by Rodney Hall
Four
No one sleeps in the industrial cities. Confidence is shattered; money being in ruins. People buy anything at any price. Gold is declared the sole currency for international trade, speculators pushing its price past a thousand dollars an ounce within hours of trading, only to find their dollars mean nothing when they’ve got them. Public credit collapses. Paper notes are virtually worthless, the bankcard system discredited. Optimists buy up dead money believing the slump to be temporary. Interest rates soar to 12½% per day. The United Nations Organization closes its doors while the experts rewrite classical economics. The free interplay of selfish interests which is capitalism, so the revised theory goes, paradoxically produces a desirable social result provided wealth is predominantly more apparent than actual. And the Law of Diminishing Returns is made to embrace a rider that when labour is concentrated on land yielding pure gold rather than crops, the ignorant swine who dig it unbalance the delicate mechanism of sophisticated argument. In other words, the law no longer operates. Growth economics are at an end.
Small communities of drop-outs living in home-made shanties worshipping the forests and hoping to be visited by the wisdom of the Aborigines are hailed as visionaries of a future with maximum health and minimum worry. As far as politicians are concerned, their idea of a pioneer is the president of a South American republic declaring all his citizens bankrupt and calling in every last peso of the nation’s wealth. We are hamstrung by courtesy. Computers in Johannesburg at mining corporation offices roll out thousands of sheets of analysis to answer the question how to get a year’s output of Rand gold from the ground in a week.
Children in a primary school near Renmark, SA, set a class assignment on alternatives to the disaster of a gold glut, encouraged by their teacher, devise the biggest walkathon in modern education, with the proceeds raised for each kilometre walked buying food and drink for the journey: the youngsters leave the school gates on the first day of the six hundred kilometre hike to Whitey’s Fall. The holy land of stable commerce is to be reclaimed without bloodshed by the faith of children. No sooner has the ABC News broadcast this item than a boy called Nicholas, a precocious ten-year-old, fires all the youth of Melbourne with the ideal of a cycle crusade and leads them out of the city through Preston and Coburg and along the Hume Highway, pedalling for Albury and the border of New South Wales, filled with the triumph of superior tactics, calculating that they would arrive weeks ahead of the South Australians. Children from all kinds of homes come wheeling their machines, mounting, coasting and racing. They sing popular songs, also Advance Australia Fair because everybody knows it. And when the road passes a school, Nicholas calls the children out, he preaches to them, winning hundreds for the cause. Children to rule the world. Boys and girls without bicycles steal them rather than miss the excitement. Past the pea farm belt, out beyond the dairy cattle among the sheep they cycle, thousands of children alight with an ideal, pursued by hordes of adults, guardians and parasites, the parents begging them from car windows to come home, the business people selling them sweets and pornography or interviewing them for their opinions on Euro-communism, quantum mechanics, and the future of God. Onward past paddocks stifled in a purple blanket of Paterson’s curse, through orchards and vineyards, ambulances parked along the way staffed by doctors specializing in heat exhaustion and sunstroke, plus psychiatrists of the fanatical order, pedalling ceremonially through cheering countrytowns, waving at white-faced children imprisoned behind their own bedroom windows, Nicholas and his following of youngsters pump along, thighs and shoulders sprouting muscles big as a man’s, minds empty of ideas to make room for the cuckoo of self-importance. At Wagga-Wagga the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops vie in medieval splendour to bless them while the supporting teams of clergy bellow their bit-parts on the assumption that to be heard is a step towards paradise. The mayor of Gundagai is host for a convention of employers and academics who have volunteered to break up the crusade by offering individuals a short-term servitude to curb all this unseemly hysteria, plus a long term contract on their working lives. Now hundreds of children collapse each hour. The hospitals and secondhand bicycle shops are crammed to overflowing. At Canberra the Governor-General assures them he too was once a cyclist of no mean skill. They are met by a humourless Prime Minister who reminds them of their headmasters and whose eyes are so hard and close together it makes you pity his nose. As they reach the Great Dividing Range, coal companies kidnap them in coaches, drive them away as strike-breakers to work in the mines for a pittance with the opportunity to slave the idealist poison out of their systems, to purge them in the blinding dark shafts for sixteen hours a day plus two round meals provided on the job and a free visit from the Sisters of Mercy on the first of each month.
The Renmark children turn back, disenchanted.
Five
At the negligible cost of lameness and exhaustion, the Whitey’s Fall walkers have caught up with the picnic. They stretch their bones on the grass, grateful for the offer of a ride the remainder of the way. Uncle is still attending to Vivien’s education. We breathe the green of trees, he says. Did you know that? And wherever we go we spread trails of food for the little fellas, there’s bits of us fall off like a scab, a drop a blood maybe, speck a dandruff, all food for somethin, and then there’s ants we tread on and we never know, left for somethin else to eat and keep goin. We’re givin the whole while and takin the whole while. He blows on his tea watching the circles flow out to the side. If God was to stop the world this moment, he says, He’d see my part in it, He’d see the justice of me belongin here. And He’d see your part in it too Vivi. Uncle draws the skin off his creamy tea, sucking it noisily into his mouth. He inclines his good ear towards her in case she has anything to say, but she hasn’t.
Vivien listens. She has found what she needs. Her longing is for Billy, that powerful young man with his dark lashes, his clumsy energetic manner, his perpetual failure to understand, to have him follow her about, sit when she sits, stand when she chooses to stand, wait to see what he must do next. She relishes Aunty’s famous dictum: The old days? what old days? I don’t remember a thing, what do the old days matter when there’s today to live? These ugly wrecks, the darlings, she thinks. They don’t mind walking out of their places. They’re enjoying it. Vivien makes a decision. She goes to the cliff edge and pitches her umbrella over the precipice, watching the silly past flap helpless. The grannies laugh among their hairy moles, toothless grins waggling in her direction.
Well you’re right, Uncle tells her as she sits beside him again. You can’t own anythin, not even your body. Most you can do is strike up an acquaintance. I had an acquaintance with me house, overgrown as the bugger got across the years. With a switch of tone he asks her pointblank – Are you plannin on stayin?
– You mean, if Bill and I have children?
– We don’t want the young ones to go, he explains. Just pray for a girl and don’t be ashamed like Felissy was.
They ruminate on this, birds darting about their heads and the plants bursting with woody perfumes. Vivien, plagued by a problem nagging to be solved, finds the moment is spoilt for her. Then Uncle launches into another of his favourite theories.
– A course we eat the mountain, us people. Think of the vegies; we grow them in soil here don’t we? And soil’s the mountain I suppose? So you see. The same for the milk we get from our cows and that-there. And the beasts we slaughter. What’s a lump of beef in Whitey’s but a cut off a the mountain?
He is interrupted by a shadow. Mrs Angela Collins the horse lady, her head cocked, one hand on hip, the other wielding a whip with which she slaps her high boots. A transistor radio hanging from her shoulder speaks.
– Uncle, says Angela Collins interrupting the broadcast. I reckon I ought to be able to trust you with my milkcart. Her shadow slaps its shadow boot.
– Angie my dear, he replies pertly. I wouldn’t dare set me muddy feet so much as on the running-board a your flash outfit.
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sp; – … brought to us direct by satellite from the BBC, says the transistor.
– Well you got her then, the lady declares. Here’s the whip, but you just touch one of them beauties with it and I’ll lay about you, you sinner, no worries. Just let them hear it, they’ll go.
– Do you reckon I’m too feeble to walk then, Uncle shouts angrily, sensing a favour. The transistor plays a fanfare.
– Yes I do and that’s a fact. The point is there’s four people sittin in the back sending me mad with their chatter. But how can I get away? They’re my aunties. And what if some hamfist drives her for me, steers her into a ditch and tips them out sideways?
– You mean, Uncle’s face changes, instantly deceived. You mean you want an expert, he exclaims happily.
– Miss Lang, says Mrs Angela Collins in her loftiest manner. I hope you won’t think badly of us in this town.
– I’ll do it, Uncle proposes. Only to save them pretty geldings a yours.
At this point Mrs Collins’s transistor, one among 155 million round the world, begins to talk about Whitey’s Fall, a voice beaming down from a satellite. Uncle goes pale at the sound of it.
– I left Whitey’s Fall because that was the old world and I longed for the challenge of the new, says the voice.
– And now here you are in our West Country studios in England, an interviewer marvels in a voice rich with complacent charm. And have you ever been back there Mrs McTaggart?
– No I’ve stood on my own two feet, replies the voice on the radio.
– Aunt Annie, Vivien gasps. All the old people crowd round the set excitedly.
– What can you tell us about the place as you remember it?
– Perhaps it’s a bit rough and ready…
– Was there gold to be found on the mountain even then?
– Put it this way: the day the Brinsmeads discovered a reef, I knew it was time to get out.
– You went to serve as a nurse in the Great War, didn’t you?
– None of your business.
– She’s back, cries Uncle recognizing the mortal wound in his heart as joy.
– Geologists, the imperturbable interviewer continues, today confirmed that the mountain is almost solid gold. I believe you still own some property there. How much do you think it is worth now, Mrs McTaggart?
– Not a cracker more than it was sixty years ago.
– I’m sure the listeners will appreciate your modesty. You’re ninety years old, Mrs McTaggart, tell us about the past.
– You listen to me, young man. This is Aunt Annie speaking. I’ve no patience with the past, not in any shape or form. You take my word it’s finished and gone. If you waste your life worrying about the past you’ll never have time to live the present. And now I’m speaking to my kin back home. Can you hear? Get out of there if you’ve got any sense. Do you hear me Arthur? Don’t be afraid to change your mind, it’s only too late when you’re dead. I’m sending you my love. Bless you, and stick up for yourselves. My thoughts are with you.
– How can I tell her? moans Uncle when the voices on the radio change and a couple of Keynesian dons drone statistics to prove the eternal verities of tinkering.
Miss Brinsmead fell in love with me, Vivien understands at last. And I am to re-open her shop at London. Could I be the one to keep this past now? Is that it? She is daunted by the prospect of having to match Miss Brinsmead’s practicality.
Bertha McAloon, mortified at hearing her deadly enemy made famous, decides to show off her floating again and recapture the admiration of this ignorant rabble of in-laws. But though she lies down the usual way and thinks pretty hard of success, nothing happens and she has to get up pretending she was only trying out a bit of yoga.
Motors rumble into life, gasp as they’re cranked, fire off like machineguns. They warm up. The Bedford sways ahead on to the track the boys cleared when they were making their way down from their fossicking trip. The motorcycle follows, snare-drumming among the stones, then the tractors and buggies, the carts, the flat-top, the two drays. And finally the steam plough, having built a sufficient head of steam, jerks into life, exotic as an Arabian bazaar with chains clittering round the galah cage and a giggling old lady swaddled up in the passenger seat.
The Chinese acrobats produce ten-foot silk scarves from their sleeves, swirl them, floating shapes, illusions of solidity, they perform hallucinations writing messages of hope on the sky with the brilliant fabric, blue on blue. They jump through the loops they appear to have made, they create winter of the world, they are playing with frozen cloud, the sun itself glows from a prison of ice, sharp air catches at the spectators’ lungs, crystal rocks underfoot and the creek arrested, snow casts its ermine of blue shadows on the clearing, the bush crackles with frost and individual crows sound harsh answering echoes, kyrie and response. Now they are laughing Chinese laughter, highpitched and wholehearted so that the ice evaporates from round the sun, Rupert Ping the priest of warmth, and the mountain flutters humid with parrot feathers. The journey home to London begins again amid applause and the energy of renewed spirits. This time the locals will accept a joss-house among them, if there has to be one.
Vivien, with her hair growing, is walking between Miss Bertha McAloon and Mrs Angela Collins whose transistor is now silent as it swings from her shoulder. Since setting off in the dust-wake of the vehicles, these two ladies haven’t left her an opportunity of saying anything, their shrill non-stop voices loud with the excitement of antagonism. They drive the livestock before them, dogs barking and cats dodging (tails up) at their heels. Mrs Collins and Vivien are striding along in step, liking each other. But Miss McAloon as usual is a pilgrim in the desert, a lone figure on that monotonous crust of earth. A tree sweeps up and away past her, a malignant eye darting into hers, the wind becoming a hail of insects or a thicket of thorns, the ghosts of two unwanted women haunting her, hanging on like shadows, now pushing her along, now dragging her back.
– There must be something in that stuffed cow, is what I say. I know you don’t agree Miss McAloon but how can it be explained otherwise? It sticks in the brain that cow does. I never saw anything like it. And Rupert Ping showing it off, you’d think he was proud of it.
– I reckon it’s all a lot of hooey, that’s what. And you’re behaving like a silly rabbit Angie for taking notice. Look at him: damn primped up little chink in his sonky rig. The thought of him messing with a dead animal and practising his black arts makes me puke. And you lot go in with your eyes popping, so he gets what he wants. Like a kid that bloke is, always angling for attention and never getting enough. Look at him now with his hoop-la.
Vivien thinks his tumbling performance marvellous, but has no chance to put in a word for him.
– I don’t know that you’ve got much call to go looking down your nose at others Miss McAloon, I really don’t. You never knew Alice did you Miss Lang? Well Alice was a personality in Whitey’s Fall, she wasn’t just an ordinary cow. We all knew Alice. And you’d have swore she knew us.
– Fair gives me the pip to hear talk like that, Miss McAloon announces with scorn (without a blemish of guilt remembering, in the knitted bedroom of her own house, a knitted picture of the south paddock with Alice prominent in the foreground).
– Didn’t look like Alice any longer, Mrs Collins goes on determined to take no notice, being an independent woman of forty-eight as she is, one of the young people of the district. Alice all the same, and up there to be laughed at, it didn’t seem natural.
– It wasn’t natural you chicken. The damn cow was dead. And what was it stood on a hoist for?
– That’s what I was asking when you interrupted, love.
– Don’t love me. Not till you can tell me what’s gone on with that dead brat of Felicia’s. You can’t have a twelve-year-old kid come out of a pumpkin is what I say. It’s our town, our reputation. There’s more than meets the eye.
– I’d give a packet for the truth myself I don’t mind telling you. Though I th
ought you’d know, being the one who always knows everything. That Miss Brinsmead, although she was such a friend of Mum’s and I oughtn’t to speak ill of the dead, she used to frighten me when I was a girl. I swear she could read your mind. But you couldn’t read hers, no way, not a soul had an inkling that child was in the house.
– I can’t tell what you call right and wrong, Miss Bertha McAloon observes virtuously. But I know what I know.
Vivien wonders at the consequences if she’d offered to adopt Fido, why not, when she saw him peep out from under the blind the day Mrs Ping died. And of course she must have guessed he was in hiding, you never saw him around. The thought might have crossed her mind, she thinks it now. A thought she has always known.
– Friend of Bessie’s though she was, I don’t know that she was anything so special I do declare, declares Miss McAloon.
– And she threw herself on him as if she wanted to eat him, dead as he was.
– Poor little mongrel.
– His uncle standing there like a stuffed I-don’t-know-what.
– To my way of thinking she must have brought the child home with her last time she came back from those foreign places.
– He might have been adopted, Vivien suggests to their surprise.
– Might of, Miss McAloon agrees.
– But still he’d have had to be in the place close on a year without anyone knowing.
– I wouldn’t be too sure there wasn’t nobody knew about that kid Angela, I wouldn’t be too sure at all if I was you.
– Well there’s people wise after the event as always, love. You can’t expect anything else. Always is. Isn’t that a fact Miss Lang? Yes, you see. There’s no knowing what’s in the human heart. Like Heathcliff turning tender.
