Currawalli Street (14 page)

The sad truth is that Charles, a major in the British Army assisting the generals here, is returning to London in a few days.

That afternoon, Nancy and Janet are the last to join the other women around Rose's kitchen table; the coronation cake mix has already reached the stage where the beaten eggs are about to be added. The cake baking around Rose's table has become a weekly event. The women of the street keep every Wednesday afternoon free. That Nancy and Janet have been talking about something important is obvious to the others; both women have red eyes from crying.

And the truth is there is a lot of crying in this street now.

S
ometimes the wind roars, sometimes it hums, but it is always running down Currawalli Street. Alfred leans on his front fence. There have been times when he has yelled into this breeze and times when he has whispered. Both have had the same effect. The wind doesn't listen. He looks at the line of houses across the street. His neighbours have sometimes heard his voice, sometimes they haven't. He has become a man with a lot to say, who talks to no one. His words are like dust: they come together; they drift apart. Sometimes he says what he means; sometimes he doesn't. Mostly his words are just blown down the street by the wind.

He throws an apricot stone over the roof of the new house. It is almost finished. He will be pleased when Elizabeth and Walter can move in. His house is too small to accommodate all of them. He looks at his apricot tree. The leaves have all fallen to the ground. He walks out of the front gate, leaving it swinging open, and begins to walk up to the manse. Everybody will be there by now. Rose has already gone
up there with yet another coronation cake that the women baked yesterday. Alfred has been loitering; the sky was clear for a moment and he wanted to watch it change. The clouds sitting heavily on the horizon seem to signify sad departures, the way they move steadily across from west to east.

He passes the currawalli trees, as silent as stones, their trunks grown white, grey leaves bowing to the ground; they are a little taller, the wind is a little stronger, the cockatoos are a little quieter, and the dust is a little more settled. As Alfred walks up Currawalli Street, the apostle birds sit still in their tree and make long squawking noises. The whole world changes but not for them.

Everybody is sitting around the long dining room in the manse: Johnny and Kathleen; Rose; Maria and her children; Morrie; Eric and Nancy; Elizabeth and Walter; Janet and Thomas. Lazarus is under the table. Only Robert stands—stiffly by the window, looking out as if his orders to depart might arrive by magic at any time.

As Alfred sits down beside Rose, Thomas rises to his feet. The sound of the chair scraped across the wooden floor draws everybody's attention. He touches his throat and then speaks. ‘Neighbours, welcome to our table. I will say only a few words . . .'

‘Hear, hear!' calls Alfred as he settles back in his chair. Everybody laughs.

Thomas continues, ‘Winter is well and truly with us. The bushfires will leave us alone for another year. They have done their damage.

‘We have gathered around this table to celebrate, be it belatedly—three years belatedly, in fact—the coronation of the king. The beautiful cake that sits on the table in front of us is the same as that made by
people all over the Empire to celebrate this event. As you know, it was baked by the women sitting around this table and that will make it all the more exquisite to eat.'

For some reason unknown even to himself, Eric says, ‘Bravo!' As if he is royalty at the opera. Nancy elbows him.

Thomas smiles. ‘To take the place of the bushfire smoke we are now looking at heavy black thunderclouds in the distance. A war in Europe—God help us. We thought it would be just a small war, if there can be such a thing. But maybe it will encompass us. Maybe we are all going to be affected by it.' He looks at the cake and the cups around it. ‘Acting as a neighbour, not as a member of the clergy, I asked you to meet here so that we can wish safe times for each other and hope that we are all left as untouched as one can be by what is coming.'

‘Thank you, Thomas.' Johnny doesn't speak often in company, but impending fatherhood has forced him to make some changes in the way he acts around people.

Alfred stands. ‘Down at the pub, there are now fifteen mugs hooked up on the wall. Plenty of men are joining up, leaving their wives and families behind. If the need arises I assume most of us will have to do the same.'

Thomas looks across at Robert, who is still gazing out of the window. Janet clasps her brother's hand.

‘God keep us all safe,' Alfred finishes.

‘God keep us all safe,' Thomas whispers.

‘Now let's eat some of this cake!' says Eric.

Kathleen looks over at Rose. She is staring out the window at the little expanse of lawn next to the church.

Johnny looks across the table at Walter at the same time as Walter
looks at him. Both men give tiny nods to acknowledge that they are in the same situation. Elizabeth is rubbing her belly. Kathleen smiles to herself as she touches her own stomach, knowing that in a moment Johnny will be listening to the distant train as it goes past.

But things are different now. It is the same engine, with the same pair of goods vans, the same passenger carriage and conductor's van, but it has a new driver who doesn't wave. The old driver has joined up.

Alfred eats his piece of cake, happy that his heart condition has improved enough to be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. He is pleased to be back in the shop, catching the train every morning to work in the city and leaving all the wagon driving to Elizabeth and Walter. He has yet to tell Rose about an offer that has been made to him by the army. It will be hard to refuse.

Nancy places a cup of tea in front of Eric as she regales Maria's children with tall tales of her childhood back in Scotland. Eric barely hears her; he is thinking about the sea. His old ship is one that will be adapted easily to wartime needs. It makes him sad to think of her sailing into danger. Vulnerable, without him to look after her.

Maria reaches down under the table and pats Lazarus's head. She looks over at Morrie and remembers William's words the night he explained why he was joining the army. They still don't make sense to her. The true taste of pasta. The taste of liquorice. What on earth pasta and liquorice has to do with his decision, she will never know.

Kathleen knows without a doubt that Johnny will go. He will be uncomfortable for the rest of his life if he takes no part. His sense of honour lies just below the surface of everything he does. She knows that. She knows him well enough to foresee that he will find a way to
conceal his impairment.

Elizabeth is thinking about her baby and what it will need when it is born. Walter's love is one thing—and he may be away for some time. Living with her mother and father and a new husband hasn't been anywhere near as difficult as she thought it would be. Her parents seem to get on better with each other now that her father has gone back to the shop. Her mother is still a misery of sorts though. But she knows Walter will go and fight if he has to protect his wife and child.

Nancy looks over at Kathleen and then at Elizabeth. It's not too late for her to have a baby. A little girl. That would be just fine. She smiles to herself. Eric is watching her as if he is thinking the same thing.

The orange cat has come inside and is rubbing against Thomas's legs. Thomas continues to look over at Robert. The sadness he feels at the thought of Robert's departure is in a place very close to the centre of his heart. He doesn't look forward to the day when Robert's marching orders are placed in that letterbox, and these days he dreads hearing the postman's whistle. He thinks that he and Robert are good together. Just as much as love is about a physical act, it is also about sitting quietly at a table, feeling content in each other's company and knowing exactly what the other needs to be happy at that moment.

In the end, a relationship is not measured by the grand gestures that might fill a day or the exquisite gifts that might fill a room but by the inconsequential moments that individually add up to hardly anything. If only I could fit that into a sermon, Thomas thinks. That is what we all need to hear.

Beyond Robert, out of the window, Thomas can see an aeroplane struggling in the wind as it comes in to land at the field where he is
continuing to take flying lessons; he watches as it is pushed around. He is pleased to be learning to fly. It strikes him suddenly that the aeroplane, so heavy and useless on the ground yet built to float effortlessly up in the air, is a good metaphor for the dilemma of a life of faith. This life that he has chosen, that his father chose too, pushes the boundaries of everything that is safe and comfortable. And logical. It makes no sense, yet nonetheless it exists right in front of him. Sometimes he thinks his faith is falling from the sky and other times he sees it sailing through billowing white clouds. Perhaps things aren't meant to make sense. Perhaps that's it.

He shifts his gaze from the window, to the photograph of his father on the wall above the sideboard. Maybe he doesn't have doubts anymore. Maybe he has been through his crisis of faith. Or maybe this sudden certainty is just a small plateau. He knows for sure that either this is or there will be a time soon when a man must hold onto something to be able to maintain a definition of himself. And the truth is, Thomas has nothing else to hang onto. Except his faith.

Rose looks down at her hand. She is holding something that Kathleen gave her two days ago, asking if Rose knew what it was: four bulrush heads stuck in a ball of yellow mud. At first Rose didn't know what it was, but now she does. Something or someone told her when she wasn't listening.

Kathleen gave it to Rose because she is the one it rightly belongs to. Rose first saw it when she was a little girl: it was lying next to her neighbour's fallen body. She saw it again as the floodwaters raced through the sheds at her parents' farm. It is the shadow of a spirit that still has work to do. She is going to bury it this afternoon in the centre of that little
expanse of lawn.

She glances around the table and adds to what Thomas said. But quietly, so only Alfred can hear. ‘We have arrived in this street, all of us, our backs laden with things that we can never throw off. Look at us; we have carried them into this room, just as we carry them everywhere.'

‘What things?' Alfred whispers.

‘The . . . heaviness of our memories, the emptiness of our past pains, the sudden glimpses of things unexplained, the strains from our sudden leaps of faith, the horizons of hills still to be climbed. We have to carry them, for none of us knows how to lay these burdens down.'

Alfred leans forward and touches her cheek gently. ‘But what else can we do? Isn't this . . . life?'

She lifts her hand that had been cupping the small ball of mud, now sitting in her lap, and holds onto his at her cheek. ‘Do you think that they will bury these things with us?'

‘What do you mean?' Alfred's hand goes limp. Rose holds it for a moment then lets it fall.

‘All those things I was just talking about. The memories, the disappointments, the hurts. Will they return to dust like us?'

He looks at her in a way that she hasn't seen him look for years. ‘I don't know, Rose, I don't know. Maybe some of these things stay around . . . in the dirt. In the trees. In . . . whatever. So people know who we were. How else are they going to know? We won't be around to tell them, that's for sure.'

A willy-willy dances away from the church down the centre of the street, drawing in the dust that has been lying still as if untouched by the rain. A pair of green parakeets flies just above the ground, calling out loudly to the world.

J
im closes the taxi door, feels the duffle bag fall hard against his leg, looks up the street to the church at the end. A willy-willy zigzags towards him. Although the street has long been asphalted, there is still enough dirt around in the gutters and the nature strips to give the willy-willy flesh. Of course he can remember lots of things that happened after the asphalting was done, but his best memories of this street are of when it was unpaved.

The willy-willy dances up to his feet and in a moment is past. It takes only a second for him to realise why it gives him a foreboding feeling. There is something missing; it comes to him like a snake of smoke. Where he's just come from, when the Iroquois landed, they would make willy-willies appear in the red dust. But over there the zigzag dance was sinister. And he has grown used to hearing the accompanying roar of the rotors. That is what is now missing. The willy-willies scamper up Currawalli Street in silence.

His dad once told him that they were the ghosts of Aborigines
performing a welcome dance. Jim agrees that they are ghosts—though whose and what their purpose might be, he is not sure of anymore. It seems fitting that a ghost should come and greet him now, but he doesn't necessarily read it as a welcome.

For Jim, ghosts now live in everything. There isn't a tree, rock, piece of scrap metal or old pot that doesn't look as though it has a ghost residing close by. Vietnamese soldiers, he learned, don't like to sleep in the dark because of ghosts. And after Jim was over there for a few months, he became used to keeping a fluorescent light glaring fiercely every night. Now he doesn't know if he will ever be able to sleep in a darkened room again.

But the dark of the jungle is something else altogether. The ghosts generally don't venture that far from civilisation. The only ones you'll ever find out there are lost ghosts. And they are the worst kind: they're as scared as you are, as tense as you are and as ready to defend themselves as you are. He met one once. For a few seconds it got inside his head looking for something it knew. By the time it left him, he was two hundred yards from where he had first encountered it and his pack and rifle had gone. It took him most of the remaining night to find them.

This morning flying in over Melbourne, Jim peered out of the window at the houses and streets with the same methodical detachment with which he had looked at the jungle over there. Melbourne, he sees now, is just another type of jungle. There might be more cars than when he left—there seems to be one outside every house as well as one in every driveway—but he hadn't been looking properly before so he can't really say. He was surprised at the start of his tour of duty by how few specific memories he had of this street that weren't from when he was a child. It is as if he stopped registering any change in his landscape when he was about twelve.

Nineteen when he left. Twenty-two on his return; both parents dead. And not just dead but dead in a grand way that people are quick to talk about. They relish the flavour of each word as it leaves their mouth.

Jim didn't go to the funerals; he was still over there and at the time, deep in the jungle, uncontactable. His radio was the one that a sniper sometimes carries: small, with only enough power for one message to be transmitted out, they were not designed to ever receive anything. Besides cover, a sniper requires silence.

Jim had been waiting for an infamous North Vietnamese commander to reach a particular spot. Then he would use the radio. The cannons of a warship over the horizon were aimed at that place; the bullseye of a target.

There was rarely information of this kind about such a fluid enemy and it was seen by the command in Saigon to be an important opportunity in the conflict around this province. Jim also saw it as a potential trap in which he found himself at the centre.

After he made the call on the radio, he threw off his camouflage of leaves, climbed down the tree and ran from the area. The cannon shells started to fall within ten seconds. He remembers the goods-train roar of the shells over his head—a sound that you could never get used to—and how stiff his legs were after being up in the tree, not moving, for ten hours.

He walked out of the jungle into the Nui Pham township and was immediately sent back to Australia. He was on a 707 rolling down the runway at Saigon before he had wiped the tree sap from his hands. He arrived at Richmond airforce base still in his jungle camouflage outfit.
It was only then, in the commander's office, that he learned what had been done in his house several weeks before. Jim didn't read the report until he returned home. The coroner said that Kim Oatley and his wife were murdered by a person or persons unknown. The report goes into the sort of great detail that newspapers are beginning to enjoy, but Jim didn't need to read any more.

And that's how he has ended up here, dropped off by a taxi at the end of Currawalli Street with a duffle bag at his feet and jungle mud still on his trouser cuffs, watching a willy-willy doing a sinister dance around him.

He begins to walk up the street, hesitates, turns back, heads left at Little Road and walks towards the Choppingblock Hotel. He can smell bushfire in the air. He is used to that, but he never grew used to the wafts of cordite that would blow into the camp on the wind.

The barman is staring at the door when Jim enters. Jim quickly looks around. A bar, just the same as it was, just the same as any he entered in Saigon. Or Nui Dat. Or anywhere. The towels on the counter are faded to the same colour as in any of those bars. Glasses make the same sound on the tabletops. The only difference here is cosmetic: a football club scarf is draped over the cash register and old tin cups are hooked to the wall above the bar. For a moment he assumes that the barman's gaze is welcoming but quickly he realises that his eyes don't move and that it is nothing more than a vacant stare of boredom. Jim puts down the duffle bag and is leaning on the bar before the barman can rouse himself enough to register that there is someone who requires his attention.
Finally he strolls over, a stocky man in his late forties with Elvis Presley sideburns and lank hair down to his shoulders. Jim's own hair is shaved to his scalp, not as a fashion but to stop the tiny bright-red swamp leeches from boring unnoticed under his skin.

Jim was almost too young to drink when he left and now he feels he has returned after already having drunk his share. And that he has seen too much in too clear a light for any amount of alcohol to blur.

His dad always drank Victoria Bitter; he remembers this when he sees the advertisement on the wall. Jim only drinks whisky now. Beer is like water to him; it takes too long to have any effect. And time was something that nobody over there had enough of. Besides, it bloats the stomach, and a gurgling stomach is something you don't want when you are lying in an ambush position.

He finishes his drink before the barman can return to his original place, gazing this time at a spot on the wall. Jim walks away without saying thank you.

The barman waits till he is at the door and then says, ‘Are you the boy from up Currawalli Street?'

‘Yes, I suppose I am.'

‘Bad business that.'

‘What?'

The barman suddenly stands up straight. ‘You don't know?'

‘I know when to mind my own business.'

‘But . . .'

‘Do you?' Jim walks out the door, the taste of the whisky in his mouth. A cheaper brand than he is used to drinking but it still burns his stomach as the first one of the day should. He has promised himself that
when the burning stops he will give up. But until then he will continue to drink.

He returns to Currawalli Street and continues the hard walk up to his family home. Number ten. A number that is always easy to remember. He reaches the house and immediately smells the honeysuckle growing along the front fence. His grandmother Kathleen originally lived here and he still remembers coming to visit her and smelling the honeysuckle as he ran up the backyard to watch the train coming. He was nine when his grandmother died and the house was passed on to his father and they came to live here. Soon Jim no longer ran to the fence to see if a train was coming. There was always a train coming. After a while, he didn't even notice the sound.

And that's what his adolescence consisted of: ignoring things he couldn't be bothered getting out of the beanbag for. At least, that is how he remembers it now as he opens the front gate. The honeysuckle still grows; it refuses to die. He has thought about that scent a lot. It is another smell that he now doesn't like much, perhaps because it represented the dread of going inside, the pain of being outside and alone, or maybe because it was the smell of boredom.

The front door might look the same or it might look different. There is a tall pot plant beside it that may have always been there; Jim doesn't remember. Things like that might be in his mind somewhere but he can't find where and he doesn't bother looking too hard. In fact, at the moment he finds it difficult to believe that he ever lived here.

The squeaking sound of the gate as he pushes it open is enough to draw his neighbour Val out of her front door. She looks at him, identifying him by his uniform even though she has known him for most of
his life.

He nods at her. She looks older than he remembered. He hasn't thought about her at all for three years. He wonders if her life has changed. His mother told him that once she thought she was very popular. She was the sort of person who thought that people hung on her every word; she thought they found her satirical comments hilarious and needed to have a moment in her shining light. She thought it was her duty to give them that moment, and even if she was tired and had no more anecdotes to dispense that day, she always managed to find one.

The cold truth was, his mother told him, that no one liked her much and that the time they did give her was out of politeness and kindness; the sorts of things neighbours do for each other. Apparently Val's mother had been a bit superficial like that too. That's what his grandmother Kathleen told him.

Jim never knew Val in that way. He knows her only as the strange lady who lives on her own and doesn't go outside much.

Val clears her throat. ‘Home from the war?'

‘Hello, Val. Yes, I've come home.'

‘My father didn't come home from his war. He was in the navy. His ship sank near Malta. My husband didn't come home from his war either. His tank blew up. He was near Malta too. Where was your war?'

‘Vietnam.'

‘That might be near Malta. I'm not sure. I'll find out for you.' She takes a step off her porch and comes to the side fence. ‘You know about your mum and dad, don't you?' she asks, seriously.

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Because they're not in there anymore.'

‘No, I know.'

‘I heard the gunshots, you know,' she says, suddenly sounding like a child.

‘Did you?'

‘Yes, I did. I didn't know there was a murderer about in this street. It's not safe anymore. I saw the gun. It was big. I saw it being carried from the house by a policeman. I saw it.' She brings her hand to her chest and then matter-of-factly says, ‘Oh, I'm sorry. Do you want a cup of tea?'

That's exactly what Jim wants. Anything to avoid going inside number ten. He looks up at the wooden silhouettes of the faces that join the roof to the walls of Val's house. He has stared at these all his life, it seems. Now the paint is beginning to fade.

‘I would love a cup of tea. Can I come in?'

‘Ooh . . . yes. Come in. The bathroom's not clean. It's not dirty. I don't keep a dirty bathroom. I don't like it. It makes the whole house feel dirty. But it's not clean.'

‘I really don't mind.' Jim is actually a little disturbed that he has stepped back so easily into the role he always played with Val, of him being the adult in the conversation. As if nothing has happened in the last three years. He retreats out of the gate of number ten and enters number twelve. Val waits for him on the porch.

From the front window of number seven across the road, Mary watches Jim go inside Val's house. The phone rings. It is the stationmaster asking if she will come and collect her husband. She sighs. It is the afternoon. An agreement has been made that Patrick won't go to
the station in the afternoons, only in the mornings. He has walked out without her noticing again. She gathers her bag, makes sure her purse is inside, picks up the half-composed shopping list from the table and heads for the front door.