He wished Patty would go quickly. Yet he knew she would hang about, nuzzling into him like a puppy, waiting for the words of endearment that he felt too weary to formulate.
His hands strayed down over her throat and onto her young, firm breasts, but he was too tired to be really interested. Patty’s face was upturned to his, her lips still tremulous and eager. He bent over her, kissing her now without passion, trying to disguise his impatience. His eye strayed to the hands of his watch.
‘Nearly time to go, sweetheart,’ he said.
She sat up, straightening her hair. Her mother would be waiting, sitting up in the corner of the untidy room, her sharp eyes ready to inspect her hair, her lipstick, her rumpled skirt.
Renshaw handed her his comb. He was anxious to be rid of her. He helped smooth her skirt and held the mirror while she dabbed her nose with powder and marked in her mouth with vermilion lipstick. She was pretty enough, he thought, and eager. She was like the smooth, lush peaches in an orchard he had visited as a child.
But sitting in the car, impatiently waiting for her to go, he felt no emotion; nothing but a faint feeling of aversion that he knew would deepen from now on.
With her hair combed down, ready to step from the car, she leant towards him. Her voice was soft and husky. There was rhythm and melody in it, but the accent was Barrington Terrace, and the beauty was lost on Renshaw.
In the light she looked little more than a child.
‘You meant it—what you said?’ she asked him.
He was used to this. Did he mean? Of course he meant. He stirred himself.
There was a technique that led to the pick-up, the romance, the moment of satisfaction. There was a technique for the brush-off too. It was gradual, but final.
‘Did you mean it—what you said about us getting married?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
There was silence. He wished she would go, stop standing there asking silly questions.
‘I feel frightened,’ she said. ‘You don’t think…?’
‘I don’t,’ Renshaw said. ‘There’s not a chance in a thousand. Now be a good girl and hop up into bed.’
He looked again at his watch. Almost two o’clock.
The trouble with virgins, they always wanted reassuring. He wondered if the game was worth the candle. Fretful little bitches who hollered about marriage. No experience, no technique, and an hour’s post-mortem after the act.
She stepped back, reassured, and Renshaw let in the clutch. He backed to the corner, then headed past the Parade. Patty listened to the hum of the engine until the sound was lost in the night.
Her heels were too high, and they gave her an odd look, like a doll teetering a little forward on its tiny feet. They also made a clicking, clattering sound on the pavement as she walked.
As she paused at the terrace door, a man passed. It was Oliver Henery, who worked on the mangles and helped load the vats.
‘Good night,’ Patty said.
Oliver stopped. His hair was straight and well brushed. He had a sardonic, amused grin on his face.
He doesn’t like me, Patty thought. And that’s because I’m Renshaw’s girl.
‘You mean “good morning”, don’t you?’ Oliver said. He grinned a very sharp, knowing grin that was nevertheless friendly.
‘Time you were in bed,’ he said, and walked on down the Parade. Patty saw him, now solid in the moonlight, now melting into the dark shadows of the houses, walking on towards the point where the two vertical lines of the street seemed to rush together.
Then, quietly, she slipped off her shoes and turned the key in the lock.
Mrs Webb, the landlady and custodian of the morals of the residents of Barrington Terrace, occupied the front room. She retired early, first cutting off all electricity at the main.
Patty closed the door behind her. In the darkness, the straight stairway rose out of the front room. She had almost reached it when she heard a movement. A body turned over in bed and she heard the scraping of a match. She shrank close against the wall. The match spluttered and slowly found the wick of the candle in the old-fashioned enamelled candlestick.
Mrs Webb held the candle up and peered into the room.
‘Who’s there?’ she called.
Patty pressed close to the shadows.
Mrs Webb moved the light along one wall, then another, until it picked up Patty’s shrinking form. She held the candle, outlining the girl’s slight figure, her drooping head and outstretched arms.
Then she got slowly out of bed, draping a blanket round her shoulders, and advanced towards her.
Neither spoke.
Mrs Webb looked in turn at the shoes, at Patty’s crumpled skirt, at the alarm clock ticking on the rickety table.
Then, drawing back her lips, she said one word. ‘Slut.’
Now the spell was broken. Patty dashed for the stairs, running with no thought but escape up to the third floor. There pale light glimmered under the door, announcing her mother’s vigil.
In her flight she had lost a new metal bracelet that had cost Renshaw seven and elevenpence. She searched for a while in the thick darkness, but it was nowhere to be found, and she sat, suddenly weak with emotion and the happenings of this extraordinary night, crying a little from excitement and fatigue.
When she pushed the door open her mother saw the shoes clasped in her hands, the new, gaudy baubles in her ears and round her throat, the tear-washed face and the bedraggled skirt.
All around, as far as she could reach with her still strong arms, the room was tidy. The ink-stained red cloth on the table was smoothed and neat, the thin globe of the kerosene lamp gleamed and the flame burned clean from the trimmed wick. Beyond the reach of her arms there were papers, clothes waiting to be washed, and Patty’s still unmade bed.
She tried not to look at Patty.
There was tea in the thermos flask, hot and sweet, and Patty drank it gladly.
Then the lamp was turned low.
Raising herself on her hands, Mrs Nicholls slid into bed.
For a while there was the sound of Patty turning the mattress, straightening the sheets. Then, with the light out, the sound of Patty washing. Mrs Nicholls carried the thought into her uneasy sleep, until it became part of the drifting calls from the railway-yards, the occasional taxi, the clattering milk carts, and at last the shrill early morning whistle of the Dyehouse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was almost dark when Barney Monahan opened the gate and pushed into the garden. All around was scrubby bushland, grey and depressing.
On the uplands a little beyond the house was a group of bloodwoods. Later, in the autumn, the trees would burst into a mass of feathery white gum blossoms, fragrant and honey-sweet.
Tonight they stood, dark sentinels, their long green leaves pointing downwards, the bark serried and marked by blood-red sap. Soon the possums with their grey furred coats would appear, carrying their young on their backs or in their pouches. They would merge with the shadows to become part of the grey night.
When Barney was building a shed the possums had built in the ceiling.
‘You want to get rid of them,’ neighbours said.
But he let them stay. Esther liked them, and fed them bread soaked in tea and sugar.
The house was remote from the Dyehouse. Barney had bought the land—rough, isolated and scrubby, on the edge of a sweeping reserve near where the train came round the loop from Sutherland. It was cheap, but it took every penny of his carefully hoarded money to pay for it. There was nothing left over for luxuries, and he and Esther had started in a tent bought second-hand in Oxford Street.
That was a long time ago.
Tenaciously, after his day’s work at the Dyehouse, he had worked on the block with Esther, clearing the rough undergrowth but keeping the trees. Then the slow job of pegging out, digging, splitting stone for the foundation in order to save money; the period of scraping, economizing, going without. And gradually the small timber-framed cottage was
raised. Into six squares they had fitted two bedrooms, a bathroom, a laundry, a kitchen-cum-living room. And there was his shed made from odds and ends of material and plain junk. It housed the tools, the tent carefully packed and tied to the ceiling, and the stretchers.
This was his home, the best he could afford, and he had struggled hard to get it.
Into this structure—peeling, and beginning now to need a fresh coat of paint—had gone his strength, his leisure and his youth.
At first, when he was younger, the journey home from the Dyehouse had been a joy. There were fewer people living so far out, and seats were always available. It had been good to sit with the windows up and drink in the clean air, to watch the houses swallowed up and the paddocks and trees emerge.
Now the journey was something to reckon with. A man was lucky to find a seat even on the early morning trains and more often than not he stood hanging onto the back of a seat, lifting his feet, resting them, bracing himself for the journey.
And then the day. Sweating in the Dyehouse. Pulling the cloth through the winches, packing down the hydro, loading the vats.
Then the rush for the train home; racing through the light summer evenings, or the dark, sullen landscape of winter. The walk from the station. Five, ten, twenty minutes. The last excruciating minutes! And then there was the menacing little house, demanding more paint; pipes to be fixed, cupboards not quite finished, electricity not yet connected.
Barney fiddled in the garden, unwilling to open the door, trying not to think of Esther. But finally, finding no comfort in the dreary grey of the evening, he pushed the door open and struck a match. The lamp’s blackened chimney was a sharp reminder of Esther’s absence.
He lit the lamp and looked critically round the room. It was small, mean and oppressive. The remains of his breakfast were still on the kitchen table. The bread was stale and hard, the eggshells white and flat. There were dishes piled on the sink. Cups smeared and tea-stained, an enamel plate, a teapot without a lid. The gingham cover had slipped from the homemade settee; there was a rip in its flouncing.
He went over, trying vaguely to straighten it up, to put the cushions into place.
He went through to the bedroom. The room was untidy, the bed unmade. The closed room smelled of stale tobacco. He put down the lamp and bent over to pick up a soiled sheet, but let it fall again on the floor. He threw the pillows onto the bed.
He sat down, running his fingers through his hair. He could see his reflection in the mirror; an ageing man with sallow face, hair still thick, but grey.
He went through to Kathy’s bedroom. Here the bed was made, the quilt hanging evenly to the floor. The cheap, thin curtains were gay. On the toy-box that he had made from a discarded packing-case were ranged Kathy’s toys. He bent over and picked up the cheap little black doll with one leg off. He had bought it eighteen years ago, when Kathy had been one year old. There was the giraffe that he and Esther had made for her fifth birthday. A fine tall giraffe, eighteen inches high, made from waste and graphed from a pattern Esther had found in an old journal.
How he had loved Kathy! Sitting now in the empty house he sought to recapture the joy of those earlier days. He picked up a book and turned the leaf. ‘To Kathy on her twelfth birthday.’ There was an album. He thumbed through it. Kathy sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Kathy married, away from the struggle. Decently married to a man with a trade.
But there was Esther!
He brought his mind sharply and suddenly back to Esther.
The kitchen. The lamp flaring, the heat rising from the stove. And Esther, gaunt, hollow-eyed, grey and haggard, telling him.
God in heaven it was good! It was a bloody circus!
The makeshift kitchen; the flaring light; the dehydrated woman; the weary, ageing man! And the womb. The tenacious womb.
‘It couldn’t be,’ he said.
He wanted to shout it. As though the very sound of his voice could make this thing not be.
How could it? Look at her! Her skinny arms, her stringy grey hair, her thin face with the cheeks fallen in because there were no teeth behind them.
How could it be? What spark could leap from the weary comforts of their love? What spartan seed nestle in that ageing womb?
‘You’re sure?’ he said.
The stillness answered him. Her drooping figure, her arms hanging wearily from their sockets.
She turned so that the light fell harshly across her face.
No need for her to speak. Her hollow, tired eyes confirmed the answer.
She was sure. How many nights had she lain, looking into the soft dark, thinking? Being sure, before troubling him.
‘But how could it be?’
The kitchen was suddenly a trap. He was struggling like a rat. The steel of the railway tracks, the revolving cloth on the brusher, the swishing of the water in the vats, the shabby little cottage, all clamoured and thundered in his brain.
‘Perhaps,’ he said evenly, ‘you will miscarry.’
Barney put down the album. He lingered, unwilling to leave the clean freshness of Kathy’s room. He went into the kitchen. There was no kindling for the fire. He went out into the dreary night and gathered a handful of gumleaves and candle bark. The axe was standing in front of the shed. He split the logs slowly and methodically. The action brought relief, and despite his aching arms he continued to work, splitting the logs and piling them in the woodshed.
CHAPTER NINE
There had been little sleep for Barney that night. Worn out, Esther slept fitfully. But with the lamp out and the cotton sheets drawn over his body, he lay looking up into the dark. He saw the embedded embryo, fighting to retain its slender hold on life. His mind leapt to the future. Doctors, hospitals, the inadequate Social Service. And in the background the grey, steamy Dyehouse.
But morning brought no solution. He had slept late, but it was still dark when Esther called him. He sat silently through breakfast, rubbing his hand over the stubbly growth on his chin. He was too late to shave and too tired to care about it. He put his razor in his bag. He would clean up at morning-tea time.
It was scarcely daybreak when he called goodbye to Esther and set off down the rough road that led to the railway tracks. Far off he could hear the train. It was coming round on the loop. He began to walk a little faster, and then to trot.
His breath came in great gasps and the backs of his legs ached. He should be easing up, slowing down. He was no longer young: the thought hit him suddenly. And all the time he had been going on, making the pace, being better than the youngsters, while time was creeping up.
The train was well round the bend and he began to run again. His head throbbed. But he must run. Like a rabbit—run, run in the dark morning. Forget the way the air was pumping and sobbing in his lungs. Forget the ache in his tired legs. Run. Trot, trot, run. Run grey-faced and unshaven over the broken ground. He was almost there. His feet were on the steps. Thirty and more of them, and then the platform, and already slowing to a stop, the train lights yellow in the coming dawn.
Goodwin had a reputation in the Dyehouse. He was ‘in the know’. He knew a woman.
‘Fifteen pounds down,’ Goodwin said, ‘and fifteen pounds when the job’s done.’
He and Barney were talking together at morning-tea break.
‘Thirty pounds?’ Barney laughed. ‘It’s pretty steep.’
‘Oh, well—you take it or leave it. It’s not my pigeon. I can’t say I had any finger in the pie.’
‘What’s it worth to you?’ Barney asked.
Goodwin shrugged.
‘I tell you I know this dame. I get Sweet Fanny Alley out of it. As it is I take a pretty big risk telling you. Yesterday you were bellyaching like a cut cat over this, and now thirty’s too steep.’
He pushed on past Barney.
‘Wait on,’ Barney called.
He had the money.
‘We’ll go down tomorrow after work,’ Goodwin said.
But Esther would have to be told.
Barney walked slowly down to the vats, thinking of what he would say to her.
CHAPTER TEN
In the afternoon of the next day, Esther set about tidying up the kitchen.
She worked mechanically, scraping the plates, piling them onto the sink, lifting the steaming kettle from the stove, listening to the hissing sound of the water as it hit the cold sink. She swept up the floor, went into the yard to fetch wood. She stacked the wood into the box until it was full. She rinsed her hands and straightened her hair. In the shadowy mirror her face was strained and her eyes were dark. There were purple shadows under them.
In the bedroom she stripped the bed, changing the sheets and pillowcases.
There was no need to begin preparing the evening meal yet. Barney would be late. She put the thought at the back of her mind.
With everything tidy, she walked towards the little garden in front of the house. It was an effort to get down the verandah step, and she stood for a minute holding on to the post, listening to her heart. Her legs were heavy, and suddenly the sharp warning pains assailed her.
She sat down suddenly on the step feeling faint and dizzy.
The sun was still above the treetops on the ridges, but the gully was shadowy. Children were going past on the way home from school. Sitting with her head propped against the verandah post, she could hear them skipping and chattering, but they seemed a long way off.
They’re only at the gate, she thought. I could call out to them.
At four o’clock Mrs Macaulay closed her cottage door. She had her basket, her string bag, and the list for her shopping. A middle-aged woman in sensible walking shoes and a dark floral frock, she came down the unmade bush track, looking inquisitively into gardens as she passed, waving greetings to people busy round their houses.
There’s something funny going on at Monahan’s—you mark my words, she told herself. Something pretty queer.
She stopped at the front gate. Esther was sitting on the verandah, her head against the post, her eyes closed.
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