The Following (12 page)

Shep took a special liking to young Ross, who each day guided her through the rooms, showing her the skeleton of the house as it grew. Ross, at fifteen, had two women after him now, or so he reckoned in his conceit as to what life he might lead if it was different from his father’s. He dogged Shep’s elbow and sang to her every pass of the plane and each bite of the saw the men made, as if it was music he’d made himself.

‘You little charmer,’ said Don, filled with rancorous love for his fifteen-year-old changeling in carpenter’s overalls and spider-boots.

One day Rosemary MacKinlay with her busy binoculars asked Ross who his girlfriend was, and through that simple, teasing jibe gained influence over a boy’s preferences with the effect of giving him a standard of what he believed possible.

Ross was smitten – dropped his tools, mislaid them, forgot what he was told to do, and when he cut his hand, his father said, ‘Deliberately on purpose, Roscoe?’ Ross blushed purple while Shep fixed him up with a plaster from the first-aid kit, and the men whistled from the tops of their ladders, looking off into the blue.

The men wondered – out of earshot of Don, but not of Ross – if the bloke was up to rooting her, which was what they reckoned Shep needed to bring that colour to her cheeks. The excitement of going hard at a woman in the bloke’s condition might kill him, they said, except it was true a man could still cock a leg at ninety, in sickness or in health, and should on principle get it up whenever he could. The bloke was past sixty and Shep half that age.

The way the men talked made Ross glare with tears in his eyes: ‘Why don’t you blokes all drop dead?’

One hot Friday at knock-off time it was interesting that Luana Milburn raced up in a jalopy with a dozen Dinner Ales melting their shapes into a block of ice.

The men tossed back their DAs, toasting the bloke’s generosity with the feeling they were being primed for a reason, because shouts never came till the end of a job, which was a while off yet. So the bloke was in a hurry, being overtaken by his time on earth and getting his scrawny old secretary to speed things along.

The next time Don asked for the sharpening stone Ross said, ‘I already told you, Dad, it’s in the toolbox.’

‘No, Roscoe, it is not.’

‘It was last time I looked.’

Ross didn’t want to say where the stone was, that it was in the bloke’s keeping. It made him feel big, as if – a mere kid – he had a future apart or distinct from his father’s. But telling a lie made him feel small again. He said the stone must have fallen out somewhere between the big tree and the puddling pond where the labourers mixed dirt for the mud bricks.

This was on the Sunday after mass.

‘Then get on your bike and ride out there. In the direction of Meadow Flats,’ said Don. ‘Get going,’ he added, giving Ross a clip on the ear while Father Pat looked on, idiotically grinning. ‘Stay out till dark if you have to, search the whole bloody district if need be.’

Ross crammed a haversack with bread, cheese, a tin of sardines and an orange, slung it over his back and pedalled the twelve miles out to the house with the feeling that the world was made just for him. That stone from the Emerald Isle had won him a glorious story to tell about himself.

‘Ross! Roscoe!’ voices chimed from a forest of ringbarked trees.

The MacKinlays were on their horses, picking their way along through the white gums and stony ground near the creek below their lucerne paddocks. Ross carried his bike in among their horses. He would never belong with these people but loved being with them as they drifted over the land, appreciating its harshest, neglected corners.

‘Your girlfriend is up there,’ said Rosemary MacKinlay, jerking a thumb towards the hilltop, ‘in that government car.’

It wasn’t a government car, it was the bloke’s own car, bought with his own hard-earned stipend, and Ross was ashamed of himself for not saying so because if he did Rosemary MacKinlay would only ask how he could afford it, even so?

Coming along the ridge to the building site, Ross saw the cream-coloured Holden parked on the bare ground in front of the half-built house.

He jumped from the bike and hurled it to the side of the track, not caring how it fell, then crawled below the half-built retaining wall and peered over the edge.

‘Whose bloody house does the bloke think it is?’

Of course it was the bloke’s house, he knew that – paid for from his own pocket – but the bloke had no right to be there without the rest of them, Sunday day of rest included, because a builder owned a site until a job was handed over. That was law to Don Devlin, who always said, ‘No tradesman, no architect, no stickybeak, no hissing cat or warbling magpie or dipping swallow comes onto my worksite without my say-so.’

Ross moved around the end of the wall, hiding behind the cement mixer, where he crouched till his legs cramped, staring at what he was not meant to see, the bloke and Shep lying on a picnic blanket on a sunny Sunday morning. They were in the windowless main bedroom, with gaps in the walls, the roof finished and the floorboards nailed down.
They must be trying it out
, thought Ross.
They must be seeing how things look from the kitchen, hallway, bedroom angle. But they ought to be waiting for Dad.

A gummy, thick tearfulness blocked his sinuses and blurred his vision. Now they were lying down. The bloke had his suit coat folded under his head, his braces turned from his shoulders and bunched to his waist. Shep was down on an elbow, looking at him hard in the face.

Ross jerked his eyes away as a thought came to him, making him hot. They were doing it; they were cocking a leg and doing it, like the men said a bloke could, at whatever age.

The bloke groaned. Shep said something urgent to him. The bloke groaned again. Shep rolled the bloke against her with her hands on his chest.

‘Jeepers, they
are
doing it.’ Ross said.

Shep threw back her head and bellowed, ‘Ross! Roscoe!’

She was looking straight at him, her golden hair flying up.

‘Help me, Ross Devlin, you useless whelp! I can see you, Ross Devlin – get over here, Jesus, bloody help me, come on,’ she sobbed. ‘For Christ’s sake, help!’

Ross hunched himself into the smallest shape possible as the swear words flew over him. Shep threw a rock, only it wasn’t a rock; it was the sharpening stone thudding through the dirt right up to him.

Ross stood, scrambled over lengths of timber, dodged stacks of drying mud bricks and climbed through the empty window frame.

‘Get behind his shoulders,’ said Shep. ‘He needs an injection. It’s in the car, in a tin, in my handbag on the front seat.
Run
.’

Ross ran to the car and fetched what she asked for. Shep opened the tin and detached a glass vial, kneeling on the floor planks among the sheep droppings. With tense, white fingers she screwed a needle on. She knelt over the bloke, rubbing a vein in his arm, sliding the needle in.

‘Ah,’ said the bloke, gazing at her, ‘you little beauty, Shep.’

The bloke noticed Ross, then, and threw his captivating grin. ‘If you don’t mind a spot of bother on your day off, mate, what about a hot, strong cuppa?’ He wheezed out the syllables as if they were the greatest question a man could ask, the right to smoko time, the sacred breather.

Stoking the fire, Ross found himself looking back across the building site from the angle the bloke looked at the half-built framework every day. It was a house, a home. The bloke would die but Shep would live there. And up would come Ross any time he liked, riding a horse on the rutted track.

Later, Shep told people how Ross Devlin came back with them to the Kurrajong, his bike strapped to the boot; how she drove the boy home and thanked his parents for having brought up a good son.

Shep sent Luana Milburn a package across from the Queanbeyan District Hospital with instructions for use. Thereafter, Luana carried in her handbag a vial of morphine, a zinc tube with a hypodermic needle attached, encased in breakable glass, a small bottle of almost colourless liquid folded in cotton wool and contained in a small yellow tin.

The next Sunday, Father Pat asked Ross to come into his vestry. Congratulations were in order for the fame of saving the bloke, but something Ross was unable to guess was in the air between them. The stone lay warm in Ross’s pocket where he’d slipped it after showing it to his father, who’d said, ‘It’s yours now, Roscoe. You’ve earned it.’

Every spare thought Ross had was of Shep. It spoiled things with her when she came out during the week to see progress. She did not seem as true as she was in his sight of her, calling his name and bringing him to her, having him close to her so that he felt the heat of her.

Ross thought Shep had no idea why he looked at her so dumbly.

She said, ‘Are we still good mates, Roscoe?’

Any mention of Shep’s name caused a thud in his stomach. He tore a hand across in front of his eyes to hide his confusion. All else was nothing compared with a need to get close, to watch, to listen – crouched, ready to run that run again.

There were prayers for the bloke, and all through the prayers Ross looked around for Shep. She was never there.

The priest was on to him. ‘Have you seen anyone hanging around the worksite?’ he said.

‘There’s always someone, Father.’

‘A big, burly cove with a pink, shonky face like a shaved pig? Anyone answering that description?’

‘No. Never.’

‘He’s famous in his own perculiar way.’

‘What’s his name, Father?’

‘Bert Shepherd, butcher and livestock dealer,’ said the priest. ‘Walks like a butcher – shoulders back, chest out, hard ball of meaty gut pushed out.’

‘Don’t know him, Father.’

‘Oh, but I think the name might ring a bell. Shep. Shepherd. He is your Shep’s father.’

‘She not “my” Shep,’ said Ross, twisting in his chair.

‘That is not what I’m hearing,’ said the priest with a filthy grin.

Father Pat had coarse yellow hair and a red face. When he spoke his lips went tight across his teeth with a look of enthused madness.

‘There are those who say your Shep is a commo and a free-thinker,’ he said. ‘They say the bloke is playing with fire with her, that she is a fornicator and an adulteress. Have you heard that opinion?’

Ross gaped that he’d not even or hardly ever even heard those particular words in all his life.

‘In many countries now,’ said the priest, ‘the church is stepping in, where it can, through the actions of quiet-doers bringing order. Here in Australia we have men such as your father and, if I may make so bold, your own good self, young Roscoe. Do you understand?’

‘Not much, Father.’

‘No need to give back any catechism. What I’m saying is quite simple. Just keep your eyes open.’

Ross went to his father and told him what Father Pat had said.

‘The explanation of it,’ said Don, ‘is that everyone wants a little bit of the bloke for their own nefarious purposes. Father Pat would like credit for the bloke when he dies. He wouldn’t want anyone else getting hold of him. He thinks he has you by the short and curlies, my boy.’

‘I do say my prayers,’ said Ross.

‘Good, if you mean them,’ said Don. ‘Pray for the bloke with his angina and getting his job done, for that Shep of yours, who’s looking out for him – his party’s not there for him, they’ve punted him over the hill, he’s yesterday’s bloke, pray for him. As for those holy plotters using party branches to start the next Inquisition, I wouldn’t want a bar of them.’

Ross took to riding out on weekends and half-day holidays, cycling the shortcuts, stock lanes and railway feeder tracks into the dry hills running east of Queanbeyan. He loved the country life, the bush life. He never wanted to be tied down to a nail pouch, a hammer, a carpenter’s rule and the work of sawing off lengths of plank all day. His mother struggled to understand.

‘Not a word to your father,’ she said, though someone must have spoken, for Father Pat weighed in, talking of a spread owned by the church where novitiates had horses and wore elastic-sided boots, moleskin trousers and wide-brimmed hats. Obligations were towards anything on four legs and the week was pretty active, and on special nights the novitiates let their hair down with home-brewed beer.

Ross thought,
Wouldn’t it show Shep if I took a vow
.

He set off on his bike looking for her wherever he could, never seeming to be able to find her with the ease he once had. He stayed out late, watching tail-lights in the dark, pedalling towards them, a moth on a Malvern Star.

From every direction, it seemed, the Friendly house looked down from the ridge. Roofing iron glimmered like solder, revealed and unrevealed, as Ross rattled along. From knolls and saddles he looked down on roads cutting between paddocks and the dust of cars creaming behind them.

One night Ross found himself almost on top of it, the Holden, Australia’s Own Car, the bloke’s own car sitting in a paddock, engine switched off, a dollop of gleaming bumper bar, green instrument lights, curved, shiny duco and flat passenger-side windows.

*

L
UANA WAITED AT THE REAR
door of the Kurrajong for the Holden to come and collect her after Marcus’s note was sent:
I need a breather
.

The tones of a solo clarinet wafted over the dry grass paddocks of the capital. Luana was dressed and ready for the Jubilee of Federation Ball, with the new PM presiding, and Jim Gussey and the ABC Dance Band playing. At the most critical and dangerous of moments, the rolling stock edged the downslope and Marcus’s chest was like a vice of crushing steel.

Through a screen door of the hostel Luana could see the kitchen hands, cooks and waitresses bringing dessert dishes back. Wearing his old cardigan, Marcus emerged into the night talking to Tim, a hand on Tim’s shoulder, before coming around the back to find Luana. He was pale as milk, drawn as wire, between his eyes a shadowy dent that seemed to have been pressed by a pair of knuckles.

They exchanged a look.
Just the two of us for this. Let’s go and find Pearl
.

Tim wore a tux. Later, when Luana returned to the ball, there’d be jitterbugging on the spot and gripping each other by the elbows so Tim wouldn’t fall over. They’d weave away into the night after the national anthem, two haughty old party survivors and one of them, Luana, a long since derailed revolutionary brought to book by the consolation of Tim.