The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  Then out of the blue Robbie said, ‘It’s pretty crazy to think that your sister used to clean here. Before she ran away.’

  ‘Mary hates cleaning,’ he bit back. ‘She’ll be doing something much better now.’ Robbie had once come fourth in the arithmetic bee, Dom remembered, as he stood to leave.

  Then Good Friday, just a month ago, he and Fairless bumped into Robbie down by the river. They’d been straggling about, working the smell of incense out of their clothes after the Stations of the Cross. Under the Piper Street bridge they’d come across Robbie loitering with a mate — a big-shouldered bloke. They could tell he was a city boy by the way he looked them up and down. But it stung when Robbie — Bob, he was calling himself now, apparently — did it too.

  ‘What’s that pong?’ asked Robbie. ‘You two been putting on perfume?’

  ‘Incense,’ Fairless explained cheerfully, while he, Dom, kept his eyes down. ‘I copped a bloody lungful of the smoke,’ Fairless said. ‘Made me eyes water.’

  ‘You Micks,’ said Robbie. His friend snickered.

  Dom would’ve walked away right then but Fairless kept at it. ‘Who’s your friend, Cameron?’ It was always agonising when Brian tried to talk tough. ‘Is he gonna give us a fag, or what?’

  Robbie flicked his butt into the grass. ‘Up to him,’ he said. He drew away from the underpass wall and stood up straight. He was pretty big himself these days. ‘Introduce yourself, Hammer.’

  ‘Alan Stokes,’ the bloke said. He pulled a Capstan packet from his pocket and chucked it to Fairless, who took one and passed the packet around as if it were his. They all smoked in silence, until Fairless piped up: ‘Lucky we ran into you blokes. I was dyin’ for a smoke.’

  They talked a bit about footy. Brian asked Stokes how long he was staying.

  ‘The whole of bloody Easter.’

  Fairless laughed. ‘It’s only four days.’

  ‘We’re already bored to the back teeth,’ Stokes said. ‘This place is a shithole.’

  ‘Ease up,’ said Robbie. ‘These blokes have to live here.’

  Fairless started up with his usual blustering, and Dom put a hand on his mate’s shoulder and ushered him away. Fairless talked big but never raised his fists, though, looking back, Dom knew a mean, hungry part of him had silently urged Fairless on. A punch to the guts would have seemed kinder than Robbie’s throwaway pity. These blokes have to live here. He’d been dogged by anger all the way home, and chopped wood in the backyard until he was spent. Robbie, once his mate, now stuffed full of pity; and his own father, too, who’d died and left him here — no longer the benign town of his childhood, but a sad, forsaken place he had no hope of leaving.

  He exits the town on Trentham Road and rides the first eleven miles: Carlsruhe Central Road, Carlsruhe Station Road, Dunbars Road, Tylden-Woodend Road. At the approach to Woodend he slows his pace and rides upright, hands behind his back, down the shaded Avenue of Honour. The elms whisper stories of the Great War. He knows many of the names by heart: Boyce, Boldiston, Gilchrist, Sutton, Rowe, Ring, Connelly, Barker. The light of early morning splinters the trees as he recites in time with the push of the pedals: Taylor, Mazzocchi, Casey, O’Neill. This recitation’s now become a daily practice, a ritual of sorts. He thinks of his father. There’s no tree to honour him. He thinks of his sister, too, but not of her memorial. To think of Mary is to think of the living.

  Almost six months since she left. He remembers the day after she disappeared, how the morning came and leached away without her return. He’d stayed home from school to walk the streets with his mother. They went to the police station, of course, where Sergeant Peacock winked at him when his mother’s back was turned, and he wondered if somehow the sergeant knew what he knew — that Mary wasn’t hiding in some corner of the town just waiting to be found.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into her,’ his mother said as they strode along Edgecombe Street towards the school. ‘Putting us through this worry.’

  It was the lunchtime recess and Mr Welsh was in the yard playing kick-to-kick. Dom hung back behind the fence as his mother bowled up to his teacher and drew him aside from the game. They spoke for a minute or two, both their heads bent to the asphalt. When, as his mother walked away, Mr Welsh raised his hand to him, Dom had been gripped with a sudden, crazy yearning to sprint across the yard and into the arms of his teacher, to be caught like a football — a chest mark, held close and tight. Instead he raised his hand and waved back.

  ‘He hasn’t seen her,’ his mother said as they exited the school gates. ‘Still, it was worth a try. She always liked him. I thought perhaps …’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I thought.’ She picked up her pace. ‘I told him you’ll be back tomorrow. No doubt she’ll be home by then, with her tail between her legs.’

  They asked in at Nuttalls and J.G. Charles, even the Rosaleen dress shop. In Hayes’, Mrs Boyle looked fit to burst when his mother said Mary had gone missing. ‘It will be all over town now,’ his mother said as they walked home. She sighed. ‘So long as it brings us good news.’

  No news was good news, some said.

  The town of Woodend is still shuttered and quiet at this time. He’s grown used to this feeling of ghostliness, his silent, unwitnessed passage through the streets that are made for human industry and commerce, connection and transaction. It’s the ride through this town that most reminds him of how much life has changed. School was all noise and motion, his passage so often impeded by the derision of his classmates, the tug of a freckled arm around his neck, the banter and boasts. Now his only hindrances are from the natural world: the gradient of the hills, the driving rain.

  His favourite stretch is between Woodend and Romsey, despite the hills. What is it about the curve of a road, the pattern of light through the trees, that seems comforting? And there’s Hanging Rock — a jumbled basalt outcrop emerging from the plain. At the turn in the road, just after Coach Lane, he counts: one, two, three … At four, just as the road straightens out, he sees it, rising up, still somehow catching him by surprise. This April morning is cool and still, and the Rock wears a skirt of light, white mist. There’ll be snow on its peak before winter’s over.

  A mile from the place where the Rock vanishes from view, there’s a farm he covets. It’s a small holding that slopes upwards from the road, with a gravel drive between two stands of poplars. He knows what’s at the end of the drive because he rode there one dusty afternoon, past a neat, capacious dam and a small herd of Herefords, to the top of the hill where the poplars ended. Beyond him was the house he wanted, then and there, for his mother: as grand as the Camerons’ in town, with a view to the Rock and an arbour of pink roses at the front door. His mother could preside over the kitchen, which was doubtless large and bright, and Mary, when she came back to them, could arrange flowers in every room. He’d take up the life of a farmer and converse with his neighbours about cattle and crops. What would he plant? He suspects crop choice has little to do with personal fancy. Instead there’ll be a scientific way to go about it — a set of observations to be made about soil and rainfall and temperature, a deductive process that will produce the right answer, the best conclusion. He grins, imagining his crops towering above those of his neighbours, his cattle the fattest in the shire, his orchard the most bountiful. ‘Dominic Quinn knows what he’s doing,’ everyone will say. ‘He’s a man of science.’

  His thighs tighten and resist. He has ridden twenty miles and the day’s work hasn’t started. On the crest of the final hill he stops and looks westward. He’s high enough to again see the Rock, and around it the quilted plains of the shire. He breathes deeply, shakes his thighs loose and sails down towards Romsey, past the last straggle of bushland before the town fences claim him.

  The post office is on the main road between the shire offices and the pub. Today a tailwind has favoured him, so he takes the time to drink from the outside tap. He si
ts on the side verandah to wait for the click of Mrs Egan’s heels on the path, her key in the front door.

  ‘Good morning, Dominic,’ she says when she sees him come round the corner. ‘How was your ride today?’

  Hands in pockets, he searches for details from which he can fashion something complete: the echidna that crossed his path at Cobaw, a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos languorously airborne above the McKays’ farm. He doesn’t tell her about the mist at Hanging Rock. She’s come to Romsey from Ireland: she’s probably known enough of mist and fog for a lifetime.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ she says when they are inside.

  ‘Yes, please, Mrs Egan,’ he says, and hopes for a biscuit. While she puts on the kettle, he takes yesterday afternoon’s mail from the sorting trays and gets to work.

  At lunchtime, after the morning deliveries, he returns to the post office. Mrs Egan sometimes brings dinner leftovers — a wedge of pie, or baked potatoes that she takes from her tin, douses with salt and eats cold. ‘I could heat these up, I suppose,’ she says between mouthfuls, ‘but I just can’t be fagged.’ Today she has cheese sandwiches. ‘I’m not much of a cook,’ she confides as they drink their tea. ‘Poor Bernie never complained, though. When I think of those burned chops, the scones as hard as nails …’ She shakes her head. ‘Still, it was only food,’ she says. ‘He was like me, not much of a gourmet.’

  On the wall of the shire building next door there’s a silver plaque bearing her husband’s name, along with the names of the twelve other Romsey men who fell in the war. Some Friday afternoons, as he returns from his rounds, Dom sees her wiping the plaque. She cleans it with small, reverent circles. He’s sometimes wanted to tell her my father died too, but he’s silenced by the vastness of the oceans that stretch between Kyneton and the foreign land on which Bernie Egan fell.

  Mary enters their conversation sometimes. He’s told Mrs Egan of the search that came to nothing, of his mother’s trip to Melbourne a week after Mary disappeared. Ted Boswell, the Kyneton station-master, had given Sergeant Peacock a description of ‘a dark-haired slip of a girl’ taking the Melbourne train. She hadn’t bought a ticket, Ted said. He wasn’t entirely sure it was the same afternoon that Mary disappeared, but it was all they had to go on. At dinnertime his mother had telephoned from Spencer Street station. ‘I’ve done what I can. Every police station I could get to in a day. And I’ve lit a candle at St Patricks.’ Her voice came to him thick and muffled, as if the dust of the city had lodged in her throat. ‘It’s such a big place, Dom.’

  Dom tells Nuala Egan of Mary’s countless drawings of roses, of the twisted garlands of vines and leaves with which she’d decorate the dinner table, how she sang to the chooks to help them lay. ‘You must miss her dreadfully,’ Mrs Egan says one day, and he has to find an excuse to go to the kitchen and splash his face under the tap. He might not mind so much if he could talk of Mary with his mother, talk and talk until his worry’s all bled out of him. Late at night, or in the early hours, he listens from bed as his mother moves about the kitchen. He understands the shape and nature of her sleeplessness, but in the morning he pretends he hasn’t heard a thing.

  They finish their sandwiches and Dominic wipes down the table while Mrs Egan washes out their cups. ‘Looks like it might rain,’ she says, drying her hands. ‘You’ve got your raincoat?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answers, stifling a smile. She sounds just like his mother.

  He has only Pohlman Street to go when the skies break open. A westerly whips the rain against his face, the ink runs on the envelopes; still he goes on, closing each mailbox latch carefully against further ruin. When it’s done he stands shivering on the post-office verandah until the water stops dripping from him. He takes off his coat and sodden boots, and tiptoes inside to find something with which to dry himself.

  Mrs Egan finds him in the kitchen, wringing his socks in the sink. ‘What bad luck, Dominic,’ she says, and, ‘Is that your mack on the verandah?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ll put it away.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I just happened to notice it, that’s all.’ She looks at her watch. ‘I’m going to close up shop for a bit. There’s something I need to get from home. Bring your socks and boots and sit by the radiator until you’re dry.’

  Half an hour later he sees her on the verandah, shaking water from her umbrella. She comes inside with a cardboard box. ‘Now see what you think of these,’ she says. ‘And I won’t be offended if you don’t want them.’

  In the box there’s a black oilcloth coat, a pair of leather boots and three pairs of socks. She takes out the coat and carefully unfolds it. ‘I hadn’t got around to giving them away, but when I saw your old coat on the verandah, and you soaked through … it seemed like the right time to get these things out.’ She holds it out to him. ‘Would you like to try it on?’

  It hangs wide in the shoulders, but when he rolls up the sleeves Mrs Egan says, ‘That’s a good fit. A bit of room to grow.’

  The boots he tries on with a pair of Mr Egan’s socks. The leather pinches his toes. ‘They’re all right,’ he says.

  ‘Bernie was about your height,’ Mrs Egan responds.

  It threatens rain again as he’s about to ride home. Mrs Egan comes out on the verandah. ‘You can wear Bernie’s coat. Give it a trial run.’ She stands and watches as he pulls it from his satchel. He has the socks in his satchel, too. The boots he’s tucked away in the back of a kitchen cupboard.

  The coat is warm and keeps him dry through the frequent passing showers, but at the corner of Bourke and Edgecombe he swaps Bernie Egan’s coat for his own. His mother will be watching for him. It’s only in his mother’s company that the thought of wearing a dead man’s clothes makes him shiver.

  ~

  Bill Wentworth climbs the House stairs two at a time and thumps at Bob Cameron’s door. ‘There’s a girl at the fence, asking for you,’ Wentworth says when Cameron opens. ‘Bowled me up and begged me to get you to go down to her.’

  ‘What’s her name? If it’s that fat sheila from the stinking play —’

  ‘No, not her. Mary someone. A bit of a looker. Says she knows you from your home town.’

  ‘Mary Quinn. Bloody hell.’ And Bob Cameron, sixth-former and cricket captain of School House, blushes all over, remembering how, in his Kyneton bedroom, he’d wanked more than once — a lot more than once — while picturing her tits and her come-hither eyes.

  ~

  At the post office, their lunchtime conversations sometimes turn to history. It was never Dom’s favourite subject at school, but local history seems more akin to gossip than something academic. He tells Mrs Egan of the gold rush that brought wealth to Bendigo and Ballarat, and, if not wealth, respectability to the smaller places. He finds himself telling her of the Victorian bushrangers who developed a taste for gold: Black Douglas and Harry Power, Mad Dan Morgan. He saves the Kelly gang until last. ‘As a boy Ned Kelly watched his uncle being tried in the Kilmore courthouse,’ he tells her.

  ‘For murder?’

  ‘Stealing horses. They were very poor.’

  ‘Dominic Quinn, are you making excuses for stealing?’

  She understands because she comes from the same place as the Kellys, the green watery isle from which his great-grandparents also escaped. At school he learned the story, vague and generic, of the great Irish emigration of the mid-nineteenth century, the hundred thousand men and women, often young, unskilled and unmarried, who left south-west Ireland for Melbourne or the goldfields and farms of central Victoria. In the classroom Mr Welsh spoke of potato blight, Whigs and Protestants: a convergence of factors that culminated in mass starvation, exodus and death. ‘Famine is almost always political,’ Mr Welsh said, the colour rising in his throat like a high-water mark.

  Mrs Egan comes from Dublin. Her story, better known to Dom than those of any of his forebears, is one of curiosity. Lure
d by tales of sun and surf from cousins of cousins who’d already emigrated, she set sail to Sydney in 1938, aged twenty. On a weekend trip to Melbourne, she met Bernie Egan while having a drink at the Celtic Club with a girlfriend. ‘Love at first sight, Dominic. There is such a thing, you know.’ Bernie was still working the family farm on Black Range Road, three miles west of Romsey. ‘He was never one for a quiet life, though. He’d come to Melbourne that weekend to see about joining up.’ Bernie Egan was killed in ’42, in northern Papua. ‘Fighting the Japanese,’ Mrs Egan says. As if he didn’t know. ‘A terrible, gruelling fight. Who knew how stubborn the Japs would be?’ Her eyes cloud over, and Dominic looks away. ‘But that doesn’t tell the whole story. We had two wonderful years together, before he was sent away. I’ll never regret that.’

  Mrs Egan loves books, and often talks to him about her favourites, the ones that have stood her test of time. She brings them for him to borrow: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. ‘I like the American writers best,’ she says. ‘They have big horizons, big ideas.’ The first book she gave him was The Great Gatsby, and he tried to like it for her sake, but he thought the story pointless and irritatingly slow, the characters lacking. His mother had found the book in his room. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asked.