The Following, page 5
Through a gate into a paddock of trees, Kenneth and the butcher came to their view of the cattle. Each had a glowing face framed by a pair of white horns. Anvil heads turned following the ponies’ movements. Except they were drought-starved and off condition, they were animals you could believe kneeling down before and flourishing a sword and waving a red cape towards. Kenneth was advised against them by Sir Don McIver when he went to sign for them after they were overlooked at auction. He ignored that advice, with a toss of his blond thatch, which had softened old Don, not enraged him. It was in a dry corner of the state up Coolah way, where the banks were pressing hard. They were great, old-fashioned creatures and appealed to Kenneth against reason. Now he was proposing to give them away.
Bert Shepherd dismounted by dropping one foot to the ground and raising his other leg to allow the pony to slip out from under him. He climbed through the fence and walked towards the beasts as Kenneth followed.
The lead bullock was the one with the brass ring in its nose. Instead of standing back, Bert walked right up to it, took its head in his hands and slobbered his face in its wet, hairy nostrils. Then, smacking its flanks with the flat of his hand, he walked all around the beast, deriding the tough cuts of meat it would give, once it put on some condition.
‘Oh, but I’ll take them,’ he said.
On their ride back to town Bert instructed Kenneth to make arrangements with a train drover: one hundred head of cattle, two hundred miles, to be railed to the lucerne flats of the southern parts.
Then they said goodbye and Bert walked back into town. Kenneth stabled the ponies and returned to Goldsborough Mort’s. He went to his desk. For some minutes he fiddled with items there, playing with ink bottle, nib, penholder, blotter and ledger book. He sat in thought, chewing the wooden end of his penholder, reducing it to a fibrous wick. The office women peered at him from behind their fingers, with his long teeth, long face, long ears and long, pale, flattened locks. He flashed a toothy smile. You had to love the way he loved himself – it was enviable. Using careful strokes with huge initial capitals, he wrote up a record of arrangements for the sale of the Coolah Red Devons to Bert Shepherd, Wholesale Butcher, of Murrumburrah-Harden.
Then he sat back and stabbed his nib in the ink-stained kauri pine of his desktop.
‘What have I done?’ Kenneth said. ‘Did I outright say they were his? They are my father’s mob, Warner Tarbett the First’s, I will call him, when I get my family tree, my family’s lot – and I seem to have given them away. I must have done. I have. They are gone. I feel a big life ahead of me. On to the rail yards they go. Here is the proof of it, in my own writing, ready to be signed by Sir Donny boy, who advised me don’t take them. Something’s got into my head. Nothing’s the same in the air, and I know why.
‘It’s them string-ups. It’s when we saw the prison that I said he could buy them. Why does that make me glad? What have I done to be glad, except lived a bit longer than blokes my own age choked in Bathurst Gaol or shot in Belgium wearing khaki?’
He went on in this vein of resentment, surprise, humility, fear and amazement. Three stock and station boys had gone to the war, leaving Kenneth Tarbett at home to be advanced in the agency. One lay dead at Suvla Bay, one was in Palestine with horses, and the third, Duncan McIver, was missing in action in France. Goldsborough Mort’s was seen as doing its part and Kenneth – of serving age and fitness – was so far safe from a coward’s white feathers in the post or slipped under the doormat of the boarding house where he lodged. Indeed, he was safer than that as a pampered pet of Sir Don and Lady Penelope McIver, grieving for their son.
Safe from accusing righteousness, but not from that man, Bert Shepherd, who roused a bloke’s spirit and made him wonder at the bigness of things attempted, and try them.
So Kenneth decided: he would be the train drover himself and get the stock delivered. And after that life would become larger.
When the clock came around to dinnertime he snorted, threw down his pen like a twanging dart and set off back through the town to find the butcher, to tell him he was in his care.
WHEN MARCUS FRIENDLY CALLED AT The Whistle that day, the editor looked up from his desk in his small glassed room and nodded a greeting – whatever the needs of the paper, they could wait.
Tim Atkinson stood up from his line-caster, leaving the oily black machine to sullenly tremble and creak back to stillness.
‘Take over, Spotty,’ he said to the apprentice, grabbing his crutches while the proofreader predicted the mistakes that would flow from a tyro at the keys.
The two friends sat on a public bench in the municipal rose gardens.
‘The hangman must still be in town,’ said Marcus, ‘as there hasn’t been a train left since nine. I’d like to look him in the eye. Hear what he has to say.’
‘Struth, brother,’ said Tim, peering around in case they were being overheard, though they had only sparrows and wilting red roses for company, and the sight of a leering youth with rabbit teeth, Kenneth Tarbett, passing along the street in a white sweat. ‘Is that wise? You want to be careful what you think, now, Marcus. It’s work that’s been done.’
It did not matter to Tim, who did not work for the Railways, but surely it mattered to Marcus that the Railways’ Commissioner, Fraser, was on a hunt for Wobblies on the Railways’ payroll.
Any man under least suspicion of being a Wobbly was fingered. You could hate Wobblies, as Marcus and Tim did, but it was easy now, if you were some sort of streak of workers’ political enthusiast, as Marcus and Tim were, to be seen as dangerous, if not a Wobbly yourself as few actually were, then stained with a spread of outrageous idealism.
For this was an era with madness thrust into every man’s heart and hearth, while the country sang battle hymns and marched to troopships in parades. It was a time when boys and men fell over themselves to wear the khaki until just lately there were not enough volunteering to satisfy the need. Voters were asked to send more in the next conscription referendum. They would be made to go. The answer in October had been ‘No’.
The question was to be put again in another referendum in the New Year. Peacemakers were turned warmongers in pulpits and parliaments. Matters of principle held over from before the war were derided as lacking in general truth. Morality was set aside except by white-anters of the public good.
These two men sitting on a park bench, Marcus Friendly and Tim Atkinson, were white-anters of the public good one minute, fine citizens the next.
Did all men feel this as they grew older, changed from youth to deciders and getting their say pushed through? In their consciences Tim and Marcus made daily decisions about where they stood in relation to forces of iniquity, just as Maguire and Herbert had done. They had not paid any great price for it, but if a government would not take ‘No’ for an answer, what might a government do? It had a reach coming down to the workingman, who put them where they were, via their union membership, their party factions and their vote. Government was the workingman himself in its incarnation of the workingman’s strength under the banner of democratic socialism in state parliament.
Socialism as a creed was on a sliding scale, that was the trouble. At one end, Marcus’s and Tim’s end, it created opportunities for free men to better themselves in their own way – socialism with a vote. At the other end it became violent, where socialism told men what to do and be – men to be killed just for the idea of what they weren’t, plug a copper, do it.
Nobody predicted the body of the state getting hateful itself. The New South Wales government, new in this world, was invented by the workingman’s own imagination, argued under their gum trees, on their clay-gold creekbanks and in their co-operative clubs, railway barracks and underground miners’ crib rooms, in engine drivers’ change rooms and by resolutions during party conferences at Trades Hall, and given connection to history at the School of Arts.
They seemed to have had it all, but when the vote went against their leaders, their leaders changed parties. It was like that dream where you were strangled by your own hand. Everybody had that dream now.
That there was a strangler – a public strangler – in their midst, acting on their behalf to make the law whole, was just to bring it down to democratic daylight.
Each week now there was a meeting in the anteroom of the newspaper offices. The plan of a big strike was underway. A striker and a Wobbly might meet themselves in the one person turning the corner of a street.
Marcus was getting this lesson in his love life, too – how you could be seen one way, yet be another, and not be able to escape what had not yet actually been acted out. For he’d heard Miss Harris had them as good as engaged.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Timmy,’ said Marcus. ‘You don’t stand in a public street and raise a weapon against the law, screaming abuse to draw attention to yourself and then blow out the brains of a copper, expecting to get a round of applause.’
‘The copper had his back turned,’ agreed Tim. ‘He was doing his paperwork at the end of a long day. If a principle is in a person, tied up in a job, you don’t kill that person to get rid of the principle.’
‘Not by our lights, brother. They practically begged to be hung,’ said Marcus. ‘But if you want to know if I could have sent them to the gallows, even believing what I do – believing they should have been hung – I don’t know.’
‘You mean, say if you were a judge, Marc?’
‘Say I was Caesar. It’s a good one, isn’t it, cob?’
‘It’s a perfect Plato,’ said Tim, bandying words from Philosophy Down the Ages, held weekly at the School of Arts with a rotating leader, and Marcus one of them. Tim wondered if Marcus was stepping into politics just to find out how far an honest, ordinary man could give himself to the needs of State.
Marcus said nothing about Luana left with Bub, money sent when he could, meetings with her when trains went through. Last week he’d given her an envelope of notes. As they talked, Ron Kristiansen looked on from the footplate while Bub, seven years old, imitated Marcus in a fit of glowing temptation. It was a terrible thing. To be born into knowledge as your father was hung. And yet not to know it quite yet. For on that day Bub’s father still lived.
Until stopped by his mother with a curt little smack, Bub copied the one step to the side and one step back that Marcus made in his anxiety to be of help to Luana.
‘For God’s sake, show him, take him up on the engine,’ said Luana. Thin, worn, shrill, she had not eaten more than a crumb for weeks on end. A flame that licked her was all her sustenance, a flame of burning chill that demanded, for its life, ideas be stronger than feelings.
With Bub scooped up, kicking and twisting, Marcus showed him the engine – the big wheels, the moon lamps, the grinning cowcatcher. Ron Kristiansen stepped down from the footplate, giving the impression of diplomacy in a balanced exchange with a child as witness.
The next time Marcus looked along the platform he saw Ron and Luana standing together outside the Ladies’ Waiting Room. They had the famished look of a higher ardour, religious, or, as Marcus dared think now, political.
Luana and Bub had gone on to Tottenham that day. Marcus swore he would look after the boy. An orphan knew an orphan’s wants. But something was to emerge in Bub like a snake from where it was throttled to death in the father. Luana could not control him. She would make another life to save herself, to bury herself in.
Marcus narrowed his eyes, knuckled them, rubbed them red – so tired they were from nights of reading, study and locomotive driving overtime. He lowered his voice and looked at his hands for a moment of mystification.
‘Everyone reckons they know the choker,’ he said. ‘They think the worst of their own best friends. The town’s hopping with the thought of it. We all think he’s one of us, but which?’
‘Whoever it is must be off his flaming lid,’ said Tim. ‘It would have to go with the job. You would have to ask the candidate, “Are you off your flaming lid, mate?” If you are, sign on the dotted line.’
‘We ask it of someone to do it for us,’ said Marcus.
It was possible almost to inhabit the thinking spaces of that gnarly Irish–Australian head.
‘You think he was on the train, Marc? You think you and Ron Kristiansen brought him over?’
‘I do,’ said Marcus.
‘Say it quietly, then.’
‘After we pulled in last night, and the passengers got down, I looked back along the platform, and you know how it happens, Timmy, how a face jumps out? One face in a hundred? A bloke – stocky, stolid, face like the moon – flushed, pink, rosy, red – a bushfire red, sweating, a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, carrying a sack. That’s what knocked me, the sack told me everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘A constrictor knot, in the neck of the sack.’
‘What was in the sack?’
‘When I walked home I went down into the back lane behind the police residence . . .’
‘You were trying to prove . . . ?’
‘That he might have been the dunny man, mate, but didn’t have a cart.’
‘Fill me in, Marc. You’re getting ahead of me.’
‘There’s a side window, a kitchen window. Imagine the copper, McHale, pouring a drink, a drink pale as Lourdes water, the bloke tossing it back. Imagine a man standing on a chair, the shape of a rope in his hands, nine turns up the doubled lengths, they say, is the way to go with the knot because a cat has nine lives, and this knot’s for the last one of them, while others say there’s thirteen turns, as it’s the unluckiest knot, bar none. Except I’ve heard eight turns is best, Timmo.’
‘Eight – what’s that mean as a number?’
‘Eight is seven plus one, the start of a new rule, a new order, the death and the resurrection and the life ever after.’
‘Well, I never.’
‘Imagine shadows on the wall, magnified, from a point near the ceiling six feet down to the floor, a twist of fingers knotting a rope. My bloke takes a bow when it is done. You might remember how I said, Tim – there was a bloke I knew – courtly, unbothered –’
‘I know which bloke you knew, Marc. The Dutchy, the Deutsch, the Boche. Change the subject, Marc. If you think he’s the one, I feel sick. The way you talked about him he was good, a good man.’
‘He’s the same man,’ said Marcus. ‘Whatever he is.’
‘My thinking can’t go that far, Marc. You are the one, so watch it. You are the bloke, Marc. You are the chosen, brother. Get us through to the end, wrap us up worthwhile. They’re waiting inside there for you, in the meeting room. Don’t go the other way, Marc. Stuff a rag in it. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Want a smoke?’ said Marcus. He rolled one, flared a match, took a drag, passed it over. Tim looked at the lung-buster between his fingers before handing it back.
‘No, but thanks,’ he said. ‘Chuck it in the gutter. I’m through.’
Normally Tim was a fumatorium with smoke coming out from under his shirt collar. But he knew the power of absolute limitations. The man with the crutch always did. It was the same when he’d shot the hat, according to Marcus, that might have had a head under it, the one that turned out to be a paper bag floating in the wind, as Tim knew all along it was.
Tim was fixed on finding whatever was practical to stand against in Marcus, yet without breaking their bond.
Marcus went into the meeting. Tim went back to his line-caster.
As Marcus sat through that meeting, pondering decisions involving the railways; the government; the unions; the accursed, doomed Wobblies; the war and the conscription referendum dodging between yes and no, it was as if the man who was the bit player had the choices of history. The handsome, sooty man wearing a suit and tie.
Marcus emerged from the meeting after five hours of rotten wrangling, compromise and vituperation to sum it all up. They sat on the park bench again, the late afternoon sun burning a hole in the clouds.
‘It’s a strike,’ said Marcus. ‘We’re all going out. It’s the big one.’
SOME MONTHS LATER A MESSENGER BOY ran through the Harden rail yards jumping rails and dodging rolling stock, looking for the fireman Marcus Friendly. When he found Friendly oiling an engine, working himself out from under the wheels of a locomotive, he produced a letter from his canvas satchel.
‘Watch how Friendly takes it,’ he’d been tipped by the depot clerks. ‘Wait around for his flaming reaction.’
Marcus Friendly – the engine driver who’d been demoted to fireman for his role in the strike. Other men had caved in, accepted lesser conditions to hold their post and retain their gold watches. They were often married men with hungry mouths to feed. Some, like Ron Kristiansen, were not.
Marcus wiped his hands on a ball of cotton waste and took the envelope between two fingers. He delayed ripping it open while the boy stood there. The pink, decorated paper and the name of the sender, Miss Pearl Dease, of Tottenham Rail, had the Harden office talking.
‘Anything else, sonny?’
‘They said, gee, you’d want to send an answer.’
‘I’ve got an answer for them all right.’
‘What?’
‘Tell those old maids I’ll knock their teeth into their arses if they make a donkey of you ever again.’
