A Long Way From Home Read online

  12

  The arrival of the Bobbseys had placed a greater stress on both my normal and abnormal customs. For instance, no knock or thump would have previously persuaded me to show myself to any bailiffs lurking on my front verandah. Now I was drawn out of hiding by the Bobbsey boy playing with his wooden truck.

  ‘Bobby,’ I cried.

  He jumped off the verandah and considered if he would run out the gate. I pushed myself into full view and stood with dried hydrangea petals on my trousers.

  ‘It is a race,’ he said at last.

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘A hundred trucks.’ He frowned. ‘Roundy bout that chair. I’m Ronnie.’

  ‘Can I play?’

  He thought that might be possible, so I crawled around my verandah and soiled the knees of my second-best trousers.

  A few days later I heard an extremely light, rather scratchy signal on my door. Clearly not a bailiff. More likely a boy with a truck to race. When I saw the mail pushed beneath my door, I smiled.

  As I reached, the weathered envelope was snatched away. Ronnie was fishing for me, as if I were a yabby who could be drawn from his creek with lamb fat tied to a piece of string. Little bugger, I thought. And waited for the envelope to reappear and then I grabbed it.

  ‘Got you,’ I cried, flinging open the door.

  Dear Lord. There was Miss Cloverdale, her bare knees on that day’s copy of the Melbourne Sun.

  It was completely and totally inconceivable that she would ever be in this place. She should be forty miles away, teaching history at the Methodist Ladies’ College. But now she saw me in these wretched slippers, in this house, in this street.

  ‘Don’t you pick up your mail?’ The Sun’s front page showed a mushroom cloud. A-BOMB TEST AT WOOMERA. These were the catastrophic tests at Maralinga but I could not have been less interested. The top of my spine buzzed with excitement.

  Then she, Clover, was inside my hall, then in my front room, selecting books like a customer in auction rooms. Her calves shone in the sombre light.

  ‘So,’ she said. Her eyes were wild and sooty. ‘What is it you want of me?’ she demanded. She had picked up my copy of Maurice Busset’s En Avion Vols et Combats, and seemed to examine the frontispiece before laying it aside.

  She chose another volume and dropped that too and I saw she was inexplicably angry, or possibly frightened. There was an intimate ferocity completely new to us.

  ‘What about all this bloody dancing?’

  ‘You ran away,’ I said.

  ‘I waited.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you came rushing out of the Windsor and looked straight at me. Then you pretended not to see me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it was dark.’

  She laid her cool hand on my cheek then withdrew it instantly. She returned her attention to my books. I saw my front room was a rat’s nest and the floor was none too clean.

  In this poor place I had dreamed of holding her slender body, had imagined her skirt slipping like a petal to my familiar floor. I had imagined saying ‘I love you’ and here she was and I was no longer sure that I loved her, and I felt, not the intimacy of a beloved, but the shell of otherness. She moved from table to shelf, discarding the Sun and its mushroom cloud, examining my books, perhaps imagining their lonely owner with holes in his socks, at street stalls and auction houses, understanding that I was not who she had expected but a pathetic hoarder facing the abyss of an empty life.

  ‘You should have a bookshop.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘This one is from the State Library of Victoria.’

  Indeed. It had been a ‘gift’ from the map librarian.

  ‘Are you a thief then?’ She removed her shoes as she so often did in the studio and I was shocked to see those gorgeous perfect feet touch my dirty floor.

  ‘I really didn’t see you outside the Windsor. I thought you had run away.’

  ‘Show me the house,’ she decided, and carried her shoes down the hallway.

  ‘Don’t go into the kitchen.’

  Of course she walked directly to the kitchen where the lino was as sticky as flypaper.

  ‘Sugar,’ I explained.

  And she was separating her perfect feet from my adhesive floor, making and breaking contact and looking out across my little garden.

  ‘You should clip their wings.’

  I had a chipped enamel basin in which I was accustomed to washing the dirt off my potatoes and I now filled this with warm water from the tap. I shuffled around the borders of the sugar spill, placed the bowl on the table and brought a towel and bar of soap.

  ‘Oh Willie,’ she said, and her upper lip looked slightly swollen. ‘Are you going to give me a bath?’

  She was laughing at me, and I was so full of blood I could hardly see her. She sat on my least damaged kitchen chair. I boldly placed the bowl of water by her feet and she peered down curiously. When she handed me the soap I could not understand her eyes but they did not seem inclined to look away, not even as she placed her bare feet in the water.

  I wished it had been new soap, not worn and old like this. I kneeled. I lifted her left foot. She permitted me this intimacy. I washed her pink soles and the soft shadows between her toes. I soaped her round slim heel and then her calf and when I finally looked up I found her thoughtful eyes. She reached to touch my cheek and then I stood and then she stood and I took her dry hand in my wet one and found myself not exactly present in the world.

  ‘Can you see me, Willie?’

  I led her back into the hallway.

  ‘Are we dancing?’

  ‘The floor is cleaner back here.’

  She showed nothing but curiosity about where I led her, to my unmade boy’s bed, two foot six inches wide, books nestled in amongst the sheets.

  ‘Read to me,’ she said, and there were practical reasons I was relieved, and I found the Persian poet and we lay together on my rumpled sheets and she rested her head upon my chest and I stroked her hair with my left hand while I held the slightly puffy water-damaged volume with my right. It was twelve ghazals by the Persian poet Hafiz.

  I read and she kissed me on the cheek and my body arched in frank desire.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  I did.

  If I go after her, she stirs up a fuss.

  And if I hang back, she rises in wrath.

  And if, in desire, for a moment on the road,

  I fall as dust at her feet, she flees like the wind.

  And if I seek out but half a kiss, a hundred evasion

  pour out like sugar from the pearl case of her mouth.

  ‘Sugar,’ she said. Then Hafiz was done, and I must read Neruda, then Christina Rossetti, then e e cummings, then Walt Whitman, then John Donne, then William Shakespeare and we rose to eat buttered toast until there was no more butter and it was getting dark. Our stomachs were rumbling. I left to feed the chooks and returned with eggs but she had grown up on a poultry farm and could not bear the taste of them. At dusk we walked down Gell Street in secret, past the hunchback’s bright fish and chip shop, thence into the main street. I had not pushed myself on her but I was a man and therefore overflowing with calculation and I had hoped against hope that Frank Benallack had not closed the door of his chemist shop. Too late. We walked slowly along the main street without touching. Clover folded her arms across her breasts and recalled certain stories to do with Giotto. We were thrilled to discover we were both admirers of the intemperate autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Outside the courthouse, her elbow bumped my arm. She was wonderfully infuriated that Vasari had so patronised Uccello.

  It was now dark but the blacksmith was still working. The chime of his hammer was always, to my ears, the equal of the songs of magpies, the wrens and butcherbirds that gave the town its deceptive sense of peace. A single car travelled slowly past us. The second chemist shop was closed. It would have tested me in any case, to ask for what I wanted from people who knew me as a bachelor. Af
ter the chemist was the cruel dentist and after the dentist was Mrs Hallowell’s lolly shop, then Simon’s garage with its forest of petrol pumps, all different species, some with glass reservoirs and hand pumps, Neptune, Caltex, Golden Fleece, Plume, Ampol, sad and faded, corner property for rent or sale.

  On the opposite corner was the old Merrimu Cafe, known as The Greek’s but owned by Ben Calvo, a Jew who had survived the homicidal German army in Salonika. Ben’s haircut, courtesy of Eric Redrop, did no favours to his ears, and made no attempt to hide the deep creases up his neck and skull. As we entered the cafe it was clear he had seen us coming. His smile had taken possession of his swarthy face and his frown was rushed down towards the bump of his mighty nose. I was embarrassed already, before he demanded to be introduced. But then he made things worse.

  When Clover said hello Ben cried, ‘The voice.’ He took her hand without a by-your-leave and led her to inspect the framed photographs of local legends: Carr the famous local bicyclist, Jackson who won the Stawell Gift, Dangerous Dan’s crash on the Bacchus Marsh racecourse, the main street flooded, the Wool Pack Inn where they had changed horses for the stagecoaches of Cobb & Co, and there he pointed my place out, a pale patch on the wall.

  ‘Tell him to let me put it back,’ he said now to Clover. ‘Why not let us admire him?’

  ‘I think he’s on the run,’ she said, a little flirty. I thought, please don’t encourage him, he’ll want to join us. But he was a nicer man than that. He knew I didn’t drink but, perhaps in order to aid me in my wooing, served us illegal wine in teacups. We sat in the booth next to the Grant Street window and affected to believe the homemade plonk was chianti and we were in Firenze looking out at the Duomo rather than Simon’s garage and that we, framed by the window, suspended above the footpath, were the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza, in majestic profile.

  We trod lightly around the edges of our pasts. We did not discuss the schismatic Lutheran churches of Adelaide or the poultry farms of Dandenong but we were, I believe, so very happy with each other that we failed to see Mrs Bobbsey park her car opposite. Thus I was shocked to notice the light appear on the upper floor of Simon’s garage and see quite a different painting, framed in a high bright window, of Mrs Bobbsey in the arms of a strange man.

  13

  From the time of her first marriage my sister cheated on her household expenses and maintained ‘rainy day’ bank accounts not only in Geelong but in Colac and Winchelsea. She had kept her earlier engagement rings and knew their resale value. She was always married, then abandoned. It would have caused offence for me to say it was her fault i.e. you keep your husband because he is a treasure, and the more that is true, the more there will be other women after him. You ‘see off’ the other women, is what I would have said.

  So it was up to me to give Mrs Markus her driving lesson and give her back her pine cones. I told her, to her face: I have no problem starting a fire in my own home.

  I got home at lunchtime to find the heavy black telephone ringing. Below it were all Titch’s worry papers: there was no handwriting quite like his, finance calculations, the names of prospects with the capital and smaller letters all jumbled together in a language of their own.

  It was Mr Dunstan.

  ‘Your husband can never be the Ford dealer in Bacchus Marsh.’

  I thought, what have I done?

  ‘The franchise is allocated elsewhere.’ He was so jubilant it made me ill.

  ‘How can you know this?’

  ‘If he wants to play now, he has to play with GMH. It’s exactly what you wanted, Mrs Bobs. It’s everything we hoped. Ipso facto. QED. He’s a Holden man today.’

  I thought, poor sweet Titch. Betrayed by your awful father, now your wife as well.

  ‘We’ve bagged the number one country salesman in the state. We’ve bagged the little bugger.’

  ‘Don’t call him that.’

  ‘No disrespect.’

  ‘And you haven’t bagged him. He doesn’t even like the Holden. You don’t know him.’

  ‘It’s not personal Mrs Bobs, but this is what they call checkmate. You’ve been a major player on the team.’

  This was the actual point at which I wrecked our lives. Dunstan himself would play a major role, as would Thacker and Mr Green, but I was the one who unlocked the door for them.

  On top of that I got the capital. I had steeled my heart against my sister, because I thought it was my right to do so, because half the house was mine, because she had abused my generosity travelling up to Melbourne and running up bills at Myer’s and Georges.

  ‘You know your family’s future is with Holden,’ said Dunstan. He had a deep slow voice. It would have calmed a yappy dog. ‘We’re getting closer every day, Irene,’ he said. He had never called me Irene before and I didn’t mind so much. He said he was driving up to Ballarat tonight and would pass through the Marsh at six o’clock. ‘You’ll never guess what I have to show you,’ he said. ‘Everything is falling into place.’

  Whoa, I thought.

  ‘My cousin is an Anderson,’ he said.

  Anderson was a big Bacchus Marsh family. Of course I knew the name.

  ‘She is married to George Halloran.’

  I knew Halloran, of course. He had built a scandalous ‘extension’ for Mrs Markus.

  ‘Halloran is going to develop the site of Simon’s garage.’

  He said Simon’s garage was a perfect place for a dealership, a corner property, petrol tanks already in the ground, a hoist in place, and the failed bicycle factory just waiting to be a workshop. Plus there was a loft which, according to his cousin, could be turned into a cozy flat for ‘proprietor and family’.

  ‘The lease won’t cost a penny until you take possession.’

  ‘We can’t afford it.’

  ‘Yes you can. You’ll have the cashflow of a major dealership and GMAC behind you with the financing.’

  In my defence: this was what Titch and I had both talked about when we were still living in a boarding house in Bairnsdale. Our own Bobs Motors with a display space for four vehicles with the lights on all night long.

  ‘My husband would go nuts,’ I said. ‘He won’t tolerate the debt.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t worry. Come and look at the site.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate him, Mr Dunstan. He is not a timid man, believe me.’

  ‘I’ll be in the Marsh at six tonight. Come by yourself. When you see it, you’ll understand.’

  Oh Jesus, I thought. I didn’t know where Titch was. He was meant to talk to Ford that morning, but he wasn’t home.

  ‘I don’t think my husband heard from Ford.’

  ‘He did, yes.’

  Then why was he not here? What pub was he in now?

  ‘Mrs Bobs,’ Dunstan said, ‘if you were my wife, then I’d be very, very grateful. I’d know you had saved my life.’

  I arranged to meet Dunstan in the early evening expecting Titch would be there to go with me. At dusk he was still not home. Mrs Wilson across the road was not exactly friendly but said the kids could sit at her kitchen table. So I went to meet with Dunstan alone.

  His voice had suggested a tall slow man but in the murk of Simon’s doorway he smelled of mint and whisky, a wiry bald fellow with a two-inch high moustache. He stamped his feet and clapped his hands and frightened me.

  The beam of his torch swept across the heavy steel beams and concrete floors. What was I meant to think? I could make out a shadowy mess of chairs stacked to the ceiling. The lights came on. I saw tea chests and a workshop bench where someone had been turning bookends on a lathe. I told Dunstan that this was not for me to judge. I would have had a better idea if it was a cow.

  He said I would grasp the value of the property if I came up the stairs and it was there he finally turned to face me. Dear God. Did he mean to propose to me? He was holding out a little velvet box.

  ‘We want to thank you,’ he said.

  I thought,
it ’s pearls, but it was a fancy pen with my name engraved on it.

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘No-one must ever know,’ I said, and it was true.

  ‘No-one need know,’ he agreed and grasped my hand and I said quit it but his mouth looked spoiled and sulky beneath its bed of hair. He was a married man. He wore a ring. He was kissing me, pushing his thing against my stomach, the idiot, with his awful tasting mouth. I pulled away but still he slobbered on my cheek and I looked down on Grant Street and saw, in the window of the Greek’s, Mr Bachhuber looking directly at me.

  ‘We will go home now,’ I said. ‘You will tell this to my husband.’

  Dunstan took a step backwards, as if taking stock of me, and who I was, and what he might finally do to me, or I to him. I had a ladder in my stockings. Let him stare at that.

  ‘You thought I was a cheat,’ I said. ‘You thought I was cheating on my husband by confiding in you. I was wrong. I never should have.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s just a fountain pen, from all of us at GMH.’

  I didn’t bother to call him a liar or make him more of my enemy than he already was. I told him to follow me in his car but when we turned the corner onto Gisborne Road I thought, what if Titch is still not home? Or if he’s drunk?

  I pulled off the road and waited for the pervert to come back and talk to me.

  ‘You have to return later,’ I said. ‘I have to tell him what I have done with my sister.’

  He stood there in the darkness, staring at me. That was Dunstan. From the very start he thought I was a pain.

  14

  I waited for my husband. The silly quiz show finished and then Crosby by Request and then a pair of headlights washed down the drive and I stood at the back door and saw my Titchy was alive. In the bright light of the shed I watched him perform his customary inspection of the tyres and Duco.

  He met me at the door and I hugged him, knowing how the rejection must be hurting.

  ‘No Ford,’ was all he said.

  ‘Good riddance,’ I said. ‘We’ll do something even better.’