Mrs Moy flushed faintly. ‘There was a question of bad language,’ she said. ‘My husband was horrified...a child of six!’

  ‘There’s no telling where the children pick it up, is there?’ lied Mrs Hanna rapidly.

  ‘We wouldn’t like Dorothy to learn any common expressions,’ said Mrs Moy. ‘You understand?’

  ‘I do, I do!’ said Mrs Hanna. ‘I’ll not let young Jackie get away with it, I promise you. Oh, he’ll get a tongue-lashing, if not worse, now that you’ve brought it back to me mind.’

  Jackie got up tired and cantankerous, obscurely displeased about the failure of his quest, violently hating his deep-dyed nose, and knowing that he’d never dare take it down the road to play with the boys.

  So when his mother treacherously attacked him about his use of a bad word to Mr Moy, he retorted as vigorously.

  ‘But it was a bloody hill, it was a bloody steep hill.’

  ‘You’re not to say bloody!’

  ‘You say it, you bloody well know you do!’

  ‘If I don’t half-kill you for that, you young devil!’ said Mrs Hanna, ‘You just wait till I get to you!’

  But, being sensible, Jackie was away around the brown-sugar barrel and the kerosene drums and half-way towards the door before his mother could count four. Bad luck for Jackie that the door opened then to let in the Nun, come with the Sisters’ weekly grocery order. He grabbed Jackie by the coat collar and held him, the little boy flailing and spitting, and doing his best to get the Nun around the hips and squeeze the tripes out of him.

  ‘You need help, missus,’ observed the Nun.

  Jackie let rip with an oath, and the Nun gave him a cuff across the ear that felt like a blow from a handful of candles. The boy fled with a blaspheming howl, and the man turned to Mrs Hanna, rosy and flustered, half inclined to blubber with embarrassment and vexation.

  ‘That boy needs a father’s hand, missus,’ said the Nun.

  ‘Take it up with the Lord, then,’ retorted Mrs Hanna spiritedly.

  ‘No need,’ stated the Nun. ‘I’ve thought it over this last twelve months and I’m here to make you an offer of marriage.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’ snapped Mrs Hanna. ‘You with the reputation you have, half your life downing the stuff up at the Princess May and the other half codding them poor Sisters into paying you good money for the bit of wood you chop that wouldn’t cook more than a sausage.’

  ‘True,’ admitted the Nun mildly. ‘I got it sewed up, all right. But I’ll give it all up for you, and take care of you and the boy as best I know how.’

  Mrs Hanna scarcely knew which way to look, so she bristled and faltered: ‘You! I hardly remember your name!’

  ‘It’s Jerry MacNunn,’ said the Nun, ‘as well you know.’

  He turned away and began shifting the bags of poultry-feed, which the carrier had carelessly dumped inside the shop door, swinging them easily to their little platform beside the heavy brass scale. Mrs Hanna, half thrilled, half outraged, stared privily at him, his pleasant, rubbery brown face, not old, but already crumpled. What was inside him—a husband? She imagined him with his shirt and trousers off, and got a fright.

  He gave her a sideways glance. ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Never more so. And if you take me, I’ll play a man’s part to your satisfaction.’

  Mrs Hanna dared not think what he meant.

  Hot and red, she stammered, ‘Go away. I’m bothered. I can’t think.’

  The upshot of it was that within six months Jerry MacNunn and Peggy Hanna were married, and in no time at all the sound of a father’s voice and the occasional touch of a father’s boot to his stern had straightened out young Jackie.

  He and the Nun were as thick as thieves. The Nun got him on to weight-lifting, and taught him how to wrestle. He said that with Jackie’s lack of stature there’d be no point in teaching him how to knuckle, for every blow he landed would be a low one.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he cautioned, ‘there’s times when a foul blow may save your life, so I’ll inform you how to land such a one and how to dodge it.’

  The Nun was a treasurehouse of information to Jackie. From him he learnt how to whistle, tickle trout, play the mouth-organ and the spoons, cook in a camp oven, plant a garden, and shoot rabbits. As for Peggy Hanna, who was then thirty-eight and some eight years older than her husband, she took on the appearance of a woman ten years younger, for she’d never before had the company of a real man. The restraints fell away, her natural exhilaration burst out like a fountain, and she began to see the late Mr Hanna more or less only as a packet of worries, prejudices, and spinsterish little ways and manners all wrapped up in a pair of tradesmen’s trousers. Her life with him seemed but a dream, not a bad dream, but one with no significance. She couldn’t believe her luck.

  The Nun was so good-tempered that being with him was like sitting in the late afternoon sun. He didn’t speak much, and when he did all his words were well worn with use. These comfortable, familiar vocal progressions were like an old tune to Mrs MacNunn; she could have listened for hours. Yet her husband’s placidity was not indolence; he got things done. He had the clock collection sent to a Sydney firm and auctioned, and with the capital he straightened out the grocery shop and in no time had it running as prosperously as it had done in the days of Walter Hanna’s father.

  He had a knack, that was it, not only with life but with living. He and Peggy MacNunn had a tremendous amount of love to make, and they made it in all kinds of ways, not only in each other’s arms, but with sly glances and smiles and friendly slaps and pushes, yells and sulks and Saturday afternoons at the football, and good hot Sunday dinners. All the air around them was mellow with this simple enjoyment of themselves and each other, and in this golden climate young Jackie bloomed.

  The doctor, already stiffening up with arthritis, able to move his crumpled body from place to place only with difficulty, examined Jackie every six months for signs of the orthopaedic and optical deterioration that his books told him sometimes went with dwarfism. But the boy was radiantly healthy, like a tree or a young bear. The grotesqueness of his shape, becoming more noticeable as he grew, did nothing to mar this image of joyful vitality.

  ‘You’ve done a great job, Peggy,’ said the doctor, ‘and you, too, Nun.’

  The War had begun, and young men disappeared from Kings-land in small flurries of beer, tears, and band music. News of battles flickered like harmless lightning over the town. Jackie, growing up, in and out of mischief, had a pantomime idea of ‘The Front’, a remote country coloured like jelly babies, populated erratically by camels, Arabs sitting around the wells of Beersheba, Huns in spiked helmets, and our brave boys. The only one of these with whom he had been at all familiar was Cushie Moy’s youthful uncle who died of wounds at Gallipoli.

  The uncle had, in fact, been a dingy, barking adolescent who stumbled through life as a junior bank clerk under the critical eye of his elder brother, Cushie Moy’s father. Their temperaments were in constant opposition, their leisure times filled with uneasy silence or venomous bickering.

  Mrs Moy, who had brought her indifference towards the young man to a high level of unkindness, was able to squeeze out a tear every time she spoke of his gallant death, and Mr Moy thought this most becoming of her. But the passionate Cushie, thus brought for the first time into contact with death in her family circle, and rendered stone-cold by terror, endured the mourning atmosphere for a week, and then broke—with a spectacular fit of bawling and vomiting during the memorial service. For this she was slapped and put to bed. She was seven and never forgot her Uncle Graham’s demise.

  She had hardly recovered from this event before the town hall bells tolled for young Baillie Nicolson, football star and champion runner, Kingsland’s hero and only son of John Nicolson, the town bagpiper and the Nun’s closest friend. When the news came it was a Saturday so wet and blowy that even the football had been cancelled. Mrs MacNunn had plunged off against the gale towards the school, where the parish ladies held a sewing circle every third Saturday. She had gone before the news of Baillie Nicolson’s death was posted up outside the post office so she was not there to support her husband.

  It hit him as though Baillie had been his own brother, not for Baillie’s own sake, but for the piper’s. Old melancholies he had forgotten since he came to Kingsland, childhood wounds and bereavements and horrors, rose up from some place in his soul and nearly swamped him. He lay flat on his bed staring at the ceiling.

  The thick cobwebby light of winter afternoon buried him. There was nothing, he thought, but himself alive in the grave of the world. The dead despondency that had so often characterised his mood before his marriage came to him again as he thought of his friend Nicolson.

  Some, like his own father, had kids and they punched and kicked them. But those kids were still alive. Nicolson had cherished his only son like a bloody great diamond and now that diamond was lost. Nicolson was a man in solitary now, that hard hawk of a man.

  ‘I got to go and say something to the old piper,’ he thought, ‘and I don’t know what to say.’

  Jackie watched the fire die down into a grey ruff of ash, streaked with gasping ruby. He had overheard the man who came briefly to the backdoor, and he knew that Baillie Nicolson was killed. He waited for a long time for his stepfather to come out of the bedroom, while the house became colder and darker.

  Jackie listened to the lift of the wind, the sudden seething as it found trees to scruff. He tried to distract himself with it as it tried the windows and proved a rattle, whistled through the keyhole as with pursed lips, shouldered the house and the shop, knocking the creaks out of the timber, hoying down the chimney and dusting the hob with ashes, skiffing under the house and across the floor so that one end of the mat reared up at it like a cobra and dropped again.

  He was sad and lonely, feeling less than eight years old.

  The Nun, sunk in lethargy, heard a new sound above the reeding of the wind, a scrabble at the door. A little sun of light leapt up against the hollow greyness of the hall.

  ‘What you light the gas for, Jack?’

  Jackie pushed himself farther into the bedroom. ‘To keep me company. What are you doing, Dad? You sick?’

  The Nun said, ‘A man’s a cur. I oughta be down at the Princess saying something to the old piper.’

  ‘He’s not down at the pub, Dad,’ said the boy, eager to help.

  ‘Sure he is. Bellowing boozed. Where else would he be after hearing what he heard today?’

  ‘I seen him go past, Dad,’ said Jackie, ‘A long time ago. On the steamroller.’

  The Nun sat up like a shot. ‘Heading which way?’

  Jackie pointed. ‘There were lots of people running along behind.’ He caught his stepfather’s arm, ‘I can go with you, can’t I, Dad?’

  The Nun was hastening into his oilskin. ‘You rug up then, and leave the light on for your mother.’

  He limped out, leaving the backdoor swinging. The two of them bored through the gale.

  Jackie tugged the edge of the oilskin. ‘I hear something funny,’ he shouted. The stravaiging wind brought extraordinary sounds down the main street, a fearful stridulation, pierced intermittently by a grinding crash. Looking through the swimming air towards the park, the Nun could see little but a group of people trickling about some central point, breaking up, coalescing, flying apart. The steamroller’s calliope uttered an exultant shriek.

  ‘Holy God!’ said Jerry. ‘What’s he up to?’

  John Nicolson had learnt his trade at a Clydeside engineering works, and twenty years before he had begun work in Kingsland as borough engineer. But his long drinking-bouts had driven him farther and farther down the ladder until now, loyally retained by a council comprised mostly of his old friends, he worked spasmodically driving the steamroller.

  Drenched and hatless, he sat on the grotesque vehicle like a mahout, rain spilling into his untied boots and out again. It streamed down his skull so that his thin ginger hair was invisible; his face was purple with drink and cold. To the little boy, staring up at this towering, silent figure, it seemed that the eyes were as red as blood, like a dragon’s eyes.

  ‘Chris’sake, what’s he up to?’ shouted the Nun.

  ‘He’s run amuck,’ answered someone, thrilled to death. ‘He’s gone and demolished the cottage where him and the boy lived, and now he’s got it in for the Gallipoli memorial. Man’s a nut case.’

  ‘Ooo-ahh!’ gasped a child’s voice in Jackie’s ear. ‘He’s smashing up the new monument!’ it said, now becoming the voice of Cushie Moy, who stood beside him in a crimson coat, holding the hand of her furred mother.

  ‘Come away at once!’ said Mrs Moy sharply. ‘The man’s mental, he’s dangerous!’

  But Cushie, mad to see this astonishing spectacle, whined and yelped, pulling against her mother’s gloved grasp, and straining all the time to see the reef of white marble rubble, and the obelisk, cracked as though lightning had struck it, standing lop-sidedly on its concrete platform.

  A man near by sobbed angrily. ‘No respect for the dead...our poor boys...Baillie wasn’t the only one...my young brother died in France, didn’t he?...wants to get his own back, he says...why doesn’t he go and flatten Dr Zimmermann’s surgery then...dirty Heinie...why don’t he?’

  ‘Hypocrites! Damned bloody hypocrites!’ howled Nicolson suddenly, and the steamroller squealed into movement.

  ‘Is he,’ demanded Mrs Moy in a stricken voice, ‘talking about our side?’

  As the steamroller trundled dinosaur-like towards the monument, the sobbing man scrambled up over the rear, and snatched John Nicolson around the neck, clawing and shouting. With one sweep of his iron arm, Nicolson tossed him backwards into the crowd. The front roller collided violently with the shattered marble, grinding over the fragments and jerking back and forth across the wreckage. The noise was so great that no one could hear the stream of imprecation or blasphemy spouting from the driver’s mouth.

  Alarmed and embarrassed by this rare drama, Mrs Moy seized Cushie by the back of the coat and switched her away, willynilly taking Jackie as well, for Cushie had hooked herself to Jackie’s arm.

  ‘Can’t you get some sense into him, Jerry?’ bawled someone.

  Clumsily swinging his game leg, the Nun dragged himself up on the juddering vehicle.

  ‘Put an end to it, you old galoot,’ he begged. ‘Come on, chum, turn it up and we’ll have a grog and talk it over.’

  Piper Nicolson heard. He turned his red eyes on the Nun. ‘I lost my lad, did you hear, Jerry?’ he said. ‘My grand lad.’

  He shoved the lever, and the monster moved forward with catatonic slowness, nuzzling the face of the monument with an abrasive shriek. With a groan the obelisk came out of the ground like an uprooted tree. Majestically the steamroller tilted forward and buried its bow in the hole.

  The children’s desire to see this wonder was overwhelming. They dragged away from Mrs Moy and rushed towards it. Cushie goggled at the wreck in horror and delight.

  ‘They’ll never, never get it out,’ she said.

  ‘We can have that for a war memorial instead,’ said Jackie, and they screamed with laughter.

  The sound drew the attention of Piper Nicolson, sitting amidst restraining hands, dazed and glowering.

  ‘Would you look at it,’ he bawled, ‘running around on its bit legs, alive and kicking, and my boy Baillie dead and rotten. My lad that was a cricketer and a runner, and saved the day in the Shield match for the shire last year. Dead and rotten, and that deformed wee turd of a creature still above ground. What justice is that?’

  A hush fell over the crowd, though mostly they were farm workmen, not sensitive or used to stepping delicately around other folks’ feelings.

  Cushie felt the silence, and remembered her shock and panic at her uncle’s death.

  Jackie, who had not understood the drunkard’s words, still looked up into the wet, corned-beef face with fascinated expectation of more excitement.

  It was Jerry MacNunn who said calmly. ‘I’ve never yet belted a man silly with the drink, nor one who’s had the news you’ve had this day. But me and you are finished, John.’

  The piper began to blubber. Cushie and Jackie, appalled at adult emotion, turned their eyes away.

  The Nun drew Jackie away. ‘Come home, boy, your Mum’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.’

  Jackie looked round for Cushie, but her mother was hurrying her down to the park gates. The rain began again and blotted out the crimson coat.

  ‘What was the matter with Mr Nicolson, Dad?’

  ‘His boy Baillie is dead and his heart’s broke.’

  ‘If I went to the war and I was shot, would your heart be broke?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the Nun. ‘Now shut up.’

  The next school day, Cushie Moy, full of indignation and sympathy, blurted out to Jackie what her mother had told her the drunken piper had meant. He was certain that Cushie’s mother must have made a mistake, and hastened to his mother and step-father for reassurance. As soon as he saw his mother’s angry eyes he knew that Mrs Moy had translated accurately.

  He asked, trembling, ‘Was that what he meant, Dad?’

  His mother made a movement towards him, but the Nun checked her abruptly.

  ‘Yes, that was what he meant. But you got to remember he was talking out of a bottle.’

  The boy, bewildered, baffled, said, ‘Did he mean that I don’t deserve to be alive because I’m not as big as Baillie Nicolson? What’s deformed mean, Mum? Cushie Moy didn’t know.’

  ‘Cushie Moy ought to keep her little gob shut!’ said his mother fiercely. ‘And that goes for her Lady Muck of a mother, too. Talking to a child about such a thing!’

  ‘Am I deformed?’ muttered the boy. ‘Is it awful?’

  Mrs MacNunn made a cat-like sound, and the Nun shot her the hardest look she had ever had from him.

  ‘I’d like a cup of tea,’ he commanded, ‘and so would the old Jack, after a long cold day at school.’

  ‘Why did you send Mum away?’ asked Jackie. ‘Isn’t she to know what’s wrong with me?’

 

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