Joan Makes History (12 page)

I need not even tell you that we were not so crass as to point out that this was no accident, or to ask her how it felt to lift your palms to that torrent from a deafening heaven. But I had been made small, I had been exposed—to myself if to no one else—as being no heroic Joan, no maker of history, but simply Lady Stoneman, the somewhat insipid wife of one of the less spectacular governors of one of Her Majesty's dullest corners of Empire.

I was humbled, but I could not bring myself quite to loathe myself. I watched Mrs Beauman in one of my wrappers, still glowing from her passion, though restored now to some of her plaster perfection, and gracing my pink wrapper rather better than I ever had. I saw that Mrs Beauman, even in my wrapper, was not me. She was making history in her own way as I had to find a way to make my own, even though mine, I now saw, was unlikely to have anything to do with hot-eyed poets, or cavorting horses, or even the ecstasy of ice against fevered flesh. My history would reveal itself to me eventually, and I would have to embrace it, whatever humble form it might choose to take.

I left Duncan not on a night of moon while stockmen snored and dreamed of wild exploits, but among quinces in syrup and bottled peas like pearls. Duncan and I had come to the Show to look at the cattle for professional reasons, and we had stayed for the sheepdogs, marvelling with everyone else while small men in hats clucked and whistled to their dogs and made them perform absurd feats with sheep. I found myself becoming anxious, watching so much obedience, such intelligence, packed into the parcel of a mere dog.

It was all new to me, and intriguing: those dogs, and the huge-uddered milkers rolling their gigantic eyes at us, and the enormous hairy tassels of bulls, and the small skilful men and women who moved quietly among them with shovels of dung and bales of hay. So by the time we reached the Agricultural Hall I was in a trance of strangeness, and after so many months seeing only the same few people day after day, I was as if hypnotised by such an extravagance of strange faces, such an excess of other people's eyes flickering across mine as we jostled past. So many souls, so many stories, were whipping me up to madness.

I paused in the crush before a display of bottled edibles: serrated carrots, diamonds of sliced pale beans, onions and purple cabbage
and peas all packed like jewels in their gleaming jars, no longer food as much as a tribute to ingenuity.

I paused to wonder, and when I looked around I saw that Duncan had continued to move on, past the displays of pointless labour, and in a moment his tweed shoulders had disappeared behind a cluster of flowered hats. A few steps would have taken me back to him: he would have turned, taken my hand, made some small joke about losing me, might have suggested a pot of tea and scones in the refreshment tent. But those few simple steps did not occur to me. Without quite planning, without anything as deliberate as choice, moving by a kind of gravity, I found that I had stepped sideways, into a narrow tunnel that led to the back of a display of apples and pears, arranged so as to represent the main thoroughfares of Mudgee. It was the impulse of a moment, and the shuffle and buzz of the crowd was instantly muffled by a roof of fruit, the glare of lights was darkened and I was alone. I knew that if I did not make the choice of moving back out into the lights, I could remain alone here, and not be found.

Some decisions are over in the wink of an eye and others spin themselves out into a whole tale of their own. I had not made any decision yet, but when I found a fruit box to sit on in this dim sloping space, and discovered that when I sat on it I could see out through a chink in the display and watch the crowd, my action seemed more intentional: the act of sitting gave it a domesticity and permanence it had not had until then.

Duncan appeared in my line of sight after a moment: I watched him glance around, crane over heads, wave at someone he thought was me: I watched him shuffle and turn on the spot, always sure I was somewhere behind him, watched his face gradually close
in on itself with anxiety. At last he walked purposefully off, though with many backward glances, and I guessed that he would spend some time lurking around the powder room (but first, blushing and cross, would have to ask where it was and weather a suspicious stare from someone), and perhaps after that he would go to the tent where lost children waited and wailed.

Trance had me in its grip, but not so much that I was not cunning: I was not so entranced as to come out from behind my peas and pears yet, for a calculating part of me knew that Duncan would be back, and I continued to crouch and peer, watching the country folk whose world I was leaving behind.

A woman in a huge hat of a rather electric shade of blue, that made her face corpse-like, stood pulling her cardigan over her bust and stared, not at the display—she looked a woman who had seen plenty of peas in brine in her time—but at the crowd, at the sharp city folk sniggering openly at so much innocent rustic endeavour, and marvelling, but with contempt, at the way someone had spent days making sure no pea was out of place.

Some goodhearted woman in an apron thriftily made from an old cotton frock had worked hard and been proud of what she had done, was perhaps even this same woman, ill at ease in her electric-blue hat and the new cardigan from Mark Foys that was, she now realised, a little tight over the bust. She stared at the city folk and watched them nudging each other and smirking, and I crouched behind the jars and was a traitor to everything: a traitor to Duncan, gone off in search of me while I hid, a traitor to this kindly woman with her good heart (for I had sniggered, I had scorned!), and even a traitor to the smart folk in their sharp shoddy clothes (no quality from Mark Foys for them, that would last for donkey's years, the look was the thing
for them, not how a thing would last), and I despised them and feared myself for all that I was, and for what I was allowing myself to do. This was the world I had been living in with Duncan, the life of scones, the life where preserved quinces mattered, the life where women did not care if they got fat, and red-faced, and elephantine of ankle, as long as their scones were crumbly and as long as their marmalade could bear the test of being held up to the light by women who knew cloudy marmalade when they saw it, and who did not mind giving you a piece or two of advice on such matters.

Just look at that arrangement,
I heard a woman say in a voice like church, who'd
have thought it possible,
and the man with her, in a hat and a blue-striped suit, guffawed in a way that said he was not going to be intimidated by any number of peas in brine, and said
Blooming waste of blooming time, I'd as soon eat them and be done with it.

I was right in knowing that Duncan would be back: there he was again among the cardigans and the flat country hats, and now I was seized with a terrible stifling excitement and a deadly glee, and watching him this time I felt my trance lifting: I had taken those few steps in a cowardly stupor, but now I could pretend the decision was irrevocable: now I could agree with what my feet had already said, that I had abandoned my husband.

I watched and crouched, breathless with the farcical enormity of what I was doing, and I wondered if he knew, as I did, that he was listening to his watch tick out the first few minutes of the birth of the new Duncan, the Duncan who had been abandoned at the Show, in the Agricultural Hall, by his reckless wife. He stood among the shifting tides of people enjoying their day out, and I watched him become angry, kicking hard at the sawdust
on the ground and ramming his hands into the pockets of his tweed so hard I thought his fists might burst right through.

Anger faded quickly in Duncan, though: he was not a man to keep up a good head of rage for long. I saw him become anxious then, biting those freckled lips of his and shifting from one foot to the other, whirling around as if he had heard me call him, peering and straining through all the people. I watched him rub his eyes where they were weary with willing me to appear, smiling and apologetic, from behind a large man with a pipe, or a clutch of women with flowered frocks. I watched him take off his hat and inspect inside it, running his hand around the brim as if I might be hiding there, saw him look at his watch, then take it off, slowly, being careful with that worn and slippery leather strap that I knew so well. He wound it slowly, carefully, held it to his ear, and looked solemn, listening to it tick.

There were moments when I could see he had convinced himself I was playing a joke on him, and I crouched lower in shame, seeing his face serene and even amused, such a man that even after hours of standing waiting he was prepared to forgive me my little joke. A joke would have been cruel enough, but his face never showed that he could conceive of cruelty worse than that.

The afternoon wore on, my fruit box became hard, and I watched Duncan grow pale, insubstantial with the doubts and fears that I could see filling him now. I grew hungry among so much massed nutrition, and when Duncan had wandered away a few steps I snaked out my hand into the display and took a pear and an apple. They were hard as rocks, both of them, for they had to keep for all the time the Show would last, for it would never do for the display to turn brown and putrid, or for
the slick city folk to snigger about clouds of flies around the map of the main thoroughfares of Mudgee done in seven kinds of pear and eleven kinds of apple. So I ate my bitter fruit, and burped on its hardness, and pondered my own hardness of heart, that I could sit for a whole endless afternoon watching my husband grow wan and worn, haggard with waiting, bloodless with a growing fear that he would not confess to himself.

At last the crowds thinned, bells began to peal, and people in white coats began to herd everyone towards the doors. But Duncan would not be herded. He stood immovable in his thick brown shoes while the men in white gestured at him: he stood, I could see his mouth, a little stiff now and livid with the long hours of patience, saying the same thing over and over, and he would not move: not until one of the men in white, a large red-nosed one who looked impatient to get home to where his wife would have his tea ready for him on the stove, laid a large hand on Duncan's arm.

Then I watched in astonishment at what I had already done to my mild Duncan, for he wheeled on the red-nosed man with rage, took aim at his nose, and let fly with one fist, then the other, and sent one of those brown shoes, too, into the poor shins of that red-nosed man. I saw then that, if I had been crouching on my box, watching and waiting for the possibility that I might change my mind, it was too late now: Duncan was no longer the peaceful man who had woken up beside me that morning. I saw, in the expressions of outrage and righteous sternness on the faces of the white-coated men (hired for just such an emergency, but who would ever have imagined it would take the violent efforts of three large men to remove a spectator from the excitements of the Agricultural Hall?) that Duncan was no
longer a peaceful man. I had fractured his peace for ever, and I sat shivering with awe at my power.

I was off then, away on the open road with the small shammy bag containing William's wizened nuggets: off into my own future. No more crouching red-faced over the fire, poking at corned beef in the pot, no more lugging water up from the creek, and no more of William's caresses under the fly net at night: no more of hearing his voice crack and go hoarse, ragged with lust, or what he called love: no more feeling his eyes on me every minute, even in our bed, where I could not escape his soft looks, for they were caught in the mirror he angled to inflame himself, watching how he penetrated my dark flesh, and how it arched and bucked under him.

And where was I going, I hear you ask? I, Joan, am larger of spirit than that, and do not trouble myself over-much with such small-minded considerations as what might come next. It was enough for me that I had begun my journey, and the journey was the simpler for there being but two roads out of this place: I could head west, or I could head east. I had no answers to any such questions, except the answer of movement, by which one forgot most things.
On!
the inner voice commanded, and on I went, turning my back on the past like every other coward, delighting in speed, or if not speed at least motion.

Walkabout
was something they accused us all of, and used it as the pretext for letting us scour, and scrub, and lug, and display our charms to them in the thickets of their bedclothes, and for giving us nothing of substance. Even my William, who was better than most, had only guffawed when I had revealed to him that I was a woman of destiny:
Oh Joanie,
he had laughed,
what need have you of destiny, when mine is at your disposal?
He had curled my fingers around his warm worm of destiny then: the notion that I might be possessed of an inner voice that bade
On, on, Joan, to your grand future!
was nothing more for him than an amusing flight of fancy that his Joanie was indulging in.

But it was no blackfeller compulsion that set me on the road away from William: it was good sound sense, such as the clay-coloured folk thought they had a monopoly of. I had
plenty tucker, plenty mutton,
as William was fond of reminding me in a threatening way when I wearied of his blandishments, and it was true he had bought me
plenty fine frock-frocks
from the catalogue. But of such trifles a life was not being made. I had other ambitions for myself than being the dusky paramour of lascivious William.

Here I was, then, with nothing much but my nuggets on the road: my nuggets (William's nuggets by rights) making a single suggestive bump in my bodice where nature had provided me with none, and in my bundle a pair of woollen stockings, a shawl, my piece of false hair, and one or two other useful items. Like every other roaming adventurer, I stood looking up and down the road, waiting for the next thing to declare itself to me.

Feet were my first friends. Mine were well shod, in a pair of well-fitting boots that William had had made for me, and which he had polished himself of an evening by the fire until they gleamed along every wrinkle. I strode out along the streets, heading
east and hopefully, but the buildings passed too slowly, too many men stared rudely into my face, and I had a sense of trudging and getting nowhere, of stifling down there among others afoot, and of being too vulnerable to apprehension and all the indignant shouting and nugget-brandishing that would tiresomely result.

So I hopped astride a bicycle as it leaned against a lamp post, and wobbled off down the street. I had not had enough practice at this bicycle business, just a few giggling goes on William's big black Swallow, but I had never been able to make it
Skim The Road
as its advertisement claimed, and the sight of me astride it had always reminded William of me astride other kinds of machines, fleshier ones, and he had tipped me off, and into the hut, and onto the bed, before I had properly mastered this device. But I sprang on this one and made all the haste I could around the first corner. I loved the feel of air rushing past my face, and I was hot with the desire to be on my way, anywhere, quickly.

But that saddle did not fit me, perhaps because it was made for a person with protuberances where I had none, and this Swallow was much too big for me, so that after only a short time I began to pant, and ache, and strain and sweat over the gleaming handlebars, and knew that other gentlemen on other Swallows would be
Skimming The Road
after me at a speed greater than I could manage. I could imagine their indignation, their congested and frustrated ire, that would have liked to hit me, but had to be held in check because I was a female, and a darky, so that it had to be compressed into angry gestures and threatening shouts: I could imagine the way their faces would swell around their moustaches and their voices grow hoarse: oh, I could too easily imagine it, and it filled me with weariness.

So I left the Swallow, propped against a convenient fence, and
tried to walk away as if I had nothing to do with it, but also with a good turn of speed. I was able to round a corner and watch from behind an oleander as five gentlemen in plus fours rode by, saw, shouted, rode back, dismounted, and stood for a long time gesturing and peering and smoothing with their hands the leather of the saddle, and exclaiming at each other before they finally got back on their bicycles, and the one on his penny-farthing leapt up onto it above them all, and wobbled dangerously before picking up speed. Two of them pedalled slowly behind the rest, wheeling the stolen one between them shamefaced like a miscreant.

But the urge was on me now to cover much ground, and to place myself and the bump in my bodice beyond the reach of anyone who might think they had a right to them. So I stepped out quickly and became cunning, leaving the road behind and finding my way up hillsides of trees, along gullies of ferns, and having not forgotten how to creep up on a goanna and bake it in its skin over a few coals, I did not go hungry. And what a pleasure it was, baked goanna taken in solitude! I sang to myself as I wandered on, led by a dragonfly darting ahead of me through the trees, or following the sound of currawongs at dawn, or kookaburras at dusk, or wallaby tracks in the dust until I had to make them up.

A track, then a road, then a town, gave themselves up to me at last, and I put my boots back on (I could not catch goannas in boots, I could not even seem to eat them in boots), and my frock-frock (also removed, the better for listening to dragonflies), and descended on civilised man.

In my frock-frock and my boots, and with my straight hair and light-brown skin from my unknown father (his skin was
speckled like an old leaf with freckles, and she thought his name was Charlie, it was all Mum could ever tell me, and she did not care much), I was a person of some presence, although unmistakably a blackfeller. So I held my head up while I bought another stretch of journey with one of William's bits of dirt, and took my place in the train.
To the Junction?
they asked, and I said
Yes.
I was not interested to know what
Junction:
to know this was a train bound for
the Junction
was plenty of knowledge for me.

A train! I speak of it now casually, as though stepping on trains came naturally, as if I had done it a thousand times before, or even once before. But, I will tell you as being between friends, this was the first train I had ever boarded, and in fact the first train I had ever seen. I had heard about them from William, and from Violet down the road, who had gone on a train once to find her Douglas in the city and lure him back: but this was my first actual train.

I knew that blackfellers on a train did not excite too much curiosity, for Violet was another white boss's gin like myself, and had travelled without causing a stir. I wished to avoid the curiosity of others, and knew that if I truly had a cautious white man's blood flowing in my veins, I would not risk a train, but would stick to feet on dirt. But my own curiosity was too great: I could not resist.

I had heard from Violet how you bought a bit of paper from a man in a cage, and sat on a wooden seat, and how there was a dunny that you could see the ground out the bottom of, that you were not supposed to use when the train was in a station. All this I found to be true, and more besides: Violet had done her best to make a train noise, and we had laughed so loudly that William had come in to see what all the noise was about,
and he had laughed too, when he heard Violet's train noise and saw her eyes roll, describing the blasts of smoke from the engine and the great speed of the train's progress.
It left me stomach behind when it started,
Violet claimed,
and it was two days later it caught up with me.

Now I knew what she meant, and I was afraid of the way the trees and stones moved past the window, all blurred and dizzy, and of the thunderous clacking and rattling of the box we sat in. But there was a nice chatty stickybeak of a knitting woman in the box with me, an old grey-haired auntie sort of person, Mrs Cheeseman from Brewarrina. She agreed that she was a long way from home, and after treating me to all the reasons, she began to probe my own recent past and how it was that I found myself,
a nice native girl like yourself,
as she called me, on this train going to
the Junction.
Mrs Cheeseman had a way of not listening, and of interrupting you to ask
Where exactly is your home, dearie?
and
After the Junction, dearie, where exactly do you go from there?
and other questions I did not wish to have to answer. Nice native girls like myself can always feign stupidity, so I did for Mrs Cheeseman:
Oh, such a lovely home, Mrs Blenkinsop is ever so kind,
I gushed,
Oh it was so hot out that place, Mrs Cheeseman, well, Mrs Blenkinsop she fainted dead away every afternoon at three o'clock, Mr Blenkinsop he had to give her medicine from the brown bottle.

Well, Mrs Cheeseman was no fool, she knew something was awry, and began to eye the bump in my bodice, so that when the train slowed and clashed into a town, I whisked up my bundle from the floor and said
Bye-bye Mrs Cheeseman, I hope your niece be better soon,
and made ready to get off. But she held me by the arm, saying,
No dear, this is not the Junction yet dearie, you must not get off here,
and Mrs Cheeseman's grip was strong, and I saw the
way she was looking around for a man in a uniform to question me and delve into the secrets of my bodice, so I brought cunning to bear on the situation.
Okay Mrs Cheeseman,
I said and sat down grinning my amiable blackfeller grin, but when the whistle blew and the train began to move, I was up quick as a flash, grabbed the bundle, and shot out the door and off the train before Mrs Cheeseman could as much as stand up: so it was that I found myself on all fours, panting, with a grazed hand and gravel in one knee, my bonnet askew and everyone staring, on the platform at some place that was not
the Junction.

I picked myself up with a great show of rue, and as if I had been on the run all my life I threw more dust in the eyes of any pursuers by asking the way to the Catholic school (it was a town big enough, in my cunning I was sure there would be one). But I had been too smart this time for my own good.
My word yes,
said a man on a buggy who had watched me pick myself up.
You mean the Welfare, I am going past there myself, jump up behind now.
This was not what I had intended: I had intended listening solemnly to long explanations of
left
and
right
and
you can't miss it,
and once out of the station I intended to take every
right
where they had said
left,
every
left
where they had said
right,
and to succeed in missing it. But here was destiny suggesting another plan, and I surrendered for the moment.

You are older than the general run of them,
this man observed when he had got the horse going.
They like to get them young and train them up.
I nodded and made my eyes go somewhat poppy and my mouth slack-lipped: I watched him like this until he grew uneasy under my idiot stare, and said no more until we arrived.
Here you are lass,
he said loudly and clearly, I
hope they
can make a useful God-fearing domestic out of you,
although his look said clearly that he did not think it possible.

I knew about the Welfare, of course, and had promised myself never to have a child, so I need never know the anguish of having it taken from my arms and sent to the Welfare people. I did not intend to delay in the vicinity of any such place, but I was obliged to hover by the gate until the man's snail-like buggy was out of sight: I hovered and pretended to be having trouble with a bootlace, hanging for balance onto the gate that struck chill into my hand.

But before the obliging man and his horse had moved out of sight, the great door of the building opened and I had to step aside for a long column of children. The brown serge they wore made their dark skins sallow, and there was a dullness of eye to them all, a droop of shoulder. These children did not look around as they walked, but trudged along in pairs looking at the ground as if their futures were written there.

They were children who had been numbed: they looked as though they did not care any more. With them from the interior of the dark building came a stream of air smelling of carbolic and furniture polish, and of too many humans too close together and not happy.

There was a line of black boys, then one of black girls, and beside them walked their white guardians: a long thin melancholy man of feeble whiskers and jutting chin, a man himself as beaten and glazed as these children, and two women, one so stout she seemed to pant in her flesh, and roll from one foot to the other, and the other a pointy-faced plain woman, plainer even than myself, with ears far too large for her head, and too much on display, the way her thin hair was pulled back over her skull.

As I watched, one of the girls suddenly burst out of her ranks and before the fat woman could move, or the large-eared one catch her, she had shoved her way into the lines of boys, and was clinging to one of the grey-faced boys, who clung back, both in a terrible silence, while the thin man, the fat woman and the one with ears were parting the rows of boys to reach them and drag them apart. They were silent throughout: silent while they were being pulled away from each other, silent while the girl was marched back to her place, silent while the boys' lines were made straight again. Then the lines of children went on trudging out the gate as if nothing had happened and I watched the face of the girl as she passed me: her small face was without expression, not even a look of hopelessness. This was all she could expect from this bit of her life: to touch the skin of her brother for a few moments once a day.