The Following Read online

  Lone voices in the bush had the power of prophets with their own words megaphoned back at them. Tim read Pearl’s letter on Marcus’s dresser. Luana had some of Maguire’s fever in her. Luana. She asked for nothing, wrote Pearl. Every Christmas the Milburns travelled to the Swampland Block, their paradise and recompense. Tim in his mind went with them, hovering over them.

  ‘She asks for nothing,’ he thought. ‘What could I give her?’

  Everything, was the answer, but he would have to wait, as people did who had ideas about changing the world and made preparation. Tim’s range was modest by a revolutionary’s standard. It stretched only as far as taking hold of Luana, whispering in her ear, talking of what his love could offer. Safety, was what he’d tell her. Safety.

  Tim and Marcus led separate working lives. Marcus was promoted from engine cleaner to fireman in the railway service and often away, staying in barracks at Eveleigh, Dubbo, Goulburn or Murrumburrah-Harden on the Southern Line. Tim worked as a typesetter at The Whistle, never getting away much at all.

  Both paid board at home, and every time they won a wage increase they paid more. Mrs Atkinson had known the mother Marcus never knew. From her, Mrs A., Marcus gained his fullest sense of that dependence of heart in one person, all that a mother could give. But he could never quite reach the feeling altogether.

  Mrs Atkinson had loved to dance as a girl, but she and Barney had forsworn the pleasure. Dancing was the greatest perfection denied to Tim, though he tried and made progress, but not much, and so Marcus said he didn’t need dancing either. If he wanted someone he’d do his best with palaver.

  On Saturday nights socialism was the topic of those who stood around in the half-dark listening to the thump of the piano, the paddle of soft shoes on the waxed Town Hall dance floor.

  Marcus leaned on the fence, enjoying a supper passed to him by Aileen Harris, the Anglican canon’s daughter. He kept his eye on her through the kitchen window while drinking tea, eating pound cake, smoking shag tobacco and talking about the workingman’s ways of improvement by thrusting his left fist into his right-hand palm, a few emphatically minded blokes and young women pressing around him.

  At the end of the evening when Miss Harris came out, bunching her apron in her hands, Marcus pulled a length of cord from his pocket and tied a few knots, hitches and bends for amusement. The Whatnot Knot and the Tom Fool Knot and various cats’ cradles – ‘Like visions in a delirium!’ Miss Harris shrieked.

  Her piled red hair and moon-white skin were elements of Marcus’s whim to get to know her better, but without putting a foot wrong. She came from the class that had swallowed the cream of an education. She had travelled to the old country with her father following the death of her mother when she was sixteen, returning with a plum in the mouth and strong opinions, but she held back from them, allowing Marcus his forum.

  ‘My father would put you right,’ was all she allowed herself.

  TIM AND MARCUS HAD CLASSES at the School of Arts, Marcus studying for his fireman’s and engine driver’s tickets, Tim for his printer’s ticket and improving his written English for the day when he’d move to the editorial desk and lash out with words of his own, expressions more heated than those penned by The Whistle’s editor, he swore, that he was obliged to set in type.

  On Thursday nights the friends shared a bench in a class of Dr Walter Kitchen, the littérateur who wrote in The Whistle under the name ‘Mercurius Rusticus’. They chewed through Shakespeare, Johnson, Macaulay and Carlyle, Gibbon, Scott and Shaw. Kitchen took a liking to Marcus and looked to Tim as a lesser hope, even as Tim was the one with words on paper. Kitchen roused Tim’s inventive energy in those classes, making him prickly, challenging, aspirational, boastful, artful – qualities Tim polished as much as grammatical style under the eye of that man. Marcus, meanwhile, took what he needed of English as a subject in order to make plain statements ring, shrugged off Kitchen’s admiration and worked hardest in his technical classes, on the mechanics of making steam.

  ‘Any scandals in the fettlers’ camps?’ asked Tim when the next letter came, postmarked Tottenham.

  ‘ “Scandals”?’ said Marcus.

  Words had a way of saying one thing and meaning another, not Marcus’s style but Tim made a lot of it. The manner made its way into ordinary speech as sarcasm, which Marcus disliked.

  ‘Read the letter yourself,’ he said. ‘Now or as you like, Tim – later?’

  That ‘later’ stung. Poor bloke, Tim, in love with a woman he’d never met or sighted. Yet it cleared the air between them, as was needed from time to time. A sense of trust was there, the first clause in the unwritten contract between them, trust of a sort that Marcus encouraged, where Tim was allowed to go prying if it served their mutual interest.

  That contract would last all Marcus’s life and into a couple of decades past its end when Tim, beyond any imaginable vision of mobility, would in his eighties be driven around in a dark-green Jaguar XJ6 with the white-haired love of his life, Luana, by the flashy young man he knew without doubt to be Marcus Friendly’s late-age natural son, Max Petersen, who one day would untangle, by shaking loose a knot, the proper legal ownership of the Milburns’ Swampland Block – and if Tim had any lasting influence at all would then rise on the foundations of his genes to become leader of the party.

  A DEATH NOTICE RAN IN The Whistle, Tim being the typesetter taking it upon himself to set the words in full twenty-point type as requested:

  KNOW BEFORE WHOM THOU DOTH STAND

  FAREWELL

  FRITZ known as ‘DUTCHY’ WOLFF

  The size of type requested used more space than the younger Wolff’s postal note for the standard charge covered, but Tim went ahead, and a scrawl of thanks came from Harden on the Southern Line, signed Albert Wolff, Butcher and Livestock Dealer.

  ‘It was good of you to do that for him,’ said Marcus.

  ‘I did it for you, mate,’ said Tim, with a dispiriting sense of what the younger Wolff meant to him – a fairly pumped-up version of arrogant humanity, without the mystical power that any of us might invest in the larger figures of our childhood.

  Once a month Marcus broke from work and study and visited his grandfather at New Killarney and stayed overnight. He lay on his narrow bed of dusty sacking between rickety poles, a glimpse of frosty sky between gaps in the walls. When the air, slab-like, shifted one way he heard the sounds from the direction it came – bush sounds, night birds crying, possum-cough, owlet-nightjar twitter. When the cold air breathed the other way he heard the sounds from the other direction. Fog whistles from the ridges, the scream of braked engine wheels. Marcus felt his stomach knot in the hope of what was coming for him in the wide night.

  ‘I heard they was building a bush capital at Queanbeyan,’ said the old man with shy querulousness over a breakfast of mutton chops and bitter black tea. Wistfulness touched the syllables of that town name, as if it were a bedsheet aired in sunshine and dried in the wind.

  ‘They’ve dedicated the stone,’ said Marcus, ‘chiselled the words in marble, given the place its name, Can-berra, which is as far as it goes for any start to work. It’s the same rolling, windy place it always was. It’s a country of one-tree hills.’

  ‘You’ve been down there, Marc?’

  ‘With the Flying Gang,’ said Marcus.

  ‘So you’re one of them smart alecs now.’

  Old Friendly was dying of malnutrition and drink and had shingles to the point of agonised torment, but the talk roused him – just the name of that town where an old nun lived, who’d been a scrub-faced girl in the sight of a heart aspiring, in a village in Ireland – and he sat straighter at the table.

  ‘Are they building a great capital, then?’

  ‘Palaces, gardens, terraces and lakes,’ said Marcus. ‘The plans painted in many colours. I’ve seen them under glass in a travelling display, in a watercolour projection of the capital as it’s dreamed of becoming.’

  The old man said, ‘Pour me some a’that.’

  Marcus popped the cork from the bottle standing on the table, that fragrant, swirling, pale-oysterish concoction now a fixture of the place. The old man held the glass between his bony fingers and swilled it down.

  ‘Another,’ he begged.

  There was shame there, for whippings and neglect, for Marcus as a boy having to find his way without guidance, shame of cowardice brought low to grovel in the mirror of its own refusals, a lawless grandfather reflected in the honest face of his grandson.

  Marcus poured.

  His grandfather wheedlingly said, ‘Do you ever see the young Dutchy, Marc, now the other one’s gone?’

  ‘He’s prospering, from all accounts.’

  ‘Have you got meat from him, Marc?’ the old miser urged.

  ‘I have, in the Harden barracks when I cook up a stew.’

  ‘Does he make you pay?’

  ‘He never does.’

  ‘Where do they git this from?’ said the old man, eyeing his bottle. ‘It don’t get any lower than its last-lowered mark, giving me the feeling that I am levelling off.’

  ‘You must be, then.’

  ‘Aye, reaching my limit of stimulants now I am so near the end.’

  When the priest came there was no last appeal, no complaining after a lifetime of caterwauling. For when Peter Friendly died it was undeservingly, with all pain and anguish smoothed away. When they laid him out, taking his body in the goods van to be buried next to his wife in the Catholic section at Bathurst, there was a touch of colour in his cheeks as if, at the very end, something held in tight as possible was released in a blush. Then the coffin lid was put down, and Marcus learned that Albert Wolff had been through, buying stock.

  MARCUS WALKED OUT PAST THE edge of Bathurst, past the high walls of the gaol and the few poor farmlets of goat yards and sties. It was a bleak, narrow country of ringbarked trees with southerlies aching the back teeth, with scoured gullies opening after a mile to horizons of flaring sunsets. Marcus could see the railway curves gleaming, rounding the creek flats on their way down from the sandstone hills.

  Marcus was made a technical instructor and appointed engine driver, a notable promotion in a younger man. He would carry, henceforth, the gold watch of the driver, the veritable sash and buckle of a prince.

  The appointment meant that Marcus could think about marriage on the wages awarded. Tim had predicted the day when Marcus would seek Pearl Dease and he, Tim, would get his hands on the other one, the smirched one, Luana, and like a pagan groom see the face of his bride revealed. In others’ eyes she had lowered her bride price by having a boy. In Tim’s arithmetic she had raised his chances.

  It turned out that the one Marcus declared he might be after was that third party altogether, Aileen Harris. Marcus was full of surprises. She was, of course, a copper-head, as Tim knowingly pointed out.

  Nameless encounters defined Marcus’s freedom in Tim’s imagination, nights of living in trackside barracks and railway town boarding houses, cooking up arguments and stews. He saw Marcus kick up his heels with those copper-heads he liked, the easy women of the railway camps, now Aileen Harris – a copper-head of another sort. Easy? Tim hardly thought so. Crossing to the other side of town for a man of Marcus’s principles – nothing easy in that. That Marcus was a Catholic, she a Protestant, made it an odyssey.

  ‘Do you love her, brother?’

  ‘It’s more than that.’

  ‘More than love?’ Tim said. ‘What can that be?’

  Marcus explained. Or tried to. He’d taken an apparently irrevocable step by accepting an invitation to have tea at the vicarage in the town’s best street.

  ‘So you’re spineless before every whimsical demand of the weaker sex?’ said Tim.

  ‘Something like it,’ said Marcus.

  Canon Harris was a man whose views were far from Marcus’s – on the matter of conscription, on the demands of unions. Marcus let drop the attempt to contest them under the influence of whisky and soda served by Aileen on a silver tray.

  Harris said he was fascinated by Roman ritual and wished to include more in his services. Marcus said he wouldn’t know about Roman ritual, but supposed that being a married priest was the easier path, for a man, when he strapped on the robes.

  ‘It’s true we have family as recompense and your chaps don’t,’ said Harris, who’d lost his wife but had a daughter, and who was this man to take her?

  He supposed that the railway life was the gypsy life: ‘Merry, footloose?’

  Marcus said there were no supposes in the railway life. He read books when away, made notes of his reading, played hands of cribbage in smoky mess-rooms when he was not felled by exhaustion from standing on a footplate facing the gritty wind.

  Aileen, silent till now, said with a theatrical shudder, ‘Marcus!’ to the dirt, heat, grime, soot and grease of the railway life – and then she told her father that everyone said Marcus was ‘the coming man’.

  ‘A future commissioner,’ she said rather purposefully.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the Canon.

  It seemed on that score that Harris might condescend to have a railwayman in his family.

  ‘Struth,’ said Tim, feeling a bit sick at Marcus’s account of his whisky and cakes. ‘A future commissioner? Pull the other one.’

  ‘I gave that impression,’ said Marcus, ‘or must have done.’

  There was a feeling of Marcus wanting to climb a rung or two of ambition – and that was all right. It was why Tim stood behind him. But social ambition? An Anglican vicar’s daughter? Joining a social set? Coming in under the bosses’ bailiwick on the better side of town?

  A SPRING DAY IN THE time of the Great War years was the last time the two young men ever went rabbiting and marsupial-shooting in quite the same carefree mood of endless ranging that they had enjoyed since they became friends and brothers when they were hardly more than boys.

  They came into the hills on a slow goods service and unloaded Marcus’s bike. Tim sat on the luggage rest astride a rolled-up oilskin, according to the rule of necessity by which Marcus did the pedalling. They rattled overgrown fettlers’ tracks without seeing any game. Marcus called a smoko at the steep embankment between Crystal Creek and New Killarney – this was the famous Pinch, vegetated now as an ancient ruin, while half a mile away the Western Line dashed through cuttings and swallowed itself in tunnels and loops. There was an old spring where they filled the billy. Rusty sleeper spikes littered its dipping pool.

  ‘Hard to believe the legends forged here and disdained by time,’ said Marcus in the tone of Dr Kitchen’s spittle-flecked rhetoric. They drank their tea and rolled their smokes.

  ‘Permanence,’ echoed Tim. ‘The only worthwhile delusion.’

  Marcus looked around with his hands on his hips.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said. It was a question worthy of philosophical debate. Tim had the doggy devotion to serve Marcus’s every thrust. He said, ‘Indeed,’ then set about deciding exactly where it was.

  The old tent sites were unrecognisable except by relating them to sections of line new and old. New Killarney selection had been cut up. The home block was sold, the bark hut burned down. New Killarney siding no longer existed. The settlement of fantastical tents no longer was. The Deases’ half-house, built of canvas and shaper of Marcus’s architectural ideals, if he was ever to have a house of his own, carpeted and with its cast-iron stove on clawed eagle’s feet, was gone. The rows of long-drop dunnies were gone. The wagon tracks where Marcus rode with Pearl on a loyal pony were thick with saplings. The loyal pony was a skeleton somewhere. Clumps of thorny bursaria bushes plucked at Marcus’s shirt and trousers. The old-fashioned lengths of the Pinch were gone; they had lost their boy-dreamt marvel of trains descending first one way, then the other, through raw slopes of tumbled boulders, and then the trains ascending with two or three stumpy engines coupled, doing the puffy work.

  Marcus said that Tim must be wrong when he called out that he’d found a bottle dump and lines of drainage ditches dug around tent sites. ‘It’s in the other direction,’ he said. Marcus lined himself up with landmarks. It was the ghostly lump of the Dease and Milburn camps all right, and he hadn’t known he was standing in the middle of the house he was looking for when he searched so intently.

  ‘Full marks to you, Timmo,’ he said. It was by being forced to stay put and poke around with the aid of a sapling crutch that Tim found things out. What he wanted came to him that way.

  A rustle in the air and a thrashing sound came from the ridge above them. They heard the thump of a falling tree and the slither of loosened branches coming down the embankment. In the mountain-bush district of the chilly plateau all was wilderness except for the civilised blade of rails cutting through, and trees fell on still days without warning. A possum was thrown from the branches as they toppled, whooshed and crashed, and that possum came bounding down in daylight astonishment towards them.

  Tim dropped to the ground with a drag of his torso and made a triangle of elbows and cheekbone against the rifle stock, the better to sight the possum, which now bounded back up the slope, and paused. From his alacrity was proved Tim’s regret in never being able to sign up for six shillings a day as a soldier.

  Something else went bobbing on the skyline, where the unused line went into an abandoned tunnel. ‘Two shots,’ said Tim, nominating targets. ‘Possum, and that other.’

  ‘Careful – that’s something up there,’ said Marcus. ‘It looks like a hat?’

  ‘I’m tough on hats,’ said Tim.

  First crack, the possum fell over. Second crack, whatever it was, browny-white, slipped from view.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ said Marcus.

  ‘Do what?’ said Tim, smirking.

  ‘Why did you take that second pot?’ he said. ‘It might have been someone.’

  ‘A miss is as good as a mile,’ said Tim, looking pleased at proof of mettle.

  Marcus clambered up the slope and approached the place along the overgrown line. Tim looked on from below. There was no way possible that Tim could climb that sixty-degree slope, which Marcus scaled with ease.