Black Diamonds (8 page)

 

FRANCINE

So, reality was wrong: He, This Lad, gets up into the trap without any trouble, at least not much anyway; and I have jumped across fate's railway tracks, without getting run over, yet. I can hear Father chuckling and applauding my bravado from across the other side of the town. Even as my hands are trembling, very visibly, holding the reins. Hayseed nickers into my terror and thrill, I imagine in concord, but more probably because he can feel the extra weight, rather a lot since The Lad is not small, and quite a bit taller than I had estimated; inordinately tall, in fact. Never seen a man so tall — he had to duck a little to go out his front door. But it is not this massive shift in my own reality that terrifies and thrills; it is that The Lad evidently feels something of the same thing I do. I had hoped, but didn't dare think it, not really. Yet it must be true: if hiding in the rosebush, then blathering and weeping didn't put him off, I don't know what would. But then, even as I glance at him to check I am not dreaming, it strikes me that I might have got this all wrong: what if his intentions are no good? And calm myself as quickly: I can simply run away; he's not going to chase me, is he. What I would do if he did is something I cannot consider for fear of spontaneously combusting.

‘Where shall we go?' I ask him.

‘Down the track into the gully. I want to show you something.'

Fear redoubles; he sees my alarm and adds: ‘The view.' Laughing at me.

The way the brightness in his eyes makes them greener is positively sinful; but that's not his fault. All mine, and I have given up on God anyway, truly, for more reasons than I can count, especially the most recent injustice. But I shall not think about Father's predicament now, I shall think only of what he wants me to do for his last hurrah: be a good girl, and a happy girl, and a student of industrial philanthropy. With a beau, perhaps. Who's a decent working man. With a broken leg. Here, with me. The Lad knows I am considering him, because I am staring again, and I swear the amber flares brighter still.

Oh, stop it, Francy, and just get going before he changes his mind!

Our shoulders bump as Hayseed sets off; this is our first touch. Oh my goodness. The first of many as it turns out: it's a rather rough track that winds down and around the gully's left flank. I wonder if we should turn back: ‘Are you all right? You can't be comfortable.'

‘Just fine,' he says, and he doesn't seem to be pretending stoicism as he drags his eyes from the trees to me; he really does want to show me a view. ‘Not exactly comfort, but … Not far anyway. Pull up at the top of the rise ahead.'

The gully closes and closes around us as we head up the rise, till the tops of the gums join and arc above us; on either side huge ferns fan out and the smell of damp earth is a colour not a smell at all: green, soft and deep. I'm already gasping before I see what he wants to show me. He doesn't need to tell me to stop here.

At the top of the rise is a picture window formed of bowed trunks and branches stretching one to the other, and it frames a pristine valley, above which sits a sheer escarpment. The rock is grey now, as the clouds pass over the sun, then tanned in the light again, then grey. I look up and around to try to imagine how this would look at dawn or dusk, whether it might flame like my rocks on my hills, but I don't know where I am and have no sense of direction at the best of times, even among the clear lines of town. I look into the window again, and finally see it: he hasn't brought me here to show me just a lovely view after all.

On the far top edge of the escarpment, set against the clouds, is the profile of a woman's face. She is looking out towards the distant blue of gum haze and her long hair of perching plants trails around the side of her face and down into the valley. Just when I think that this is a figment, he says: ‘Her name's Calypso.'

Calypso? I could not be more astounded. Calypso: abandoned by Odysseus on her island of Ogygia, looking out to sea, bereft in acquiescence to his will and that of the gods, but secretly defiant. So taught to me by Sister Carmel at Our Lady, who was something of a radical educationalist when it came to Homer and Other Great Works of Classical Literature, if contemptuous of us all. I have no idea why Calypso was bereft and defiant, yet there indeed she is, on the escarpment.

‘How did she come by that name?' I ask, still gawping.

‘My mother, she's always called her that,' he says, but that's not an answer. ‘She's a goddess or something — Calypso, not Mum.' He laughs.

‘I know.' She's a nymph, daughter of some titan or other. But how does Mrs Ackerman know? As if I'm the only person in the world to have read a book or had a Sister Carmel, I chide myself.

‘Mum says she waits there for justice that never comes.'

He says it mildly, but it jolts and I don't ask him what sort of justice she might mean. Instead I ask him, remembering the faint vestiges of somewhere-in-Europe in her accent: ‘Where's your mother from?' This goddess of wisdom and obscure Homeric allusion.

‘Germany. Dad too.'

‘Ackerman doesn't sound German,' I blurt. As if I'd know; I've never met a German before. They all live in South Australia and make fine wine for my father, or import coffee. When they are in Germany, so say the newspapers, they have a big army, and want a bigger navy, which upsets Britannia for some reason or other. They're all Fritz and Schultz, or Albert if they were Queen Victoria's husband, and they have a kaiser. Sister Simon-Peter didn't get through much in The History of the World and Geography; she was more interested in penance. But I do remember that that von Bismarck character had a funny helmet and that the Teutonic Peoples live somewhere in the middle of the European Continent. I flush at everything I've not bothered with.

‘It used to have two n's,' he explains into my wondering, ‘but everyone kept dropping the second till it disappeared altogether. Suited Dad: he never bothered much with unnecessaries. Didn't see himself as German anyway. Just Australian.'

Australian. What is that? Except being here. Everyone comes here from somewhere else, except the native Aborigines, whom I also know little about. Australia is a photograph of the opening of the first Federal Parliament the same year that my mother died.

‘Why did your parents come here?' I ask him, thinking about my own.

‘Don't know, really.'

He shifts his shoulders and is quiet again. I should like to tell him we have something in common there, with mysterious transplantation, but I won't: his seems a sore point and mine is just a void that will stay that way. Certainly not going to tell him about Father's criminal past. Maybe he's thinking about his father's death; another thing we appear to have in common, sort of.

It's too beautiful here to let those thoughts take hold, so I say: ‘Daniel.'

He looks at me. ‘Hmn?'

‘I just wanted to say your name,' I tell him, truly, for the first time, properly. Daniel. The Prophet. Daniel in the lions' den. God sent the angel to shut the lions' mouths so that they could not hurt him. It's old, Hebrew. And lovely on my tongue.

His face becomes the smile that seized me in the street, and at the back of his house, that fills me now.

He says: ‘Francine. It suits you. It's unusual.'

He says so little, but whatever he says is what it is: sharp, intent and clear. Without ornamentation. He doesn't need it, believe me. I wonder if he thinks as concisely, or if, like me, his head is a sludgy mangle.

‘I mean that as a compliment,' he adds. And I know; I heard it in the way he said it. My whole body is soft with the sound of it.

But there's so much that separates us, I can't imagine how we're going to broach … Is it really possible for us to …? Stop it, Francy. Choose a safe subject and get on with it.

‘You never told me where you learned to whittle like that — I love my kookaburra; he sits and looks at me from my dressing table. You're really very good at it. Is it something German too?'

His face darkens; I've said the wrong thing. ‘Don't know if it's German; it's something of Dad's,' he explains; the chasm gapes.

I want to touch him, tell him that has nothing to do with us; but it has everything to do with us. The arithmetic is painfully simple and ruinous.

But he saves us from it this time. ‘Dad's pieces are pretty impressive. They're all over the house. The backs of the chairs, bedheads, trims round the table, the mirror in the hall, doors on the cupboards, on the handles of the cupboards. Everywhere.'

‘Oh.' And I am impressed. I can see the kitchen cupboards in my mind, with their relief pannelling, a crosshatch pattern of leaves. That's what I was looking at when I nudged the kettle off the stove top. I had thought their furniture rather nice — like everything else, not as I expected — but I didn't consider who had made it that way.

‘My pieces are all pretty useless. Like kookaburras,' he laughs, releasing me and returning me to him. ‘Toys for my sister's kids, really.'

‘Must be very pretty toys,' I say. ‘Kookaburra's more like a sculpture than a carving.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘Well …' Must be very careful to avoid suggesting that I think he is artistic and that his father wasn't. ‘It's in the movement that you've captured.'

‘Is it?' He's teasing me, because I am on the verge of embarrassing him, I think.

‘Anyway, I love it.' Enough said on that. The clouds have thickened and fill the sky in the window, round grey puffs of cold. ‘Maybe we should turn back now; I should get home to Father.'

‘Mmn,' he says, and I wish he'd say more. I don't know what I want him to say; something to keep us here. Should I ask him about his sister? Perhaps I should cut short my babbling while I'm ahead. And I really should go. I've been out for hours now.

I turn the trap around and Hayseed takes us down and up again, our shoulders bumping all the way, and I don't want that to stop either. It's too short a distance back to his house.

‘Shall I come back next Friday?' I ask, since I already seem to have that routine, though I'd like it to be tomorrow.

‘Could you come out on Sunday, around midday?'

‘Why Sunday?' Joy! I don't really care why, but maybe he has something particular in mind.

‘There's a game on, rugby, at the paddock at the Wattle, that I should really turn up to, but I need a ride, if you could make it …'

What an invitation. Rugby! Didn't think working men played it. Though I've only ever been to one match — Joey's boys barrelling into St Ignatius boys one picnic day at Hunters Hill, the Marists in violent contest against the Jesuits: the sound of thumping, mud flying, inexplicable cheering and poor Iggy's boys getting a beating. But I'm hardly going to say no, am I. So: ‘Of course.'

‘Good-o,' he says, manoeuvring himself up and over and out. He stops there with his hand on the wheel to reach in for the crutches. ‘See you Sunday then.'

I very much want to touch his hand, but it's gone. I say: ‘Yes.' Then I'm gone too. I can feel him watching me go, everything unspoken trailing between us, but I don't look back to wave. The enormity of what I have just done is settling already.

 

DANIEL

If she's serious, well then she may as well see me as I am. All very well to go for a ride and look at each other and wonder what the other's thinking about the scenery; she may as well know, sooner rather than later. I still feel a bit guilty, though. She probably has no idea about rugby, not as it is with us at least, and she doesn't know anyone, and everyone from the Wattle will be there, curious about the Connollys' latest act of charity. But they won't twig that anything's going on: why would they?

Mum's not impressed; I've told her the sum total. The lot. She says: ‘You'd better not be having a laugh at her expense now, Daniel.' And presses her lips tight, which is as close as she gets to a frown. ‘She's out of the ordinary, but in a good way. If you upset her, I will be ashamed of you.'

‘I won't.' Hopefully.

‘What do you want from her?' she says, pinning me with her eyes.

‘I want to know if I want to marry her.' There, stupid as that sounds, it's said.

Mum's not surprised. But: ‘What will you do when you marry her?'

Like it's going to happen. Badly hopeful. But the answer is, I don't know. I'm avoiding the idea that marrying Francine — Francine Connolly. Jesus. Marrying her would practically make me an owner. That's just not a consideration, obviously. So I ignore it. The likelihood of all this ever happening is so remote that it's easy to ignore. So what am I doing mucking her about like this then? I can't answer that either. I just have to know first if that's what I want, and I reckon I do, and then if she
will.

‘Tell me why you went out today when you knew she'd come here,' I say. And it's the first time I've ever challenged my mother in my life.

She lets that lie there, and turns back to the stove. Because I know why: there is only one reason why you'd leave a bloke, even in my fairly arse-bound state, alone with a girl; well two, but Mum wasn't thinking of the second one. She sees this as a way for me not to go back in. That's not going to happen either; I still don't want to. So why am I going to the game then? When I see everyone, I know what's going to happen: I'll feel like I should go back in. I already feel like I
should.
How can I just say thanks for the payout for Dad, now I'll be off then? And to do what? I'm nearly twenty, locked into mining, and not qualified for anything but. Be a dock manager like Pete? I'm sure Francine would love to be married to a docker. No, a plumber. Start smoking a pipe and drinking whisky and pretend? Carve kookaburras for her? Well, I wouldn't mind carving all day — I've got used to doing little else lately — but, as Francine put it, it's just not reasonable.

I shouldn't have asked her to come on Sunday, I'm never going to ask her to marry me. I don't have the bottle to. I'm such an arse.