by Stephen Orr
‘He’s probably in his room with his headphones on,’ Murray said, stuffing his mouth with bread.
He stood, walked from the room, down the semi-papered hallway and looked into his son’s room.
Empty.
Then he went out through the sliding doors to the front of the house with its view from the hill, down the slope of old bloodwoods. ‘Harry!’ he called, but there was no response.
He stood on the wide porch which, although at the front of the house, was really the back, away from the chaos of the compound. Broken tiles. A bull-nosed verandah that leaked, although they knew where to sit to stay dry. There were several old chairs—wicker, tube-steel, a fluffy stool from Carelyn’s ABBA days—and an old tranny, although there was no signal for it to pick up.
This is where they’d come on hot evenings to escape the house, to watch distant freight trains or the Indian Pacific, scurrying between oceans. They’d watch them come into view and, an hour later, disappear. They’d follow their every painful inch, as if it was the first time they’d ever seen a train.
‘Harry!’
Nothing.
He’d warned him so many times: stay within calling distance of the house. He could remember a night when Harry was three or four, when it was pelting down (the first time in years), the fork-lightning picking up the glint of the railway tracks, strobing the cattle-eye desert. And there he was, standing in this same spot, calling out, ‘Harry, where are yer?’
Searching the sheds, the roads, the tracks, down among the bloodwoods, out onto the flats, their rain-soaked outdoor lounge room; Chris cowering under a rug; Fay, still in her nightie, poking about in long grass with a broom.
Until Harry emerged from Murray’s sleep-out, from under the canvas stretcher the old man slept on, saying (words like), ‘I knew you wouldn’t find me.’ Smiling, laughing, wondering why his dad was covered in curry-coloured mud.
‘Dad.’ Harry was at the door.
‘Christ,’ Trevor said, turning. ‘Where were you?’
‘I left my iPod in the ute.’ He was gone, back to the table, the thick slabs of cold ham and beef and pickled onions.
Trevor followed him in. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s probably those headphones, makin’ you deaf.’
‘Dad, it’s not.’
They both sat down.
Fay’s chin was nearly on her chest. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’
They all looked at her, then at each other.
‘What, you wanna say grace?’ Murray asked his sister.
Fay took a deep breath and looked up. ‘No, of course not.’
‘You wanna say the Lord’s Prayer?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You were sayin’ it.’
She shook her head. ‘No, go on, get on with yer lunch. You want more tea? Anyone want more tea?’
They ate silently: nothing but the roar of Spitfires and Messerschmitts.
Half an hour later, Harry stood in the machinery shed wearing gloves, gumboots and overalls. Trevor looked him over and said, ‘Fifty mils.’ The hazel-eyed boy carefully measured fifty millilitres of herbicide into a cylinder and tipped it into a spray-pack. Then used a bigger cylinder to fill this with water. Took a stick, stirred the mixture and screwed the lid on tight. Primed the tank and started spraying around the sheds—coating every weed, every blade of grass with herbicide. He’d stop, prime the pump, and start again, following fence lines, in and around Fay’s garden.
At one point, Carelyn stuck her head out of the door and called, ‘Watch the washing.’
Trevor, following behind, just mumbled, ‘There’s not a breath of wind.’
Chris appeared from the house wearing his spaghetti singlet and boxer shorts and started singing The Battle of Britain theme. He conducted with his right hand as his head flew about in incomplete orbits. Finding the exact centre of the compound, he came to attention, saluted and started marching around the perimeter. Each step was in time with the music. He stopped, turned and was off again. Stopped, turned, marched.
Harry smiled at his father. Trevor just raised his eyebrows. ‘Go on, get on with it.’
‘Shouldn’t we tell Aunty Fay?’
‘No.’
He continued along the fence line, saying, ‘Dad, what’s gonna happen to Uncle Chris?’
‘He’ll get tired …’
‘No … later? Will we have to look after him?’
‘We already do.’
‘No … by ourselves?’
Trevor saw he’d missed a spot, but he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like you could get it all. Or, for that matter, stop it re-growing. No matter how careful you were the weeds would win. ‘Maybe there will be somewhere he can go,’ he said.
‘Where?’ Harry asked, pumping with the palm of his hand.
‘A home.’
‘A nursing home?’
‘No, some sort of … well, perhaps a nursing home.’
Harry wasn’t happy. ‘But they’re for old people.’
‘Not always. Just people who need … nursing. Hence the name, numbat.’ He knocked on his son’s head. ‘Nursing home.’
Chris stopped and waited.
‘What’s wrong?’ Trevor called.
And then thrust his arm out. ‘Sieg Heil!’
They had to stop themselves from laughing.
Chris was hot; he took off his singlet and stood at ease. Then, having received some sort of order, was off again, this time launching into a vocalise of the Colonel Bogey March.
Harry continued. The herbicide was running out; it was frothing, drifting in the chemical breeze. ‘If he needs a home, we should start looking,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Aunty Fay …’ He didn’t really know how to say it.
Trevor took a moment and said, ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Are you gonna look?’
‘Soon.’
This didn’t seem the least bit sensible to Harry. ‘Don’t they have waiting lists?’ he asked, finishing the poison.
As they marched back to the shed, Chris stopped and waited silently. Then he said, ‘Fall out.’ He walked towards the house, wiping his red flesh with his singlet, drying his armpits and the skin that formed a pouch between his belly and pubic triangle.
‘We could always look after him,’ Harry said.
‘We could.’
‘Will we?’
‘That’s up to Pop, and Mum.’
They arrived back in the shed and Harry unscrewed the top of the spray-pack. Trevor handed him the measuring cylinder. ‘This time we’ll do twice as much.’
Harry was opening the poison. ‘I could do more, to help him.’
‘We’ll see. A lot could happen. He might need more help than we can give him.’ He looked up and saw the yellow sheets hanging on the line.
Harry was just about to measure the herbicide when he heard the back door open. ‘Harry, time for your lesson,’ Carelyn called.
‘Mum!’ he complained, loudly.
‘Now.’
2
Aiden Wilkie, seventeen, summer-tanned and red-nosed, waited for the singing to finish. The organ huffed and McIlwain, the chemistry teacher, switched it off. Brother Adlam stood and approached the lectern. ‘Brother Giles left Mercy in 1971,’ he read, using his right hand to settle his glasses on his nose. ‘He’d helped redevelop school facilities and was always a positive presence …’
Aiden stretched his long, brown legs and compared them to the boy (a local, the son of a cop) sitting next to him: pale-skinned, none of the scars or discolourations of real life. And the Brother, completely removed from reality: ‘He’d been a member of the Mercy staff since the early days …’
He guessed he had to be here, had to suffer, but felt that some good should come of it: book-keeping, letter-writing, physical education, even what passed for agriculture (a flock of sheep, a few calves, a few pigs). But not this.
�
��During these years two more Brothers passed on …’
He could see there was strength in his legs and he felt he was wasting it. He could see his dad digging a hole for a fence post, and his brother, trying to help him, although there were only a few jobs he was good for. Anyway, Harry had seven years of his own bullshit to wade through. Education in the ether: webcams and the faces of distant teachers, their lips refusing to synchronise with their words. King Henry the Fifth, Pontius Pilate, salmon swimming upstream, the importance of an opposable thumb, Mozart dead at thirty-five. Three times a day, despite what really needed doing around Bundeena. As he heard his father light the welder.
Now, Aiden, which of these is not a mammal …
Or, a long, hot afternoon, and 300 head to castrate. Looking at his mother, eyes pleading: ‘I’ll do twice as much tomorrow.’
‘No.’
‘Dad will be going for hours.’
As the baby (the pest, Harry-shit-arse) cried in the corner and Aunty Fay peeled potatoes. ‘No, Aiden, Bill’s helpin’ … they’re nearly done.’
‘Catholic laity began to assume responsibility for schools from various religious orders …’
He saw Mrs Dale pointing to his un-tucked shirt. He fixed it; just enough to keep her quiet.
‘Examination results were invariably good: Latin, Classics, Geometry …’
He looked down at the school-crested carpet, discoloured by the light from the stained-glass windows. Noticed the dozen or so pairs of boots, and his were the most polished; legs, and his were the longest; hands (some clutching hymnals), and his were the strongest—and most frustrated (squeezing, rubbing, tapping). Then he looked through a window with the word ‘Eucharist’ in gold along the bottom. A leadlight showed a long table, chokers with disciples, each with their own pink beard. There was a white-whiskered Jesus, too old, too fat for Messiah-as-Catholic-school-leadlight.
It is, he thought, staring at him. Father Christmas. What year? I must have been eight or nine.
It was the same face: high forehead, and eyelids that covered most of his eyes; a small mouth, few words, dented chin.
It is, he thought.
An hour’s journey in the family car: him, Shit-for-breath, Trevor, Carelyn and Murray. He could remember stopping at the siding and getting out and waiting, his parents refusing to tell him why they were there. Remember wearing his new Akubra, a clean shirt and too-tight moleskins coming up above his gristly ankles. Murray grinning. ‘They used to do this when I was a kid.’
‘What’s that, Pop?’
‘Wait and see.’
Then the train: a pair of locos pulling a long, silver slug. The Indian Pacific stopping at Bundeena siding (the first time in twenty years, Murray pointed out, as the train slowed towards them). It stopped and waited and hissed. Then, Father Christmas descended the six steps from the front loco.
He could still see him in the leadlight, reaching for his chalice.
He was back in the desert. Harry was crying (because Santa had asked to hold him, to give him a small gift they’d stopped a hundred tonnes of train to share). He could remember waiting his turn, watching as Santa handed Shit-for-brains back to his mum; as the old man opened his arms and embraced him; as he knocked his Akubra to the ground; as the old man said, ‘I’ve got a gift for you too,’ and gave him a present that turned out to be a totem-tennis set.
He remembered telling Santa what he wanted, and Santa saying something like, ‘Well, I’ll do my best, but it’s a long way for my reindeer to carry so many presents.’
And he remembered thinking, So what, you silly old bastard. Looking at the costume, and seeing that it barely covered the engineer’s overalls, the beard doing little to disguise his coffee breath, his boots covered in oil.
He remembered looking at his parents and thinking, Thanks anyway.
Brother Adlam was still going. ‘Handball calls into play every muscle of the body.’
He realised, not for the first time, that it was all a big put on.
‘Let’s keep it relevant,’ Mrs Amery, Harry’s teacher (captured in a small box in the corner of his screen, cigarette smoke drifting across her face) said to him.
Harry couldn’t see how German was relevant—a clunking language giving everything labels that didn’t fit. And why German? When was he going to Germany? Did they even have cattle stations in Germany?
‘Der Stier,’ she said.
‘Der Stier,’ he repeated, staring into the small camera on top of his computer.
‘Which means?’
‘A steer?’
He didn’t really care. It was either this or Japanese and he had no idea what that was about. He could remember sitting, listening, as Aiden struggled with the words. He could see his brother now, looking down at him, rolling his eyes. And his father, standing in the background: ‘Why on earth would they waste their time?’
‘Der Traktor,’ Amery continued.
‘Der Traktor.’
Murray was sitting on the lounge rolling cigarettes, licking and lovingly sealing the seams. He had five lined up on the coffee table. ‘Ich rauche jetzt eine Zigarette,’ he said.
Harry’s classroom had colonised the corner of the lounge-dining area. His computer sat on a desk beside a bookcase made from old floorboards. There were posters—tables, the world, even Gandhi, as if (Carelyn had once supposed) this might inspire some sort of global consciousness in her trail bike-riding, cattle-branding sons.
Murray lit a match, placed it at the tip of his cigarette and inhaled.
‘Not in here,’ Carelyn said.
‘I was going out,’ he replied, standing.
She watched him go. He opened the sliding door and walked out. He could see low cumulus spreading to the north. The heart of the clouds was grey, but he knew they wouldn’t drift any further south. Never did. Just along their fence line, before breaking up in a sunset of broken promise.
‘Die Gans,’ he heard Harry harping.
He noticed his nephew, further down the hill, harvesting lavender heads from bushes his sister had planted years ago. Chris moved on his knees, picking flowers, placing them in a shopping bag and moving along. Murray studied his body, his movements: careful, like he might be assembling a diesel engine or contemplating a line of calculus.
He knew why Fay had planted her lavender crop: their mother, always smelling of the stuff, making potpourri and lavender sachets to sit in drawers and under pillows. Thirty years later Fay’s lavender was still there, prospering in full sun and bad soil. French, English and Italian, watered daily, pruned (Chris, manic with the shears) three times a year. Fay out of an evening walking between the rows, pulling a spike of angustifolia and smelling it, dropping it in the sand, passing on.
He watched and inhaled as Chris worked. He felt like this boy (for he was still a boy, really) had been at Bundeena forever; as he had been, for most of what amounted to a lifetime.
It was a cold day, July or August 1964. He could remember working with his dad in the yards, then the sound of a car in the driveway. It came up to the compound and there was Fay and her six-year-old son climbing out of an EH Holden. He could remember his sister getting out of the car, and immediately crying. ‘Barry, he’s run off.’ As the boy ran down to the yards.
‘Chris, careful!’ he’d called, but he was gone.
‘What do you mean, run off?’ his dad had asked his only daughter.
‘Left a note saying he’s had enough.’
He’d noticed the suitcases and clothes in the back of the EH.
‘What are you gonna do?’ they’d asked, and she’d just shrugged.
Chris was poking a bull with a length of rubber tubing.
‘Get away from that animal,’ his father had shouted.
‘I’ve come a long way,’ Fay had answered, and there was silence.
‘You wanna stay here?’ his father had asked.
‘Can I?’
‘How long for?’
‘A few weeks?’
Becoming months, years and decades. As the lavender grew, pushing its roots into soil that couldn’t stand rain, not that they ever got any. As the EH was moved into one of the sheds, its motor seizing, its panels rusting.
‘How much more you got to do?’ he called to Chris, as he sucked his rollie back to his fingertips.
‘A few more.’
‘You should have a hat on.’
Chris looked at him as if he wasn’t sure what he meant.
‘Fucking idiot,’ he whispered, focusing on the boy’s big ears, burning deep red as he worked.
The Wilkies had found a room for them but after six months it was a very full house: Trevor in his first Akubra and boots always running away from Chris, forever wanting to hug and kiss him. Fay, always in tears, locking herself in her room for days on end as everyone fed, educated and entertained her not-quite-right son. Then there were the whispers and grumbles across the tea table. ‘Of course no one minds that you’re here, but if you’re gonna stay, you gotta help out.’
‘It’s all Barry’s fault.’
At first he’d been protective, telling his father to be patient, but by late 1964 a consensus had formed: enough was enough.
Then, as if by magic, Barry appeared on Christmas Day 1964. When Fay crawled out of bed at ten o’clock (the others having taken care of Chris, and his presents) he was sitting on the lounge assembling some of his son’s new Meccano. ‘G’day, Fay.’
‘Barry …’
As everyone watched, anxiously.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I’ve come to see me son, for Christmas.’
‘Oh.’ She just stared at him.
‘I thought you might be glad to see me.’
Her face hardened. ‘Yeah? You thought? After just pissin’ off?’
Someone said, ‘Go easy, Fay, he’s done the right thing.’ But she just glared at them, turned and stormed into her room.
Barry shrugged. ‘Give her a couple of days, she’ll come around.’
As a voice called from behind solid wood, ‘I’m not comin’ out till he’s gone.’
The family was torn. Yes, Barry could stay (that was their best, and only, hope) but what if he then settled and became part of the problem? Man and wife, living separately in the same house? How long could anyone put up with that? No one was entirely sure what Barry was thinking. They suspected he didn’t like work, and as for the conductress he’d run off with—where was she? Were they willing to wait days, weeks, before the frost thawed, if indeed it ever would?
