Tiger Men (8 page)

‘To be honest with you,’ he admitted, ‘if I’d known the fellow had a knife I wouldn’t have called him up at all. That poor lass would be down there now, raped and beaten to a pulp, I fear.’

He was rewarded with a cackle of delight, which pleased him. He knew how to play Ma Tebbutt now. She enjoyed a dose of the downright truth, and he’d be more than happy to oblige – within reason, of course.

‘Cheers,’ she said and raising her mug she drank.

Following her example, Mick took a healthy draught and the effect was instantaneous. He nearly gagged as the rough rum seared his throat and the fumes brought tears to his eyes. As his preference was ale, he rarely drank hard liquor.

‘I could do with a chappie like you around here,’ Ma said, the rum having no apparent effect upon her at all, ‘a chappie who has his wits about him. Since Sid’s gone, some of the men take advantage of my girls.’ She downed the remainder of her liquor and poured herself another, Mick wordlessly waving aside the bottle she offered as he regained his breath.

‘Len looks after the clients and Billy handles the bar,’ Ma continued, ‘and between them they can break up a fight if need be, but they can’t stop one from starting, if you get my drift.’ Another hefty swig of rum found its way down her throat – fresh company being a rarity, Ma was enjoying herself. ‘Just between you and me,’ she said confidentially, ‘Len and Billy aren’t all that bright. They can’t sense trouble and deal with it the way Sid used to do. I need someone with wits and diplomacy. Someone who can pick the troublemakers, and steer the girls clear of the bastards before things get out of hand, because frankly some of the girls aren’t all that bright either. Think you can handle that, Mick?’

Having recovered himself, Mick looked her straight in the eye. ‘I know I can.’

‘Good lad.’

They toasted each other and Mick downed the remainder of his rum with comparative ease. After weathering the initial assault, the second time around was much easier to take. He accepted Ma’s offer of another tot, but rested the mug on the table while he took a bit of a breather.

‘I’ll only need you nights; the days are no trouble,’ she said. Digging a wad of tobacco from the pouch she started tamping it into her clay pipe. ‘But that’ll give you time to sort yourself out, won’t it? Get the lay of the land as it were, being newly arrived in town. Like I said, there’ll be no money to speak of, but I’ll sling you the odd bob now and then, and board and lodging’ll be thrown in. Do we have a deal?’

‘We most certainly do.’ Mick was about to offer his hand, but Ma gave another salute and, realising it was the way she did things, he once again returned the gesture.

‘It’ll be good to have someone about the place with a bit of a brain,’ Ma said, clenching the stem of her pipe between her teeth and lighting a taper from the flame of the oil lamp. ‘God, but I’ve missed Sid.’ She applied the flame to the tobacco and sucked away furiously, her face disappearing behind a thick, grey cloud. ‘Sid was a smart bugger, sharp as a tack.’

‘Sid was your husband, I take it?’’

Ma was so obviously in the mood for a chat that Mick had no qualms about asking the question, and indeed Ma displayed no hesitation in answering.

‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘the best husband a woman could ask for and that’s a fact. He died two years ago, more’s the pity. Things have never been the same since.’

Ma felt one of her maudlin turns coming on, as was quite often the case when she thought of Sid, although in reality she was mourning the loss of her old life rather than the loss of her old comrade in arms. Everything had gone wrong from the moment Sid had died. She’d turned sixty that very same week. The girls had thrown her a birthday party to cheer her up and, drunk as a lord, she’d fallen down the stairs fracturing bones she’d never known she had. That had been the beginning of the end. She’d healed after a fashion, but arthritis had set in and, unable to leave her upstairs rooms, her weight had ballooned, compounding the problem immeasurably. These days she put everything down to the loss of Sid.

‘He was a good man, my Sid,’ she said, gazing nostalgically into her pewter mug as if it were a magic crystal ball that could transport her to the past.

‘Was he a Londoner too?’ Mick asked. ‘Did you come out here together?’

Ma’s eyes snapped up, sharp and shrewd and beady-blue. Was the boy playing games? Was he mocking her? No-one in Wapping would dare make such an enquiry. But when her eyes met his, she saw only innocence there.

‘You really
are
new in town, aren’t you?’

‘I am indeed,’ Mick replied. ‘I arrived as a deckhand on the
Maid of Canton
; she docked just this afternoon.’

‘Ah.’ Content with his answer, Ma poured herself another tot of rum. The lad was sharp, there was no doubt about that – he couldn’t have fought like he had without being canny as all hell – but he was new to the place and naive. He’d learn soon enough.

‘Yes, me and Sid took passage from London ten years ago.’ Sucking away at her pipe, she settled comfortably back in her chair. ‘We’d heard about the prospects that lay awaiting enterprising folk here in Van Diemen’s Land and we set out to start a new life for ourselves. We had such dreams, we did,’ her smile was beatific, ‘and they all come true, as you well can see. We bought up our very own pub, just the way we’d planned . . .’

Ma’s story was a tissue of lies. She’d been in Van Diemen’s Land for nearly forty years, the first seven of which had been spent at Port Arthur. Sid, a Yorkshireman who’d been transported in 1810, had served a fourteen-year term and the two had met in Hobart Town shortly after his release. They’d never wed, but they’d hired themselves out as a respectable married couple, accepting employment as housekeeper and overseer on a wealthy cattle property to the north. For fifteen long years, they’d pooled every penny of their hard-earned cash, and when they’d finally returned to Hobart Town they’d purchased the Hunter’s Rest, a rundown alehouse with cheap upstairs rooms, which they’d converted into a successful pub and brothel.

‘This pub meant everything to Sid and me,’ Ma said, puffing on her pipe and peering affectionately through the pall of smoke at the stone walls that surrounded her. ‘This was where we’d planned to live out the twilight of our days. The Hunter’s Rest meant the very world to us, it did.’

The latter part of her story at least was true. She and Sid may have fought like cat and dog, hating each other more often than not, but the Hunter’s Rest had been their mutual salvation. The pub was the unbreakable bond they’d shared, for it represented their freedom.

‘And now he’s gone,’ she said. ‘Dead and gone, and nothing’s the same.’ She shook off her mood with a businesslike shrug. ‘Ah well, that’s life, isn’t it? People come and people go, and you’ve got to get on with things, don’t you? You can’t just sit around and wait for it to be your turn.’ She skolled her rum and set the mug down on the table with an air of finality. ‘Not when you’ve got a pub to run.’

Ma no longer felt maudlin. She’d enjoyed telling her story. It had been some time since she’d had a stranger to tell it to. Everyone in Wapping had a story, which everyone else in Wapping pretended to believe: it was an understanding shared amongst neighbours. Some of the stories might even have been true, but no-one would ever know, because no-one would ever question them.

‘I got paperwork to do,’ she said, heaving herself up from the armchair. Mick jumped to his feet, aware he was being dismissed. ‘You head off downstairs,’ she instructed, ‘and tell Len he’s to set you up in the little room out the back –’

He tried to thank her, but Ma paid him no heed.

‘Bring the chair over here,’ she said as she lumbered her way to the desk in the corner.

He did as he was told, placing the chair for her, but she waved away any further attempt at assistance.

‘And introduce yourself to Freddie in the kitchen.’ She sat, glancing down at the clock on the desk. ‘You’ve missed out on the pub dinner, the stew finishes at nine, but he’ll find you something to tide you over.’

‘I’m grateful to you, Ma. I’ll be forever in your debt. What is there I can possibly say –?’

‘Nothing.’ She cut him off and glared up at him. ‘If all you can come up with is your Irish shite, then say nothing at all.’

‘It may well be Irish, but it isn’t shite, I can assure you.’ Mick stood his ground, deciding to call her bluff. She was starved for company and she liked him, he could tell. Surely she didn’t expect him to behave like a lackey. In any event, he had no wish to be bullied, even for free board and lodging. ‘It’s the way I talk, Ma, so you’d better get used to it.’

Cheeky young bugger, she thought, but she didn’t say anything. She waited for him to go on.

‘You have welcomed me, a perfect stranger, into your home,’ he said with a dignity that dared her to make fun of him, ‘and I thank you from the very bottom of my heart.’ He took her hand in his, and Ma didn’t withdraw it as she would normally have done: she was too intrigued. ‘May God bless and protect you always.’ He bent and kissed her hand, then gently released it and stepped back. ‘There now, I’ve said my piece. Thank you for hearing me out.’

Ma searched his eyes for the faintest sign of mischief, but she could find none. He appeared deadly serious. Was he playing a game or wasn’t he? It was impossible to tell.

‘Get yourself downstairs,’ she said, ‘and come back and see me tomorrow.’

‘Right you are then.’ He picked up his kitbag.

‘Not before noon. I don’t receive visitors until after noon. We’ll have another chat then, and in the early evening I’ll come downstairs and introduce you to the girls.’

Mick nodded and strode to the door, unaware of the honour being bestowed upon him – Ma’s excursions downstairs were rare.

‘Oh and Mick.’ He halted, turning back as she called. ‘Welcome to the Hunter’s Rest. You’re going to fit in real well here, I can tell.’

‘I know I am, Ma.’ He grinned as he slung the kitbag over his shoulder. ‘I know I am.’

A
N EXTRACT FROM
‘A T
IGER’S
T
ALE
’,
A
WORK IN PROGRESS BY
H
ENRY
F
OTHERGILL

C
IRCULAR
H
EAD, FAR NORTH-WEST
T
ASMANIA
, 1836

The horse stomped its front hoof and snorted nervously.

‘Easy, old girl.’ Jim leant forwards in the saddle and patted the mare’s neck. He knew why the horse was nervous. There was a tiger in the vicinity. Or at least that’s what people had taken to calling the animal, probably because of the stripes across its back and hind quarters. Jim thought it more like a dog.

Jim Daly was a boundary rider for the Van Diemen’s Land Company, a man whose job it was to wander the company holdings checking and repairing the fences and shepherding stock when necessary. He’d been riding all day from Woolnorth, the company’s far western sheep run, and now from up on the ridge, he could see way below the main company settlement at Circular Head on the rugged and remote north-west coast.

The mare snorted again, and again he calmed her. He never failed to be surprised by the reaction of European animals to the so-called tiger. It made them skittish and Jim couldn’t for the life of him understand why. In all the years he’d been in the colony he’d never once seen a tiger display aggression, and yet his company overseers were obsessed with killing the damn things. In fact the company had a bounty on the animals of ten shillings per head. Why that was he would never know and he’d made little attempt to find out. Jim was not an inquisitive man by nature; he’d learnt as a child to keep his nose out of other people’s business.

He looked down at the settlement of Circular Head. Situated on a promontory about five miles long and a mile wide, it extended finger-like in a northerly direction into Bass Strait. From where he sat on his horse it looked idyllic, but Jim knew that in reality it was quite the opposite. It was a festering wound of decaying huts and shelters full of angry, unhappy men and women. People who’d been promised an Eden by the damned company, he thought, and who were now left to rot in squalid, unsanitary conditions ruing the day they’d ever signed their indenture papers.

Nothing, in Jim’s opinion, had gone right from day one. Apart from several hundred acres near the settlement, the area chosen by the company was rugged wilderness and dense forest that proved a nightmare to clear for farming purposes. The wild westerly winds known as the roaring forties seemed almost constant and during the winter months could destroy the soul. And then there was the company’s appalling disregard for the welfare of the local native tribes. That had been the most soul-destroying of all. Rather than come to the aid of the Parpeloihener and Pennemukeer, the Van Diemen’s Land Company had ignored their plight. They had turned a blind eye to the atrocious behaviour of the sealers, men barely human, who inhabited the local islands, kidnapping and raping black women and, on one particularly gruesome day in 1828, massacring thirty of the local black men and throwing their bodies off a cliff.

Jim shook his head. The injustice of it all was beyond imagining. He was about to nudge the mare in the ribs when his eye caught a movement in the ferns to his left.

Tiger pups, he thought. It had to be tiger pups: she would have dropped them in her flight. Jim knew that female tigers carried their young in a pouch beneath their body, like kangaroos and wallabies, and that when they detected danger or felt threatened, they ejected their young and ran, hoping to lure the threat away.

He dismounted and walked the thirty-odd feet to the low-lying fern scrub where he discovered three pups, a male and two females. He picked them up one at a time, quickly dashed their brains out against a large rock and placed them in his saddle bag. Thirty shillings bounty was not a sum to be sneezed at and he was not about to pass up the chance of adding so considerably to his savings.

He closed the bag, hauled himself into the saddle and nudged his mare in the ribs. With a bit of luck, he thought as the horse made its way down the hillside, I’ll be home before dark and a tot of rum would be a fine thing after the long journey back from the Woolnorth Run.