Black Diamonds (39 page)

 

F R A N C I N E

‘It'll be just as it was, Francine,' Doctor Nichols says, taking out the stitches, only three of them: urgh. ‘But no, er,
relations
for another month. Still a possibility of infection, inside. There, all done. Good girl.'

Good girl.
Do I get a pat on the head or a lolly? Certainly won't be having
relations.
I get a kiss on the forehead from my husband in the mornings and if he touches me at all it's as if I'm made of china; barely spoken to me beyond the children, food and the weather all week. A campaign to keep France safe from anything and everything that might distract her from … I know he's trying to do all the right things, but when he ironed the boys' school shirts last night, he looked so slapped when I asked him not to any more, I could have slapped him. I don't have anything else to do. And I don't know what I want him to do. But I know how I feel: like I'm not a woman any more. And resentful, and twisted up … Oh, stop it, Francine, it's only been a fortnight since … Sarah said I should try to give myself something she could never give much to her own self: time, to let my thoughts return to normal. I don't want time; I don't want normal thoughts; I want my Baby Joe to be alive. That's not going to happen, is it, and babies die every day, fact of life, you're not the only one, so pull up your drawers and try to be sensible, at least.

But Doctor Nichols now sits beside me on the edge of the bed, not-to-worry tone replaced by grave and kind: ‘I should say, though, that it's unlikely you'll be able to have another child.'

Oh.

He talks about the
trauma
to my
uterus
, the inevitable scarring in there, says it's best not to have expectations. I want to shout: do you have a crystal ball, then, to go with your medical degree? How can you say that to me? Because you're a doctor, my doctor, and you're trying to be kind and fair. I want to cry, I want to wail and wail and wail, but the sadness has lodged itself direct in my womb. No more babies? I am not a woman any more and I have no expectations.

I am not sensible. Can't even remember letting Doctor Nichols out the door.

I am rubbed out. By my lack of attrition? I can hear myself snort. That's what they call this war now: a War of Attrition. Not much fearing of God's Wrath going on there, I don't think: merely a phenomenal excess of death. A rolling abomination of infinite abnormalities. But oddly, I can feel God weeping into my soul, somewhere past emotion. No, the universe is weeping. It weeps as it tilts and tilts, throwing out stars like tears.
Über aller Welt.

Who am I to mourn my small bundle against this vastness? No one. Davie's bleating for a feed: get on with it.

Sensible now, sort of: kiss on my forehead and Daniel's come home with that smell on him, that smell he had when we were first married. It's not coal; more acrid than that. He's bending over the stove, sampling dinner, and I ask him: ‘What is that smell on you?'

‘What smell?'

‘That sharp, dusty smell.'

Sarah says behind me: ‘Shot powder.'

‘Shot powder? Why do you smell of shot powder?'

He says, ‘I don't know,' around another mouthful.

Sarah has an idea: she's just made a sound that's half a laugh, half a sigh of scorn, and now she's left the kitchen.

I say: ‘How can you not know why you'd smell of shot powder?' Since it's a volatile substance with a very specific purpose …
Oh.
I realise before he replies. He's not just running the Wattle, is he: he's working
in
it. That's why he looks so tired, too; and bleary-eyed, from the dust. And he's hiding the fact, must be washing before he comes home, he must even take a change of clothes: because he's done this before, hasn't he, smelled like this lots before, when he was managing the mine. Sniff, sniff: smell from the blasting sticks in his hair. Oh. Oh. Oh. This was not part of our proposal.

He says, reaching for a glass, not looking at me: ‘I hang about a mine. Why are you bothered about it?'

Because …

There's no completeness to our union.

I say: ‘I'm not bothered.' I have no expectations and no valid opinion; even if I could speak. Everything I've ever done for you is negated now in this deceit, and I don't care if it's well- intentioned: you are a moron.

‘Good,' he says, then kisses me on the forehead again.

So much for promises, so much for locking you in your room if you misbehave, so much for true love. Kookaburra cackling sunset somewhere in the orchard: thanks for the note of ridicule.

Bit more than sensible now; it's been ten weeks and I am declaring myself well. I'm fit, physically, and inspired by my own epiphany in the bath this morning: while my body has resolved itself to be what it will be henceforth, bit bunged up but in good working order, so has my mind: I have decided that there is no such thing as a normal thought, not for me, when I doubt very much that there was ever much that was normal in me to begin with. Promise to myself then: proceed henceforth as I wish to continue. And I wish to do so as intrepidly as I can. The AIF have broken through Fritz at the Hindenburg line, and even the Troll has demanded they now be pulled out of the cauldron for a spell. I have my own line that needs to be broken through, my own demands as regards enough being enough, and it's going to happen today.

‘I want to go to the paddock to visit Joe,' I tell him.

He looks up at me from the little truck he's carving for Danny: sad lone dog. Not at all surprising: I've barely spoken to him since The First Night Of Shot Powder, as if I thought I might play him at his own game; make
him
talk to
me.
As if the words ‘yep', ‘no', ‘don't know' and ‘nothing' could be used against the expert. I can't bear this any more. Bleary and weird with my own grieving as I have been, I can't blame him any more either. And I have sunk that low, if only to myself: it's all your fault. If I hadn't accumulated so much worry and so many tears on your account, then I wouldn't have lost my baby. I wouldn't feel as if I've been dragging myself through the gelatinous soup of my own guilt for weeks on end. Sinking low enough within it that when I discovered through Sarah via Evan that he's been carving a big tunnel underground, appointed himself Chief Navvy, I even thought: I hope you do blow yourself up, since that seems to be a particular ambition of yours. Watching him picking at the savage blister on his thumb and thinking, I hope that hurts. Watching him sleep so deep he doesn't stir a muscle even when Davie squawks out in the night, and thinking: you exhaust yourself deliberately because I am repulsive to you now. Juddering glimpses of throwing myself under a train, not to follow Joe, nothing as romantically daft as that; no, just murderous. And worse: imagined throwing Charlie under the next Mail instead just because he'd dragged me out to see the blue tongue he'd found under the verandah and wouldn't stop his jolly burbling about it when I wanted to be stringing beans. Very ugly load of abnormalities. I want to cancel it all out; I want peace.

‘I want to go now. Today. With you.' Because I have been avoiding this: the final proof that Joe is truly not here. I've told myself I don't visit graves: not Father's, in the Mick section of the cemetery which is always kept spick and span by donation to the tiny colony of mute nuns in town; and not my mother's, not ever, because Father couldn't bear it. I've told myself I don't need to visit Joe's because I see him every day, in David. But that's only another reason why I do have to go, isn't it. And I can't do this alone, not only because it's not my grief alone, but because I'm frightened.

‘All right,' he nods, and the fear becomes a clenching round the swallowed cataclysm in my belly, but I will do this. He says, ‘Good,' and I know I can do this, because I can hear that he is coming with me.

It's Sunday. We leave the boys with Sarah and Mim and drive round to the Wattle, past the office, the sheds, the toot, the black holes in the hill, and pull up on the flat, still mowed short like a rugby field by the pit ponies. A monument to Nothing's Really Changed.

We walk across it to the edge of the ridge and Daniel helps me down the rocky slope to the small flat at the bottom; he hasn't said a word, and neither have I. Can't; just need to keep hold of his hand. Whisper to myself: this is where our son is buried, this is real. And yet it's not at all; fear falls away from me like the bark peeling from the trees. This place is too beautiful for fear, and somehow the thought that our little boy keeps Daniel's father company here comes immediately to me, as a gentle fantasy, one I can keep. About two who live in this place, looking directly into the bronze-green skirt of the escarpment on the other side of the valley, who live beneath the gums that rustle above us, red-tipped with new growth, who live among the golden banksias and bright pink orchids that range up behind us. I can hear my whimpering, feel my knees buckle, feel Daniel's arm catch me round the waist, feel the warm solidity of the rock he sets me down upon, hear myself ask: ‘Where is he?'

‘That little peppermint,' he says, raspy and soft and warmer and more solid than the rock. ‘See, near that scribbly? That's Dad.'

I say, ‘Peppermint,' as I see it. About three feet tall, with three very sturdy sprays of bright young leaf.
Eucalyptus piperita
, Sydney Peppermint Gum, and it's very happy here. Thirteen to the dozen, but for the sprinkling of tiny, tiny daisies beneath it, so tiny … don't know what they are. Except … too lovely.

He says: ‘I thought you'd like it. You know, peppermint.'

Like
it? That I now know he's chosen this tree for Joe, for me, that he's nurtured it, that he's been waiting, all these weeks, waiting for me … I don't know anything. Except the pain washing and tumbling through me, waves and waves of it, overtaking me, and Daniel keeping hold of me and saying nothing because there is nothing to say. I am inconsolable, I will always be inconsolable for Joe, and that's all there is to it; and that's all right. My pain is soaring and circling out into the trees with my breath, my existence, the particles of my loss permanent in the atmosphere, permanent as this valley, and I want it to be. I howl for this injustice. I howl into the earth at my feet, between me and my child. I howl until I don't, until I feel his arms around me tight with his acceptance, gossamer and firm, until I am quiet and I feel his breath through the back of my hair, until we are sitting, hip to hip, just here.

And into this stillness I find I can say something I have to say, simply, with no tangles: ‘I don't want you to work inside the mine any more.'

I can feel his jolt at my voice, at my knowing that; but he only says: ‘It's nearly finished, and I won't after that.'

Whatever that means, at least I've said it; and something else: ‘I don't want you to come to bed and just sleep any more, either.'

Silence. But I have to know this, now, today.

‘Daniel?'

Into the earth: ‘I didn't imagine that you'd ever want me again.'

‘I do.'
Please.
Please don't let this have wrecked us there.

He looks at me and smiles, just, that heart-sore barely-there smile, and he stands up. ‘We should probably get back.'

No.
Yes: I need to feed David, probably a few hours ago. But … I take his hand and follow him up to the top of the ridge with my impatience stinging: this is hardly the time to have raised the subject. I have desecrated everything, us, everything, and somewhere across the paddock I blather: ‘I'm just awful, I'm twisted up and awful.'

He stops and stares at me, and I don't know anything and I don't know him, and I want him to let go of my hand. I want him to stop looking at me, but I can't stop looking at him. Heavy storm clouds are arcing above the valley, behind his face, and the low sun at my back strikes the gum leaves blood red, the peeling branches luminous white. A black cockatoo is screeching cold derision; a wallaby thuds away somewhere into the scrub and I'd like to follow it. I wriggle my hand away.

He catches up my wrist and says: ‘No, France. Never.'

Words are less than useless for what happens after that, except that I can say nothing is as it was, and I know now that's all right too. It is fierce and it is infinitely gentle.
Gloria.

 

DANIEL

‘You won't be making a habit of this,' Evan says, following me in.

‘A habit of what?' I'm still thinking about Francine yesterday, two miles backwards and about twenty yards up; I'm still watching her eat breakfast and hearing her saying: ‘That was a very good egg.' She ate the whole thing, and two pieces of toast, for the first time since —

‘Labouring here,' he says:
yur.

‘No,' I tell him. I'm that full of aches I'm never going anywhere near a shovel again after this, and for the last few weeks it's felt like someone's been drilling into my hip while I wasn't looking: doesn't matter how strong I've made myself, it's the turning that does me in; I've got calluses inside and out. ‘But what's your issue with me now?'

Evan's still the real boss here, and he's the manager, unofficially, so that he can stay union; I'm just the majority shareholder and signature provider. He says: ‘It's neither appropriate nor entertaining any more that you do. Puts some off.'

‘Puts some off? Who?'

‘Me, for one.'

‘Why?' I don't need a ticket or a union card to break rocks in my own company if I want to. How's one free scab upsetting you, when I'm not taking anyone's coal? Jesus, how dippy does that sound?

Very: Evan says: ‘Because I don't want you to, and that's all I have to say about it.'

And off he goes, to labour, whether I want him to or not: he's put himself on down the bottom stalls in section two with one of the younger blokes whose dad's not well.

And off I go: idiot. But I can't drop it now. Here's my mess, lads: you clean it up, since I've got a bit tired of it, you finish the blasting, since my wife doesn't approve, just about the first thing she said on rediscovering her power of speech. Only a few days to go and it is finished. Thank Christ.

By the end of the day I don't know what's got me worse: Francine, Evan or the limitations of my hopeless body. I'm that keen to be off and home and in the bath, I've come out into the light too quickly. Wish I'd brought the car today, I don't feel much like a bike ride. I'm still squinting when I hear: ‘Danny!'

Stops me dead: my father's voice. And there he is. It
is
Dad. Marvellous: now I'm hallucinating.

Squint some more.

No, it's not Dad.

Flaming hell.

It's my brother. Peter. Must be. I haven't seen him since I was fifteen, but it's him all right. Couldn't be anyone else who looks like that: fair hair, like Dad's; only other one in the whole family. And who walks like that, straight at me, slamming the ground with his feet.

‘What do you look like?' he says, like I look stupid.

That's what you say to someone after nine years. He's smiling, but I've got an instant urge to deck him, like I'm thirteen and he's just pinched a chop off my plate. And I could too, now: I'm bigger than him. Except it's doubtful I could lift my arm that high.

Instead I say: ‘Well, hello to you too.'

‘Yep,' he says. ‘Hello all right. Jesus, just look at you.
Just
look at you.' What am I? A frigging bunyip? Then he says: ‘What are you doing back in the hole, you goose?'

What is this?
Make Sure I Get The Message Day?

I say: ‘Is it your business?'

‘No,' he says. ‘But Mum's not happy about it.'

What?
again. ‘Mum's got you down from Newcastle to come and tell me this?' I'm still having trouble believing my brother is here at all. I've been meaning to write to him for a year now; don't know why I haven't. Yes I do: haven't known what to say. I'm good at that.

He's not having any trouble with it. ‘No,' he laughs, just like Dad. ‘I only stopped in on my way back from Orange; we're moving there, next month. Mum filled me in on the latest; had to come and see for myself.'

He's still looking me over: yes, so I'm filthy. I'm looking him over: he looks very flash: nice suit, nice tie, very nice pair of boots. The docks have clearly been kind to him. What is he? Thirty-four? He looks like a bit of a sharp one, and I'm having trouble believing that too.

I say: ‘Orange, ay? Gets even colder there in winter.' Next big town on from Bathurst, not too far away. Don't think you're going to make a habit of coming round here and bailing me up like this. ‘What are you moving there for?'

‘Setting up a here to Woop Woop transport business: trucks. Not a lot doesn't fit on the back of one. The money'll help me cope with the weather.' But then he drops the laugh. ‘Mum's really had enough of you. It'd be a good idea if you stopped giving her things to worry about. I know you've had a rough ride, and maybe you think the job gives you something to control, but —'

‘What would you know about it?' Stop right there: there's nothing about you that says you're one to lecture me.

‘Danny, I know about it.' And he's dead serious, there's blokes all around us, heading up; Pete doesn't care: he has come here to tell me something. ‘I know that at Kembla I lost my brother, our brother, and that it probably would've killed Mum if she didn't have you to keep her busy, and to try to replace him. And that even still, I went in with Dad, because Dad had to replace him too. And I know that he didn't have an option but to keep on: a nobody Kraut with strange politics and no religion and his heart ripped out six ways every day before sleeping wasn't going to get a job worth anything anywhere else. But I thought he was so staunch then, the way he handled himself, though he must have been that shredded, I thought he could walk on water if he wanted to. Then when I was seventeen we were helping cart bodies, or what was left of them, after the blow-out, which I can still hear, and feel: it cracked windows in Wollongong. I found a mate's leg; recognised his sock — his sister was shithouse at knitting.'

He stops there, rubs his hand across his mouth, looks into the drift behind me. I don't know whether I hope he's finished, or whether I want him to keep on for the next nine years. He looks at me again and he looks nothing like Dad; he's got brown eyes, like Mum's.

‘And even still, it took me eight years to get out, to leave Dad. Jimmy Skelton was the decider, though: when I saw the look on your face, as you were looking at him laid out; Dad telling you to run on to his mother; you doing it, as you'd do anything he told you to. Then Dad using Jimmy to bargain with Drummond over lamps, like it would count for something against the loss. Drummond giving in only because he'd lost too much on the strike the quarter before. It made me retch.'

‘What? That's what happened?' That was
no one else's business?

‘Yep. And everyone keeping shush about it, for your sake. You didn't speak for weeks after you got home from the Skeltons that day; I tried to talk to you, and Dad told me to leave you be, that you had a mind of your own; you couldn't even say goodbye to me. Don't you remember?'

‘No.' I don't remember that bit. But I believe him. And I think I already know the answer to the question I have to ask: ‘Why was Dad so dark at you leaving?'

‘I don't know, really,' he says, ‘except that I think grief does strange things. Took me a fair while to come to it, but I think Dad was off his trolley with it; couldn't see that I wasn't leaving
him
, letting
everyone
down. I don't blame him now; it's sad, is all. I'm still cut, over Kembla, and over Dad, sometimes so sharp I … How can you not? When Mum wrote and told me about the loss of your boy, to add to all you've … then told me today about you coming back in here, firing and
labouring
, in the worst hole in the place, where Dad … I thought: here we go. Tell me if I'm wrong.'

‘You're not wrong,' I realise, barrel of this more than good oil smacking me in the head. ‘But I'm not Dad, am I. Too much of a sook: it's the last time I'll be doing anything like this.' Then I have to laugh at the fact, at the truth of what I have done. ‘I am fairly off my trolley, though.'

‘Runs in the family, and you're supposed to be the smart one,' he says, smiling again, and looking very much like Dad again. ‘But you're winning the sook competition: I've heard you've been
painting
— how sooky is that?'

Not very; not at all, actually: you try it. But I say: ‘Not as sooky as my sorry arse: I'm that fucking sore. How'd you get here today?' Please have a trap.

He says: ‘I drove. Got a little model-T Ford to go with my filthy middle-class life these days. Fell off the back of a ship.'

‘Champion,' I say. ‘Can I get a ride home?'

‘I don't know, Danny, you'll grubby up the upholstery.'

‘Do you want to come for tea?'

‘Can't. Got to get back to Newcastle by the morning.'

‘You can stop for a minute; you haven't met Francine yet.'

‘Yes I have. Met her this morning at Mum's. Probably shocked me more than anything else, that did.'

‘What did?'

‘That an idiot like you caught one like her.'

Prick. Good one, though. And I feel about half a ton lighter now; lighter still when he puts his hand on my shoulder. I've got a brother, haven't I.

And I will feel even better shortly. Down to the final hours now: everyone's knocked off from day shift, but I've got half-a-dozen boys down here with me, to move the last few tons off the floor, and getting a taste of just how boring breaking and shovelling rubbish for fuck-all is: they'll never complain about shovelling shit in the stables ever again or the ragging they get from the miners if their skip tokens aren't exactly where they should be. Of course I'm going to pay them quite a little something extra for the trouble; haven't told them that yet, though. Sent one of them off to run up through the valley to tell France I'll be late: for the last time. Very late, as it turns out: whose bright idea was it to let the boys at it? Like watching paint dry, in the dark.

But it's done now: good job, lads. Leave the skips for the ponies in the morning, leave the last stretch of cementing to someone else, knowing this roof isn't going to fall down for anything. Time to knock off. Forever, for me: go home. Get clean, get into bed. Give France a kiss or several, or maybe just lie there and look at her, with that little light back on inside her, thinking about the things I know I can do to try to keep it that way.

Then the whistles blow for evacuation.

‘Aw no,' says one of the boys; they all look at me.

Aw no, all right. I say: ‘Don't run, don't fall behind. And stay put when we're out.'

Spend the next half-hour wondering what's happened. No one to ask down here; just us. Can't hear anything, no one calling down to us, not that that means anything necessarily. But whatever it is it's probably not big. Hopefully. Whatever it is it'll be bad enough. Can't see anything amiss along the way up the drift; not that that means anything either. But I can hear a huge racket above now, coming through the air shaft ahead: running, yelling. Jesus, it must be a fire, or gas; I'm sniffing the air thinking I can smell it, knowing, where we are, there's less than a fart between us and anything that might have happened. That's just too bloody marvellous: I missed every kind of gas on the Western Front, but I'm going to be asphyxiated or incinerated now, last day on the proper job, and I'm going to take six boys with me.

I tell them: ‘Run, and hold your fucking breath while you're at it.'

I do, grabbing the slowest of them, all the while thinking that France has heard the whistles and how pleased she'll be to hear of my final achievement. Nearly as thrilled as Mum.

Don't breathe till pit top.

Here we are, one two three four five six, thank fucking Christ. And I can hear Billy above the pandemonium, still with that high voice, though he must be eighteen now, yahooing. Yahooing? And then I see all the lamplights, spinning through the night. There's a couple of rifles going off; ponies raring up in fright. Mad. Billy runs up to me; he's so skinny and slight he still looks fourteen; he looks like he's about to piss himself, he's that excited. He grabs me by the arm and says: ‘It's over. The war's over. Mr Drummond called, from Sydney, for you. On the telephone. He said we've won. Germany's surrendered.'

I'm that confused, and starved of air, I just look at him. Drummond? Telephone. That's right, we've got one of them now, for emergencies. And I've put Billy in the office, ‘assisting the night deputy', because he's too useless for anything else, and Campbell's not my best mate for it. Where the fuck is Campbell? His nephew's in Syria, that's where he is.

Billy says: ‘Didn't think you'd mind coming up in a hurry to hear that.'

No.

Didn't have to blow four whistles, though, you little shit. Don't say that, though. Can't speak. Just manage: ‘Going home.' Let go of the kid first; he rubs his arm like I've nearly ripped it off on the way up.

Walk home.

Shut the lamp off; just let it be dark, and quiet. But it's not quiet: I can hear more rifles going off in town.

I get halfway home before I have to sit down. Didn't think I'd feel like this. Thought I'd be happy. I've got to have a few moments here to believe it. A week or so ago Turkey surrendered and there was talk of the end coming, a lot of talk about the Light Horse and Aussie Captain Ross Smith in his aeroplane practically pulling off the victory on their own too. Talk of ceasefires, the German navy mutinying, Austria hoisting a white flag. There's been that much bullshit flying around through this whole disaster that I didn't let myself believe it. But you don't bullshit about it ending, do you. That's either a fact or it's not. Must be true. You don't hear that many guns going off in town every night, do you. And why else would Drummond telephone, to tell me; that was good of him. More than good: above our bullshit. Maybe even an apology, of sorts.