Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  He left a pause while he wheezed for the strength to continue. When he did speak again, it was to dream out loud.

  – If you leave a stack of bricks on a flat place long enough, they’ll fall over. That’s a mystery. Nobody can tell me why. Like when a sea eagle comes in from the coast all this way, he shouldn’t have come so far but you’re glad to see him. Think about that. We could have done with a mascot this morning, the dreamer had forgotten the nature of the occasion.

  He lurched forward to the coffin. He witnessed death, a weather-worn mossy stone head looking in for a long time.

  – He’s a fine lad Felicia my dear, he complimented her. How wicked we are, he added to encompass them all (us all).

  – Yes, she whispered.

  The mourners moved closer to examine the boy’s face for likenesses.

  – Well mother, Mr McTaggart concluded thus making her relationship legitimate. If you’re ready we’ll take him now and put him away.

  She nodded.

  – I brought some flowers, Olive McAloon offered.

  So had they all. The summer perfumes advanced to suffocate Miss Brinsmead. They arranged the flowers in the coffin, patted rustling chrysanthemum petals into place, bedding carnations and honeysuckle deeply in every available cranny around the child. Then came the ritual draping across the coffin of a string of metallic tassles, last relic of the old horse-drawn hearse from the town’s heyday. He was ready. Bill Swan and his father took one end while the two Buddalls took the other, being the nearest match for shortness. They hoisted it on their shoulders. Jasper led the way carrying the lid to be nailed on when they reached the graveside, as the custom was. Across the bar-room they went, the coffin bucking and pitching while they failed to agree on a common step, the body softly thudding, the heap of flowers heaving to the shape of a boy, blossoms tumbling out as Fido let tributes drop. Rose Swan, Billy’s mother, picked them up because she had, perhaps, lost her own son.

  Sebastian could not be expected to realize Felicia, for once, did not understand what anything meant, had no notion what he was doing for her. He stood miserably among his customers, sacrificing himself to his sister’s greater need. The town was allowing her the privilege of sharing her grief; she needed to, God knows she had been through enough. He would destroy this for her if he demanded the same right for himself. In his view, the people thought her strange and cruel to keep the child hidden, contributed their flowers with tightlipped disapproval, but did not regard her as an unnatural parent, not in her sorrow. He need only speak the truth, claim his darling son, to destroy what she had, the communion at this moment, to make Fido an object of revulsion. Forgive me, Fido, he prayed as a nonentity. He had expressed what he felt early that morning when his charge of gelignite blasted away a slab of cliff to crash across the mouth of the highway. He and Bill Swan had prepared the charge and placed it carefully: in that moment coming close together they moved to the same rhythm, expunging the same memory. So close were they that when he decided to stay with the charge and be killed by it as his son had been killed already, Billy said nothing, asked nothing, understood but did not judge him. Suicide is not often witnessed, still more rarely is it tolerated. Bill, however, turned his back and set off for safety alone; to become a murderer twice. Yes, as Sebastian Brinsmead watched the coffin rock out through the door, he acknowledged that fate was dignified by a certain justice. The corpse had just time to nudge out a head of hydrangea for him. He saw it was for him. He watched the feet trample around it, his son’s token, a blue pad of flowers, a hemisphere of space on the floor. Sebastian approached it eagerly, but Rose Swan was there first and gathered it among her anonymous blooms. A voice was speaking to him, he realized, Miles McTaggart, Miles whom he’d nearly forgotten except sixty years back as the fastest boy runner he’d ever seen.

  – We dug his grave beside Kel McAloon, said Miles kindly. We thought you wouldn’t want the boy next to your father, he added by way of explanation. Him with the sin of taking his own life.

  Nine

  You see, said Mr Ping facing himself in the mirror. I can still do everything.

  Look at the scars, said the man inside him.

  Look at me, said Mr Ping instead. And he stood on his hands. He had a feeling he could no longer stand on one hand as he used to, so he didn’t risk that.

  You never seem to take my advice. You still pretend you’re young. I thought we’d cured that.

  It was different when there was blood, said Mr Ping lying belly-down on the floor.

  Yet you know it’s impossible.

  Youth? Actual youth? Maybe it’s not youth I want after all.

  You mean it could be something you missed?

  Why not? If other people have it. Perhaps I want to stay young so something can happen.

  Happiness, suggested the man inside him.

  Why shouldn’t I? Mr Ping began a routine of push-ups. His face bobbed in and out of the mirror’s range. Silence in the cool bathroom. But the moment he stood, the voice was at him again.

  What’s the point of keeping in training?

  Watch this, said Mr Ping leaning backwards, hands above his head, far back, arching right over till his palms rested on the floor. Then he somersaulted towards the door and came back to the mirror with a vain shake of his shoulders. Sixty-eight and I can still do that, he pointed out. The man inside him was struck dumb. So he reached for his trousers and pulled them on, slipped his arms into a shirt (he’d prepared the one with the pockets for today). I’ve got an idea, he said watching his fingers at work on the shirt buttons, refusing to look himself in the face. Then he took his boots which he seldom wore and threaded a single long lace through both so he could sling them round his neck. I can still do everything I used to do, he told the mirror. So why not? He went out to fetch his jacket. On top of the jacket lay an unfamiliar ladies’ purse. Of course, yes, he remembered the other day. The failure of Alice. That Lang girl viewing his beautiful beast. He had forgotten how the job began with his savaging of Mercy’s beloved pet; but restoring a dream was fresh in his mind. In the end he watched with the locals as if he were not related to the cow. Mr Ping opened the purse he had picked up in the gutter. Inside he found two letters. One of them began: Vivien my duck, you should just see what a picture my peonies are this year, something wonderful will happen if you believe in signs, how green Mrs Cox and Mrs Pye, whom you will remember I dare say, go when they pass my gate, I could clap my hands, they have made my life a misery with their tittletattle, you wouldn’t believe … Mr Ping was not interested. He unfolded the other letter: Dearest Auntie Anne, nothing has happened yet … Mr Ping laughed a silent laugh. He felt purged and hopeful, anything possible, the world invited him. He could tolerate triviality. Also he had an inspiration. He replaced the letters in the purse, he would be passing her way.

  That was how he invented the act of disinterested kindness.

  He’d call, though he had no need to do so, and leave the purse for her to find when she came home from the funeral. Everybody was at the funeral except himself. He’d place it on the verandah. He could see nothing against that. He turned along the Lang track with this irreproachable intention, pushed open the gate and walked in up the steps without hesitation. It never occurred to him that she might be afraid Felicia’s nightmare could prove contagious.

  – My purse! declared a voice, startling him. How kind of you Mr Ping. I was so very upset yesterday.

  She didn’t like him, he could tell. Yet she invited him to have a cup of tea with her, which he declined.

  – Are you going to stop in this town? he asked, surprised at the way she clutched the purse with its gossipy letters.

  – That’s how things seem to be turning out.

  – What did you do for a crust?

  – I was a schoolteacher, she answered.

  – There’s no kids to teach here.

  – There might be.

  – My wife was a schoolteacher, he drawled in the broad Australian accent
he’d cultivated, his virtuoso defence. Till no one wanted her any more.

  She did not comment on this. Instead she retired inside to put her purse somewhere safe, then came back with the air of a new woman. Mr Ping was already surrendering to the flow of events, his mind agilely resolving difficulties as they arose, he found that without any plan a sequence of action was shaping itself towards a definite conclusion. Everything depended on moving as opportunity presented itself. With an ironic twist of his mouth he recalled Felicia once telling him I do not accept what you accept, that is all, I do not accept the world you accept. But what did he accept? What was his world?

  – Miss Lang, he said. If you want to thank me, you can come down the street to the workshop.

  Unwilling as she was, she agreed to go. Dreaded the workshop, the complex presence of that stuffed cow. They walked together. She braved the threat of what she already knew: not just Mrs Ping’s dead hand in the grass but this man who was her husband refusing to help save her, also the proprietorial tone Mr Ping used when referring to Miss Brinsmead. These accusations stuck burrs in her mind on the way, neither of them attempting to be companionable. Yet he was so mild and courteous.

  He did not ask her into the workshop, so she needn’t have feared Alice on the vehicle hoist. He was only in there a minute before he came out again and began padlocking the two doors. Vivien glanced across the fields to the cemetery where a group of black figures, a mourning conference of scarecrows and crows, stood in a close circle. She should go and join them.

  – Now, said Mr Ping. I’m going away. These keys are for the workshop and that one for the house.

  She held them warm in her palm, messengers of his body heat. She remembered Auntie giving her the keys to her own house, and to the labyrinth.

  – I’m new, she objected.

  He was already leading the way in the direction of the waterfall. They reached the head of the winding road where Mrs Ping had driven to her death and now rose with the rest of the dust on the wind.

  – There’s one thing, he said. You might have to go away.

  – No I shan’t go, she answered after a while, fixing her decision.

  – But you are in love with Bill Swan?

  – …

  – People with young children move away.

  – What will you do? she asked, evading his argument.

  – I shall work as an acrobat, the old Chinese replied promptly. I know the trade. I’m not happy here. Mercy, she belonged on the mountain, but I was never happy in prison, Miss Lang, I was taken from my home a long time ago, a small boy. My name in Shanghai was Lu P’an Ping. Why did Australians call me Rupert? It’s a mystery.

  He turned his face toward her for the first time, requiring her to meet his eyes. She controlled her distaste; among the crazed wrinkles, neat scars down the cheeks and across the brow gave him the appearance of having been carved up, stuffed, and stuck back together. His fine white hair had been cropped short.

  – I can come back here and you will have my keys, he said simply.

  Vivien stood in her own thoughts, believing for the first time that her mother’s name was Esther; accepting that her father had threatened to take an overdose of sleeping pills if she, Vivien, turned out to be a girl, how we laughed, and the precious evidence in her purse safely at home. She watched Mr Ping walk away, his jacket slung jauntily over his shoulder, boots dangling round his neck, looking down to where his wife’s truck rusted, his neat bare feet scarcely raising any dust. Now he was far enough away, you could swear he was a youth, so slight and springy his figure appeared. As if the future lay before him. The faint sound of his voice singing in a foreign mode.

  She clinked the keys already warm with her own warmth.

  Ten

  Uncle had a good long look at his house. He stood out in the street and took it all in for the first time in many a long year. His hound Bertha came and stood beside him, watching also, every so often turning on him her sensitive mechanisms for divining his mood. Then he started laughing. The more he looked the more he laughed. Bertha indulgently smiled. He was coughing and laughing at the one time, spitting out gobs of phlegm, his face a great raspberry, his eyes bright with tears. The dog caught on to the spirit of the thing and barked, she joined in happily, dancing round him on elastic paws. How ridiculous it was, this house, hut, everything slapdash, nothing finished, not even the guttering along the front, half a windowframe flaking its original blue paint and the other half disintegrating with dry rot, the whole place leaning against its chimney which had been added as an afterthought one winter, gaps in the walls patched with tin, roofline bowed, the verandah sagging, front steps fallen away, kitchen on a tilt because of the roots of that damn native fig, the fig itself harbouring the whole mosquito population of the shire into the bargain. But what kept Uncle laughing till it hurt, and so that neighbours came out to see, was the plants: grass sprouting here and there up the brickwork chimney, the choko appearing with a basketful of unharvestable fruit from a gap in the roof though god knows where its roots were, the mountainous tangle of living things, creepers and morning glory heaped by the ton over the whole building, stinging nettles among verandah chairs and blackberries in the outdoor bathhouse, his water tank buried under a thicket of lantana, and proliferating grasses tall as a man growing up inside the front room windows, prisoners clawing at the glass.

  Billy’s head poked out from among the morning glory.

  – What’s up, Uncle?

  – You look so bloody silly, Uncle laughed, with your head poked out.

  – Well I’m doing what I can for you, Bill’s face retorted irritably, a flower among flowers.

  Uncle laughed all the more. Lately there had been too much sorrow and worry to be healthy. This was a joke he’d been waiting for, you only see the funny side once.

  The hound barked ecstatically trying to get inside the laughter. Then Uncle’s neighbours began joining in. They stood in the dusty street, hands on hips, and laughed at their own old wrecks. Look at this! and just get a load of mine will you! More people gathered, pointing and sharing what they saw, their threadbare voices young with laughter. It was the joke of a lifetime.

  Eleven

  Mr and Miss Brinsmead sat in their kitchen, not having spoken, the house and the shop fomented warm silences and consolidated the rightness of things which do not move, the dust putting a finish, a bloom, on everything as it was. Only the kitchen and the bedroom still suffered change and use; Fido’s den had given up singing to itself and already crumbled though no one bothered to see, and the shop shut yesterday. They were dressed in their travelling clothes, ready except for their bare feet. But this was not to be another journey abroad with the gold mountain in their wallets. Felicia had lost her bright questioning, her contemptuous toss of the head to set her hair-bag nodding. Sebastian too appeared altered now he must live with the way she hated him for his gift to her, the grief he longed for for himself; he’d grown softer and pinker, with that surprised air of a person who has lost a lifelong protection. She fed him, he fed the chickens, she untwisted his braces when he couldn’t cope, he passed her a letter from Senator Frank Halloran which she had already seen but might wish to read again.

  Dear Mr Brinsmead,

  I’m pleased that we can finally agree on the date for convening our committee and the personnel to sit on it. The sooner this deadlock is solved the better. As you must be aware, every day the highway project is delayed costs the taxpayer thousands of dollars for the idle plant alone, not to mention the cost of uncertainty to yourselves.

  The committee will be invested with a broad brief and, as the attached agenda exemplifies, is expected to discuss the whole range of issues associated with the Government’s plan for the region as this affects Whitey’s Fall and its development.

  The committee’s first sitting, which should resolve the main issue of the highway and its proposed route through the township, will commence at Whitey’s Fall School of Arts at 10.30am, as agr
eed. Local personnel will be as set out here: Mr Sebastian Brinsmead, Miss Felicia Brinsmead, Mrs Bessie Collins, Mr Jasper Schramm, Mr George Swan.

  I look forward to your co-operation and trust that the discussion will prove fruitful and cordial.

  Yours sincerely,

  The Hon. F. T. Halloran

  Felicia received the letter in her hand but declined to re-read it, renewing her knowledge by the feel of the paper.

  – We shall begin in half an hour, Sebastian said.

  For this one moment his sister heard in his tone the hoot of a Sydney steamer and her footsteps together with his drumming the boards of the old pier, the excited voices of travellers and seagulls, heavy objects being moved around … also she heard a thrush calling from an ashtree and saw the ring of flowers she made to hang round his neck while behind him priests advanced in their black habits escorting two prisoners, one of whom called the sea, the sea.

  Sebastian used the silence to inspect his knees where his best trousers stretched shiny; to contemplate also his bare toes, long, white and dirty; to check the two pairs of shoes put ready near the stove. Then he gazed out of the window at that fateful gravel road down the mountain. A fowl strutted, queening it round the kitchen, the ceaseless wind outside tearing at gutters and loose windowframes. To his astonishment Sebastian was assailed by nostalgia, yes for somewhere, for a paved square surrounded by stone buildings, sun-warmed columns, trembling slatted shutters, drains, voices speaking Greek or was it Italian? himself holding little Fido’s hand, pointing out flowers in urns and the British flag fluttering in a breeze perfumed by oranges. Where? But the scent was gone, his eyes saw only a dirt road with yellow dust lifting. He heard the clicking of hen’s feet. He did not go outside: why should he look at that great hole ripped in the yard? or the last living tallow tree in the district?