Currawalli Street (18 page)

‘Do you think it will rain?' he asks dryly.

‘No, I don't reckon,' Jim answers in a similar tone.

‘Oh well. I'd better water the roses.'

It's an old joke that Patrick used to say to Jim's dad. It still works well as an end to a conversation. Together they walk down the hallway, then Patrick turns at the door.

‘I have walked down this hall many times. And not once have I had cause to say goodbye. I was here the night before . . . just for a cup of tea. Like now. I should have said goodbye then, but I didn't know . . . what was going to happen. They were nice people. I liked them. I still do. Oh well . . . goodnight, Jim.'

Jim can only nod his head. He watches Patrick pick his way through the puddles on the path. The moon is reflected in the water.

This time Jim walks into the lounge room and sits cross-legged on the floor facing the window. Empty, this now feels to be more his space. The only items left to link it with the past are the old piano and the photo that has always sat on the music stand on the lid. In it, Grandmother is standing behind Grandfather as he sits looking at the camera.

Because the piano has always been in that spot, Jim looks on it as if
it is a wall or a door, solid and neutral. He still feels connected to his grandmother and the photograph on the stand.

This house had been his grandparents'. His father had grown up in it. The residue left by years of laughter and yelling and talking and crying, of bitterness and anger, of affection and contentment, of confusion and coldness is always going to be in the corners and on the windowsills of this room. No amount of dusting would clean any room of that type of familial dust.

Jim looks up, sensing something watching him, surprised that his head had absently dropped to his chest. Thomas the cat is at the window. Neither of them is alarmed at the sudden eye contact. The orange cat mouths something and then withdraws into the night.

Jim leaves the curtains open. As the night becomes blacker, he settles in and waits for the ghosts. But they don't come. Maybe they know they no longer belong inside. He will keep the trees and flowers the same for them outside; they can walk around out there. They all can live in this place together.

He shakes himself. He is still too young to have so many dead people in his life.

Trust me.

Jim thinks at first that he has heard the words spoken aloud. But there are no ripples in the silence around him. It is unbroken; nothing has been said. Those words were scratched into the footpath outside the supermarket this afternoon and, like the echo of a bell, they must have resonated in his head. And then he remembers Mai said them to him once when he hesitated before going with her down a crowded alley behind her parents' house.

He dismisses the memory sadly and decides to go to bed. Bed is on the floor in the lounge room. He is not ready for anywhere else yet. Before he falls asleep, he hears a long freight train go by beyond the back fence. It rocks him to sleep, as it has always done.

W
hen all is said and done, Patrick knows what his job is. He knows what is needed. He has done it all his adult life. And even though he can do it without thinking, he prefers to put a lot of thought into it.

Being a stationmaster is a science. A stationmaster needs to know the exact timetables; what unexpected delays may occur to his trains (a good stationmaster calls any train that passes through the station ‘his'); which driver to approach to ask for a child to be given a birthday treat of a drive in the front cabin; how many carriages each train will have; which carriage of any approaching train is the emptiest; and to be alert for any mother struggling to alight with a pram, or any elderly veteran or widow trying to measure the drop of the step. He also likes to know how the weather is panning out. (He keeps a dozen umbrellas in his office to lend: they are always returned.) He tries to remember everybody's name. A brisk ‘Good morning, Mr Chard' can put a sudden spring in the step of someone reluctantly heading into a new day.

And he likes the platform to be kept clean; the first sweep in the morning he always does himself. People smile more easily on a clean platform: that's what he tells the station assistants, and isn't that what their real job is? Isn't that what everybody's job is? To make each other smile? The response from his assistants has always been blank stares.

There was only ever going to be one problem with the job. He knew it was coming. But it still surprised him when it did. Patrick was retired from the railways one year ago.

There is a new stationmaster, a former senior assistant from Flinders Street Station in the city. Patrick has known Brian McGuinness since he started work there, young and keen, a stationmaster in the making.

But Patrick wasn't ready to give Brian his station.

As he always has, Patrick still goes to his station every morning to sweep the platform, between the 6.08 and the 6.18 (stopping all stations except North Melbourne). The customers expect to see him, the new stationmaster expects to see him, the train drivers wave to him as they always have. But then, at around ten o'clock, his wife or one of the neighbours comes to get him. He is resigned to leaving the station in Brian's hands; although he is an inexperienced young man, all in all he has the makings of a good stationmaster. But if only Brian McGuinness was somewhere else. This is Patrick's station. Everybody knows that.

Brian McGuinness knows it. He allows Patrick to sweep the platform every morning and stand at the gate and greet the peak-hour passengers. He is happy for Patrick to keep on wearing his stationmaster's uniform. Brian realises that it makes his own job easier.

But it doesn't make Mary's job any easier. She sends Patrick off every morning, cut lunch in hand. At ten am, after dropping in to the shops,
she walks up to the station. She always says hello to Brian, watching his face for a hint of displeasure at Patrick's morning routine, but never finds one. On the days she can't walk up to the station herself, she asks a neighbour to collect her husband; sometimes, if they happen to be going up to the shops, one of them will ask her whether she would like them to get him. Patrick then eats his cut lunch on the front veranda, and she watches as his mind evaporates with each cheese sandwich.

Patrick studies the current timetables at night while Mary watches the television. Mary sometimes looks across at him during the advertisements. He doesn't generally notice but when he does, he smiles at her quietly as he has always done. That is what makes Mary continue to support his habits. She doesn't know why the rest of the street offers support but she suspects that Patrick is well liked.

The afternoon sun is hot. Jim is standing in front of the statue of the soldier, looking absently at the names. Suddenly he can sense someone coming towards him. The birds have stopped singing. They know there is danger about. The jungle is still.

He doesn't try to stop the tension as it runs down his neck muscles into his spine, rushing through his arms until it reaches his fingernails, then racing down the tendons of his legs to the soles of his feet. His hearing becomes acute. His eyes no longer see the statue. He concentrates on the movement of the wind on his body and the sounds of the person approaching, trying to register any change that might signify an attack. Inwardly he tightens everything, ready to spring in whatever direction his intuition tells him. His hands are clenched, his jaw is tight.

‘Hi, Jim.'

Breathe out. Wind everything down. Blood rushing through body. Wait for a moment. Smile at statue. Use the face muscles. Lift the toes. Use the calf muscles. Pretend to be chewing gum. Find a release. Think about Mozart.

Come back. You are safe.

‘Hi, Maddie. What's happening?'

‘Nothing much. I was coming home from uni . . . saw you standing here . . . came over to say hello properly.'

‘You going to uni? That's great. Doing what?'

‘Arts. Everybody is doing arts.'

‘Are they?'

‘Seems like it. I don't know what to say, Jim,' Maddie says, her voice suddenly quiet.

‘About what?'

‘About you going over there. About your mum and dad. About . . . anything, I suppose.'

‘Don't worry. There's not really anything to say. Life is going to go on, whether we like it or not.'

‘I don't have any words . . .'

‘Is that bloke your boyfriend?' Jim tries to sound light.

‘Oscar? Yes, I think he is. You know, Jim. Once I used to . . . think you were . . . pretty cool. I had a crush . . .'

‘Did you? I thought I was imagining it.'

‘So you knew? It was that obvious?'

‘No, it wasn't obvious at all. I didn't really notice until your brother brought it up.'

‘You mean, Luke knew? Oh my God. That's dreadful.' She turns away from Jim, looks down the street and waits for her embarrassment to disappear. Jim smiles and stares up at the statue when he speaks.

‘It's not too bad. He didn't let on to you that he knew. Some little sisters get tortured by their brothers for things like that.'

‘I suppose so. Jim, I was sad when you went away. You looked as if someone had . . . dressed you up in that uniform.'

‘It felt like it for a long time.'

‘I was so mad at Jenny. For what she did . . . I put dog shit in her handbag.'

Jim laughs. ‘Did you? Good!'

‘Don't tell her, will you. No one knows that I did it. It was a big drama in the neighbourhood for a long time.'

Jim nods. They look at each other. He stays quiet but wants to tell her to be careful about what she and Oscar do to people like him. To warn her that people who have been over there can't help how they react; Oscar might say the wrong thing or show that star on his bag to the wrong person and Maddie might get hurt too. That these are truly dangerous people who are finding it hard to come back and be the same as before they left. But Jim doesn't want to scare her and so he says nothing.

‘It was horrible?'

He shrugs. ‘It wasn't too bad.'

What he wants to do is take her by the shoulders and look into her eyes and tell her the truth. That it was beyond horrible. Horrible is having to lie motionless and let a poisonous snake slide over your leg because you are in a ditch that is its home and you are hiding from
a man with a gun who will blow your arm off your shoulder. Beyond horrible is holding someone you have never met before as your friends try to press his intestines back into the hole in his stomach and your trousers are drenched with his blood while you look at him, trying to think of something to say. He knows he is about to die just as you do and the memory of the look in his eye and the way the grip of his hand goes from strong and desperate to soft and flaccid is something that doesn't fade. That's what is beyond horrible. That's what he thinks about at night sometimes and what he feels he has a responsibility to keep to himself.

But Maddie must have seen something of his thoughts written across his face. She has gone white. Jim reaches for her and holds her as her whole body shakes with sobs. He holds her for a couple of minutes. Then she pulls back from him.

‘I'm so sorry, Jim. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry . . .'

She turns and runs home. Just as she used to do when he and Lukewarm teased her. Jim watches her, unable to call out.

Hay can than cua con rong ban danh thuc.

Beware of which sleeping dragons you awaken.

The reverend from the church at the end of Currawalli Street is a big man. He is comfortable with his size and that confidence makes him somewhat disarming, rather than imposing. He used to think people were drawn to him because of his character, his eloquence, his courage, even his sense of humour, but eventually he realised that they liked to stand close to him because of the power that lies just behind his gentle
manner. Men tell him things that they probably don't tell their friends. Women tell him things that they don't tell their husbands.

His name is Jan Domak. His wife is Sally. They live in the manse next to the church. They have been there for five years; the bishop has no interest in moving his reverends around. Jan doesn't mind; he likes it here. The double murder was a little bit confronting but he was able to draw on the things he knew of violence and its consequences and he found some appropriate passages from the Bible to assist those in his congregation who were suffering.

It is a striking thing, he thinks as he walks down Currawalli Street towards Little Road, that the art of living can be shrouded in so much unimportant incidental dust that it is easily forgotten just how fragile life is and what a thin knife edge each human being walks along between life and death. And when someone falls as hard as the Oatleys did, how devastating it is, to people who should know better—himself included.

This afternoon he has forsaken his collar for a turtle-neck jumper. The Choppingblock Hotel is where he is headed.

That strange thing has happened again.

Three weeks ago, in the pub, a woman made a wordless erotic suggestion to him with her eyes and her lips. Since then, as is his custom, he has stood in the public bar of the Choppingblock Hotel at four o'clock in the afternoon every Tuesday and Thursday and she has been there in the ladies lounge opposite him and made the same suggestions in the same unmistakable way. So he is striding confidently towards the hotel today to see if he can gently move the adventure forward. The first time something like this happened, he expected to feel guilt and
remorse—for his wife, Sally, who has never done him any ill, and for the church and his calling, which have also never done him harm. But, truth be told, all of these episodes have given him a deeper understanding of his married life, his religious devotion, and even himself. He knows that if anything beyond a physical attraction ever develops then it will have devastating effects on those things. But he is not planning to let this happen. It is this realisation and decision that puts the spring in his step and makes the coins in his pocket jingle.

He knows that this woman lives in Currawalli Street and that she is aware of what line of work he is in, because he has seen her and her family in the Sunday congregation and she has also seen him with Sally. So she knows too that he is married. But desire is an untameable beast that must, on occasions, be given its head. And so on he walks, to feed the beast. They are the words he uses in his head. And he laughs aloud because it sometimes sounds as if a destructive monster is about to be released, when in fact he is doing nothing more than seeing if an arrangement can be made between two consenting adults. There is nothing to feel guilt or remorse about; it is just playful subterfuge.

He walks in the front door of the hotel, looks briefly up at the tin mugs on the wall and, as he always does, greets the barman, who sets a coaster in the spot where Jan always stands and then turns to pour his drink. Jan walks up to the bar, touches the coaster once and looks up. Through the bottles and glasses, he looks into the ladies lounge. She is there, and she returns his look. He glances meaningfully down at his hand and, after the barman has placed his drink on the coaster, he turns his hand over and opens it, palm up. In fact, he fully extends it, and as he does he looks at her. It is a strange movement for somebody
to make and he sees a ripple go through her as she tries not to show any excitement. His gesture is an open hand accepting her invitation. No one else looking on would know that, but she does. He watches her take a deep breath and feels the need to do so as well. They breathe out at the same time.

Her friend, sitting with her at the table, says something and quickly she turns to answer. The moment is slow to be swallowed up by the lunatic orchestra of voices and the cigarette smoke, but it gradually disappears and he attends to his drink. He watches her as she draws heavily on a cigarette and listens to her companion's comments. Only once does she look up at him again; it is only for a very tiny moment and there is no readable expression in her eyes but that look is branded like a flash in his mind. This situation is one that will drive him crazy if he does not do something about it. He knows that about himself.