. Ted put down the letter and reached for the telephone. The man who answered had a reedy voice, and a pompous way of speaking that reminded Ted of his Latin teacher at Sydney Boys’ High who always wore a graduation gown draped around his shoulders like a toga. They arranged to meet at Cahill’s restaurant in Castlereagh Street the following day.

  On his way home that evening Ted hoped that Mr Addison wouldn’t turn out to be an old crank who saw conspiracies everywhere. But if he had some evidence to show that illegal immigrants were infiltrating Australia, Gus would have to agree that the story was worth pursuing. He could already envisage the headline — REDS UNDER OUR BEDS — with his by-line underneath.

  The tram was even more crowded than usual with workers returning home from town, mostly men in grey suits with large lapels and baggy trousers, and women in hats and gloves. Undeterred by the cramped space, some women were knitting, and their needles clicked incessantly. Hanging onto the leather strap, Ted glanced to the right, and his heart stopped. Standing on the other side of the compartment was the girl who was rarely out of his thoughts. She was looking the other way, and he watched her with an enraptured gaze. She had the kind of European complexion he’d only read about: porcelain-fine skin that had never been touched by the sun. Her flaxen hair was caught back from her heart-shaped face with small clips; it made her look like a schoolgirl, but even under her coat he could see that there was nothing girlish about her figure.

  She flicked her hair back from her face and he saw that the tips of her ears protruded through her hair, like a pixie’s. Ted swallowed. He knew he would want to keep looking at this girl for the rest of his life.

  At that moment she turned and saw him, and he felt his face burning, because he knew that his infatuation was written on his face.

  ‘We are like sardines, no?’ she laughed, and her cheeks dimpled. She regarded him for a moment. ‘I think so you live near me.’

  He elbowed past two men to get closer to her. ‘I’m Ted Browning,’ he said and for some reason he suddenly felt the need to clear his throat. ‘We live in the same street. Funny we’ve never met, isn’t it?’

  She laughed her rippling laugh again, and he felt he was levitating, like the woman on the magician’s poster outside Kings Theatre.

  ‘My name is Lilija Olmanis.’

  He tried not to stare at her. ‘Lilija?’ he repeated. He’d never heard such a beautiful name.

  She nodded. ‘Latvian for Lily.’

  ‘And what’s the Latvian for my name? Tedmanis?’

  She laughed as though h
e’d made the wittiest comment she’d ever heard, and he laughed too, and neither of them noticed that the other passengers were looking at them and smiling indulgently.

  ‘Have you been hiding?’ he teased. ‘I’ve been trying to catch sight of you for weeks.’

  Two parallel lines appeared between her eyebrows. ‘Catch? What is that?’

  Just then the tram jolted and he caught her as she tottered towards him.

  ‘Like that,’ he said, and they both laughed again.

  ‘I am happy you catch me,’ she said, and he was enchanted by the blush that coloured her cheeks.

  Engrossed with each other, they almost missed their stop in Oxford Street, and they laughed as they jumped out of the tram. As they walked towards Wattle Street together, Ted slackened his pace to make the walk last longer. She was eighteen, she told him, and wanted to be a nurse.

  He looked at her delicate wrists and ankles. ‘You’re too dainty to be a nurse. You should be a film star,’ he blurted, and wanted to kick himself for sounding so unsophisticated.

  They were almost at the corner of Wattle Street; time was running out. He had to think of something to detain her.

  ‘Do you like ballet?’ he asked.

  She nodded, and her hair bounced on her slender shoulders.

  ‘They’re showing The Red Shoes at the Prince Edward. Would you like to see it?’ He held his breath and waited.