The House That Was Eureka (14 page)

He tried now to imagine embracing Evie. He could faintly hear her voice talking to the voice of that other girl that he’d shot from the balcony as she arrived. He’d been going to ask Evie tonight if she felt like going down the landscape again but he couldn’t now because that other girl was there. Noel felt vaguely jealous of Roseanne. Noel hadn’t been down the landscape since the time he took Evie. And Evie was really cold to him now, ever since she’d started doing despot-duty.

Noel went back to picking out a tune in the new music he’d got up the music shop today. He helped out there sometimes in the afternoons, while the boss went out. The boss didn’t pay him, but he let Noel play the instruments and he gave him things. Like this music book called
Dole Days
that went with some new record of old Depression songs that some group had just released. It wasn’t Dylan, but maybe he was going off Dylan a bit: Dylan made him feel cold and lonely.

Noel couldn’t imagine having his arms around Evie. She kept slipping out of them and went running off down the street.

So he sat there playing this stuff he’d been given for free. He had some vague idea that he might play it one day to torment the despot, if she started tormenting him again.

‘Cruel it was then…’
Noel quoted. The theme-song of his childhood.

Cruel it was, Evie’s loneliness. She’d had something, and thrown it away, and now she missed it terribly, but she didn’t know what it was she’d had. The not-knowing made her cranky, gave her headaches. She swung her legs in time to the music and didn’t hear a thing Roseanne was saying.

Next door, the despot heard the music too. Lonely in her room she lay, looking out from her dark room onto the dark roofs, the dark backyards.

We belong to the doley-oh mob,

The doley-oh mob are we!

We never fight or quarrel,

We never disagree…

The sound of that tune floating through the long dark night, the sounds they made to mock her. Evie’s laugh. The flicker-flicker shadows she saw, of Noel’s candle.

The despot leaned out her window and rang her bell: loud.

Noel jumped. Evie jumped. They were trained to the despot’s call.

Lizzie’s out in the street when Nobby runs off to Kennets’ to get the tucker.

Lizzie’s heard by now about Bankstown, wants to ask him – ‘What was it like?’ – but he’s in too much of a hurry for her as he goes down and as he comes back past with the hot stew going slap-slop inside two billycans, and a sugar-bag of bread and jam slung over one shoulder.

His mother watches from the window. Watches the billycans as well as her son. It’s three days now since she’s eaten, for she won’t walk out the door now to go to the shop. Her son comes in late at night, never thinks to bring her a little food. Her son doesn’t speak to her. He’s no son of hers. She feels the hatred in the house at night, the coldness of her son lying awake in his room, she lying awake in hers, the hatred of the men who sing next door…

As I was walking down the street,

A copper said to me…

Nobby disappears into the lane. Lizzie wants to run after him.
But yer think yer smart, Nobby Weston
. They think they’re smart, him and Pa, but she’s got a plan.

After what happened at Bankstown today, Lizzie is more dead-set than ever not to miss the action here. Lizzie plans to hide in the cupboard in the scullery. The scullery isn’t fortified, so she can creep in there later tonight and hide and wait.

Lizzie grabs Fee’s hand and runs off down to Kennets’ to bathe Fee and Maudie and have her tea.

Nobby’s mother watches Elizabeth Cruise’s too-big shoes thudding down the pavement, and she feels jealous, and she feels hungry, and she feels vengeful.

‘Chris is really lovely,’ Roseanne says again. ‘A really lovely guy. Much nicer than Kim.’ Kim was her last love.

The sound of a mouth-organ drifts in faintly from the next-door toilet and makes Evie lonely.

It makes her lonely, Lizzie’s love, that thin white face makes Evie lonely. The face like Noel’s, but older; and with his hair short instead of long like Noel’s, the ears stick out a bit and the long thin white neck looks somehow vulnerable.

She wants to skip and jump, to cheer him up.

She wants to skip and jump, to cheer herself up.

The loneliness without him.

In the kitchen the pickets eat the stew. Only three shanks between the eighteen of them, but the broth’s filled out with lots of spuds and chokoes and pumpkin. Better than a lot of them would get at home, for everyone from round about has been giving what they can for the pickets’ rations.

‘Don’t wait for the billies, son,’ Paddy says. ‘We’ll toss them down from the balcony in the morning.’ The sooner this lad’s out and the gap bagged up, the better.

‘Righty-oh,’ Nobby says cheerfully.

Too cheerfully, but Paddy’s got too much on his mind to be suspicious.

Nobby shuts the kitchen door on the pickets.

Nobby has a plan too.

Nobby crawls through the gap in the diningroom window and creeps into the scullery, then pulls a big old tin trunk out from the bottom of a pile of other trunks and tea-chests and suitcases. He fiddles with the lock, presses it upwards, then sideways, carefully, holding his breath and praying, up and sideways, and it opens.

Inside are books, old photos, a moth-eaten coat, and the thing in the old soft brown bag, the thing that Nobby pulls out now as reverently as if it was a Bible. He pulls out the old tobacco tin too and sticks it in his pocket. Then Nobby locks the trunk and – quietly now – rams it right in again at the bottom of the pile, and creeps back in through the gap.

(To be someone and do something, then Lizzie will love him.)

Nobby slips up the stairs and hides himself under the big double bed in the upstairs front room. The counterpane hangs right down to the floor, so no one will see him. Looking up, he sees the criss-cross of the bed-wire, beneath the mattress. It might be a long wait. (What if it’s days?) Nobby wishes he’d had time for tea. He’s hungry already.

Downstairs, Mr Dacey plays his tin whistle. Mick and Williams and Paddy plug up the gap. The others sing.

Roseanne was still raving on. Evie swung her legs back and forth as she sat on the dressing-table, and blocked her mind off from Roseanne. Evie heard the music, but only faintly. It was a jolly sort of tune that only made her lonelier, she wished she had a love. The tune sort of bounced along in time to the scrabbling. Scrabble-scrabble. In the cupboard. Evie often heard it, but since that first night she hadn’t looked in there. Hadn’t even opened the door. It had been open, that day Jodie had been in her room, but Evie had slammed it shut, not even looking. The cupboard was probably connected with the weirdness, and Evie didn’t want to know. A minute ago she’d even thought she’d heard the despot ringing, like the despot did all the time now when Evie went in to get her midday dinner.

Ring, ring, and Evie would go running up the stairs, only to find that white face staring at her. Occasionally there’d be something on the magic-pad.

‘
TELL
’

But it wouldn’t say what to tell, who to tell.

‘
WHAT’S THE DATE
?’

It had said that on Monday.

‘The fifteenth of June,’ Evie had said.

Then the despot had just looked, and said nothing.

‘
I’M HUNGRY
.’

It had said that yesterday.

‘I’ll bring it up in a minute.’ But then when Evie had taken the food up, the despot had waved it away. That ring-hand ordering her. That bell ordering her, ring-ring.

‘What’s that scrabbling sound,’ Roseanne said, ‘in the cupboard?’

Roseanne shuddered: probably rats. Roseanne’s dad had said something about Ted being down on his uppers. (‘Don’t breathe a word to Evie. I don’t even think he’s told his wife.’) Roseanne’s dad used to drink with Evie’s Ted at the Campbelltown Catholic Club. ‘You’ve even got
rats!
’ Roseanne said.

Her shrill voice went through Evie, woke her up.

‘What, d’you hear something?’

‘In the cupboard.’

Evie almost hugged Roseanne. If Roseanne heard it too, it couldn’t just be Evie off her brain.

‘No, of course I don’t.’

Of course I don’t have rats.

Pushed like this, by Roseanne there in her new pastel jeans that her mother had just bought her, with her packet of cigarettes that she smoked so expertly, Evie leapt to the defence of 203 Liberty Street.

‘Look, I’ll show you.’

Evie flung open the cupboard door. Roseanne jumped onto the bed. Stood there precariously on the springy mattress in her high-heeled sandals, looking like the farmer’s wife in Sammy’s
Three Blind Mice
book.

Nothing ran out of the cupboard. Evie laughed to see Roseanne, then bent and looked under the old copper, looked in the big gap where the fire used to go. There were no rats there. The scrabbling sound had stopped as soon as she opened the door.

‘It’s just the boy next door,’ Evie said, hearing the music a bit better now that Roseanne had stopped raving. ‘He spends half his life in the dunny.’

As I was walking down the street

A copper said to me:

Do you belong to the doley-oh mob?

Well come along with me…

The music was coming easily to Noel, more easily than usual with new music he’d never seen before.

‘What’s that?’ Roseanne said from the bed. She started giggling. Could giggle now, now there were no rats. Standing upon the bed in her shoes made her feel silly and giggly after drinking two cans of Ted’s beer. She saw a heart that must be poor dumb Evie’s, poor dumb Evie scratching out a big heart inside the cupboard door on the paint, it must’ve taken her hours. ‘What’s that?’ said Roseanne.

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Evie.

On the inside of the slatted wooden door was a large heart, picked out with a fingernail.

Inside the heart was something that said:

I
Love
N
4
Ever
18/6/1981

‘Hello, I’m Noel.’

A voice came in the door and addressed itself to a girl in pastel jeans bouncing giggling on a bed. A body accompanied the voice. Someone short and thin.

‘Oh, you’re
Noel
, are you?’ the giggler giggled. It made a big deal of it. ‘Evie,
Noel’s
here!’

‘What?’

Evie wanted to be alone with the heart.

To work the heart out.

To work out the date: for that was today.

Only just today, for it was only just Thursday. Just past midnight and becoming Thursday 18 June 1981.

‘Noel,’ said Roseanne.

I have to be alone with the heart, to work the heart out.

‘Noel with the lovely hair, really clean, and a really good suntan,’ said Roseanne.

I have to work this out.

‘Your boyfriend,’ Roseanne added. ‘Remember?’

Evie remembered lots of things. Lights out there, crisscrossed neatly by the wire of the streets. That was one thing.
I’m a flame
. That was another.

But getting in the way of that was Noel there at the door, pale and stupid, and Roseanne still bouncing and laughing.

I love for ever, a feeling told Evie. A feeling that almost had a shape, it was so strong, a feeling that jumped through her mind, sharp as silver, bright as flame. Evie’s mind kept making sudden jumps these days and she got muddled.

Roseanne laughed, and the flame flicked out, the feeling of the love was gone now, chased out of her mind by the embarrassment, the laughter.

Noel was embarrassed too. Embarrass/embrace, he thought, the two words coming together as he watched Evie standing in front of the cupboard door. Her shoulder was pushed against it, so he couldn’t see the heart. The girl Noel had shot in the street was laughing on the bed in pink jeans. Noel was still carrying his mouth-organ, and it was real and comforting.

Bang, Noel blasted but it didn’t stop anything. It didn’t even make a sound.

‘So you’re Evie’s love.’ Roseanne stopped bouncing and climbed off the bed. She felt sick, a bit. ‘Evie’s told me all about you. I should’ve clicked, when I heard the mouth-organ, that you were just the boy next door. Evie told me about you playing up at Newtown.’ Roseanne lit a cigarette.

Evie looked at Noel, whose face was particularly pale tonight. Evie felt very sick.

Noel felt sick. Evie had laughed with Roseanne about his secret landscape. He said nothing.

‘Piss off,’ said Evie. She screamed at him. ‘I’m sick of you creeps next door. Will you just bloody piss off and leave me alone! For ever!’

Noel ran, and as he did, Maria came to the scullery door and said there was a man at the front door who’d been knocking and had woken her up.

‘It’s Roseanne’s dad and he says she has to go now.’

Evie lay on her bed for a long time after Roseanne had gone. Lay with her eyes open, her face flushed still at first with the shame of Noel, the fury; lay staring at the open cupboard door, concentrating her will upon the hatred so as to close her mind to the heart.

I love for ever
.

Never never.

It
’
s going to be a long hard night
.

Evie lay very still to make the time pass, to make the feeling go, and as she lay she felt the edges of herself dissolve into the place, so that there was no longer any line between the night, the room, and Evie.

It was now she saw the girl with long black hair peer out from the triangle of the cupboard, then snap shut the wooden door.

Oh, you
, Evie thought, as if the face was someone she knew from primary school perhaps, from way back anyway.

I remember lots of things
. But can’t now, can’t quite remember how Evie was seven weeks ago when I felt nothing in me.

I know I know hate now, but I don’t know where it should go; know I know love, but that was gone before I ever had it. I know Evie’s changed since she moved to Newtown.