Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – Who’s this Heathcliff then? Have you been setting your cap down in Yalgoona again? You should be ashamed.

  – Yalgoona! You’ve got to be joking. It’s just Mr Brinsmead’s book I’ve been reading at last.

  Miss McAloon rounds on her, impressed and deceived.

  – You never let on you were a book reader, she says. You never let on Angela.

  – Well I have my moments, the other lady offers modestly, speaking past the obstruction of Vivien’s dreaming head, but refuses to be drawn further.

  Vivien is remembering the sea, the dramatic crunch of waves, foam kicking up, water rushing back off sand, beaches jewelled with shells, and a storm coming over, staining waves dark grey and driving a scatter of seabirds before it, salt and seaweed pungent in the air and a faint sniff of iodine, the fresh tide washing out rockpools where she’d find stiff porcupine shapes of sea urchins, fleshy anemones, striped limpets and periwinkles, sunshine dancing a moment before the shadow, the lightning and the first plickering of raindrops in water. And then jellyfish floating inshore like a dead army.

  – Them Brinsmeads! Such particular people they wouldn’t poke a pig with a stick, and that bloody great mansion they were building, all full of nothing, dust this thick on the floors and hardly a stick of furniture, rooms as big as a barn with the rolls of fluff wandering about in the draught. I was up there many a time, them being neighbours of my father. And old Brinsmead committing suicide. Now what did he do that for when his son gave him a lump of gold? There’s a question never been answered to my satisfaction. And not likely to be now. What I say is look at the grandfather, that’s where the clue is, I agree with you Angela.

  – I don’t hold with suicide myself Miss McAloon though I’m not religious. Always seemed to me that life was give to us for something, else why have we got it? Come on Grandpa Buddall, get a shift on, if you must walk up front you got to keep the pace going. Look out for the ladies! Can’t have no slackers up front.

  – I damn near think I ought to give you a taste a the back a me hand you young piece, Grandpa Buddall curses her already vexed with fatigue and the dumps. Don’t know what this world’s coming to. Bertha you got no business letting your girls go misbehaving like that.

  – She’s not one of mine Grandpa I’m thankful to say. She’s a McTaggart girl this one. Married Bernie Collins when he was alive, poor young fellow getting killed by a falling tree, you know. And I was there to see, such a dreadful thing. A fallen tree’ll always remind me. No she’s a McTaggart.

  – Well I can’t sort em all out, he grumbles badtemperedly, hands pushing on his thighs to help him along.

  Mrs Collins, who doesn’t intend trying to understand, sidesteps him and stamps her long boots in the dust to annoy him.

  – And who’s that? he shouts, being left behind, pointing at Vivien.

  – Mata Hari! Angela Collins laughs. God help whoever he chooses for a neighbour when we get there, she adds cheerfully.

  – Your grandfather, Miss McAloon warns Vivien, was best man at his wedding as I recall. O glory, what a wedding it was to be sure, with the lilies brought down off the mountain and a real horseshoe on the weddingcake.

  Vivien glances back at the old man, suddenly curious to recognize this distant connection. She finds him hobbling after them, a fierce glint in his eye and a rejoinder evidently on the tip of his tongue. He looks at me, she thinks, as a stranger, he doesn’t remember me helping him during the battle when he hurt his shoulder.

  – Be damned if she isn’t a dead ringer for Annie Lang, he grumbles threateningly.

  – There’s always a chance, Angela Collins is saying. A chance the kid wasn’t Miss Brinsmead’s really. But if it wasn’t hers then whose was it?

  – Now you’re asking!

  – Would it be far, Vivien ventures to ask, from here to where we’re going?

  This sort of question gives away that you are not listening, that your mind is somewhere more urgent.

  – Everything’s far, Miss Bertha McAloon complains. When you’re my age. I’m not used to walking, she explains being cross with herself for failing to show off her floating a second time, her voice developing those mincing tones that so infuriated Uncle. Young Peter gives me a ride in his Land Rover as a rule but he went off to Yalgoona last night about his own business. If you ask me he doesn’t know his mind. I think he’s in a dither, like a lot of strong men, weak in the head, he is. Now why didn’t any of his kids stop in Whitey’s? He had a whole regiment of them. All gone now. Those young ones hung around my place hoping to get things out of me, you’d think I had a will to make. For all their pestering they never got a brass razoo, she shrieks triumphantly. They never did. Painfully she remembers her own cadging brother, her younger brother Kel, gone mad and now dead, the only one to go to the Real War and come back, though he came back with stories no one would believe like the winter soldiers frozen to the ground where they slept, stories that made you laugh they were so far-fetched, poor Kel. Though a liar he was, after all, dead.

  – I hope Uncle doesn’t rein them beauties in too sharp, Mrs Angie Collins worries out loud. They got lovely soft mouths them chestnuts of mine.

  – Him! Uncle’s ex-wife snorts poisonously. If they’re got four legs and no feelings he’ll understand them. It’s people that’s beyond him.

  Vivien feels guilty not sticking up for darling Uncle. But she knows the live injury flows between her and Miss McAloon, that her Great-aunt Annie stood in the way of their marriage being happy. There’s nothing she can possibly say. Even Angela Collins in her high boots is too courteous to change the subject. With no way out, they must walk together, communicating unspoken hurts. But Miss McAloon is not built for tact.

  – That Lang woman’s an aunty of yours, is she? she snaps with the Irish showing.

  – Aunt Annie? Yes she is.

  – Well she did me an injury once you know.

  – I know.

  – I declare to Jesus I’ll never forgive her.

  – It’s a long time now, says Angela Collins.

  – I’ll never forgive I shouldn’t wonder.

  – She lives in England.

  – Serves her right too.

  – I love her, says Vivien eventually, short of breath.

  – Humh! the old lady tosses her head in the air decisively.

  Their shoes turn on the loose stones. The forest stretches away down to the right in a vast sea of susurrating leaves, glinting and tumbling in sunlight. One thing I will say, says Miss Bertha McAloon exercising the prerogative of her seniority, for a judgment is expected of her. One thing I will say is I got a lot of time for loyalty. Then she adds with venomous relish – Only God help some people for the ones they got to be loyal to. When there’s only Aunty Jezebel there’s not much future for them.

  The future, the future, Miss Brinsmead tells Vivien. If one means anything by the future then it already is… as I explained to that wretched man in his felt-padded library (oh, when was it?), we don’t use the word future if we want to be understood. No. We call it hope. And hope is. Or alternatively fear. And fear is.

  Vivien closes her eyes, she has begun to see the shape of the mountain, a gorgeous silhouette of purples and ambers. She has the unaccountable impression that if she wished, she could move it about and even begin to affect its shape. Then she hears Lance groaning as the Bedford jolted his broken leg; groans hovering at that spot for months to return to the pain where they belong.

  – Marvellous how this track’s being kept open by some cove, Mrs Angela Collins says. See all the slashing. That’s new that is.

  Six

  So strong is tradition that miners’ vigilante groups convene to guard the gold dug. But here at Whitey’s Fall they will never have anything to do, because each prospector gets what he came for. As long as he can wield a pickaxe he can go home with a nugget. Strangers pour out with their loot almost as fast as other strangers pour in. A well-known firm operating tourist coaches is acceptin
g two-day return bookings, leaving Sydney at dawn and driving to the roadblock at Yalgoona, then a stimulating guided hike for thirty-seven miles to the goldfields, an overnight camp with the comradeship of thousands, an hour after breakfast to extract your fortune from the bountiful mountain, a return hike of thirty-seven miles (downhill) with a backpack supplied for carrying your personal nugget out, then a fast ride home to the city.

  There is no singing on the field now. It is not like it was before. Everybody works soberly at deciding the size of nugget suited to his or her desires; neither too big to carry out, nor too small to provide for a lifetime of indolence. There is little sense of locality once the pirated bulldozers clear a huge swathe of bush, people swarm over the area, pick a spot each at random and, without so much as goodday to their neighbours, claim what they dig out and leave while the next arrival takes over.

  Into this half-world of clinks and grunts come furtive visitors with familiar surnames. Renegade Whitey’s Fallers return, hoping not to meet their relatives and to make a quick getaway with no call on the emotions. They are led by the young generation under the command of Lance Lang, a weightlifter in boarding-school uniform, striped blazer and straw boater, losing his sense of direction without a mirror, a nagging young woman in tow, and bad breath. Maggot Buddall also appears, beginning by pocketing somebody else’s gold till he realizes morality is thrust upon him by the prodigality of the supply. There is no future for the pickpocket when you only have to bend down for as much wealth as you could wish. The McTaggart twins arrive in drag straight from The Sky’s The Limit Night Club where they work as hostesses. There wasn’t time to change, their athletic male bodies stretching the flimsy fabrics, their wolves’ eyes among the Elizabeth Arden eyelashes, they teeter about on high heels heaving two-hundred pound boulders aside.

  – So we did find the Golden Fleece, Maggot says (glancing over his shoulder expecting a posse of police led by a stool-pigeon). When we ran out of juice and stopped here at the cutting, the truck must have been standing on solid gold if only we’d known. I thought it felt smooth. He laughs with delight at how they were tricked and reviews his brief criminal career, solid as a wall between Maggot then and Maggot now, too cheerful by nature to succumb to the cannibal Regret.

  – Bloody Tony singing’d put anyone off their stroke, Lance rages.

  – Jeez I’d like to see Billy, says Maggot sensing that he is demeaned by being one of this grovelling multitude.

  The big schoolboy is too scornful to bother answering. He pulls off his blazer, wrapping it round a massive nugget, heaving it on his back and tying it by the sleeves around his muscular neck, then trudges away, permanently lame from that leg injury, toward his parents’ house for a temporary stop-over and perhaps the use of a tractor to get him across country to an unblocked road.

  – Look out mate, Maggot calls after him. You’ll break your back He joins Peter and Dave at their campfire for a billycan of tea while they display their collection: a dozen eggs of gold, pure and clean, which they explain are gifts for special people.

  – And what about yourselves? he asks.

  They look blank. Why should they need gold?

  – We found what we wanted in the city, Pete confesses being a particular friend of Maggot’s.

  – Shit, Maggot swears, recognizing the truth. What’s a man here for? I can’t come back. This stuffs nothing more than a fucking trap.

  The horror of submission to respectability is suddenly clear.

  – Here son, says Maggot accosting a crying child. Take this into captivity with you. Tell your mum a dirty old man gave it to you in return for a look at his dick. He thrusts his gold into the boy’s hands.

  The twins begin singing harmoniously as they used to:

  When first I left old Ireland’s shore, the yarns that we were told

  Of how the folks in far Australia could pick up lumps of gold!

  How gold-dust lay in all the streets and miner’s right was free

  ‘Hurrah,’ I told my family, ‘that’s the very place for me.’

  The sound, so simple and human, haunts the goldfield. They clap their hands in time and the bitter tradition pours from cherry-gloss lips, blonde wigs bobbing and fire in their mountainfolk eyes.

  With my swag all on my shoulder, black billy in my hand,

  I’ll travel the bushes of Australia like a trueborn Irishman.

  Felicia Brinsmead strolls up accompanied by a man in a white sheet.

  – Boys, she says giving them her number one expression. This is Mr Julius Caesar. Julius, these are the boys.

  – You, suggests Caesar seeing through their disguises as no one else has. Are lusting for danger, is it not?

  – Pass the rum, bawls Maggot. More than anything I hate the truth.

  The twins sing along:

  For many years I wandered round to each new field about

  And made and spent full many a pound till alluvial petered out.

  And then for any job of work I was prepared to try,

  But now I’ve found the tucker-track I’ll stop here till I die.

  Felicia and her escort walk sedately through the fire towards the waterfall and straight over the cliff.

  Caesar’s successor in Rome faces the knives of his colonels. The Stazione Termini fills with troop-trains, Ospedaletti and Finale Ligure, those tranquil Riviera villages, witness the arrival of a submarine fleet. The cautious Swiss block off the Simplon tunnel. Russian tanks chew the roads of Bulgaria (such as they are), Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, lining up along their western borders, the world’s biggest ringside, to watch the European Economic Community tear itself and its neighbours apart. And sure enough, no sooner are they settled than the RAF swoops in for an intimidating show of force over the Alps, the Black Forest seethes with German underground armies surfacing, the French nuclear deterrent gets a final spit and polish, the Belgians and Dutch open a war of words, and Spain invades Gibraltar. The Austrians blockade all milk supplies to Liechtenstein, while Denmark and Sweden negotiate a pact against Norway. The insult of bullets flies both ways across the Irish border. The directors of the trans-national corporations stir the ambrosial air of their Olympus to decide where the first neutron bombs should fall, who and how many ought to die. Sipping at a health-promoting brew of rosehips they consider their verdict. But history is happening too fast for them. Their syndicates are already wreckage being picked over by middle men. Not one person will obey them when they do decide. And power passes for the first time into the hands of the elected governments, a disaster nobody could have foreseen.

  From the ashes of authority the peoples’spirit rises. Even those with a liberal education recognize liberty when it happens. Peasants, savage from ignorance and the struggle to survive, no longer accept as fate the cumulative burden of superstition. Workers who have been debased by their bargain-price labour and employers debased by exploiting them escape their roles. Thanks to Uncle’s disclosures about Whitey’s Fall, they mingle, walking their own streets freely all round the continent of Europe, also in parts of Asia and Africa, in Australia and the two Americas. The cracked husks of the world are flowering hope.

  Seven

  The Bedford noses down through the scrub, wattles whipping the screen, leaves brushing up underneath the chassis. In the cab the aged McTaggarts excitedly argue about the exact whereabouts of the track which is now completely overgrown. One of the horses whinnies while the orchestra of motors, wheels, traces, chains and voices has begun to seem hopelessly out of place, wallowing, sinking in the bush. Little wallabies and black goannas tear off among the trees, while high above the caravan a pterodactyl hangs interestedly eyeing the scatter of possible victims.

  Suddenly it’s all over, they arrive at London, place of terrible memories, to accept their past again as physical fact. The Bedford swings on to a broad flat, the Reo puttering gravely behind, Uncle on the driver’s seat of the immaculate milkcart shouting I thought you was gettin us bushed
for a while there Billo, the geldings duck their heads to the juicy grass, the steam plough jingling and swaying, passengers totter out, life easing painfully along their limbs again, goods and food supplies are stacked neatly to one side, the galah gives a couple of hallelujahs, and Uncle directs the setting up of camp with tarpaulins being slung over ridgepoles and pegs hammered into the soil, the firearms are stowed in a tent. Vivien is to be put in charge of the food from Brinsmeads’, but until she arrives a fly is pitched over the top of the dray. An encampment takes shape on the abandoned racetrack while rivals decide which lots to claim in the old streets according to family rights. There are people reminding themselves of the view, people exclaiming at this and that memory, people wandering among the foundations naming who used to live there, people on their way up to the dam across the creek checking out the water supply, people kicking turf from doorsteps, places of remembered cruelty, years of greed raising the ghosts of violent times and shaking the shafts of a rotted sulky. Those who had been children when they left remember it as a haunted ghost-town where plums and apricots grew mysteriously in the tangled scrub. Mary Buddall discovers the oldest inhabitant, Mrs Nell McAloon, accidentally left where they packed her, high on top of a wagon, her balding head birdlike and waggling, mad Nell the loony with her toothless mouth in an ecstatic grin, feeling herself a young woman again, waving a royal claw; while propped back to back with her sits her son and heir the oldest mongoloid boy in the world. Mary calls four men to lift the baggage down. Mrs McAloon emits whoops and whoos as the wind goes up her skirt.

  – Viv’ll be here before long son, Uncle chuckles as he observes Bill looking back down the ridge to where the walkers should soon be toiling up. Poor bugger’s got himself fallen in love, he explains to Mercy Ping who vanishes at the thought. Hell find out!

  And it is true, Bill has been thinking about Vivien all this time, not just about the warmth of her bed and being sure she’s managing alright, but hoping the old folks like her, seeing her in his mind’s eye strolling up the track swinging a switch at the rump of a lazy cow, shouting hoy to Mrs Collins’s goat. Billy thinks. He thinks of her, or when not exactly thinking of her he suspects he ought to be, or rather that he owes it to her and can’t help thinking of her, and hopes this is what shell want, at least that she won’t mind. He recalls the day he caught Uncle prowling in her house, his own jealousy pathetic. Had he forgotten the A.L. commemorated in a browning paint heart on a doomed building where so recently some of the population failed to accept the inevitable, killed by the timbers they had set in place to their own design?