A Long Way From Home Page 6

  The ever shifting recording times of the quiz show (an accommodation that would cease being offered once Deasy had his national advertiser) took me to the city at different hours, but no matter the time, the light, the weather, the brown droughty summer, the damp green winter, the landscape beside the railway line was always dreary and denuded: rabbit burrows, erosion, L-shaped plantations of hard conifer windbreaks in the corners of the lonely paddocks, yellow gravel roads cutting through the red soil, dun coloured sheep country eventually giving way to the banal outer suburbs of western Melbourne.

  The cover of Oceania No. 3, as I recall, was reliably unexciting, with no hint of its explosive nature. When I began to study the proposed survey of the archaeological structure of Melton East I had no foreknowledge, but I would soon see that same landscape outside the window for what it had always been: a forgotten colonial battleground, the blood-soaked site of a violent ‘contact’ between the indigenous blacks and the imperial whites. If it was not a state secret, it might as well have been.

  One hundred and twenty-one years ago, before the sheep arrived, before the factories, these volcanic plains – I learned it only now – had been covered with ‘luxuriant herbage’ and ‘waving purplish-brown kangaroo grass’, ‘shoulder high and thick as oats’. The black skinned hunter-gatherers were unaware that the whites planned to stay for ever. None amongst them could credit that a human being might ‘own’ an animal, particularly one as tasty as a sheep. Or that the sheep would eat everything that attracted the kangaroo and wallaby. And so on.

  Very well, I thought, I will give you a bloody syllabus on the wool industry. It will be a pleasure to keep my word.

  The hunter-gatherers killed the white men’s sheep and ate them. What a treat for the education department of Victoria.

  Bennett Ash, pay attention.

  And here, just off the railway line, near the Massey Harris tractor works, the Darling flour silos, the dusty stone crushers and that threatening cluster of explosives factories, a cycle of murders had begun.

  Deer Park, they called this place.

  Sir, sir, I’ve been there, sir.

  Yes, the Deer Park Hotel. Where are the deer?

  I don’t know, sir.

  There were never any deer. Deer was a pretty synonym for murder. The Deer Park Hotel was now a ‘watering hole’ for travelling salesmen, on the bank of the Kororoit Creek.

  My planned class excursion would follow the creek behind the gunpowder factory and here inspect (Fig. I) the grey-box tree with footholds cut into its trunk. The young PhD suggested the steps might have been used for gathering honey. Where is the honey now?

  The wool class could study archaeology, not only Fig. I but also Fig. III, the nearby red gum, whose high scar marked the shape of a canoe. With his warty fingers Bennett Ash could learn what wool had wrought.

  As the train passed the Sunshine station I must have appeared both dull and diligent. I took pencil and paper and made a grid of thirteen squares, each one a history period of one hour and ten minutes. Who would guess that I was no more stable than a blowfly bouncing off the glass? Shall I blame Miss Clover?

  It was Clover’s unrealistic ambition to use Deasy’s cheque to go to Florence, to spend three hours of every day at the Uffizi or the Pitti Palace. Unrealistic? But do not men fly through the sky and drive cars at one hundred and thirty miles an hour? Might a woman do that too? Might not Deasy get his sponsor, finally? Was it possible that, any day now, I might be permitted to bank my cheque? Would Clover come with me to Italy to start a life? In any case, there was Clover and there was the Pitti Palace as I wheeled my bicycle into the tea room of radio 3UZ.

  I found her already in the studio, face framed by black turtleneck and curling Fellini hair. In Vermeer there would have been a window to bring out the light in her eyes. She narrowed hers, and her mouth moved a millimetre at the edges and I would have given her everything she asked.

  I also thought, you are a total moron. You are inventing her completely. That is what you always do.

  Just the same, I felt completely comfortable as she beheld me. I experienced a buzzy feeling, like a comb run through my hair.

  I asked her what she was reading and she asked me the same and I told her about Oceania but all the time I was thinking, is this the day when I finally leap? I had no idea what I would do.

  Deasy and Baby Deasy were in the control room. So what if they heard me say what I must? Would I die? I said, ‘Perhaps it is time for you and I to go dancing.’

  Clover’s eyes gave off a light and energy which can be rationally understood as the reflection of the spotlight in the booth. She nodded at Deasy who had his questions stacked on yellow cards. She watched him shuffle as he was wont to do. He left the control room. Clover smiled at me and I thought I could look at that face for ever, in the Uffizi, or in the Pitti or George the Greek’s in Bacchus Marsh. Deasy entered crying, ‘Up and away.’ He required no rejoinder. This up-and-away was his trade name, his call sign, his very self and when he placed his questions face down on the green felt table, he was here to work. In response to a signal from his heavily ringed finger, Baby Deasy began the prerecord.

  Deasy cued his theme song and introduced himself and, for the eighth week in a row, made a big business about Miss Clover, who would, this time, perhaps, topple the king. For the moment this was cruel, but who knew what might happen next?

  ‘Make it or break it,’ he cried. ‘Ladies first.’

  He flashed his cuffs and chose a card at ‘random’, and I would never know if the question was by chance or not. He was duplicitous, of course, yet he always relied on me to know the answer and there had never been skulduggery of the expected sort.

  ‘The first question is for Clover, for the challenger: who designed the first circular saw?’

  Immediately she acted ‘thinking’ which – she never seemed to quite get this – had no sound at all. Deasy told the listeners she was frowning ‘like a bloodhound’ although her forehead was as smooth as marble. He held a noisy kitchen timer against his microphone. ‘The first . . . circular saw.’ He spoke in the same ‘intimate’ voice he used on Crosby by Request. Then he began the countdown and Clover, without any warning, collapsed her shoulders and drew her finger across her Botticelli neck.

  But of course she knew, I thought. She must. The circular saw had been designed by a woman. You could rely on her to know a thing like that and it was unforgivable, in this particular instance, that I should beat her to it. I would not be let off. I was my own worst enemy but I was also the show pony and I released the first answer in stages, in the way I had been coached.

  ‘Designed by a Shaker,’ I said.

  ‘Good grief,’ cried Deasy.

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘And off he goes.’

  My opponent ’s eyes were now bright with emotion. She was nodding at me, smiling, encouraging. But what would that mean when the show was over? She had no idea how I wished to lose.

  What Deasy understood I did not know. He slapped his head. ‘Gee-up!’ he cried.

  I cared only about Clover now. What was happening behind that furry microphone? I couldn’t tell.

  Deasy was frustrated with me, without a doubt. ‘Up up and away,’ he cried.

  He asked a question about carbon paper. I looked to Clover who seemed to nod. Carbon paper had been created to help blind people write.

  ‘Off he goes.’

  But I did not wish to be the winner.

  ‘Why so glum oh genius?’

  When the show was over I got my fake cheque and Clover received her real one and asked to use the lav.

  I was slow to understand I could not invite her to a picture show today. She had left the key in the lavatory door and run down the stairs to the street. Then I, of course, was required to have sandwiches at the Windsor with Mr Deasy who, in a strange fit, had once kissed me on the mouth.

  We were both subdued. Mr Deasy refrained from his usual reports, but I inferred Coca-Co
la had stopped nibbling and become a ‘bait robber’. Even when he revealed his eldest son had won preselection for a seat in parliament he remained forlorn.

  I bolted my second egg sandwich of the day, and was back on the crowded train at 4.58 p.m., arriving in the Marsh at the so-called Wobbly Hour.

  11

  The Wobbly Hour began at exactly six p.m. after which it was an offence for a pub to serve a single glass of beer. The parliamentary intention of that law had been to force the drinkers home to dinner and the bosom of their families. The accidental consequence was the ‘six o’clock swill’, in which all those frothing glasses, purchased when still legal, were set in line and consumed, one after the other, in what was known as the ‘period of grace’. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

  When the period of grace expired, then began the Wobbly Hour. Thus Bennett Ash might explain to me, I couldn’t do it sir, my dad had his wobbly boots on.

  At the Wobbly Hour I cycled home through the dark streets. The fallen leaves were in piles and burning and the spitting rain produced sad odours of wet coal-dust and ash and mould. Dangerous headlights burned my back as I hunched against the drizzle. I passed over the bridge on the Werribee River, past the cold discoloured swimming pool with my mind flicking through the pages of Oceania.

  Excepting some engravings and that postage stamp portraying One Pound Jimmy, I had never seen an Aboriginal. They were all far away in dusty history, or in hot places where they threw stones at passing cars. But if they had once dwelled on the Kororoit Creek, they had also been here on the Werribee, just there, behind the changing sheds below that empty chlorine swimming pool. They had walked where I was cycling now when Jesus hung upon the cross.

  By Eric Redrop’s isolated barber shop, I escaped the front bumper of a speeding truck, then pedalled illegally on the footpath as far as Simon’s corner where a streetlight revealed a solitary boy, or so I imagined, sheltering beneath the butcher shop verandah. Was this one more teatime victim of the wobbly boot?

  ‘Mr Bachhuber.’

  Bless me, it was Mr Bobs. I crossed the main street as a semitrailer descended on me, air brakes farting, gears changing, hurtling down Stamford Hill. As I reached safety, the high beam headlights revealed the Bobbsey with his brilliantined hair swept upwards in a comic book of shock. What on earth had happened to him?

  ‘I am a man without a car,’ he cried.

  ‘Then we are both in the same predicament.’ I spoke lightly, but I smelled the booze on him and thought, dear goodness, it is Icarus, crashed into the sea.

  ‘It was impossible, Mr Bachhuber. So the experts said.’

  ‘Hop on.’ I pointed the front wheel towards him, thereby indicating I could give him a ride home. Too late I saw he was attached to a hessian bag which he lifted with him as he sprang onto the bar. He almost tipped us into the gutter.

  ‘Hold steady Mr Bobs.’

  He could not have been a heavy man, but whatever he carried in his sack made him difficult to balance. I set off just the same.

  ‘In the land of potato farmers, you can never sell an XK Jag.’ He turned his head to address me directly. ‘But ask me, where is the Jag?’

  He was an adult, the father of children. It would be rude to instruct him to sit still.

  ‘Ask me, is it up my sleeve? No. But there must be a trade-in. Where have I parked the trade-in?

  ‘Steady there, Mr Bobs. There’s a car behind us.’

  ‘No trade-in,’ he cried. ‘But that’s impossible.’

  I could hear tyres hissing, windscreen wipers slapping. Then, as the car drew alongside, he kicked a leg at it. ‘But do you see a trade-in here? If you can find it, that’s where I’d lose money on the deal.’

  We were opposite the shire chambers, by the crowded footpath outside the Royal Hotel. I lurched left, wobbled into Young Street, got safely to Bennett Street where he held his chaff bag high.

  ‘I have done what cannot be done,’ he said, perhaps intending to make a magician’s gesture, although the consequence was that the Malvern Star hit a deep concrete drain and we all flew, flesh and steel, landing hard, tangled up together.

  Drain-water filled my shoes. I did not yet know that I had torn my new Fletcher Jones trousers but I could feel I had grazed my shin and palm. My neighbour crawled further along the drain, dragging his chaff bag behind him. There he sat, cross-legged beneath a streetlight, as blood descended from his brilliantine.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you home.’

  ‘No home,’ he said. ‘You listen. First I thought I would sell it to Halloran. That was last night.’

  He would not budge no matter what I did. Finally we sat together, cross-legged in the drain. The rain continued. I learned that Halloran had been a perfect prospect, in every way, possessing not only income but a well-known passion for the latest vehicle. However the show-off builder was over six foot tall with the result that, once he had squeezed himself into the driver’s seat, his ‘big boof-head’ poked up above the windscreen.

  His mates all barracked him unmercifully from the dark doorway of the pub.

  ‘Pull in your head,’ they called. And: ‘Pull in your elbow.’

  But neither head nor elbow could be pulled inside the car and the prospect’s knees pressed up under the dash and rubbed against the steering wheel. (‘I’m not a bloody contortionist,’ he said.) He could not easily operate the clutch but he was, at the same time, a keen reader of Wheels and Modern Motor and could not deny himself the chance to unleash that legendary engine on the road. Alas, when truly tested, he lacked the ear and sensitivity to drive without synchromesh and his fellow drinkers cheered each time he crashed the gears. It was no deal, no sale, no luck and Bobs had to go home to the missus with a vehicle he could not easily explain.

  ‘That was last night,’ he said. ‘I crashed and burned.’

  Stupidly I asked him to explain. So he continued with the story of his day until even I lost patience and got him propped against the sale yard fence. I gave him my hanky for the blood.

  Then he was busy collecting the spilled contents of his chaff bag. ‘Pine cones,’ he explained. ‘Nothing like them to light a fire.’

  I straightened up the front wheel and together we set off, both drenched to the skin, me walking the bicycle, him dragging the pine cones behind.

  Mrs Bobs must have heard the gate. She met us red-eyed, weeping in her housecoat. The children were in great distress, the little boy howling in anguish, the pale daughter comforting her mother who seemed to believe, against all evidence, that she was now the mother of two orphans.

  My presence did not staunch the widow’s grief. She compelled her husband into a kitchen chair.

  ‘Impossible,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ She bathed his wound and anointed him with red salves and yellow tinctures, and kneeled beside him. ‘My darling little Titch, what have they done? What has happened to the vehicle?’

  Only then did she see the bag which she kicked at with her little slippered foot. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Pine cones,’ he said. ‘For the fire. If I can do this I can do anything.’

  ‘We have a gas fire,’ she said.

  I sensed the necessity to flee a private scene but I was conscripted by the boy who rolled up his pyjama pants so I could apply to him his father’s salve or sacrament.

  The girl made tea.

  The salesman’s hair was now moulded flat upon his perfect head. His forehead and brow were painted red and yellow. He sat suddenly on the linoleum floor and pulled his snotty little son into his lap and wiped his face. The boy wanted the pine cones but his father removed a fat white envelope from inside his jacket.

  ‘Get your sister to help you count it.’

  I remained at the table between the boy and girl as they counted out the largest amount of cash I had ever seen. Ten-pound notes, huge fivers, on the kitchen table.

  ‘I could never sell it,’ said Titch, s
till on the floor. ‘Impossible.’

  Mrs Bobbsey kneeled close by Mr Bobbsey, alternately dabbing his head and kissing his hand.

  ‘I thought you’d killed yourself in that horrid thing.’

  ‘What did I say I would do? This morning?’

  ‘You said you’d take it back and pay the interest. Then you would chat to Ford about our franchise.’

  ‘And what did I do instead?’

  ‘You made a brilliant deal, of course.’

  ‘Is this a deal?’ the boy asked and although he continued to repeat his question, no-one answered him.

  ‘But who?’ his wife said. ‘Not Halloran, so who?’

  In spite of his family’s obvious adoration, the returning hero was, I slowly realised, reluctant to say who had provided these banknotes now stacked in three piles according to denomination.

  Mrs Bobbsey pushed his shoulder. ‘Who?’

  ‘Can I have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Was it Mrs Markus?’

  ‘Cuppa first.’

  But Mrs Bobbsey’s face had hardened. ‘What would she want with a car like that? Can she even drive it?’

  Her husband shrugged.

  ‘I suppose she wants driving lessons again.’

  ‘She has a licence.’

  ‘She had a licence last time.’

  ‘Irene,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Were you drinking up there? With her? At Mount Egerton? Pine cones,’ she cried. ‘We have a gas fire.’

  ‘I’m a salesman.’

  ‘You left the car with her? What about the registration and insurance? She didn’t drive you back to the Marsh?’

  Something had happened. Everything had changed. Suddenly the children were to get to bed. Missus ushered them away, closed the door behind her, then opened it again.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘She gave you pine cones for the fire? You were meant to be on the phone to Ford.’

  MYOB, I thought.