The Following Read online

  About the Book

  Years ago, in a midnight encounter beside the railroad tracks, a young boy meets a stranger with a powerful secret, a gift of uncanny understanding and a talent for knots. From this encounter, Marcus Friendly’s ideas of himself take shape as he rises to become Australia’s sixteenth Prime Minister. The night he dies, a shadow, ‘thin as a scythe’, is there to collect him when he falls. Another young boy, Ross Devlin, witnesses the event. Ross eventually finds himself on an outback station working for Kyle Morrison, son of Australia’s most famous poet, ‘The Bounder’. Kyle suddenly needs help to undo a knot of his own, and a young union organiser, Max Petersen, steps in to right an old injustice. Now, after years in parliament, Max Petersen, the inheritor of the Friendly tradition in more ways than one, awaits a call from the PM for the ministry he craves. Around him, a crisis among friends and family is unfolding, and everyone is forced to confront the legacy they have inherited, their influence in a changing world and what follows on after them.

  Book One

  The Friendly Knot

  Book Two

  The Morrison Hitch

  Book Three

  The Yeomans Bend

  ‘For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,

  And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.’

  – S. T. Coleridge

  Book One

  The Friendly Knot

  OLD MAN FRIENDLY SENT HIS GRANDSON, Marcus, to search through the bush at night for a pair of thieves known as the Dutchies, to sleep in forks of trees and doze against railway embankments waiting for the bellow of a driven steer.

  Dutchy Wolff and his son, Albert, scavenged engine coal, butchered cattle on the rails and hawked meat through the fettlers’ camps, poor and cleanly bled meat at twopence or twopence halfpenny a pound.

  Under threat of his grandfather’s blows Marcus was cold, hungry and sodden, a crumb of cheese in his pocket and a tin of wax matches for setting a few sticks alight.

  Up by a length of the Western Line he found them.

  A hurricane lamp shone from the tailboard of a bullock-drawn dray. Ropes hung from the sides in coils, tied at the throats like gentlemen’s cravats. There was a hook and a tripod, chains, a carcase, buckets of blood. A cookfire flared, throwing sparks. Strange as Nineveh were the woollen caps they wore, pulled down to their dripping noses. Their shapes made shadows in the mist, great heads and long arms reaching down to find the small beings who created them.

  The Dutchy Wolffs knew their night trains – on the up line the Bourke Mail, nothing down until late. The Bourke Mail had struck a beast, tossing a carcase aside. They tore away at it, reliable as crows, lowering foreheads, swivelling their chins, sleeves flapping, wiping wet from their noses with the backs of their hands.

  The one place they never looked was in Marcus’s direction, so it was evident by their avoidance, call it awareness, they knew he was there – a boy cut from shadows and set slightly forward in cap, overcoat and muddy boots.

  Marcus knew when those Dutchies beckoned he would go to their fire, right up to the coals to warm himself in defiance of his grandfather’s edict to spot them, and know them, and bear witness against them but have nothing to do with them.

  What Marcus would report to his grandfather, owner of New Killarney selection and the steers crashing about, he could not fathom, his conviction of rightness being about equal to a blow to the head when it came to squaring matters with that rancorous old man. That the butchered animal was Marcus’s birthright for the reason it carried the brand of his inheritance – NK – scorched on the hide, only seemed to Marcus a reason for letting it go.

  The Dutchies were swift in what they did, getting on with the greasy work, making up sides and quarters. Their arms pushed into wobbles of guts as they talked a lingo of ‘hochs’ and ‘grunzt’ and ‘oys’. Each hack, blow and penetration of the boning knife had the look of a lesson as Marcus stepped closer.

  He would use the word ‘inexorable’, when the time came, to those who asked about his path crossing with the Dutchies, father and son.

  ‘You couldn’t beat them even if you wanted to try.’ He’d say it in a way that made you think he had something in mind for himself along those lines.

  Now they were done, throwing bits of offal on a rack. Flames seized and curled around the intestines. Fire gave the tracks an orange shine.

  Albert Wolff peered into the fog’s rays, hands cupping his temples, looking straight at him. ‘Is that you, the friend-boy, Marcus Friendly?’

  It was so well spoken that Marcus tweaked his dripping cap brim and followed the Dutchy along the tracks.

  Albert Wolff was aged around twenty then, firmly packed into coarse flannel trousers pulled up over his navel to his barrel chest by leather braces that buckled like luggage straps. His father, Fritz, was already sickly with his grey beard matted and tangled. Both had the same moon face, but the father’s face was sunken, hollowed, while the son’s was smooth and shining, pink-flushed and expectant. The waning moon and the waxing, they were.

  The food they passed around on a tin plate comprised those parts of a beast that Marcus’s grandfather called fries or Rocky Mountain oysters and threw to the dogs. The fat was warm and sweet. The bites were cake-like, crumbly, and steamed between mouthfuls.

  Father and son passed a square bottle between them. Drink ran down the father’s beard and splashed on the coals, where it danced like a paper daisy taking fire. It was a wonder to Marcus how the flames intensified in the wasted drops. One minute he’d been under the trees alone, the next he was squatting in the dirt shovelling food into his mouth and wiping fat from his lips.

  If the old Dutchy had anything to say he said it in a whisper into the son’s cupped ear.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Marcus, unable to keep from his voice the edge of it reserved for foreigners – and never would.

  ‘Friend-boy, don’t mind his English,’ said Albert. ‘You ain’t like the others, is what he says.’

  Marcus supposed who was meant – anyone who played shenanigans with outcasts and peddlers. That was all boys and plenty of grown men who should know better. But you had to laugh.

  ‘Now what?’ said Marcus as the old man cleaned the bottle with the tail of his shirt and held it out, corked and filled to the neck.

  Fritz said, ‘Gott, Gott, Gott,’ and Albert rendered the exclamation.

  ‘It’s for your grandfather, God bless him.’

  After wiping his plate clean Marcus thanked them for the feed, for the sack he pulled over his cap and coat to stop his shivering, and for the bottle to take to his grandfather.

  He made his way down an eroded gully to the wattle and daub hut known as the homestead of New Killarney, to a bed of potato sacks hung between stringybark poles near a matching bed where his grandfather snored, stalky, ulcerated legs poking out from moleskin trousers.

  WHEN MARCUS WOKE, the sun burned through the morning mist, splintering between bunches of gum leaves. He felt he’d live for ever and stretched his arms to the light and tightened his fists, splayed his fingers out. The Dutchies would be up there now, hawking their cuts of meat to the fettlers’ wives along the Western Line.

  ‘Maaarcus! Get your brainless corpus over here, out of that bed. Did you see them, boy, do we have them? Them with their thieving ways?’

  Against his grandfather Marcus held to a view as he pulled a blanket up to his nose that, if he hadn’t been a boy, would have been a grown man’s philosophy: the truth was the old man’s thieving ways, not the Dutchies’.

  His look spoke it: You’d better know this, old man. A steer drinks water from a railways’ water pipe; a steer is struck by the Bourke Mail of the government railways. You are the one who takes government land for your own, hoarding your own title.

  A metal lid twirled through the air and hit the hard-packed dirt.

  ‘Get up, yer loony little crack of a wild-bred bone.’

  At birth Marcus was covered in matted, coppery hair. His little monkey face peered out through an old man’s whiskers. That was his grandfather’s face peering at him now, wizened, pinched and puckered.

  God knows what was done in Ireland to create the lavish form of abuse heaped upon the boy, crippled brilliance carried across the world in efforts of destruction, teaching Marcus the benefit of speaking straight at the same time as it advised him to hold his tongue.

  He buttoned his shirt, belted his trousers and pulled on his cold, wet boots.

  His grandfather raved of injustices and limitations upon the natural freedom of men, and, yes, if he could have harnessed Marcus like a mule he would have made him one in his rocky domain. But Marcus’s life was shaped from the midnight encounter – what he could not understand or express but would act upon – and he saw past his grandfather’s words to a place where his grandfather wanted to be but was never able to take himself. That place was an ideal conception of the world that the old man’s failures, resentments and rages prevented him ever getting near. There Marcus would go when he left New Killarney; let the bush grow back on the ruins of the bark hut.

  Old Friendly grabbed Marcus by the arm, pulled him to his feet, making ready to thrash him.

  ‘Were they up there, were they, boy?’

  Marcus told him yes, they were up there, father and son. ‘But they never took nothing but enough cuts for them in need.’

  ‘Who might that be?’ leered the old Irishman. ‘Them sluts and monkeys of the railway camps? Get your mind orf of them, Marcus. Struck, were they? I’ll strike
you,’ said the worn-out old orator, missing his mark with a jerky swipe.

  Marcus ducked under the eaves of wattlebark, wove round the posts of tattered messmate, then came back and stood his ground.

  On the bush table newspapers, soiled teacups, bread crusts, bowerbird and bush mouse droppings spread around, the paraphernalia of a chaotic mind in the axed-out wilderness.

  Light winked from a square bottle on the table.

  Friendly drew up with a hee-haw expression. ‘Where did that pottle come from?’

  He pulled the cork with his teeth, spat it on the packed earth floor, held the bottle neck under his nostrils, giving a sniff of misgiving – then drank with a heedless swallow.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Thin as dew on a wire, but oh with a barbed effect. They can’t buy me so easy.’ He grinned, his white lips pulled back from horsey molars. ‘Salty, sour – there’s minerals in this, and it’s oily,’ he appraised, complaining about what he suddenly so massively liked.

  A FEW DAYS LATER SERGEANT Robert McHale was told an embellishment of a lie – that the boy had seen a bullock driven at the headlamp of a train, quartered on the rails hardly before the red lamp of the guard’s van departed around the next bend of the line. And what old Friendly said, McHale accepted.

  McHale, a man inclined by temperament to bear false witness in a court of law, rode out from Bathurst and up to the Wolffs’ bush camp with a case against them. But something happened to soften him, given a bowl of stew, thick with onions, browned in flour, and a dish of potatoes baked in a cast-iron oven on a bed of sparkling coals.

  ‘What do you know of the brand NK?’ asked McHale, gravy juices running down his chin.

  ‘It is the brand in your dish,’ said Albert Wolff.

  It came with a bottle, McHale confessed to Marcus years later, when Marcus was a man to crawl to, confide in and look to for comfort – a square bottle with a velvety feel down the throat when the stuff was took at the invitation of the father, who seemed to shine from too much drink, from a liquid that seemed to replenish itself in a man’s fist.

  ‘Was it true spirits, you would have to wonder?’ recalled McHale. ‘Intoxicating, for a cert, cloudy and they said made from turnips, but you never had dreams like them but woke with a head crystal clear. More like a cure, I would call it, or an anti-dote. But to what? Anyway, as was my duty, I reported them.’

  To have reported those names, the Dutchy Wolffs’, in among so many names in his week’s reports to Sydney, was to stir the bull ants’ nest. For when McHale’s report reached the office of Edmund Fosberry, Inspector-General of New South Wales Police, the big man himself made a visit to McHale in Bathurst. A country copper was never so honoured by the head of a public service. Fosberry told McHale that Wolff and son had come to New South Wales to do a job of work. It was an unspeakable job of work, unsuited to mortal men. Did McHale understand?

  McHale did not understand, but said, as Fosberry made a looping sign, as with an end of rope, and made a bight in that rope, and bound that bight with a slippery turn, ‘Oh, but I am starting to, sir.’

  ‘Knowledge of the Wolffs’ whereabouts,’ said Fosberry, ‘is an imperative of police duty. Not to be spread around.’

  ‘I do understand,’ said McHale, his flesh creeping, ‘but what am I to do, when they break the law?’

  ‘The law is never so tight as it doesn’t have loopholes,’ said the chief with a feeble smile.

  McHale rode out to New Killarney and told Marcus’s grandfather that if he valued civil relations with the force he must temper his war on the Dutchies. Old Friendly thought of that bottle of stuff, which gladdened the blood, and Marcus was sent to tell the Dutchies they could have their beast.

  MARCUS FOUND THE WOLFFS IN the rows of his grandfather’s corn, driving off cockatoos with sticks, the birds wheeling back across the Western Line in noisy hundreds.

  See what we’ve done for you? the Wolffs seemed to say.

  Marcus got down from his pony to tell them they could keep what they took. The old Dutchy pulled a length of cord from his pocket.

  ‘You vant?’ he said, dangling the cord in Marcus’s face while his son drove the last cockatoos back past the corn, except for one, haughty and watchful, that roosted in the highest part of a dead tree.

  ‘You vant? You vatch.’

  Marcus watched as the old Dutchy tied two ends of the cord in a lumpy knot. It seemed to gather life, that knot, and take motion, sliding like a mouse through his fingers and coming out into the pale of his hand then scuttling all the way back through his fingers. It was alive, peeping as if aware. Then old Fritz Wolff doused its life with a jerk.

  Marcus saw how it was done. The old Dutchy kept a tension on the ends to make sure the knot hung slightly down as he ran it along. He never pulled hard but turned his head away, as if it was not his doing, that it was only the rope that had the task in hand.

  The world was run by knots and methods of knots, demanding the agreement of a nudge or a tweak, and if you didn’t slant them, or snug them, or roll them they would not be right. Everyone from railwaymen to priests, storemen and underground miners had their knots of trade: end-stoppers and eye-splices, tassels, sinnets, round turns and half-hitches, occupational hitches and working bends.

  Marcus had trouble stopping his pony from throwing its head back, and the Dutchies knotted him a hackamore, a bridle, from a few ends of hemp in a minute or two. Tied with a diamond knot, the hackamore fitted against the pony’s cheeks and controlled a head-tossing habit.

  ‘Adios,’ said Marcus, jamming his hat on his head.

  Off he went, pounding along the trackside to the fettlers’ camp, whooping and hollering with the railway embankment running level past his ear.

  IT WAS THE DAY BOB Dease drove his hand-trike along the rails approaching the Pinch, sending cockatoos up in scattered formations.

  Clamouring the disturbed air for a place in the flock, one bird tumbled from the rest, squawked, fell bang on Bob and clawed him on the work singlet, rotating like a hag’s tits in a willy-willy as Bob pumped the trike handles.

  On the corner of the Pinch, just past the Cone Hill tunnel, Bob laughed and roared, and the bird let go, fell to his feet white as a bucket of snow, heavy as a ham, its yellow crest flattened by the wind Bob made with his muscular exertions until he slowed on the long curve towards New Killarney siding, where he scooped it under his arm and it stayed there, glaring.

  One hand on the cocky’s feathers, the other feeling for his watch, Bob declared he’d shaved thirty seconds from the five-mile measured section between Crystal Creek, Cone Hill, the Pinch, and New Killarney siding. The trike slowed the length of the siding with the stunned white prize on show. The bird raised its crest in the sun, looked at Bob’s daughter, Pearl, then at her friend Luana Milburn, and then at their friend Marcus Friendly.

  ‘Maaarcus,’ the bird was heard to croak.

  ‘You can thank those Dutchies of yours,’ said Bob, ‘for their work in scaring-up birds. Along the straight near the water tank there’s blood on the ballast from their butchering. I couldn’t see for them buggers for a while.’

  ‘Can we keep him?’ said Pearl.

  ‘Or I’ll wring his neck,’ said Bob.

  ‘He’ll be ours for ever, they live to a hundred,’ said Marcus.

  ‘“Ours”, the three of them’s,’ said Bob, turning aside with disdainful wonder.

  They called the bird Fiver and kept him on a chain crimped to his leg at the end of the kitchen tent poles.

  SAY FIVER WAS FIVE YEARS old when they got him that year of Bob’s five-mile, record-breaking pump. It means that today, when the railways are mostly all torn up, the cockatoo is one hundred and ten years old.

  Fiver sits in a wire cage on a brick pathway under an old wisteria walk overlooking a railway embankment one thousand feet below, near Queanbeyan, New South Wales. He is guardian of an architectural work, the Friendly House, designed by Warner Tarbett II and built by Don Devlin, master builder.

  Fiver is familiar as tumbleweed to those who tend the Friendly House as if Marcus Friendly still lived there – though the fact of the matter is that Marcus never did spend a single night there, in that house conceived ‘as the hard, physical equivalent of a tent’ in the words of Harry Johnstone’s M.Arch. thesis.