The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  The men in the stairwell laughed. ‘It’s not an earth-shake, son,’ said Keane. ‘Clement has taken to his hurdy-gurdy. You’re in for a treat over supper.’

  ‘You’re a strange one, Keane, if you think that a treat,’ said Mannix. ‘There’s a reason the redcoats pipe men onto the battlefield, which after all is nothin but a floggin of the ears.’

  ‘Not where I come from.’

  The sound rose beyond them as they went lower into the building. On a stool in the corner of the groghouse, an old man with a shiny pate and grey whiskers was bent over a contraption that was half bagpipe and half accordion. The dog kept to Sam’s ankles as he took the bench indicated by Keane, where the others also sat and removed their coats and rolled up their sleeves. The sound of the instrument was a fierce warlike drone that rolled and grew, and made their chests tremble. It was an infernal sound, but over the course of minutes, in his weakened state Sam began to feel a kind of strong emotion that brought tears to his eyes, and that he hid by pretending to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. But Keane nodded and his eyes were also bright. The other men grumbled and ducked their heads when the old man launched from the dirge into a manic finger-play over the keyboards that sounded like fifty mad fiddlers setting fire to the air, before he slumped, eyes closed, and returned to the drone in a posture of prayer.

  Sam looked to the faces of the hard company but none of them spoke or discouraged the player with looks or gesture. An earthenware pot straight off the fire with its base covered in peels of glowing cinder was placed on the table by the Ancient in the black tricorne hat, who returned with a loaf of bread the size of a pillow that the men set upon. A scree of tin plates was cast down the row, and Sam took his own and a ladle of stew and a chunk of bread, and with the relieving of his hunger, and the pressing of the dirge, the tears in his eyes returned, and Sam hid them by passing bread to his dog and staring into his plate. The only words spoken during the meal were addressed to Sam by a sceptical-looking youth named Barr with sailor’s tattoos and iron rings in his weighted ears, who leaned into the noise.

  ‘That dog of yours. Would you share with it your last crust?’

  Sam nodded, because it was true, and he had done so, but the youth didn’t seem appeased in his suspicions. ‘And after your last meal was gone, would you slay and partake of your hound if needs be, to survive?’

  Sam looked at the youth who was reading him closely. He was on the verge of replying that yes, he would, because he’d thought it often, but the boy nodded because he’d seen it in Sam’s eyes. The youth returned to his stew, and called for ale as the elderly player reached the peak of his drone and bit again into the swarming sound with another frenzy of fiddle-play.

  7

  The mirror looked like it was made of smoke, and from that smoke an image of Samuel Bellamy emerged that pleased the Chinaman and made him coo. Sam didn’t move for fear of bursting the pins that framed the woollen suit jacket, and the picture of himself better groomed than he’d ever been.

  That morning Sam had scrubbed himself in a bathtub until his skin was burnished pink. He had a bellyful of black beans and bread, and smelt like the milk-soap that all the men shared, along with the damp blanket used to towel himself dry in the stable at the rear of the hotel. Sam had the stable to himself and lit the fire and heated the jug, filling the tub and soaking in the water until it lost its heat.

  He then retraced his steps through the nearby streets until he found the row of molly-houses where Sarah Proctor was quartered. The buildings were each two-storeyed wood-framed huts, rooved with pine shingles and canvas tarpaulins. They were dingy and damp-smelling and had the air of lodging houses because of all the women’s clothes drying on ropes between the balconies. He recognised the molly-house where Sarah was delivered on account of the bright yellow blanket that was hung there in place of a door. Sam carried a posy of red and yellow flowers that he’d gathered up the hill from the settlement, and he held them like a candle whose flame was delicate. He wiped his bare feet on the hog-bristle mat outside the door, and pulled aside the blanket and entered the darkness. What he saw there in the windowless room was not like the molly-houses he’d seen in New South Wales, where there was commonly a table and chairs set aside as a welcoming area, but rather some plank benches that held the shapes of snoring men. The smell was of stale beer and cigar smoke and mouldy linen. Sam heard the ceiling creak, and he could see light drizzle down through the cracks in the floorboards. Ahead of him was a large room separated into stalls by wooden posts, in the manner of pigpens, each given privacy by a hung piece of canvas.

  There was no sound coming from any of the stalls, and so Sam took hold of the rough-hewn ladder that did for stairs and rose into a small gap in the floorboards above him. He heard the sound of voices and smelt brewing tea. The light from the front balcony was sufficient to observe the dozen women sleeping on mattresses on the floor of an open room with a brazier in a corner. There was no chimney for the smoke to draw and the room was stifling with the smoke from the wood that was wet and green. There were a couple of women on the balcony that he could hear, and so he rapped his knuckles on the floorboards, clearing his throat before announcing himself. There was no response from the sleeping shapes, with only a foot or an arm exposed here and there, and so he climbed off the ladder and into the room.

  ‘Sarah? Sarah Proctor?’

  He walked toward the light where the women had stopped talking, although he made a slow progress because he had to step over and between the sleeping shapes, so crowded were they across the floor. Then the doorway was blocked by a woman whose silhouette he recognised beneath the sleeveless cotton shift and whose hands were on her hips. Sarah Proctor raised a finger to her mouth and ushered him toward her. He followed her out into the weak sunlight where she sat on an upturned wooden bucket and indicated that he should sit on the identical bucket beside her.

  There was nobody else on the balcony beside Sarah, and Sam tried to hide his alarm because she had been talking to herself in two voices, playing the part of herself and another, whose voice had sounded younger and chiding. But Sarah showed no awkwardness, and he sat beside her while she stared at him. There was friendliness in her eyes but also suspicion.

  ‘I don’t want nothin material from you, Sarah, so don’t worry on that account.’

  She looked at the flowers in his hand, and he followed her gaze. The yellow flowers were beginning to bruise, but the red flowers were waxy and shining as though polished. A thorn had pricked him as he climbed the stairs, and the side of his thumb was spotted with blood. Sam had gathered the flowers for his mother but he saw his mistake, and ducked his head in a bow and passed them over.

  ‘Samuel Bellamy, I never…If you was older or I was younger—I believe that I’d eat you alive!’

  The image confused Sam, but her sisterly cuff around his ears put him at ease. Once Sarah had sniffed the flowers and smiled, Sam leaned forward.

  ‘Sarah, what you said. You was right that I didn’t come to California for the gold. I never told you while we was aboard that whaler my purpose on this shore, because I feared you would use it against me. I apologise for that, but now I got something I want to share with you, and a question I’d like to ask you.’

  Sarah Proctor pretended to be wounded. ‘There I was thinkin you was makin love to me, Master Samuel Bellamy. Never one for small talk though are you? And no need to apologise for not trustin me with secrets. I’ll admit I was scared enough on that ship to have sold my mother’s soul if it got me some advantage. You was smart to abide with your whys and wherefores. So speak now. It appears as though I’m well situated here. The other girls is nice and so is Mrs McGarry, the proprietor. You’ve given me flowers and that is special but more important is that you trust me.’

  Sarah pressed her hands upon his own and he let them be clasped while he told her about his mother and how he came to be aboard the whaler. Sarah heard him out and never once interrupted to clear a point, and when he was fi
nished she squeezed his hands and nodded. ‘That is a terrible and sad tale, Samuel, but I knew you was a brave boy the minute I saw you. Yes, I can surely help. I’m only learnin the ropes here so to speak, but I can make enquiries about your Ma. I’ve heard that there are near a hundred Australian women working in this area, and I’m certain that Kathleen McGarry, who seems to know everybody’s business, man or woman, will advise me.’

  Her words buoyed Sam’s spirits, and he promised to drop by tomorrow morning at the same time, because according to Sarah at night it was too busy to receive visitors.

  The other women were rousing as Sam left the molly-house, and they blinked themselves awake and brushed their hair, and one of them sang a bawdy song about a priest’s passion for a chaste young lassie, who to deter the priest’s attentions dressed like a barrow-boy, but that only spurred the older man on. The song made some of the women laugh, even though the singer was still hidden beneath a blanket. Sam retreated down the rickety wooden ladder that he realised was designed to be drawn up into the second storey, to protect the women while they slept.

  It was back at The Stuck Pig that Sam received his first orders for the day, which was the welcome news that he was expected elsewhere so that he could get clothed. The old man in the tavern pointed Sam first toward the Chinese streets, where for a price Keane offered protection from The Hounds, and Sam was barbered for free. He watched in the reflection of a gilt-edged mirror the first Oriental he’d ever seen up close, who did him the honour of pretending he had growth to warrant a shave. He came out of that barber smelling like fresh laundry, even though he was still barefoot.

  Next stop the bootery, where a Frenchman from British North America made him wash the mud off his feet in a bucket by the door before measuring his foot-size. While Sam watched, the Frenchman cut a pattern from a bolt of brown suede that he braced on an iron foot and stitched to a leather sole with waxed twine and pliers. When the pair was sewed, he laced the shoes with buckskin, and they fitted so perfectly on Sam’s bruised feet that he did a little jig that made the Frenchman smile.

  The final stop was the Chinaman haberdasher and tailor, with the smoky mirror set into a lacquered black frame, who offered him bitter green tea with pieces of rice floating in it and a pipe of tobacco while Sam watched the sewing of his grey woollen suit, complete with waistcoat and two collarless cotton shirts and three pairs of woollen socks. The Chinaman pointed to bolts of coloured felt on a rack of hardwood-shelves and invited Sam to choose a colour.

  ‘Sydney-town man like the slouch hat. You choose; I make you one good hat.’

  The Chinaman spoke so much like the mocking imitations of Mannix and the others back in the groghouse that it made Sam think he was the instigator of the joke.

  ‘Where you keep your knife? Nice new suit, no cutting with knife in belt no good. You need sheath, I give you sheath. On belt or strap under arm. You choose.’

  Sam showed the single-edged hunting knife that Keane had given him.

  ‘Put that one on belt-sheath. No need for dagger sheath. Good one.’

  Sam stood on the carpet in his new shoes, and looked through the window of the haberdashers to the street crowded with Mormons in black suits, and Orientals in belted smocks, and dusty Australian miners in pelts come from the hinterland for the gambling and whisky and mollies. The Chinaman’s hands prodded and pressed, and with his mouth full of pins and bowl-face and ponytail, he looked like a creature from a children’s story about djinns and dragons. The Chinaman wore a western suit of simple black cotton, but the notes of familiarity only forecast the alien in him. The smell of the Swan River blacks was smoky and sour, but this man and his lair smelt of fish and some kind of herbal unguent that Sam couldn’t name.

  ‘You sit there, and smoke. I sew it now. Not long, you see.’

  The Chinaman bowed his head in deference but Sam wasn’t buying it. The Swan River blacks cracked dumb when a white man spoke to them direct, then laughed among themselves at the false impression they had drawn, and went back to doing what they’d been chastised for. Same way the old lags on the whaler hid their true face from Dempsey, biding their time. For they had learned that manner of dissembling on the chain, although no white overseer was ever persuaded from anticipating the retaliatory blow. The Magistrate George Moore had explained it to Sam after witnessing the hanging of two blacks on a tree by the river. The hangings had been ordered as an example to the men’s kin, who were herded there and forced to watch. He described how the warriors were proud and defiant until they saw the rope. The terror of the clansfolk was pitiful to witness, but also a salutary lesson of how the British penal code worked on the single hard truth that the only man who doesn’t pretend, and doesn’t lie, is the broken man.

  The Chinaman seemed to understand the importance of pretending by his manner toward Sam, merely a boy—but a boy sent by Keane and therefore a fellow of Sydney-town. Sam’s role was to pretend a confidence by virtue of his race, itself a lie and a performance that the Chinaman was playing along with. But while it felt good to pretend, Sam suspected that he’d never be like Keane and his men. The Swan River blackfellows had always treated him kindly, knowing him the son of the limeburner murdered to avenge the slaughter of one of their own, in accordance with their law. Sam grew up playing with black boys in the blacks’ camp, and although they hit him and each other when roused to anger, they were never cruel, and Sam never felt a moment of fear among them. But the young wards in the Vandemonian Boys Home had picked him for a weakling, and terrorised him from the first day, in a manner that made Sam suspect that he was born wrong and so marked out.

  Perhaps it was this apprehension that turned Sam from the Chinaman at his cutting bench, scissors slicing through yielding cloth, toward the dusty sunlight playing across his arm on the windowsill that opened to a side alley of bright green grass. A passing shape, thin and small, in a filthy homespun nightshirt belted at the waist. The conical hat made of reeds. A softwood yoke across the shoulders at whose end swung cane baskets. A Chinese boy the same age as Sam, but as soon as he thought this, he saw the lie. As the boy approached the side door, the posture of his shoulders changed, and the way the yoke was thrown suggested not only frustration, but a girl sloughing off something that disgusted her. Her face was filthy with smudges of soot and grease, but the markings looked hand-applied. Their eyes met; her’s black and accusing, reading the surprise in his own, and thinking nothing of it. Saying nothing either, she tipped the hat onto her shoulders and entered the haberdashery side-door. The Chinaman at his table cocked an ear and seemed relieved, then looked to Sam, who stared at his feet. When he looked up the Chinaman was still staring at him; the little savage in his new boots and drawers, reading for the truth that Sam had witnessed the girl disguised as a boy.

  Chastened, but hoping for another glimpse of the girl, Sam leaned on the windowsill. There began a banging and clanging of pots, and the scraping of a spoon in a pan. The Chinaman grimaced but continued at his work, sewing the seams of the trousers by hand, his bulging eye only a few inches from the cloth. The banging continued, and then the smells of a soup coming to the boil, something like boiled dumplings and the scent of a bitter herb. Sam kept an eye on the alley, glancing at the curtain separating the shopfront from the rooms, but there was no sign of her.

  He’d been surprised on his reconnaissance through the town by the number of men who’d met his eye, smiled and even greeted him; the sight of a boy in the streets unusual enough to be welcome. So different to Australia, where he’d been just another urchin, a thing of suspicion and contempt; where he’d received the kindness of strangers but also considerable cruelty. How different therefore for the Chinese girl, who had to hide herself, although whether this was prudent or because of her father’s over-protectiveness, he couldn’t say. Sam didn’t know the way of Orientals, although he resolved to know her.

  The Chinaman’s shoulders were tense as he tied off a thread. Sam packed the Chinaman’s pipe, long and slender w
ith a brass stem and some kind of resinated bowl. He’d learned to smoke dried cane stems at the Boys Home in imitation of the cigars that the master smoked, although he’d never smoked real tobacco. But it was time that Sam learned to smoke, and so he inhaled the Chinaman’s tobacco in sips that didn’t hurt his lungs, and exhaled the blue wisps of smoke until the smell of it filled the room and the light in the streets began to fade, and the Chinaman left his labours and began to rummage in the corner where he’d flung Sam’s trousers, which were little more than rags. He approached Sam ducking and smiling, but his eyes were hard.

  ‘No finish today. You come back tomorrow, I have ready for you. Yes, sorry. Sorry. You take.’

  The rancid cotton was greasy to his touch, but Sam nodded, stood into the tattered legs, tied the waist-string and lifted the knees where his skin showed through. On his tail the patches were also torn and frayed, and his new drawers of whitest cotton were bright against the soiled exterior. He looked a ridiculous figure, with his new boots and shirt beside the ripe cloth of his old garment. He turned from the smoky mirror and tucked his knife. Reached out his hand to the Chinaman, to thank him. The man stared at Sam’s outstretched hand, a novel or perhaps unkind gesture to him, Sam couldn’t tell. More head-ducking and a hand indicating the door. Sam glanced at the curtain but it never trembled. He took his leave with the promise of a midday return.

  Across the plaza square was the wine saloon that Sam sought and which was notable for being well lit in the gloom. The establishments around it were mostly dark and shuttered, including the muster-station where the stagecoaches arrived, and the mail-house and several other government buildings whose porches were given over to loitering and conversation.

  To get to the saloon, Sam had to pass a row of gambling establishments with names like El Dorado and The Tin Star that were little more than candle-lit tents packed with drunks. The gambling in the tents was precisely as Keane had described—men lining up and not even bothering to sit at table to play the games of faro and monte, but standing on drunken legs and betting bags of gold dust on the turn of a single card.