The Sunken Road Read online

Page 8


  Income

  Anna was started on sixpence a week pocket money. Then, year by year, as she grew in age and aptitude, it was increased by increments of a penny or a penny-ha’penny until finally she earned a shilling a week, two sixpences, one to spend, the other for her piggybank. This was income, not a gift. She was expected to earn it. She wiped the dishes, collected the eggs, swept the back porch, unsnagged the family’s grass-seedy socks and chopped kindling for the kitchen stove. As she progressed to more difficult jobs, Hugo came in behind her, wiping, sweeping, chopping. They had cows on the six-forty acres. Anna was expected to drive them into the milking stalls when she came home from school, pull up a three-legged stool to the ballooning flank of the most patient cud-chewing cow, and strip the milk from teats that to her were like coarse-skinned, waggly dicks on a bloated sac. But her Tolley fingers proved to be useless, and so her father replaced her on the stool. She worked for Grandfather Tolley all through her high school years, every Saturday morning between eight o’clock and midday. Again she swept, but she also took inventory, restocked the shelves, and waited on customers. One day Mrs Morehead, the piano teacher, came tight-lipped and hotly tense into the shop, settled her account, and was never seen again. Her old man was caught with his fingers in the Council till, Grandfather Tolley explained. Anna froze. She drew her cloaked fear and guilt around her, waited until his back was turned, and replaced the two florins that she had pocketed from the cash register—one in her left pocket, the other in her right, so that they wouldn’t clink. She kept her eyes open for shoplifters after that, even though Grandfather Tolley did not list shoplifting as one of his burdens. His burdens were freight charges, tardy payers, non payers, the lure of the bigger towns, and the contemptuous indifference of the Showalters to their massive monthly bill. They let it run up to five hundred quid, he said, then act like they’re doing me a favour when they eventually pay it. If jokers came in asking for a left-handed hammer, Anna cut them dead. If little old ladies said: My, haven’t you grown, or: Your mum and dad must be very proud of you, dear, Anna withered them with a stare. Then she left to study in the city and Grandfather Tolley took Chester Flood under his wing, paying Chester a weekly wage to help in the shop and putting him through a course in accounting. So there was no work for Anna in the shop when she came home during the sixty-seven drought, and work, but no income, on the six-forty acres: Sweetie, we’re struggling this year. Anna blinked awake. She seemed to hear her father for the first time. She stopped dreaming and grew up a little. She returned to the university in February, when only distracted thesis writers, lost Africans and cleaners were about, and secured a job for herself in the library basement for ten hours a week. Ten hours to think in, for the work was not demanding. Ten hours to stew in, all those boys dying in that foreign war. When she applied for her first job in London, the bookshop manager in the Kings Road said: Restless tribes of colonials, then cocked his head as though another fine phrase might find its way into his mouth. He winked: So I know you’ll soon be moving on, love, but you colonials work well, I’ll give you that. Few people could live on what the man paid her. Anna was expected to be aggressive with the customers, to sell plenty so that she could top up her income with bonuses. Her legs and feet ached. Shoplifting gangs made snap raids on the expensive art folios, and she encountered chiselled bluebloods—The Lady or The Hon. printed on their rubber cheques—who behaved as though the air around her were tainted. But she was finding her return ticket, here, away from her past life. Lockie and her heartache receded. She was able to stand back, assess herself, move on to other things. She moved on to marriage and children and hidden sweatshop labour. She discovered that Sam was paid a poor, thin, grudging allowance and herself nothing at all. I tend to the battery hens, she argued. I collect, pack and weigh eggs every day. Shouldn’t I be paid something? It’s all for the family, Sam’s father replied. Sort of like a little communist system, Anna observed, and saw by his splutter and redness that her father-in-law was a fool and she could always silence him. Then father and son fell out and suddenly Anna and Sam knew what it meant to need money to pay the rent. At least the old system had cushioned them from some of the blows of life. When Anna first started working at the Chronicle, young mothers looked at her side-on, as if making a list of everything that marked her: A tart at school; fancied herself for going to university; her boyfriend was that Kelly who got himself killed; she came back from overseas with her tail between her legs; married into a family of religious nuts; and now she’s forced to go out to work. Money in dribs and drabs, for all of Anna’s life, except one day her father died and left her twenty thousand—and Anna lost the lot. Sam has been advised that the bank is forcing a sale and will appoint a manager. Anna observes, in her weekly column: Losing a farm also means losing a home, a way of life, a whole social framework. She should feel more sorry for herself, but can’t forget the local kids, who leave school year after year, full of eager hope—except there is nothing to hope for in Pandowie. One or two boys have wrapped their cars around the only roadside tree in miles and it’s clear to everyone that they are swelling a hidden statistic. Teenage mothers push sullen prams up and down the aisles of Tolley’s Four Square Store and if they lift an item here and there, Anna’s mother turns a blind eye. She has put a notice in the front window: Buy your kid a job, shop local, shop Pandowie. Anna writes: We must think laterally. It’s no good finding jobs for our young people in time-honoured occupations. With tourists renting the miners’ cottages in Paxton Square, and King William Street farmers snatching up our farms, now is the time to think about jobs in tourism, cottage crafts and organic farming. When she moves to the city, Anna will place small advertisements in magazines: Typing Done. She will be paid by the hour to invigilate at end-of-year exams. Anna will accept an old-age pension, a grateful government’s reward for all that she has contributed to the nation, but keep to herself the conviction that she hadn’t always been a worthy or a deserving citizen.

  Parades

  The children constructed a banner, ‘Harvest Thanksgiving’ picked out in scissored silver-foil letters glued to a length of castoff velvet curtain. Their mothers dressed them in white tunics fashioned from bed linen and they wore leather sandals upon their feet. Crowns woven from straw, daisies and green crepe paper capped their skulls. Clueless, dutiful, faintly Roman and pagan, the children of the Sunday School waited for Mrs Morehead to strike the first chord on the pedal organ. They heard a wheezy blast of air, the snicker of the unoiled pedals, then a stately hymn full of weighty flourishes rattled the windows, and someone, the minister’s wife, nudged Anna to lead the others down into the body of the church. Her feet glided, her back was like a reed, her hair crackled in the electric air. She sensed the vast spaces under the ceiling beams, the foolish, melting faces watching from the pews to her left and her right. In her cradling arms she carried counter-stacked sheafs of wheat, oats and barley. The boy behind her carried a bundle of loaves, Maxine behind him wedges of butter and cheese on a tray. Hugo carried honey, another kid a basket of eggs, others jars of jam, pickles and stewed apricots. Anna paraded to the front of the church, paused at a tier of planks decorated with butcher’s paper, and stacked the sheafs of grain in a golden sunburst pattern against the white, exactly as instructed. She stepped to one side and took up her position beside the display. She watched the other children file down the aisle toward her. They were trampling one another’s heels. It was not that they were unused to parading—they did it every day, marching into class to the beat of a slack pigskin drum—but they were unused to parading slowly. The first television set in the district was installed at Showalter Park. An antenna tower twice the height of the chimneys shone like a galvanised Eiffel Tower next to the stone cellar at the rear of the homestead. The invitation was for children under twelve. Anna sat at the back, the polished floorboards cold under her thighs, and stared out above the heads of the little kids. A bit snowy, said Mr Showalter, fiddling with knobs on the side of the cab
inet. The floury images on the screen sharpened a little and he stepped back from the set. He stayed for the duration of the Christmas Pageant broadcast. In fact, Anna saw the gardener, the overseer, the stud manager, a few mothers and the cook standing behind the rows of children slackjawed on the floor. She turned her attention to the screen again. Floats, clowns, a pipe band and marching girls paraded past the cameras: Anna could feel her feet high-stepping, pointing, toe-spinning along the streets of the city. Only thirty people turned up for the march on the Raintree Corporation. It was a bad time of the year: October rains, examination blues, the risk of getting roughed up. The thirty paraded in a tight bunch, five abreast, along the centre line of Frome Street. Some carried banners attacking the government, others supported the National Liberation Front. Anna’s banner read: ‘Join the army today. Travel to exotic, distant lands, meet exciting, unusual people—and kill them’. The wind howled down Frome Street and twisted the banner in her hands. She saw unmarked police cars draw up beside and behind the demonstrators. There were vans at the mouth of the street. An amplified voice broke up in the wind: ...an illegal gathering... the street... or arrested. When her children were toddlers, Anna liked to walk with them to collect the mail at the end of the Jaegers’ long, rutted drive. They made slow time, the children ranging restlessly off the track or squatting to peer at ants and flint-chips gleaming like diamonds in the dust. One day their little procession met another one, a small back-blocks circus grinding past the gate. The children froze, their arms shot out: Look! A lion and an elephant in painted wooden cages, a couple of rusty cars, a lorry stacked with canvas and poles for the big top, four caravans jerking and hunting like tethered whales at the tow bars of three station wagons, and a converted milk van. The circus creaked by so slowly that the dust failed to stir, and Anna and the children saw clearly the expressionless profiles of the dark and fleshless secret people who run circuses. Anna collected Rebecca outside the high school gates and drove her to her cello instructor’s house in Clare. She parked the car in the street, watched Becky enter through the side gate, and opened the newspaper over the steering wheel. They did this twice a week. Becky was Conservatorium scholarship material, according to the woman who instructed her. Today Anna was fidgety. She put down the paper, unfastened the catch on her daughter’s satchel. Becky wrote with a small, precise hand. She did not doodle on her covers or in the margins. She gave nothing away to snoops. Anna sighed, pulled out one of Becky’s textbooks. Becky had flagged an illustration: ‘Wellington’s troops on parade, Busaco’. Or perhaps she had flagged the accompanying text: English maps showed the sunken road but the French maps did not. From such discrepancies battles may be lost or won. The Iron Duke moved his troops unseen along the sunken road and in time was victorious in this stage of the Peninsula War. There have been eight Pandowie Showalter Lustre rams produced by the studmaster at Showalter Park. Lustre 7 sold for $60,000 in 1985. Anna saw Wesley Showalter lead Lustre 8 in the Copper Festival’s grand parade around the town oval last year. Ram and owner looked topheavy. Broken blood vessels mapped the skin on Wesley Showalter’s face and the blue and gold prize ribbon around the animal’s shoulders had slipped and was dragging in the mud. They led the parade and were slow, too slow, so that a utility from the Holden dealership stalled, horses pigrooted and the high school band concertinaed into the rear of the float entered by Tolley’s Four Square Store. There won’t be a Pandowie show this year, now that Showalter Park has collapsed and the banks are trying to find buyers for the frozen straws of semen from Lustre 7 and Lustre 8. The 150th Jubilee Committee is clear about one thing for the Year 2000 festivities: the town will stage a procession along the Main North Road, starting at the railway station, passing through the town and finishing at the oval. Period costumes to mark the generations. Anna will drive up from the city and watch the parade from the verandah of her mother’s shop. At least she will do that.

  Home

  Grandfather Tolley carried her through to the bathroom behind the shop, hurrying her along a narrow passageway hung with blistered brown wall panels, past shadowy door recesses, under a solitary low-wattage bulb that glowed dimly beneath a patina of singed moths and dust. He stood her in the chipped bath, stripped off her socks and shoes, dabbed at her bloodied knee, crescents of blood chasing one upon the other as he swiped at the injury with his washcloth. Wicked girl, unmanageable. Anna stared over his head at Hugo, who jittered in the doorway, his thumb in his mouth for the first time in years. Grandfather Tolley had rooms they’d never seen before. He lived in the shop, his kitchen and his bedroom. Sometimes he opened the sitting room for birthdays, Sunday teas. He was absorbed, solitary, shut in, a man who sought comfort in indirect light. It just shows you that a house is not a home, Anna’s father said. It lacked a woman’s touch. I lived there from the time I was a baby until I married your mother, and the only time I ever smelt baking or perfume was if one of his customers felt sorry for us and dropped by with a cake. He wouldn’t know what to say to her. But we were okay. We managed. I would’ve liked a holiday at the beach now and then, but that was out of the question. He never ever saw the sea again. He tried hard not to be over-protective, but it wasn’t easy for him, poor old beggar. A few years later, Anna’s mother blinked at the dents where her bed had pressed against the carpet, at the shadow where ‘The Haywain’ had angled upon a picture wire, her voice bouncing from the empty surfaces: Isonville used to be my home, now it’s just a house. Anna’s father had one hand around her waist, another finger-hooked to a hatbox: Come on, Ellie. A fresh start. It’s not as if I ever felt truly at home here, you know. Your father’s place and all that. He saw his mistake, her offended spine and betrayed mouth, and tried to make it better. Catching Anna’s eye: Get in the car, you kids, quick smart. Anna came home to Pandowie every Easter, every semester, every long weekend. Lockie would call for her at the six-forty acres and they would disappear for hours in his ute. Her mother said: We never see you. Can’t you stay at home this once? Poor Hugo, he misses you desperately, you know, stuck here with us. He’s always asking when you’re coming home again. Pay him some attention, dear. Take him to the Wirrabara Dance tonight, why don’t you? Mortified, Anna went in search of her brother. Fencing with Dad on the other side of the hill, her mother said. Anna climbed away from the house, kicking at dirt clods between the stubble rows: I am guilty of selfishness and self-absorption. I am a bad sister, a bad daughter. I have much to atone for. She found the menfolk in a creek where a flash flood had swept the fence away. Her father was saying: She’ll do, mate. Hugo was saying: No, Dad. It’s crooked. This was the essential history between them. They welcomed her interruption. Two warm, uncomplicated smiles to light her advance through the wiregrass. Uncle Kitch chose a day in early spring for the Ison reunion. The women wore spring cottons, the men wore their shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Isons from all over Australia. Isons I hadn’t known existed, Anna’s mother said. She walked with Anna through the big rooms of her brother’s house, smiling hellos to the thronging strangers. She went to the bathroom, came out stifling laughter: Anna, go and look. Anna looked. All through the day she came upon those message strips: Turn Off Light. Flush After Use. Keep Shut. Private, No Entry. Poor Uncle Kitch, she said. It’s as if his home is a monster, devouring all of his money. Anna compiled her lists from the To Let notices in the Chronicle and the Stock Journal, piled the children into the car and drove through the dispiriting hours, crossing off one address, scribbling maybe against another. She didn’t see how she could turn those empty hovels into homes. They were eaten up with weeds and salt damp. Their floors leaned. They were angled to resist the sun. Didn’t these people think before they built? she wanted to know. Then the empty schoolmaster’s house by the sunken road was offered for rent. It had been renovated by a weekending QC from Adelaide, who now wanted to spend his weekends on a yacht. This is our new home, Anna said, holding two little hands. You’ll each have a bedroom, won’t that be good? She watched the children, waiting for
them to throw off their chains, thinking that she could relax when finally they relaxed. They stood mute and dazed, wall-sidlers who dared not stray from her side. It was their Uncle Hugo who saved them, with a little red wagon. Anna watched Michael balance on his heels and poke the wagon and swivel the handle and gauge the capacity. She saw him lift Becky around the waist and plonk her down on the tray top. He tugged the handle. Becky rocked, her eyes wide, her knuckles white: Mikey, make it go! The Conservatorium of Music wrote to say that Rebecca was obliged to enrol in person. We’ll drive you down, Anna said, and went at once to the telephone: Sam to see Dr Slade about his back, 9.45 on North Terrace; a glaucoma check for herself, 11.15; the three of them to pop in on Mrs Mac in the nursing home around two o’clock. On the way home, Rebecca leaned into the space between the two front seats: Mother, where does it come from, your saying Home, James? Every time we go out anywhere. Anna had to think: You know, I believe poor old Mrs Mac used to say it whenever she picked us up after school. Home, James. We used to wonder who James was. The six-forty acres is home to Hugo now. Anna and Sam like to have dinner with him. He’s a man alone, like many of the men in Anna’s life. Alone doesn’t necessarily mean lonely, he says. I’m content. He’s a good cook. He’s proud of his garden. He likes to show Anna the hidden folds in the six-forty acres, washaways he’s reclaimed with a hundred young trees. Anna’s last home will be a little place beside the sea. A home, not a house, as some of the places she’s lived in have been. Even so, two or three times a year she will ring Pandowie and say to her mother, her brother: Get a bed ready. I’m coming home for the weekend.