Corroboree (4 page)

‘You, sir, are trying my temper to the very utmost,' he trembled. ‘And if you are not astride that contraption of yours, that ridiculous pedalling-machine, and gone; if you are not gone by the time I reach you with this cane, then, God help you, I will have that skin of yours; and I will stretch out that skin of yours on my fence.'

Eyre reached the hawthorn-tree and retrieved his bicycle. ‘You can consider me gone already,' he said, tilting his nose up haughtily. ‘If I'm not welcome, then I'll leave you. But a sadder man, let me tell you. And a disillusioned one, too. I used to respect you, Mr Lindsay, as a man of great social grace. I used to believe that you could charm the birds out of the trees.'

‘By God,' Lathrop threatened him; but at that moment there was a dull dusty flopping sound on the sidewalk next to him; and then another. He looked around in surprise, and saw that two currawong birds had fallen unconscious out of the hawthorn-tree, one after the other, and were lying in the dirt with their legs in the air.

It was a common enough sight at this time of year, when the birds gorged themselves on dozens of fermented hawthorn berries and fell out of the trees in a drunken stupor. But the apt timing of their appearance led Lathrop and Eyre to stare at each other in utter surprise. Eyre couldn't help himself: he burst out laughing.

‘I told you, Mr Lindsay! And it looks as if you can still do it!'

Lathrop let out an unearthly growling noise, and rushed towards Eyre with his cane lifted. Eyre pushed his bicycle four or five quick paces, then mounted the saddle and pedalled off along the street as rapidly as he could.

‘I'll thrash you, you blackguard!' Lathrop screamed after him. ‘You stay away from Charlotte, do you hear me! You burrower!'

Eyre raised his hat in mocking salute, and pedalled off between the rows of houses and hawthorn trees. Three Aborigine children in mission-school dresses stopped and stared at him as he balanced his way past them. He was whistling defiantly, a new popular song that had just found its way to Adelaide from London, ‘Country Ribbons', and he sang the first verse of it as he turned right at the end of the road and bumped his way downhill on the dry ridgy track that led towards the centre of town.

‘
In her hair were country ribbons
,

Tied in bows of pink and white;

In her hair were country ribbons

In her eyes a gentle light.
'

But he stopped singing long before he reached the corner of Hindley Street; and as he approached his lodging-house he dismounted from his bicycle and walked the rest of the way. The truth was that he had grown far fonder of Charlotte than he had actually meant to. There was something so unusual and provocative about her; something that stirred him in the night, when he was curled up under his blanket and trying to sleep. Charlotte Lindsay was special, and Eyre was afraid that what he had said to Lathrop was painfully true: he loved her. In fact, he loved her so much that he almost wished that he didn't.

His landlady's husband, Dogger McConnell, was sitting in his red-painted rocking-chair on the porch, smoking his pipe. Dogger had once been a dingo-hunter, out beyond Broken Hill, and he reckoned that in his life he had killed thousands of them. ‘Bloody thousands.' His face was as
creased as a creek-bed, and his conversation was unremittingly laconic. He could tell tales of the outback that, in his own words, would ‘shrivel your nuts', but he rarely did. He preferred instead to smoke his pipe in satisfied silence on the porch and watch the comings and goings along Hindley Street, and take a prurient interest in the activities of his wife's eleven lodgers, who were all male, and all clerks, and all desperate for female company, always.

‘Back early, Mr Walker,' he remarked

‘Yes. The young lady's father was home. Rather unexpectedly, I'm afraid; and not in the best of sorts.'

‘Hm, I've heard tell of that Lathrop Lindsay. Old Douglas Moffitt used to do odd-jobs for him, painting and suchlike. Not an easy man, from what Douglas used to say.'

‘No, certainly not,' said Eyre. He wheeled his bicycle into the cool dusty shadows under the verandah. He only left it there so that the leather saddle wouldn't get too hot in the afternoon sun, not because he was frightened that anyone might steal it. Apart from the severe punishments which met any kind of pilfering, hardly anybody in Adelaide apart from Eyre knew how to ride a bicycle, and even when they had seen him do it, many of the blackfellows still believed that it was impossible, or at the very least, magic. The children called him Not-Fall-Over.

Eyre came back out and sat on the steps.

‘You're glum, chum,' said Dogger. He puffed his pipe and frayed fragments of smoke blew across the sunny street.

‘Well,' said Eyre, ‘you'd be glum if you were in love.'

‘With her?' Dogger cackled, gesturing behind him with his thumb. ‘You've got to be bloody joking.'

‘I don't know why you're so hard on her,' said Eyre. ‘She's a fine woman. She's always good to me, anyway.'

Dogger took his well-gnawed pipestem out of his mouth and leaned toward Eyre with a wink. ‘She's good to me too, chum. Always has been and always will be. But as
for love. Well, no, love's in your head. You can't love any more, when you grow older, you don't have the brain for it. And the things I've seen, out at Broken Hill. Different values, you see, out beyond the black stump. And, to tell you the truth, you don't have the steam for it. Do you know what I mean? And she's had eleven children, Mrs McConnell. Eleven; nine still living, seven normal, two potty. Left her as capacious as the Gulf of St Vincent, without being indelicate.'

‘Indelicate?' said Eyre, mildly amazed.

They sat together on the verandah for a while in silence. The sun began to nibble at the branches of the gum trees on the other side of the street and the dusty lanes and gardens began to glow with the amber light which Eyre could never quite get used to, even after a year in Australia; as though everything around them, houses, trees, and sun-dusted hills, had become theatrically holy.

Dogger said, ‘There's a jug of beer in the kitchen, bring some out. Maybe I'll tell you about the time that poor old Gordon Smith had to cut his horse's throat, just for something to drink. And listen chum, I'd forget that girl of yours, I would, if I were you.'

Eyre turned to him, and looked for a moment into that brown, crumpled-handkerchief face, and then turned away again. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I suppose I ought to.'

But he couldn't, of course. He had the same obstinacy in him as his father; the same determination to have what he wanted in the face of every discouragement possible. And he very much wanted Charlotte.

That was why, at a quarter to ten that evening, he was crouched among the wattle bushes at the rear of Waikerie Lodge, whistling tonelessly from time to time so that if Charlotte had managed to venture out into the garden, she would be able to hear him over the sweatshop clamour of insects and night parrots.

He had brought a plaid blanket with him, as well as a bottle of sweet Madeira wine, which was Charlotte's favourite; and a handkerchief with a few of Mrs McConnell's apple turnovers tied up in it, in case they felt peckish.

He was probably being wildly over-optimistic. Lathrop would more than likely have kept Charlotte confined to her room, in disgrace. Lathrop was the kind of father who would allow his daughter every indulgence, except the freedom to choose her own lovers. Not that he was particularly unusual. Eyre had already discovered that most of the upper-quality families in Adelaide were stiff and virtuous, and kept a very short rein on their daughters, regardless of how plain they were.

Eyre felt tense and lustful at the same time; and his starched collar cut into his neck. He wished very much that he hadn't drunk quite so many glasses of Dogger's home-made beer; for if Charlotte didn't appear soon, he was going to be obliged to hide behind the stringy-bark gums which screened the end of the Lindsay's garden, and relieve himself.

He whistled again, low and flat. Still there was no reply.

The moon was not yet up, although the sky was a pale luminous purple, the colour of parakeelya flowers. Lathrop Lindsay's grand white-painted mansion had taken on the
appearance of a house made of sugar, with gingerbread shingles and frosted verandahs. Like most of the statelier homes in Adelaide, it had been shipped from England piece by piece, pillars and newels and architraves all numbered and ready for reconstruction among the gums and wattles of the Lindsays' private estates.

The Lindsays lived to the north-west of Adelaide, in common with almost all of the richer and better-connected settlers; eschewing the streets and squares and parks that had been laid out for them by Adelaide's Surveyor-General, Colonel William Light, only five years ago. Last year, soon after Eyre had arrived, Adelaide had been declared Australia's first municipality, and land prices in the centre of town had soared, up to £10,000 a section, but the heart of Light's city was still neglected. Those brave souls who ventured for a walk into Victoria Square, the small park halfway along King William Street, were still quite liable to become frighteningly lost, and have to spend the night under the shelter of fallen gum-trees.

Lathrop had several times thrust his thumbs aggressively into his waistcoat, and told Eyre, ‘Planners don't make cities; people do. And the manner of man who has chosen to make South Australia his home, free and self-determined, is going to build his house where he wishes. We're not convicts, by God; nor refugees political or religious; nor anybody's minion, neither.'

Eyre took out his silver pocket-watch and sprung open the case so that he could check the time. Ten o'clock and half-a-minute; and still no sign of Charlotte. He shivered, partly with cold and partly because he was bursting to empty his bladder. But supposing he went for a piss and missed Charlotte altogether? Or supposing she came out, all perfume and beauty, and caught him at it? He swore to God that he would never drink beer again.

He whistled again, and listened. A parrot creaked and chattered, and fluttered in the branches off to his left. One of the windows in the Lindsay house dimmed, and then the window next to it brightened, as if someone were
carrying an oil-lamp from room to room. A window was closed, and then four or five shutters. It sounded as if the family were preparing to go to bed.

Eyre thought of the afternoon when he and Charlotte had walked in the abandoned Botanic Gardens, among the wild and scraggly bushes, down by the Company's bridge. A flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos had suddenly risen from the river-banks like a shower of snow, and circled around them, fluttering and crying, and then gradually settled again. And while Yanluga had sat placidly at the reins of the carriage, smoking his small clay pipe, Eyre had drawn Charlotte close to him, and kissed first her cheek, and then her forehead, and then her lips, until she had lifted her fingers gently and touched his mouth, to make him stop, because he was disturbing her so.

A dog barked three or four times, over by the mill. Then there was silence again, for endless minutes; except for the insects, and the night-birds, and the whispering of the trees.

Eyre decided that Charlotte wasn't coming; and that it was time to give up this amorous vigil as nothing but self-inflicted torture, both physical and mental. He collected up his blanket and his bottle of wine and his parcel of cakes, and retreated from his hide-out by the Lindsay's back gate at a slow backstepping crouch, until he was well beyond the stringy-bark gums. He paused for a clattering pee; and he was just buttoning himself up again when Yanluga appeared out of nowhere, the whites of his eyes as bright as a beast's, and his teeth shining in a disembodied grin.

Eyre let out a whoop of fright.

‘Mr Walker, sir,' said Yanluga, clutching his sleeve.

‘Yanluga! You scared me out of my skin.'

Yanluga couldn't help giggling. ‘You were making
kumpa
on the dry tree-bark. Anybody could hear, for miles and miles.'

‘Only if they had ears like a blackfellow; or a dingo. Where's Miss Charlotte?'

‘Miss Charlotte had to go to her room, sir. Mr Face FunGus say so.'

‘Damn it,' said Eyre. ‘I thought as much. Damn. Can you give me another message for me?'

‘You shouldn't worry, sir,' said Yanluga. ‘Miss Charlotte said, wait for just a little while, and she can escape from her room. Then she will come to the garden to see you.
Ngaiyeri
Face Fun-Gus is very tired from travelling; and from
ngraldi
, from anger.'

‘
Ngraldi,
' Eyre repeated. ‘I think that describes it perfectly. Will she be long?'

‘One minute, two minutes. But wait here.'

Eyre laid down his blanket and his wine, and then reached out and took Yanluga's hand, and squeezed it. ‘Teach me another word,' he said. ‘The blackfellow for “friend.”'

Yanluga kept on smiling, but he was silent for a very long time.

‘What's the matter?' asked Eyre.

‘No white sir ask me that before,' said Yanluga.

‘Well, there's always a first time.'

Yanluga squeezed Eyre's hand in return. ‘Friend is
ngaitye
, in my tongue, sir,' he said.

‘
Ngaitye,
' Eyre pronounced; and then he said, ‘That's you.'

Yanluga hesitated, and then he bowed his head, and said, ‘I go find Miss Charlotte, Mr Walker, sir.'

‘Good,' Eyre told him. ‘And next time, don't come jumping out at me like a ghostly golliwog.'

Yanluga laughed, and raised both hands like a demon's claws. ‘You be careful of Koobooboodgery, sir, the night spirit.'

‘You be careful of yowcheroochee, the box on the ears,' Eyre retorted; and smiled to himself as Yanluga rustled quickly off into the golden wattles again and disappeared towards the house.