A Long Way From Home Read online

  ‘No, the other one.’

  They might have been doing the dishes, she washing, he drying, at the kitchen sink.

  I was drawn inevitably towards the automobile. I called first good morning and then coo-ee. Then I was inside the shed which had become the home of pigeons with alarming wings. Then came another awful noise, like a filing cabinet dragged across a concrete floor and there they were shooting out from under the Ford, the astonishing pair clad in faded coveralls, lying flat on mechanic’s trollies, icons with bright silver spanners in their hands.

  Mister must have been five foot two and she even smaller. Missus’s hair was so tousled and curling she might have been, had not all the other evidence been so much to the contrary, a boy. Her husband’s complexion was smooth and glowing, he could have been a girl. Yet to talk of boys and girls is to miss the point. The new arrivals stared at me and I somehow understood that they, being visions, were not required to speak.

  I am Willie Bachhuber, I said, for the war was less than ten years over, and it was best to get the German business finished with at once.

  3

  I am Willie Bachhuber the stranger says, God bless him. Why did that make me grateful? Because he did not say he was William Bach or Billy Hubert. That is, he was in no way like my father-in-law Herr Daniel Bobst who lived his days in terror of being thought a kraut. Dan had changed Bobst to Bobs then acted out this airman nonsense as if he had really served the King of England. When he retired to his scrap yard he reinforced this false impression, filling it with bomb casings and other matériel from War Disposal.

  But Dan was gone from our lives now, together with his belief that his son was put on earth to do his bidding. I had not taken an Aspro in a month and I knew the reason. No Dan. No more. Titch was finally his own man, at work pacing out the shed and he was understanding that it was true what I had told him: we could put three vehicles there. I loved so much to see him happy.

  The autumn air was sweet with burning leaves. There was a white chook fossicking for worms. I didn’t even wonder how it got there. White chook, green grass, blue sky. My Edith had said goodbye to her last boarding house meal. She had found canna lilies growing wild behind the laundry. Ronnie dug up a wet and slippery tennis ball with which he accidentally hit the neighbour. Mr Bachhuber had a colander in his right hand but he caught the ball on the rebound off his chest. The colander contained a cauliflower and teetering eggs but he lobbed the ball gently back in the direction of my son who had already run away and was tracking a rusty coloured hen through unmown grass. I slipped my spanner into my pocket. Edith jumped at Ronnie’s chook and the chook flew into the air. Whoever heard of such a thing? A brown hen with wings like a mighty eagle’s. It landed on the tin roof of our house. You had to laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the neighbour and I understood the chook was his.

  ‘Bachhuber,’ he repeated, reminding me I hadn’t said my name.

  ‘We are Bobs,’ I told him, nodding to my husband who was attending to our vehicle with his Belgian feather duster.

  ‘Blind to everything but cars,’ I said. He could not help himself, dear Titchy. His vehicles must be clean. He could travel the dustiest road to the loneliest farm and he would always find a creek before he arrived and he would have a chamois and a bucket and roll his sleeves up. He presented his vehicles in the filthiest situations, always in showroom condition like himself.

  The neighbour was tall and whippy with slender arms. He had not yet explained the colander and I did not like to presume it was for us, but he was a nice-looking man with fine fair hair he had to flick away. He had the most spectacular frown which pushed down around his schnoz. It made you want to comfort him some way.

  He said, ‘Perhaps I can carry this inside for you?’

  He meant the colander and I followed him inside trying to remember where I had packed the Kraft cheddar. It was a Sunday. All the shops were closed.

  The house was a shambles and a pigsty and the movers had left the hydraulic jack in the hall and the kitchen table in the living room. There was a hole kicked in the bedroom plaster I hadn’t noticed when I took the place. Only now did I learn that the oven was coated with rancid grease. I turned on the gas range but it would not light. I tried a dozen matches and burned my finger on the last one before I accepted that the gas was not connected.

  Meanwhile the neighbour had vanished. Embarrassed for me, probably, but we would get our domestic situation into shape. The hydraulic jack was six feet long, weighed a ton, but I wheeled it out to the back door and across the threshold and down the garden path. Finally the gravel stopped all further movement.

  Ronnie had commandeered next door’s colander and was gathering eggs from amongst the canna lilies. The neighbour was standing at the fence again. He raised his eyebrows, perhaps referring to the tea towel on his shoulder. He was a comic turn, but not too much I hoped.

  I had no heat to cook with, but we had bread and I knew we had cheese and some apples. I was so light and happy to be just us four.

  Then I heard the crunch of tyres on gravel and saw, entering our establishment, a 1938 Plymouth equipped with one of those wood-burning gas producers, from the days of wartime petrol rationing. This one had a large cylindrical furnace. From this a pipe snaked across the roof and then down into the engine. Who would drive a thing like this in 1953?

  As the window in the driver’s door descended slowly, the vehicle cut rudely in front of me, laying white oil smoke across the yard.

  My father-in-law was on the graveyard side of seventy, but he stepped into our yard clad in the usual cotton dustcoat, full of piss and vinegar. How had he tracked us down? He released a statuesque biddy in furs and high heeled shoes. That must be the Mrs Donaldson. Ignorant, I thought, seeing how she gave the kiddies barley sugar.

  No-one had invited Mr Bachhuber but there he was standing on the Plymouth’s running board, inspecting the dog’s breakfast on the roof, amongst which, it seems, he had identified an old aircraft propeller. ‘Westland Wallace,’ he pronounced, as if I should applaud.

  Both kids took my hand, dear babies.

  The neighbour closed his eyes and spoke without invitation: ‘Mr Dan Bobst, having engine trouble with his Westland Wallace, negotiated a clever landing by the Jarrahmond station, then transferred to his Malvern Star bicycle by which means he travelled four miles to Orbost for emergency supplies.’ He was like a clever child reciting poetry.

  A look of cunning twisted my father-in-law’s features. He grabbed for something in his trouser pocket, a business card which he would snatch back when it had served its purpose. The card would be green and faded. On it would be printed the likeness of the Westland Wallace which had appeared in the British Empire Trade Exhibition in Buenos Aires. Above this image, in the washed-out sky, would be a moustached aviator in leather helmet and goggles. Dangerous Dan Bobs, the oldest airman in the world.

  ‘Thank you Mr Bobs,’ said Mr Bachhuber. I was upset to see how reverently he held the card. ‘But I do know exactly who you are.’

  But who could ever imagine the size of Dan Bobs’ self-regard? A mood descended on me very bad indeed.

  ‘A clever landing by the Jarrahmond station, then transferred to his ever-present bicycle by which means he travelled four miles to Orbost. Where –’ Ronnie squeezed my hand and looked up at me, all teeth and worried eyes – ‘he purchased a bar of soap needed to repair the leaking petrol line.’

  You might expect Dan to be interested in how a total stranger could have this write-up off by heart, but curiosity was not his strong point. He puffed himself up like a cobra, glaring in triumph at those of us whose wallets he planned to lighten.

  ‘I should like to introduce my colleague Mrs Donaldson,’ he said.

  As the housekeeper stepped forward, Titch removed a box from the boot of the Ford and escaped with it towards the house.

  Dan and his female ‘colleague’ hardly noticed. They were all over Bachhuber as if he were a feed of steak and
kidney pudding.

  ‘You in the motor game?’ Dan asked.

  ‘No, no, nothing so interesting.’

  I interrupted but it was as if a dog spoke, the way he looked at me. ‘The propeller is a real beauty,’ I said.

  ‘Talk to your husband,’ he said but I was the one who must refuse this ‘gift’. I smiled and grovelled and wagged my tail. I told him I wished we could afford it, that we had no place to even store it. I made myself feel sick. ‘It would be a crime,’ I said, ‘to expose it to the weather.’

  Dan turned away to Bachhuber. ‘What sort of vehicle do you have yourself ?’

  ‘Just the bike,’ said Bachhuber. ‘A Malvern Star.’

  Dangerous Dan then announced he had personally known Sir Hubert Opperman. ‘Oppy’ had ridden a Malvern Star to win the famous Paris–Brest–Paris race.

  ‘In 1931,’ added the neighbour.

  This unsettled Dan. ‘I was a mate of Tom Finnigan. You ever hear of him?’

  ‘My word,’ said Bachhuber. ‘Mr Malvern Star himself.’

  ‘Began business in Glenferrie Road.’

  ‘Yes, number 58.’

  Dan began searching urgently inside his wallet. Then he changed his mind. ‘Go get your bike,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘It’s just an old crate.’

  ‘You won’t be sorry Bachhuber.’

  And off the innocent went, still carrying his tea towel, marching over the fallen autumn leaves, up the driveway to the street. There were bloody chooks lined up on the ridge line of the house.

  ‘Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Keep your panties on. Jeez.’

  ‘We’re broke, Dad.’

  Mrs Donaldson urgently produced more sweets, fancy chocolates from Darrell Lea. I had to take them.

  ‘You’re not setting up a pitch here?’ said Dan. He was on the running board, his back towards me, releasing his white elephant. ‘You haven’t got a hoist. You haven’t even got a petrol pump. You should have told me.’

  ‘We wouldn’t ask you for money,’ I said. ‘You’ve got trouble of your own.’

  That got his full attention. ‘What trouble?’ He swung on me. ‘I’ve got no bloody troubles. I’m not like some people. I’m not going into business with no experience. I’m not sneaking off to go into competition with my father.’

  ‘You said you were retired.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so secretive,’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t have your number.’

  ‘The boy imagines he can be a Ford dealer? With a place like this? With five quid in the bank? Does no-one have a clue? You think I don’t still talk to the blokes at Ford?’

  ‘They’re assessing the application now. We filled it out.’

  ‘You just embarrassed them,’ Dan said. ‘Call your dog off, Dan, they said.’

  ‘Don’t call your son a dog.’

  That was the wrong way to speak to Dan but fortunately Bachhuber came back with his bicycle and all his interest went that way.

  ‘I like bikes,’ he announced, winding rope around his arm. ‘By Jove yes. I had a bike myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ the poor fellow recited, ‘you carried a Malvern Star bicycle on your plane.’

  ‘No, listen.’

  The neighbour smiled agreeably.

  ‘I’d give you forty quid for the bike. I could tip you into a Ford Customline exactly like that one there. How’s that? I’m not so far away. Any problems I can be here in a mo.’

  ‘Yes, but I brought something for you, Mr Bobs.’

  The neighbour had a beautiful old book in the basket. There was a gold picture of an old plane on its cover and a title like Aeronautics except in some foreign language. Of course Dan wanted it but he stepped back, holding up his hands. ‘I could go as high as fifty for the bike,’ he said.

  The neighbour held the book like a bible to his chest. ‘I can’t drive.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Are you?’ Dan asked and I recognised that nasty edge. ‘What do you do for a crust?’

  ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’

  That was when Dan lost interest. I had seen him do this so many times before. He climbed to the running board and untied the final rope. He lifted the propeller free and with a grunt pivoted, and compelled the poor bloke to accept it. ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Schoolteacher.’

  Mr Bachhuber was forced to kneel in order to set the propeller on the grass. He pointed out that it had been sheathed in copper which had once been secured by either screws or rivets soldered and then expertly smoothed down. ‘Lovely work.’

  Dan hid his smile behind his hand, an offensive gesture, there for all the world to see.

  ‘A chalk-and-talker.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘And these are your chooks on the roof ?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  ‘You can’t have them making their mess here, not now there are little kiddies. Their mother will tell you, won’t you Mumsy? It’s not hygienic. You kept chooks before? No? The trick is, mate, you need to clip their wings.’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t get around to it.’

  ‘Any mug can do it. All we need is some clippers, which actually I have.’

  When I protested, he turned his hate on me. ‘Are you a mother or what?’

  I heard the back door bang. Titch returned not knowing I had lit a fire. I had promised I would never again fight Dan, but now I didn’t care. ‘If Mr Bachhuber needs help with his chickens,’ I said, ‘I’ll be happy to assist.’

  ‘You can clip wings?’

  I smiled right in his nasty face.

  ‘Dad,’ Titch said, ‘I’m sorry but we can’t use the prop.’ This was a first. I could have cried.

  ‘You need some signage, sonny. You can be a Ford dealer all you like, no-one will notice. The prop is what they call sales promotion.’

  ‘I can’t afford it,’ Titch said.

  ‘Fifteen quid? Of course you can afford it. You want people to know you’re in business, don’t you? You want the town to talk about you? Even if the council makes you take it down. Just dig a hole in the front lawn.’

  ‘Your dad says his mates at Ford have rejected our application.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone behind my back to Ford,’ Dan said. ‘You’re an embarrassment. You think they’ll give you a Ford dealership? A place like this?’

  Titch’s colour had risen, but his smile was crisp and neat. ‘We’ll help you tie it on again.’ Then he lifted the propeller and I thought, you lovely man.

  Dan nodded to Mrs D. Immediately she turned and, with a small apologetic smile to me, teetered across the gravel to the car. A moment later the Plymouth accelerated up the drive.

  The propeller dwarfed my husband, and seemed to overpower him, but no, he lifted it like a barbell. And hurled it against the fence. ‘Fifteen quid,’ he cried.

  Our neighbour’s mouth was open.

  ‘Thank God I was not born a strong man,’ my husband said, ‘or I would have killed someone by now.’

  4

  As a baby in the Payneham parsonage, I had climbed up to the kitchen sink and tumbled out the window where, by sheer good fortune, I gouged a lump from beneath my shoulderblade and left my little head intact. Sometimes in later years, in the shower for instance, I would explore the crater in my flesh and amuse myself by thinking of what it prophesied: a lifetime of escaping my own dull nature, of seeking the thrill of energy by jumping when I should be safe and still. It was this desire, I am now certain, that physically attracted me to Adelina Koenig, that tall dark beauty with whom I had cut my high school classes and explored the musty mud and grasses by the River Torrens where it lived its sulky sullen life at what was still called Payneham then. I was a pastor’s son with no interest in money. I was not excited by the Koenigs’ wealth or status in the Deutscher Club, but to be in Adelina’s presence was like being plugged into a power point, like becoming her subject, as vitally
connected as an electric fan, or drill.

  Mrs Bobbsey was the same.

  Her husband had pink cheeks, jet black hair, an unworldly vitality that made you think of the circus. How I envied him his life.

  Mrs Bobbsey struck matches and her failures were exhilarating. I had a week’s worth of stew to offer, seven single meals for each inevitable night, just waiting in the fridge. My thoughts were on the mad side, obviously.

  At home I put the dinner on my stove, removed books from my dining room table, replaced them with others. I doubted my personal library would be of much interest to this family but I also knew there were volumes anyone would love, French mostly, but illustrated with fine engravings: the beauty of the mechanical age, knitting machines, automata, aeroplanes with feathers on their wings. It was to my advantage there was no market for that language in my monolingual land.

  Mrs Bobbsey did not like her father-in-law. I could have listened to him all day. If he had tried to sell me a car, why would I mind? Given a chance, I would have paid for the propeller. I could have hung it from the ceiling, on the diagonal, suspended by piano wire. At the same time I was thrilled to see tiny shiny Mr Bobbsey HURL the valuable item against the fence. What different lives they lived to mine, clipping chook wings, repairing aeroplanes with soap, deciding to be Ford dealers, asking no-one permission, alone, like tightrope walkers, with no summonses to hide from. I would have given everything to be like them.

  What would Dangerous Dan have done about the summons? Would he pay support for a child that was not his? Would he endure the double insult of being laughed at as a cuckold as well as suffering the relentless punishment of paying for the fruit of adultery? I was not sorry to have removed myself from Adelina’s world, but I was ashamed to have fled like a worm. I had crawled from the State Library of Victoria (where I had been wonderfully at home) and slunk to Bacchus Marsh where the high school was desperate to let me teach the worst class in the school.

  Legal letters sought me c/- Mr Deasy’s quiz show but Deasy had much invested in me, and for this reason we always prerecorded at erratic times. The bailiffs arrived when the show was on air, and I was far away. When you understand the deceitful nature of the quiz show prizes, those huge cheques as big as a door which Deasy presented in public, you will bet he must have dodged a bailiff once or twice himself.