Swords and Crowns and Rings (10 page)

‘Very wise,' said Mr Moy, and with a smile scarcely more than a dropped lip he gave the boy a nod and went on his way.

‘And bugger you, too,' thought Jackie. He resumed his whistling, but the man in some way had dimmed the day. A soberness foreign to him, but these days not unfamiliar, settled over his spirits like dust. He turned away from the town and went down to the river, where he mooched along, his hands in his pockets, his cap pulled down over his eyes. Jobs! Bloody, bloody jobs! The place was full of them in this boom year, and yet no one seemed to have one for him.

Sometimes he awakened sweating in panic that he'd never get one, that he'd spend the rest of his life delivering groceries, being cheery, firing blandishments at customers, arranging lemonade bottles or apples, or pumpkins in pyramids in the window, and ‘doing the books' which his mother, and to a lesser degree his stepfather, regarded as a task both difficult and grave.

The river was low, running between banks bearded with silvery weeds. A smell of burning leaves hung in the air, bitter and melancholy. The oppression of the last half-hour suddenly opened into full-blown despondency.

To distract himself he tried to recall, to experience once more, the ironic amusement he had felt only an hour or so before at the Dairy Co-Op manager's attempts to get out of engaging him as an assistant book-keeper. Jackie was an old hand at rebuffs. He knew them all, from the lightning-fast ‘Position's filled, I'm afraid,' to the brusque ‘Afraid your physique's not suitable for the work.'

The eyes, dozens of them, under grey hair, bald foreheads, through gold-rimmed glasses, pince-nez—eyes embarrassed, stupid, resentful, because by merely applying for a job he had put their owners in an awkward position.

But this one, quailing, pussyfooting, had said, ‘Your references myumm are excellent, yes, myumm, Mr Moy of the Bank, Father Link...I'm sure your qualifications, myumm, quite suitable. But it's your myumm delicate health, you see, the work perhaps too myumm much for you.'

‘I've never had a day's sickness,' said Jackie.

‘Really, myumm? I was under the impression that well, myumm no matter. My secretary will let you know, myumm. Good-bye then, delightful day myumm, is it not?'

Jackie, aware that he was being dismissed, that never would he sit on a high stool at the Dairy Co-Op office, had committed the conversation to memory, and was looking forward to entertaining the Nun and his mother with it.

‘Exacting work myumm couldn't be done by anyone under myumm six feet tall. Our stools myumm, would be much too short for you, don't you agree, myumm?'

But the joke wouldn't work; it had no fun in it any more.

‘Poor silly old cow myumm,' thought Jackie drearily.

He was past seventeen and had never succeeded in getting a position yet.

‘And maybe I never will.'

The thought struck him with a frigid horror, as though a doctor had told him he had some terminal disease. Maybe he did, as far as the labour market was concerned. What did his brains matter, his energy or industry? All they saw was a funny little sawn-off fellow they felt they couldn't cope with. His body was odd, freakish, so his mind and abilities had to be the same way.

Ah, God, for mediocrity, ordinariness, legs the same length as everyone else's, a head that would fit in a felt hat, a brain to match!

Yet at the same time he rejected this idea. He was himself, no one else. ‘Be proud of it,' his mother had said. ‘You're special. Never forget it. Never let yourself down.'

And he hadn't. Not until now.

‘But I haven't let myself down,' he reminded himself, even in the depths of his unhappiness. ‘I'm just being tempted to, that's all.'

‘Dad,' he had once said to Jerry, ‘when you were young, did you ever feel that everything had stopped and was never going to get moving again?'

‘Damned right I did,' said the Nun, ‘for years on end. Stuck on that stinking farm. Cows. I still hate bloody cows. I can't stand 'em even cooked with onions.'

He smoked, remembering his desperation, despair. At Jackie's age he had been no better than a convict, chained to an endless round of filthy, meaningless, unpaid tasks. He remembered the times he'd thought of tying a rock around his neck and drowning himself in the dam, or taking a dose of Lysol. It sounded crazy now. His father! The memory of him gave him indigestion, so he never thought of the old reptile.

Then the Boer War came, his chance. He ran away and joined up. And by the time he was invalided home his Pa was dead, and the farm resumed by the mortgagee, and all that part of his life was finished.

He told some of this to Jackie, knowing what the boy was feeling, and at the same time realising that he wouldn't be believed. Who amongst the young believed that older people knew what they were talking about?

He said, ‘You never got to think that today's all there is. There's kind of patterns in life, like currents in a river, swirling around. Sometimes you're far out from the bank, then in a little while you're near the shore, and maybe someone's waiting for you.'

Jackie could see by the reminiscent smile on his face that the someone who had been waiting for Jerry MacNunn had been Peggy Hanna.

‘Yes, all right,' said Jackie then; ‘but a person can't be sure that will happen.'

‘Will it happen to a person who is as different as I am?' he thought.

‘Me old Jack,' said the Nun, knowing this, ‘you can be sure.'

The female voice of the wind in the desiccating trees made him think again of his mother, looking at him in simple amazement one day, discovering he was fourteen and nearly grown-up.

‘Where does the time go to?' she said. The years had been happy ones for her. Looking back on her time with Jerry all she could see was a kind of warm golden mist. She was well and hearty, the shop was more prosperous than it had ever been.

Kingsland had begun to grow. English migrants had swelled the population; two small factories had opened. Trade had increased, and Jerry had bought a modest, second-hand lorry for deliveries and fetching freight from the railway station.

‘We'll get a wireless one of these days, too,' he said. ‘Don't see why not. Things are getting better every month. The old country's coming to life again.'

Timorously, he opened a hardware section in the shop, tools and gardening materials. He wanted to stock a lawn-mower, a poultry incubator or two as well, but he funked the outlay of capital.

‘We'll just go quietly,' he said. ‘I don't take to gambling.'

When he was young, Jackie had believed he could talk to the Nun about anything, and he did. But some time after he was twelve or so he discovered that there were a number of things for which there seemed to be no words.

It took him a year or more to realise that he wasn't the way he used to be, and even then he couldn't understand which way he'd changed. When he was a child life was all of a piece. There'd been moments, like Armistice night, when at the sound of the pipes he'd seemed to be seeing sideways, through a crack, into a real world of terror and splendour. There'd been some times too when he and Cushie had glanced at each other, and he'd felt on the verge of learning something astonishing and wonderful. But mostly he had been a complete person with hard edges.

And then, without his noticing, he had split up. He was full of pieces going different ways, and most of them were troubling, or wildly miserable, or madly happy.

Cushie had none of his powerful, inquisitive questing after comprehension. She was so docile, so gentle, that when she was wounded or baffled by people, or happenings, or life itself, all she could do was to cry. As though she were an angel, or a changeling, she was ill-equipped for earth. Yet Jackie, who knew her as no one else did, understood that she was experiencing the same change as he; that she had discovered that beside the world on the outside of her, there was another—unmapped, mysterious, unexplored—on the inside as well.

Jackie himself felt that he—whatever
he
was, his self or his soul, a small speck of awareness and nothing else—was the swinging door between the two.

He tried to explain this to Cushie. For a moment or two her blue eyes shone. She said, ‘Yes, that's it.' Then her mouth drooped, and she added, ‘But so small, so powerless, no wonder it dies.'

When he was fourteen he had wanted to leave school, but his mother had said she'd knock his block off first.

‘Brains like yours!' she said vigorously. ‘The reports you've had! And what Sister Leo said at the prize-giving!'

The Nun, in his serene way, put a brake on her enthusiasm.

‘There's always the shop,' he said. ‘A nice secure thing, a shop.'

Mrs MacNunn shook her head. ‘No, I never fancied that for Jackie, with his brains. It's different for you and me, Jerry. Why, I was taken away from school when I was in fourth class to look after my mother. I'd hardly got up to long division. It was different when you and me was young, Jerry. We've done quite nicely, but Jack's meant for better things, I've always thought.'

At the time Jackie hadn't an idea in his head what he wanted. He wriggled around, discomfited, bursting with energy, thinking of football, from which he was now barred, for he was too old for the junior teams and too light for the seniors.

They discussed trades, and the Nun even went so far as to inquire about the prospects in some of them. But Jackie's lack of stature made most impossible. Others were scorned by Mrs MacNunn.

‘No, my Pa was a plumber and gas-fitter, and it was terrible heavy, dirty work. Jackie's not going to be a plumber, no fear.'

‘I wouldn't mind being an electrician,' said Jackie, thinking of shinning up ladders and working out-of-doors in the sunshine.

‘There's a future in the electric all right,' said the Nun thoughtfully. ‘It's going to wipe out gas altogether. Maybe even electric cars and lorries before long. You sure your mind's set on that now, me old Jack?'

Jackie didn't care two hoots as long as he could leave school.

The Nun went around to the three or four electricians in town, but none of them cared to apprentice Jack. They gave no reasons, and the Nun felt he wasn't in a strong enough position to demand them. It was Jackie's first rejection in the world of labour; but although the Nun was disconcerted about it, Jackie and his mother were easy.

‘There, you see?' said Mrs MacNunn victoriously. ‘He's meant for a profession. And this afternoon we're all going up to see Sister Leo to ask what she advises.'

The upshot of that interview was that Sister Leo, a masterful and intelligent headmistress, arranged for Jackie to stay on at school and do a business course, book-keeping and letter-writing, banking, and what was known as ‘office procedure'.

‘We'll keep up his English, too, and do some elocution, and smarten up that accent,' she said. ‘Telephones are coming in. Soon every office will have a telephone, and Jack will need a well-modulated voice if he's to impress clients.'

Jackie could have died. To be a book-keeper—ledgers, pens, and figures—until he was an old man! He could feel the walls closing in on him.

‘And book-keeping will always be handy in the shop as a last resort,' said the Nun, but he said it to himself.

Jackie saw the boys who had been in his class, those who had been in senior classes, gradually being absorbed into the Kingsland community, working on the railway, driving tradesmen's vans, going on the land. A few vanished to boarding-schools in Sydney; some went to Ghinni Junction and attended the high school, boarding out and coming home for the weekend.

Jackie envied all of these boys in different ways, the railway apprentices for their uniforms, the money in their pockets; the Ghinni Junction high-school boys for their world of cricket, their solidarity, their knowledge of a wider milieu than that of Kingsland.

After a while Jackie got used to being the only one of the gang still at school, and found enjoyable his status as a half-grown youth who was not treated as a pupil except in the matter of tuition. Father Link, faded and brindled and still pathologically shy, gave him the run of his library. Through books he discovered that the world of the mind was almost without limits, and that a determined traveller might cover a great deal of it before he died.

‘Astute and perspicacious,' commented Sister Leo to the nuns at recreation. ‘If his family had been in better circumstances he would have been sent to a university, given a profession. As it is, what will happen? Wasted, poured down the drain. One can see it coming.'

So here was Jackie Hanna now, half-educated, with a brain full of bees of discontent, resentment, and honest consternation. The idea of going home and telling his mother and father that he'd missed out again made the languid hopelessness in him rise like a tide.

But he had to go and face up to their disappointment. The Nun would want him to help load the afternoon deliveries.

‘So, you understand,' said Jerry, later that day, ‘I was writing to old Eva, and it just came over me to inquire like whether they could use you for a few months in the orchard.'

Jackie, who knew that the Nun would rather walk on hot coals than set pen to paper, kept a straight face. He read his stepfather like a book, could almost reconstruct the conversation that had taken place in bed between him and his wife.

‘Not good for him, love, feeling no one wants him. Almost anything would be better than nothing. He's dragging his tail a bit, haven't you spotted it? Feeling as though luck's got a down on him. Now, there's Eva—you know, the one that married the German farmer, up above Ghinni. They might be able to give young Jack a start, maybe in the picking season. What say I drop her a line?'

The compassion of the man was hurtful to Jackie's vulnerable, uneasy spirit, and he cursed the circumstances that made it necessary for Jerry to be kind to him. But he kept a look of attentive interest on his face as Jerry struck a match on the seat of his trousers and lit a cigarette.