A Town Like Alice (34 page)

"I don't see why he's got anything to worry about," she said. "I'm not going to sell beer."

"You're going to sell drinks to ringers," he remarked. "If you had a bar instead of this, wouldn't it rile you?"

She laughed. "I suppose it would. I can't see myself putting the bar out of business, Joe."

"I can see you doing all right, all the same." As they sat at the little chromium glass-topped table, Pete Fletcher came in shyly and sidled up to the bar and ordered an ice-cream, and began chatting with Rose Sawyer. Joe said, "Poor old George Connor." They laughed together, and then he said, "I bet you don't keep Rose six months."

Jean had seen a good deal of Rose Sawyer in the last month. "I'll take you," she said. "Bet you a quid she's still there in a year from now, Joe." They shook hands on it according to the custom of the place. "If she is," he said, "it'll be a miracle."

Now that the businesses were started, she was very tired; she felt slack and listless in the great heat, drained of all energy. She would have liked to go out with Joe to Midhurst that evening and live quietly there for a day or two, sleeping and riding and playing with the little wallaby. A cautionary instinct warned her not to offend against the rural code of morals by an indiscretion of that sort; if she was to make a success of what she had set out to do for women in that place her own behaviour would have to be above reproach. No mothers in the outback, she knew, would care to let their daughters work for her if it were known that she was spending nights alone at Midhurst with Joe Harman; no married man would care to bring his wife and daughters to an ice cream parlour run by a loose woman of that sort.

It was a Wednesday, but Sunday was no longer an off day for Jean since it was likely to be the biggest day of all for the ice-cream and soft drinks. She arranged with Joe that he should call for her at the hotel soon after dawn and take her out to Midhurst for the day. She said goodbye to him and went to her room as soon as work stopped in the workshop, pausing only to see the girls from the workshop sampling the ice-cream parlour. She went and lay down on her bed, exhausted and too tired to eat that night; it was refreshingly cool in the workshop building, for the air-conditioner had been on all day. She took off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, and slept in the coolness; she slept so for twelve hours.

She had been out to Midhurst several times since that first visit and had fitted herself out with a small pair of ringer's trousers in Bill Duncan's store for riding, with a pair of elastic-sided ringer's riding boots to match. She met Joe in the early morning with a little bundle of riding things under her arm, and got into the utility with him. As usual they drove a little way out of town and stopped for an exchange of mutual esteem; as he held her he asked, "How are you feeling this morning?"

She smiled. "I'm better now, Joe. It was the reaction, I suppose-getting it finished and open. I went to bed just after leaving you and slept right through. Twelve solid hours. I'm feeling fine."

"Take things very easy today," he said.

She stroked his hair. "Dear Joe. It's going to be much easier from now on."

"This bloody weather'll break soon," he said. "We'll get rain starting within the week, and after that it'll begin to get cool."

They drove on presently. "Joe," she said, "I had an awful row this week with the bank manager-Mr Watkins. Did you hear about it?"

He grinned. "I did hear something," he admitted. "What really happened?"

"It was the flies," she said. "It was so hot on Friday, and I was so tired. I went into that miserable little bank to cash the wages cheque and you know how full of flies it always is. I had to wait a few minutes and the flies started crawling all over me, in my hair and in my mouth and in my eyes. I was sweating, I suppose. I lost my temper, Joe. I oughtn't to have done that."

"It's a crook place, that bank is," he observed. "There's no reason why it should have all those flies. What did you say?"

"Everything," she said simply. "I told him I was closing my account because I couldn't stand his bloody flies. I said I was going to bank in Cairns and get the cash in by Dakota every week. I said I was going to write to his head office in Sydney and tell them why I'd done it, and I said I was going to write to the Bank of New South Wales and offer my account to them if they'd start up a branch here with no flies. I said I used a DDT spray and I didn't get flies in my workshop and I wasn't going to have them in my bank. I said he ought to be setting an example to Willstown instead of…" She stopped.

"Instead of what?" he asked.

She said weakly, "I forgot what I did say."

He stared straight ahead at the track. "I did hear in the bar you told him he ought to set an example instead of sitting on his arse and scratching."

"Oh, Joe, I couldn't have said that!"

He grinned. "That's what they're saying that you told him, in Willstown."

"Oh…" They drove on in silence for a time. "I'll go in on Friday and apologize," she said. "It's no good making quarrels in a place like this."

"I don't see why you should apologize," he objected. "It's up to him to apologize to you. After all, you're the customer." He paused. "I'd go in there on Friday and see how he's getting on," he advised. "I know he got ten gallons of DDT spray on Saturday, because Al Burns told me."

When they got to Midhurst he made her go at once and sit in a long chair at the corner of the veranda with a glass of lemon squash made with cold water from the refrigerator. He would not let her move for breakfast, but brought her a cup of tea and a boiled egg and some bread and butter on a tray. She sat there, relaxed, with the fatigue soaking out of her, content to have him gently fussing over her. When the day grew hot he suggested that she took the spare bedroom and lay down upon the bed leaving the double doors open at each end of the room to get the draught through; he promised, grinning, not to look if he passed along the veranda. She took him at his word and took off most of her clothes in the spare room and lay down on the bed and slept through the midday heat.

When she woke up it was nearly four o'clock and she was cool and rested and at ease. She lay for a while wondering if he had looked; then she got up and slipped her frock on and went to the shower, and stood for a long time under the warm stream of water. She came to him presently on the veranda, fresh and rested and full of fondness for him in his generosity, and found him squatting on the floor mending a bridle with palm, needle, and waxed thread. She stooped and kissed him, and said, "Thanks for everything, Joe. I had a lovely sleep." And then she said, "Can we go riding after tea?"

"Still a bit hot," he said. "Think that's a good thing?"

"I'd like to," she said. "I want to be able to sit on a horse properly."

He said, "You did all right last time." She had been promoted from the fourteen-year-old Auntie to the more energetic Sally and she was gradually learning how to trot. She found that trotting in that climate made her sweat more than the horse and made it difficult for her to sit down next day, but the exercise, she knew, was good for her. Starting at her age, she would never be a very good rider, but she was determined to achieve the ability to do it as a means of locomotion in that country.

They rode for an hour and a half that evening, coming back to Midhurst in the early dusk. He would not let her stay out longer than that, though she wanted to. "I'm not a bit tired now," she said. "I believe I'm getting the hang of this, Joe. It's much easier on Sally than it was on Auntie."

"Aye," he said. "The better the horse the less tiring for the rider, long as you can manage him."

"I'd like to come with you one day up to the top end," she said. "I suppose it'll have to be after we're married."

He grinned. "Plenty of wowsers back in Willstown to talk about it, if you came before."

"Do I ride well enough for that?"

"Oh, aye," he said. "Take it easy and you'll get along all right on Sally. I never travel more than twenty miles in the day, not unless there's some special reason."

He drove her into Willstown in the utility, and as they kissed goodnight he said he would be in during the following week. She went to bed that night rested and content, refreshed by her quiet day.

She went to the bank on Friday and cashed the wages cheque as usual; she found that the walls were in the process of being distempered and there was not a fly in the place. Mr Watkins was distant in his manner and ignored her; Len James, the young bank clerk, gave her her money with a broad grin and a wink. She saw Len again on Saturday afternoon, when he brought in Doris Nash for an ice-cream soda. He grinned at her, and said, "You wouldn't know the bank, Miss Paget."

"I was in there yesterday," she said. "You're having it all distempered."

"That's right," he said. "You started something."

"Is he very sore? " she asked.

"Not really," the boy said. "He's been wanting to decorate for a long tune, but he's been scared of what the head office would say. There's not a lot of turnover in a place like this, you know. Well, now he's doing it."

"I'm sorry I was rude," she said. "If you get a chance, tell him I said that."

"I will," he promised her. "I'm glad you were. Haven't had such a laugh for years. I don't like flies, either."

On the first Sunday she worked steadily in the ice-cream parlour with Rose Sawyer from nine in the morning till ten o'clock at night. They sold a hundred and eighty-two icecreams at a shilling each and three hundred and forty-one soft drinks at sixpence. Dead tired, Jean counted the money in the till at the end of the day. "Seventeen pounds thirteen shillings," she said. She stared at Rose in wonder. "That doesn't seem so bad for a town with a hundred and forty-six people, all told. How much is that a head?"

"About two and six, isn't it?"

"Do you think it's going to go on like this?"

"I don't see why not. Lots of people didn't come in today. Most of them come in two or three times. Judy must have had about ten bob's worth."

"She can't keep that up," Jean said. "She'll be sick, and we'll get a recession. Come on and lets go to bed."

She opened the ice-cream parlour after lunch on Christmas Day and took twenty pounds in the afternoon and evening. She had the gramophone from the workshop in the parlour that evening playing dance music so that the little wooden shack that was her ice-cream parlour streamed out music and light into the dark wastes of the main street, and seemed to the inhabitants just like a bit of Manly Beach dropped down in Willstown. Old, withered women that Jean had never seen before came in that night with equally old men to have an ice-cream soda, drawn by the lights and by the music. Although the parlour was still full of people she closed punctually at ten o'clock, thinking it better as a start to stick to the bar closing time and not introduce the complication of late hours and night life into a rural community.

The workshop went fairly steadily under Aggie Topp and they despatched two packing-cases of shoes to Forsayth just after Christmas to be sent by rail to Brisbane and by ship to England. She had already sent a few early samples of their work to Pack arid Levy by air mail.

On Boxing Day the rain came. They had had one or two short showers before, but that day the clouds massed high in great peaks of cumulonimbus that spread and covered the whole sky so that it grew dark. Then down it came, a steady, vertical torrent of rain that went on and on, unending. At first the conditions became worse, with no less heat and very high humidity; in the workshops the girls sweated freely even at seventy degrees, and Aggie Topp had to postpone the finishing operations and concentrate on the earlier, less delicate stages of the manufacture of shoes.

Jean went with Joe to Midhurst for a day soon after the New Year; as usual he called for her just after dawn. This time it was a grey dawn of hot, streaming rain; she scuttled quickly from the door of her room into the cab of the utility. By that time she was getting used to being wet through to the skin, and drying, and getting wet again; the water as it fell was nearly blood temperature and the chance of a chill was slight. She said as she got into the car, "What are the creeks like, Joe?"

"Coming up," he said. "Nothing to worry over yet." A time would come when for a few weeks he would be unable to reach Willstown from Midhurst in the utility, and would have to ride in if they were to meet at all. He had been stocking up with foodstuffs for the homestead in the last week or two.

There were two creeks between Willstown and Midhurst, wide bottoms of sand and boulders that she knew as hot, arid places in the dry. Now they were wide streams of yellow, muddy water, rather terrifying to her. At the first one she said, "Can we get through that, Joe?"

"That's all right," he said. "It's only a foot deep. You see that tree there with the overhanging branch? When that branch gets covered at the fork, it's a bit deep then."

They drove the utility ploughing through the water and emerged the other side; they forded the second creek in the same way, leaping from boulder to boulder, and went on to Midhurst. They got there as usual in time for breakfast. It was still streaming rain down in a steady torrent, too wet for any outdoor activity. They set to work after breakfast to plan out the new kitchen and the toilet he had set his heart on.

In Cairns that morning, four hundred miles to the west of them, Miss Jacqueline Bacon tripped delicately down the pavement in the rain from her home to the Cairns Ambulance and Fire Station. She wore a blue raincoat and she carried an umbrella. She hurried in between the fire engines, and shook the rain from her umbrella. She said to one of the firemen on duty, "My, isn't it wet?"