Currawalli Street (9 page)

The wagon up ahead has stopped. Johnny and Cedric stop about fifty yards behind and Johnny can no longer hear the raised voices.

‘This is why the trip has taken so long,' Cedric explains. ‘They stop every time after they have argued. Another hour is gone. I sit back here and smoke.' He lifts up his cigarette and looks at the burning end.

The next day, after an early morning visit to the Victoria Markets, the ingredients are all laid out on the bench behind Rose's kitchen table. The four women are sitting around the table discussing whether to have a cup of tea or a glass of Eric's apple brandy. They decide on tea.

Rose pulls a mixing bowl from the cupboard and Kathleen grabs a wooden spoon from a drawer.

Janet draws the unfolded newspaper clipping close to her and starts to read aloud: ‘A Coronation Cake to celebrate the Coronation of George the Fifth, 22 June 1911, created by Sir Stephen Bolton, Master Chef to our Royal Family.'

The women begin measuring out the ingredients, and Janet reads the recipe's explanatory paragraph with a flourish: ‘Drambuie from Scotland to bring a flavour of the Highlands, oats from Wales to give a blood-warming body to the cake. East African dates, Australian sultanas, Canadian maple syrup, Rhodesian sugar to add a rich sweetness. Cardamom seeds from the jungles of India to give a hint of spice, Palestinian nuts to give a taste of the Northern African climate, coconut
from the Solomon Islands to add some tropical sunshine, Irish butter to smooth everything, the flour of New Zealand to offer a firm base, chemicals from Hong Kong to embrace the evolving twentieth century, and finally the eggs of England to bind everything together. The cake is covered all over with Royal Icing.

‘Firstly, the dates, cardamom seeds and sultanas are soaked overnight in the Drambuie . . .'

‘We don't have Drambuie so we have to make do with Eric's apple brandy. Eric is Scottish so it's pretty close,' Rose says.

‘The butter is melted, blended with the maple syrup then added to the dates,' Janet continues. ‘The dates should be soft enough to break up into the butter mixture . . .'

Kathleen brings over a saucepan from the stove. The melted butter turns golden brown as it mixes with the dates and the maple syrup. The bowl is passed around the table as they take turns with the wooden spoon and mix the ingredients vigorously to break up the dates. As she mixes, Maria is talking about the benefits of folk dancing as an aid to childbirth. She had learned an Arabian dance in the third month of her second pregnancy and is all for it. Kathleen listens with some interest, Janet with none at all.

‘In another bowl, place the walnuts, almonds and coconut and pound into a powder. Add the sifted flours and sugar to the butter mixture . . .'

Nancy is keen to see New Zealand because she met someone from her corner of Scotland who said that parts of it are very similar to where she comes from. She is interested to see what it might look like. Not at all because she is homesick, she adds a little too stridently. She shakes
her head when asked about family still in Scotland. All surviving family members have gone to South Africa.

Maria would like to return to Italy because she misses something she calls ‘the babble' and wants her children to have the experience of it. She describes it as a mixture of every noise from every street, from every room, from every voice in Italy. Something so overpowering that even the white cockatoos in the trees around Currawalli Street would not be able to hear themselves screech over it.

‘Add the baking powder and the walnut, almond, coconut powder . . .'

Maria smiles when she talks of the babble. It is a cacophony, she says, that gets in the blood, the muscles, in every thought, every dream, every conversation.

Janet interrupts. ‘How is this Arabian dancing done?'

Maria, who didn't think Janet had been listening, stands and lifts her dress above her knees. She begins to hum a discordant tune and repeatedly bends and straightens her knees, which makes her hips sway. Before too long, Kathleen and Nancy are trying it. Maria's humming grows louder. Janet has put down the spoon and joins in, moving with the others.

‘Back to the bowl!' Rose orders and the women sit down, laughing.

Janel continues. ‘Beat the eggs and add to the mixture which should then be mixed thoroughly . . .'

It takes forty minutes for the bowl to go around the table twice. By the time it is in Rose's hands the second time, she has a cake tin ready, greased with butter. She turns and opens the oven door, checking the temperature by splashing a small amount of water onto the oven wall.
She can judge what the temperature is by how far down the wall the water runs before it evaporates. If it isn't hot enough, she puts some more wood in the fire; if it's too hot, she closes the vent that lets in oxygen for the fire to breathe so it dies down a bit.

She spoons the mixture into the cake tin and then bangs it once on the table in front of Maria to dispel any air bubbles. Maria blinks. Rose then places the tin in the oven. As she closes the door, she sighs happily and is smiling by the time she stands.

Nancy and Kathleen have already gathered the dishes and spoons and are washing them in the sink.

‘Time for apple brandy?' asks Rose.

‘Definitely,' Nancy answers. They all fill their glasses and raise them to toast the monarchy and apple brandy.

Thomas is weeding the church garden. He works harder at this than he does at delivering his sermons. There is an orange cat walking about his feet, watching what he is doing, and Thomas's friend Robert Parsome is sitting reading on the bench under the currawalli tree.

A few months ago Thomas had been trying to formulate a sermon while working in the garden. He was struggling to find the right words as he pulled out weeds. The more he struggled, the more weeds he pulled out. It was early on a Friday morning, sunny but not yet hot; the air carried the scent of gum flowers and bushfire smoke, and he could hear the bleating of sheep in the paddocks beyond the trees. He was so caught up in wondering what to talk about on Sunday that, without being aware of it, he began to weed his way down the street. Once he
realised what he was doing, it occurred to him that the sermon should be about taking things too seriously and the danger of obsession. He then threw down his trowel and went to look through the Bible for a suitable passage.

The more he looked, the more it seemed that the whole book was about obsession and so he went and lay down on his bed.

He didn't doubt that he was writing a sermon about obsession that he himself should listen to. Janet had said that he was getting obsessive but he thought she might only be joking. She obviously wasn't. It wasn't just things like the weeding. It was the punishing prayer times that he devoutly adhered to, the large amount of Bibles that he kept throughout the house—in every room, in fact—the regular cleansing of every crucifix in the house, even the blessing of the eggs that he made Janet suffer through.

He sat up in bed. The thing he didn't like about self-reflection was that he often saw things he didn't like seeing.

That night he ate only a bread roll for dinner as penance, and as the sun began to go down he walked out the front door. The owner of the Choppingblock Hotel had given him a standing invitation to come down to the bar for a drink and this is what he decided to do. He knew about going to the side entrance and by the time he walked into the half-full bar, he was ready to abandon whatever needed to be abandoned. He was given a tin mug with his name written on the side of it and he began to drink, listening to the people around him talking. The more he drank, the happier he became. He was invited to express his thoughts on many subjects in a number of conversations and was surprised to find that he actually had a healthy body of opinions that
weren't necessarily the Church's. The people around the bar seemed to recognise that too and the talk became freer as the night progressed.

At about the time that he gave up trying to climb onto the bar to marry the barmaid to the owner of a wheat farm down the road, he was coaxed home gently by a quiet man named Robert. Inside the manse, Robert made him a cup of tea and began to feed him slices of dry toast. Soon Thomas was sober enough to realise where he was and what was happening. Robert and he eventually became tasters of an exquisite kind of love. And they have been tasting it ever since. Robert Parsome, a lost man from a strongly Catholic home in Sydney, the place where his mother's God was cold and his father's faith was cruel was finally finished with sitting alone in a room above the Choppingblock Hotel and moved into the manse effortlessly. And as if they had always been together, the three became one of those families who aren't really families. The sermon that was to be about obsession became about finding love in unexpected places.

But today the weeding isn't helping to find the subject of Sunday's sermon; Thomas's mind keeps wandering off. The orange cat is now sitting by the front gate, still watching him. Robert, deep in his book, has become enough of a comfortable companion to be left to entertain himself.

Thomas hears the sound of an engine and looks up. A biplane is crawling uneasily across the sky. Thomas watches as it disappears into a bank of cloud and then emerges, going in a different direction. The pilot must have been so disorientated by being inside the clouds that he didn't know in which direction he was going. Thomas likes the idea of that; it is very appealing. He wonders why he finds it so. The plane quickly returns to its original direction and soon the sound of its engine
fades into the distance.

He looks down at a weed he is about to pull out of the earth and thinks about that plane lost in the cloud. It strikes him that what disappoints him sometimes about the Bible is that it never gets lost in a cloud. The words and the stories are always the same. They always go in the same direction. Sometimes he would like to tell a different story, using different words, and not know what the ending is. Not know where he is heading with it. It's not about faith. He certainly doesn't question his faith any more than the next man does. Sometimes that's a lot. Sometimes that's hardly ever. What he questions is the validity of the path his faith leads him down. It is well trodden, probably overused. He knows that on this path he will never see or touch anything new because everything has been examined, turned over, patted, crumpled and stroked already. And is new no longer.

On a whim he decides that he will walk down Choppingblock Road to the field where the planes are kept and see if he can be taught to fly one. He will go right now. The sermon can wait. Robert looks up from his book as the gate closes. He smiles at Thomas's retreating figure.

Eric is stretching his legs near the side fence, having a break from carving another silhouette. This one will be Burns the grocer. He is happy to be thinking about idle things, such as how Burns had a withered arm but was stronger than most and able to carry heavy boxes from the carts into his store better than any man who worked for him.

Eric's day started out well enough but now this strange cough has come back. He remembers the night three months ago at the Mozart
concert in the town hall; that was the last time it appeared. It is a cough like no other he has ever had. It seems to rip the skin from his lungs and his throat each time it comes on. And always in gaggles of three.

He is leaning against the house with the side fence three feet in front of him. It still smells of the tar that the builders have daubed on it to protect it from the termites. He can hear Johnny moving on the other side of the fence; it sounds as if he is gardening. He must be back from the bush, Eric notes. But then he hears hammering and the fence begins to vibrate. Funny, he thinks, Johnny must be just home from chasing Alfred's wagons—why is he doing repairs around the house so soon? A sulphur-crested cockatoo sits in a tree above the fence, head turned sideways, looking down at him.

A paling in front of him is torn away and then the one next to it. The afternoon sunlight bursts in and for a moment Eric is blinded. In front of him is a man he's never seen before, about twenty-five, with short cropped black hair like an onboard Chinese coal shoveller, unshaven but not bearded. He is wearing a strange red shirt and blue trousers, the shirt so bright it makes Eric blink. What is this man doing attacking Johnny and Kathleen's fence? They lock eyes for only a moment. Then the stranger quickly replaces the palings where they were and Eric hears him step back from the fence, which appears completely untouched. That strange man certainly wasn't Johnny but there was something in his face that did remind Eric of him.

Eric pushes himself away from the house wall and walks inside to find Nancy.

‘Is there a man staying with Kathleen?' he asks. ‘If there isn't then I
think I have just seen a ghost. I might have a brandy.'

Nancy comes straight over to him, sensing in his voice that something has happened. ‘What's come over you? You must have seen many, many ghosts at sea.'

‘I did,' says Eric nervously. ‘Plenty. But they all made sense. I don't know—they were always doing something symbolic . . . something operatic.'

‘What does that mean?'

The words come tumbling out of Eric's mouth. ‘They were wrapped in sails and ropes, being dragged just under the surface of the water. Or rising above the waves of a storm. Or standing at the end of a pier waving goodbye. But never like this. He was just fixing the fence. With a hammer and a red shirt.' Nancy can tell that Eric has been shaken by this.

‘But the fence doesn't need repairing,' she says, as she touches his cheek.

‘No. And I can't see where he has been. He ripped off two of the palings but they look untouched now. And the red was . . . so bright. So . . .' He lifts the glass to his lips and drinks.

‘Are you frightened?' Nancy asks.

‘No, of course not. I'm concerned, more than anything. You know how I am with things I don't understand. I hope Johnny and Kathleen are alright.'