Oddfellows

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Rosalind had encountered Gül eight days earlier, at the town’s Christmas Eve dance in the Trades Hall. He stood inside the vestibule with two other dark-skinned young men.

  Lizzie stared back at him through eyes lazy and narrowed. Her face in her outsized head had the energy of an unformed sentence.

  ‘Ros,’ she rejoiced, ‘look what I see.’

  Rosalind remembered the way Oliver turned his long nose in the men’s direction, his annihilating glance.

  ‘Camel-li-as,’ he said. He pronounced the word with a lilt before the third and fourth syllables, as if he could already sniff the strong camel odour.

  ‘What?’ It was Rosalind’s turn to say something, indignant over that ‘Camel-li-as’.

  ‘From Ghantown.’

  Rosalind knew where they were from. She wanted to ask Gül about the injury to his hand. But he was being restrained from entering by a suddenly superior-looking Roy Sleath.

  Something in Gül’s expression continued to hold Rosalind. He wore European clothes, and stood straight and tall.

  ‘Strike me pink,’ said Oliver, puffing up his cheeks like a bugler. ‘Isn’t that Lakovsky’s Turkey lolly?’

  But she was not revolted by him as Oliver seemed to demand.

  Nor Lizzie.

  Her sister was chewing her knuckles and looking into his hurt dark eyes. He was refusing to budge.

  ‘Alf will help see them off,’ Oliver decided, and called over to a stoutish young man with a wart on his eyebrow.

  ‘Shall I ask him to dance?’ Lizzie enquired, and kicked out her legs in a crude jig. She had no sense of her effect on others.

  ‘No,’ ordained Oliver in a cavalierish voice, ‘you will dance with me.’

  Arm-in-arm, he escorted Lizzie through the packed hall towards the stage where a brass band was beginning to play.

  Leaving Rosalind standing there.

  Meanwhile, Alf Fiddaman, who could be a bit of a hothead, was aping the Germans’ marching style and thrusting the three Afghans back towards the entrance with Roy Sleath’s assistance. ‘Sorry, camel-lips!’

  Rosalind was conscious of a savage intensification of feeling. Gül seemed to look at her, before raising his hand – still wrapped in her handkerchief. It was a small gesture, but remembered to exaggeration by Rosalind as some sort of farewell.

  Then, without resistance, he turned and walked out.

  She thought of Gül next day when her father shooed away a small group of Afghan children who stood hopefully on the doorstep in their best clothes, asking to be allowed to join in the family’s Christmas celebrations.

  One girl, braver than the rest, with paler skin, stood her ground. ‘Please, mister.’

  ‘You please yourself what you do, but if you ever come round here again you won’t walk away from the place.’

  The choppy pitch of his voice upset Rosalind, and she made the mistake of saying so in front of her sister. ‘After all, local European children are welcome at the Ramadan feast.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Lizzie, stepping out of her slow churn of thought. She unwound her glance from the drawing she was doing of the crocodile she had always believed lived under her bed, and looked up at Rosalind. ‘Ros, you haven’t been hanging about there, have you?’

  She had, but she did not reveal this to Lizzie. Her younger sister was the last person she would have told.

  A loud explosion eight months earlier had drawn Rosalind to the settlement. A shot in the camp that brought out all the cats and dogs in Williams Street, returning at a run with bits of offal dangling from their jaws. Evidently, they knew when a sick camel was slaughtered.

  She had been on her way to the Brodribbs’ house, to lend Mary a novel she’d borrowed from the free lending library, and was already in a strangely restless mood. Moments before, she had had an awkward encounter with her former teacher.

  An engagement broken off, a Greek-sounding name. Miss Pollock had recently come back to Broken Hill with an orange dress and not much else, after things had not worked out in Adelaide. (‘He promised her the earth,’ confided Mary, who believed in the infallibility of everything she overheard in Harvey’s, even when the speaker was Mrs Rasp, ‘then treated her like dirt.’) And though Miss Pollock professed chirpily there was no place like home, she hadn’t truly returned.

  They had stopped on the side of the road. Miss Pollock, who was never at her best in public, started off politely, but soon became oddly inquisitive, asking Rosalind about her life since the last time they had met, almost four years ago, when Rosalind was about to leave school.

  ‘Mrs Stack offered me a position.’

  Miss Pollock nodded. A job at ‘The People’s Drapery’ wasn’t to be sniffed at, with everyone at the front or being laid off; seventy-five per cent of the population were on half-time.

  But her smile was congested.

  ‘And you’ll get married,’ she said out of her unusually lined face. ‘And live here. With your grandchildren.’

  Rosalind remembered her grandmother swishing around town in her moss-coloured dress, muttering to herself.

  She wanted to say, ‘I expect you are right,’ but altered this into ‘I would like something more’. She looked surprised by the words that blurted from her mouth, as if put there by someone else.

  ‘Something more?’

  ‘Yes. Something more.’ Rosalind’s voice sounded steely in its surround of politeness.

  Miss Pollock gazed at Rosalind. ‘There’s nothing more,’ she said matter-of-factly, and her expression turned to pity. ‘You must realise this is an egotistical town, Rosalind. It makes you think of yourself only.’

  BANG.

  At the sound of the shot, Miss Pollock broke off their conversation, and hurried away.

  Rosalind couldn’t help being infected by her teacher’s mood. She continued along Williams Street, and was less than 100 yards from the Brodribbs’ house when she saw a little grey dog, too small for what it had snatched, lie down in the shade and lick its tongue around something large and shiny. As if tugged by an invisible rope, she decided to turn right, towards Ghantown, and see for herself this much talked-about place.

  If you don’t behave, the Afghans will get you, her father used to joke.

  Provoked by her father, and by the picture that one or two of Oliver’s mates had painted, but most of all by her unsatisfactory exchange with Miss Pollock, Rosalind walked along the perimeter until she entered the camel camp. She did not know what she would find, or even what she was looking for. Her brother in the dark groped for something he could not see.

  And what had she seen?

  Square wool bales like wombat dung.

  Children returning in a line from school, the boys in turbans, clean white trousers, and black waistcoats with large buttons.

  A sockless man at the top of a ladder pollinating the date palms.

  From under the trees came a strong, latrine-like stench.

  Cross-legged on a tarpaulin, a black-haired young man sat repairing a broken saddle with a packing needle. He did not move his head as she passed.

  Further in, camels lay on their stomachs on the flat ground, swinging their lower lips back and forth as they chewed. They looked jittery and somehow different from the creatures that meandered in placid columns beside the road to Silverton. His arm around a camel’s neck, fondling its ear, a boy talked soothingly in a foreign language – in Pushtu? – calming them.

  The transition exhilarated Rosalind. One moment she was wandering along Williams Street, saying a stilted good afternoon to her old teacher; the next, she could have been standing on the banks of the Nile. It was hardly possible for her two eyes to take it all in.

  Bent over under the bough of a white gum, a bare-headed old man with a protruding belly sawed noisily at a carcass. Patriarchal, thick, and divided in two, his grey beard seemed to brush the ground.

  Rosalind stood there uncertain, her eyes on this small, stocky butcher who was cutting up the dead camel,
in between fending off a pack of darting dogs and cats – until a woman in a veil hurried over and motioned her into a skillion-roofed shed with a hessian partition, no windows but open one end. Old clothes and dried dingo scalps dangled from bent wires, like the hooks that held up her father’s horse harness. On a table constructed from packing cases was a jam tin filled with dripping, and a slush lamp with a strip of trouser cloth for wick.

  The veiled woman scrubbed out a plate with wet sand, and put onto it something plucked from a box suspended by wires, and indicated that she should eat. Rosalind thanked her. She examined the doughy offering, the depressions with thumb prints, and took a tiny polite bite. The tart, peppery flavour was invigoratingly unlike her mother’s johnnycakes.

  Rolled out on the ground was a brilliant-coloured rug, embroidered with unfamiliar patterns and motifs. Invited to sit down, Rosalind knelt and looked outside at the camels. She was conscious of the tinkling of bells and of muscles relaxing on arched necks. Also, of the odd way the animals examined her. Miss Pollock had taught that the camel had a membrane like a black film, which in desert storms shut across the eye while the lid remained wide open, to protect it from stinging sand. So Rosalind chewed on her curry-flavoured chapatti and gazed back.

  Without the camel, Miss Pollock had told her class in Gypsum Street, the empty places would never have been opened up at all.

  A goat came in at the entrance and stood and eyed Rosalind, the sand bubbling and darkening around its hind legs. Under the white gum, the long-bearded figure went on sawing. She thought of Sukey, who lived wherever night overtook her, and wondered if it was over that branch that Sukey tossed her blanket.

  Rosalind had visited the camp once more, at the end of June. A holy man from Sinde was touring the bush mosques. It was Ramadan, and camelmen from miles around had gathered to be within the emanation of this travelling imam whom everyone was talking about.

  She was intensely curious to see what a holy man looked like. He was twice descended from the Prophet, the papers said.

  When she reached the camel camp: the noise. The braying and bleating was louder than the town’s brass band tuning up. Rosalind was again made welcome. She was given a glass of tea and invited to take her place on a bench where a slender young man who had arrived late was removing his sandals, adding them to a heap. Also milling about were children whose faces she recognised – Prisks, Rutts, Spanglers, Deebles. Their families lived in the neighbouring streets.

  Figures bustled past dressed in white flowing clothes. What Rosalind saw mocked the stories she had heard. These people weren’t unclean. She was surprised by how exceptionally clean, in fact, they were. Her mother couldn’t have laundered their clothes to this standard.

  It was made clear to Rosalind that she couldn’t join in the prayers, but she managed to eavesdrop. So many worshippers had assembled at the mosque that its door had been wedged open in order for those outside to hear. She peered over their backs into a room about twenty feet long by fifteen feet wide, heavily carpeted, and lit by two lamps. In successive flashes, she catalogued a driftwood stand with an open book resting on it. A bunch of emu feathers on the wall. Two pictures – Mecca? Bethlehem? And lying on the carpet, face up, a circular wood-framed clock that might have come from the railway station.

  Glancing from time to time at the clock, the holy man stood leading the prayers. Rosalind’s only yardstick for holiness was the Reverend Cornelius Hayball, and the imam did not look like him. He was under average height, sandy complexioned with a white beard, and on his head a bright white turban. He bent and kissed the Koran, then turned the pages from the end, reading passages aloud.

  Transfixed, Rosalind watched the lines of worshippers kneel on the prayer mats, touch the ground with their foreheads, then sit back, chanting in unison, ‘La-ilaha-illa-Allah wa ashhadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluh.’

  A balding assistant with a divided grey beard limped in the imam’s wake, a pace or two behind. Rosalind recognised the sawing figure from under the gum tree. And then it came to her where on another occasion she had seen this man: he had helped shovel away the sand after the dust storm in January.

  That storm was one of the most violent anyone could recall, announced by dark specks tumbling high overhead – twigs, bones and other detritus blown into the upper atmosphere by fierce currents of wind, and far in advance of the angry tube of grey smoke that rolled across the horizon from east to west. She and Lizzie had raced inside to block all keyholes, windows and fireplaces. For four days, red-brown dust and gravel had rattled down on the iron roof in Rakow Street, blocking out the sun. By the time the storm passed on to the Mallee, their house was buried up to its barge-boards. The cameleers had had to bring along the scoop which they used for excavating water catchments. They had worked for hours. And this bald fat man with the long forked beard and a limp had been their foreman.

  Otherwise, she looked around at men who were physically imposing and graceful in their movements. Rosalind also saw one white woman with five children.

  All this occurred in June. She met Gül nearly five months later, in the second week of November. She had finished her afternoon shift at the drapery store and was walking home when she heard a clang.

  The white-painted cart on which he sat shaking a cowbell caught her attention more than Gül. It was hitched to a thin bay horse with its head in a nosebag, and was low-sided like her grandmother’s four-poster bed – so that Rosalind’s first thought was of her grandmother, stalking through the dust in a tattered dress, after losing her savings to a lanky hawker of bogus mine shares that she had purchased under the balcony of the Denver City Hotel.

  Rosalind waited until the steam tram had passed, then stepped closer. The four barley-sugar posts supported a dark green tarpaulin to shade the ice-cream chest in the back.

  She read the words italicised on the side of the cart.

  Lakovsky’s Delicious ITALIAN ICE CREAM. A Food fit for Children and Invalids.

  She was about to cross the street when he called out in surprisingly good English, ‘Warn your children against inferior vendors!’

  ‘I don’t have children,’ and looked at him. Dressed in waistcoat and watch.

  Was he one of those sitting back on his heels outside the mosque? He had given her the excuse to stare, at least. He wore loose blue dungarees tied at the ankle and under his waistcoat an oversize bushman’s shirt that hung down over his trousers. One of his boots had no lace.

  She felt her face colouring. ‘Are you new to Broken Hill?’ for something to say. She had never before seen this two-wheeled cart.

  But he was not to be pinned down so easily. ‘Prompt delivery and general satisfaction is my motto.’

  At this, Rosalind couldn’t help smiling. She recognised his manager’s words.

  ‘Does that mean Mr Lakovsky’s freezer is working again?’

  Leo Lakovsky was a Russian Jew from Odessa who advertised himself as ‘Broken Hill’s No. 1 champion ice-cream manufacturer’. He recently had imported an expensive freezer from America, powered by electric motor. But less than a week after he installed it at his premises in Blende Street, the famous electric motor had broken down. Distraught, Lakovsky had summoned Oliver Goodmore. The machine needed to be mended if the Russian wasn’t to have his licence taken away by the town’s overzealous sanitary inspector, Oliver’s uncle, Clarence Dowter.

  ‘Oh, it bin working very well.’ The bell was put down and he swivelled. From one of the tubs inside the chest, he scraped out a spoonful of ice-cream.

  He turned back, lifting it for her to taste.

  ‘Buttermilk ice. Only four per cent fat. Most delicious.’

  The sun was shining. His hands, she saw, were clean.

  Shyness prevented her from knowing what to do.

  ‘I’m …’ ruffled by a gust that no one else in Argent Street seemed to be feeling.

  She knew the person who had repaired the freezer. She could tell him that. Or that Oliver was twisting La
kovsky’s arm to favour Rosalind’s father as the chief supplier of his milk, in place of that larrikin Beek who wasn’t a member of the Milk Vendors’ Association.

  ‘Go on, taste.’

  The ice-cream was beginning to drip down his fingers.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Broken Hill.’

  ‘But before that.’

  His chin rose. ‘Afghanistan.’

  As she opened her mouth, Rosalind was conscious of his eyes on her. They were clear and clean. Like his hand.

  And gave a cry that Oliver must have heard over in the South Mine.

  She reeled back, choking. What she was recoiling from were two strands of wool. She had swallowed one. She produced the other from her mouth – damp, long, scarlet-coloured – and held it out between her fingers.

  How quickly he sprang up, like a sitting camel bounding to its feet. He was new in the job, he apologised. He couldn’t imagine how this wool … how it could have got itself into the ice-cream.

  He snatched the offending strand from her, and insisted that she sample another spoonful from a different tub. And ran around to fetch it, this time yellow in colour and more generous than before.

  She tightened her mouth.

  He was standing beside her, holding up the spoon.

  What had started in fun had become serious. Rosalind no longer had any desire to taste Mr Lakovsky’s most delicious buttermilk ice-cream. What she ought to do, she knew, was walk off. But she felt sorry for him. This strange man, the lost foreigner away from his family, ice-cream in the heat, dripping down his fingers.

  ‘All right,’ she relented. ‘But you can’t object if I take a closer look.’

  She examined his second offering. Which did on this occasion seem hairless.

  After all, well, they were probably only shaken from some rug, and gingerly pushed out her tongue.