by Rodney Hall
– So to the rest of the agenda, he said. Now perhaps we can get somewhere.
Discussions began on a catalogue of implications. The two corpses nodded and slumped on their chairs, as others settled in for long negotiations. The bureaucrats called on their reserves of experience, their training in patience, their capacity to bear crushing weights of boredom.
George Swan ached with the need for action. He had already sat too long. Idleness got him in its vice and knotted him painfully tight. Writhing against good manners, he suffered one flash of his nightmare: Billy leaving Whitey’s Fall forever, escaping the carefully laid ties of marriage and duty. Long after George Swan was dead of impatience, the committee waged a tactical war over then or therefore and provisionally as opposed to in principle.
Breathing the pure mountain air, the government administrators toiled at their appointed task, never dreaming their bodies might be undergoing a change, the blood clarifying, purged of anti-bodies. The longer they sat in familiar deadlock the purer their blood became: and the more vulnerable to infection. By the time they began framing sub-section (ix) of section (h) of the provisos of the guidelines for proceeding with the preservation of the village as a historic monument, protocolitis struck. The contagion took the youngest first, the most imaginative next, then those whose attention was not wholly focused on meeting procedure. One by one it paralysed them, their hearts and lungs hardened and stilled under the proliferating disease. Nefertiti, who had so often watched her cat stretch every muscle when it woke, felt her own feline body reverse the process, contracting. Last, she and the chairman saw in each other’s face a flash of panic as they succumbed at the same moment. Sebastian and Jasper, who had waited for most of a century already, could outsit anybody and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The only other survivor of the committee was the senator. The air still hummed with quiet formulas, when Mr Brinsmead pushed back his chair and attended to his wife, easing the scissors loose, he crossed her hands in her lap. He kissed her poor wounded head in a gesture he had longed to make public for fifty years. He cradled the sweetheart, her skull now so light with no longer having to carry about the whole of history, stroked the stubble where his tears dripped on her crusted scalp. Then he took her scissors more firmly in his hand, held them as a dagger, and stuck the long pointed blades deep into Senator Frank Halloran’s neck. With his great strength Saint Sebastian forced them into the flesh, in among the yielding folds and satisfactions till they were buried right down to the handle. The victim let out a terrified hiss of blood, his crepe soles contracting, squeaking against the floor. Jasper knew now why he had dressed suitably for a funeral; last night he had put off his life when he thought he was remaking it, the ceremony an absolution, his soul made ready for the crisis that now came.
When Sebastian Brinsmead straightened up to stand before his maker, red-handed and defiant, he was the only living person left in that building.
The hall, perhaps the mountain, lurched. A boom like an earthquake followed an immense yawning of the timbers. The trellis fell off, teacups scattering solid as billiard balls among feet and ankles, the floor itself wavered upward, tilted to become a giant oblong wing. The sky exploded into twenty-four stars of glass shooting darts at the dead people inside. Dust puffed about their shoes from cracks opening under them, the tree outside rushed upward slow as a moon rocket, its foliage sweeping out of sight; chairs flung askew on a single leg pirouetted their doll occupants against the fairground wall. Sebastian Brinsmead was thrown flat, his chest being crushed at a blow by a beam he once watched set in place to carry the roof. Above the doorway the circular vent cried to the empty town of flowers, a human shout of alarm and pain. The conference table tipped on end displayed its proclamation: a blue bird escaping through grey words. The great doors themselves (last opened thirty years ago for welcoming a local horse who ran seventh in the Melbourne Cup) swung inward. Not the view of Brinsmead’s store. All a rush of blank sunlight arrested a moment by two yellow butterflies bobbing together, as if love and the world would go on as usual.
Little Rose Swan, become a giant, strode staggering up the last bank of grass, stooped to crawl between the wire strands of the fence, not caring that this time her dress snagged and a small V ripped open on her back. She had reached the road with her head full of the word she couldn’t get hold of. Never had she been rich before. Music in her blood. So undeservedly the keeper of good news. She faced uphill along the dusty road, walking, using these final minutes to compose herself. Knowing she was awaited. They were longing for her without realizing it, poor things, dying in their desert, wandering on flat places, singular isolated figures, lost, now turning to hail her so gratefully, so humbly.
Within yards of the hall Mrs Swan composed her hands, took a measured breath of mountain air, trembling. She smoothed back her hair and, in doing so, found she had looked up … yes.
One Commonwealth Car driver stood tilting his cap back, shocked to inaction, while the other was down in the rubble doing what he could to release the only survivor, Senator Halloran’s black dog Ocker.
BOOK SIX
Exodus
One
Mountain wind ruffles the clusters of flowers once more, makes friendly noises in the open houses, drives hot dust pleasantly against your shins; this wind with its summer heaviness inside your shirt, buffeting and caressing, remembering its past days stale with grit and the smell of rotting leaves, its cold winter days of remote sea, spring days loud with coupling birds. Silverbeet and rhubarb stand up strongly in vegetable gardens, their crisp leaves rubbing flesh on flesh, a community in agreement. The figs and plums which had once jutted green and hard, bitter with youth, now sag full of juice. Bougainvillaea and clematis weigh down the fences with colour and scent, they break the guttering loose. In every detail Whitey’s Fall is familiar except for the absence of people, the people who should be in the street as old people generally are or in their doorways on the step or weeding the garden or snoozing or swatting flies. You can’t avoid a sense of emptiness, the incongruous knowledge that this lived-in place with its handworn handtended character is uninhabited. The houses are grey bare wood as they always were, weatherboards overlapping in wavering lines, metal roofs rusted the colours of volcanic earth, yet they are powerful with the touch of humanity, saturated by use and habit. Without the people, you notice how strongly they smell of people, how they’ve got the ways of people stamped on them, as if they could go on living by themselves, as if they’ve been working towards this, drawing the life-energy from their occupants, those who built them, from the memories of tent encampments weathering storms and smoke, the peaks of canvas like whitecapped waves stiffly arranged around the Noah’s Ark of the pub full of bestial couples, resisting the jealousies of mining company employees from the New Reef, and drawing energy from times even before this, when the gullies pulsed with steam engines and the handheld pans of pebbles, when the original rush of prospectors, single males, the first male plague, surprised the innocent countryside with complaints of a mountain there. No such mountain was known to the Koorie tribe who had long since passed in flight, dangerous shadows, leaving enough dead intruders to make known certain religious sentiments. The empty houses live by the energy of men and women who survived punishment for their crimes against the owners of hens and fob watches, their pilferings of petty cash in Cumberland, their sauciness towards the Kent magistracy, their failure to kiss the Bible in the name of King William IVor his debauched brother George IV, or for that matter his mad father chewing ermine for breakfast and calling on India the whore to come and be raped in the hope that he might this way learn to endure the humiliation of his blameless marital conduct. Life-energy still possesses the town, carried over without break from hand to breast, from woman to man to child, from relatives and strangers, passed on strongly from the foot soldiers of civil wars in Oxfordshire and Lanarkshire and the peasants who suffered them, from visionary bookmen and cunning astronomers, sailors with their astrolabes
and folklore, from Sir John Falstaff himself, and the nameless ostlers who when the house of Ross went up in flames tried to save the servants while their master was saving his horses, from the farmer’s wife who saw the heathen Vikings come and did not run back inside her mud embankment but took up a flail, strode right out there and defied them to chop up her children with their battle-axes, making them understand her foreign words so that at least one stayed his hand remembering his wife at home and his dogs like these dogs, and elsewhere the artisan falling from a ladder of angels he was carving on an Abbey front and later being represented near the top of the same stone ladder by his apprentices as the first face to shine in the light of heavenly peace, two rungs above the commissioning Bishop, and before this when Julius Caesar had risen from his bed in the staging camp at Gessoriacum to attend personally (as he made a point of doing always) to the administration of some plan for equipment, his lady of the night, having achieved only a respectable minimum of satisfaction with him, reached her hand over to where he’d slept and felt the coverings damp, to her disgust yes damp, and she thought of the puzzle of this dampness while he made ready to conquer Britain; the long generation of this energy was stored in the houses of Whitey’s Fall, energy which reached back and abroad, profound and limitless as blood, limitless as water on the world’s surface, flowing and receding, malleable but indestructible, held by the magnetism of earth, trembling at its upheavals, smoothing its harshness, floating through air, ascending as a breathable ocean, clashing to spark the light of lightning, drawing delicate groundplants up to flower and be visited by bees so that in time when their petals wilt and stain brown, shrink and moult, the calyx will harden round a knot of seeds, the seeds falling or lifted clear in wallaby fur or on woollen skirts, hiving an endless continuity of the empires of yellow and crimson seen blooming still along the housefronts and roadsides of Whitey’s Fall, all the more eloquent for the sound of abandonment beginning to thicken round the place, for the lack of any sign that Vivien Lang looked at them this morning and cried out in her heart what shall I do? No sign of this. The plants themselves tell their own saga, geraniums among grevillea, honeysuckle behind the wattle; and especially in Mr McTaggart’s circular garden with its bounty of five continents burgeoning in concentric circles, countless flowers quivering at the wind speaking their perfumes from gorgeous lips. But the ancient ugly mountainfolk are not there today to tend them with tough fingers and bring them water from the tanks. The houses stand silent, no sound comes from them. Even the big machines up at the highway site, have not been heard for weeks now, not grumbling distantly at their chores, they have fallen into disuse again. But this time the workmen are not camped at the side of their cutting boozing in idleness and playing poker. They have urgent business in the city concerning their private fortunes.
If you were to walk into town this moment you could hardly fail to be struck by the accumulated meanings of the gardens, the placement of the town on its mountainside, these steps, that roofline, the dry drinking fountain, the petrol bowser still to be worked by a hand pump, this doorway with the words Please Knock, and someone else’s disintegrating Welcome mat. The meanings are known simply by your standing still long enough to let them speak.
It is as natural for you to stand in this place as for the wind to move. Among the houses, the hotel, the welder’s workshop, the graveyard, wind has its business, bearing no trace of gasoline although minutes ago the street was full of vehicles choking on their own black fumes, lining up in a gala procession and heading for the disused showground, followed by carts, people on foot herding their cattle and goats, calling their dogs to heel, and Grandma Buddall with a felt hat pulled tight down over her ears for comfort, and mounted on her old cow. No trace left in the street except shifting ruts and a few steaming turds dropped by various beasts. The echo of Rememberings ghosting into bedrooms. No way of telling how Bill Swan, ready to lead off the procession in that big rattletrap of a Bedford heaped high with bedding and boxes, took Mr Ian McTaggart and his invalid wife Violet proudly tearless in the cab beside him, the same Bedford now standing at one end of the showground, facing a logging track which passes obliquely across the surveyed highway (that same track Bill and five other hooligans had come down, from their foolish scrounging for The Golden Fleece, bringing instead the news of Kel McAloon’s death). The Bedford stands at the forest edge in green light, a sunken hulk with Billy out front, the bonnet up, and tools busy in the hot motor. The old people still in the cab open a packet of sandwiches and then sort out whose false teeth are whose from the bedside jar they’ve brought. They munch placidly at the food – You’d a thought, says the husband, we’d a had more sense at our age. His wife replies, past the difficulty she always has swallowing – Well it is a new chance though Pa, a fresh start and that. Her hundred-year-old eyes stained in the whites to ivory. – How’s it coming along son? they call to give the young fellow heart and so he’ll know not to worry about them. – It’s coming along, he answers burning his hand on the manifold and wiping a moustache of grease across his lip, wishing like hell Tony was here to fix it and worrying momentarily about what might have happened to Tony, shrugging at the memory of coming round after being punched, the urge to hit out, to keep it going. He pulls the rubber fuelpipe off its nozzle, this has to be a blockage or he can’t imagine what. Just now his own motorcycle emerges gingerly on to the showground, drumming at such low revs it sounds like a giant sewing-machine. Jack Collins, the only male Collins left with both eyes good, and him a man who never married though he’s eighty-seven and despite being related to a pretty fertile branch of the population, is driving the bike. Clutched on to him from behind you can see two purple claws and nothing else till the bike draws level, but already you hear a high voice hammering sharp little nails of words, tacking them into the brain, not even interrupting herself when the bike slows beside the stalled truck, not even acknowledging young Bill Swan greeting them – If you was to have listened to me, the voice is saying delivering itself of a mouthful of nails, you’d have loaded them boxes around the other way and put the mattress on top instead of… Mr Collins raises his eyes to heaven as he circles Billy, travelling at about ten miles per hour and having already suffered his cousin’s lecture on the wages of recklessness, to park behind the truck. There! hardly a dribble of petrol getting through, that’s been the problem alright; Bill forgets about Tony as he detaches the pipe completely and peers along it, blows along it, kneels down and slips one end over the valve of a tyre letting out a squirt of high-pressure air and laughing with the satisfaction of success, calling to the old people that it’s fixed now and hearing their bread-filled voices drift back to him with the offer of a sandwich. The 1919 Reo lorry comes whining into the ring, good as new, the boxy bonnet trembling, the stub nose jolting woodenly down into a pot-hole and rising with the assurance of a tank, singing along steadily with its load of roof iron, rolls of wire and boxes of new nails, taking up its position behind the motorcycle. Then immediately following, a string of horsedrawn sulkies and carts arrives, squealing with disuse, big wheels aching out loud over the bumps, and Mrs Angela Collins leading them in her smart rig, calling to the Bedford, calling proud and dignified as you like – Will you need a tow mate when we’re ready to go? Not since her three teenage children left for the city has she felt the sap in her like today, her rig jogs past for the sake of display and then returns to its place, the four passengers on improvised seats all facing backwards offer the crones in the Bedford gummy grins out of their nests of wild hair – Tarrah! they call and Ooroo! and Be seein ya! so that two horses pulling the following cart look up from their considered examination of Australia and shake their traces with a pleasant jingling, teeth muttering against the bits, the crates of food piled behind them sway, giving off delicious mixed odours from earthy vegetables and steaming roast chickens in wrappings. So the Whitey’s Fallers are gathering ready for a journey. But even this will not cheer Dick Buddall and his wife Doreen neither of whom is old
enough to remember London; they’re leaving the things that make life worthwhile because they’re needed by Doreen’s mother Jessie McTaggart who married a second time and to another McTaggart so being made a McTaggart twice, and then only because Jessie’s one you can’t refuse. Up till last night they had no intention. They were ready to welcome the highway and the tourists, they were saying we shall be glad to see the end of the old struggles, and it’ll be easy keeping the place neat without the dust off that road, city folks are polite, and soon everybody’s kids’ll be driving the easy way home to visit. But they began to look around with strangers’ eyes at their decaying house; visitors a threatening idea and a judgment. They are going because old Jessie’s going, they are promising themselves it’s only seven miles so if they change their minds, well the house is there to return to. But the house dies with the front door shut for the first time in living memory, and Marmalade miaouling till they bring her along (though she wet on them when she twigged). Billy glances back at them from under the dinted green bonnet and waves because he knows their doubts, then refits the tube carefully clipping it on, watching the petrol run cleanly into the glass filter, he clangs the bonnet shut just as his Uncle Wally appears driving the famous steam plough, a Queensland design, hissing and pooting and clanking its chains, the blade periodically ringing against a rock loud as a churchbell, and a galah swinging morosely in its wicker cage from the canopy-frame, a passenger on a home-made seat so swaddled against the dust she can’t be recognized, and Uncle Wally, his bald head wrinkled as a peanutshell, soberly raising one paw from the nest of levers as he pulls up at the end of the line, the invalid Violet McTaggart leaning out of the Bedford’s window flutters her fingers, Wally being her son’s nephew by marriage and a nextdoor neighbour, the crumbs dropping from her lips to hang on her mister punch chin. Uncle begins marshalling the people on foot and their smelly mixed herd of domestic animals. Bill listens a moment to the plough shutting off steam, the confused puttering of tractors approaching behind, the horse noises and the cattle. He climbs back in, the Bedford ready to go when everyone has assembled.
