Common People

by Tony Birch

  ‘On the side of a road, I’m guessing.’

  Hester got to his feet and dusted himself down. ‘There was something here, wasn’t there, Pete?’

  ‘There’s always something some place. Which way’s town, you reckon?’

  Hester pointed east and then west. ‘Could be that way. Or maybe that way. I’m heading this way. West. You coming?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see you when you make up your mind.’

  Pete watched as Hester walked out along the highway, tracing his own long shadow. He thought about following but had failed to decide by the time Hester had vanished into the distance. He walked across to a circle of ground and dropped to his knees. For reasons he would never be able to comprehend Pete started digging with both hands.

  LIAM

  In the year of his sixteenth birthday my uncle Liam spent time in youth lock-up after a robbery on a newsagency. The shop was run by a Mr Quigley who’d fought in New Guinea during the war. Although he never spoke of his experience, Quigley returned home traumatised and would often wake in the night screaming with rage. His wife died two years after his return and Quigley was left to cope alone. It didn’t take long for his life to fall apart. It was common for him to politely greet a visitor to the shop only to abuse the same person minutes later. He once threw a handful of coins at a customer and the police were called. When newspaper proprietors, confectioners and tobacconists would no longer supply the shop with goods, Quigley’s business collapsed. The shop remained open nonetheless. Newspapers and magazines, some many months old, their corners nibbled at by mice, sat on the shelves unsold. When unsuspecting customers entered the newsagency and were confronted by the mumbling shopkeeper wearing nothing but a moth-eaten dressing-gown and reeking of urine, they made a quick exit.

  Although he appeared to live in poverty, a rumour circulated the neighbourhood that Quigley kept large amounts of cash secreted inside the shop. The story of a hidden stash took on the status of myth and the supposed hundreds of pounds soon grew into thousands, eventually tempting a pair of teenage boys to rob the old man. One of the robbers was Liam, the youngest of my grandmother’s four children, a deceptively sweet faced boy with a head of rich auburn hair and large brown eyes. Liam had run wild from a young age. My grandmother did her best to rein him in, but had little control over a boy she admitted herself was born for trouble.

  Liam broke into the newsagency late one night with his friend, Martin Caton. Well after Quigley had locked up the shop and gone upstairs to bed they jemmied the side door with a pinch bar and began ransacking shelves and cupboards. Unknown to the boys, Quigley was awake, having been stirred by one of his night terrors. He heard the commotion and tore down the stairs screaming a war cry. When Quigley reached the landing, he fell and tumbled into the hallway breaking a shoulder bone and several ribs. Liam went to investigate and saw Mr Quigley on the ground moaning in pain. He and Martin panicked, left Quigley where he lay, and ran from the shop.

  The pair were arrested two days later. The evening before, Martin had been out on a date with a girl at the local movie theatre and bragged about what he and Liam had done. She went home that night and told her father, a prison warden, who walked straight to the local police station and repeated the story. When the officers arrived at the newsagency they found Quigley still lying where he’d landed from the fall. He was unconscious, dehydrated, and had soiled himself. The boys were arrested, remanded and appeared before a judge at the Children’s Court two months later, where they each received a custodial sentence as a result of, according to the judge, an act of extreme cowardice committed against a war hero.

  I would visit Liam with my mother on Sundays. She’d take him a chocolate bar and a bottle of soft drink, a comic book and cigarettes. We’d sit on a bench in the sun, my mother preening her younger brother’s unruly hair. Liam had that impact on people. As troublesome as he was, most adored him. I was seven years old, about to turn eight, and couldn’t comprehend that at the end of our visit Liam couldn’t come home, too.

  On his release, a year later, Liam asked my mother if he could stay with us. We lived several suburbs away from where the crime had occurred, and the streets where Liam’s teenage friends continued to cause occasional havoc. Whether they might be a bad influence on him, or more likely, that Liam would lead them to trouble, my mother agreed but only on the condition he avoid his old friends. My grandmother, who rarely visited Liam in lock-up, was unhappy about the arrangement. She and my mother argued and stopped speaking to each other. My father was also unhappy about Liam coming to stay, complaining to my mother that our house was already overcrowded. Surprisingly, she got her way, firmly telling my father that the decision to support her brother had been finalised and she wouldn’t be going back on it.

  Our house was dominated by my father; his physical presence, his sullen moods, his unpredictable explosions, even the sound of his shuffling work boots in the hallway when he arrived home was ominous. Privacy was non-existent and secrets impossible to keep. My parents shared the front room with a ridiculously oversized club lounge, a twenty-one-inch television set, purchased on the never-never, and a radiogram ‘three-in-one’, old enough to play seventy-eight records. I slept in the second room with my older brother, Matthew, and my three sisters, Margaret, Irene and baby Rose. The room was furnished with a pair of double bunks, one on each side of the room and a cot under the single window for Rose, who was a little over a year old when Liam arrived.

  He came only with an army duffel bag my mother bought for him from the disposal store. The bag contained a few spare clothes, a breadboard he’d made for my mother in the lock-up workshop and a pile of dog-eared comic books. Mum decided I’d move down to the bottom bunk with Matthew, allowing Liam to enjoy the top bunk to himself. Irene, who was four, slept in the top bunk across the room. Although initially she was a little fearful of Liam, she couldn’t take her eyes off him, and as happened with most people, she soon fell for him. Irene would wake early of a morning and climb down from her bunk and then up the ladder, into Liam’s bed. I’d wake to the sounds of him whispering Irene a story that he’d made up, or reading to her from one of his comic books.

  Liam had been with us for less than a month when my eldest sister, Margaret, came home from school full of anger. A girl had confronted her in the yard, shouting to other students gathered around them that our family was sharing our house with a criminal, a murderer, and that the church would never tolerate the situation if the details were known. She told Margaret she should be expelled, immediately. That afternoon Margaret sat on her bed waiting for Liam. When he came home she asked him directly if he had killed a person.

  ‘Of course not. I swear on your mother’s life that it’s not true.’

  ‘Well, what did you do wrong to be locked away?’

  Liam sat on Margaret’s bed and told us the story of the newsagency break-in and said he felt terrible for the trouble he’d caused Mr Quigley.

  ‘It will never happen again. Anything like that.’

  Margaret stood up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you, cousin. I believe you.’

  Liam took no time settling in. His probation officer arranged a job for him at Stones Timber Mill, not more than a ten-minute walk from our house. He enjoyed the mill and never missed a day’s work. If he happened to be passing by on a timber delivery, he’d drop off a load of off-cuts for our fire. Liam also changed the mood of the house with his warmth and humour; he was a great storyteller and never told the same story twice, unless one of us insisted on it. He was able to hold our attention from the first to the last word. After he’d left the front room one night, on a visit to the backyard toilet with a lamp for company, my mother said that if Liam applied himself he could become a writer one day. If she’d mentioned that word – writer – in the same sentence as anyone else in the family, it would have sounded ridiculous. With regard to Liam it made pe
rfect sense.

  His influence on the family gradually extended to my father. As Liam told a story my father would poke the glowing fire, occasionally adding a block or two of wood. To everyone’s surprise he began sharing stories of his own. While he sometimes stumbled with words, I gradually learned more about his past. He told us about the years he spent on the road with his parents. They had worked as labourers in the fruit-picking industry and moved from town to town, which meant my father had little formal education. He also told stories about his army service, a period of his life he’d never spoken of before.

  Months after Liam moved in with us I was doing one of my regular chores, helping Margaret with the Saturday morning shopping. It was her job to go into each shop – the grocer, the butcher and the baker – while I waited in the street with the baby pram that doubled as a shopping trolley. I was looking in the window at the grotesque line-up of decapitated pigs’ heads that both frightened and fascinated me, when I felt something lick the side of my leg. I looked down and saw a dog. It was a solid animal with a rich brown coat except for the white socks on its paws. I dropped to my knees and gave the dog a pat. It ran around in circles, wildly wagging its tail, jumping up and licking me.

  When Margaret came out of the shop she ordered me to leave the dog alone. I did so, reluctantly. The dog followed us, initially at some distance. We turned the corner at the end of the main street and the dog trailed behind. Margaret tried shooing it away, with little luck. She unwrapped the parcel of meat, took out a chop and waved it in front of the dog’s face. The dog snapped at the meat as she pulled it away. Margaret ran into the middle of the road and hurled the chop into a vacant allotment. The dog raced into the empty block, sniffing amongst the weeds and rubbish in search of the meat. As we turned into our street I looked over my shoulder. The dog was nowhere to be seen. We thought we’d lost it until Margaret was just about to open our front gate and the dog came running down the the road with the chop hanging from the side of its mouth.

  There had been many occasions when we’d asked my father if we could have a pet. This was a time when dogs were given away free and it was not uncommon for a pup to be left tied up outside the milk-bar for anybody who wanted to take it home. My father would argue that he could hardly afford to feed his own children, let alone an animal. His claim wasn’t quite true, of course. My father was no drunk. Not at all. But he enjoyed a glass of beer after work and bought the newspaper every morning. I was convinced all we needed to do in order to afford a dog was to persuade him to give up drinking and reading the paper; an unlikely solution that I knew, even at a young age, could never be suggested to him.

  While Margaret and my mother unloaded the groceries that morning I made a peanut butter sandwich and quietly snuck out of the house. I was desperate to play with the dog. I ate half the sandwich and offered it the other half. The dog showed no interest, but followed me anyway. We spent the day together on the flat, a scrubby patch of land three streets from home. It was dotted with broken swings, a seesaw, maypole and a slide. The flat was where kids played British Bulldog and learned to smoke cigarettes. One of the older boys playing competition marbles that day got down on his hands and knees behind the dog and told me it was a girl dog.

  ‘This dog has no balls,’ he explained.

  Another kid, Lenny Kelly, who’d had polio and wore callipers, interrupted. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s not a boy. Some boy dogs have no balls either. I’ve seen my dad cut them off. Stuck our new pup in a gumboot, headfirst so he couldn’t move or bite, and snipped his balls off with a razor.’

  Other players who’d gathered around to pat the dog looked at Lenny like he was mental and went back to the marbles game.

  By late afternoon, when the time had come for me to go home and light the fire, I didn’t know what to do with the dog. I couldn’t stop her following me home so I snuck her through the side gate, into the backyard. I tried coaxing her inside the back toilet but she was too smart for me and sprinted excitedly around the yard in wide circles, barking loudly enough to bring my mother outside. She pointed and screamed, A dog! Liam was close behind her. He smiled, ran over and tickled the dog behind the ears. My mother shook her head and walked back inside, leaving Liam and me to play with the dog until the sun had gone down. The house across the lane from us was empty and when it was time for us to sit down and eat we hid her in the back shed.

  Most days my father finished work on the garbage truck before lunchtime. He would come home, have a sleep and then sit up in bed reading through a pile of paperback westerns. In the late afternoon he’d head for the pub and have no more than two glasses of beer before walking home. My mother could set the clock by his regularity. He’d walk back into the house at ten minutes after six o’clock closing.

  The next afternoon, I was playing in the yard with the dog, and was enjoying myself so much I forgot about the time. I was about to put her in the shed across the lane when my father called me into the kitchen for tea, Now! I panicked, left the dog in our yard and ran inside. The food was already on the table. While Margaret said grace I prayed that the dog would keep quiet, at least until my father fell asleep in front of the fire, which he usually did soon after we’d eaten.

  My mother cooked the chops that night. Dishing up, she complained the butcher had pulled up short. ‘How many chops did you ask for, Margie?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Margaret answered, without missing a beat.

  ‘Well, there’s not twelve here. You keep a watch on him next time. Count them out in front of him if you need to.’

  Outside, the dog had picked up the scent of the grilled chops. She yelped and scratched at the back door. My father stood up from the table and pulled the door open. The dog jumped at him. ‘What the hell is this?’

  In any other circumstances my father would have kicked the dog’s arse and thrown her into the street but Liam came to the rescue, saving me and the dog both. He quickly invented a story that the dog had followed him home and asked if we could keep it. Liam assured my dad that he’d pay for her food from his own wages, and he’d pick up her mess in the yard and give her a hose down and wash once a week.

  ‘She’ll be no trouble,’ he smiled. ‘Look. She’s a beauty.’

  We all looked to my father for a response. He fell silent and walked back into the house, one of the few times I remember him resigned to defeat.

  We enjoyed that summer with Sally Ann, the name Irene gave the dog, in honour of her closest friend in kindergarten. Sally Ann followed me everywhere I went during the day and slept in the kitchen on a stuffed hessian sack of a night. My father left the house early of a morning for work and once he’d gone I’d fetch Sally Ann from the kitchen and put her under the blankets with me, which annoyed Matthew, as the bed was already crowded. Sally Ann also ate breakfast with the family, enjoying a bowl of milky tea and two slices of buttered toast each morning.

  Laying in bed one night, jammed between Matthew and the wall, I heard people talking loudly in the front room. Sally Ann let out a growl from the kitchen. Liam had been to the football that day and hadn’t come home. I shook Matthew awake.

  ‘Hey, Matt. They’re fighting in there.’

  He rolled from his stomach onto his back. ‘What?’

  ‘Mum and Dad. I think they must be having an argument.’

  He sat up in bed and listened. ‘You’re having one of your nightmares. Get back to sleep.’

  I lay as still as I could until I was sure that Matthew had fallen back to sleep and then put my arm around him for comfort.

  The next morning, when I got out of bed to go into the kitchen to get Sally Ann, Rose’s cot was empty. In the kitchen my grandmother was sitting at the table, my mother across from her, nursing Rose. Sally Ann lay on her bed, looking mournful. I hadn’t seen my grandmother in a long time. She looked terrible. Her hair was a salt and pepper colour and stood on end, while her face was caked with a powder that
gave her skin a grey appearance. A young man stood against the kitchen sink drinking tea. He wore a grubby pair of overalls and a work jacket. I didn’t recognise him but would learn later that he was Liam’s older brother, my uncle Jack.

  ‘Give your nan a kiss,’ my mother ordered.

  I kissed my grandmother on the cheek and was left with the taste of scented powder on my lips. I felt sick. My grandmother didn’t say a word to me. She was looking down at the leaves in the bottom of an empty tea cup. I noticed that the rim of the cup was lipstick stained. My mother ordered me back to my room. ‘Get your brother and sisters up.’

  I was hungry. ‘What about breakfast?’

  ‘You can have it when you get back. I want the four of you off to early Mass.’

  Matthew, Margaret, Irene and I got ready and left the house. A Bedford truck was parked in the street. I held Irene’s hand as we walked to church, as much for my own comfort as hers. There was something terribly wrong at home and I was sure that Margaret knew more than the rest of us about what was going on.

  After Mass she demanded we say a prayer at each of the twelve Stations of the Cross. Matthew refused and waited for us on the stone steps out front of the church. When we got home the truck was gone and so was my grandmother. Inside, the house was deadly quiet and my mother was nowhere to be seen. My father was standing in the kitchen awkwardly nursing Rose. He handed her to Margaret.

  Around lunchtime my mother returned home with a steaming package of fish and chips. She opened it at the kitchen table. Such food was a rare treat. We ate together in silence, savouring the meal and holding the tension at bay. Afterwards, my mother put Irene in the cot with Rose, handed her a cloth book and asked Irene to read a story to her baby sister, which wasn’t easy, seeing as Irene could hardly read herself. She then ordered us older kids to sit at the kitchen table, where she delivered the terrible news. Liam had been killed the night before.