Black Diamonds (30 page)

Francine takes care of him, and Danny and Charlie too, while I stay out on the verandah trying not to be angry. It's a big effort. Harry will be all right, eventually, we'll see to that however we can. But how many kids are going through this rubbish? Tonight. Never mind yesterday and tomorrow. All over the world. Sliced up by grief and propaganda. Finding it a bit hard to float away from this one.

‘Are you all right?' France comes back out.

No. ‘Yes.' Dull throb now, very pleasant.

She stands beside me. ‘Apologies for jumping to conclusions earlier, I …'

‘I wasn't ever going to belt him,' I tell her. Don't think I could ever belt a kid, any kid.

‘Good,' she says, and she sounds so sad with it; I can't look at her.

But I ask: ‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes,' she gives me a soft little laugh. ‘In spite of a few good
beltings
'

That makes me look at her. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Our Lady of the Leather Strap, at school. Hideous.' She winks: ‘And I never did a thing to deserve it of course.'

Gut knots again at that thought; what sort of a grub would you have to be to hit Francine?

She adds: ‘You don't have to work too hard at being intimidating, Daniel, and he's only a little boy.'

‘I know.' And I do, very much, so I tell her: ‘Losing Harry after four days didn't do much for my temperament, did it. I've lost less to just about do my head in, and not even mates, France. I didn't have mates over there, only a few, and you can work out why, but Harry is a fair bit more than a mate, and if I was a bit rough on him when he came in, then too bad. He won't leave this house again without telling anyone where he's going, will he. He's not going to push it that far a second time to find out.' I am barking.

‘No.' She puts her hand on my hip and says: ‘But if he does, he knows how to disable you now.' Very funny, France, but she cracks me anyway. Then she says: ‘If you're not going to paint or do anything else in particular, then maybe you should see about getting that elbow fixed, if it can be.'

No, for all the same reasons. ‘Missed that boat, I'd say.'

‘Daniel,' she's talking to a moron,' a Sydney surgeon, a Sydney anyone will do anything for money, especially now. Don't think you've got a problem with cobbling together funds and just asking for it to be done; you can relax your frugality for a minute and splash out on yourself.'

It's not my frugality that needs relaxing. ‘You want an indoor bathroom,' I say. ‘Maybe after that.'

She laughs, loud: ‘Capable as you are at everything under the sun, darlingest, I doubt you'll be able to put in an indoor bathroom on your own. Not as a community undertaking either: you are
not
getting Evan and friends to do it for their Danny for the love of it. That's immoral.'

‘That's not immoral — that's the way we are.' Though she has a point. I could ask Evan to get me the moon and he would, and he'd never take anything for it. We are all idiots. Complain about the unfair distribution of wealth and then knock back a bit of equaliser. For a mate. Jesus. ‘All right, I'll pay for help then.'

‘This is a stupid conversation,' she says. ‘I can wait for a silly bathroom. But you didn't look too well just now. I didn't realise it gave you any trouble at all.'

‘It doesn't.' It does though; I've done that to myself a fair few times to know about it; done it in bed, that's why I like to put her up on the sideboard whenever I can. ‘It'll be all right in the morning.'

Everything always is, isn't it.

No it's not, and it's not just the fact that grinding throb kept me awake half the night. It's more that I feel like something filthy at the bottom of a trench. It's come back and hit me like a cave-in and I don't want to get out of bed. Rats have stopped to watch and listen. I can hear France outside the bedroom door, talking to Charlie, who wants to kick the ball around if I'm not going to work, and asking why I don't go to work. She's saying: ‘Oh, we sometimes sleep in on Mondays, any old days, when it's required. We do things a bit differently round here whenever we can.'

I could smile at the whole truth of that, but my face won't work. I didn't even hear the whistle this morning, and I hear it every morning, bar Sundays, even when I was going mad out the back. I should get up and talk to Harry, let him know everything is all right, or will be. But I can't picture myself actually speaking, saying something useful to him yet, apart from, maybe: thanks a lot, you little shit. The fact that I know what this is this time doesn't help. The very last time this happened was that day in London, when I went to the gallery to drag myself away from it. That worked. Didn't it. I have to do something like that now. Paint my France; dull angry throb; won't be today. Can't make a fist, let alone hold a pencil. Nothing for me at the Wattle either, apart from resuming hostilities with Drummond, and I couldn't be further from arsed. What does he do all day? Read the papers, talk to a few people, look at the books, look important, get together with other important people at this place and that and talk about how important they are and how wonderful the war is. I don't know where I fit in. And I don't particularly want to fit in. Anywhere.

I'm just thinking about how quick chloroform would kill you without you knowing about it, when France shoves open the door, closes it and whispers: ‘Whatever it is that's going on in here, just stop it.'

That's enough to frighten anyone out of it. I lie there and look at her like she's a witch. Maybe she is.

She says: ‘There's a boy wandering out in the orchard on his own who needs a word with you.'

Yes. Yes. Yes. Rattled out of it now.

She says: ‘What's wrong?'

I say, getting up; awch fuck: ‘Just sorry for myself.'

‘There's no room for that here any more. If you've got a problem, for heaven's sake will you speak to me?'

‘Won't happen again,' I tell her. And it won't, not while the witch is anywhere near me. Just as well she loves me. ‘But I'm fairly certain Harry's broken my arm.'

 

FRANCINE

Oh dear indeed. He doesn't have a choice now; he'll have to see Doctor Nichols at least, since no-good elbow is defunct and he is in a good deal of pain over it, pretending he's not. Harry is silently mortified even after Daniel said to him: ‘Mate, you've got no idea how much this is my fault. You didn't mean it, and I know why you let fly. So you can put it right behind you. I, on the other hand, have to do what I should have done weeks ago. The only lesson here is not to put things off. If you've got something on your mind, discuss it, don't bottle it. Always leads to trouble.'

Bravo, Daniel. If only … but let's not dwell there. Nor I in the churnings that kept me awake all night feeling your hurt, watching you pretend to be asleep, then asking you if you want breakfast in bed and getting an indecipherable grunt in reply. Nothing hocus pocus about that. It's knowledge all right: knowledge that I can look past your anger, your foul mouth, and your surly face, I can even cope with the occasional beard if you ever do that again, but I won't abide this worst of yours: this feeling of …
absence.
Perhaps a hole filled by grief and shame. And perhaps I have a will to match it, if the look on your face when I did speak my mind was anything to judge by. Is this the worst of you? Regardless, I shall exploit my power over it ruthlessly from here on. So, there you go, Father. Maybe there you go, Sarah, too.

And now here we all go, piling into the car. I ask Harry to hold onto squirming Danny, to give the lad something to take his mind off our predicament, give him an awful lot to do on the short trip to the hospital. He needs this responsibility, not being carted off to Grandma's feeling glummer than glum. Then I ask him to look after his brother and Danny while Big Danny gets Achilles' Elbow fixed up. Well, at least a more comfortably incapacitated fracture, waiting for word from this fellow in Sydney to see if and when the structural problem that caused it might be corrected. Doctor Nichols manages not to rub it in. This has to be the last time, please, for the Curse of the Thing. But not for something else; something I've been longing for.

I say to Daniel on the way home: ‘Do you know what this situation is missing?'

‘What.' Trying not to be cranky for Harry's sake; not quite succeeding.

‘A further complication.'

‘Hmn.'

‘You don't sound like you want one, Daniel. What's wrong with you?'

He looks at me that way I love. ‘What now.'

‘I think we're going to have another baby.' So pronounced Mrs Moran while Daniel was receiving application of
cement.

Cracked
him. Beautiful.

 

 

FIVE

JANUARY–NOVEMBER 1918

 

FRANCINE

Darlingest Little Danny will not accompany us to Sydney. No chance but Buckley's there. He can stay with Grandma. But we will take Charlie and Harry as well as Miriam's eldest, Kathryn, who's almost twelve, since an extended tour of Babel is a good reason to delay the trauma of starting at a new school, and the children will provide good distraction for me from the purpose of our trip: The Operation. It's a glorious big blue sky morning as we tootle around to Grandma's, and I don't want to leave the valley, except that, apart from getting Achilles's Elbow brutalised by some man we've never met, I also have an act of sedition planned for the sojourn. Not completely gaga this time, given the change in our circumstances, and greater degree of rationality obtained after thought; it will be a small but significant act. I probably won't succeed, but I'd kick myself forever if I didn't have a go. Daniel wishes he could be a fly on the ceiling for my attempt; but I'm glad he won't be: better that he takes my failure lying down and medicated. I'll take it like a girl. Besides, I don't really want him to see me make a fool of myself: he can hear all about it in amusing anecdote afterwards.

Plenty of inspiration for foolishness and sedition of all kinds today, I think, but not very many avenues left for the expression of such. Billy the Troll still reigns over us, despite the failure of his last conscription referendum, and his promised resignation: he's been recalled by the Governor-General, Sir Someone or Other, because no one else was available to fill the vacancy. Not a soul in the entire parliament? If you believe that, you can believe there's a man in the moon. Suspicious by nature, as I am, I do, however, think it would be fair to say that there's rather a lot going on down the dark rat tunnels of power that we don't know about. The Troll was asking our permission to send seven thousand conscripts per month:
per month?
At that rate he'd have no one to rule over in quick time; he'd have to start sending women and children. Our population is about four million, and he's determined it be decimated: ten per cent unaccounted for. He's already unaccounted for three hundred thousand odd, so he's getting there. He is clearly deluded, but the only man capable of running the country? Very concerted efforts being taken to ensure our ignorance remains intact, too. No photographs, no words, no speeches allowed against the war effort, the government or Britannia. No complaints, no strikes, no fainting in the street allowed against poverty and exploitation. Stick your hand up and you'll get it bashed down by a pack of returned men, who are allowed to do as they please to dissenters: anyone who's served in the AIF could probably murder a trade unionist, a Catholic or even a pacifist over a penny and claim defence of the national interest. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you can at the very least now be arrested by the Troll's new Commonwealth Police Force, established in response to some wicked Queenslander who hurled a couple of terrifying eggs at our PM last month; apparently the local constabulary were too busy laughing to come to his aid, so the Troll has declared the entire state of Queensland a viperous nest of sympathy for the Hun, and the other worst one, Sinn Fein; and the entire country in need of supervision against any impulse more radical than breathing.

Obscuring the real news: that the veterans still haven't been delivered their promise of land grants, housing, jobs or meaningful compensation. If you lose both legs then you get four pounds a week, good job, but if you only lose one you get one pound eight and six. The average working-man's wage is something like three pounds seven, now that inflation has pushed it to the dizzy heights. Do the equation for the fellow who didn't stand close enough to the shell to get both blown off. Do that equation for Stan Henderson, who still can't get a job to make up the shortfall, whose Lilly now works the dawn shift in the arms factory cleaning the machines. She laughs at the irony, good for her, but I think that's what you call straightforward evil; and will be more so when their baby arrives sometime in April. I'm waiting for the Troll to proclaim that compensation has been found to be entirely unnecessary, since he's made it to the top of the tree in spite of being stunted, ugly, obnoxious, demented and, apparently, deaf as a post.

The veterans' leagues hail him, though — they're the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia now, and express their cooperative frustrations with hatred of everything that's not British. Part of the reason I've quietly retired my association there: too tricky to sympathise with that conflict of interest, and in any case, Those Who Help Themselves are coming back in droves now to look after each other so us women are not really needed any more for much beyond cake-baking. The other part is my own sense of conflict: in deciding of late to refrain from tongue-holding where an issue burns, I don't want it to lash at anyone who really doesn't need my opinion adding insult to their injury. Enough of a small but significant victory to have got Daniel out the door to add his ‘No' vote to the referendum; he said, ‘I can't write,' and I said, ‘You only have to tick a box.' I could feel the hurt burning all the way into town, but he did it, and afterwards when an old wag idling about under the awning of the Cosmopolitan said, ‘Oi, young fella, I'd say your motor was a beauty if I hadn't caught sight of your driver,' he laughed all the way back home.

And now we're going all the way back to the Big Smoke, and he's been laughing at me all morning: ‘Everything's all right, and no I don't think I'll need a jumper, Francine, not even just in case. ‘And now Danny's dispatched and Kathryn ensconced; Mim tells hopeless little brother to ‘break a leg or let Harry have a try' — she's bouncing back — and Sarah chides for bad taste but she's smiling as she waves with the four little girls and one little boy running round the bottom of her skirt out on the street. Wish I had a camera. Push all other thoughts aside. I'm overwhelmed with a wash of joy; throat closing over for every life that's not like ours. Leprechaun pokes me in the ribs and says: Laugh! I do. And we hit the road, driver delightedly maternally deranged.

Motor backfires as we turn up off Dell, kids squeal, and Daniel doesn't even flinch; instead he turns around to them and says: ‘Settle down, you lot.' Then: ‘Keep your eyes on the road, Francine.'