Hill of Grace (37 page)

‘They don't show no ads,' the candy bar girl added.

‘When?' Ellen asked.

‘Whenever we decide to go.'

Ellen knew that there was no use trying to make sense of it now. Within minutes the five of them sat lined up on their pew, licking Choc-Tops which tasted sweeter to the accompaniment of high violins and the credits for
The Happiest Days of Your Life
. Strange, Joseph thought, smiling at Ellen with her face changing through various shades of confusion. Even Margaret Rutherford wasn't enough to cheer her up, eighty-one minutes of wicked school-girl comedy passing like so much Mahler on her father's radio.

The sky finally darkened, thunder crashed in the distance of the Barossa ranges and the audience let out a collective sigh. The wind picked up, blowing dust out of lifeless curtains and triggering an epidemic of sneezing. Moments later the rain started, lightly, and then before anyone realised, blanketing the town torrentially, drowning out Rutherford doing battle with impish school-boys, eliciting a small, miraculous round of applause from an audience in a fantasy of summer-ended, although later they'd realise it hadn't. For the next twenty minutes no one could hear what the actors were saying, but didn't care too much, realising their hibiscus and hydrangeas were getting the soaking they needed. With subsistence came reality and the realisation that the good bits, like film night, were few and far between. It didn't take much to catch up with the plot and when the rain returned in fits and starts no one made too much of it.

At eleven o'clock the lights came back on and people sat stunned in their pews. Standing up they made their way out through the locked up foyer, back onto the street. Walking home down Murray Street, already dry again, Ellen didn't say a word until Joseph said, ‘I have a paid day off on Wednesday.'

‘We can all go somewhere,' she offered.

Joseph nodded his head. ‘I'm going to Adelaide. Jim's lent me his car.'

‘Why?'

‘To look for a rental, for us.'

The children ran about on the grass of a small reserve, attempting to stand on each other's elongated shadows from a newly emerged moon. The grass was clipped short and all Ellen could think to say was how much it looked like the Streims' new wool-blend carpet.

‘So?' Joseph said, at last.

‘This is your . . . ultimatum?'

‘Ellen, I'm not getting back into that.' Next it'd be how they hadn't planned, or saved enough, or thought through the options. How he didn't realise how good they had it, how happy the kids were, how much they all loved the valley. It was an endless script.

‘I've decided,' he said.

‘And what about me?'

‘Always you. You've never seen my side.'

‘I've always defended you, when . . .'

He smiled at her. ‘I've had enough of talking. I've decided.

Next Wednesday I'll find a rental. They'll even pay my relocation.

I can start in the city the following Monday.'

Not I can. I will.

‘Now you decide. I'm not hanging around waiting for Miller.

If you stay, I'll do everything I can to get the kids. I support them, I decide. Okay?'

Ellen had stopped walking. He turned and looked back at her – ‘Are you coming?' – and felt her presence a few steps behind him, head down, heard her cursing the rain which had turned their town into a giant pressure-cooker.

The following Friday, just before lunch, Joseph unlocked the door to the Tabrar family's new three-bedroom flat. It wasn't Elizabeth, but it would do, for now. He opened the windows and walked out onto the back balcony, overlooking the Klemzig Tennis Club and a pair of trotters pacing the track around the GAZA football oval. A group of hausfraus in tennis skirts attempted jumping jacks on the grass, collapsing one by one in Klemzig's version of the League of Health and Beauty.

Joseph came back in and sat on the lounge, hitting it and filling the room with dust. Semi-furnished, the ad had promised. Fully appointed. Just off North East Road. Ten minutes from the city. Serviced by four bus routes.

One of which he'd caught from the city, taking up most of the back seat with his duffle bag as Klemzig Germans chatted in broken English. He was aware of the connection, but time had been against him on Wednesday, and after four or five flats they all started looking the same. This was the area where Pastor Kavel had first settled his boatload of Prussian crackpots, setting them up in the bush beside the Torrens, miles away from the English settlers. Naming the area after his old home-town, he soon had them building wattle and daub huts, thatching roofs and whitewashing walls in a down-market fachwerk. Trees were felled and vegetables grown, carried into Adelaide and sold at the markets.

Within a few years, settlement had spread out from Adelaide, along a new road which passed within a mile of them. Kavel took it as a bad sign. Soon his followers would be building pubs and trading all manner of horse flesh on street corners. Maps were consulted and a distant paradise decided upon. Beside the banks of the North Para River he would found a town called Langmeil, with its suburbs of Tanunda and Dorien. Streets would be given names like Sobels and Traeger, honouring other pioneers in a gesture which would last until the Great War, when the trucks arrived with their Anglicised street signs.

Many decided to stay on at Klemzig, having grown tired of Kavel with his endless rantings about the imminent Apocalypse and Saxons and Celts being thrown into a hell of untamed Aborigines and cholera. They grew their vegetables and smoked wurst until they were overcome by the promised pubs and boarding houses which soon ran the length of Osmond Gilles Road.

A hundred years later there were still pockets of Prussia: a few bakeries, a pioneer cemetery with a few headstones of anchors and grapes never grown. Fruit shops and early stone cottages surrounded by fibro monstrosities already cracked down the spine. No one came looking for the Germans because they were too hard to find. If the locals wanted a touch of the Kraut they'd go to the Barossa.

Joseph had caught the bus in front of the Tanunda Institute at eight o'clock that morning, after having dressed and shaved as Ellen lay in bed, refusing to say goodbye or good luck. Eventually he took his bag and whispered, ‘Bye.' Waiting and then closing the door behind him. Going into the children's room and waking them up, explaining how they'd join him soon, when everything could be organised. How things would be better in the city, dozens of movies screening day and night, trolley buses and trams, gelati and, best of all, a world without end, where they could study hard and become journalists, teachers, pianists, anything – having their own children and growing old beside a sea of inexhaustible tides. No one in their ears, day and night, telling them how rotten humans were and how the drinkers and laughers and watchers of Francis the mule would all end up in Hell.

He travelled down the road Arthur had walked, past the earthworks of Elizabeth and Parafield Airport with its Viscounts and Constellations, past the abattoirs, the outer suburbs and into the city itself. Getting off in Franklin Street, he asked where he'd catch the 273, and trudged with his bag four blocks to Grenfell Street. Getting on the bus, he realised he didn't have anything smaller than a ten-pound note, running into a deli for change as the driver and a busload of hot passengers waited. They drove past the Botanic Gardens, Collinswood and seventeen stops worth of well-clipped suburbs with their pittosporums and agapanthus, oleanders and multi-coloured gnomes. Getting off at O.G. Road, he headed off towards Klemzig, every bit as much a pioneer as Kavel.

Now, as he nodded off on his lounge, the smell of fresh yeast blew in on a light, warm, northerly breeze. He smiled. That was the hard part done, the rest would be simple. Before Christmas there'd be a car, and next year a house. None of the ironstones and black kitchens of Tanunda. Something modern. Cream brick with a galvanised iron roof, acres of kentucky bluegrass and a concrete footpath. Kids on Malvern Star bikes and church on Sunday, perhaps, if there was nothing better to do.

Wednesday night – two nights ago – flashed back at him. Arriving back from the city he'd taken Ellen into the garden and told her what he'd found. ‘It's close to everything, a butcher and a laundry.'

‘It doesn't have one?'

‘You can sit on the balcony and watch the footy.'

‘But it doesn't have a laundry?'

Just as he'd expected. ‘The money will still be in our account, every Thursday,' he consoled her. ‘Until you're ready.'

‘For what?' she'd asked.

‘To join me. What else?'

‘It's that simple?'

‘Yes.'

At which point Mary came out and smiled at them. ‘Tea's ready.'

‘Coming, Mum.'

‘Enjoy your day in Adelaide, Joe?'

‘Thanks . . . Mum.'

Stirring himself in the half-light of the flat, the smell of yeast gone, staring up at a ceiling of vintage cobwebs, he wondered who would have the most patience. If she'd write him off and refuse to touch his money, asking her father or applying for the Deserted Wives Pension, accepting Sunday collections taken on her behalf.

No. Ellen was more than reasonable. It was just a matter of time. Patience. Patience and the dull thud of the harness racers training in the distance.

Nathan had spent the afternoon diagnosing sick fridges, testing the pressure inside evaporators to see if sulphur dioxide was evaporating in the coils, absorbing heat and cooling the cooling box. Other times the problem was in the motor, or the pump, or maybe just a faulty seal on the door. Like a doctor he had to recognise the problem instantly, taking in the symptoms with a look of confidence, shaking his head and reaching for his tools.

He knocked off at three o'clock and walked towards the main gates with a hundred others: grease smeared through hair and over work clothes wives wouldn't let them wear inside, dropping them on back porches and throwing them into laundry troughs. Men snapped satchels onto the back of old bikes and rode off down Churchill Road, fresh air in their lungs and light in their eyes, stopping to buy stamps and ciggie papers at the deli. Men who'd left brushes soaking in turps until tomorrow, until the continuation of the endless cycle of broad-gauge axles and boiled cabbage.

Nathan felt one of them now. A work-experience student and a veteran all at the same time. He knew what they meant when they talked about the Garratt 409 or an eight-wheeled compo brake, knew the smell of ammonia better than a wash-house full of freshly pressed shiraz, the taste of cafeteria stew better than bratwurst.

As he walked through the gates he heard a familiar voice.

‘Nathan.'

Looking around there were just overalls and lunch-pails, the sweet ether of body odour and the din of men moaning.

‘Nathan.'

Lilli fought her way through the slow tide of bodies and stood before him. ‘Guess who?'

‘Christ.' He grabbed her arm and pulled her towards a bus stop of waiting men. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I live here,' she replied.

‘Where?'

‘Prospect. Just up the hill.'

He stopped to let it sink in. ‘Since when?'

‘Two weeks, just over.'

The first thing he thought of was the night in the ruined farmhouse, but then the threat she would pose to his new life – uncomplicated relationships with uncomplicated people, resurrected wheelchairs, the smell of antiseptic on Rose's tunic and sleepouts in the Church Avenue reserve. A few men at the bus stop looked at him. So what, she could be his sister. He turned away and faced a peppercorn tree. ‘How did you know where I'd be?'

‘I rang.'

She turned back and fixed the men. ‘Five quid, the full hour.'

‘Christ.' He took her arm and dragged her along as she laughed. ‘How about a simple hello, how y' been?'

She re-claimed her arm and stopped in the middle of the footpath. ‘I've come to apologise.'

‘For what?'

‘Which way?'

He pointed up the hill and they crossed the road, Lilli stopping to smell unfamiliar plants. ‘It's obvious, what happened in Krautland,' she said. ‘It wasn't me at my best.'

He thought of their final meeting at the railway station. ‘You'd rather impress, what's her name?'

‘As I said, not me at my best.' With an I-shan't-say-it-endlessly tone of voice.

‘And that's it?'

‘Now I'm a city girl. I'm not out to impress anyone.'

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye: head down, thoughtful, dragging her feet as usual. If it took six years to prove yourself to the Railways, perhaps he could try again. Faith. Maybe even a little of William's grace. It would end disastrously, of course. Lilli couldn't stop being Lilli, there'd be someone else, a time she could get a laugh at his expense. Then again, maybe one day she'd be an asset, a good mother, feeding him through an old age of dementia and wet nappies. Faith: like God promising to reveal the scheme of things to William, but only if he worked at it, studied, invested time and love in the satellites which orbited him.

‘So where are you living?' he asked.

She stopped to study a stobie pole. ‘My cousin Nerida, the forty-one-year-old teenager. She wants us to go out together. Apparently this will enhance our chances of finding a man.'

‘How's that?'

She walked on, avoiding dog shit. ‘Maybe she thinks I'll make her look younger.'

‘Unlikely.'

They sat in the reserve and she took out a pack of Craven A.

Lighting up she stretched out on the bench and blew smoke into the air, talking like Bette Davis. ‘Yes, quite frankly, the Fechners were sad to see me go. Like you, I'll be sorely missed in Tanunda.

An artist has been commissioned to render a likeness which will be placed in the Town Hall foyer.'