The House That Was Eureka (20 page)

Noel’s mum finally ladled soup into a bowl and placed it in front of Noel. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything, dear,’ she said. She stood, while Noel and Evie sat. ‘My father, your grandfather, died when I was little. So I grew up without a father, just as you did, dear.’

Noel nodded impatiently. ‘The despot’s a widow, tell me something I don’t know.’

‘But I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more, dear,’ Noel’s mum told him. ‘She’s never talked about the past, I’ve never liked to ask her. She’s always been a quiet woman, kept herself to herself. Even when I was a little girl, she didn’t talk to me much.’

Quiet, Noel thought. Hardly. If you heard her mumble-whining to her mates, old Mum.

Kept herself to herself,
Evie thought. Then why doesn’t she keep her temper to herself instead of taking it out on
me
. I’ve never done anything to
her
.

Evie felt uncomfortable, sat spinning the silver serviette ring around her thumb: they didn’t have serviette rings in her family.

‘It’s funny, the only thing I remember, dear, was that we had a parrot, a noisy nasty thing that used to scream out a lot, in the night too sometimes, and then she’d yell back at it: “Keep quiet, persecutor, or you’ll be dead too!” She talked to that parrot, I think more than she talked to me, but she’d mutter into its cage and I never heard. She called it Job, after that prophet in the Bible, the one that suffered so much, poor man, when God sent down all his afflictions. I always felt she sort of meant the name for herself. She’s suffered a great deal in this life, your nanna, dear.’

Evie span the serviette ring slowly round, the action eased her tension. ‘This is old,’ she finally said, looking at the tiny craftsman’s mark inside it.

‘Yes, dear. Noel’s nanna gave it to me for him when he was just a baby.’

‘Older than that,’ Evie said. After the mark it said 1914.

‘Yes, dear. She had it in a drawer, wrapped in tissue paper. I dare say it must have belonged to someone else once.’

‘Who?’ Evie demanded, remembering the heart. I love
N
4 ever.

‘Who?’ Noel demanded, feeling part of the ring.

But Noel’s mum looked useless. She was the sort of person who never asked questions herself, and felt uneasy when other people asked them. ‘Promise me, dear,’ she said to Noel who sat silent, not eating his soup, ‘promise me you’ll never ask her anything that might bring back the past. And you too, dear,’ she added to Evie. Noel’s mum was a poor frightened woman, begging them.

Noel and Evie said nothing, but it was the same as if they’d said they promised. That avenue was closed. Evie span the serviette ring angrily and it went flying off her thumb and rolling across the lino into darkness.

We belong to the doley-oh mob,

The doley-oh mob are we!

We never fight or quarrel,

We never disagree.

ANON,
TRADITIONAL SONG, 1930S
.

He’d left her, her nice fugitive. Had told her a tale about a girl he said he loved, made her swear on the Bible that if she came, the fugitive’s love, she would pass on messages between them. Then he’d bundled a couple of things into a sugar-bag, asked her so polite if he might possibly take an old grey army blanket, refused her offer of her last shilling, and slipped out the back way in dead of night, last Thursday night. It was so lonely here without him.

First her husband left her, years ago, slipped off up into black heavens and left her here with a parrot that said things and a wicked piano that thumped day and night and a son that wouldn’t speak (no son of hers); and then she got the fugitive, found him like a gift in the dawn, as if black heavens were trying to give her back a thing to replace the others. Gave a gift, only to take it away.

‘I don’t give charity.’ The heavens gave no charity. So why should she?

She’d been going to keep him as a pet, a darling treasure. He could talk to her, to keep her company. It was lonely, having no voice speaking in her house but Job the parrot since her son stopped speaking. Your voice gets so, you forget how to use it.

So she clung to his body as he left and she begged, the first and only time she’d begged in her life, but the begging did no good. He’d gone for ever, her lovely fugitive.

Noel’s mother was right in intuiting that when she’d named the parrot, the despot had had in mind her own sufferings, though when she’d named the parrot, back around the middle of World War I, her sufferings were just beginning. She still had her husband, though he was a sick young man, dying of TB despite being a bank teller, dying through the night, unfit even for war. Noisy through the night too was her son, sickly too, waking screaming in the night as decades later her grandson was to do, her grandson who even as a just-born infant was so like her son that she’d insisted he be called after him, without telling his mother why. Rita, she was always so obedient (the despot despised her) and any questioning in Rita’s soul had been taken away utterly by the sudden death of Noel’s father who was a pedestrian run over by a hit-and-run car just before Noel was born.

Sudden death. Sudden deaths and lingering deaths: there were many in this story. Her own death lingering now, refusing to take her as it had refused before, one day upon the roof. When no thunderbolt came crashing down, and she was left there to battle with a heavy tarp and an unwanted life.

All she wanted now from life was to make some sort of change. If I write it differently, it happened differently. Ever since that dawn last Thursday (it’s Monday now), ever since she heard the battle creeping down the stairs, she’s been writing letters to make it change.

‘Noh!’ she’d yelled that dawn. But no one came. No one to tell.

But maybe, she thinks, tell Lizzie. This Lizzie who comes each day with my dinner. Write now, explain to Lizzie; but Lizzie, she hasn’t come since that gun-dawn. She’s run off with my nice fugitive. They all run and skip and go.

The parrot though (she returned full circle), the parrot had been given to her by her bank teller. ‘He’ll be a comfort to you,’ he’d said, ‘when I’m gone.’ A comfort: a parrot: a stupid green and red thing with a vicious pecking beak! She’d thought of Job’s Comforters, those vile men whose visits to Job only seemed to mock his woes, and so that was what she’d called the thing: Job’s Comforter. But it shortened very quickly just to Job.

Yes, she was Job early on, an innocent victim, tormented till she threw defiance at the clouds: she’d go it on her own. Expecting nothing, giving nothing, except of course for the jealous love that she gave to her son, who threw it in her face.

Her son, no son of hers, she’d rather see him dead.

And so betrayed.

(
Traitor traitor

We all hate her…
)

The first betrayal: because I’d rather see him dead, than let her have him. So allowed police to enter the house where she thought he was, and indeed where he was though no one else knew he was there, allowed police with guns in their hands, suspecting violence, even death, to be done, hoping death for her son, allowed them in there through her balcony, through her back room and over the scullery roofs because she hoped for her son’s death.

The second betrayal: because he left her, her nice fugitive. And so she swore upon the Bible that she’d act as go-between, between him and his girl, finding it easy to swear on something she didn’t believe in. For why should she act as go-between when he didn’t have the common decency to stay for ever and be her treasure? When his girl came, she’d say she’d received no letters.

And so, when the first letter had come, on Tuesday 23 June, she’d put it in the piano stool, unopened.

When the second letter came, on Thursday, she’d repeated her action. Though relenting slightly towards the boy. Some ancient sentimental place inside the despot had warmed, and it had come to her that perhaps she might help the two. Until the night of that day’s tomorrow came…

The third betrayal: this third time, she was sane again, or more sane anyway. At least not dizzy with hunger any more, and the beating torment of the children’s footsteps was less loud within her head. Until the knocking that Friday night upon her door, which she opened: to find Elizabeth Cruise.

‘I’ve come to ask,’ Lizzie said, ‘about Nobby. I thought perhaps you might send him a letter for me. Or that perhaps he might’ve written to me here.’

‘Scratch out her eyes!’ Job squawked.

‘No,’ the despot said, only then coming to her full senses and realizing who her nice fugitive had been, ‘he hasn’t written. But come into my parlour,’ said the spider to the fly.

It was that night that the despot wrote to Nobby, making that night the first act in the treachery that went on and on through the years of five decades.

Traitor traitor

We all hate her

Put her in a pot

With choko and pertater

Boil her up with onion

Till she cries

Then get Pa’s knife

And cut out her eyes.

Traitor traitor

We all hate her

Put her in a pot

With choko and pertater

Boil her up with pepper

Till she’s nearly dead

Then chop her into pieces

And give the dogs her head.

Traitor traitor

We all hate her

Put her in a pot

With choko and pertater

When the dogs are done

Then ring the bell

Then put her down the dunny

And she
’
ll go to hell
.

Through the years of five decades, a boy was wandering on the track. Treading his boots in a rough circle through the back-blocks of New South Wales: Wilcannia up to Tibooburra across to Brewarrina, down the Barwon to the Darling there at Bourke, then follow the vein down through Louth and Tilpa to Wilcannia, and start the circle again. He walked on the red soil and on the black soil, through the mallee, through the scrub, along the river, increasing his swag from one blanket to three blankets and a tarp, replacing a blanket every so often when one gave out, bumming a fresh pair of boots at a station now and then, but otherwise making little change. He wouldn’t carry a gun.

‘You’re mad you know,’ men often said. With a gun he could’ve shot things: tucker.

He preferred to pull yellowbellies from the Darling, black bream sometimes too, in decreasing numbers though as the decades passed and the European carp ate the native fish. He preferred to set snares for possums, baiting them with a line of flour up a tree. He preferred to sneak up behind a porkypine or a goanna and knock him on the head, or run full-pelt in the early decades when he was younger and grab a squealing pig from under a burr bush. He could come at a knife, for it was after all a matter of survival, and he could creep into a mob of someone’s sheep and grab a lamb and slit his throat and carry him off like the cove in
Waltzing Matilda
.

Like the cove in
Waltzing Matilda
too he lived always with a nagging dread of the troopers, one two three.

‘You’re mad you bastard,’ other men said, for with a gun he could’ve eaten emu and kangaroo.

They were right, he was mad.

Wandering for miles and decades, living first under false names, then no name.

In the first decade, no one noticed much, for there were thousands like him on the track: men who began as boys then grew into men as they followed a myth of work from town to town, from station to station, humping a swag of blankets and a sugar-bag of tucker, adapting in this way or that to mallee or soil or river or scrub but still in their minds tied to George Street or Martin Place and walking on a Saturday night arm in arm with their girls down a city street of shops and light, and then just a short tram-ride home.

In the second decade, though, men went to war. Overseas in uniforms they ran, to hold guns and shoot them. He thought about it, but only for a second or two one day in ’41 or so, lying in his swag next to a straggly goyamutta tree; but because of holding guns and shooting them, he discarded the thought quick smart.

‘You’re mad you mad bastard,’ said men. ‘It’s clothes and tucker and a job.’

By the third decade they were back from war, living in the city most of them, with lights and Saturday nights and perhaps wives, but the wives were not the girls they’d left in ’31, for those were already married to other blokes. His was, he knew.

For every five years or so he’d amble into Wilcannia post office and find a letter waiting for him under the false name they’d agreed upon, and he’d learn news.

Dear Son,

I never know if you Receive my Letters, for you never Reply, but I continue to write as it is my Loving Duty.

Life is the same here, very quiet, but would be Happier if you Returned. There is nothing to fear, all that is ‘Long Forgotten’ and the Police have other worries.

I should add that your Friend Elizabeth has ‘Long Forgotten’ you too. I of course have not seen her for Many Years for, as I told you before, she left Home shortly after you left and she ran away to New Zealand with a man whom she married by Special Licence. I however sometimes hear News of her ‘On the Grapevine’ and learn she now has a number of children and is very Happy. Her Husband has done very Well for himself in Business and also served as a Lieutenant and was Decorated on the Field for Bravery, so you see ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’

My Wish is that you Return as it is your Duty as a Son and would give Happiness to

Your Loving Mother

There was once a reference to her own new Husband, and to his Death in the War, but the letters were otherwise the same: only changing as the number of Lizzie’s Children grew or the Success of her Husband increased, way off there overseas.

At night-time, most nights, questions would bite like mosquitoes. ‘If we’d’ve tried it, if we’d’ve had a chance, would we’ve made a go of it?’ Questions circling around like the buzzing of a mozzy that you try to ward off before it lands. He’d light some dung to make a smoke to make the mozzies go away. He’d make up answers, lying there,
‘We were always chalk and cheese. She’d’ve never loved me anyway. I’m happiest alone.’
Making a smoke of answers curl around his swag so the questions might stop biting in.