Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 9

I stretched and yawned. There was a soft noise above the ceiling, a pattering.

My hostess stared at the ceiling, a deep frown creasing her forehead, a lamington held between thumb and forefinger. I returned her anxious smile.

"A possum," I said.

"Surely not."

"Almost certainly," I said, and languidly constructed a tale about how, during my attempts to fix the tile I had been confronted with "a big brown fellow" who had "a brush-tail as thick as your arm".

"No," said Molly, putting down her lamington and holding her hands tightly together.

"And c.o.c.ky as all get out," I said. "Sat there like Jacky and wouldn't budge."

"You don't say."

"In clear daylight." I saw the possum with complete clarity as it came to take its position, the position Phoebe had occupied in the dazzling moment when she appeared on the top of the ridge.

"And wouldn't go away?" Molly shivered.

"No harm," I said, but I was surprised to see goose-flesh on my hostess's arms.

"I live in terror," she said, leaning forward and shifting in her chair a little so that her dimpled knee almost touched me. There was hardly room for a piece of French toast to slide through the s.p.a.ce between our knees. She meant nothing untoward. She was merely moving closer to seek the protection of a man, an instinctive move she was not even aware of having made.

"In terror?" I asked as she put her hand on my arm.

"In terror. Do you know," and she widened her eyes accordingly, "a very good friend of mine, a dear lady, very sweet, was in a house, her house, when a possum," she held her white throat with a hand where Jack's gifts glittered expensively, "came down the chimney and quite destroyed ..." she waved her hand around the room, "everything."

"Surely not." I discreetly separated my p.e.n.i.s from the spot where it had glued to my woollen underpants.

Molly blinked and drank her tea.

Phoebe appeared silently in the doorway.

"I was telling your mother, Miss McGrath," I said, "that I have seen possums on the roof."

"Oh," Phoebe said disdainfully, "really?" "really?"

"You be polite to Mr Badgery when he speaks to you, my girl."

"Frankly," Phoebe said, her cheeks flushed, coming to address her mother with dangerous green eyes. "Frankly, I think he's lying."

I took refuge in a lamington.

"What was it like?" she asked.

I swallowed the cake. My throat was dry. I needed tea to wash it down. "A big old fellow," I said, "a brush-tail."

"That seems an unlikely story, Mr Badgery," she said coolly. I held my half-eaten lamington between gluey fingers and hoped she would sit down before her mother saw the patch of blood on the back of her dress.

"No," I said. "I a.s.sure you. Your mother has heard it, just a minute ago."

"That was me," Phoebe said wickedly. "I ran all over the roof."

"Phoebe," Molly said. "Don't tell fibs."

"I must say, Mr Badgery," Phoebe smiled at me, "all that exercise has given me an appet.i.te."

She sat down, at last.

My muscles slowly untensed and let me enjoy the splendid vision of my beloved who happily ate her lamington in the deep shadow of the parlour while the windows were filled with blue sky and the air with the white cries of seagulls.

30.

In his cups Jack McGrath confessed to me that he had no affection for the Western District of Victoria. It filled him with melancholy: those great plains of wheat and sheep, those bland landscapes perfectly matched to the forlorn cries of crows. He did not care for the towns: Colac, Terang, flat sprawling places where Arctic winds cut you to the bone in winter. The c.o.c.kies, he claimed, got a look in their eyes that came from staring at such uneventful horizons; but perhaps the look was in his eyes, not theirs.

As Jack McGrath motored out of Geelong in his Hispano Suiza there were many who saw him who judged, correctly, that he was a rich man in a Collins Street suit. They could not have guessed at the store of memories he carried with him like Leichhardt in the wilderness with his vital provisions: ice crystals in the high country, smoke, sawdust, the flavour of yarns with old men with age-blotched faces, a snake of apple peel dropped into sunlight. No one watching the bullock driver's body, the city man's suit, the grand automobile, would possibly guess that he had, somehow, missed the track, taken the wrong turning and ended up in Geelong by mistake, guided by a luck that was really, if he could have admitted it, no luck at all.

The things that really pleased Jack McGrath were all in the high country of the Great Divide, two hundred miles away from wool-bound Geelong. He could still read off their names, like a Catholic does his beads: Howqua, Jamieson, Woods Point, Mount Speculation, Mount b.u.g.g.e.ry, Mount Despair, The Razorback, The Governors, Mount Matlock. And whenever, in the middle of his bright electric nights, he wanted a peaceful place to rest his mind he shut his eyes and found a place on the ridge between Mount Buller and Mount Stirling, on the way down to the King Valley; there was a place there called Gra.s.sy Knoll and he could still, day-dreaming, sit there and feel the cold air in his lungs and let his mind float across the deep valleys to where the Razorback Ridge showed its clear sharp edge against the pale blue evening sky.

He had never meant to become rich. He had never planned anything. He had trusted his life and let it carry him along never expecting it to mislead him. He could not acknowledge that it had. And although depression often enfolded him as he sat alone in an armchair he could not, would not, admit that he was unhappy. He built brick walls. He placed sheets of gla.s.s above the door. He laced his home with electricity and thumped across its polished floors in heavy boots.

His father had been a bullock driver; Jack McGrath did the same. He had a talent for it, a sympathy with the beasts that got them moving when other drivers whipped and swore and tangled themselves in hot confusion. By the time he was sixteen he was entrusted with old Dinny O'Hara's best teams and he worked the long rutted miles between Melbourne and Mansfield, a broad young man with a full beard who soon became famous for two unlikely qualities: he used none of the profanities for which bullock drivers were renowned, and he was a teetotaller.

It was March and the shearers were on strike and if everyone in Melbourne and the bush knew about it, if they imagined gangs of shearers were burning down wool sheds and setting fire to the squatters' paddocks, it was news to Jack McGrath who travelled innocently beside his team in his faded red shirt, his moleskins, bowyangs, and heavy boots. He did not read the newspapers. He did not sit drinking around the campfire, telling yarns or singing songs.

When he found out he did not even know what a strike was and it was Dinny O'Hara who had to explain it to him. O'Hara was a huge man, withered with age, whose enormous cauliflower ears dominated his blotchy face.

"The shearers is on strike," he spat.

"What's a strike, Mr O'Hara?"

"A strike is when the b.u.g.g.e.rs won't work," he spat again. "So we got no wool to carry. The Fergusons got no wool. The Rosses got no wool. The McCorkells got no wool. It's all on the sheep, not in the bale, and there'll be b.l.o.o.d.y war before there is."

They sat on the back veranda. Jack McGrath stared at Dinny O'Hara. He had never heard of such a thing. "A war."

"A war, a b.l.o.o.d.y war, that's what they want," O'Hara said, "and that's what they'll get. Boozers and bushrangers," he said, "galloping around with their guns and their speeches. So I'm giving you the sack."

Jack didn't say anything. He remembered breaking a gum twig in half and then in half again. He threw the pieces of broken twig on the ground. He could not understand the justice of it. He was so used to being liked by men. His eyes were suddenly, surprisingly, wet with tears and he turned his head into the shade of the veranda on the pretext of finding something amiss with his kangaroo-hide belt.

"I hear tell," O'Hara said, "there's a fella in Point's Point with a team doing work with the timber. His driver got kilt, run over by his own wheel, the silly b.u.g.g.e.r."

They didn't shake hands. Young Jack McGrath rolled his swag and started walking the sixty miles to Point's Point. He walked through the bush all night and all the next day. He sang hymns as he walked, not because he was deeply religious, but because they were the only songs he knew. He walked for twenty-four hours and stopped, dead beat, three miles short of Point's Point. He unrolled his swag and slept beneath the bridge at Gaffney's Creek.

The next day he found there was no job and no one had been run over by a wheel. He walked up to the gold mine to try and get work but there wasn't any. The manager of the mine was an Englishman known locally as Twopence Thompson, a name that related to his cunning in money matters.

Twopence Thompson's problem was a thirty-six-ton steam boiler that a previous contractor had abandoned sixteen miles away on the mountain road to Point's Point. He offered Jack McGrath two hundred pounds to bring it into the mine and whether from desperation or a rare fit of generosity, advanced half of the money to enable Jack to buy a team.

The opinion of the town was that they were both fools, Jack for accepting the job and Twopence Thompson for parting with his cash.

Jack McGrath chose his team, paying forty pounds each for good polers and ten pounds each for the rest of the team. He made the yokes from Queensland brush box and spent two weeks rigging together a new harness. Then he walked sixteen miles to the abandoned boiler and studied it. Where the other contractor had tried to pull the thirty-six tons uphill, Jack worked out a series of pullies so his team could move downhill. He anch.o.r.ed the pullies to giant bluegums and began the job. It took him three months. Sometimes he was bogged for a week. At other times he moved it a hundred yards. But move it he did, and Twopence Thompson parted with his other hundred pounds.

His luck had started. He had a good team and he was well respected. He worked in the timber and had he wished he could have drunk himself to death on French champagne as plenty of bullockies had done before him.

He banked his money. There was nothing he wanted to spend it on.

When, in 1910, he bought the charabanc he was thought insane and then shrewd. In his opinion, he'd been neither. He'd been lucky. The gold mine was working hard by then and there was plenty of money in the little town. He took his share of it: running sober miners down to Warburton and bringing drunken ones back.

Ten years later, on the road to Colac, he could still smile about those days. By G.o.d it had been fun. He'd driven that Ford, the first of its kind in Victoria, around those winding mountain tracks, stopping every mile or so for men to empty their bladders or settle disputes which were often funnier than the arguments that had begun them. And coming back after a big storm! That was the go. The road blocked by fallen trees. How he had loved shifting them.

They called him "Jack the Gelly" in Point's Point.

He blasted those trees with gelignite and never, as long as he did it, did he ever learn to carry enough fuse so as they approached home the fuses would be shorter and shorter and once, just by the Sixteen Mile Creek, he had been blown nose first into the mud and had a dagger of splintered wood driven into his broad backside by the force of the blast. When the dust settled, his drunken pa.s.sengers clapped and cheered.

He could still wax poetic about the smell of cordite which had become, in memory, the perfume of the eighteen-ounce gold nugget-shaped like a swallow-he had accidentally blasted from that roadway. He could still feel the soft clay mud as he rubbed the swallow in his hands. He could still smell the sweet sappy wounded wood of the great gums, see his breath suspended in the air above the road in 1910 while his pa.s.sengers, suddenly sober, gathered in the headlights of the charabanc. They stood in the spluttering light of the acetylene arcs, as silent as men in church, and handed the nugget one to the other.

The Point's Point Historical Society has a cast that was taken of the nugget at the time. It is named, in that dusty little-visited room, "The Swallow". The real name for the nugget was not "The Swallow" at all. It was "Gelly's Luck".

It was also Gelly's luck that he had the honour to drive Molly Rourke from Warburton to Point's Point for the first time: a more proper barmaid than any he had ever seen, a more beautiful woman than he could have imagined.

There are people alive in Point's Point today who have never heard of Molly Rourke but they can tell you the story of how old Sam McCorkell spent a pound one night just on swearing, and how he paid up, meek as a lamb, before going home to strangle his wife and children. The swearing box in the story is Molly's. It changed the Grand Hotel and those who didn't like the restrictions would walk across to the Sandy River Hotel. More often the traffic was the other way and Dusty Miller, the publican of the Sandy River, became disheartened and sat in the parlour drinking Queensland rum. Molly sent men across to cheer him up. A small group, known collectively as Dusty's Bridesmaids, sat with him on his veranda above the river and drank tainted beer from unwashed pipes.

Molly Rourke hated the bush. As everyone said, she was a city girl (she came from Ballarat) and they liked her for it, even while they teased her because of it. She was a point of distinction about the town, like Bert McCulloch's German clock and Mrs Walter Abrahams's fine bone china set. She was something that set them apart from other dusty streets in the middle of the Australian bush.

Jack McGrath drank his lemon squash and fell in love with her, although it took him an awful long time to do anything about it.

On one Sat.u.r.day afternoon in May he was observed to drink a total of sixteen lemon squashes. The Cavanagh brothers kept a book on it and Bert McCulloch won ten quid.

When, at last, he courted her, it was as delicately as he might (had he been permitted) have picked up Mrs Walter Abrahams's bone china between his big callused fingers. Dusty's Bridesmaids would smile to see them together, the big clumsy man bending over her so attentively, so delicately, as they took their Sunday stroll down the two miles of macadam to the Boggy Creek ford and back again.

He was told often enough how lucky he was to have found Molly. He never doubted it. He expected they would marry and have children and live out their lives in Point's Point and be buried on the hillside amongst the bracken above the river. It was the place where, the man in the Hispano Suiza at last admitted, he really belonged.

His soul was a jellyfish stranded on the sh.e.l.l-grit sh.o.r.e of Corio Bay. All he wanted to do was feel something as good as the air on the Warburton Road in 1910.

31.

Molly McGrath sat in the parlour with the curtains drawn and would not say why. She had Bridget bring her fingers of toast and weak black tea. There were noises. She did not like them.

On the previous night Phoebe had made jokes about possums and Molly had left the table hurriedly, leaving us to finish our jelly unchaperoned.

"She knows," I said.

Phoebe shook her head. "More tea, Mr Badgery?"

If I had been less besotted, I would have taken more care of Molly, would have trod more cautiously, but we left her to suffer her terrors alone on her bed and were pleased to be left so dangerously together. We knew nothing about the electric belt, and even if we had known there is every chance we would have continued to torture her.

At breakfast next morning Phoebe announced her intention of visiting the library in town. I knew exactly what she meant. Ten minutes after her departure I decided, out loud, on a stroll. I wore a three-piece suit and a watch with a gold chain. I walked up the fig tree and crossed the steep tiled roof with my shoes in my hand.

Phoebe waited for me, artfully naked, reclining in a valley on a travelling rug under a powder-blue sky.

She was like no woman I have ever known. Please note: I said woman, not girl. This was not a case, as Jack would have imagined, of a grown-up man, already fearful of death and decay, falling for the smooth untroubled skin of a young girl. (Later I will sing you some songs to ageing flesh, a woman's body with scars, stretch marks, distended nipples, b.r.e.a.s.t.s no longer firm, a slow sweet song by a river, not a bay.) She climbed naked to the roof ridge and wanted to be taken from behind while she watched the farmers and their wives promenade along Western Avenue. She licked my nipples as if I were a woman and laughed when they stood erect. She told me I had a Phoenician's mouth and stared so hard into my eyes that I shut them to protect the poor bleak rooms of my life from such intensive scrutiny.

Phoebe looked into those blue clear eyes and thought I was the Devil. There was nothing soft about me, she thought, no soft place, just this cold blue charm. She wrote all this in her book. Sometimes she showed it to me, holding her hands to hide what was before and later.

"He is an electric light," she wrote. She was well pleased with this description, suggesting as it did both electrocution and illumination.

Baked by hot tiles, goose-pimpled by breezes from Corio Bay, she shucked off Geelong and left it lying in the box gutter of the roof like a dull tweed suit. She held a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e in her mouth and listened to me moan. She shocked me with the attentions of her tongue.

"I like him," she wrote in the book, "because he is probably a liar."

And when I protested, she said: "You have invented yourself, Mr Badgery, and that is why I like you. You are what they call a confidence man. You can be anything you want."

Of course I loved her for more than b.r.e.a.s.t.s and tongue. I had never stood so naked and felt so whole. She spoke like a ventriloquist speaks, hardly moving her splendid lips. It was a constant wonder that words emerged at all and that, when they did, they were so velvet soft, the tips of fingers encircling my ears. It was she who was the magician, and I the apprentice.

"We will invent ourselves," she said.

Geelong did not exist for us. We were oblivious to discomfort in our inconvenient nest. We lay, sat, squatted together in the valley of the roof while Molly lay, half crazy, on her bed below and Jack was entertained by his backers in gardens of Western District sheep.

"Will you teach me to fly?"

"My word, yes."

"Could we fly to Europe?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever made love to a man?"

"Good grief, no."

"I have made love to a woman," she said.

I was shocked, jealous, l.u.s.tful and my voice was hoa.r.s.e, half strangled with it all. "What woman?"

"You must teach her to fly too."

It is no wonder I did not take to Annette. I was jealous of her before I met her.