Hill of Grace (20 page)

Platform eight, ten fifteen, the man in blue resting on a stool, Phil with his head out of the Brill's window as they passed Dudley Park Cemetery with its cracking memorial wall. ‘I do!'

The driver stopped at Islington to come back and quieten them down. The rail-yards were oblivious to the night, steam and diesel refusing to sleep, skylights bleeding arc light back into the universe as engineers ground axles to within a thousandth of an inch of their lives.

Kilburn. Red-brick dreams heavy with lantana, and Rose pulling back the boys' beds, discovering
The Secrets of St John Bosco
and sitting down for a giggle, taking it out to the shed to share with Bob who put it down to Phil.

The boys in the driveway, and then in the lounge of exploding tea and laughter, narrating the farce of theatre Fargo style, Phil describing the bride as a Wagnerian whore (while Rose crunched candied almonds in ignorance) and the director as a cross between Oscar Wilde and Goebbels.

That Friday, over bangers and mash in the cafeteria, Nathan asked Bob if he could stay down again. Bob channelled gravy through a canyon of finely mashed potato before saying, ‘We don't mind you staying, only, it's what your mum and dad want.'

‘They wouldn't care.' Going on to explain how much work he'd been given at trade school, his cold turned green, heavy, dark clouds, cold mornings and exhaustion.

‘How they feel about you skippin' church?'

‘Dad does, if he's got something on.'

‘Yeah?'

Seeing how Bob understood that skipping church wasn't a mortal sin, having done it himself for thirty-odd years; seeing how it was just a case of being practical, God understanding that kiddies needed their wheelchairs, citrus its white oil, lawns their weekly trimming. Anyway, there were Rose's hymns on the radio – passing out through fly-wire which had to be cleaned, windows polished – serenading his near-ripe nectarines with the voices of angels from the Methodist Ladies' College.

And this is how it was that Sunday morning: Phil in his bathers, on a towel on the lawn working on a winter tan, Nathan beside him coughing, phrasing and re-phrasing definitions for torque and motive power, converting between pounds and stone, perch and acre, Bob staring through a lattice of gardenia into the sky, secateurs idle, silently mouthing the words to a distant
My Redeemer
Liveth
. Thinking how, if the sky was a jigsaw, no one would ever solve the riddle of the blue bits, cloudless, featureless, stretching out forever – so many disjunct shapes refusing to come together, the poetry of what Handel had achieved in music eluding him.

William sat at his table, waiting for Bluma to stop coughing, receiving the usual complaints about dampness but explaining how this was neither the time nor the place – their table becoming their altar, demanding the same concentration and focus they gave at Langmeil.

‘“And He showed me a pure river of water of life,”' he read, but Bluma couldn't take it seriously. Church wasn't church without Edna's rusty fingers, without the Stations of the Cross to study or your bum going numb on Arthur's resurrected pews; without hymns to sing along with or the smells of ladies doused in talc, children slurping Turkey lollies in paper twists or the back of Mary Hicks' head full of dandruff and God knows whatever else. ‘Coffee?' she asked, but William just looked up at her with a deadly stare, smoothing his page and continuing.

Bob finished pruning his six rose bushes, snipping the branches into twigs the size of cigarette butts and raking them into a compost pile of his own design: a border of railway sleepers containing everything from lawn clippings to broken egg shells. Drummond compost, he claimed, was the secret of plants which lived longer than a Bulgarian grandmother. Poking Phil's stomach with his rake he asked, ‘Haven't you got exams to learn for?'

‘All in good time.'

‘When's the first?'

‘Tomorrow. Listen, it's under control. You squeeze too much in it's likely to build up and rupture.' Showing how his head might explode all over Bob's buffalo grass.

After lunch they all walked down Carpenter Street towards the station. God had been satisfied (receding back into the box hedge for another week) and creamed corn toasties consumed to the gentle, persistent rhythm of the ABC's stock report. They walked past a sprawling Federation villa on a hill, Bob raising his hand to greet an old lady sitting on the porch. A goat grazed the un-mowed front lawn, tethered via a chain to a stake.

‘Story has it,' Phil said, as they passed on, ‘she was taken to the Queen Victoria Hospital, heavily pregnant, ready to pop. “Here comes the head,” the surgeon says, but when it emerges . . .'

Rose shook her head. ‘People might have stories about us.'

Phil imitated a goat. ‘No joke. She arrives home with a goat, but no baby.'

Rose nodded. ‘She lost the baby. The goat was a distraction.'

Phil laughed. ‘Who gives a goat as a . . . grieving gift? A dog perhaps.' He remembered riding around on his ‘bitza' bike with friends, hiding in the acacias across the road from her, imagining Satan reclining inside with his Best Bets and a lager – calling for her to come in and join him. They'd call out to her, ‘Darling, I'm ready,' and she'd pack up her knitting and go inside, proving it beyond a doubt. Crawling under her window to listen they'd only hear the hum of an old Singer, but this was just put on to fool the innocents.

Arriving in Botanic Park they strolled among the crowd, gathered in close around speakers on the backs of trucks or standing high on piles of fruit crates. The speakers were generally done up in tie and jacket, preaching Communism and Temperance on ninety-day permits. Agitating to crowds comfortably numb in a paradise of Kelvinators and melamine kitchens free of garlic and spring rolls. The only ones taking it seriously were a pair of detectives, standing out like rams' balls as they scribbled in their notebooks:
Clyde Cameron, speaking at the
Comm. (Soviet) ring. Discussed situation at Port Adelaide. Mentioned
how men were organising and being drilled by returned soldiers.

Beside the Communists were the single-taxers, for whom Bob cheered in support, confiding that most people were unaware of what they paid in indirect taxation. Then there were the Douglas creditors, the Socialist Labour Party and a religious group called the Rationalist Society. But for value for money, most people were drawn to the ladies of the Temperance Union, standing before a large banner of what seemed to be an inebriated pony thrown down at the feet of Christ. The first speaker identified herself only as Mary, Mother of Temperance, and declared that spirits worked by dissolving the very cells of the liver and kidney.

Phil couldn't believe it, calling from the back, ‘Where's the research?'

‘Oh, there's research alright. Visit our headquarters and we'll supply you with copies of papers from Europe, written by professors of biology and medicine.'

Bob tripped over a small sign, planted into the grass, announcing Peter Laundy, a pastor who described how the black man was being saved, taught the values of thrift and hard work in a network of missions throughout South Australia and the Northern Territory. Removed from alcoholic mothers (gins sleeping around with multiple partners) so that they might amount to something; given clothes and a bed and a roof over their head, and if they so desired, education to ‘the very highest level'. Briefly reminding the crowd of what their fate might have been otherwise: ‘“For
without
are dogs, and sorcerers, and whore-mongers, and murderers, and idolaters . . .”'

Phil nudged Nathan and whispered, ‘Is this why you stay down?'

Nathan smiled. ‘This one's a nut.' But wasn't so sure, conjuring up William on a soapbox, spewing forth the very same lines.

Bob looked at Nathan and wondered if it wasn't time he made contact with William himself. He watched as Phil, nudging Nathan again, said, ‘Six months with me and you'll be throwing tomatoes at this fella.'

Nathan laughed, explaining how this place would bring out the idiots in any group. ‘We're just like the Baptists,' he said. ‘Nice sing-along and a prayer.'

But Bob wasn't so sure, remembering how his old man had taught him to recognise a Lutheran – walk into a pub and tell a joke, he'll be the only one not laughing.

Sitting in the ‘switch-back', watching teenagers jumping mounds on stripped-back bikes, Bob could still hear Pastor Laundy above the other speakers, more convinced than anyone else of what he was saying. He felt glad, irrespective of the dramas, that they could give Nathan a buffer from the endless devotions and prayers and thanksgiving of the existence he'd described on their walks to work through Kilburn.

Eventually they bought ice-creams and tuppence of lollies from an old Afghan at the zoo gates and headed back into the city. Phil was left at the university library to study and Nathan stayed with him, content to catch up with the papers.

In the late afternoon – as the sun started setting west of the Torrens, streaming in the Barr Smith windows through an opaque, yellow film – Nathan left the newspapers behind and wandered aimlessly through rows of shelves pregnant with books. Rows which stretched as far as Arthur's bottom paddock, the full length of Murray Street, holding more information and facts than he thought the world contained. Row after row, reaching up to a ceiling of spray-on concrete. Six or seven shelves per row, each with a few dozen books – African mystical cults, Micropaleontology, Common Algae of the Great Lakes. And when you were finished on one floor there was another. Silent. Heaters humming. The buzz of fluoros heard above water dripping somewhere. Almost devoid of people. Like the promised End had come and gone. Leaving behind books.

Each of the thousands of books was a world unto itself. Sitting silently, refusing to reveal any of its secrets unless someone picked it up, read it, and thought about things. Like his father's Bible. But that was only one book – one in an endless sea of words in which he stood, drowning in the smell of old paper, overwhelmed and overcome as he was sucked under. Each book seemed to contain its own truth and reality, quoting research and references, so that the Bible itself seemed to be lost among them, unable to support its own wild claims.

If this place represents all knowledge, he thought, then there's no way the Bible is right. What would be the chances of that? People as smart as Phil, working for thousands of years, having and sharing ideas, doing it all honestly and without bias and sentiment, testing them, rejecting them, trying again. Or on the other hand, water into wine and feeding the masses with some old bread.

He stopped randomly, opening a text on Climatic and Biotic Evolution, and although he didn't understand a word, realised that after so many books even your faith in God couldn't be a certainty.

Which led him to Phil, cramming in the medical library, suddenly aware of how much he had to learn before tomorrow. But Phil still wasn't worried, it always worked out in the end. ‘Exams are a game of chance,' he'd told Nathan. ‘There's only so much they can put in and after a while you work out what it will be.'

Nathan held a text and tested him. ‘Stock solutions – G is equal to . . .?'

‘Shit . . . yes . . . MWv over a thousand.'

‘Where M equals?'

‘Molarity.'

On and on like this, surprising Nathan at every turn. ‘Enzyme kinetics?'

‘No, they won't put that in.'

‘Relative potency?'

‘No . . . maybe . . . the dose of an unknown drug, U, divided by the dose of a standard drug, S.'

‘Nearly.'

‘The log of the relationship?'

‘What's a log?'

‘A bit of dead tree.'

They ignored the five-minute bell but were eventually evicted by a cleaner. On the way home, Phil's thoughts drifted out of the railcar's window, leaving molarity and enzymes behind in search of other things. Nathan watched him and, not in a competitive way, felt jealous. To think he had the contents of at least a few dozen of those books in his head, and yet, wasn't interested in using his knowledge as a tool to influence or control others. Phil was at peace with himself and what he did and didn't know. Dismissing it all as ‘so much rot you'll eventually forget anyway'. As if he sensed that the important things were mostly unsaid and unwritten.

‘“For
without
are dogs, and sorcerers . . .”' he intoned, quoting the soapbox pastor and turning back to Nathan.

‘Yes, there are some like him.'

‘Some?'

‘Lots.'

‘What about your old man?'

Nathan turned his head towards the window, smiling, suddenly struck with his own apocalyptic visions on the back of toilet doors (Phil had given him the grand tour, the originals far exceeding the tracings: a nun exposing her breasts, ten times the size of her head, filled with sharks swimming as though in a gold fish bowl).

‘What can I say? My old man believes in the end of the world.'

‘Really? When?'

‘Next year.'

Phil followed the progress of a conductor. ‘You're kidding . . .

how's he worked that out?'

Nathan put on his father's voice. ‘“The dates are all in the Bible.”'

‘And he's found them?'

‘Yes.'

Phil smiled. ‘You know what this means?'

‘What?'

‘I can't date a Catholic.' Presenting his ticket and settling back in his seat. ‘It's alright for you, you've had a root.'

Chapter Ten

Late on a Tuesday night, after the staff had gone home, the Millerites stood around in the
Tanunda Oracle
's hand-press studio. Its editor, a valley newcomer named Juan Pascoe (his beard and hair as wild as Ned Kelly's, forever in untucked shirts and Levis) had given them a crash course on the iron hand-press, locking them in at ten p.m. and asking for things to be left as they were for the morning shift. He had no idea what William Miller was printing, but his money, a collection taken from the whole group, was as good as anyone's. ‘A brochure?' he'd asked, showing them how to ink a form, but William had just replied, ‘Along those lines.'