Tommo and Hawk

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Probably gave you his name then got nervous that maybe it weren’t quite kosher, so he cancelled it by adding the X. Nothing would surprise me with him.’ Mary snorts each time the story comes up but she’s got a smile on her face too as she thinks of him. ‘Ikey always did have a bet each way.’

  Mary also told us that Tommo and I are twins, the same but different, the same mother but different fathers. A fluke of nature, she said, that happens sometimes with whores. Tommo came out with white skin and blue eyes, small as a tadpole, and I as black as the ace of spades and big as a bullfrog! It’s very confusing to other folk, but not to Tommo and me. We’re twins in the heart and in the head. Whether Jew or Mohammedan, twins are their own religion.

  Anyway, Mary isn’t much concerned with religion. ‘Tell ’em you’re Church of England,’ she says when we’re asked. ‘Don’t suppose it matters, do it? God ain’t got no religion, now does he? As far as worshipping goes, it’s best not to take sides.’ She decided for all of us when she pointed to the mountain towering above us, ‘Best off worshipping that!’ She was not jesting either, for she loves the mountain. ‘God lives in that mountain, right above the organ pipes!’ she told us once. The organ pipes are the shafts of rocks that form a steep cliff to one side of the top of Mount Wellington.

  When we were little, Tommo and I always skirted well clear of those pipes when we climbed the mountain, just in case Mary was right and we should bump into God.

  ‘What would you say to God if we should meet Him up there?’ I once asked Tommo.

  Tommo thinks for a moment then says right off, ‘I’d invite Him to Sunday dinner.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that’s the most holy place we got, silly!’

  He was right, too. Once when Mary spread her damask cloth we asked her why, and she said, ‘It be our way of giving thanks to Him what keeps our bellies full. It be our altar cloth.’

  ‘We belongs to the White Tablecloth Religion,’ Tommo once told the curate at St David’s who stopped us in the street and asked why we didn’t come to Sunday School.

  As for not going to church, Mary always says, ‘If folk don’t like it, well, that’s just too bad now, ain’t it? Knowing right from wrong is all what matters and I’ve yet to meet the preacher on this Gawd-forsaken island what does!’

  There is little doubt Sunday is important to her, though, and a special occasion. Almost every time she spreads the cloth she says, ‘One day I’m going to buy us some silver, some Sunday silver!’ But I don’t think she ever will. Such a gesture would be much too flash for Mary and we’re still eating off the same tin plates and using the most ordinary cutlery you can buy.

  Since I have come back from England with Ikey’s stolen fortune, Mary could have a crystal chandelier in the kitchen if she wanted, and bone china and silver cutlery heavy enough to sprain your wrist. But Mary doesn’t want people to think she’s a free settler or a toff, or that she believes herself better than the rest of the lags. She isn’t ashamed of who she is, a convict who has earned her ticket-of-leave and had her freedom granted after serving her sentence.

  ‘It’s who you is when folk knocks at the door of your heart what counts,’ she always said when we were young. ‘Hide the past and it gives them what’s jealous of you the power to bring you undone.’

  I remember her telling us always, ‘Never give no one the power to shame you. Keep everything clear and in the open. Hiding from the past be the main business o’ this cursed island, people trying to pretend they’s better than other people, when they’s dirt, the scrapings o’ the barrel, just like what we is. Hannah Solomon be the prime example, putting on airs and graces, talking like a toff and trying to be a free settler, what she ain’t and never can be.’

  Hannah was Ikey’s lawful wife, but all she did was try to do him harm. Now she and Ikey’s children live with a cove named George Madden in New Norfolk. Mama once taught three of Ikey and Hannah’s brats, David, Ann and Sarah, when Hannah was a prisoner seamstress in the Cotton Factory. ‘They was bright too, those young uns,’ Mary told me.

  Mary doesn’t care much for the free settlers here. ‘Who’d come to this miserable place even if it were free, ‘less they was third-rate to begin?’ is what she says. But she is not being altogether truthful about her feelings. She’d not return to Blighty even if the governor granted her free passage. Mary loves this island, it is where she found the chance she was always looking for. Tasmania is what saved Mary and gave her back her character. She doesn’t pine for the good old days like Ikey did.

  ‘Blimey, what good old days was they, then?’ she’d say sarcastically when Ikey got to reminiscing about London Town. ‘For the likes of me they was shit!’

  ‘And this ain’t shit, my dear?’ Ikey asks, sweeping his arm to include the whole island.

  ‘Yes, but there be a difference,’ Mary snaps back. ‘There you was buried permanent in it, born in shit and drowned and died in it, no bleedin’ hope o’ rising above it. Here if you pushes ‘ard enough you can get your ‘ead up through the surface.’

  ‘And when you does, my dear,’ Ikey cackles, ‘all you can see is arseholes!’

  But Mary would not give in. ‘Life’s too bleedin’ short to be frightened o’ what’s already been,’ she’d say. ‘Can’t get yesterday back and change it, now can you?’

  That is why Mary can’t see what has gone wrong with Tommo. She won’t ever look backwards. When we were put to bed as young uns she’d often say, ‘Today is all we got, ain’t it? I mean, who knows, tomorrow we could all be dead.’ She’d take Tommo’s hand and mine so that we were joined to her. ‘Be honest, fair, listen, keep yer gob shut. Anyone can get through one day at a time. It’s light and then it’s dark and then it’s bleedin’ over, ain’t it? Persistence, that’s all what gets you there in the end. Believin’ in yerself and persistence!’

  Then, after she’d made this little speech, she’d let go our hands and tug at the chain about her neck and produce from her bosom the gold Waterloo medal Ikey gave her. She’d hold it tight in her fist. ‘What’s it say?’ she’d demand.

  ‘I shall never surrender!’ Tommo and I would shout together, that being the legend written on the back of Mary’s talisman.

  ‘And don’t you never forget it,’ Mary would say. ‘Persistence and character!’

  That is everything Mary believes— never give up no matter how painful the journey. Overcome and persist. I know that in her heart she can’t understand Tommo, how he’s sorry for himself and won’t forget the past now that things are good again. Drowning his sorrows in grog, not showing grit in his character, that’s what she can’t abide in my twin. I can sense she sees too much of Ikey in him. Not the Ikey of London Town, not the successful fence and forger much admired amongst thieves and villains and even accorded a grudging respect by policemen and magistrates; but the broken Ikey, the Ikey who was brought to his knees by hard convict labour and trained to obedience with the warder’s whip.

  Now I’ve told her Tommo doesn’t want to take up her legacy of persistence and character, to work at her beloved brewery. She looks down at the white damask cloth and begins to smooth it with both her poor broken hands. A little frown forms, her top lip covered by the bottom one, then she begins to speak quietly without looking at me, like she’s thinking out loud.

  ‘Course he’ll want to work at the brewery! Tommo never were a lazy boy. He’ll do his share. He’ll come good,’ she says, as though she’s trying to convince herself, as though she secretly fears she might not be right about my brother.

  ‘Mama, it’s not that. He isn’t ready to come back to us yet.’

  But Mary will not look, doesn’t want to see my hands, and continues. ‘We’ll buy all the new land in the Huon Valley we can get. We’ll do it through Mr Emmett, so nosey parkers what can’t mind their own business don’t catch on. Surprise the buggers! We’ll grow all the hops we need for the use o’ the brewery and maybe some for the new colony of Victoria.’ M
ary lifts her chin and her eyes narrow. ‘We’ll not be caught short again because some bastard beer baron tries to put us out o’ business. Not never again!’ She grips the sides of the table, then she looks up and becomes aware of me again. ‘Hawk, you’ll not talk to no one about the money, Ikey’s money, ever, you understand?’

  I’ve been back from England three months and this is the first time Mary’s talked about what we’ll do with the fortune I took from his and Hannah’s old Whitechapel home. Ikey’s stolen treasure had lain there for years, hidden in an Austrian safe, for though Ikey and Hannah knew half its secret combination each, they never trusted each other enough to tell each other their half. Hannah believed she and her brats deserved the lot and sent her son David to claim it, but with a little luck and cunning, I got there first.

  ‘You know I won’t tell anyone, Mama,’ I nod.

  ‘Not even to Tommo, you hear!’

  I look at her, shocked. There is nothing I have ever hidden from Tommo. ‘Mama, Tommo’s my twin!’

  Mary gazes down at the table. ‘Tommo’s been away, we don’t know where, he won’t say!’ She looks up, her eyes steady. ‘You hear me, Hawk Solomon, don’t you never tell your brother until I say!’

  There is a part of Mary that’s hard as granite, that won’t brook any contradiction. Her mouth is drawn in a thin line, the skin seeming to barely conceal the hardness of the skull beneath. Mary has a look that can frighten me and now she’s used it against Tommo, her dearest Tommo whom she loves with all her heart.

  She lowers her eyes again. ‘You know about growing hops, you learned it in England. That will be yours to concern yourself about. The Huon Valley, what we can buy of it, will be yours, Hawk. Tommo can work with me at Strickland Falls and prove himself, prove he may be trusted. He must learn what you already know about brewing. Catch up like, be an apprentice boy.’

  I bang my fist on the table so she is forced to look up. ‘Mama, Tommo won’t, he won’t come back, not yet!’

  But she’s too quick for me. She doesn’t hear the half of it because her eyes are squinched tight closed and she can’t see my hands speaking to her, though she’s heard the smack of my fist and knows full well what I’m trying to say.

  ‘The Potato Factory,’ Mary says fiercely, her eyes still closed, like it’s a holy catechism, ‘comes first!’ She opens her eyes and spreads her crippled hands against the white of the cloth, fingers splayed as wide as they’ll go. Then it comes to her what she has just said and she adds, ‘That be after you and Tommo, o’ course.’

  ‘Mama, we’ve got Ikey’s stolen fortune, you don’t ever need to work again if you don’t wish!’

  Mary is silent a moment, then she says, ‘That be the whole problem. We has to make what’s been stolen honest again.’

  She can see that I don’t understand her. She shrugs. ‘All Ikey’s money’s been gained on the cross, not one penny comes from honest toil. It all comes from fencing, forging, laundering money, brothel-keeping and having his brats at the Academy of Light Fingers pickpocket for him. As for Hannah Solomon, hers comes from running scams in bawdy houses. All right, I put in me time in such places too, but I never cheated nor used poor kids what can’t defend themselves. We has to put the money to decent use and make it clean.’

  ‘But, Mama, I stole that fortune! I opened Ikey’s safe using the combination we worked out from Ikey’s riddle. We’ve no more call on that money than the Solomons have.’

  ‘Hawk!’ Mary shouts in protest. ‘You know it’s not the same. Ikey gave you the riddle that held his three numbers to the safe. He were as good as saying that if you be the clever one to crack the riddle what opens his half of the safe, then providing he could also find out Hannah’s set of numbers, what were in it be ours, his to share with us!’

  ‘Mama, Ikey didn’t say anything of the sort! He didn’t know you already knew Hannah’s half of the combination! You never did tell him, did you? Ikey always thought it was just a clever riddle he’d given me to test my wits.’

  Mary purses her lips. ‘More fool him, then,’ she says, but softly. ‘He were a fool to underestimate the both of us, you in particular.’

  ‘But even if I’d cracked Ikey’s part of the riddle he knew it would give us only half title to the money.’

  She smiles. ‘If Ikey were alive he’d be proud, most proud that we beat the wicked cunning of that bitch, and her miserable brat, David Solomon! They were his natural family, but he saw them for what they were.’

  She gazes at me fondly now. ‘I were right to send you to England, to learn the growing of hops. Heaven knows we didn’t have a penny to spare at the time, not for sending you, nor for purchasing land when you returned to do the growing. But I always knew it were the right thing to do,’ she claps her hands suddenly, ‘and look what happened, you returned with Ikey’s fortune and the knowledge we needed. Now we can buy the whole Huon Valley if we wants!’

  ‘Mama, perhaps we could argue that if Ikey hadn’t died before the safe was opened, he would have left us the part of the fortune that was his to give. But half of what came out of that safe rightly belongs to Hannah Solomon! Ikey was willing she should have her share, he always said so. But Hannah demanded more, much more, and that’s what stopped him giving her half in the first place— the thought that she wouldn’t rest there! That, and the fact that he didn’t trust her to do right by him, stopped them from dividing it fairly in the first place. They were both ruled by greed. But what was Hannah’s wasn’t Ikey’s when he was alive! Nor is it for us to have now that he’s dead!’

  ‘Her half share be our compensation for the kidnapping of you and Tommo.’

  ‘Mama, we can’t prove she and David Solomon were behind the kidnapping!’

  ‘Ha! And Hannah can’t prove you opened Ikey’s safe before David arrived in London either! That’s two can’t proves! We’re quits then, ain’t we?’ Mary looks smug. ‘Far as she’s concerned, you were waiting in London with Ikey’s half of the combination, and the two of you opened that safe together and found it empty.’ Her expression turns grim. ‘I know it were them,’ she taps her chest with her finger, ‘in me heart. I know it were David and Hannah Solomon what kidnapped my boys!’ She points her finger at me, shaking it. ‘All the bleedin’ dosh in the world can’t bring back your voice or undo what’s been done to Tommo! They’ve got to be punished!’

  Mary suddenly realises that she’s shouting and looks around. She lowers her voice to almost a whisper even though there’s no one about to hear us. ‘Besides, if Ikey were alive and you’d brought him back the whole fortune from London, do you really think he would have divided it in half and given Hannah her share? Not bleedin’ likely he would! I’ll tell you something for nothing, he wouldn’t ‘ave given her a farthing! Not a brass razoo!’ Mary folds her arms across her breasts. ‘By keeping the lot we’re only doing what Ikey would have wanted most!’

  I shake my head slowly. ‘Mama, we don’t know that. It isn’t a decent thing that we’re doing.’

  Mary’s face reddens. She is suddenly furious. ‘Don’t talk to me about decent! Decent be what decent does. That bitch done nothing decent in her friggin’ life! I ain’t giving that whore nothing, you hear? Over my dead body! Not a bleedin’ penny, you hear me? Me conscience be clear on the matter!’

  I’ve never seen Mary so fierce and Ikey’s words come back to me. ‘Out of a clear blue sky, my dears, with not a cloud o’ contention to be seen, not a fluffy puff o’ ill humour on the far horizon, Mary can evoke a hurricane in minutes. She don’t give a tinker’s cuss for the consequences to herself of her malevolent tongue. Mary has a temper what can turn the sweetest harmony, the calmest waters into a raging storm at sea greater than that what wrecked the Spanish armada!’

  There is nothing more I can say in the face of her anger. I shrug, but Mary’s not finished yet.

  ‘You think Hannah’s going t’ be happy with ‘arf? She’ll be off to the law in a flash if she knows we’ve got Ikey’s money. Bes
ides, who’s to know what’s hers and what were Ikey’s?’ She stabs a finger at me again. ‘You going t’ let her decide? Let Hannah Solomon tell you what’s her fair share? Eh? You going to do that? You barmy or somethin’?’

  What Mary says is logical. Hannah will never be satisfied until she has the lot, but Mary knows Hannah won’t go to the law. When Ikey was sentenced to transportation for purchasing stolen goods, the Old Bailey ruled that whatever could be recovered of his stolen goods was the property of the Crown. Ikey always said that if we recovered any of the money we should never speak of it. ‘The law has big ears, my dear. Ears what can gather taxes and fines like a dredger gathers mud! When it comes to money, stay stum, the less known all ‘round the better, know what I mean?’

  I remind Mary of this, knowing full well that she doesn’t need reminding. ‘Mama, you know Hannah won’t go running to the magistrate. She won’t want to draw attention to herself. Besides, she’d have done it before if she’d thought it an advantage to her. She already suspects we’ve got Ikey’s money.’

  Mary frowns, then shakes her head. ‘Suspecting and knowing for certain ain’t the same thing now, are they? Once Hannah and that son of hers knows for certain, they’d be after us. David Solomon wouldn’t never let up. The humiliation of him knowing it were you what tricked him would be enough, he’d kill you!’

  I shrug. ‘Mama, you recall I left a ring in the safe with a little note that purported to be from Ikey: “Remember, always leave a little salt on the bread.” It seemed a good joke at the time. David still thinks Ikey outsmarted them. He thinks the fortune was taken when Ikey was still in England and that the note was intended for Hannah. As far as he knows, Ikey had the money and couldn’t spend it before he died, so it must be here.’

  ‘No!’ Mary says. ‘There’s no proof of it.’

  I shake my head. ‘Listen, Mama, David must conclude that Ikey left the money to you. That would be a natural enough assumption, don’t you think?’