Hill of Grace (29 page)

Arthur hung his dressing-gown over the back of a chair and placed it in front of his stove. William came in, wiping clusters of wet hair from his face. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Arthur.'

Nathan heard the voices from the kitchen and breathed deeply.

When his father came on he said, ‘Mr Drummond said he would explain, how the indentures work.'

‘Nathan, I don't – ' But Nathan had gone.

Bob took the phone from him. ‘Mr Miller?'

‘Mr Drummond?'

William's voice was colder than Bob had imagined. ‘Nathan has asked me to explain the legal aspects of his uh, apprenticeship.'

Nathan sat down on the arm of the lounge and listened eagerly.

Arthur sat down on his own chair, leaning into the stove, reading a volume of Steinbeck he shared with a nest of curious mice.

‘I understand,' William replied, ‘but sixteen's too young for a person to decide their future.'

Bob paused, not wanting to agree, not wanting to disagree. ‘Everyone's different, Mr Miller. The thing is Nathan – '

‘The papers are asking me, do I think he's ready? No. That's why I haven't signed.'

There was no other way to say it. ‘Mr Miller, I've worked with Nathan – '

‘And I'm his father.'

‘Other supervisors I've spoken to – '

‘The papers ask me, I say no. If you think he is, all well and good.'

‘But Mr Miller, he can't continue without your consent.'

‘Mr Drummond, I didn't draw up your contracts.'

Bob looked at Nathan and shrugged. Phil, laying back on the lounge with his eyes closed, whispered, ‘Barbiturates,' but this time Nathan couldn't laugh.

‘Mr Miller, I keep copies of Nathan's work from trade school.'

‘I have no doubts they're good. Nathan was drilled in maths and science. It's not a question of marks.'

Or dates. So many numbers, meaningless in some cases, profound in others. Cleaned from the collective memory like graffiti from a cubicle. From thirty-foot dicks to the Apocalypse.

‘Mr Miller, if you don't mind me saying, there seems to be a separate issue – '

‘Nathan has told you this?'

‘No. I've gathered.'

‘You're wrong. You'd have to know everything about us. And anyway, to say I can't keep things separate . . . if it's the girl he's mentioned, he's wrong. I look at everything. That's something you can't do from Adelaide.'

Bob knew there was no point arguing. After a few, empty moments he said, ‘Maybe I'll send you the results anyway, and get his supervisors to write something down.'

No reply.

‘Mr Miller?'

‘It's up to you. Apart from this, I'd like to thank you for looking after Nathan.'

The strangeness of this comment struck him; William was just as Nathan had described. After he hung up he said to Nathan, ‘There's always a way.'

‘How?'

But he just looked at him as if to say, Innocent child.

After the commiserations of a shared, communal cuppa, Bob went out to his shed, coughing from a cold he said he couldn't shake, and Rose returned to Lorna and the League of Health and Beauty. The boys stretched out on the lounge-room floor with Phil's doctored version of Monopoly, the Strand becoming Syphilis Street, Westminster Herpes, Bond Gonorrhoea . . .

William left Arthur buried in Steinbeck. He went home, peeled off his wet clothes and stood completely naked in Bluma's black kitchen. ‘Telephones,' he whispered. ‘Who'd have 'em, bringing bad news into your house.'

On Friday, Nathan had the Drummond house to himself. He rose early and cooked everyone breakfast, burning bacon in a frypan Rose had picked up for a steal in the Harris Scarfe basement. After he'd waved them off at the door, he attacked the dishes, scrubbing with a rusted, limp Steelo; he cleaned the WC and hand-washed Bob's overalls, the familiar smell of kero, turps and everything diesel in his nose.

Just before lunch he sat down with a clean, white sheet of paper and tried to summon words.
Dear Dad
. . . no, too familiar for his purpose . . .
Father
. . . melodramatic . . .
William
. . . he'd never called him William, that denoted an equality they didn't have. Eventually he left it out all together, starting simply:
Regarding our conversation,
and the phone call Mr Drummond made on my behalf
. . .

He finished the letter and found an envelope in Rose's drawer of everything that doesn't go anywhere else. After feasting on a lunch of stale bread and jam, he locked the door and headed south towards Churchill Road. Stobie poles stood rusting silently in the half-sun, their foundations overgrown with capeweed or tarted up with geraniums and asparagus fern, either way, a compendium of dog piss as unknowable as the Enigma code. Turning into Churchill Road, he stopped to look in the window of an old funeral parlour turned white-goods showroom. It would never happen in Tanunda, he thought, imagining the guts of Langmeil church full of grocery-lined shelves or agricultural chemicals, the spirits of the dead retreating from the rafters in horror.

He bought a stamp at Wagner's deli and licked it, positioning it geometrically in the corner of the envelope, as if this might impress his father. Eventually he took out the letter, sat at a bus stop and re-read it.
I can see that you're determined to have me home.
Why, I don't know, as there's nothing for me there. I could never go back
to school now and our farm, as it is, could never support us both. And
anyway, it doesn't interest me . . .

Going on to explain that a compressor was no less profound than a bottle of shiraz, one set of skills no more important than another, but how it was
the way
you spent your days. And what he meant was, the people around you, their way of talking, of kidding you, of seeing you not as a son, eternally driving through life on a set of learner's plates, but as a complete and fully formed person, reliant, derived or reminiscent of no one else.
If it's a
case of having me around to help fulfil your prophecies, forget it. Christ
is coming, maybe, but God's quite content to let us go on running
railways . . .

And Hoovering rugs, growing orchids, entering lotteries we'll never win (Rose was religious with her Tatts), repairing wheelchairs, making conversation with patients too deaf or nutty, or both, to know what we're saying, but continuing anyway, sure that something will get through. A God content to let us go on eating chow mein, share memories of relatives no one had seen for thirty years, take the wrong job or marry the wrong person; to let us go on living until an artery blocked or a bus swerved somewhere.

. . . the thing being, Dad, I won't come home until you come to your
senses. I know you're probably cursing me, but there it is. I could come
home, but I'd be full of resentment. I don't want to be. I don't feel that
way here. And anyway, why should I give up what I've worked for?
You wouldn't . . .

A bus pulled up and the doors flew open. The driver looked at him strangely. ‘It's an hour service.'

‘No thanks.'

The driver shook his head and, revving the engine, pulled out in front of traffic. Nathan opened out a near-perfect electronics test and checked the answers, knowing it wouldn't matter anyway.

There was a hand-written note from his lecturer and a brochure on the benefits of working for the S.A. Railways. Nathan knew that superannuation, sick pay and a job for life would mean nothing to William compared to the promise of March 21.

Anyway, Mr Drummond says there are ways. Failing that I can
wait. There are shops to be cleaned. I will find money. I will continue.
Please make it easy and sign my papers. Sincerely, Nathan.

So be it. He sealed the envelope and dropped it in a post box. Walking back into Wagner's deli, he bought a pack of Craven A and started off down Churchill Road towards the city. At five o'clock he met Phil and they managed to sneak into the Imperial Hotel. By six they were nearly pissed, chatting up a pair of twenty-something office girls in search of a reliable man. ‘I'm nearly a chemist,' Phil said. ‘Chemists hold people's lives in their hands.'

He cupped his hands, anticipating something more than Bex, and they laughed at him. ‘Where do you ladies stand on the 38th Parallel?'

The manager rang a bell. ‘Time, gentlemen.'

As the girls climbed the stairs to King William Street, Phil called after them, ‘Let me shout you some whiting.'

But they both knew communism and youth were no match for a solid income, even when Angelakis' Fish Cafe was involved.

‘How would you have afforded whiting?' Nathan asked, as Phil lead him towards Rundle Street.

‘I would've improvised,' Phil replied, going on to explain how they were probably private school girls, beyond pre-marital corruption. ‘What we need are a couple of girls like us.'

‘Like what?'

‘Unbound by . . . moral considerations.'

‘Speak for yourself.'

Phil smiled at him as they paused at the Beehive corner. ‘Nathan, dear boy, five minutes horizontal beside the Torrens and you'd forget your Proverbs.' As Phil imagined giggling voices and wet, hungry tongues, as Joe Aronson drifted across the water. ‘The Beehive is where they meet.'

‘Who?'

‘Girls. Before the flicks.'

Phil was a collector of human refundables, thrown into the bin of his good fortune. But tonight was a quiet night. After twenty minutes Nathan said, ‘This is useless.'

Phil persuaded him to do one circuit of Hindley Street. Eventually they returned to the train station and the consolation of new-season bikinis in Rose's latest
Weekly
.

The next day, as the Millerites sat on Arthur's ark in a lukewarm pool of gemutlichkeit, involved with Mary's pretzels and Catherine's lighter-than-cumulus potato salad, Bluma asked Mary what had happened to their son-in-law Joseph.

Mary shrugged. ‘He has work.'

‘On a Saturday?' William asked.

‘This is what he says,' Mary responded. ‘What about Nathan?' she asked, as if in retribution.

‘Study,' Bluma replied.

Instead of Revelations, Bluma felt like their time was becoming a salad of half-truths and bluffs, things people didn't want to discuss. And at the centre of it was William, the Anubis of Tanunda, weighing up souls and finding them wanting. It could be anyone next. The best you could do was bring a salad and keep your mouth shut.

After lunch they gathered in the shade of William's myrtle, kneeling before a cross Arthur had built them and erected in place of Nathan's old swing.

‘See,' Bruno said to Edna, staring out of the window at them.

‘This is how those cults start in Africa. Should've closed them down.'

‘Who should've?'

‘The government.'

‘What can they do?'

Bruno was thinking how they should've put William in Loveday, and thrown away the keys. ‘Not a proper religion. Shouldn't be allowed.'

‘Y' sound like the Russian fella, with the mo.'

‘Stalin? So?'

‘Down to Korea, be here next.'

Bruno parted the venetians, raising his voice. ‘Eh, William, keep it down.'

Edna pulled him away from the window. ‘Bruno.'

The Lord's Prayer stopped and they all looked up. William saw Bruno moving around inside but said nothing, bowing his head, ‘“. . . Thy Kingdom come . . .”'

The following Tuesday, William stood beside Arthur's cross, a can of varnish in one hand, a brush in the other. Bluma approached him, holding Nathan's letter. William, knowing what it was, continued painting as she read the letter aloud.

‘So?' she asked, when she'd finished.

William half-smiled. ‘I'm not going to let it affect my blood pressure.'

‘Damn your blood pressure, what about me?'

‘Bluma, it'll work itself out.'

‘It won't. He's determined. Sign the papers and let's have peace. Otherwise it'll go on forever.' She paused, staring at him.

‘My brother didn't talk to my sister for seventeen years.'

‘No wonder.'

‘We don't all measure up, William Miller.' She used his full name on purpose, explaining how you didn't throw away underweight tomatoes, how they were the ones that had the flavour.

But William was unswayed. ‘It'll work itself out.'

She stamped her foot on the ground. ‘William, I want to see my son.'

He pointed his paint brush at the letter. ‘He's the one with the dramatics. The door will never be locked.'

‘Tell me why he should come home, to this.'

William just kept painting. Bluma stormed off, half dreading she'd never see her son again, half believing that William was right and it would work itself out.

That night William locked himself in his study and wrote a letter to the ‘Director of Adelaide Railway'. Although Bob Drummond had been doing a good job with his son's accommodation, he explained, he was failing to reinforce family values. Some days later William received a letter back saying that Mr Drummond had been consulted, and that host families had the right to run things their own way. Mr Drummond had done his best to consider Mr Miller's wishes but in respect to ‘grey areas', Mr Miller was advised to resolve differences with his son directly.

As there was no definition of ‘grey areas', William didn't know what had been said, or by whom. He wrote back (THIS SHALL BE MY FINAL CORRESPONDENCE) saying that the Drummonds of the world could be teaching their children anything.

‘I'm not responding, then we'd be at his level,' Bob said to Rose, showing her the copy of the letter, lighting it and throwing it in the laundry trough and making her promise never to mention it to Nathan.