Brian Penton Page 2

  Governesses had taught her a language her brothers and her mother could not understand, tastes they could not share, so that she lived amongst them, under his infatuated eye, almost like a courtesan he had set up in his house. And as something of the kind, vaguely, they thought of her—as the symbol of an ungovernable lust in the old man which no loyalty to them and no sense of propriety or honour could restrain. “He'd do anything. ANYTHING,” they said, and saw all their personal ambitions being sacrificed to her.

  The words were Joe Gursey's. “He's barmy as I am. He'd do anything. ANYTHING.”

  There was no doubt about Joe. He was barmy right enough. One of the hatters, bewitched by the nibbling, bleating sameness of sheep, loneliness, and the blind stare of the bush. There had been other things—back in the days of The System, when he came out in the bottom hold of the old OSPREY to do a stretch for inciting cotton workers in Manchester. He used to talk about them to Larry, in the storehouse at the bottom of the yard, where the semi-darkness, scented with leather, tobacco, and rum, was streaked by the silver of light in the cracks of the wall. There he was a mere agitated heap of rags behind the counter, muttering an incessant gibberish of hatred and self-pity, from which would emerge before the eyes of the young boy a picture of a man cruelly maltreated by the fates and his own kind—a picture as vivid and incredible as the face, pitted, twisted, starved, that thrust suddenly from the dim shape in the corner and hung for an instant in the beam of sunlight striking across the gloom.

  “'Give him a hundred at half a minute,' says the Beak. They liked to make it last, see? So they took me out in the yard and there was a cove walking back from the triangle with the blood squelching in his boots. A dog was licking it off the triangle and there was as many black ants as you'd see on a meat-safe. One of the police that was taking me stopped to pat the dog. 'That's Darky's dog, a bloody fine ratter,' he says. Then they tied me up. I couldn't see nothing in the sun for a while. Then I saw where the flogger's foot had worn a hole in the ground with the last bloke. . . That was in Bathurst courtyard, fifty years ago. The first red back I ever got.” He spat. “The sods!” His curse startled the motes swimming lazily in the beam of light. They whirled upwards, settled again. He sank back into his corner and brooded with his chin on his chest. For the rest of the day he would brood there, in his rat-hole of malodorous rags behind the counter, till the sun began to set. Then he would come out into the yard, blinking at the light, dragging one leg behind, casting myopic glances about as he sneaked to the gate, down the slope, and into the scrub. He would skulk there for days, muttering, squaring up to the trees, coming down to the river at night like the wild cattle to drink, hiding himself, trembling, whimpering at the sound of Cabell's voice shouting at cattle and men. But sooner or later he would be back at the kitchen door, his cabbage-tree hat in his hand, cringing, whining, “Won't you give a bite of tucker to an old timer that never wished you anything but well, missus. I been walking around a long time, missus. Spare something from the dogs.”

  Emma would bring him the food hastily and thrust it into his hands.

  “Thank you kindly, ma'am. It's good to think there'll be more like yourself. It must be fine always being the way you are.”

  Emma was always pregnant in those days. She would shut him out quickly and go back to her work, but his voice would keep on for a minute or two, ingratiating, but somehow indefinably abusive.

  “Nobody knows how you deserve the good things better than Joe Gursey, missus. Old Joe knows a thing or two. Breeds a bit himself, he does—breeds lice. Ha ha.”

  Emma would stand with her eyes sideways on the floor till his feet padded away in the soft dust and they heard the door of the storeroom bang. Then she would turn to Larry. “You keep away from that trash or I'll know why.”

  But he could not keep away. The intense imaginative life with which he solaced his loneliness between a silent mother and a scowling father took stuff to feed on from Gursey's mad tales. Back in the storeroom he found Joe chuckling to himself. “Breeds a bit himself, I told her. Breeds lice. Ha ha. Ach, the bloodsuckers.”

  He munched the food noisily between bony gums, muttering, “. . . country soon be lousy with his brats—fattening on it—eating it to the bone—then hop it—back to England—chuck the bone to the scum. . .” His hand appeared in the limelight of the sun, clutching a mutton bone. “They'll crawl for it. 'Thankee kindly, sir'—lift their lids—'thankee for chewing all the meat offa our bone. For stealing our land. For emptying our rivers. For burning our timber. Thankee kindly, sir.'”

  Larry ducked, and the bone hit the wall and rattled the the bottles on the shelves.

  Out in the yard a man was hard at work filling the water-butts at the kitchen door. The old water joey, Tom, stood on three legs quivering the flies off his rump till the butts on the sleigh were empty, then turned and plodded down the slope and into the river, knee deep. The man, with his trousers rolled up his thin horseman's legs, followed slowly, flashing the tin dipper in the sunlight.

  Gursey sneered. “Look at that poor gazook, Sambo. He'd call your old man God Almighty even if he starved him to death. Thirty quid a year and tucker—the same tucker and the same amount they used to give us in the bug-house.” He hitched himself up to the counter to peer through the door at the valley spread out before them in a sweep of blue shadows and grey, still scrub. Away in the distance, up near the Three Mile, men were digging post holes. Their minute immobility magnified the hills and the open grassland. Here and there sheep, cattle, horses, and the slow smoke of scrub burning off.

  “A hundred thousand quids' worth, and what did we get? Damn all.”

  His voice that was like a bad-tempered dog's yapping went up half an octave. “There were five of us come here with him—me, Sambo, Cranky Tom, Old Dan, and a bloke named Penberthy who made a pile at Ballarat later. The blacks killed Tom and Dan. Sambo's working a dead horse, in debt to your old man for the duds he's wearing. And here's me.” He pushed his grey face into the sunlight as if to lay before Larry irrefutable evidence of his father's avarice. “It isn't the way he kicked me out in the flood the night you was born, after I brought him here in the first place. And it isn't the way he walks round me in the yard now as if he might catch something. He knows what I know—that there's nothing behind his aristocratic mug now but fear. No, it's none of that. It's just that once, ten years before you saw the light, he slammed the door of chokey on me for life. I nearly had my ticket and he put a trick on me to make me escape. And a man can't escape. There's nothing left for the man that tries to but watching and waiting to be grabbed. That's what he did to me. For the sake of a thousand sheep. He'd've done it for less. He'd do anything. ANYTHING.”

  A hard lump was beginning to form in the pit of Larry's stomach. He flew into sudden rages, hammering his horse with the handle of his stock-whip, slashing at the piled bales of wool in the woolshed. After that he felt easier for a bit. Now, as he listened to Gursey, it was like the pain of dry vomit. He felt he had to get something out or stifle. Pity for Gursey was not the only thing. He felt he had known this all the time, as though Gursey was only blowing the ashes from his own smouldering fire. Things he had forgotten came back to him, and things he did not know he had seen: his mother standing in a doorway; his father watching her for a moment, then brutally pushing her aside so that her head cracked against the wall and her hair tumbled over her face; his father shouting at his mother and threatening her in words he could not understand; his father sneering at her, “You and your family—dregs! Scum!” His father looking at him with glassy eyes, never talking to him as a son, calling him in another room, “Your brat!” He was eighteen now and still growing, with Cabell's nose and the sensual lower lip of the Cabells, his mother's shiny jet hair, sunken, secretive eyes, and gipsy skin.

  Gursey watched him intently. “And why? Why wouldn't he stick at nothing, even at robbing the shirt off Sambo's back, even at murder? Because we're just dirt to him. So EVERYTHING HE DOES TO US IS
RIGHT. That's bred in his bone.” He tapped Larry's arm. “Mind this, lad, there's only two kinds here—them who came free and privileged to make a pile and spend it in England, and them who came because they had to—lags and the offscourings England had no place for but a stinking back-street tenement in Manchester.” His ranting voice died wearily in the back of his throat. “We reckoned it would be a new heaven, but we didn't reckon with your old man, and his like.”

  Larry began to see his father as the apotheosis of all evil as he had learnt to understand it from the affairs of the little world locked in between the two blue ranges of hills. This much he got from listening to Gursey—a moral principle of hate, a rationale for the hard pain sprung in his vitals.

  He spent more and more time in the storeroom, sneaked down every night to sit in the corner, where the guttering candle threw the blackest shadows, and listened while the men, strolling up for a plug of Barrett's Twist or a packet of Holloway's Pills, lounged about arguing, grunting, telling tales in high, laconic voices.

  They had a sheet of old newspaper, and Jack Berry, the stockman, was reading bits out of the advertisements, laboriously, his head sideways, his eyes screwed up, the paper tilted at arm's length towards the light. “One brand new music-box for sale,” he read. “Plays 'Killarney,' 'Home Sweet Home,' 'Irish Jig,' etc. Quick sale, two pounds.” Monaghan the rouseabout listened with his mouth open, in guileless wonder, Sambo, lounging cross-legged against the wall, in sardonic disbelief.

  “Ye could buy one of them things yeself then,” Monaghan said. “Ye could too.”

  “Set of Bengal razors. Good as new,” Berry read. “Five pounds in leather case with velvet lining and mirror in back.”

  “Velvet!” Monaghan made a papery noise with his fingers in his beard. “Velvet, eh? Only a fiver. A man could buy that.”

  “Effects of the late Sam Goossens, of Spring Street, Fortitude Valley. One silver watch and chain, one suit white ducks, one straw hat and pugaree, one pair new spurs, three pairs boots, size nine, one picture in gilt frame, one Odd-fellow's apron. Widow will take twenty pounds to clear.”

  “Twenty quid!” Monaghan exclaimed, goggling at the hitherto unsuspected richness of the commodity market. “And here's me knocked down twice that much in one go down Mother O'Connor's last month. Next cheque I'm taking it down to Brisbane and buy some of them things. Jist you make a note of them names, Jack.”

  “Wouldn't catch me wearing nothing offera dead man,” Sambo mumbled. “It ain't safe.”

  “Aw, I ain't scared catching nothing off a music-box.”

  “Ain't catching nothing,” Sambo said. “It's the bad luck.”

  “Jeez!” Monaghan detected the snag in a too alluring proposition.

  “Had a dog here once,” Sambo said, “belonged to a bloke named Herb Tutt. Spanker the dog's name. Collie mongrel. Tail as long's yer arm. Dog died—haunted Herb to death.”

  The light washed into Monaghan's mouth, gleaming on the two hard ridges of bone that had grown to replace teeth long wasted away, danced shadows across Jack Berry's red face and naked, hairy chest, painted Sambo and his splendour of a stockman, red shirt, speckled handkerchief, Wellingtons, snowwhite moleskins, and snake-skin belt, flat on the darkness.

  “Bloke died in the scrub off Pyke's Crossing road. Swaggie found five bob in his pocket. Swaggie kicked the bucket down the Five Mile. Tells Herb about the five bob to ease his mind, but Herb's a ignorant sort of bloke and don't know no better—pockets it. Coupla days after comes riding in hell for leather. Reckons something's after him. 'That there Spanker,' he says. 'Keeps sneakin' round behind me.' A week later, riding home in the moonlight with the boss, sees a man get up on the track just ahead with his arms stuck out—AND YOU COULD LOOK RIGHT THROUGH HIM.”

  “Jeez, a ghost?”

  “Ghost! Ain't no sich thing. But the boss, he near had a fit. Near pulled the mouth offa his horse. That old chestnut mare it was. 'Who's that?' he says. 'Speak!' And it don't say a word. Just stood there, shivering like a mirage. And the funny thing was IT DIDN'T HAVE NO FACE.”

  Gursey's rasping cackle made Monaghan jump. “He didn't wait to ask twice, I'll bet me bottom dollar.”

  “Whatyamean? Boss ain't scared no man.”

  Gursey winked. “Supposing it wasn't a man? Being like a mirage and having no face to speak of.” He cackled again at a good joke. “Might've been something the boss hadn't expected to see again this side of nowhere. Might well've been.”

  “Eh?” Monaghan said nervously, and they all looked at Joe, questioning.

  Joe frowned and slid back into his corner. “Mind your own business.” “Supposing!” Sambo jeered. “It wasn't nothing but that bloke Tutt, see. We went back in the daylight and found him lying on his back along the track, dead's mutton. Maggotty. Boss seemed pleased. Said it was an option on something. But I reckon it was that there Spanker. Herb shouldna et that dog's tail.”

  “Et a dog's tail?”

  “Yeah, that's what he done. Got swept away in the Fifty-one flood, night young Larry here was dropped. Got washed up a tree, hangin' on to Spanker and a billy. Up there four days, starving. Always reckoned Spanker kept waggin' his tail in his face to tempt him. So he cuts it off, boils it in the billy, gives Spanker the bones to eat, and drinks the broth himself. Anyhow, Spanker went mad from the flies after and bit a sheep and the boss put a blue pill in him.” He nodded sagely. “Always said that dog had a lot of dinger in him.”

  Jack Berry picked up the paper again. “Those unemployed blokes been making it hot down Brisbane,” he said, “pelting the police and shouting, 'Bread or blood.'”

  Gursey stirred. “They'll make it hotter one day. Shouting don't scare these lousy landgrabbers.”

  Berry's heavy frame rolled on the tea case. “You talk a bit fierce, Joe. You talk a bit too fierce!”

  Gursey's head appeared over the edge of the counter again. The dancing shadows and the perpetual twitch in his cheek—relic of his last flogging, he told Larry—blurred the outline of his face, but his eyes were vivid. “A bit fierce, you think? Well you've got a lot to thank them for, Jack Berry. You've got your woman here maybe? Or didn't I hear the boss saying, 'Be damned if I'll provide you with rations for wife and brat?'” He laughed scornfully.

  “That's a fact,” Monaghan said. “Stone the crows, a bloke ought to fork out an extra ten pounds of mutton when a bloke get's a chance to do a line with a shielagh.”

  “I don't hold with agitators,” Berry said stubbornly.

  “D'you hold with them bringing in Chows to do your job?”

  “No, I don't hold with Chows in a white man's country.”

  “D'you hold with kanakas and coolies?”

  Berry wriggled.

  “Huh, you don't hold with nothing, but you lickspittle just the same.”

  “Never lickspittled to any man,” Berry said. “It's no business of mine how he runs his affairs. Let him pay up my cheque next year and nothing else concerns me. I'm going across the border to get some of that selection land and get married.”

  “You've got a mind like a sheep, Jack Berry,” Gursey sneered. “For one thing thinkin' he'll let you get off with a full cheque, putting up the price of your snout and pickles the way he does whenever you get a rise out of him. And thinking there'll be any land but stony ridges waiting for you in New South Wales. Or d'you expect the squatters to come and ask you to pick the eyes out of their runs, eh? You're just gettin' the willies dogging sheep, Jack Berry. That's the matter with you.”

  “I'm going, anyway,” Berry said. “I been wanting a place of my own and there's a lot like me.”

  “Hope they got more guts'n you,” Gursey said. “Or they'll soon be piggin' it on rice like the Chows.”

  Berry shook his head. “Never get anywhere being so fierce, Joe. We're all men and every man's got his rights.”

  “No, we ain't,” Gursey said, “we're men and bosses. Two different races. One's got his fist on the land and the other's just let work
on it. That's where the difference comes in.”

  “Yes, men and bosses,” he said, when they had gone, stumbling each in turn over the doorstep on feet unused to walking the earth, “and there can't be nothing in common between us but hatred. We're not even the same nation of people any more. We belong here. But they're never done thinking of the day they'll be back in the Old Dart with a deer park and a mansion. So they go away and change back and their children ride with both hands on the rein and look at you as if you were a shape in the air like Tutt's mirage. Absentees—throwbacks, still hanging on to the land and gutsing up the profits, milking the country and us.”

  The thick hot darkness outside, coagulated under the shards of black cloud gathering for the rainy season, shuddered with spasms of sheet lightning that lifted a hill, a black silhouette of grasping boughs, a glitter of tree-tops from the nothingness and dropped it back—a world agonizing to be born.

  Larry tried to think of England but he could think only of his father talking about it, half-shouting at his mother with an exacerbated intensity of grievance, glaring at him as though England was all the strife and bitterness between them.

  “But you belong here, Larry,” Gursey was saying. “Weren't you born with a birthmark?”

  Larry shook his head. “No, Joe. I haven't got no birthmark.”

  “You've got a brand,” Gursey said. “You've got a birthmark all right.” He grinned. “Inherited it from your ma, you did.”