Autumn Laing (6 page)

The blood stain might have been the confident final flick of a Chinese master’s brush as he lifted it from the paper. A smile of private triumph from the old poet painter. Was her mother’s handwriting what they called copperplate? He didn’t know and
would not ask. It was another gap in his knowledge of them that could stay a gap. Some gaps didn’t need filling. Whatever kind of handwriting they called it, he could see it revealed nothing personal but perfectly concealed his mother-in-law’s character behind the blind regularity of its elegant curves. Better to have a gap you could see through than fill it in with knowing something useless. Maud Black had made it plain to him that she thought her daughter marrying out of her caste, and to a Catholic, would bring nothing but heartache and trouble on all of them.

The Blacks were tall people, the men broad with it. Big fellows. Thighs like bullocks. Country boys. Highland or Borderers in their origins, they had the weight and presence of farmers or fighters, a tight violence of ownership in them. Perhaps it was a remnant of the Viking. Just the men for throwing hammers and tossing cabers. Pat himself was of a slight build, like his mother, and might have been a dancer or nearly a jockey. He felt like an elf standing with Edith’s father and brothers. A shifty little Irishman from the back streets of St Kilda, one of the Black boys was heard to say of him. A Pat, they said, dismissing him. Indeed he was, and did not wish to apologise for it. Wasn’t marrying that Irish scallywag the very worst thing possible our Edith could have done? Why ever did the girl have to go and fall in love with that scrawny little bugger?

He knew Edith defended him. ‘Pat is going to be Australia’s greatest artist one day.’ Her mother nearly choked on her apple crumble to hear this from her daughter. ‘Oh, not the
world’s
greatest then?’ she said, and was intending to develop a sharper sarcasm but a piece of the crumble went down the
wrong way and prevented her from speaking. She took a gulp of water, everyone at the table watching her sideways, and cleared her airways before she was able to go on, getting just a little beetrooty in the cheeks with the effort of fighting the crumble. ‘Even Max Manner never made such an arrogant claim as that.’ A thick wheeze still in her delivery. Dabbing at her lips with her napkin. ‘It’s all right! I’m all right! Don’t look at me!’ There was still something throttling her speech, as if a persistent crumb in the airways might yet get the better of her. ‘And the good Lord alone knows,’ she went on valiantly, ‘Manners is a man with a very high and mighty opinion of himself.’ She needed to breathe, however, and had to pause and blow her nose again. They waited in respectful silence for her. ‘Your grandfather would have been ashamed to hear such a thing from you. The
greatest
, indeed!’ They ate in silence for a while, subdued and sombre, looking down at their bowls of apple crumble, knowing it was the disaster of Edith’s man that was choking the wife and mother of them and was not the fault of the crumble at all. Edith ought to have been ashamed of herself. But that girl was too stubborn for shame. What would Grandpa Anderson have said if he’d been alive? His favourite little peach hooking herself up with a Mick? And Edith’s brothers ever after greeting him with, ‘And how’s Australia’s greatest artist today?’ Slapping their thighs and looming about the place laughing.

Maud Black, Edith’s mother and the author of the blood-smeared letter in his hand, was not, in Pat’s opinion, a generous woman herself and was unlikely to ever come around to his way of seeing the world. When he told her he was a sixth-generation Australian on both sides of his family (the only family distinction
he could think of that might amend her displeasure), she closed her eyes and drew herself up and murmured something about the first Catholic priests to arrive in Australia being convicts. He told her he and his family didn’t give a tap for religion. But like the crumble this seemed to go down the wrong way too. So he went silent and withdrew into himself and thought about something interesting that had nothing to do with his in-laws. Fuck them.

Still standing by the gate with the letter in his hand, he looked at the defaced handwriting on the envelope. He noticed the dried horse blood on the brown skin on the back of his hand had formed a lovely crackly look over the prominence of veins. He examined the effect with interest. He was wondering what might be done with it. He picked flakes of the blood off with the nail of his thumb, experiencing the same pleasurably private guilt he experienced whenever he picked his nose. He tried a flake of the blood on his tongue. Something metallic. For sure, he might have been defensive about his own handwriting once upon a time, for it
was
childish and awkward-looking. When he wrote he stuck the tip of his tongue out the corner of his mouth. It was for steadiness. Having his tongue under control helped him concentrate on the point where the nib was moving across the paper, releasing its lovely mysterious snail trail of dark ink. A trail that could, and indeed would, take on meanings of all kinds for him. There was, if you thought about it at all (which he was surprised to find no one but himself ever did), no limit to what the ink trail could manage in the way of uncovering and portraying likenesses and even thoughts. The ink, he observed with astonishment, had states of mind in it.

The day Miss Tasker issued the class with pens and nibs and inkwells Pat was smitten with the power that was handed to him and fell in love with the life of the ink trail. That day, his secret life of words and art began their mysterious dance, embraced so intimately the one with the other that he had never been able to decide since whether he was poet or painter. Copperplate, or whatever conformity of regularity it was Miss Tasker was required by the Victorian education department to impose on their hand, was the enemy. He refused it with a fierce intuition. Seeing the trap at once. To bring the ink trail under their control. That’s what they were up to. Old Miss Tasker, with her yellow ruler and the smell of offal on her breath, her long grey hairs falling onto your paper when she leaned over you, had no success curing him of his protruding tongue or his wayward pen and she exhausted herself finally in the futile effort of opposing him. ‘You are a gipsy!’ she shrieked at him, her cheeks flaming, as if him being a gipsy excused her failure. She made him stand with his face to the map of the world, pushing his face into it (Mercator’s projection), on which Australia was a big pregnant pink island. Now there was a shape for you! A bold outline to be laid down in his memory and never forgotten. His country. He was blessed with the entitlement of being native born. And she clouted him on the ear with the side of her ruler to bring home to him his failure. He mistook her fury for a most convincing act. ‘There is no hope for you, Patrick Donlon!’

His mistake was understandable. Gipsy was the worst insult Miss Tasker knew. But for Pat, being called a gipsy did not carry the demeaning force of an insult, implying instead the exotic, a hidden promise of something uncommon that not
everyone had. He took it as a distinction and from that day was confirmed in his sense of being different and superior. You might say that his teacher, this grey and harried old lady, had addressed not him, the boy wearing the dirty khaki shorts with the rent in the bum, but his demon, the invisible elemental presence within him. It was the first time anyone had spoken so personally to the genie of his imagination, and it made Pat realise something obvious he had always known but had never described to himself: he lived in two worlds, the private world of his imagination and the public world of breakfast and walking home from school with Gibbo and riding his bike and being clouted on the ear by Miss Tasker and longing to touch the back of Catherine Phillips’ knees. Miss Tasker’s fury was a revelation, and he came thereafter to think of her as his secret ally and to treat her with great respect and kindness, taking all her nastiness and her punishments and insults as part of a game between the two of them to keep the truth of their unusual alliance a secret from the rest of the class. He thought sometimes she overdid it a bit. His mother asked him why his right ear was always inflamed. He said it was nothing and wouldn’t let her look.

His attachment to his teacher was a circumstance that bewildered the crabby old maid, and she remained convinced that it was Patrick Donlon’s singular aim in life to make fun of her in front of his mates. The more exaggerated he was in his politeness, the more she saw his behaviour as cruel and satirical. When they were all gone home and everything was quiet and she was alone in the smelly classroom, on more than one occasion she put her head in her hands and wept, wishing she was young again and had the energy to defeat the boy.
That a boy with dirty feet and occasional head lice, who stuck his tongue out of his mouth while he struggled to copy the alphabet in large capitals from the board, should bow to her when he came into the classroom could be taken as nothing less than intentional insolence. And the class laughing their heads off and hissing with delight at the performance. So she used her ruler freely on him. But failed to rule him with it. Which eventually helped drive her to despair about herself and everything else. Her failure to turn up for work one day was never satisfactorily explained to the children. Her replacement was of no special interest to Pat. Miss Tasker had done her job well and would not be replaced in his special affections.

When Pat asked his mother if there was gipsy in him, she said he was born with a shock of black hair and that you could never tell what was in you if you were Irish, there having been in Ireland every kind of person and strange being you could ever imagine, including leprechauns and Spaniards and heaven knows what else in the way of witches and fairies and goblins and that kind of thing, and it all went back too far to ever know what bits of this or that might have got into you along the way. ‘You could be a moon boy for all I know.’ No one, she said, bending over the washtub and scrubbing the last of his father’s shirt collars against the ripples of the board, breathing hard through her open mouth, no one knew who they really were if you went deeply enough into it. ‘So have I got gipsy in me or not?’ he wanted to know. ‘You might have a bit of gipsy in you and you might not.’ She would not commit herself beyond that. ‘It’s even money then?’ he said, using a phrase he had often heard his dad use when talking with his mates about the gee-gees. ‘I suppose so,’ she conceded. It was good enough
odds for him and he took the offer of it. ‘And have you and Dad been to Ireland then?’ he asked her. ‘You should be at school,’ she told him. ‘
Have
you?’ he persisted. ‘No, we haven’t.’

He thought about this for a while, watching the rinsing and bending and breathing going on fiercely beside him. But he wasn’t quite done yet. He wanted one further point of fact cleared up. ‘If you and Dad have never been to Ireland, why do we call ourselves Irish?’ She straightened and eased her back, the palm of her hand pressed to her kidneys. ‘What else are we going to call ourselves, you ninny?’ She flicked suds at him and bent and picked up the basket loaded with rinsed shirts and collars and pushed him out of the wash house, holding out the dripping basket ahead of her and threatening to wet him. ‘If we’re not Irish, what are we?’ She laughed as she went out into the sunlight of the backyard, a shapely young woman still in those days and filled with wonder herself at the curiosity of her eldest. She ached with anxiety to think of him going into the world on his own one day and would have liked to keep him at the age of holding hands and looking up with belief in his innocent eyes asking her his lovely silly questions. Did he suppose they could call themselves English? As she pegged her husband’s dripping shirts on the line, Edna Donlon said to the blackbird that was watching her from the overhang of the neighbour’s plum tree, ‘And isn’t he going to be breaking hearts with those sky-blue eyes of his one day?’

He got his bike from the shed and rode down the street to Gibbo’s place. There were two things that day he swore to do when he grew up: make the acquaintance of a fair-dinkum full-blood gipsy and see Ireland for himself. Had he been hoping to encounter ancestral affinities with this wish list, even then?
Wondering if meeting a gipsy would be like meeting a long-lost brother? And if being on the soil of Ireland would give him a queer feeling he didn’t get from being in the country of his birth? Some expectation of this kind, of encountering a world more real than the one he was in? Beginning to ask, in other words, the grown-up question: who am I really? Where do I belong? The same question wearing different clothes. And what did he think of all that now that he was a grown man of twenty-two? Did it still matter to him?

He ran up the path and took both veranda steps in a stride and snatched open the flywire door. In the kitchen he nipped a corner of Gerner’s ten-shilling note with thumb and forefinger and withdrew it from his trouser pocket. He put the precious note on the draining board beside the letter. Blood money. While he was butchering the horse for Oscar Gerner’s dogs, his axe aloft, a big idea had come steaming into his mind, like a train arriving at the station, and he the only man alive waiting there for its arrival, a solitary figure on the platform knowing it was his destiny to step on board and take the journey. His train. In that poised instant, before burying the bright steel blade in the poor beast’s groin, the flesh still quivering, Pat conceived his bold plan of escape. Audacious it was, and not one of their mates they’d left behind at the Gallery School would have been game to try it on.

The thought of it was making him hot with impatience. He would do it. There was nothing to stop him. He would carry it out. He turned on the tap over the sink and washed the blood off his hands. There was blood on his khaki shirt, too. His mother would have had the shirt off his back and soaking in cold water in the laundry tub by now. He cupped his hands
and leaned and drank, the water chill in his throat. A poet warrior of the old Icelandic days, he was, Egil Skallagrimsson, his axe beside him, taking his feud to the king himself, bending to drink from a sacred spring that had been pouring out of its magical crevice since before the gods retreated from the face of the earth, knowing themselves cursed by the death of poetry among men. Would he learn the ancient Greek and read their great literature in the original? Was it possible? And French. To hear Rimbaud as Rimbaud had heard himself. He envied Edith the fluency of her French. In his mouth the words were tortured out of shape, chipped, hard and separate, insisting on being Australian. She made the flow of them all running together sound as natural as thought. A song she had learned in her infancy. How could he ever get to that? There was so much to read. So much to learn. So much catching up to be done. Surely he had started too late and would never be convincing on their terms. Hadn’t he always known that he would have to do something else? His
own
thing. Something they were not already expert at. Something they and their teachers had never thought of. There was already one thing he had done the others had not, and which stood him in advance of their reading. For while they were poring over the novels of D.H. Lawrence, he had been reading the Icelandic sagas.