Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  Senator Halloran, modestly having choosen to be at the south-west corner of the table, periodically reached down to stroke his black dog curled under the chair (well, in the bush they don’t mind informality), touched up his image as arbiter, the man of the moment, one foot in either camp and respect all round. The way he cracked his knuckles betrayed some intellectual activity but so far he had said nothing, local yellow dust burnished the shoulders of his dark jacket because he drove up with the car window open. He welcomed everybody by name when they first gathered.

  The west side of the table was occupied by Jasper Schramm and Sebastian Brinsmead, respectability still sitting misshapenly on Jasper, his nose pendulous, and flapping earlobes worn as if they could be taken off at bedtime. He kept his eyes down for fear of being humiliated by curious glances from those he loved. His elbow touched Sebastian’s elbow. Sebastian, tightly buttoned in his jacket, locks of white hair drifting free behind his ears, the fine white beard spread on his massive chest, every particular of his face settled by some perfectly defined characteristic, the founder of a stable society, a Moses. But he was neither at ease nor conscious of his dignity, he had not yet trusted himself to acknowledge the man between himself and the chairman, the last member of the committee, Mr George Swan, Judas, Quisling Swan the stocky redneck, bitterness and moralism endowing him with a quality of vigour no one else had.

  So they deliberated while wind worried and pushed at the building. A bird fluttered in the ceiling. A few spokes of solid gold sunshine sliced the teeming air, the hall drumming sensuously. The committee was waiting, the chairman having delivered his preamble and his summary. The minutes secretary finished the left hand of the Appassionata and held his pen poised to add a couple of noughts to his salary. All that was needed was somebody to speak, for reason to take its course.

  Thirteen

  Mrs Rose Swan stayed at home meekly working at her chores, the dear little person, mulling over insignificant griefs, sewing at the window where you used to see the tallow-wood tree in the perpetual wind. She assured herself this was a great day for the town, what with the government meeting and George being chosen. Everything would be alright if only she kept quiet and let the men get on with it. But how could she help wondering what her husband was saying, fearful that he may not be clever enough to save making a fool of himself? A suppressed voice spoke of him contemptuously, but she wouldn’t listen. Instead she took refuge in a dream of wealth to be brought by the highway, how she’d have this and that and all electric.

  Suddenly, with the fluid rapidity of a bird flicking its tail and shooting off in an unplanned direction, the world about-faced. Life flipped over. And before you knew where you were, it whirled away on a new course, so that you giddily caught your breath and staggered to retain your balance. The afternoon television program which had been occupying a space somewhere back of centre in her mind, at about the level of her sewing (she was mending Billy’s clothes for when he returned home) now loomed urgently to the foreground. An announcer interrupted the bland chatter, presenting himself solemnly before a backdrop of the nation’s capital and read a newsflash. The newsflash stopped Rose Swan’s blood.

  – The Government of Australia has been dismissed by Vice-Regal decree, he told her. The Governor-General this afternoon dismissed the Prime Minister and his government and called on the Leader of the Opposition to assume responsibility for running the country in a caretaker capacity.

  Rose Swan jumped to her feet, scattering the fragments of her littleness. She towered, she froze, she raged, she sparked with understanding.

  – So we’re still a colony then! she shouted at the announcer who, unaware that this was the first time she had shouted in forty-seven years, droned details that did not explain, could not explain, what was happening. He talked to an empty room. Mrs Swan had gone, her sewing a heap on the floor. She already knew too much to wait for the sedative of dispassionate reason, prismatic colours playing at the rim of her vision, such was her anger. Out in the paddock she headed south-west across country, the sun in her eyes. Must be at Whitey’s Fall before the meeting finished. She’d walk the whole two miles if need be. No, she’d run. Little Rose pushed herself to trot. Unfamiliar. Was trotting. Feeling the unaccustomed discomfort, her breasts flopping, stomach jiggling, thighs and cheeks. Small as she was she felt encumbered by fat. Lungs wheezed. But this had to be done. Mrs Swan was running, making a good go of it. A spirit woke in her. Something nobody could imagine in peacable Australia; the government overthrown by a single man who’d never been voted for, the Queen of England a sinister playing-card figure. Trumps. The Governor-General, to her astonishment, shown to be the joker in the pack. But Mrs Swan ran without fear. She was rediscovering herself, second wind coming nice and easy, her stride lengthening. Herself growing, pulsing, flying, head thrown back in the glorious wind. So long ago. And what did she know? Yes. Yes. She recognized this as a moment waited for. That’s right. People don’t always have to be told what to do. The idea had not shaped itself clearly, but she prepared for it. She ran through the grass along the windy skyline with rejoice in her heart, because at last we’d know what to do. It was the finish of the monarchy in Australia. It was civil war. And this would show the roadworkers were not the enemy, they’d be with us. George was right and Billy was right too; we can’t be kicked around. If Queen Elizabeth wanted it this way, she’d get it in the neck. Ourselves on our own two feet. Independence. Rose Swan panted out the one word us, word of hope. Us. Us. Us, she hissed with each expelled breath. A rhythm of us us us and her great strides. Running strongly, she could last for ever. She was carried along, lifted up, not alone. No. There were others running with her. All over the country at this moment, perhaps thousands of them. Whole cities of people running to their kin, to gather and rise up for their rights. She ran. A lone woman on the great bare hillside, heading round the flank of the mountain towards town, her mind ripe with a single thought: this is what we’ve been waiting for.

  Mr George Swan listened to the chairman outline the procedural assumptions behind the submission from the Australian Aesthetic and Historical Resources Commission which I shall now circulate for your perusal and consideration ladies and gentlemen. He heard Felicia Brinsmead giving her girlish cough. Already uncomfortable at catching the eye of the senator too frequently. Mr Swan wondered briefly what the senator thought of Miss McAloon his estranged mother and her house of knitted rooms, the choking mothball fumes. Well the old lady deserved to be taken down a peg, the way she marched about judging everything. Even the blasted tallow-wood had to be hers of course and not within his rights to cut down. He heard the submission read out; he was beginning to see something.

  So the minutes secretary offered his considered opinion of the problem of getting the highway men (chuckle chuckle) back on the job with the least friction possible. So the Nefertiti lady in her glowing reds and golds registered an impassioned case for the unique village, this collective creation of primitive artists, this Australian cathedral as it were, to be painted, treated, propped, reinforced, sealed and made a monument to the genius of our nation. So Mr Brinsmead spoke icily of rights and privacy, astonishing the meeting with his presence and fluent command of foreign examples. So Senator Halloran placated every ruffling of feelings, every emergent dispute, stressed the national strategy of the planned highway and heard with disbelief Miss Brinsmead reply that the highway was trivial. So the bald man polished his head and blew his nose, experimented with his glasses on the tip of his nose while he bleated yes and yes yes to everything. So the debonair architect scattered kindly gestures about and offered a ritual courtesy of elegant compliments. So Jasper Schramm stood and could find no words, but would not sit, mystified that even this might be his proper contribution, held them all to silence, the doughy cheeks working, his mind stuck on the sobriety of some women in a painting of the moment the world changed. So this speechlessness made George Swan think. So Mum Collins shook her head and berated them for a mob of in
terfering mongrels to come disturbing decent people, so she called them son and sonny and youngfellamelad, my boy, my girl, poppet and you damn hussy. So the chairman pleaded for restraint, decorum, order and an end to argument. So Felicia Brinsmead addressed the nature of the past, taking words from their very mouths to use against them. But still nothing happened. The wind pushed at the building as usual, the roof clattered, a few dazzling bars of light pursued their sundial pace across the room. The dusty air pulsed about them. Reason had died and power took its place: only those without power or the desire for it had the least idea this happened. George Swan, with his vigorous narrow viewpoint, his energy and greed, became the central figure in the discussion. A picnic lunch was unpacked and served. Cups of afternoon tea stood in their rings of milky liquid, biscuit crumbs crunched among the papers. The chief document, a ministerial proposal awaiting the signatures of local residents, lay flimsy and treacherous in front of the chairman.

  Then the most unexpected thing occurred: the wind dropped.

  The mountain wind which had blown with absolute reliability since Whitey’s Fall was built faltered and died altogether. The buildings, braced so long against its pressure, sighed into awkward attitudes, boards creaking painfully at the unknown, leaning to the east for knowledge, the stillness unearthly. The committee listened with apprehension, their senses stretched alert, waiting for reprieve, for a renewed rush of air, the known world.

  The chairman spread his hands before him and examined them for clues to the mysteries of nature and the fickleness of humankind. A steady rain of silence immobilized the meeting. The mountain was to blame for everything, the place incomprehensible. Through the open door the warm air trickled out. Nefertiti shuddered. The trellis groaned feebly. Nothing is without its consequences; a cricket under the floor burst into song, which caused a balloon of tears to rise in Sebastian Brinsmead’s chest for the Lord had cast off another thread, the tapestry perfect, intact, seamless and almost relinquished.

  The eight men and three women looked deep into each other, wholly preoccupied with allegiances, passing their decision along so that yes became no became yes was reaffirmed as yes and yes again became no became yes became definitely no and absolutely no again. One vote left to be cast.

  Mr George Swan, the perennial dealer, master of the card-pack, was still to speak; the government already had a five to four majority, so they were relaxing because this fellow was a pledged progressive, a yes voter. The seating arrangement now shown to have had some system. So the chairman’s hands were washed of blame, the magistracy seen to be above manipulation even on a parliamentary scale. The workmen up at the road site felt a spirit of hope dispel their sluggish weeks. George Swan opened his dry Quisling lips, hearing what nobody else could hear: his wife’s quiet words that night the motorcycle carried Billy away from home for good You were wrong George. It was an enigma, an admission of love. He heard it again as he felt her soft hand slip into his, this sensation altogether beyond his control. No, he said. Then he spoke it out loud No.

  – No.

  – Your father will be so proud, Mum Collins whispered across the table.

  Senator Halloran’s face flushed a difficult red above his white collar; angry, embarrassed at his nominee letting the side down, alarmed that the project might be further delayed, that he might be blamed for bungling, yet gratified at how right he had been about these impossible people, exasperated that he waived his right to speak in the debate, caught by the simple trap of leaving power in the hands of the one man completely unknown: the chairman. To risk so much. Wasn’t it on the cards that the magistrate could actually be impartial and therefore unpredictable? Madness. What did anybody know about this lugubrious fellow except that the Chief Magistrate’s Office sent him? The Chief Magistrate himself might not be above suspicion. Too late to check. Senator Halloran boiled with frustration.

  The room quivered. The inside of a drum. That loose flap of roofing uttered a ghost of its bassoon note.

  The chairman consulted his immobile knuckles, then complained wearily that this was not as he had hoped, however the will of those present being amply clear and beyond further argument, distasteful as it was to him personally to take action in a matter he’d hoped to leave to those more intimately involved, he found himself duty bound to offer his own judgment on the evidence as put forward, trusting this would not be inferred as proclaiming the present hearing exhaustive, he was bound to find in favour of the case representing most responsibly in his view the general benefit of the community at large, a benefit which included not only progress, admirable as progress was, but conservatism where the implementation of new ideas meant irreversible changes. He paused and helped himself to a sip of cold water from his glass to confirm the authenticity and dignity of this impartial decision. Then he croaked the word yes. The word the government was waiting to hear. This was what he had been sent for. And brought Frank Halloran alive again. No one could guess the government itself had fallen. No one could guess the horrors of subservience to follow, the rapacious dogs of international commerce tearing the carcase of the land apart, nor that for all the blunders these might have been the most enlightened years, nor that the people would lie down under the imperial heel. No one knew that Mrs Swan was sweating it out across the paddocks bursting with joy and hope.

  – Have you ever cut down a tree? George Swan asked the School of Arts. A tree you’ve known all your life? And taken full responsibility for cutting it down?

  Tears streamed through the valleys of Mum Collins’s experience, from all her generations the suffering and fortitude gave way, the virtues of courage and honesty swept up through her in successive waves to pour out. Without a word, for there are no words, she sat, her eyes ejecting the world as she knew it to be, the beauty of the mountain flowed down her cheeks, her kindly face itself a map of that mountain; birds too familiar to need names all made tears; tears washed out shy spiders together with the scent of horea and the deep blood of running-postman; out through the crevices where her great-hearted smile grew now welled the colourless amalgam of all colours, the perfumeless knowledge of all perfumes, the bitter taste of everything good being reduced to a thin salty solution.

  Mum Collins’s tears poured on to her dress and her large bare folded arms, down to the table top where (due to its unequal legs) they formed themselves into a runnel, the blind head of which stretched to a golden worm, wavered, seeking, sensing … till it set out with that slowness which takes the watcher beyond time, advancing straight for the chairman, its brow gathering again. And again released. Still the tears flowed from the endless resources of Mum’s huge body; from her thighs and her elbows the forces of grief gathered, from tributaries as remote as her heels and her palms the waters came, from her loins they flooded up into her head and ran glittering, splashing, spouting on her folded arms, out along the channel now established, pushing the head of the tearworm inexorably closer to the chairman. The blind head blazed in a single needle of sunlight that probed through the rotting wall, the tear-journey witnessed by all but Mum Collins herself, its dazzling sparkle flared in every eye among the hollow shapes, and so the head of the weeping of the generations of Whitey’s Fall crept on in the darkness and touched the document laid out before them, under the flimsy paper the unseen tears spread fast as grassfire. Immediately the whole sheet lay wrinkling, stuck to the tabletop, consumed by a grey shadow that shaded away the close typing and undermined the firm signature of the Minister who still used a fountainpen and ink, dispersing his name to a feathering of blue till the ink filled out its own image and a bird formed where there had been an ultimatum a moment before, the wings of the bird blue distance itself breaking free through blank grey cloud. Beyond it, at the far edge of the document, the tears re-formed so that, spent and exhausted, they reached forward just far enough to touch one fingertip of the man who passed judgment on the town and its people. He gently withdrew his hand with a magnificent show of unconcern and plunged it into the hot recesses
of his pocket, vainly hoping to wipe away that icy contact with the real world, its history and meanings. There and then Mum Collins died of grief.

  Somewhere out the back, her housecow gave a single enquiring moo.

  Felicia Brinsmead stood up, not meeting the eyes of her husband nor the sober eyes of Jasper Schramm next to him. Not looking at the representatives of government ministries and instrumentalities, not looking at the honourable senator, nor at the magistrate in the chair. She concentrated on that nowhere which is without perspective, without focus. Distantly her shop cried out from a dream of portents miserable miserable. In one hand she was found to be clutching a pair of scissors. There is something horrible about domestic scissors brought out like that. The departmental architect next to her ducked aside, his dandyish cravat fluttered, agitated, in terror that he might find those precious chrome tips next moment stuck in his throat. Miss Brinsmead saw space. She reached round behind her head, the accustomed fingers caressing her bundle of hard grey hair, handling the netting sack, taking its weight upon herself. She began hacking at the roots, jabbing furiously with those scissors, the long points wounding her scalp, snipping and cutting, missing, wrenching, while her mouth twisted in concentration, her face utterly free of its repertoire of masks, her breath leaping out in huge sobs, explosions of gas from some soft decay, the blades crunched against her gritty hair and squeaked with rancid body oils, the bundle gaped open till light touched the nape of her neck for the first time in living memory, spots of blood blotted ugly patterns on her hands and dripped into the hair, still she drove the scissors to her purpose and the white girlish neck miraculously unlined now arched vulnerable to air and its changes. The hair banged away at her back, a living thing fierce with the struggle to survive, to escape more pain. There. She had it free, clutching it and tearing out the last few threads by the root. For a second her hand and her lip shook. She was reverent with the hair as if it might be a kind of knowledge grown from her head. She cradled it in front of her, helpless to the world while everybody could see the one golden wisp still curling warmly at the end as if nothing had happened. She studied her hair, never like this before. Placed the bundle on the table before her; she was a sovereign, the ceremony of laying aside her imperial orb. Next she bent double, straining the seat backwards, and tugged at her shoes which she put neatly on the floor side by side out of sight. Having accomplished so much, Miss Brinsmead returned upright in her highbacked chair, resting her stubbly scabbed skull against the wood. She was Abraham Lincoln. She was Abraham. She settled her arms along the chair arms, her bare feet flat on the boards, her breathing controlled, the acid stink of dirty clothing pervaded the room, a clock ticked busily in the well of her throat. When next the chairman looked up out of his embarrassment and disgust, her dead eyes locked with his, and no escape, lids sagging and red, her mouth hinged open, tongue lolling out with trails of whitish saliva dangling from it. Otherwise she might still have been alive with accusations. Though dead, she was draining the chairman, extracting his willpower, a warm placenta of air peeled off from around him, finally slipped free and lost. The impression of his inside-out head flipped beyond reach and away. Him left naked to the unknown.