Paper Daisies (14 page)

Until Mr Thompson dashes into it, coat tails flapping: ‘Don't stop the music now!' Bounding through the hubbub, bounding through my rage, for the piano. ‘Excuse me, miss, whatever you are,' he shoos off Dulcie, and seats himself with a cracking of knuckles. ‘Let's sing! Let's sing until three!' He appears considerably more intoxicated than he was when we left the men to themselves; he is bashing at the keys and yawping discordantly: ‘Ooooooooh! Do you like bananas, ladies, because my banana likes you. It's fat and sweet and succulent, so I've been told, and nicely bent.'

‘Oh my Lord!' Mrs Virginia Dunning's shriek is almost as lewd as the song.

A mortified Mr Wilberry has his head in his hands, while everyone else has begun clapping theirs in time to the galloping music hall tune, whether they've caught the fruity innuendo in the lyric or not.

‘It's Queensland's best, you won't regret this taste of sunshine once it's et!'

Gret's caught the gist and, hands clasped over her mouth, she's shaking with laughter at the filth and uproar both. But I cannot find my own fun in this.

I turn to Uncle Alec now instead. Numb. Beyond exhaustion.

He looks back at me with vacant, unseeing eyes. His smile is tight. A pinched smile. I once overheard Buckley refer to it in conversation with the ice man as
tighter than a cat's craphole.
That's precisely the type of smile it is and Uncle Alec holds it until he can bear it no longer. Thunder stolen by the clown, bested yet again.

He claps his hands against the gathering rhythm, shouting over it: ‘Enough song, my friends! Enough! Come! Come out to the verandah. It is time for the fireworks display!'

A full six minutes early, too.
Tick. Tick.
Move along, everyone. We are so very nearly done with this evening's farce.
Tick. Tick.

Mr Thompson smashes down a final dis-chord: ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba banana booooom!'

Fireworks

You must have chaos in you to give birth to a dancing star.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Ben

‘
G
od save the Queen!'

The first of the rockets roars up and it is red. A red bloom exploding across the night, a shower of red stars.

There's your everlasting, dear son. See, it is here.

Her voice is so distinct this time, when I turn around I expect to see her. But she is not there. Of course she's not. And I'm a bit drunk myself. Quite a bit drunk. I should not have taken that second port but I couldn't stop myself – if I'd wanted to be trapped in a room full of self-important bastards outdoing each other for sanctimonious greed and bigotry, I'd never have left Queensland.

‘Happy New Year!'

‘Here's to 1901!'

‘To the twentieth century!'

‘God save old fat ladies hanging on!' Shut up, Cos.

Another whistle, another bang, and a bright lime chrysanthemum bursts out of the black above a bunch of whistling Catherine wheels, spinning out gold sparks. I laugh up into the night.

‘Good show, hm?' Alec Howell directs my attention rather than asks me, then under all the spellbound
ohhing
and
ahhing
of his party he grips my left wrist and I bend to hear him direct me further: ‘You will not encourage my nieces to undertake this journey to the Hill, I hope.'

I will not? There is no greater guarantee that I will disregard such a
hope
. Just who does this fellow think he is, telling me what I might or might not do? With some West Country farmboy accent slipping further around his own one-port-too-many, he is no better of mine; he is not even a peer. He is an odious little turd, actually. I tell him: ‘You need not be concerned, sir. Cosmo and I are far more reliable than we appear. I'm very much looking forward to seeing this fabled place of Hill End. Unexpected diversions can lead to the best discoveries, I've always found. An old gold rush town, isn't it? Tending more to ghosts these days? No?'

His eyes narrow right down to a squint and his grip tightens for a moment, as though he will insist, but then he lets it go again, silently. Still staring for a moment longer as though promising consequences. I laugh again: what consequences could this man promise? He is so very little, in all ways.

‘Oh! Whoa wee, look at that one!' The sister points up at the next rocket, a huge burst of silver. A little childlike she might be, I suppose, a little reticent, but no more than I am. Waste of an education, the little turd said. Who would say that of any child? Even Pater insists that the children of the blacks out at Eleonora be schooled, under the lash as God intended, keeping his flock of stockmen faithful. But to say this of such a young woman, any young woman, when she is so talented – quite obviously. Cos will frame her menu card, too, I have no doubt; after intense consultation with Kevin the Curator, he will hang it somewhere in the studio. Greta Jones's watercolour fireworks will be kept and admired forever at the Swamp.

I look back at Howell now and down at him. ‘You like to pick on girls, do you?' The question spills from me, but he is turning away. Don't think he heard.

Which is just as well. I should get myself and Cos out of here before either one of us opens our mouths again. Where is Cos now? I look up the verandah and find him: shirt front hanging out, champagne swaying, harassing that magistrate, Wardell. Hopefully belching in his ear. Over the port, that paragon of justice declared he was all for striking miners as they keep his conviction rate looking healthy in the eyes of the Attorney-General, before thanking Howell for arranging the latest round of quiet venereal checks for all the local prostitutes.
Good, clean town, this is
, he declared.

I yawn as another rocket whistles upwards, and then another: bang, bang, bloom, bloom, orange and then blue, and then Cos falls backwards off the verandah and into the agapanthus below. Absolutely arseless. It's time to go – immediately.

But I am yet to ask the girl what time she wishes us to return in the morning. I am yet to speak to her again at all. Why did I drink so much? I do not need further handicapping. Berylda. Where is she? There, at the opposite end of the verandah, outside the pool of light coming through the doors of the rear parlour; she stands apart from the rest of the party. She is looking up, as though at some point beyond the fireworks, beyond all this shallow frivolity, and she is indescribably beautiful against the night, her nose, her lips, her chin, a cameo in ivory on onyx; and impossibly serene with all the noise going on here, the explosions, the chattering, the incessant barking of the dog. Perhaps she won't notice I'm drunk, or care. That I am apparently now approaching her with the words: ‘Er … Miss Jones. What time should we … Ah – and horses? Tomorrow, should we …?'

‘What?' The frown is as swift as her ability to interpret drunk imbecile: ‘Oh. Yes – dawn. Be here just before dawn, please. And you may take our horses if you wish. They're in need of a decent outing themselves, anyway.' And the furrow deepens sceptically: ‘You do ride, don't you?'

‘Ride? Horses. Yes. Of course.'

‘Good. There is no room for you in the buggy. All style and no substance, I'm afraid – ostentatiously small vehicle, just a one-horse.'

‘No room in the buggy. Yes, good.' I am hers to direct as she wills; I will pull her buggy myself if she should ask me to. ‘Dawn then. Just before.'

‘Yes. Dawn then. Just before.' She mocks me with the trace of a smirk as she returns her attention to the night sky.

Mama's laughter trailing through it like the fading tendrils of these fire flowers above us:
Here is the study you will never return from, my dear wandering bear.

Not an altogether attractive prospect, Mama. The girl is not interested in me. No girl has ever been interested in me, and why should this one be? Berylda Jones wishes us to come to Hill End with her and her sister as chaperones – that says enough right there, doesn't it? And as reward I might have three days in her company, in the midst of stupefying beauty; three days exploring the Macquarie and the Turon, the gorge there, which I have never seen but have certainly heard of: steeply clad with river gum and river oak, understoreys of grevillea, banksia,
all
in full summer inflorescence – and that rare alpine callistemon found there. When did I read that paper on it? Was it last year or the year before? I don't know what day of the week it is, never mind what I read when.

Cos looms up out of the dark of the yard. What's he been doing out there? Pissing into the vegetable beds, possibly. We must leave before the girl changes her mind about us, too. But before I can find an appropriate load of bumbling stupid to farewell her with, Cos has launched himself back up the verandah steps and is shaking me by the shoulder. ‘I believe my work here is done, Wilby. And I'm tired now.' He yawns, a bellowing moan into the sudden quiet; the fireworks display is finished, too.

Thank you for small mercies, my friend. I turn to the girl; I say: ‘Early start – yes, we should go. Hm.'

But I'm not sure she has heard me. She has closed her eyes, her face again upturned to the sky. She is absorbed in some meditation, somewhere else, out in the universe, not here, and I am interrupted by another: ‘I say, we can motor you boys down the hill, if you like.' It's that Mrs Dunning, wanting five more minutes of Cos as much as this opportunity to show off the new wagon – 192 pounds it cost, so she's said at the table, twice.

‘What, woman? We're not leaving so soon,' the industrialist husband corrects his wife, the blubbery neck shaking with it. He's still stung by Cos's Fat Man insults, rather kick him down the hill than drive him.

So would Howell; his hand is quickly outthrust to see the back of us: ‘Good of you to come this evening, Mr Wilberry, Mr Thompson. A most colourful addition to, er, a most colourful event.' He chuckles, fancying himself a wit as well as master of this small and eminently forgettable universe. As I shake his hand with some sort of ‘thank you' in response, I have the sensation of touching a slug. I do not wish to see this man again. I hope not to encounter him in the morning.

‘Goodnight, Mr Wilberry.' The girl is suddenly here again, taking my hand. Berylda. Her small perfect hand in my great oaf's one. Again. How does this occur? She presses my outer knuckle and smiles
that
smile at me: ‘Till tomorrow. Dawn then. Just before.'

The smile that drives right into me, seeing me. Could it be? Could she find something in me? Something beyond some pleasure at paralysing my mind altogether by taking my hand? She is dropping it now. Unreadable, exquisitely so. Turning away again …

I suppose I bid them all goodnight as we leave. Cos leans into me as we amble back round to the front path, and something touches my left hand through the dark as we reach the gate – something wet. The dog. The staghound, Prince. ‘Where did you come from, boy?' I'm sure someone said the dog was chained. Well, he's placid enough now, anyway. I pat his head: ‘Good night, Prince.' I hear him pant; his tail wags against my thigh but he doesn't attempt to follow us out of the gate.

‘God's hairy eyeballs, Wilb, that was bloody terrible,' Cos says as soon as we're on the descent to the road; tripping into me over tussocks, belching into my ear: ‘And that was mutton, too. The things I do for you. The things I do. And now we're changing course from Manildra, wherever that devil of a hole in the ground might be, for Hill End. Hill
End
– doesn't the name tell you something? End of the earth, Wilby, end of the earth it can only be in this place.' As though the place by the same name in Brisbane is famous for anything but flooding and, at three miles from Woolloongabba, being the western boundary of all his tolerance.

‘You can go back to Swamp paradise whenever you wish,' I remind him. ‘And I mean it. I'm all right now. Really. Drunk, quite successfully drunk, but in fair condition. You don't need to look after me any more, such as your looking after me ever is.' And it's true, I think; something's shifted. Mama is gone, but she is here. And it's all right. Nothing I can do about it anyway; it is what it is. ‘Thank you, old matey of mine, thank you for keeping me company,' I tell him. ‘But not for the banana song.'

‘You loved it.' He belts a shoulder into me.

‘No, I didn't – honestly.' I laugh. ‘But really, all the embarrassments you've ever caused me notwithstanding, go home to Susan. Don't worry about me from here. You don't want to come rambling with me – and you never did. You don't want to come trail-riding to the End of the Earth with me now. Your effort on my behalf thus far has been valiant – well done. Epic.'

‘Epic.' He grunts. ‘Might as well see it through to its grisly end. I'm in no burning hurry to get home to Susan.'

‘Why? Do you have trouble in paradise?' I ask him, surprised, and not only because he's been moaning so loud and often about being away. Susan and he are made for each other, in the way that flotsam and jetsam go together, and I realise I haven't much asked him about himself these past three weeks; too preoccupied, obsessing about daisies and being off my head with grief.

‘Huh,' he grunts. ‘She's more interested in the babies than she is in me. She doesn't care about me.'

‘Aw, Cossie,' I mimic Susan, and the tender smile that is always in her voice, for what is really her third child, in Cos. He's jealous of the twins, I imagine, of the time they take up, taking Susan away from him. I see his last portrait of her in my mind now as we walk, full of worship: her coffee-coloured breasts, her full lips, and those huge dark eyes that come from another world – literally. She wandered into Cos's life looking for work, two years ago, scared that the Protection Act for the blacks would see her picked up off the street and shoved onto a mission. She's not that black, she has no tribe. She has no story, as she calls it. Just something in her past that has made her content to hitch up with a mess like Cos. There'd be plenty of story to Susan, I'd say. Susan Turner from Caboolture. I look at Cos, shambling along beside me, falling down. She was looking for a job: she found one in him. And she cares for him absolutely, despite his many faults. I am jealous of what they have, I suppose, even if the children don't bear Cos's name. But then I've never really known what I might want in that regard. Always been too shut up in myself, maybe too scared to embark on that sort of exploration. Too certain of failure.

Our way is lit by bonfires now, all the way into the town, blazing on every corner, drunks sing and stagger down the main street, the last straggling crackers let off in soggy, halfhearted afterthoughts behind a row of terraced shops promising a city and only delivering: ‘Oi Bluey, you got another bottle at home, ain't ya?' We could just as well be somewhere in Brisbane right now. Anywhere in Australia. But we are in Bathurst.

And I have just met a girl called Berylda. I look behind me and see the half-moon is sinking behind the hills. Silver-frosted hills. What am I chasing after now? I'm not sure it's the sort of joyful thing Mama had in mind.

I ask Cos: ‘What do you think of the girl, really? What do you think of Berylda?'

‘She's pretty,' he says. He stops, unbuttons his fly to relieve himself again on the step of some shop:
BLUNT'S WATCHMAKER & JEWELLER
. ‘Very pretty. Pretty. Tiny. Freak.'

‘Freak? She's – what did you say?'

‘What did I say?' He is a lot further schnigged towards oblivion than I am: cross-eyed with it. ‘I'm sure I have no idea.'

‘And me probably less.' I keep on towards the pub, the quicker to be asleep, the quicker for it to be morning. To see her again.

Cos laughs after me: ‘I say, but that uncle doctor was mad enough to flog a cat, wasn't he? Reckon that's what he's up to now? Got all his little kitty cats in a pretty little line.' Cos shouts up the street: ‘
Step up now, kitties, step up and take your flogging! Roll up, roll up, get your floggings here!
'