The House That Was Eureka (21 page)

They never did, but some time in the third decade at least the letters stopped. For his mother had accepted that his not writing meant his death, and had ceased to write herself.

In the fourth decade and the fifth decade he’d still front up to stations like a bagman of the thirties, ask to chop a bit of wood or do a bit of weeding in exchange for tea and tobacco and flour to last him till the next place. By the fourth decade and the fifth decade there were few of his kind left. And so he achieved notoriety of a kind in the backblocks of New South Wales, that tall skinny whitefeller who walked alone with a swag, living off bush tucker like a blackfeller, the weak cove who wouldn’t touch a gun.

When darkness came he lay and thought of time. Counting off the nights since
that
night, that dawn, counting as the nights became years, then decades, then miles, then dawn, but dawn simply treading on to more nights. One night, early on, lying in the first decade in his swag beside the Darling, a fire smoking near him to ward off the night, there’d been no one there beside him, and then someone, a young
thinagulla
from a band of wandering men. He was scarred, and smelled of emu, and they exchanged some things. This one gave a tobacco tin with bullets in it; the other gave some clouds up in the sky. They were about the same age.

‘Them ones, there,’ said the young
thinagulla
, taking the other’s hand and pointing it up at a little puff at an angle to a bigger one, ‘I call them ones the mechanical clouds.’ Showing the other how to tell the time at night by the circle of the little one round the big feller.

After that he’d lie there at night and watch the circle that circled like his tread upon the track. Wishing to high heaven that his arms were longer so he could reach them into high heaven and stop the circle, or move it backwards, as if it was just the clock upon his mother’s kitchen wall…

And so the decades passed, and stations changed hands; and by the end of the fifth decade there was no one around who could even remember the false name he’d used at first. When people questioned him, he’d smile, then slide through the web of their curiosity as easily as his thin body slipping through the hidey-hole, many years before.

At the beginning of the sixth decade, in March 1981, he collapsed one midday in the heat on the fine hot red soil of the common at North Bourke, collapsed on the track that leads past the Bourke rifle range and down to the North Bourke pub and shop, and he was found there by an Aboriginal girl who then ran full-pelt to the phone at the shop.

An ambulance came, and then the air ambulance flew him to Sydney, all without his knowledge. He came to his senses weeks later in a white bed in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with a tag on his arm saying: Nobby Weston.

On the Wednesday after the Friday when she’d first gone to see Nobby’s mother, Lizzie went to Long Bay gaol to talk to her brother Mick.

‘Hello.’

‘G’day.’

You feel false, talking through gaol bars. Even to your own brother. Even to your only brother, Mick.

My brother, Mick. So strong, so big, so much bigger than Nobby and me. It was real good, moving in to Liberty Street, having Nobby’s weight to hurl in with me in a fight against Mick. Any fight against Mick. Mick has green eyes and wild hair like mine. The identical mirror to me except he’s always been a boy, and bigger and older. Pa always let him do things that he wouldn’t let me do, and Ma is always telling me to plait my hair, do something with it girl, while Mick runs around with his shirt out round his bum and Ma just makes cups of tea for him and puts iodine on his cuts.

But Mick: he’d lie in wait for us up there where Crockford Lane runs into Mercy Street. Hide high up with Johnnie and Cec Kennet on top of Kennets’ chook-shed, pelting poppleberries as we ran past. Nobby and I dared him down one day and took him on, and he gave Nobby a black eye. Any time, though, anyone else picked a scrap with me and Nobby, Mick would lay in fast to back us up.

‘Skinny Lizzie,’ they’d say about me.

‘Weakie Weston,’ they’d say about Nobby. ‘Sobby Nobby, mummy’s boy.’

‘Hey that’s my sister!’ Mick would say.

‘That’s my brother!’ Mick would back Nobby up.

Anyone who spoke a word against Nobby or me, Mick would get them.

Mick has green eyes like mine and I stare into them and see myself there. It’s scary, recognizing yourself in someone else’s eyes. He’s me, except he’s game and I’m not.

I look at Mick through the grill of the gaol bars. I feel real shy, and proud of him because he’s in gaol, and angry because it’s not me there, and I wish I was Alexandra Kollontai.

‘Hello, Mick,’ I say. ‘How is it? Do you need anything?’ There’s nothing I can give.

But Mick’s just happy to see me.

I look at Mick through the gaol bars. That night in the cupboard, too scared hearing the crashing to step out and look, when it came to the barricades I was not Alexandra Kollontai, I stopped in there standing up on the copper wishing for help, till Nobby found me.

I tell Mick I was scared that night.

‘That makes two of us.’

He whispers now, ‘What do you know about the gun?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you know about Nobby?’

‘Nothing.’

Nobby. Nothing. I know the loneliness now without you.

Mick’s face is my face, we stare like mirrors through iron bars with police listening and watching and there’s no way we can tell lies to each other.

‘If you should happen to run into him, like,’ Mick says (real careful, there’s warders around), ‘tell him hooray from me.’

‘I was a coward,’ Lizzie says, her mind on something else. ‘Mick, I love him,’ Lizzie says. She’s tight, her white hands gripping the bars towards Mick’s hands as she spurts out something that is very embarrassing.

‘Yeah, well tell him, Sis,’ says Mick, embarrassed.

‘It’s too late,’ says Lizzie.

It was the gun dream he was dreaming. Collapsing after five decades in the sun of the track, the red sand beneath his eyes like powdered blood, not far away there were suddenly bullet-bangs, and he was scared and seventeen.

Distant voices then too outside the criss-cross shadow of a bunda-bush, gun bangs, the scream of a girl, her shoes flashing past, then more legs, legs in white walking around him saying words he couldn’t make out, and still the bangs that he couldn’t know were simply the Bourke rifle club having its monthly target day, and then it was dark for weeks and he was seventeen. Caught inside a frozen block of movement till he came to in late April and read his name upon his arm.

Years of fear made him jump then, expect the troopers at his bedside, one two three. He never gave his name to no one, but there was only the nice nurse.

‘Feeling better, Mr Weston?’

‘How’d you get my name, girl?’ asked the pale thin man with sunspots on his cheeks.

‘You kept saying it in your sleep.’

No troopers came, and the nurse said he was in Sydney, in Prince Alfred no less, a hop and a jump from his old stamping ground.

There were a couple of days then, and talks with the social worker, who arranged for him new shoes and a pension, for he said he was going home.

One day then in late April he walked out in the clothes and hat they’d found him in, but in new social-worker shoes, for they’d taken his boots away; a coathanger-thin man who caught a bus down King Street, got out at Newtown Bridge, stared at Uncle George’s souvlaki stall, then walked slowly like a sick man or a man in a documentary, looking at the sights as he automatically followed the back route to Liberty Street.

There he made his camp.

Seeing as he came into the street a house with a Room To Let sign with a distant view of 201, he went to the door and rented the room and then began to spend his days deciding.

Deciding what, he wasn’t sure.

Sitting in the winter sun on the gas-meter box watching Noel come and go, observing Evie, letting the days walk past as he’d walked past the years, walking backwards now through time till he felt the pain of seventeen.

One day, when Noel was out, this man saw the despot step onto the balcony and look down into the street. He felt sympathy.

Mother Mother, Lizzie Girl, don’t snap me like a dried-out stick.

To hasten the past, he purchased a parrot. Gave it lettuce and taught it the rhymes of decades ago while he made up his mind.

To what, he didn’t know.

In the daytime, watching the boy that could be him running down the street in his old black coat, with the winter air making bright warm spots on his pale cheeks, watching Evie, he planned to go away.

In the night-time, dreaming nightmares, he’d wake a coward, but his gut full of hate.

It was easier, out there on red soil, to ward off the question of Lizzie, a happy housewife with someone else as her husband.

That Sunday night, Evie did something strange. She stole the silver serviette ring. After it went flying off her thumb and rolling across the lino she politely picked it up, and thought she put it on the table, but when shortly afterwards she went home to her room and got undressed to go to bed, she found she’d put it in her cardigan pocket.

N…
She traced the engraving with her fingernail, the flamboyant arching scroll.

Spin the ring and start again.

N

I love 4 ever, Noel Noel.

But that was wrong.

‘It’s Noel. Your boyfriend. Remember?’

‘Lover Boy.’

The quick eyes of Ted. The smart voice of Roseanne. Evie shuddered.

Then through the quiet of a Sunday night the feeling told her again. I love for ever Nobby Weston.

Evie opened the cupboard then and had a good look at what she hadn’t been able to look at since the dawn of the gun. Since that dawn, there’d been no scrabbling. Since that dawn, the girl had gone. Not far, but just not here, her wild fear no longer running through the blood of Evie, though there was worse now, now she was gone.

Evie opened the cupboard that was empty now, she’d cleaned out all the junk, and Evie studied the heart. They were old, the scratches of the heart, aged by air into the paint. But the eight in the
1981
didn’t quite match. The right-hand bumps of the eight were old, but the left-hand ones were new. Evie looked, and worked it out. That was how you’d draw an eight if you’d done a three first, and wanted to change it.

Through the quiet of a Sunday night, Evie sat quiet, spinning the ring.

Through the quiet of a Sunday night Sammy screamed. A wail of terror, like police through the night.

Evie ran into the house and up and turned the light on. ‘I’ll stay with her,’ she whispered as Mum poked her head in, sleepy-eyed. Then Evie held Sammy, held tight to the sobbing body that bucked inside her arms as the sobs wouldn’t stop. Evie felt the tears plopping down onto her arms, wiped the tears from Sammy’s face, but more came fast as rain.

‘What’s up, baby-girl? Did you have a nightmare?’

Sammy shook her head from side to side, and the tears came more.

‘Are you frightened of something?’

Sammy nodded. Hiccoughed, and the sobbing dropped a bit. ‘Where do you go to,’ Sammy sobbed, ‘when you die?’

Evie didn’t know. It had never occurred to her. She held the four-year-old body in her arms and looked out the window and thought: I wonder if I wondered about that when I was four. There was darkness out there, no moon, no stars; shadow swallowed the roofs and deepened down into darker blackness.

‘I don’t know,’ Evie said. ‘What makes you think of that all of a sudden?’

But Sammy just bucked against her breast, the fearful sobbing jerking out. ‘Where will I go to,’ Sammy sobbed, ‘when I’m a dead lady?’

So Evie told her something, not believing her own words, but just to give Sammy something to stop this. A blue place, a huge blue and white place like the sea, Evie described, where dead people fly free, like silver flames in the wind.

‘Is that where she went to,’ Sammy asked, ‘the lady?’

‘What lady?’

‘The one you were telling me about.’

In the end the tears ended and Sammy slept. Evie lay there under Sammy’s quilt, feeling the need for Sammy’s warmth to stop her aloneness.

Through the quiet of a Monday dawn Evie heard the bell next door: ring ring. The ring-hand summoning her. Evie woke.

TELL

Evie remembered. But the despot’s writing never told her what to tell.

In the darkness, she pulled out the serviette ring.

N

N for Noel.

N for no one.

N for Nobby.

The bell rang again. The ring-hand, Evie remembered. The weight of those six rings upon the finger, but six rings, not three, and two of them were gold.
‘The despot’s a widow, tell me something I don’t know.’
I’ll tell you something, Noel. Something so obvious you’ve always missed it. The despot was married twice. And Nobby was the son of the first time. Your mother, the daughter of the second. Evie didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She knew another thing though: that she wouldn’t tell Noel. Why tell him that the gunman was his uncle, when the whole thing already made him sick?

TELL
, said the despot. But tell whom, tell what?

Tell Nobby, Lizzie told Evie, I love 4 ever.

I went to the door

And I asked for some bread,

But the lady said, ‘Bum Bum—

The baker is dead.’

Hallelujah I’m a bum.

Hallelujah bum again.

Hallelujah give us a handout

To revive us again.

ANON,
TRADITIONAL SONG, EARLY 1900S
.

Karl Marx says that history repeats itself: occurring the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. As a general theory, it’s probably wrong, but as far as the Liberty Street battle went, it would’ve seemed right, to an outside observer. For what happened in the CYSS centre’s re-enactment of that battle seemed like full-blown farce, except to a few, who sunk back into the tragedy of the first time. It was Evie, or maybe fate, who’d appointed when it would happen.