The Never Boys (16 page)

Sydney was a metropolis of water, tourists, humidity, talkback radio, sunless streets, smokers, beggars and no-right turns. But more than anything, it was manic. People never stopped. They hurried to work, hurried to meetings, hurried their lunches. They hurried their phone calls. Then they hurried home. Hurry, hurry, hurry. The city was so overwhelming that when Dean stepped off the bus at Central Station, a rush of commuters in too much of a hurry to see him knocked him about.

Booking into a backpackers' hostel, he showered, then left a message for Michelle. Lunch was a Whopper with cheese, fries and a Coke. As he was only in Sydney one night, there wasn't much time for sightseeing. But he did splurge on a taxi drive across the Harbour Bridge and back, just to brag that he'd done it once. Then he gave the driver a new address and marvelled from the front seat the decaying
beauty of the inner city.

Terraces, wrought iron gates, barred windows and trees rooted in bitumen replaced the office buildings. Turning at a corner shop, the taxi braked outside a blue terrace that matched the address of Clive's letters.

‘Are you sure you want to be dropped off here?' the driver asked. ‘It
is
Redfern.'

Dean swung open the front gate, noticing a line of hanging baskets dripping along the patio. Good, the owner was home. He twisted the doorbell like a wind-up toy. Two locks snapped aside and from behind the security grille a woman asked, ‘Yes?'

‘Er, hi. Bea Carmichael?'

‘No.'

‘Is she in?'

A
Star Trek
phaser blasted deep inside the corridor. ‘I'm sorry. I've never heard of her. You must have the wrong address.'

He double-checked it with the woman. Still no winner.

‘Can I ask how long you've been living here?'

‘Half my life,' she said, staying behind the grille. ‘Seventeen years.'

He stared blankly.

‘Is everything okay?'

‘Yeah. Thanks — Thanks for your time.'

Standing on the street, he only moved aside when a team of footballers sweated towards a nearby oval. He'd failed. Thirteen hundred kilometres for a dead end.

Defeated, he crossed the road to go to the corner shop, hoping it had a payphone.

‘Excuse me,' a woman interrupted him as he started dialling the taxi company. ‘Hi. I'm Sheryl-Lee Kerr. You were just at my place asking about a Bea Carmichael?'

‘Yes.'

The dark-haired woman was aged in her thirties just as she had said. ‘You don't mean
Beatrice Sutton
by any chance?'

‘Is she quite old?'

‘Yes. Or, well, she would be. I haven't seen her for a long time. She owned my terrace before my brother bought it from her. She sold it after her husband died. I try not to think of that though, considering I'm living there now.'

‘Her husband?'

‘Dr Sutton. That's why the name Carmichael threw me. And I thought you said B. Carmichael as in Belinda or Betty. What reminded me were these strange letters that occasionally arrive in the mail. They're addressed to her, even though she hasn't lived here for years. I normally forward them on to her last address.'

‘You know where she is now?'

‘Yes. It's in my drawer. Do you mind waiting?'

‘No,' he said excitedly. ‘Not at all.'

The taxi ride back almost dropped him off where he'd started. Paying his fare, he stood on the steps of a narrow triple-storey sandstone building wondering once again if he had the right address. It was an inner city hospice near Hyde Park. A number of Forgotten People stood on the front steps, squeezing puffs from cigarettes, alongside nuns who shared cups of tea.

He made his way inside, uncomfortable with the unknown. Naively, he expected people in quiet genuflection or the shuffle of robes, but in reality it was a jostle of crying babies, addicts, the homeless and HIV-positive men. There was not a habit in sight. At the main desk, a middle-aged Chinese-Australian sister rolled her eyes as she fought with bureaucracy on the phone. A street kid had been denied welfare because he didn't have a permanent address. ‘Oh, we'll be calling the Minister's office
after
we've called all the radio stations!'
Slam
! ‘Patience is a virtue. Patience is a virtue,' she repeated. Then composing herself, she asked, ‘Now, how can I help you?'

‘I'm after a Beatrice Sutton?'

‘One moment.' The nun stepped into a back room where an older colleague instantly recognised the
name. After he had been pointed out, she approached him again and said, ‘Sister Ruth might be able to help you. She's rostered on pastoral care at the hospital for the moment. You can take a seat until she returns if you wish.'

He sat next to a heavily inked biker with a bullring through his nose and his young son on his shoulder. The pale-faced boy stared at Dean with the grey eyes of the dying.

The wait was a long one. He had possibly found the only person in Sydney who wasn't in a hurry. However, after an alcoholic man had been calmed in the back rooms, an elderly nun walked in the front. She had white hair, glasses, a worn rosary and a Walkman plugged into her ears. The sister at the counter called out to Sister Ruth then stole her away for a quiet word. When he was introduced, he expected hymns of praise carolling from the earpieces. Instead, trumpets pistoned with jazz.

‘Sorry, I can't help you.' The nun smiled politely. ‘I don't recognise that name.'

‘But the sister at the counter says you do,' he said.

‘She's mistaken, I'm afraid.'

Sister Ruth left him standing in the foyer. ‘You're Beatrice Sutton, aren't you? Or at least Beatrice Carmichael.'

‘No, like I said, you're mistaken.'

She continued down the corridor, greeting a heavily pregnant mother who was shuffling the other way.

‘Clive Clancy's dead!' he yelled out.

The nun stopped. She glanced to the side, opened a door then retreated behind it. A minute later, she reappeared. ‘I'm sorry for your loss,' she whispered. ‘My prayers are with him. Now, you must excuse me.'

‘His will expires next week. I think he meant it for you.'

No response.

‘Aren't you even curious why I'm here?'

Frustration edged his voice. The nun picked up on it and warned quietly, ‘Let's step outside.'

‘You are her, aren't you? You can't lie to me. Nuns aren't allowed to.'

‘Nuns aren't infallible, you know.'

‘Infallible?'

‘It doesn't matter. Who are you, anyway? His grandson?'

‘No, Dean Mason. I'm just a — a friend. I want to give back his letters.'

‘What would I want with those? It looks like they've already been sent back to him.'

‘By you?'

‘For a good reason.'

‘So you
are
Beatrice?'

‘Beatrice passed away when her husband died. So did her history. I'm Sister Ruth now. Please, I must go. There are people inside who need my care.'

‘Wait! I want to find out what happened between you two.'

No answer.

‘But the letters?'

‘Destroy them.'

Candle soot and burning prayers curled into the high recesses of St Mary's Cathedral as silent saints watched over the small number of kneeling parishioners. Their hands were clasped and eyes closed as a cleaner rolled his mop bucket among the tourists pointing at stained-glass windows. Counted in the flock was Sister Ruth, who had been there for more than half-an-hour. Two dozen rows back, Dean sat watching, aware that she'd ignored him upon entering. He too was there to wrestle with his lot. The last time he'd stepped inside a church he'd been dressed in the black stiffness of a suit and tie, and chilled by the incense of cut orchids.

With an amen, Sister Ruth crossed her chest, pulled herself out of her seat then placed a steadying hand on the end of each pew as she walked towards the rear of the cathedral. He tried avoiding eye contact as she stopped at his row.

‘I hope you're not following me.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I came here on my own — it's been a while.'

She started to inquire, but refrained. She had a different question instead. ‘How did you know I was Beatrice Sutton? None of the sisters would have told you.'

He grimaced. ‘No offence, but you're the right age. Plus your rosary beads. They're red and green — your footy team's colours, right?'

She pulled them from a pocket and rubbed them between her fingers. ‘The Rabbitohs need all the help they can get,' she explained.

The light above the confessional switched on and another sinner disappeared inside.

‘Why did you stop writing to him?' he asked bluntly.

‘You already know the answer to that: I didn't love him.'

‘But you did once, right? You must've for Clive to love you his entire life.'

She looked up and down the main aisle. ‘You're not going to leave me alone until I tell you, are you?'

‘It would end a lot of rumours,' he said.

She fell silent. A camera flash reflected in her glasses as she chewed on her reluctance. Finally, she
lowered herself next to him and took her time to begin. ‘Clive and I grew up together in Redfern during the Depression. We were sweet on each other from a young age. About eleven, I think. No — ten. Yes, ten. We were a pair of tearaways. We would work as “cockatoos” for gambling dens for a halfpenny, ride Chippy Jones's horse when he wasn't home or sneak into the Sydney Sports Ground to watch George Treweek's Rabbitohs rough up Balmain. When money was tight — and it was always tight — we'd head to Centennial Park with big pickle jars and sit with our legs in one of the ponds. After a while, we'd pull them out, pluck off all the leeches then sell them for a penny to Washington Soul Pattisons, who would use them on bruises and black eyes.

‘Clive was a bit of an entrepreneur when he was younger. He was also a dreamer. He used to make up fancy stories about us travelling the world together — Egypt always being his favourite. “We'll fight mummies and sail the Nile, Bea,” he'd say. I would always laugh, thinking it was all nonsense. I came from a family of nine that lived in one of the poorest parts of Sydney. We could barely feed ourselves let alone buy a tram ticket.

‘As we grew older, Clive's affections grew stronger. It was more silliness than love. He left school for a
job with Sargent's Meat Pies then later as a barrow boy for a Haymarket grocer. With a little money filling his pockets, he started talking about us getting married in a few years' time. But the war put an end to that. Everything changed. Fathers, sons, husbands — they all enlisted to fight the Germans. Whole families of men in some cases. I was grateful because Clive was sixteen and too young to go. That didn't stop his friends joining, however. They thought themselves indestructible. They bet each other a month's pay on who was going to shoot Hitler first.

‘Most were too young to enlist but they lied about their age or signed up as cadets. They tried getting him to join as well but he told them his father and mother forbade him. There was an element of truth to that, but I knew him too well. Clive wasn't a fighter. He'd always kept away from William Street and the razor gangs. He was just a skinny boy who loved boats and stole banana boxes to play street cricket. The war scared him.

‘Some months later, he started getting white feathers in the mail. It didn't matter that he was only a boy or that his parents refused to let him go. The neighbours only thought of their own men dying overseas while he was safe at home. He tried hiding the feathers from us but the servicemen's wives and
girlfriends were just as catty towards me. They called me all sorts of terrible names or threw soil at me. Once, Francine Mallard even chased me down Chalmers Street with a broom!

‘It was hard on his family, too. His father fought in the Great War and lost two brothers. He didn't want to lose his only son to the Nazis as well. Keeping his boy at home cost him his standing in the community. He got into his fair share of scraps down at the local hotel, let me tell you.'

She started rubbing the blotched knuckles of her left hand. ‘The guilt and the war wore us all down. Clive was upset the most. He kept saying that he should just enlist and be done with it, but then talk himself out of it when he thought of killing another man. So it surprised us all — not the least me — when one afternoon, in May I think, he announced he
had
enlisted. This hurt me terribly but he kept reassuring me everything would be okay. It wasn't the frontline, he said. It was the navy. “I probably won't see any action.”

‘On our last night together, he took me to the pictures. I can't remember what was playing. We were both too miserable to sit through it so we left at the intermission. The next morning he was to be transported from Sydney to Melbourne on a troop
train and we wanted to spend the last few hours together. We didn't say a lot because we didn't know what to say. But it was while he walked me home that he asked of me the strangest thing: not to see him off at the station. He was afraid seeing me cry would stay with him during his service. He then gave me a GPO Box address to write to and promised everything would be the same when he returned.'

‘So what went wrong?'

A young girl ran by, la-la-lahing and slapping the end of each pew.

‘You've read Clive's letters. What did you learn from them?'

‘That life at sea was pretty hard, that he missed home and that he missed you. Why?'

‘What if I told you Clive never wrote them.'

He faltered. ‘Sorry?'

‘The originals, I mean.'

‘But it's his handwriting.'

‘They're copies.'

‘Copies of what?'

She shifted on the hard pew. ‘How well did you know Clive?'

‘Er, not that well.'

She breathed out. ‘Then he's deceived you, too. You see Clive never joined the navy. He never went
to war. He didn't even board the
HMAS Australia
. It was all a story that he made up.'

‘But the letters? They seem so real.'

‘Because they
were
real. Written by a real sailor aboard the
Aussie
— a friend of Clive's named John Kaesler.'

The General's father?

‘He and Clive wrote to each other during the war. His letters would tell of life aboard the ship and the battles he'd seen, which Clive would then copy, add his own thoughts to, then mail to his family and me. We were none the wiser. We wrote letters to him and we received letters back. His stories matched the reports on the wireless and in the newspapers; the stationery had naval letterheads; and his telegrams were true-to-their word about when he was returning for shore leave.'

He felt a hitch in his chest and tried swallowing it back down. ‘But why would he do such a stupid thing?'

‘Why do fake veterans march in ANZAC Day parades now? Is it to fit in? Or for respect? Or is it because the guilt gets too much and they have to fake another life? No one really knows. I have my own theory about Clive, though. You have to understand that society was different back then. A lot of young
people today protest against war. In my day, going off to defend your country was an honourable sacrifice. You weren't seen as a man unless you did so. Clive lied not only to avoid war, but also to avoid being persecuted by people. The problem was that he never expected the war to go on as long as it did.'

‘How did you discover he was lying then?'

‘By mistake, actually. At the laundry where I worked there was this lovely, lovely woman with red hair and high cheeks who used to come in once a week. Purely by chance she was married to a sailor aboard the
Aussie
. We would swap news about what our men had written in their letters or what parcels we'd sent them. One Christmas, she walked in with a card she'd just received from her husband. It showed a sailor hugging an artillery shell while dreaming of his sweetheart. She asked if I'd received mine. I said no. “It must be still in the post.” But it never arrived. Mail delays were common so I didn't think too much of it but my friend wrote to her husband, insisting that he give Clive a clip round the ears for not sending me one. Her husband wrote back saying that he didn't know anybody by that name. Again, I wasn't too worried. The
Aussie
was a big ship with nearly a thousand hands. But her husband wrote back a second time and reassured us
that he'd checked with one of the officers. There was no Clive Clancy aboard the
HMAS Australia
.

‘We went down to the navy office and asked a records officer. He also told us that Clive wasn't with the
Aussie
— or any other ship for that matter. It was then that we started to learn the real story.

‘His father had friends at the post office who helped track Clive to the Melbourne docks. He'd been working there ever since stepping off a train from Sydney and not for the navy. But a friend tipped off Clive before his father found him and he fled again. The news created quite a sensation back home and brought great shame not only to his whole family but to me as well. The feeling in our street was so vile that his parents were forced to move to the country after the war. But they had to suffer the humiliation in the meantime. It was worse for me. Everyone thought I'd been helping him hide.

‘From that moment, Clive could never come back home. What he did wasn't the Redfern way. He must have realised that, because the next time I heard from him, the war was finished and he was in hiding in New Guinea. He sent me a long letter, trying to explain himself while at the same time asking if we could still get married. When I refused, he sailed back to Australia, hoping to win me over face-to-face.
But I told him: no. I no longer loved him. It was over.'

Her voice sounded tired. ‘I'm no fool. I'm sure Clive was involved with other women during his life. None of them lasted, however, because more letters would always arrive. Sad, sad letters telling me how much he loved me and begging for me to change my mind. Silly man. He was in love with a girl who was still a teenager in his mind.'

She shrank with another sigh. ‘Even now I find it hard to feel sympathy for him. The only people I really feel sorry for are all the men Clive dishonoured. He stole another man's identity without experiencing the horror and death those sailors had to live through. It was just a giant story to him. But do you know what the saddest part is of all this mess? That first mistake, the very first lie. Surely Clive never imagined how many more it would take to cover it up — the hurt it would cause — or he would have stopped it before it began.

‘In the end, the truth came out — as it always does. Clive died alone. He'd lived a life that was never his and he regretted it until his last breath.'

A hush fell between Dean and Sister Ruth. She sat still, slowly rolling a single rosary bead between her thumb and forefinger, while he fidgeted, wiping the humidity from his face. Above him. The saints. Their heavy eyes. Why were they staring?

‘Young man?' she asked with concern. ‘Are you okay?'

‘Y-Yes.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I just feel light-headed, that's all. It's — it's a lot to take in.'

‘Would you like a drink of water?'

He nodded. ‘Thanks.'

A volunteer returned with a full glass, which he skolled. ‘You still look pale. Is something wrong?'

‘It's just —'

A mobile phone started ringing.

‘Clive's life — mine —'

‘Go on.'

‘How you were saying —'

Parishioners broke from their prayers as the caller became insistent.

‘Yes?'

‘About the one lie. That's all true?'

She smiled respectfully. ‘We wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't.'

The phone must have been left behind. No one was rushing to answer it.

‘How did you — I mean —'

‘You're not in trouble, are you?'

‘Yes —
No
.'

The twelfth ring.

‘Are you sure?'

‘Not yet anyway.'

‘Do you need to speak to a priest?'

Would someone answer that phone!

He caught her before she got up. The cleaner answered the phone. ‘Please. Sit. I need someone to talk to. Possibly you.'

That caught the nun off-guard. She stayed beside him, hesitant. ‘What did you want to talk about?'

He pushed his face through his hands. ‘How can I describe it, Sister? Everything's so complicated.'

‘Then start with the beginning and we'll work it out from there.'

‘But you'll only end up hating me.'

‘Then I'd be a poor nun if I did.'

He stared at her. He wanted to talk, but he was too afraid. Steadying himself with a deep breath, he stop-started until the right words connected. She sat through his story as the skyline faded and the dusk darkened with thousands of bats. When he had finished, he leaned forward, almost balled up, his shaking fingers holding his head. Meditating, the nun put away her red and green rosary and looked to the pulpit.