Lizzie became her alibi.
By Christmas, there wasn’t a single one of Lakovsky’s flavours that Rosalind hadn’t sampled, to say nothing of the sodas, milkshakes and Bijou syrups that were Lizzie’s favourites.
Once, Rosalind caught Roy Sleath looking in her direction, his nose jutting out like his father’s truncheon, and said, ‘I have to go.’
Otherwise, only Mary Brodribb appeared to sense anything. ‘How’s your new boyfriend?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I saw you with him outside Harvey’s.’
‘Oh, Gül Mehmet you mean …’ and said something about Lakovsky, the boss, needing extra milk in a hurry.
Mary did not believe her. ‘Positive you’re not keeping something back, Ros?’
‘I most certainly am not!’
Mary glanced at Rosalind. She heard a lot of things in Harvey’s. ‘You know what everyone says? It gives you the fits, not to say what you feel.’ The truth always came out in the end. When a woman had something on her mind, to stop her saying it was as foolish as trying to cover a shaft-head with a handkerchief.
But it was dangerous to tell Mary what was on her mind. Mary was jealous of her relationship with Oliver Goodmore, and Rosalind had a sharp hunch that Mary would be willing to trade in her friend for the fiancé, without really knowing or understanding that that’s what she was doing.
Mary aside, no one came forward to say that Rosalind Filwell had developed an uncharacteristically sweet tooth all of a sudden, or that she and Gül seemed to be doing more talking than the act of buying an ice-cream required. At the intersection of Wolfram and Kaolin streets. Outside the Freiberg Arms Hotel, while he watered his horse. Coming out of Lakovsky’s ice-house holding a churn. And on another occasion, going into Gilbert Bros., the saddlers.
Lakovsky’s decision at the end of November to order his milk from Rosalind’s father made it easier for their encounters to pass unnoticed. The stickiest beak in Broken Hill wouldn’t have found reason to linger over the sight of Albert Filwell’s daughter walking with a metal pail in each hand to the ice-cream maker’s factory in Blende Street. And if the white cart with Lakovsky’s name on it sometimes stopped in the street to give Rosalind a lift with the milk, this too was nothing remarkable.
After an initial wariness, Gül asked her questions, what she believed in, where she’d been, about her ashen-haired mother, who washed and darned for extra income. And about Lizzie, whose condition he appeared to understand. Rosalind’s friends knew Lizzie as a peculiar girl with a big forehead that she compulsively rubbed, and who talked to herself as though permanently frightened by something inside her. In Gül’s village near the Khyber Pass, he’d had an aunt like that, he said, with a lot of stones in her head.
Curiosity was strong in Rosalind. Gül seemed to have travelled the world. One afternoon, he produced from his waistcoat pocket a creased postcard of Hagia Sophia, and described with passion the vivid colours that the grainy black and white photograph failed to evoke. He put his hands on hers when she tried to return the postcard. ‘No, keep it.’ Their hands stayed together for a moment, one on top of the other.
The following afternoon, he quite badly ripped the back of his hand on a splinter while shifting the ice-cream chest to make space for one of her milk buckets. She produced her handkerchief and used it to wrap the torn skin. It gave her a small charge, dressing his cut, to have confirmed what she suspected all along. His blood was the same vermilion shade as the red that bloomed in her underwear, and which she was never able to anticipate in time.
She was envious of what he had seen. His visit to Istanbul, the sailing boats and minarets and tiles bluer than the sky. Is this what Miss Pollock dreamed about behind her sun-faded curtains on Oxide Street, and which accounted for her starved look? Broken Hill was resistant to comparisons. Milk, cakes, mining were what Rosalind could talk about. Gül represented life beyond the mullock. He was proof that Rakow Street was not the only street in the world.
The things he knew! He planted images in her mind. Suffocated by inevitability, she longed for what she was lacking. All she had was this flat landscape and this huge sky, black snakes, brown snakes, and the tan-coloured slag-heap with its blue and green stains on the rocks from the minerals that had been extracted. And Oliver Goodmore, of course.
She was reminded of Oliver every time the ground shook and the horses neighed. But she kept him out of their conversations.
What Rosalind learned from Gül was what he chose to reveal to a twenty-one-year-old girl who had been nice to him when no one else had. In time, others would take part in a frantic scramble to piece together Gül’s history after treating it with disdain.
Back in January, she had asked her father, ‘Where do you think they come from?’ and nodded across the road at the team of camelmen who were noisily rescuing the Filwells’ bungalow from the sand. Her father had been going on with thwarted pride about Rosalind’s grandmother, a Doughty, who had come from a cottage in Farranavara in County Cork, bringing out with her to Australia the four-poster rosewood bed that he and her mother now slept in, and in which each of the three Filwell children had been conceived as well as born. Yet he never exhibited a smidgeon of interest in the background of anyone in Ghantown, their origins, or names. Turks, Hindus, Afghans, Indians – they were much of a colour. His eyes darted over to the pot-bellied foreman, whom she afterwards realised was Molla Abdullah, and he said simply, ‘He looks like he comes from a good paddock.’
She could have written it on Gül’s postcard, all that she knew about him. In her strong, small hand, as Miss Pollock had taught.
Gül was an Afridi from the Tirah Valley who had landed in Australia seventeen years before, in the dark hold of a ship chartered by an Afghan who had promised him £3 a month to look after camels. Gül’s idea was to send money back to his family and at the end of a three-year contract go home. But there was not enough work as a cameleer, and he had found himself destitute. With no money for the return passage, he had raked stones for ballast, done a bit of bore-lining, and cut up sleepers for the railway extension at Wilcannia, before he drifted down to Broken Hill where he coaxed an Irish miner to teach him how to use a hammer and drill, wangling himself a position as an underground trucker for seven shillings and eight pence a day. He saved enough, he told her, to travel to Turkey, where he stayed for a time, but on his return to Broken Hill he found that the miners had been laid off after all contracts with the German smelters were cancelled – the Germans being the principal buyers of lead and zinc from Broken Hill. He went back to cameleering, walking strings out to the sheep stations with post and provisions, and returning with wool bales. But the war did not spare the camel trade either, and in early November he had bought an ice-cream cart off an Italian. His initial encounter with Rosalind in Argent Street took place after he had been hired to ride his cart around Broken Hill to hawk Leo Lakovsky’s ice-creams. He admitted to her that it wasn’t Lakovsky who had taught him his English, but a team of sandalwood cutters from Tarrawingee. He also said that he had not given up his intention of going back to settle in his native land.
Rosalind could not have said that she knew Gül. She never penetrated his mystery or understood him; they were different as two coloured threads crossing each other at right angles. He went into that box of people like Miss Pollock who had prised open her curiosity. But he had the effect of the cockatoos that screeched in the gums bordering the creek; he made the place less lonely by his presence.
For Gül, too, the chaos stopped when he saw her, his horror of what had been done to him faded, as did his fear and continual loneliness among infidels.
Who persuaded who? To some in town, Gül was the mastermind; to others, it was Molla Abdullah. Most likely, they evolved their plan together in the days after Gül was ejected from the Trades Hall. It wouldn’t have required much instigation. Gül, by then, had endured a bellyful of derision. And Molla Abdullah was going berserk anyway, having be
en fined a second time by Clarence Dowter.
According to who you listened to, the two men hadn’t known each other long. Or else they had known each other many years. Not in dispute was that Molla Abdullah, following a fire at his home in Williams Street, was living in temporary accommodation in a ripple-iron shack right next to the hessian humpy that Gül had moved into when he returned from his latest travels.
Gül was friendly and open, more thoughtful. His neighbour was an old cameleer with a limp. Some years before, Molla Abdullah had got between a raging camel in musth and his cow, and the bull camel had torn a chunk from his right leg. Ever since, Molla Abdullah had walked in a doubled-up manner, like someone battling indigestion, or waiting for the next stone to land on his head.
Children go for you in a small town, where stone throwing too often is regarded as one of the joys of life. Different skin colour, strange clothes, not Anglo-Saxon – Molla Abdullah, a reserved, simple, childlike man, presented a target that was irresistible. Boys laughed when he shambled by and chased him down the street. He never retaliated, but he complained on more than one occasion to Sergeant Sleath, who each time promised to have a word with the rascals.
Molla Abdullah had other reasons to feel embittered. As well as acting as the imam at the camel camp, leading the group prayers on Friday and performing burials in the absence of a permanent religious leader, he served as the butcher of his community, killing their meat in the correct Muslim manner. The fact that he was not a member of the Butchers Employees’ Union in the most unionist town in the country had brought him into confrontation with those who needed no excuse to treat a Pathan from India’s north-west frontier as an enemy alien.
Since his arrival in Broken Hill eighteen years before, Molla Abdullah had slaughtered and prepared his meat in the North Camel Camp, out of sight of the town. He had received no reprimand from the council up until the moment, a year before, when Oliver’s uncle became the local Sanitary Inspector.
Perhaps it was because Clarence Dowter was not qualified that he was overzealous. He had tried twice to get his inspection certificate, and failed. ‘Why should the council carry Mr Dowter in its arms?’ was the inflexible opinion of Alderman Turbill. But after Turbill was dismissed and asked to hand over his keys, Mayor Brody had turned to Dowter, whom he had got to know when Dowter was in charge of the gang laying the Silverton-Broken Hill water-pipe.
In 1913, Dowter was appointed Acting Chief Sanitary Inspector. He might not have a certificate, but he had a bit of push behind him. Plus he was a union man. He wouldn’t be another of ‘those silvertails who gave no fair deal in the Sanitary Department’.
Dowter set to work, and no one enjoyed immunity from him. On discovering the state of the floors in the council toilets, he installed a penny-in-the-lock slot, and chastised the men and women in the council whose sense of cleanliness, he said, ‘did not redound to their credit’.
Determined to prove himself in his war on scarlatina, diphtheria, pneumonia and typhoid, Dowter became a tyrant against all filth. To keep Broken Hill’s premises in conformity with the requirements of the Pure Food Act, he fined a shopkeeper who sold butter which, in Dowter’s opinion, was ‘not fit for greasing boots’. He chased a man riding in a suspicious milk cart – ‘the more he cried whoa! the faster he’d go,’ reported the Barrier Miner – and when the cart toppled over, after striking a stone, stayed only long enough to collect eight samples. He prosecuted one woman for selling a verminous stretcher; another for tipping her soap suds into the lane.
As well, he hunted down anyone he suspected of contravening the Broken Hill Abattoirs, Markets, and Cattle Sale-yards Act.
During his first year in office, the uncertificated ex-pipe-layer issued summons to two butchers for transporting their meat in uncovered carts. He stopped one man in Slag Street who actually was riding on the meat, with flies following like seagulls. His dungarees were saturated in blood all the way to his ankles, and a leg of lamb was about to fall off. Dowter charged a third butcher for storing his mincemeat on a floor covered with a ‘quantity of slimy stuff’; plus the owners of two piggeries for failing to keep their premises clean. But the person he monitored with the fiercest attention was Molla Abdullah, the Ghantown butcher.
Already, Dowter had found reason to caution Ghantown’s residents, after discovering that they had dug an unauthorised grave in the town cemetery, in the small plot reserved for Muslims: all graves had to be dug by council gravediggers, Dowter was stern in reminding them – although it was permissible for Afghans to prepare the body and place it in a coffin, provided they left the screws undone.
Dowter found it offensive that local Afghans and Indians would not eat meat killed by people other than their own. Soon after his appointment, he had received a letter from the Ghantown community appealing ‘in the name of religious liberty’ for Molla Abdullah to be able to kill their meat at their camp and not in the abattoirs, where sheep and cattle were slaughtered alongside pigs (‘one of the tenets of our faith is that the latter is a contamination’). The Abattoir Committee had turned down the request on Dowter’s recommendation. ‘There are people of fifty different religions who will want the same privileges.’
Molla Abdullah was not going to be made an exception.
Dowter prosecuted him for the first time that April, for slaughtering sheep at the North Camel Camp instead of at the municipal abattoirs. In court, the Ghantown butcher had read haltingly from a piece of paper: ‘Me not guilty, not know break law, very sorry, not do again.’
Ordered to pay a fine of £1, or go to prison for seven days, Molla Abdullah had paid the fine. Dowter had not pressed for the heaviest penalty of £20.
A fortnight after he had walked into Stack & Tyndall’s to question Rosalind about the purity of Gül Mehmet’s ice-cream, the Sanitary Inspector visited Ghantown again, and found four sheepskins strung out on the fence.
He cast his eyes about for Molla Abdullah and saw him crouched over a fire. Smoke gusted from a black pan where something was boiling.
At the sight of the Sanitary Inspector, Molla Abdullah forced a smile which revealed two brown teeth, and slowly got to his feet.
He stood staring at the ground, waiting.
In an unemotional tone, Dowter recited the regulation that each butcher’s carcass slaughtered at the abattoirs must be branded with a distinctive brand in indelible red.
‘There is no brand on these carcasses.’
Molla Abdullah looked up. The sun glinted on his scalp. ‘No unstan, no unstan.’
‘You said that last time. But not understanding is no defence.’
Molla Abdullah repeated himself.
To the Sanitary Inspector, the man’s store of English was annoyingly small. Dowter thrust his right boot forward and with the toe began to scratch a circle in the earth.
In the adjacent humpy, a woman pulled open the door and looked out and then turned and whispered to someone inside.
Inquisitive faces appeared at window-frames to listen. Molla Abdullah’s voice rose, imploring. The Sanitary Inspector said nothing. His foot went on circling. It might have been creating the world.
It was during their stand-off that Gül emerged from the humpy and walked over.
Dowter immediately recognised Gül from the ice-cream factory in Blende Street. When Gül offered to interpret, Dowter gave him a mistrustful and dismissive look. He hadn’t forgotten the contaminating prayer rug. ‘Don’t think I haven’t got my eye on you, too. But seeing as you’re here, you can ask your mate if he killed his sheep in this yard.’
Gül turned to Molla Abdullah and the two men spoke animatedly. Yes, he had killed the sheep here. But the abattoirs had been on strike.
Dowter looked incuriously at Gül. The fact that the abattoirs may not have been in use did not mean that they were not open for use. It did not relieve a butcher of the necessity of complying with the Act. Nor did it justify a man killing surreptitiously and in an under-hand way. ‘What he’s done is not l
egal. So he’s going to be fined for doing it.’
Grabbing Gül’s arm, Molla Abdullah wanted his position explained to Dowter. He swore by the beard of the Prophet and the bones of his seven ancestors that he sold only to his own people, and not under any circumstances to the general public.
‘Is that right?’ said Dowter meditatively. He reorganised more dust with the toe of his boot, as if he might find something buried there. ‘Then maybe you can ask your mate here if he is a member of the Australasian Federated Butchers Employees’ Union?’
This time, Molla Abdullah was fined £3 and ordered to pay the six shilling costs of court. The police magistrate gave him until the end of December to pay, or face imprisonment for one month.
A desert was closing around the old man. He heard his name in a denigrating tone being knocked about the courtroom, in a language he did not speak or write, and he wondered how his life could have ended up so soiled.
After leaving the courthouse in a rush, Molla Abdullah bashed his way up the street. A hard object struck him on the shoulder and he spun round, glaring. He grabbed the stone from the pavement and hurled it back at the goading group of boys and girls, causing one girl with sores on her face to yelp.
He lumbered on. His temples ached. Back in Ghantown, he wallowed for the next two weeks in an apathy from which no one could stir him, save for Gül Mehmet.
Late on Christmas Eve, Gül returned to the camel camp and entered Molla Abdullah’s shed, looking agitated. He produced a small fistful of hashish and they sat on the ground smoking it through a long-stemmed bamboo pipe, discussing grievances.
Gül was pugnacious after his eviction from the Trades Hall. He had maintained his composure until he stepped outside the building, but as he walked home with his two companions, he couldn’t rid himself of the image of Rosalind Filwell, her look that went through and beyond him.
Yet she had done nothing to restrain Oliver Goodmore and his jeering mob.
Oddfellows Page 5
