The House That Was Eureka (25 page)

A bloke’s just turned up here, says he’s got money for a stamp and will post this in Lithgow. I’ve just remembered you hate me calling you Girl but there’s no time to change this. I’ll write again because I’m hoping you’ll read this. I love you sorry love Nobby.

Monday, 22 June 1931

Dear Girl, I’ve got an address now to tell you, so will tell you that. If you write care of Wilcannia Post Office N.S.W. I’ll get your letter. My mother will tell you the false name to write to. I want to hear from you and know if you got my last letter though you probably didn’t if the bloke didn’t post it in Lithgow. I had real luck! Just after I wrote to you I was sitting there and a bloke on a truck went by going to Wilcannia so he brought me to here and here I am! Here isn’t very good to be, I must say, because there’s no railway work and we sit under trees near the post office, they’re called pepper trees, they’re green with pink berries but you can’t eat the berries. I’ve only been here since last night and I’m sick to death of it already. It’s different from Newtown where there aren’t any trees, there’s trees here, but I don’t see the point if you can’t eat them. It’s not real luck to be here.

You probably think I’m a coward and don’t want to talk to me, I know you must. And Mick and the other men I ran through that day, and what did you do with the you-know-what when I gave it to you? They have the papers in the town hall here and I read how they’re searching but truly Girl it’s you I run from more than the larruppers, you and your pa and Mick, I can’t face you all.

My mother will give you this and I know you must hate her. Where are you living? Please write and tell me you got this.

Love, Nobby.

(I know I called you Girl again, but you running and skipping, it’s how I think of you. There’s a river here called the Darling and its name makes me think of you and be sad.)

Friday night 26 June

Dear Nobby,

I came and visited your mother tonight to see if she knows how to get in touch with you. She says it’s a secret, but she’ll send on a letter. It was funny to come into her house but she let me feed Job and she’s being quite nice.

How are you, Nobby? We are living now in the unemployed camp at La Perouse. So if you write, write care of there. Pa has made a good camp with one tent for the four big girls and the littlies and I have got a little hut made with bags and tins. I can’t write much Nobby (you know why!) and also because I’m sitting here in your mother’s parlour, and about the thing you gave me, you know why. The police have been asking me over and over if I saw anything. And Pa and Mick and Ma have been asking me too, but with all of them I keep my trap shut, don’t worry. The police Inspector keeps thumping his desk with a ruler like he wishes it was me he was hitting, and my bloody bronchitis has come back bad, so he thumps and I cough, you’d laugh if you saw him, going all red in the face and talking about the mystery.

Ma is in hospital, she lost the baby after the battle and it was a boy, so we’re all sad. Mick is out of hospital and Pa was only in there for a day. Mick went straight to gaol but the UWM got enough money to bail Pa out so he could move us into La Perouse, but then Pa was put back into gaol when they all came up in Court again on Tuesday.

This is a stupid letter. There’s so much to tell you and I can’t talk to you like this sitting down at a desk that squeaks in your mother’s parlour. I wish we were sitting together out in Liberty Street, Nobby.

Love, Lizzie.

P.S. Ma says to give you her love and say she would have called the baby Noel after you if it had lived because you were always a second son to her, but that wasn’t to be. Love again, Lizzie

Tuesday, 30 June 1931

Dear Lizzie, I’m calling you Lizzie in case it’s me calling you Girl that is making you sour on me, and stopping you from writing. My mother wrote to me on Friday night and said she’d just seen you in the street and given you my two letters and you ran off reading them and laughing, like you were laughing at me. She says that after the battle you and Ma and the girls all moved back into 203 and she’s letting you stop there and not pay anything for a couple of weeks till you move to another place that she got a clergyman to find for you. See, Girl? I told you she’d come round in the end, the old roof-dodger. (Though of course there’s no forgiving what she’s done.)

Life is dreadful here and I don’t dare to come back to Sydney, but if you just gave me one word to make me come back I would, and damn the larruppers. If you don’t write, I’ll take it that’s the end and I won’t torment you with no more letters. Please say hooray to Mick and Pa and the other men if you go out to visit them. Say I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t do anything, I know you think me weak.

Regards, Nobby Weston

Tuesday, 30 June 1931

Dear Nobby,

I came to see your mother again today and she says you wrote to her to tell me you want to cut off all contacts with your earlier life so that is fine.

We are fine too at La Perouse and the girls are good. The weather isn’t. It’s been raining flat out since last Friday. Your mother says she will send this on to you.

Best wishes,

yours in the struggle,

Elizabeth Cruise

It made her lonely, Nobby did, remembering his face, that made her lonely. Sitting here, huddled up, arms clutched around my bent-up knees, making myself into the smallest possible ball to keep warm, my feet are ice, the coughing starts. Like someone jumping up and up inside me, the coughing starts and goes forever, each cough making the next one happen, like when you’re skipping and your feet won’t stop.

Just above me, rain on the roof, the roof just here above my head. People reckon it’s soothing, the sound of rain on a tin roof, but not when the roof’s so close and full of holes.

Lizzie Cruise

Of La Perouse

Skipping words started coming into Lizzie’s head in time with the coughs.
Cruise, shoes, choose, lose,
rhyme words pounding to the skips inside her but the rhythm too painful to turn into a song.

Lizzie moved a few of the tins under the leaks, checked that no water seemed to be falling on the little ones, thought of the run to the tent, steeled herself, pulled a bag around her shoulders, then a bit of tarp, and out into the night.

She could hear the water in the open stormwater channel, pelting along fast, a few yards over there in the dark. A lot of the time, the other campers said, it was nearly dry: just a wide ditch in the sandy soil, bringing the stormwater down from under the road, back near the golf links, and continuing down to take any overflow to the sea. Usually it wasn’t much, just a gurgle like a creek, but it’d been raining hard for five days now, raining hard since Friday night, and now she could hear the water raging down.

Pa probably should’ve built the camp further away, but it was getting so crowded out here that you were hard put to find a good camp site.

Lizzie ran through the helter-skelter rain, picking her way between trees in the dark, tripping, her foot caught on a tree-root. I’ll be glad when Ma’s back out of hospital. The girls were good, but it was a lot, being in charge of all the cooking and feeding and washing, especially since the rain, these last few days. (Especially since the loneliness these last days.) One thing, but, you could say for La Perouse, at least you didn’t have to mop it.

Lizzie pushed into the big girls’ tent. Three bodies curled up beneath their blankets, Maire sitting up, shivering, looking at Lizzie with green Cruise eyes.

‘I’m scared,’ said Maire.

‘There’s nothing to be scared of.’ Lizzie made her voice strong.

Lizzie Cruise

Of La Perouse

The coughs started skipping fast inside her.

‘What’re you scared of?’ Lizzie checked along the tent seams for drips, gently shoving Kathleen away from the door.

‘What if the water rises?’ said Maire. ‘What if we drown?’

‘What! In a stormwater channel?’ Lizzie laughed. A real laugh, but she let it come out louder, to make Maire feel better.

‘What if there’s a tidal wave?’ Bridget’s voice was muffled, beneath the blankets. ‘You can hear the sea.’

Over there, through the darkness, over the sand, you could hear the steady roar of the Pacific as it pounded on the coast. You could smell it too, a crusty salty smell, smell it as a dirty smell in the sand beneath your blanket. Though these last few days, the main smell was of wet: wet hessian, damp blankets, soggy tarp, dripping hair.

‘How about you go to sleep?’

‘But I’m scared.’

‘Don’t be a baby.’ But she said it gently.

(I’m scared, Pa, Ma, Mick, Nobby, Nobby I’m scared. Not here, not scared of the wet, but there with the boots, time crashing around. There inside the cupboard, the closed air inside it, the sight of the door as I scratch on it from inside.)

Here, though, there’s nothing to fear, nothing left in the world to fear, Lizzie thought, for every possible dreadful thing that could ever happen in the world had already happened.

Pa in gaol, Mick too, ma in hospital, Nobby gone.

Lizzie Cruise

Of La Perouse

Jumps the wet

In holey shoes

Walking back, too wet to make it worthwhile running, lonely night, Nobby gone, Lizzie hurdles a puddle, only to land in another one.

Lizzie Cruise

Lizzie Cruise

We’re all fine

At La Perouse

The words of the letter she wrote last night beating like rain in her head in her brain.

It was funny, how you could have something, and throw it away, and only know you’d had it when you hadn’t got it.

Like how you never knew you had a leg, until you broke it.

Like that day, years ago, when she and Nobby played Mick’s trick back on him, standing up on the roof of Kennet’s chookhouse, pelting chokoes down as Mick and Cec Kennet belted around the corner in their billy-cart, standing there, when suddenly the world went whirly, fear cold, a hurry and slowness, as her shoes upon the tin slipped and suddenly Nobby’s face, thin and white and scared, as he grabbed her then but couldn’t stop it. Only eight feet or so it was, but the depth of that distance dragged them down so fast. Two bodies, clasping stick arms, till the pavement hit, and I felt my leg.

It was funny, how you never knew you had a heart, until you broke it.

Lizzie Cruise

Of La Perouse

(Choose, lose, Nobby, lose.)

Lizzie was back in the humpy now, pushing wet straggles of hair out of her eyes, pushing words out of her brain. ‘
Life is fine at La Perouse
,’ she reminded herself. Fine, fine, but it wasn’t fine, only rain, rain, all the time, since she came back last Friday night, from the first time she’d gone to see Ma Weston.

Knocking on the door, so scared.

And saw her again last night, and today she saw Mick, and now tonight the rain.

Rain rain

Pelts again

Rushing down

The stormwater drain…

Then Lizzie ran. Hearing the great boom in the distance as the stormwater pipe split up that way inside the darkness, releasing the great pounding thrust of water, Lizzie grabbed the waking shape of Maudie and hauled her from the humpy, up here, to higher ground, pushed her screaming into the blackness, and ran back to get Fee.

Fee, Fee, here with me, but she wasn’t here, the humpy was empty, there wasn’t a humpy, only flat pieces of tin and hessian on the ground as the wind tore their camp to shreds.

Lizzie ran towards the stormwater channel, seeing the round shape of Fee lit up by a lightning flash as it plunged in panic running at random towards the danger.

In the danger, Lizzie didn’t think of danger, wasn’t brave because the thing was happening so fast there wasn’t time to imagine consequences.

And so, like something fast in a dream, she grabbed Fee and slung her back to Colleen who was there now, Lizzie sliding though as she did it, her feet refusing to hold on the sandy soil that, as she slipped there, caved in beneath and betrayed her.

After the battle was over, they sat in the kitchen of Noel’s place: Noel and Evie, Nobby and his mother. Evie made a pot of tea, pouring into cups without saucers, pouring the milk from the bottle, not bothering about the despot’s fanciness and fiddle and likes.

‘Thank you,’ said the despot, humble, her eyes on Nobby as he read the letters for…it must be the third time. ‘It’s nice and strong.’

Facts blurring for the despot sometimes still, most of the time Evie was Evie, but at odd seconds time would move again and here in my kitchen she’d be Lizzie, Lizzie Cruise. Pouring tea…at least she makes a decent cup of tea, that’s one thing you can say for her, I must tell her mother.

‘Mother,’ Nobby said, the word clumsy in his mouth, like when Mrs Maria tried to say words on an unaccustomed tongue.

Then Nobby said nothing, his hands awkward as he rolled a smoke, feeling strange, illegal somehow, smoking in his mother’s kitchen. He’d just been a boy when he’d left.

Left, not left, he’s back, my son, the despot thought, my lovely fugitive. ‘Noel,’ she said, speaking to Nobby, but her eyes on the face of Noel here, he’s more the right age.

Most of the time, the despot knew and understood, but sometimes was puzzled: why are there two of them? For years nothing, neither son nor lovely fugitive, but suddenly this night, in my kitchen, there are two. I must tell my son I’m hungry, the despot thought.

Anticipating Evie, who’d just gone next door to check on the girls in bed and came back now with sausages and eggs and bacon and tomatoes and onions. Nobby took them from her and cooked. Neat and fast in his movements like a bush cook, he mixed up flour and water and made johnny cakes while he fried the rest, and Noel and Evie began to read.

‘Uncle Nobby...’ Noel said (almost whispered), Noel now tasting a strange word on his tongue. All the time, when I was a kid, how I wished I had an uncle. Someone to go backstop for me.