A Long Way From Home Page 12

  She arrived barefoot, carrying her dirty bunched up stockings. Her makeup was smeary. She had ratty bird’s nest hair. I took the stockings from her and laid them in the concrete tub in silence.

  ‘He’s very frail,’ I warned her. ‘Anyone can see that.’

  ‘Frail?’ She smirked. ‘He’s twenty-six years old.’

  ‘He’s been hurt.’

  ‘Poor Irene,’ my sister said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And I was reminded of why I always fought with her. I had wanted an older sister who might have looked after me, but that had never been the case, and she would always take what she could get, and put me down. I suggested she would be better having her social life off the premises.

  She stared. I stared back. Once upon a time I would have pulled her hair.

  ‘Alright,’ she said at last. She fled across the gravel to the caravan and I was left with just her filthy stockings.

  The very next day she began to make a contribution to the household. She shopped. She cooked. She swept the builder’s sawdust off the new showroom floor and removed the ‘Pilkington’ stickers from the plate glass windows. She was not going to be denied Bachhuber. That must have been the basis of her thinking.

  She was still annoying, of course, but now she helped the kids with their school projects. The Melbourne Argus had produced colour supplements for the Royal visit and Beverly got down on the living room floor with cartridge paper and a pot of homemade paste, cutting out pictures of the ‘Royal crown’, the ‘sceptre’ and the ‘orb’.

  She also had her hair done so as to solicit comments on her physical similarity to the Royal person. She and the boys dug a pit in the middle of the back lawn, without permission. Here she cooked a lamb on hot stones as had been described in the Women’s Weeklyas ‘Maori style’. This never cooked right through, but fair is fair: she was earning her keep.

  Bachhuber then encouraged her to believe she was an expert on maps. He allowed her to lecture us on The Australian Map Compendium. I admit this contained curiosities, not least the map with Australia at the top and Europe at the bottom, also explorers’ maps with Bass Strait missing and Tasmania joined to the mainland, the Maslen map of the inland sea, and the entire country shown as a quilt of pastoral leases.

  ‘It’s as educational as a dictionary,’ Titch said, but he never did like education.

  Also, we had to listen to them from our bedroom. That made me sad and I tried to show Titch how I loved him, how he was always, for ever my husband, but we failed, somehow.

  In the dark I heard him say, ‘I’ve seen how you look at him.’

  I did not dignify that with an answer. All night my mind was full of Redex. I thought about the Holden air cleaner which would clog with outback dust. I decided I would put the kiddies into boarding school. In the morning I was ashamed. I took Beverly’s filthy stockings, and put them in my handbag and drove down to the part of Simon’s garage which was becoming our new showroom. I lifted the bonnet and there was that bloody air cleaner, a big black cylinder with a wing nut on the top. I wasn’t even in overalls, just a pleated grey skirt and blue cardy and I could feel the apprentice watching me, wondering what was the silly woman doing. In actual fact, the woman was being a genius. She unscrewed the central wing nut and lifted off the lid, removed the mesh cylinder, detached the main unit from the valve cover, poured the oil away, tucked her lovely linen hanky into the open carby, washed the filter and main unit in petrol. Then, everything being shiny clean, she retrieved her hanky, stretched her sister’s dirty stocking over the cylindrical mesh, and – Bob’s your uncle – reassembled an air cleaner that would do the job.

  I found the silent apprentice by my side.

  He asked, ‘Does your husband know what you are doing?’

  Being a man, he will have forgotten that by now.

  23

  The Bobs boy lay on the backyard grass looking at the sky. I knew exactly how he felt, or so I thought, watching a transport plane drone through the clear unclouded sky. This was the utter desolation which colonised my childhood afternoons. This sadness was always lurking and could be triggered by something as inconsequential as small black ants, beings with no possible knowledge of my existence, hurrying across a concrete slab with what purpose who could know. I felt a similar sadness exploring my grandmother’s musty atlas, those patchwork European nations whose lovely reds and violets were my natural home.

  Then Germany declared war on me. We Lutherans were loyal subjects of the British Empire but my older brother was excited by his German blood. You could see his muscles fighting with themselves. He was lean like the pastor, but much taller, and stronger, and his constant rage left his neck pushed forward. He bought a motorcycle and rode to meetings. He celebrated Hitler’s birthday by marching up and down the main street in Hahndorf. He spat a great bubbling tarry mess on our framed portrait of the King of England, and dared to smile while my father prevented my grandmother – frail and pale as china – from cleaning up his crime.

  I wet my bed. I was compelled to fight at school. My father wrote away for the 1943 National Geographic map of the world which he imagined might bring me peace of mind. By the time that arrived the war was over and Carl had finally, after so much effort on his part, become one of the two native-born South Australians to be interned.

  My parents suffered him, then I added to their pain, fleeing our home without a word of farewell or explanation. (I think of this most days.) My life was fear and chaos, but when I arrived in Melbourne it was to maps I turned, as to a parent.

  When I entered Sebastian Laski’s office, I thrust the door wide and closed it so energetically that Tindale’s precious sketch maps rose into the air and sailed perilously close to the open window.

  ‘Willy-willy,’ he called me, when he heard my name. I doubt I ever showed such energy again.

  Sebastian was the Map Librarian of the State Library of Victoria. Such was the library in those years, when there were no proper cataloguing guidelines and very few shelves to accommodate the library’s treasures, it is likely that this grand title was one Sebastian had granted to himself. He was a broad chested man with legs like fence posts which he displayed bare in all weathers, even when there was frost upon suburban lawns. He had a long jaw, and wide high cheeks and close-cropped silver hair and an ugly scar stretching from the corner of his mouth almost to his eye. I imagined him a warrior who had been compelled, by some failure or disgrace, to be reduced to this sedentary role.

  Sebastian hired me to be his assistant. Lord knows what he might have finally taught me if I had not fled again, this time from Adelina who was the reason I ran away from Adelaide in the first place.

  I was twenty-one years old. Sebastian briefly loved me, I think, in the way of childless men. He shared his reading of maps such as Willem Blaeu’s ‘Terra Sancta quae in Sacris Terra Promissionis olim Palestina’ which his erudition layered with the ghosts of other charts, including population movements, abstracting the cruel invasion of the Homo sapiens into the lands later fought over by Christians, Jews and Muslims. In those faded sepias I saw the extinction of the Neanderthals who had been moved, not through any restless desire to explore the world, but by the need to flee a ruthless enemy.

  I had only known him for a week when I asked him to help me with the crisis that had caused us to flee from South Australia. Where else might I have turned? What other reckless path might I have chosen? I requested a loan of fifty pounds to procure an illegal abortion.

  Sebastian brought Adelina and me home to meet his wife. We must have appeared to them as orphans, as indeed we were. They fed us soup with spoons so large we could barely fit them in our mouths.

  It was to Sebastian I divulged not only my guilts and agonies but the unsettling emotions engendered in me by maps. This was grief, he said. He offered Jung: I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.
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br />   It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children.

  It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

  My father never learned where I had vanished to. I owed him so much more.

  Sebastian drove us to the abortionist ’s in his rusty Hillman Minx and then delivered us home again. He left us with a pot of stew and dumplings. In that blessed time I was his protégé and he introduced me to beer and his opinions of the relative virtues of both Freud and Jung which I remember as the subject of our conversations at the Albion Hotel in Carlton. Here, every Friday afternoon, when I was still a happily married young man, I learned much of value, including the error of standing on an ashtray which might close around my ankle as fiercely as a rabbit trap. It was at the Albion that I heard him say, ‘Don’t give an old digger the shits.’ (Because how else would anyone know this odd foreigner had fought for Australia in the war?)

  It was established I had no head for alcohol, and must stop at one. Those seven fluid ounces lifted my inhibitions sufficiently to reveal things to Sebastian I had never told a living soul. He seemed astonished to hear I sometimes became a river in a dream. He asked permission to make notes. Who else on earth would have talked to me like this? Through Sebastian I understood that Freud had mistakenly thought the unconscious is the filing cabinet for those repressed sexual desires which cause pathological or mental illness, but it was Jung who was his man. That was my good fortune, he said. It would have been traumatic to confess my snake dreams to the opposition, but a Jungian could recognise them as blessings. My giant snake was a reflection of the Omnipotent and Omnipresent power of ‘God’ that lives within every human. My snakes often had whiskers which caused him to clutch me to his bosom and, such was his strength and size, no-one in the aggressively heterosexual Albion dared say a word.

  Freud thought religion was an escape and a fallacy, Sebastian said. The correct view was the total opposite. Religion was a ‘direct line’ between all peoples, from us to blacks and others known as ‘savages’. Although all religions differed, he said, the archetypes and symbols remained the same. ‘Your snake is not your penis,’ he said, ‘it is a god.’

  With hindsight I suspect he was a member of the Polish aristocracy. How astonishing that I never asked. I ignorantly imagined his wound was a war injury when it was clearly a duelling scar from Heidelberg or Bonn. He was from an old family, I suppose, and had carried those huge soup spoons across the earth for some reason I could never know.

  He told me that Jung had dreamed the First World War in November 1913, before it started. The great man had dreamed a map, in fact, a great flood and the death of thousands. He saw blood covering the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. He saw mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, uncounted drowned bodies in a sea of blood.

  I remember coming out of the Albion one yellow winter evening. I can still see the corner of Lygon and Faraday streets, and still retain whole sentences of Sebastian’s recitation. I have searched but never found them on the page. Did he invent them himself ? Was my mentor possibly unhinged?

  That afternoon was in June 1950. Sebastian and his diminutive wife were two of our three good friends in Melbourne, the other being Madison Lee, the first male nurse and the first black man I ever knew. What a rarity Madison was in that year when the White Australia policy was in full effect. A few years previously the government had dithered about letting black GIs come ashore, but Madison had been granted residence as a ‘person of distinguished merit’ which he claimed was a misunderstanding. The truth, Adelina said, was that he had saved an Australian general’s son. In any case, he worked the same shift as Adelina. He was her friend and my friend. He cooked spicy dishes from Louisiana using yabbies from Merri Creek. That must have been étoufée although we had never heard of such a thing. He sang too, after dinner in the East Melbourne flat. His ‘Mona Lisa’ was better than Nat King Cole’s. Once or twice he brought a girl around, but his manner was that of a dedicated bachelor. I mean, his grace, his delicacy, his exquisite cleanliness, and the pain and yearning of his velvet voice.

  I was relieved he was there when Adelina’s waters broke and comforted that he came with us to the hospital. He was my companion in the waiting room where we ate meat pies and drank Fanta with all the careless innocence of boys.

  But then the gowned obstetrician emerged and it was clear, immediately, something had gone wrong. I saw it on the doctor’s narrow sculpted face, a twist, a sort of anger, and I thought, they screwed up, she’s dead. I looked at Madison and he had seen what I had seen. The doctor wished to speak to me.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘alone.’

  I followed him along some corridor hating his thoughtless squeaky shoes. I don’t know where we went. Was it an ‘examination room’? I remember a bassinet, an unhappy nurse. They both looked at me with awful pity. I thought, I will bring this baby up alone. I will care for it for ever.

  But then I saw that this was not our baby. He was black with wild black hair.

  The doctor said he was sorry.

  My head was filled with storm and sand. I left the room and was lost inside the hospital. I emerged in a kitchen, and then the street and the cruel tram lines were wet with summer rain. I was a moving storm of rage and grief, a willy-willy, twenty-one years old, about to perform an action which would take a second and last a lifetime.

  Sydney to Townsville,

  1300 miles

  1

  In two weeks the Redex cars would depart from Sydney. Thus we moved from a private simmer to a very public boil. Our showroom was a work in progress, a temple to Redex Car Number 92. Once a polite suburban vehicle, our demo had become a brutal beast, four-eyed, with mesh protected headlights. We fitted a massive bull bar and applied the decals for Caltex and SPC bearings. Titch worked off the floor, taking orders in his spivvy charcoal suit. No-one seemed to understand I might be a driver too.

  The car was bound to break a spring or two. To fit a new one would lose us points. At night it was back to overalls and drills, changing tyres, replacing leaf springs.

  At night my husband did his Marine Corps exercises in his underpants and I lay in bed and watched him and wondered how much money would persuade Beverly to stay with the kids. I lay in the dark and imagined her face, the pleasure it would give her to refuse me.

  Ah, she had been waiting for this, she claimed when I broached the subject. She understood the trap, she told me. I had used Bachhuber to keep her in the Marsh and now she would be compelled to be my babysitter. Well she was sick of Bachhuber. What did I think of that?

  I said that was sad, of course.

  Was I a dummy? she wished to know.

  Yes, I thought. I was a dummy. I would have to stay at home.

  ‘What diff does Bachhuber make?’ she asked me. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Go and swan around the country. I’ve got nowhere else to live.’

  Thank you, God, good kind Jesus blessed be thy deliverance.

  Bachhuber wore shorts into the colder weather and my sister was critical of his legs. Titch taught him how to remove the shackle bolt from the leaf spring, put a block of wood between the spring eye and floor, then jack the spring up so the eye moves along the wood to the spot where the shackle can be fitted. I was going to drive. I was really going. I made sure we had spare clips on the second leaves, to take the recoil and weight of the back axle when travelling over jump-ups and corrugated roads.

  The Russian spy defected and the newspapers were full of photographs of Moscow thugs trying to drag his wife onto an aeroplane. Ben Calvo came running across to the showroom with the latest news, going yes, yes, yes, ‘Don’t worry about the Russians. Look at this.’

  It was an attractive woman with her chest stuck out. This was Glenda
Cloverdale the champion of Nothing to Lose. I would not have trusted her a moment.

  Apple season ended. I made a huge map of Australia for the showroom and Beverly stole it from me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just think I’d be better at this.’ Then she took my kids to help her paint it. I was very pleased at first.

  Ronnie and Edith’s cousins finally took an interest in them. Together they painted a window sign REDEX TRIAL 1954 in Day-Glo orange. They made small green flags to show the progress of Car # 92 through blackfellah country no Holden ever crossed before. I did not like my kiddies cuddling with their aunt and of course she knew it. But I had got exactly what I wanted, hadn’t I?

  After teatime local families stood in the dark street staring through the showroom window while the kids added details to the map, GRID, GUTTER, CREEK CROSSING, DUST BAD etc.

  I collected shillings for the public telephones along the road. I hid gifts so the kids could discover them every day I was away: ribbons for Edith, say, or a pretty little ring. I bought a sheriff ’s badge for Ronnie. I splurged on Sparky’s Magic Piano, a real ‘album’ with three ten-inch records, six sides, a total playing time of twenty minutes.

  Titch did not want to carry spare tyres on the roof but we had no choice. The extra fuel tank took up too much room, we couldn’t help that either. Titch rationed every inch of space. We laughed at Bachhuber, packing his grandmother’s atlas and a book called Answer to Job. He owned the first drip-dry shirt I ever saw.

  Dunstan was still in our hair but I expected we would soon be quit of him. Bachhuber packed no trousers, only shirts and shorts. He preferred bare feet to sweaty shoes.