The Following Read online

  Bald, scabby, blue-skinned with the vestige of a yellow crest like a stroke of dirty crayon, Fiver waddles onto the parched ground where galahs and topknot pigeons come for seed. Who knows what a bird thinks; who knows what a bird knows at a hundred and ten?

  Fiver throws his head back and screams it: ‘Maaarcus!’

  PEARL DEASE HAD A FLAT, freckled face and eyes turned up at the corners. Her ginger hair was tied back in common twine. When hot and bothered, she would burst from her overalls with rounds of swearing and laughter. Luana Milburn had short black hair growing in stubby, tight curls all over her head, hardly more than a quarter of an inch long all over.

  Luana’s father was the dark-skinned Kedron Milburn, the ganger from Inverarity Swamp, north-western New South Wales, and her mother, Tilly, the gaunt, nervy Englishwoman who turned her back on privilege to marry a man of race.

  Marcus Friendly wore a swaggering armour of short pants and braces, a pair of stiff, poorly made boots, no socks, and an overlarge pudding-bowl hat. He was a winning little prick, said the girls’ fathers in coarse confidence to each other: Might they grow old with liking him? Might they as old men in their cold cots feel the warmth of rolling out Marcus Friendly’s name?

  Pearl swung herself up onto Marcus’s pony, Stout, fitting herself to Marcus’s spine as they cantered along a dray track, and Marcus held the pony’s head correctly with his Dutchy hackamore.

  If Pearl ever went to a place without a railway line and a fettlers’ camp, she wondered why it felt so empty of the life that mattered. ‘There is no way out of this dump,’ she’d say, even of places that were famous beauty spots. Pearl shivered in the steaming heat when the Deases went on their New South Wales Government Railways travel warrants to the Far North Coast. A crane and a pair of buffers hanging over a shining estuary marked the end of something big.

  ‘Take me home,’ she wailed, a temporary sort of place even so, but where the moon turned rust to gold and storms dragged skirts of rain through lightning flashes, smelting grey ballast green.

  When Pearl’s parents talked about towns where they’d lived in the days before they ever knew the meaning of a siding, a trestle bridge, a high embankment or a spark-throwing engine passing in the night, Pearl was sorry for them. It was as if they’d confessed to imposturing royalty by admitting they had once been ordinary, outside the railway life altogether and not quite ashamed of themselves as Pearl would be ashamed of herself if she had not iron, soot and wayside wildflowers in her hair.

  Marcus, an orphan, whose childhood from infancy was spent on New Killarney’s rough selection, said there was rarely a winter’s night when he didn’t hear the shriek of a fog whistle back in the sandstone ranges.

  Marcus, Luana and Pearl – each was called to the railway life. Three bright-eyed kids, they stared into cracked platform mirrors wondering who they were, dreaming of who they might become. In that inheritance, whatever it was, they would never be alone or undefended.

  The Deases lived in a tent. The Milburns, half a mile down the track in an acre of bracken fern, also lived in a tent. Both welcomed Marcus to their skittles of purloined veal and pots of nettles boiled with watercress – but the Deases’ tent was the place for the boy.

  It was airy in summer, warmed in winter by a coal stove and hanging carpets blocking drafts, moonlight thrown on a canvas roof vivid as lamplight. Marcus liked the way the flap of the tent cut the sky like a metal ruler. They read Wild West novels passed on by fettlers who traded them.

  Luana, visiting from her lesser palace, sat on a wooden stool wearing the striped dress her mother made her with trochus shell buttons, the frugality of its folds spread around her, island-princess-like. When she took home papers thrown from the trains, her father, Kedron, could be seen sitting on a stump inspecting the pages between his fists, a proud man who could not read a word and signed his name with a cross.

  Marcus’s grandfather, dirty beard forked in the wind, foul mouth chattering, beckoned to passengers to throw their bounty from the passing trains. It was real work pushing the aches in his legs to make an accumulation of treats. At Christmas whisky bottles were dangled from carriage windows on lengths of cord – he seemed to spurn them, after a certain day, when he got his fill from the Dutchies, with their bewitching poison, as he crowed that you never knew what was enough of something unless you had too much of it.

  There was ginger beer, lemonade and plum cakes, too, sewn into padded parcels and thrown for children to catch.

  Pearl caught a pudding coming through the air like an artillery shell. She touched the fruity treasure to the ground with a spurt of dust. Hanging from the windows of the Western Mail, passengers gave a cheer for her tomboy ways and catcalled the old miser dancing for his pay.

  Wearing the textures of their bar-soaped, sun-dried cottons, Luana and Pearl roamed free as sunshine on the lumpy earth. Their mothers called them to get away, to scram from the navvies who shouldered their picks and crowbars and came over for conversation, making the girls laugh into their big, dirty faces. Navvies were the ones who built the embankments, dug the cuttings, laid down the tracks. If anyone had a right to the spoils of the earth it was them.

  IN LATE WINTER MARCUS RAN with a paraffin-soaked rag, setting the bush alight. Flame drove through the rocky land his grandfather had acquired portion by portion on the boast that an Irishman with a holding attached to the horizons was rich in legend.

  The Western Line ran past the highest ridge where a row of serrated, wall-like cliffs guarded a chilly plateau of pale-trunked gum trees, she-oaks, geebungs, swamp reeds and kangaroo grasses. The fire died out in that lonely stretch of bush traversed by the rails. The pair rode along looking for lost steers – if they counted one less, now, it was understood – the bearded old man, the keen boy and the trudging pony moving between blackened trunks of trees still smouldering.

  The world threw its shadows from passing trains and met another world, one fabulated by Marcus’s hand holding a tin of wax matches. Fire left shapes in the grass – a charcoal frieze, a pictogram or a procession. There were shapes of battleships, motor carriages, bicycles and working people crowded on the march. The passing world and the imagined one came together and called to Marcus at a whistle blow. Fuming, heaving locomotives breaking the stillness of the bush had a likeness of armoured gods, with everything the boy knew and understood going back to their first coming, and the blood on the rails where he found the Dutchies.

  The lords and earls of that railway life were engine drivers and their firemen; the foot soldiers were navvies; the sergeants gangers; the caparisoned knights of the underworld were shunters; the tyrants Railways’ Commissioners; the priests and missionaries the union men; the manna of sustenance was filthy coal; nectar on a boiling day a billycan of beer, a man’s throat tipped back, gullet pumping its piston.

  Marcus’s grandfather boasted he would be buried in Ireland when his time came. There was no chance of it. Marcus’s father, a shunter, had been buried from a funeral train, a carriage lantern over his gravestone. His grandmother had been taken away in the luggage van of a mixed goods service and put in the Bathurst cemetery across the row from Marcus’s mother, who’d died before Marcus ever knew her. His grandfather would be lucky to be carried off on a plank.

  Because of his father, shunters were men-aside to Marcus. In their overalls, stiff gloves and big, hard boots waiting to trip them up, they were marked for other-worldly attentions. But what they could bring together, bang-slam, weight and momentum, hook, couple and chain, was greater than all the world’s separations.

  Marcus’s granny had curled orphaned Marcus on her lap, tucked him into bed and brushed kisses on his cheeks. She had a wallaby skin rug, soft as her old lady’s beard, with a crackle underneath where the hide ran. She had a dangling jowl, poor woman, a goitre, and when she was dead and buried Marcus did not remember his grandfather saying one good word about her, only speaking of a stupid Connemara cow who’d walk five miles for the glimpse of a blue flower.

  His grandfather kept on with it, speaking ill of Marcus to his cronies at the Apple Tree Inn. They told him to lay off the boy, but old Friendly only grinned. He would say what he liked and get what he wanted.

  Just as well the railways captivated Marcus and offered him his life, because his grandfather would leave none of his bushland bounty to the boy when he died but make the entire grant to a pale bone stuck in his thoughts, a Sister of Mercy, Bernadette Tiernan, last seen in girlhood’s freckled freshness at her holy confirmation sixty years ago in Ireland, now living in the convent at Queanbeyan as an aged nun.

  When the Deases were away Marcus would put his ear to the rails and reckoned on Pearl putting her ear to the rails in Maitland or Coffs Harbour or wherever she went visiting her cousins. So was Pearl always the one?

  Marcus and Luana – lonely as two worms cast upon the claggy earth – cramped into the low trike shed hardly big enough for two, wrestled on a burlap sack and gave each other pleasure. It was a tangle of grabs, pinches and greedy caresses, a gratification as acute as ever existed. They were able to look at each other with scorn, even as they took the astonishment into themselves. They heard the rails humming, the trikes being pumped and pedalled towards them, and got out of there as fast as they could, brushing dirt from their knees, running off in opposite directions.

  The two girls played hop-step on ironbark sleepers and herded milking goats where a slow leak from an overhead tank dripped into a patch of corn. Single gangers – and not always single ones – wanted them, hanging around the tents when their fathers were away. Bob Dease and Kedron Milburn heard the best of this, otherwise there would have been murder. Looked over, grabbed and pinned, using their girl fists to rescue themselves to the extent they were able, they wer
e said to be made for a hungry fettler’s touch and ready to be broken to a man’s ways. The boys of the Flying Gang made a stop to look at them, they were known so wide. A toughness, stitched of disappointment, came to them early. But there was also intelligence, and that, altogether, made them beautiful.

  MARCUS FRIENDLY WAS FIFTEEN YEARS old that year, when he left New Killarney to start his apprenticeship in the Bathurst engine sheds. He was Pearl and Luana’s playmate, companion, leader and slave. Through jealousy of Marcus’s hankering after Pearl, always putting her first, Luana hated him, looking out from under her clenched eyebrows with a hostile need.

  Eventually there were just the two families left living on that lost branch of the Western Line, the Deases and the Milburns. Construction work was done – a stretch of line now bypassed them. Engineers, surveyors, gangers, navvies singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and standing on flatbed rolling stock drifted their goodbyes across the smashed-down bush.

  It left the place just for them, for a while, until they too moved away, feeling to Pearl, when she was still too young to be resentful through living an isolated life in a homemade paradise, that true paradise was always a little piece of broken bush with an unused railway line running through. As for Luana, she could hear the trains going past all night on the new section of line – snoring on the upgrade, squealing on the downgrade like pigs rooting in the lignum – in the place the Milburns came from, Inverarity Swamp, and went back to every year.

  The Swamp was far inland, taking overnight to get there and all the following day on the North-Western Mail, with its habit of creeping and stopping and jerking and shuddering. Swamp was a heedless name for paradise. A branch line led to Inverarity siding on a wide clay plain. There they unloaded tent canvas in heavy folds, crates with saucepans, billies and blankets. After a wagon ride they went in under trees to a bend of a river and lived on duck and wild pig, and yellowbelly, bony bream and Murray cod netted in the billabongs.

  Nothing was ever truly lost to the three friends if the rails led back to any one of them. Unpacking pots and pans grimy from New Killarney siding, Luana brought her finger to her tongue, tasting sour steel, coal dust and a sweet, oily substance akin to molasses, grainy as sugar, the sweat of the railways gathered in greasy droplets. Fiver, yellow crest rampant, stalked along, step by careful step, through the camp site like a queen dowered in white satin.

  A man approached on a horse. His name, Bounder Morrison, was unknown to the Milburns, but not to the Registrar-General’s department where land titles were kept. Much had changed in the year since the Milburns last came through. The cockatoo screeched a warning, flying back from the intruder in a crash of feathers, yet what did a cockatoo know about chains, roods and surveyors’ perches?

  It was a pity that Kedron Milburn did not take more notice of a bird’s wild calls so as not to be made a fool of by a man. In a poem Bounder Morrison had written and published in the Sydney Bulletin, the first of the Bounder’s ever printed, it was curiously stated:

  A lusty old cockatoo

  Gives cry that he knows

  That someone’s a fool

  Relinquishing the jewel

  In the crown

  But it’s how the world goes.

  Kedron signed his name with an indelibly pencilled cross and Bounder his with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. Their arrangement was worth more money than Kedron had ever held in his hand before, a sheaf of ten pound notes. And why not? He’d given nothing away, and yet got something for it. On the Swampland Block you would be out of your mind to doubt your depth of possession, your unspoken ancestral attachments, with those wattle seed, honey, fish and pig riches. Kedron Milburn never did doubt it, nor was he ever ungrateful for the bounty that fell to his horny hands by virtue of his being alive on this earth.

  An old system title, much amended, was locked away with an older parchment, the Milburn title, so-called by a forgotten few, tied with pink tape and lodged in a Sydney solicitor’s vault at Bounder’s behest.

  Nothing changed for the Milburns – they came every year. Except cattle came in, along with goats, sheep, windmills, turkey’s nest dams, fences and mazed, rutted, eroded tracks as Inverarity Station encroached on the Swampland Block.

  TIM ATKINSON WAS LAME AFTER contracting infantile paralysis as a child, and he jerked his body along at close to a running pace with crutches, iron hoops bound in padded leather supporting his upper arms.

  When Tim Atkinson and Marcus Friendly rambled Railway Town streets, arguing their points of view like Socrates and Plato, Marx and Engels, or, more likely – as Marcus said – like Mutt and Jeff spouting pitiful nonsense, Tim gleamed with sweat over the hardship of his limbs but never admitted the impediment.

  This was the life in the years after Marcus came in from New Killarney and his grandfather’s wasteful care.

  Marcus was like a son to the Atkinsons, a brother to Tim. ‘The Catholic cuckoo in our Baptist nest,’ said Barney Atkinson, a roster clerk in the railway service who declared Marcus’s grandfather the crustiest old miser to ever walk this blessed earth.

  Marcus and Tim shared a bedroom until they were eighteen, when Tim was given the sleep-out on the north-side verandah and Marcus the sleep-out on the south. From then on they lived the lives of men – working, eating, thinking, sleeping, waking, working.

  Tim made Marcus a promise. Whatever happened in their lives he would stick by him. ‘That goes both ways,’ said Marcus, and they shook on it.

  Marcus could go for a while without mentioning Luana and Pearl, then be fired into wondering what the two were up to since the last time he’d had a letter or heard news of them through the Flying Gang. Tim wondered if he would ever meet them. Talking about Pearl, Marcus’s voice thickened, his words slowed, his eyes took on the look of a lover.

  ‘Brother,’ said Marcus. ‘You ought to see them. They are trouble together. Batting blokes off, giving them a taste of their tongues. Pearl does it with laughter, right into their faces. Luana’s a spitfire. The bloke who takes her on better know what he’s in for.’

  Then one day Marcus said, ‘Luana does the most beautiful, intricate needlework you could ever clap eyes on.’

  The picture he gave, of Luana sitting on a stool wearing trochus-shell buttons on a cotton dress falling open, in the door of a tent with a pressure lamp throwing light on her needlework, inflamed Tim’s thinking as he pictured someone he’d never met or knew anything about. Marcus summoned from the trackside tents a life of grab and get. Everything Marcus knew, Tim knew just as well, yet never yet had the taste of it.

  Twist and thrust, bend and twirl, was the mode forced on Tim. His upper body was muscled like Don Athaldo’s of Condobolin, his lower limbs disobedient. Along, but not up, was his destiny. He could never get over fences or up steep slopes the way Marcus could. While Marcus played rugby Tim patrolled the sidelines, giving advice to the ref, agile as a swamp wallaby.

  Heckled by the crowd for getting in the way, Tim spun around to impress a smile on a hostile bunch. ‘Voilà!’

  One day he would show them. But that smile was not so gallantly scornful as he wished. He was always on the lookout for one in particular. Luana. He wondered if he would know her if he met her. Luana! Out of nothing he stood up for her against slanders. He asked himself what love was, what love’s power was, when it roused a bloke’s feelings from mystical mists in the sandstone cuttings and two girls running through bracken fern.

  Bob Dease’s trike derailed on the Pinch the year Marcus left New Killarney, throwing Bob and his billy cans, crowbars and oily wrenches into a nest of low-growing blackberries. Disciplined and demoted for reckless use of Crown property, Bob was sent out West. The family went with him, the Milburns followed. They lived in a camp near Tottenham now. The cockatoo Fiver circled the claypans and mulga flats, coming in at night to a cage. Tim had leisure for this hot-eyed reading when Marcus was away, and time to put the letters back. The girls were not married, he learned, but Luana had a boy to a man named Maguire, a union outcast, a miner who deserted her for a greater cause – direct industrial action, anarcho-syndicalism and death to parliamentary notions.