The Following, page 8
‘We’ve been given a house,’ said Tim after an interval of temporary accommodation and having their names on a waiting list.
‘A house, now there’s a step up for a nobody in from the bush, driving a jalopy,’ said Marcus.
‘Luana shall have her vegetable patch,’ said Tim rather stiffly, hiding his pleasure in the status of a solid brick bungalow in Arthur Circle.
Luana bought hens, good layers and watched them fluffing their feathers, scratching the dirt. She grew herbs in buckets in case they ever had to move again. But they never did.
‘What about you?’ said Tim.
‘A house?’ said Marcus. ‘Can you see me in one? I’ve got one – Representatives, House of. A roof over my head, couches to sit on, benches to lean on, corridors to walk down.’
Living in the government hostel, Marcus had a suitcase under the bed, a cardboard box of papers, a reading lamp burning into the night. He wrote headings for debate sitting on his iron-framed bed and drafted letters for Luana to type, directed to factional leaders of a beleaguered party of which he was, through patient necessity and a shortage of elected members, a national leader himself almost before he knew it.
He started going to mass.
‘But why?’ Tim said.
‘It’s a good place to look over the sheilas,’ said Luana.
‘It’s what you need to know about what you don’t,’ said Marcus, ‘up against what’s being thrown at you by those who think they know but don’t. The old Dutchies knew that. There’s no other world but this one, but in this one there’s a way of stepping across over into – I don’t know what to call it – consolation. That’s why I take an hour off on Sunday mornings and let Father Pat rip.’
‘Oh, there’s never any comfort for him since Pearl died,’ said Luana.
‘Can I tell you something about them?’ said Marcus.
‘The Dutchies? You have,’ said Tim.
‘I wouldn’t be here but for them.’
It was what Tim never put in his articles when he wrote about Marcus. He did write, though, that Marcus had artesian reserves to call on. Read this as Tim on the power of what could be spoken about around Shakespeare, Coleridge and Keats, but was denied to honest journalism. The power of the hidden.
‘I wonder,’ said Tim, when Marcus said everyone had a streak of it in them – something that must not come out, but drove them.
‘Even you, Timmo,’ said Marcus.
In talks with newspaper editors around the states, Tim started calling Marcus ‘the bloke’, as he had for years between the two of them. It kept Marcus in overalls, smudged him with admirable grime. It kept his origins in plain sight.
What Tim had, that he kept to himself, he was only half shameful about – a material life aspired to and cleverly achieved, a double-walled brick house, money in the bank and a car, always a better sort of car and not ‘Australia’s Own Car’, either, the Holden Marcus backed after the war and Tim wrote about so encouragingly but felt cramped driving.
No. In those latter years, post-war, it would be, for Tim, the dark-green Jaguar XJ6 with steering wheel, gearstick and dashboard veneered in walnut, the eight cylinders of British manufacture purring under the bonnet and Luana, the white-haired love of his life at his side as they ranged the countryside visiting her relations. In the end, when he couldn’t drive anymore, he would give it away.
With Luana it was an almost rapier-like refinement of resentment she kept hidden. There was too much she never wanted found out. There was the Wobbly compact to which she had given herself. There was Bub. There was the loss of Pearl. There was pride mixed with shame going back to the Englishwoman, her mother, who married a man of race and gave Luana her skin colour, coffee-cream.
Luana listened out for slurs, sitting at her desk, so brilliantly capable. She never heard anything bad. What Tim heard he never repeated but smashed his crutch down on a bar to silence whatever it was.
Without hesitation Luana helped herself when sides of meat came down from Harden in a van, in through the back door of the government hostel and served up to boarders. Luana put it on her table weekly, prime cuts, by going around there, where the cooks had a parcel wrapped up in newspaper ready.
‘Two four six eight, bog in, don’t wait,’ said Tim over a baked dinner when Marcus came over.
Tim the former Baptist was an atheist, Luana likewise. No grace for them; they were anti-religious. But Luana thought how Marcus had brought her to Tim, how Tim was her provider. Then she liked them to join hands around the table. A member of parliament had a priestly role, a power of converting will into words, words into law, law into physical structures, emotions into material benefits.
The feeling went back to when Marcus was a boy chasing cockatoos up and down a railway line – to when, like an apprentice Roman emperor with something good in mind, he was taken aside by state assassins and shown, in a knot running along a string, the needs of power.
IN 1939 THREE MEN – an industrialist, a banker and a professor of economics – went out in a flat-bottomed boat on a coastal lake. Having heard of Marcus as the coming man, the coming bloke – gifted, hard-working in the House and willing to learn – they invited him along.
Over a few days of fishing, Marcus said, he learned something about licking a country into shape at the level of policy decisions and corrected a few ideas blue bloods had about industrial work. It gave Tim the School of Arts feeling all over again, listening to Marcus talk about ideas as tools in a job comparable to tightening a nut on a thread.
As the war came on, his party came in, and Marcus entered national life. The arms factory making rifles, machine guns, hand grenades and pistols was in his electorate. He was made the Minister of Munitions – tanks, planes and ships, not just guns, to be stamped out of metal and paid for from national funds.
By the time the Jap was in, Marcus was Treasurer and saw how to pay for destruction by building.
MARCUS HAD NEVER WANTED ANYTHING for himself, just for himself. Now he declared he wanted a house.
Marcus, a house?
The builder, Don Devlin, spoke to the six men needed: two carpenters, two builder’s labourers, a cabinet-maker, a stonemason. It was all done on the mention of Marcus Friendly’s name. The tradesmen put their other jobs to the side and started with Don on the first of the month. There was never any doubt they would. For the bloke.
Friendly had an architect, Warner Tarbett II, who wore a spotted bow tie and mustard-coloured brothel creepers.
Don Devlin spat the words out: ‘Architects are the greatest damned fool-wasters of a man’s time. You’ll have to put up with me being cranky a lot. Warner Tarbett’s drawn the house plans down to the last nail. He’ll be on the site most days looking over my shoulder. I’ll try to keep him away from you. Tarbett put the idea into the bloke’s head during the war, a house at the end of the road. Tarbett was in the air force. They gave the bloke an Avro Anson, called them the Flying Brick. Tarbett was the pilot. He was like a son to the bloke.
‘Tarbett flew the Anson with Friendly aboard all over the shop, from Tassie to Darwin and up to New Guinea. It was Friendly’s Flying Brick that was bodgied in Moresby in ’44. The plane’s airspeed device was blocked by chewing gum and water was found in the gasoline. They say it was a grudge job, a louse who hated the bloke and took a step. But Tarbett saved Friendly’s life by being fussy. Always checking everything, double-checking all the time. It’s what architects are like. They never stop poking their noses in.’
The builders knew that a house was a pretty small-ticket item to the bloke, who’d worked through the war years finding money to fight the Japs without bleeding the country dry. He was the one who’d stood up to Churchill, berated MacArthur, roused the fury of his own party, argued them round, all in the deadset voice of a dogged Australian bloke, and he’d tested his brains against the best thinkers thrown at him in the arguments of the old School of Arts – and won.
Brilliant as he was, though, the builders thought he was being led by the nose by Tarbett.
It was not the sort of house that any of them would build by choice, rough-hewn, they called it. When people left the bush behind as Friendly had as a boy, it was surely for something better than a ramshackle proposition. As tradesmen they were beyond the pioneering habit of leaving timber looking as if it was dragged from the wilds – slabs of ironbark, pillars of yellow box with scabs of bark on them, knotholes exposed, insect scribbles in the wood.
Tarbett’s grandfather, an honest drover, had lived in such places in the sticks. Tarbett never shut up about it. He called for an earth-built architectural revolution: ‘Think of the structure as two sheds overlapping with a screened arcade joining them. You’ve seen the idea.’
They had. And primitive it was. Though it kept out the flies.
In those first weeks they made clay bricks in wooden moulds. Heavy, irregular window frames were hammered from second-hand iron. On the plans it looked like a fruit-packing shed or a shearing shed. A house of the sort to match the bloke’s deserves should at least have verandahs, where the heat and glare would not penetrate and the bloke would be able to hang a waterbag, go around in a singlet and shorts, stretch out in a deckchair, read up on philosophy and such. Or say his prayers. If Tarbett had called for gold leaf, they would have slapped it on. But this?
‘Here’s where the arcade comes in,’ said Tarbett, ‘a screened space between two lots of rooms, overhanging eaves in a house facing north giving shade in summer, letting sun through early in winter, climbing up the inside walls. It’s a verandah inside a house.’
No verandahs were allowed under postwar austerity rules that the bloke himself had brought in, so argument was pointless – there would be no verandahs, whatever anyone thought. There would be an arcade.
Don Devlin did not speak of the job as a rushed job, but they all knew that if the house wasn’t finished in time the bloke would never live there. It raised the question: ‘The bloke was born in a bark hut. He’s lived in railway barracks all over the joint. The last few years he’s lived at the Kurrajong Hotel in a room where you couldn’t swing a cat. Why does he need a house at all?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ said Don.
Marcus Friendly sat under a tree and watched them work. They liked seeing him in the shade of the old yellow box tree, the honey tree, talking to Tarbett with plans spread over a card table, blueprints held down by a rock. He took an interest in details but kept his distance. He was one of those old-time, working-class serving members whose climb through the workingman’s ranks from railway sheds’ apprentice to national secretary of the union to parliamentarian and wartime cabinet minister had won him the honour he craved – to sit in the place where the worker was king, on a leather bench in the Commonwealth of Australia’s parliament, in Canberra. First as a backbencher, then as Munitions minister, then as Treasurer, War Cabinet member, and then, just before the war ended, stepping up to the top job that was lately taken from him, leaving him this shell with a need for shelter.
Tarbett cajoled the men, demanding a standard of finish they’d hardly thought they could meet before the job started. They learned that Tarbett could be grateful, admitting, in his own way, that he didn’t know everything. As the weeks passed, Tarbett admitted that he never needed to say anything twice to any of Don’s men.
‘You bastards are good,’ he said. ‘You are bloody good.’
‘As if we didn’t know it,’ they answered, though not in those words. In fact, with no words at all.
At smoko each day Marcus set the billy on a fire of sawhorse offcuts. Signalling it was ready, he threw in a handful of tea-leaves. Ross Devlin, Don’s fifteen-year-old, ran over and carried the billy back to the men.
Ever since Ross was born – since a son was born – Don Devlin had spoken of taking on his son as his carpentry apprentice. Don liked seeing Ross and the bloke getting on. Each generation threw their achievements to the top of a pile from where it was easier for the next to take off. In Don’s family the connections went back to immigrants from Ireland. So did the bloke’s.
‘Show him the stone, Roscoe,’ he said one day. ‘Tell him the story.’
Ross shook wood shavings from his hair and took the sharpening stone from the toolbox – a smooth grey block, chisel-scooped. Don had carried it in his carpenter’s pouch since his apprenticeship days in the 1920s, when his father had given it to him after his father’s father had passed it on.
‘It’s from the old country,’ said Ross, showing it to the bloke.
‘The Emerald Isle,’ said Marcus. ‘One day you’ll go there.’
He made it sound like a promise, a prediction. He had that sort of faith in his own statements. You could see why. The smallest impulse he’d ever felt had been magnified into proof of it.
The men coo-eed for their billy. Ross left the bloke holding the stone, warming it in his hands. As the hours went by Ross did not know how to ask for the stone back. He did not want to ask for it back! Over the weeks that followed he felt a satisfaction. The bloke could keep the stone for as long as he liked, leaving Ross with a feeling of being big in the world, just to know the bloke had something of his and was warming it.
‘Where’s that sharpening stone?’ asked Don after a couple of days.
‘Back in the toolbox,’ said Ross, waiting for his father to say otherwise. When he didn’t, Ross felt his place in the world expand out from his father’s, more, out from the bloke’s even, and the world the bloke knew, expanding the wishes of a boy to make a life unlike theirs but without betraying them (although he did not think of that).
The men didn’t gossip about Marcus Friendly much to anyone – not to their families, not to their mates. Around him they displayed discretion, although it became fairly widely known who they were building for. Not just the bloke, either, but for a woman.
The site was in New South Wales across the Federal Capital border, east of Queanbeyan near the railway line. It was on farmland, on a rocky ridge. In the mornings when the men came to work they found sheep droppings all over the place. The bloke was paying for the job out of his own pocket. He’d bought the land from a woman called Rosemary MacKinlay and her husband, Bruce. Farther back in the title search it was owned by a prominent swell, Sir William ‘Billyum’ Wignall. Before that, by the bantamweight bigmouth, Bounder Morrison.
The MacKinlays were landed types, cousins, they let you know, of ‘the Bounder’.
They rode up on the next ridge, using binoculars to see what was going on. They were not the sort who’d ever voted for Marcus Friendly – they were the sort who had voted him out. The day he’d lost the election to the other side was the happiest day of their lives. ‘The Bounder’ was not the poet of the working class. He’d taken to workers with a poisonous pen, mocking them as lazy, venal, whining and quaint.
The MacKinlays’ liking of a curly-haired Irish Catholic boy of working-class attachment was however unrestrained. They played on his excitement, the light in his eyes when Ross first saw equine flesh with its mahogany hide. The horsey young wife, Rosemary, put him on a biddable mare and trotted him around in a circle. Soon enough Ross jumped logs, pranced and reared.
‘You are a natural rider,’ said Rosemary MacKinlay.
‘It’s great,’ said Ross.
‘Bless you,’ she said.
‘Watch out for those people,’ said his father. ‘They’ll suck your blood out.’
Another of them, a visitor from up north, was Bounder Morrison’s son, Kyle, the original in the ten-gallon hat, ‘Prince of the Dryblow Races’, a born-to-the-saddle, handsome young coot (as his father once described him), now sun-wrinkled and approaching middle age.
The men good-dayed him riding past. Tugging his hat, Kyle Morrison angled his head as if they’d thrown a bucket of water over him. His horse stepped over timber offcuts by lifting its knees and putting its feet down like half-shelled coconuts.
Marcus said, ‘Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, sit like his grandsire cut from alabaster?’
‘Search me,’ said Don.
MARCUS FRIENDLY WAS SICK. You could see it in the looseness of his suit coat over his frame, in his wheezy lungs. Some days he didn’t get out of the Holden, just rested his chin on his forearm and called Ross over.
It was the voice Ross remembered wrapping around him like a scratchy blanket – the wartime speeches, hale and commanding on the radio, soft as wind through the grass to a boy of seven or eight or nine.
Friendly spoke about rebuilding the nation to make it last, that he would move mountains to do so. To Ross it was literally proved. While the whole country listened on the ABC, Marcus Friendly had pressed the plunger on the first big explosives charge in the Snowies in ’49. It was, at the time, a momentous impression the bloke made on a kid as Ross stood in the school playground, watching the speakers of the portable amplifiers ruffle as the blast went off. There was a feeling of being brought into the care of the bloke.
To Don, proud of his son for recognising it, easy himself with Friendly in conversation, the bloke was a man apart. It went with the job he’d risen to. For the fact of the matter was that the success of a politician as a man reduced him as a man. When a politician said ‘fight’ or ‘build’, it was not in the way a man fought, bloody knuckled, or built with the force of his hands and the blow of a hammer.
A politician was a man apart, with power lent to him while it lasted, a sack of bones in a suit coat thereafter. Talk about having your blood sucked out.
Marcus Friendly was a backbencher now. Backbenchers were sad, unhealthy blokes, eating too much, exercising hardly at all, working with words on paper that got swallowed up or thrown out or changed or forgotten or ripped into squares and spiked on a nail in a dunny.
