The Following

Years ago, in a midnight encounter beside the railroad tracks, a young boy meets a stranger with a powerful secret, a gift of uncanny understanding and a talent for knots. From this encounter, Marcus Friendly’s ideas of himself take shape as he rises to become Australia’s sixteenth Prime Minister. The night he dies, a shadow, ‘thin as a scythe’, is there to collect him when he falls. Another young boy, Ross Devlin, witnesses the event. Ross eventually finds himself on an outback station working for Kyle Morrison, son of Australia’s most famous poet, ‘The Bounder’. Kyle suddenly needs help to undo a knot of his own, and a young union organiser, Max Petersen, steps in to right an old injustice. Now, after years in parliament, Max Petersen, the inheritor of the Friendly tradition in more ways than one, awaits a call from the PM for the ministry he craves. Around him, a crisis among friends and family is unfolding, and everyone is forced to confront the legacy they have inherited, their influence in a changing world and what follows on after them.

‘For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.’
– S. T. Coleridge

O
LD MAN
F
RIENDLY SENT HIS GRANDSON
, Marcus, to search through the bush at night for a pair of thieves known as the Dutchies, to sleep in forks of trees and doze against railway embankments waiting for the bellow of a driven steer.

Dutchy Wolff and his son, Albert, scavenged engine coal, butchered cattle on the rails and hawked meat through the fettlers’ camps, poor and cleanly bled meat at twopence or twopence halfpenny a pound.

Under threat of his grandfather’s blows Marcus was cold, hungry and sodden, a crumb of cheese in his pocket and a tin of wax matches for setting a few sticks alight.

Up by a length of the Western Line he found them.

A hurricane lamp shone from the tailboard of a bullock-drawn dray. Ropes hung from the sides in coils, tied at the throats like gentlemen’s cravats. There was a hook and a tripod, chains, a carcase, buckets of blood. A cookfire flared, throwing sparks. Strange as Nineveh were the woollen caps they wore, pulled down to their dripping noses. Their shapes made shadows in the mist, great heads and long arms reaching down to find the small beings who created them.

The Dutchy Wolffs knew their night trains – on the up line the Bourke Mail, nothing down until late. The Bourke Mail had struck a beast, tossing a carcase aside. They tore away at it, reliable as crows, lowering foreheads, swivelling their chins, sleeves flapping, wiping wet from their noses with the backs of their hands.

The one place they never looked was in Marcus’s direction, so it was evident by their avoidance, call it awareness, they knew he was there – a boy cut from shadows and set slightly forward in cap, overcoat and muddy boots.

Marcus knew when those Dutchies beckoned he would go to their fire, right up to the coals to warm himself in defiance of his grandfather’s edict to spot them, and know them, and bear witness against them but have nothing to do with them.

What Marcus would report to his grandfather, owner of New Killarney selection and the steers crashing about, he could not fathom, his conviction of rightness being about equal to a blow to the head when it came to squaring matters with that rancorous old man. That the butchered animal was Marcus’s birthright for the reason it carried the brand of his inheritance – NK – scorched on the hide, only seemed to Marcus a reason for letting it go.

The Dutchies were swift in what they did, getting on with the greasy work, making up sides and quarters. Their arms pushed into wobbles of guts as they talked a lingo of ‘hochs’ and ‘grunzt’ and ‘oys’. Each hack, blow and penetration of the boning knife had the look of a lesson as Marcus stepped closer.

He would use the word ‘inexorable’, when the time came, to those who asked about his path crossing with the Dutchies, father and son.

‘You couldn’t beat them even if you wanted to try.’ He’d say it in a way that made you think he had something in mind for himself along those lines.

Now they were done, throwing bits of offal on a rack. Flames seized and curled around the intestines. Fire gave the tracks an orange shine.

Albert Wolff peered into the fog’s rays, hands cupping his temples, looking straight at him. ‘Is that you, the friend-boy, Marcus Friendly?’

It was so well spoken that Marcus tweaked his dripping cap brim and followed the Dutchy along the tracks.

Albert Wolff was aged around twenty then, firmly packed into coarse flannel trousers pulled up over his navel to his barrel chest by leather braces that buckled like luggage straps. His father, Fritz, was already sickly with his grey beard matted and tangled. Both had the same moon face, but the father’s face was sunken, hollowed, while the son’s was smooth and shining, pink-flushed and expectant. The waning moon and the waxing, they were.

The food they passed around on a tin plate comprised those parts of a beast that Marcus’s grandfather called fries or Rocky Mountain oysters and threw to the dogs. The fat was warm and sweet. The bites were cake-like, crumbly, and steamed between mouthfuls.

Father and son passed a square bottle between them. Drink ran down the father’s beard and splashed on the coals, where it danced like a paper daisy taking fire. It was a wonder to Marcus how the flames intensified in the wasted drops. One minute he’d been under the trees alone, the next he was squatting in the dirt shovelling food into his mouth and wiping fat from his lips.

If the old Dutchy had anything to say he said it in a whisper into the son’s cupped ear.

‘
What
did he say?’ said Marcus, unable to keep from his voice the edge of it reserved for foreigners – and never would.

‘Friend-boy, don’t mind his English,’ said Albert. ‘You ain’t like the others, is what he says.’

Marcus supposed who was meant – anyone who played shenanigans with outcasts and peddlers. That was all boys and plenty of grown men who should know better. But you had to laugh.

‘
Now
what?’ said Marcus as the old man cleaned the bottle with the tail of his shirt and held it out, corked and filled to the neck.

Fritz said, ‘
Gott
,
Gott
,
Gott
,’ and Albert rendered the exclamation.

‘It’s for your grandfather, God bless him.’

After wiping his plate clean Marcus thanked them for the feed, for the sack he pulled over his cap and coat to stop his shivering, and for the bottle to take to his grandfather.

He made his way down an eroded gully to the wattle and daub hut known as the homestead of New Killarney, to a bed of potato sacks hung between stringybark poles near a matching bed where his grandfather snored, stalky, ulcerated legs poking out from moleskin trousers.

W
HEN
M
ARCUS WOKE
, the sun burned through the morning mist, splintering between bunches of gum leaves. He felt he’d live for ever and stretched his arms to the light and tightened his fists, splayed his fingers out. The Dutchies would be up there now, hawking their cuts of meat to the fettlers’ wives along the Western Line.

‘Maaarcus! Get your brainless corpus over here, out of that bed. Did you see them, boy, do we have them? Them with their thieving ways?’

Against his grandfather Marcus held to a view as he pulled a blanket up to his nose that, if he hadn’t been a boy, would have been a grown man’s philosophy: the truth was the old man’s thieving ways, not the Dutchies’.

His look spoke it:
You’d better know this, old man. A steer drinks water from a railways’ water pipe; a steer is struck by the Bourke Mail of the government railways. You are the one who takes government land for your own, hoarding your own title.

A metal lid twirled through the air and hit the hard-packed dirt.

‘Get up, yer loony little crack of a wild-bred bone.’

At birth Marcus was covered in matted, coppery hair. His little monkey face peered out through an old man’s whiskers. That was his grandfather’s face peering at him now, wizened, pinched and puckered.

God knows what was done in Ireland to create the lavish form of abuse heaped upon the boy, crippled brilliance carried across the world in efforts of destruction, teaching Marcus the benefit of speaking straight at the same time as it advised him to hold his tongue.

He buttoned his shirt, belted his trousers and pulled on his cold, wet boots.

His grandfather raved of injustices and limitations upon the natural freedom of men, and, yes, if he could have harnessed Marcus like a mule he would have made him one in his rocky domain. But Marcus’s life was shaped from the midnight encounter – what he could not understand or express but would act upon – and he saw past his grandfather’s words to a place where his grandfather wanted to be but was never able to take himself. That place was an ideal conception of the world that the old man’s failures, resentments and rages prevented him ever getting near. There Marcus would go when he left New Killarney; let the bush grow back on the ruins of the bark hut.