A Long Way From Home Read online

  ‘Left.’

  I turned in the direction of the Catholic school then right on Gisborne Road where I left some rubber in my wake. He took it well.

  ‘Does Mr Bobs not need the car?’

  Our neighbour knew nothing about us, so I told him how Titch had sold Henry Ford’s cars since he was twelve years old. How he was the best country salesman in this state. He was the one who talked the Ford Motor Co into offering a very persuasive type of differential which would get a dairy farmer to the top of his muddy hill. Titch had come to the Marsh confident that Ford would appoint him a dealer. I wasn’t worried. If that didn’t come to pass, Ford were not the only pebble on the beach.

  He directed me around the edges of the Darley oval, and I swung onto the gravel and dropped a cog and planted it to see what he would say. We were soon ascending a dusty cutting on the naked hill. There was a grand view across brown grass to the lush market gardens and the winding banks of the Lerderderg River.

  In the very centre was a fenced off pit, the home of crows and blowflies and two men.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said.

  6

  When Mrs Bobs found me at my bedroom window she was wearing coveralls, shockingly becoming. I glimpsed a white singlet like a baby might have worn, crocheted around the neck.

  Who would be a man locked inside his skin with only prayer and filthy thoughts for company? Is that God’s plan, that good men should buy disgraceful photographs upstairs from the milliners on Little Bourke Street?

  She was waiting at the back door and explained what she wanted of me. Astonishing how coveralls reveal a body when the intention is the very opposite. I was never a flirt or an adulterer. I said I must go to work. She didn’t even hear me lie. She wished me to destroy a beautiful propeller that a good man would have saved for history. It should be in a vitrine in the Melbourne museum. I could have written the plaque myself: Propeller from Westland Wallace. In 1933 this was the first aircraft to fly over Mount Everest, as part of the Houston Mount Everest Expedition. It was a gorgeous thing to slice the air so high above the world.

  I knew better but I would have done whatever she asked me, burned the blades of an Ader Éole, to which the maniac Ader had added feathers.

  I got into her car as she suggested. The smell of Pears soap was familial. And then, dear Lord, she put down her little foot – size five or even four – sending gravel spraying back against the fence. I had hung a child out a classroom window. Not knowing that, she smiled at me.

  Having rarely been a in a motor car, I had little to compare her with. Mrs Bobs piloted with her nose just above the wheel, checking her mirrors, left, right, centre. I was reminded of a sparrow eating.

  ‘Hold onto your hat,’ she said and squealed her tyres on Gisborne Road. Her husband’s train would already have left Ballan, she said. She insisted on him somewhat. She wrinkled her lovely nose, dropped a ‘cog’, as it is called, and passed the five-ton truck heading for the Darley brickworks. She told me, in confidence, she wished her husband would sell Holden not Fords. The American firm of General Motors had recently begun to produce the Holden, which she said was ‘Australia’s Own Car’. Titch Bobbsey, I learned, was a lifetime soldier in the cause of Ford. Mrs Bobbsey had just received information which would make him change his mind.

  ‘You are a pair of powerhouses I would say.’

  ‘You can’t know us from a bar of soap,’ she said (so happily) and by then we were at the Darley tip. It was a melancholy scene where the crime would be committed: a gate and, just inside, a small hut not much bigger than an outhouse. Here a smoking 44-gallon drum was tended by two men, Kelvin the manager (whose mighty stomach was corsetted by a leather apron) and a stringy little fellow with a battered hat, a shrunken sleeveless pullover, and a knotted rope belt. He sported dusty brickworks boots.

  Mrs Bobs did not pause to ask permission but drove straight to a place where she applied the handbrake vigorously. She was immediately out of the car and jumping to untie ropes she could not reach. If it must be done ’tis best it were done quickly.

  I lifted the condemned propeller from its quilt and let Mrs Bobs steer me to its final resting place: amidst tangled rusted wire, broken terracotta tiles, fresh two-by-four offcuts.

  It was done, I thought. I turned my back and coiled my rope and untangled her binder twine and bedding before laying them tidily on the back seat. I had previously thought the tip an optimistic place, one of the great democratic institutions of the Marsh. You did not need to pay for entrance and you could remove anything you liked. On any weekend, you could see four generations of one family, ridding themselves of bottles or grass clippings or the final pram, or pursuing private treasure hunts in the open pit where they might find butter churns, or Laval separators, and other items (Mum, Mum, what’s this?) of unknown provenance or purpose. The shire engineer served his fancy guests on a dinner service from the Darley tip. Its origin was no secret. He was as delighted with that prize as with the eight-inch pram wheels which had carried his son to victory in the Soapbox Derby.

  I turned and saw she was at it with the hacksaw. Kelvin and his colleague were cooking sausages and seemed to have no interest in what was taking place. I was the witness to Mrs Bobs’ attempt to remove the tip from the propeller. She had chosen a vulnerable spot where the copper sheathing ended.

  She had the wrong tool for the job. I could do nothing but watch and swat away the blowflies from my face, and she was halfway through when she gave up the hacksaw. Next she chose a house brick to attack the prop, her neck and cheeks all red in her enthusiasm. As she achieved the murderous separation of one part from the next, I thought how Lavoisier, when his head was separated from the guillotine, is said to have blinked twenty times in signal to his servant. I prayed that was not true.

  ‘You don’t know my father-in-law,’ she said. ‘Or you wouldn’t look at me like that.’

  I would have been too emotional to speak about Lavoisier so I was not sorry to be interrupted by the Sanitation Disposal Supervisor and his colleague. Kelvin picked up the amputated tip, and for a moment I thought it had been saved, but then he hurled it into the abyss.

  When Mrs Bobbsey returned the hacksaw to the car, I found Kelvin’s friend’s hostile gaze on me and accepted what I took to be his judgement. I hurried to join my accomplice unaware that he was shadowing me.

  ‘Barkhumper,’ he said, clearly delighted to see me jump. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.’

  ‘No pleasure,’ he said, and I recognised, in those familiar angry eyes, the father of Bennett Ash.

  Mrs Bobs started the engine.

  ‘I know where you live,’ said Ash, opening the passenger door. ‘Get in,’ he said and I could hear the cruel way life had scraped the meat off him and left him with a rope belt and shrunken sweater.

  ‘I’ll hang you out the window you fucking Balt.’

  Mrs Bobs engaged first gear. I slammed the door. The Ford attacked the puddles violently, sliding over the bulldozed earth and out the gate.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked.

  I could not really trust my voice to answer.

  ‘Jeez, what a mongrel.’

  Mrs Bobbsey drove more thoughtfully than previously. She slowed, then slowed a little more. When she came round by the Darley oval she pulled off the road. ‘Here,’ she said. It was a handkerchief.

  If she imagined I was crying, I was not, but neither could I look directly at her. Finally I confessed what I had resolved to never mention. ‘He is a parent just like you,’ I said. ‘If he had done what I did he would have gone to jail.’

  ‘I suppose he has a hateful son.’

  ‘He’s just a boy.’

  I folded the handkerchief carefully and returned it to her. She took my hand and, in a gesture that surprised us both, raised it to her lips.

  7

  Once I kissed old Father Slocomb on the top of his bald head.

 
; Another time I kissed a telegram boy because I got proposed to. Nothing came of that. I kissed an iceman. I also rode from Geelong to Barwon Heads inside the spare wheel of a Model T and got roared up. I might have fallen off and died, but then they told the story whenever we had visitors. When Dad was a stock and station agent we were often at Kippenross which was owned by the Robinsons. During harvest time one year Mrs Robinson sent me out into the paddock with billy tea and scones for the men. I found them in the middle of a hundred acres of paddock and stooks of wheat were everywhere. It was so hot I crawled into a stook for shade. Dad finally found me sound asleep – some part of my foot was sticking out from a stook. They had searched for me for hours.

  My mother was a kisser. She would kiss the top of my head while I said my prayers.

  It was not his hand, more his wrist in any case. My lips only brushed the fine blond hairs and I remarked his furrowed knuckles, as if his fingers were frowning too. The hand was slender, very shapely and shadowy in the knuckles and below the nails, but I did not need his confession on the Gisborne Road to feel pity for him. I had seen his pale blue eyes staring out his bedroom window. That was what I had in mind when I kissed his poor sad hand. I meant, you are a good man no matter what you did. I never was permitted to have a horse but I thought he was like a horse with its ears back, locked inside his stall.

  Returning from the tip I had a pile of cardboard boxes to unpack and had two children who required their share of love, poor darlings. Edith would be OK, but Ronnie would do it hard. I knew that before I saw his class dismissed and he came out the front gate wearing short pants and one long sock. How could you lose a sock and keep your shoe?

  Edith stood behind him, shaking her head at me. I asked Ronnie did someone pick on him.

  In answer he did a silly dance, in the street, in front of everyone. He looked insane, pointing at his head and then his bottom, sticking out his tongue. You can’t afford to care what people think of you, but I took his hand and dragged him home, Edith hurrying behind saying, what are you going to do?

  Of course I should have sat down with them both and baked them biscuits and poured glasses of milk, but I had to call my contact at General Motors Holden before Titch got home. If I had been found out I would have got the scarlet letter or the dunce’s cap.

  You might not imagine a huge company like GMH would know all the men who sold the opposition’s cars, but they knew my Titch, by reputation. By ‘they’ I mean Mr Dunstan. Dunstan said my husband was a ‘gun’, like a gun shearer which is a man who can tally four hundred sheep a day. (The number for merinos is different, of course.) Somehow Mr Dunstan knew all Titch’s sales figures like cricket scores: so many runs in Warragul, so many in Sale. I was gratified, the first time I made contact, to hear Mr Dunstan wanted Titch ‘on board’. Like me, he believed the future was with the Holden.

  He was very straight with me, or so I thought. He did not hide the money issue. If you are to be a dealer you have to have premises, a workshop, mechanics, spare parts inventory. He shared examples of their ‘floor plan’ whereby they would finance our showroom inventory.

  Titch had already had a similar conversation with Ford and as a result we had sat around the table filling out forms and collecting bank statements and tax returns. He never doubted we would get the Ford franchise. Who would say no to a salesman with his record?

  I was fearful of his confidence, the hurt he would suffer if rejected. It occurred to me that I would improve our balance sheet if I forced Beverly to finally sell our joint inheritance. She had milked it long enough, and I had said this to Titch, but perhaps he thought he should not take money from a woman. In any case, it would have been no fun to deal with Beverly. I had let it drop.

  But when I revealed this asset to Mr Dunstan he became extremely positive. Clearly, he then had the old place valued because on the next call he knew that it was right on Corio Bay with ‘massive’ views. Funny, Corio Bay had always made me melancholy.

  I never actually saw Dunstan’s office door but he emphasised the fact that it was open. We could get ninety-day terms through GMAC which was GMH’s finance company. Ford, meanwhile, were wanting more and more information from us. It was time to bring Dunstan up to date so I got Ronnie listening to his Superman serial and Edith had a drawing to do for school and I closed myself in the kitchen.

  ‘Yes?’ said the operator.

  I told her I had to make a trunk call to Melbourne. It was an HP number. Humbug Point.

  ‘Are you Bacchus Marsh 29?’

  I said I was.

  ‘That must be Mrs Bobs.’

  I didn’t know Miss Hoare yet but every small town has that general type of character, listening in on everybody all day long. I could hear her breathing on the line while the phone rang in Dunstan’s office at GMH. Titch would kill me if he knew.

  ‘Hello?’ said Dunstan.

  Said Miss Hoare, ‘I have a trunk call for you.’

  I hung up.

  We had scrambled eggs and toast and pea soup, the three of us together.

  There was now a functioning gas fire but I did not like to waste it, and I tucked them up in bed and told them stories of the rascally wombat their father had invented. The rascally wombat had a huge bottom which made the children laugh. Was it really big? How big was it? The rascally wombat was always falling asleep in dangerous places. He was always hungry. The rascally wombat woke up one morning and smelled bacon cooking. Or it was Christmas and the rascally wombat sat on the chimney thinking how he would reach the biscuits left out for Santa Claus.

  I had not a thought about the kiss. It was the propeller that concerned me. I should not have hurt the propeller. Is that what it is like to be a drunk? Do you wake up and think, dear Jesus, what have I done? What will people think of me? Can I still be loved?

  I sat and waited for my husband. It is awful for a woman to wait for a salesman in the night, not knowing where he is. Of course the pubs had shut at six o’clock but there were bars still operating in their version of a wartime blackout. If you were a moth, you wouldn’t know. You could drive through Balliang or Myrniong and never guess what illegal activity was going on. And good luck if you needed the police because they were hidden in the pub with everybody else. There were also other things I feared too obvious to mention. I turned on the wireless but could not pay attention. There was a quiz show but who wants to feel more stupid than they already are?

  Then Edith came out and announced, ‘The rascally wombat just wet his bed.’

  Well, at least it kept me busy, washing the poor little fellow and finding dry sheets for him and reading The House at Pooh Corner until his sister stopped complaining and they both fell asleep.

  I took the soiled linen to the laundry and rinsed it and put it in the copper. It was nine o’clock, then ten. I put the sheets through the mangle and found some pegs and hung them on the line.

  I turned on the neon lights in the shed and went back into the kitchen and sat there looking out. The light flooded over the empty yard and a man on the wireless was doing Crosby by Request. I found my overcoat and sat shivering at the kitchen table.

  I should never have done that to the propeller. I was asking for it now.

  8

  There are very sensible reasons why a man might be attracted to women who are inherently unstable. Their faces are more interesting to watch, their eyes so unpredictable. They are always more complex, dynamic, dangerous. Looked at in this way, my personal history had a certain logic.

  I lay in bed alone with the pages of Oceania No. 3 Mar. 1953 but was distracted from the index (Berndt, Elkin etc.) by thoughts of Cloverdale, my co-contestant on Deasy’s quiz show. Mr Deasy called her Miss Clover.

  ‘Listeners, we are in Clover.’ The ‘in’ was offensive code which never failed to agitate the dormant ashes of her eyes, but neither she nor I could contest the power of Mr Deasy who had been, long before his quiz show, a traveller for Rothmans cigarettes. He had us hooked in different ways.
r />   Clover was about my own age, tall and slender as a flooded gum, her unstockinged skin very glossy on long straight legs with just sufficient calf. Sometimes, in the studio, she kicked her shoes off and I was allowed to see her toenails, like sea shells on the beach.

  Each week she and I stood at our fluffy big microphones and Deasy suggested to the audience that she was about to ‘take the crown’ or ‘topple the king’. I knew he could not afford to do this. Clover, on the other hand, was like the audience in that she believed I took home thousands every month.

  Clover saw me presented with my cheque. She had no idea that I was forced to tear it up, that the big money was bait for a growing audience and finally – touch wood – a national sponsor who could afford real prize money in their advertising budget. For now we advertised a Christian Israelite car dealer, a chain of cut-price menswear, and a dry cleaning service with stores in seven suburbs. Deasy would fire them all as soon as he was able. He subscribed to the Nielsen rating service and watched as our numbers slowly rose. Meanwhile he spent ‘seed money’ entertaining the advertising managers of Colgate, General Motors, Dunlop, the Dairy Board.

  A time would come, he promised, when my ship came in. I was on the ‘ground floor’, meaning, I presumed, the wharf.

  ‘They will not let a woman win it,’ Clover had said last week when Deasy left to take a leak. ‘I am only on the show to lose.’

  We were always ‘live’ one way or another. That is, Baby Deasy never took her headphones off and I could not have asked Clover to the pictures without her rejection being overheard. But even in the most secure environment I would never have dared reveal that I envied Clover her weekly cheque for twenty pounds which would end up as real cash money in her bank account.

  ‘I don’t think you’re correct,’ I said.

  ‘You are a nice man, Willie, but what you think about this really doesn’t matter.’