The House That Was Eureka (27 page)

Under a banner declaring Unemployed Unite & Fight the thousand youths from Newtown CYSS yelled slogans and threats and jostled against police, who only managed to quell the disturbance with difficulty.

A spokesman for Newtown CYSS, Alexandra Byrne (32), stated during a television interview at the height of the battle that if the government were to carry out its threat to close down the Newtown and other centres, protest of this kind could be expected state-wide.

‘CYSS centres don’t offer much,’ she stated, ‘but cutting them out is yet another blatant attack on the facilities offered to the unemployed, and the unemployed are going to start attacking back.’

In recent weeks, Newtown CYSS officers were informed that the centre would probably be closed due to a rationalization of government welfare funding.

Dr Byrne, who has a PhD in the history of unemployed organizations in the 1930s and is a Project Officer at Newtown CYSS claims however that the move to close down the Newtown Centre is political and a response to the fact that Newtown CYSS staff and unemployed have been active in organizing rallies against the alleged inadequacy of the dole. The reason for holding the demonstration at that time was that the main funding committee that controls CYSS was meeting last night to decide the future of the Newtown centre.

The Chairman of last night’s Committee when contacted late last night at his home stated that after much deliberation the Newtown Centre had been allocated funds to continue its activities subject to review after 12 months, but asserted that this decision was taken independently of any pressure exerted by the Newtown youths.

However Miss Diana Vassey (24) the representative of Newtown CYSS at the committee meeting, stated ‘We were losing hands down till we went out for the supper break and they saw the news on TV, and then when they came back in they voted the funds.’ When asked the reason for the change she said: ‘They seemed scared.’

One puzzling aspect of the demonstration is that it was held in Liberty Street Newtown, an ordinary residential street with no connection with the CYSS committee’s meeting place. When asked why it was not held at the CYSS headquarters and the press informed before the rally in the usual way, Miss Byrne replied that the unemployed would fight where they liked, and that ‘the press had all come anyway’.

Nobby reading it could hardly stop laughing. ‘Good work, girl.’ He shook Sharnda’s hand.

‘But it wasn’t a
real
demo,’ Noel objected.

‘Don’t be a pedant, Noel,’ Sharnda said. ‘If they believe it, then it was. Besides, when the cops got here it was real enough. I’ve got bruises all over. Where the hell were you two?’

‘Um,’ Evie said, suddenly remembering the film too and how she’d just dumped the camera.

But any immediate inquiry was stopped by a man who rode up on a bicycle. He was big, not tall like Nobby but built solid as a tank, and despite the June nip in the air was wearing an old blue work singlet and work shorts and thongs. His chest hair was curly and grey, sticking out above his singlet, and the hair on his head was wild and thick. You couldn’t help noticing his green eyes.

‘G’day,’ he said, nodding to Nobby as if he’d seen him only yesterday. ‘Had a feeling you might be here. When I seen it on the box last night I think to m’self, couldn’t just be a what-summy, coincidence. So I decide to ride over. Have to keep m’ weight down,’ he explained the bike, ‘ever since I retired.’

Nobby searched around for what to say. Noel too, recognizing. Evie knew: those eyes like mirrors of Lizzie’s.

Ted shifted a bit, uncomfortable. They were all being a bit backward about coming forward. ‘Ted’s the name, mate.’ He stuck his hand out.

‘Mick Cruise.’

‘
The
Mick Cruise!’ Sharnda said. It was as if a ghost had walked out of history.

Mick’s hand went the rounds.

‘It’s been pesterin’ me for years, y’know,’ Mick said to Nobby, ‘where the dickens you ever got to.’

Afterwards, after the cleaning up and then the barbecue that Ted slapped on for his birthday, they all sat in the backyard on the trampoline.

‘Strewth it’s funny,’ Mick’s eyes were roving over the yard, ‘being back in the old place.’

‘You’re not kidding.’ Nobby still felt a bit uneasy with him.

Evie suddenly remembered. There were things she wanted to ask.

‘But for all that effort it failed, but,’ she said. ‘You didn’t stop the eviction.’

‘Struggle never fails,’ Mick said. ‘It’s always better than nothing.’

Better to be alive and flying, Evie remembered, than so given-up you’re dead.

‘Besides,’ Sharnda added, ‘a week after Newtown, the government was so worried by the publicity, it changed the laws. Made it harder for the landlords to evict people.’

‘Really? Unreal!’ Noel had another sausage. Victory made him hungry.

There was something else to ask that didn’t matter, but just to be polite. ‘What was the baby?’ Evie said to Roger.

‘False alarm. Come back in two weeks, they reckon.’

‘Tell us when it’s born,’ Evie said, a bit patronizing, ‘and we’ll all bring flowers and stuff.’ Imagine being so old you were nearly a father.

Then Evie asked something she really did want to ask. But it was Sharnda she asked this time. Not quite sure how to phrase what she meant, she said, ‘What did you mean, that first day, when you said something about Newtown being left out of history because it’s dangerous?’

‘Dangerous? Oh yeah!’ Sharnda laughed. ‘Not to us. To the other side. You’ve just seen the proof of it. If the unemployed of now know that others fought before, it makes it easier to resist.’

‘Like, history on your side?’ Noel said.

‘Something like that. Shit.’ Sharnda spilled tomato sauce down her front.

Mick passed Nobby a beer. ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, Sunshine.’

‘Here’s lookin’ at
you
, mate,’ Nobby agreed.

It was a blue day, a bright Newtown winter Wednesday, when they made the final act. Evie, Nobby, Noel. Walking, the three of them, slowly, with Nobby in the centre, a tall thin man in a coat and pants that didn’t quite match, a shirt without a tie, in his unaccustomed city shoes, but in his stained felt hat. Walking slow, not because of age, not because of sickness now, but walking slow in that rolling, steady mooch of the man on the track who has no need to hurry for destination is not his aim: there is no aim, but to fulfil the endless destiny of the track.

Walking slowly, then, even though this day there was a point in Sydney’s geography they aimed for, walking like tourists with all the time in the world; Evie, being used to Sammy, slowing her pace to Nobby’s tread, Noel on the other side bounding forward, pulling himself back, swinging the duffle-bag from his shoulder.

Nobby suddenly touched his hand out to a fence. ‘This was the Kennet place.’ A done-up terrace now, with drifts of maidenhair in hanging baskets, with gums and wattles growing at the front, and clinging native creepers. Nobby glanced as they passed along the lane, but the chook-shed had given way to an aluminium garage hidden behind a screen of more gums.

‘Do the trees make you homesick for the bush?’ Evie said.

‘What d’you think, girl?’ Then Nobby smiled to ease the shock of his voice.

Homesick for the rotten scrub? Give me Newtown concrete any day, and if you must have some greenery, stick some privet in a pot! I’m home.

‘I’m sorry,’ Evie said, getting his meaning wrong. ‘You’ve made me really want to go out there too, one day,’ added Evie, Evie who just a couple of months ago had had absolutely no ambitions.

‘Is that right, girl?’ Nobby said, thinking: Evie. This girl who barely came to his shoulder, a real nice girl with quick darting eyes, a girl who’d have something alive and strong in her for ever more as a result of being mixed up in Lizzie.

‘It’s this way.’ Noel darted left.

‘Teaching your uncle to suck eggs!’ But Nobby stopped now, stepping back out of step to cross over to a corner shop. He’d run out of tobacco.

Noel stayed put. This bad place of the past. But Matt and Tasso ambled out anyway and saw him on the corner here, standing here with Evie.

‘Hey look…’ Tasso started to cross over but Matt tossed his head to show that he was to stay on this side.

‘G’day,’ Matt muttered across at Noel, averting his eyes and hurrying on away. There was something about the shape of something in that bag that reminded him of something he didn’t like to think about.

‘Okay, son?’ Nobby was back, his eyes on the fast-moving figure that he recognized from that night.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Noel laughed, so happy all of a sudden, not quite knowing why Matt and others like him weren’t going to get him down in future, but just knowing that they weren’t. It’s funny, all those years of wishing for an uncle or someone to go backstop for me, and now I get one, for some reason I can suddenly backstop myself.

‘You’ll start sprouting any day,’ Nobby said, as if irrelevantly. ‘You’ve got the same build as me. Year I was sixteen-seventeen, I remember, I went up five inches in that year. God, the hell of that, being a beanstalk!’ Nobby promised himself that, if he could, he’d try to protect this boy; then shrugged. What the heck. You can only grow by growing.

Noel looked at Nobby’s tallness, only half-assured. ‘You stayed skinny, but.’

‘That’s much better than having a beer gut,’ Evie said warmly, and Noel felt good, as if she somehow saw him already as he’d be in the future.

And so they walked on, the three, and caught a bus into town and then another to La Perouse, where on this Wednesday that was the fiftieth anniversary of Lizzie dying they stood in sunshine on a high rock and hurled the gun, and then the letters, and the terror of the past, into the bright blue pounding of the Pacific.

The days after that Wednesday settled down into ordinary days. The past was still there, but no longer pressed itself relentlessly through the calendar. A stranger to the story could come into the street and observe a flow of unremarkable activity lapping in and out of the two houses.

First there’d be Ted, at half-past five, setting off to the building workers’ day-hire pick-up in Enmore Road. Sometimes he’d get a start, sometimes he wouldn’t; the days when he didn’t, he’d be back again and out with the ladder, working on the years of neglect that had crept over the despot’s two houses, for the despot had made a deal that Ted could work for the rent.

Round about seven, Nobby would bring him a tin mug of tea, and then Evie’s mum and Noel’s mum would pop out the doors at eight and mag away together as they headed for the station. Noel’s mum was much easier these days, had started to relax and laugh for the first time in years, for with Nobby living there she didn’t have to worry about leaving the despot with Noel.

It was Jodie and Ree’s turn next. Out they’d belt, yelling in their uniforms, yelling up to their dad on the ladder, and then Ree would be off, running like blazes, with Jodie’s stumpy legs chasing after her.

At about nine, there’d be Evie and Sammy, and Noel too; for Nobby made Noel go to school regular these days, but that didn’t mean that Noel didn’t delay the getting there, slowing his pace to match Evie and Sammy as they headed down Noel’s back way to the play centre.

After a bit, Evie would come back with the milk and bread and things for both houses, and then they’d have morning tea, Ted and Evie, Nobby and Nobby’s mother, all crammed onto 201’s front balcony, eating fried scones or brownies if Nobby made it, eating peanut-butter toast if Evie or Ted made it, eating baklava and yoghurt cake if they invited Mrs Maria up too. It took a long time sometimes, morning tea, sitting in the sun with the despot and Nobby telling yarns of Liberty Street, and Mrs Maria joining in with stories from back in Greece, and sometimes Mick would ride over and join them and talk of struggles and strikes on the wharves, and there’d be Ted with his tales of when he was an interstate truck-driver, that would sometimes link up with Nobby’s tales of the track.

‘One night, see, at Brewarrina…’ Ted would start.

‘Have you gone fishing down the Black Stump there?’ Nobby would cut in.

‘The Black Stump?’ Ted would scratch his head. ‘At Bre? Can’t say I know it. Down the weir, now. Caught fish there, heaps a times…’

‘Yeah, the old fisheries, mostly fished out now, no, I mean the Black Stump. A funny thing happened to me, camping there one night…’

And they’d be off then, miles away, their voices bringing to the balcony the places that Evie would get to one day, if it killed her.

Though these days, right now, it was the music shop she had to get to by twelve o’clock to do the afternoon shift, so she’d set off, and everyone would remember the time, and Ted would race back to his tools and Nobby would belt down to peel the spuds for the despot’s midday dinner and Mrs Maria would go home to clean the room of the new lodger who’d taken Nobby’s place, and Mick would pedal into town to some union meeting. The despot would stay there on her cane chair in the sun, her hands in her lap lying at peace now her words had come back, now her son had come back, and there was no longer the need for the desperate writing.

Round about one o’clock she’d go in for a feed and a nap, and then it would be Nobby’s time to potter about with a paintbrush, giving Ted a hand till it was half-past two and time to go and get Sammy.

She loved it, Sammy did, the new routine. Instead of Evie twice a day, taking her there, hurrying her back, there’d be Dad there now at pick-up time in the Kingswood, honking a triple honk on the horn so she’d know he was excited to see what pastings and things she’d bring home today. Or Mr Man would be there, and that was just as good, because his steps were slow like hers and they’d explore back through the lanes. Often they’d find things like a cardboard telescope or a nearly-good thong that she could take up to show Nanna. Sammy loved Nanna because she’d once found her when it was dark.