Swords and Crowns and Rings (9 page)

He propped an arm against the lintel, feeling his bad leg give, his head swim disagreeably.

‘You two walk along towards Mr Nicolson's place,' he said. ‘I'll catch you up in two ticks, soon as I've put her ladyship into her bunk.'

‘Is it all right?' whispered Cushie anxiously.

‘Of course it is,' said Jackie firmly. ‘I'll look after you till Dad catches up.'

They turned towards the older part of town. A gas lamp lit the deserted street, a faint bluish nimbus. Conic shadows lay beneath each tuft of grass, each pebble.

‘Do you remember when we went to find the dwarfs?'

‘We were only little then.'

‘The eagle in the rabbit trap. I was scared. Poor thing. I hope it got away from the Chinaman.'

The huge sky was dark. In the west over Paddy's Range the lightning stammered, deep within a cloud. A low bear-like growl rolled around the sky.

‘Are there really dwarfs in our hills?'

‘I don't think so,' said Jackie. ‘But they're somewhere. Otherwise what are all the books about?'

Darkness was all about them, and a smell of ruin and antiquity. Here, on the fringe of the town, the settlement of Kingsland had been born as the mining camp of Paddy's Leak. Here the first cottages had been built, and the stone bank, police station, and chapel raised at the end of the corduroy road that led to the diggings. But within thirty years Kingsland had moved away: like all towns it had been drawn magnetically to the railway line. The old settlement, disowned and poverty-stricken, floundered at the hem of the modern town like a beggar.

‘I'm scared,' whispered Cushie.

‘No, you're not,' said Jackie. ‘Come on.'

But she hung back. ‘We'd better wait for your Dad.'

They waited near the fallen silvery fence of a derelict shack. It was built of overlapped narrow scantling patched with bits of tea chest and flattened kerosene tins. The yawning door showed a shuffling darkness. Cushie turned her eyes away from it, clutching Jackie's hand. She jumped as bricks fell in the ruined Gold Office across the street.

A few drops plopped in the dust. Mutely the lightning pulsed in the cloud.

‘Come on, Cush,' said Jackie. ‘Your mother will be mad if you get wet. We'll go and shelter with Mr Nicolson, and wait for Dad there. Come on, I know a short cut.'

Reluctantly she followed him.

‘Does Mr Nicolson live in a broken-down old house like this?'

‘No, he lives in a church.'

Cushie laughed in surprise. The rain swished across their path in a sudden wavering spurt. She cannoned into Jackie, who had stopped running.

‘Ssssh! Listen!'

A low muttering drone suddenly rose to a wild yell. Jackie felt the hair rise on his head; Cushie almost jumped out of her skin.

‘It's the bagpipes.'

Fascinated, they went closer. The air shivered. The music was inhuman, terrifying, a great voice of unassuageable sorrow. To Jackie it was as if the rocks sang. Vibrating with primitive excitement, the children crept through a gap in the church wall, blinking in the dim light, slowly distinguishing this feature and that of the comfortable rats' nest into which Piper Nicolson had converted the tumbledown chapel. The floor was spread with newspapers, an oil stove gulped below a steaming kettle, a straw-stuffed tick lay on a pew seat.

The piper himself marched slowly up and down the central aisle. In him Cushie could find no trace of the towering red-eyed figure that had ridden the steamroller three years before. John Nicolson was a stout little man with a crannied face and hair like wolf-skin. He turned to them blue eyes so ruined by the booze that they might have been looking through smeared glass.

Like a man coming out of sleep, he squinched at the two children huddling in the gap in the wall. The pipes died in a long squealing sigh.

‘Well! What are ye after?'

‘It's me, Mr Nicolson,' said Jackie. He ventured forth so that the man could see him clearly. ‘Jerry MacNunn's boy.'

‘Aye, I see that.'

‘Did you know the War's over, Mr Nicolson?'

‘I did. I heard the row from the town. But it's nothing to me.' There was a painful silence. Jackie heard the rain fingering the tin roof. Uneasily he looked about at the gapped walls, the pyramided arch of a window, which retained a slab of yellow glass, thick and lumpy as toffee.

Cushie nudged him. ‘What your Dad said!' she whispered.

‘Dad wanted to ask you if you'd come and give them a tune on the pipes, just to mark the occasion.'

‘I'll gi' them a good kick up the fud, that's what I'll gi' them,' said the Piper. He took the kettle from the flame and made tea. The children, left to themselves, did not know whether to go or stay.

‘Will you have this muck in your tea?' asked the elderly man, holding up a tin of condensed milk. Into his own he poured whisky.

‘I shouldn't drink it; my liver's turned into cement,' he said, sitting before the oil stove. ‘We'll wait for your Daddy then.' Cushie was uneasy, fearing that they could be marooned in this dusty stone ruin for ever. She pressed closely to Jackie.

‘Did ye hear what I was playing as you come along the track?'

‘Sad,' said the girl, inaudibly.

The piper sucked his tea, was silent, and then said, ‘It was MacCrimmon Oge's “Lament for the Children”. All his bairns died in a month from the plague. 'Tis great music, very suitable for this day.'

The children waited what seemed a long time, but there was no sound of Jerry sloshing through the wet. They watched the rain falling beyond the holes in the wall, lit waterdrops in the darkness, like strings of radiant seeds. In the brief intervals of the rain, night crickets purred. The piper ignored the children, who became restless, wanting to get away from this strange, half-drunken man, back to the bonfire and the excitement.

‘Aye, I'll come,' he said at last. Stiffly he put on his coat, and began to comb his sparse hair before a speckled glass. He looked as old as a rock.

‘I was the grand lad once,' he said. The children, watching, were unable to believe he had ever been anything but old; but both of them understood his woe. Jackie sensed a wildness in him, a silent scream. He was like a lion seeking what he might devour. But there was nothing, for he had no teeth any more.

Cushie whispered, half tearful, ‘Mama will be angry with me. Oh, where's your father got to?'

‘We're going now. Don't worry, Cushie.'

Mr Nicolson picked up the pipes and marched out, leaving the lamp to gutter, the wind to explore his dwelling. The rain had stopped.

‘Come on, quick! Maybe we'll get back to the fire before it goes out!' cried Jackie.

The rising shriek of the pipes ripped through the moist darkness. Cushie's ears drummed. Her head filled with a mad excitement, and she rushed after Mr Nicolson, stumbling beneath the dripping pear-trees. The steady oceanic breathing of the drone worked in her blood like a tide. She heard Jackie laughing, shouting beside her. The piper paced majestically along the dark street away from them.

Cushie, overcome with excitement, began to cry. Something wondrous and terrible, something unendurably powerful, had filled her soul. She wanted to scream, or dance, or melt into the ground like a raindrop. She felt different, and everything looked different, the air diaphanous, the distant lights fuzzed like thistles.

‘Don't cry, Cushie,' said Jackie. ‘I'll get you home. It's not your fault Dad didn't come.'

‘It's not that,' choked Cushie. ‘It's just everything.'

‘I want to kiss you,' said Jackie. She bent down, felt his warm face, smelt a dusty, puppyish odour in his hair. So that she wouldn't be taller than he, she slid down in the grass. Held in the boy's arms, feeling him tremble, she experienced an intensely concentrated awareness of their profound knowledge of each other. Yet it was only a small part of what could be known.

They stayed like that for a little time, exchanging darting, bashful kisses, each mostly conscious of the warmth of the other's body. For the first time in her life Cushie felt at peace. The long hunger for love that had eaten secretly at her self-confidence, her faith, her pride, ceased to be felt.

‘We'll get married when we grow up,' said Jackie.

‘They'll never let us.'

‘They won't be able to stop us when we're big.'

All they wanted was to remain close together in the grass for ever. But the grass was wet; in between the splatters of rain the mosquitoes bit them; the piper was far away, the tense scream of the pipes almost lost against the tumultuous sounds of Armistice night. The grinding roar of fights, the smashing of glass, was an obbligato to the clamour of the kerosene drums. Jackie was abruptly awakened to his duty.

‘They're all getting boozed. I promised your Mum I'd bring you home if they did. We'd better run, Cush.'

They went first to Jackie's home. The Nun was fast asleep, sprawled on the kitchen sofa, dead to the world. Cosy snufflings sounded from the bedroom. Abashed, Jackie said, ‘They've both passed out.'

They hurried across the street. The big house was still lit up, and Mrs Moy was on the veranda, waiting.

‘You're terribly late,' she said. ‘And look at your dress, wet and filthy! And your stocking's torn!'

‘I fell over,' said Cushie. She took the scolding with a dreamy, abstracted air, looking at the floor. The gaslight on her golden hair seemed to Jackie to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, the sheen of her flushed cheek unearthly. But so that the mother would not guess his feelings he looked away into the darkness. The Moy house was filled with the scent of pine oil and menthol. Ever afterwards Jackie associated it with the total absorption of his passion for Cushie. To smell it put him once more into a state of grace.

‘I'm going now,' he said. Cushie smiled at him with such confidence that he marvelled her mother did not guess, accuse. He went away, running, floating, he did not know which.

The Nun had vanished from the kitchen; somehow he had got into bed. Jackie, as he had done when a little boy, climbed out along the fig-tree bough and into the treehouse. He sat amongst the drifted dry leaves and thought about the events of the night, going over and over them with marvelling pleasure. Sometimes home-goers passed along the street beneath, singing, staggering, nagging. Looking down at these revellers, Jackie felt older and wiser than they.

He smelled his hands and the front of his shirt, where it seemed to him that the mysterious fragrance of Cushie's touch still lingered. He put his fingers to his lips, felt their shape for the first time. Had she found them soft, or hard, or strange? Her own mouth had felt like a petal, faintly warm, unresponsive and yet magical.

Cushie, Cushie! It was like the murmur of a dove.

He lay amongst the leaves on the floor of the treehouse, curled up like a snail, as though to keep all memory warm in the centre of his body.

Far below his joy and exaltation, he was conscious of something else, an ominous feeling as though he had had some unspoken revelation. He felt he had reached some peak in his life, that he had left his childhood behind.

Long after he had gone to sleep, long after the rain had blackened the bonfire, and the last light in Kingsland had gone out, the piper still marched up and down the main street, a solitary rooster crowing over God knows what, until someone finally doused him with a bucket of water from the pub veranda.

2

Jackie Hanna 1924

In the winter of 1924 James Jackaman, head of the wealthy newspaper family and brother of the statesman Sir Lewis Jackaman, was knocked down by a tram as he crossed Pitt Street to his office. So, outraged and reluctant, he died, being still alert, healthy, and a mere seventy-five. It was only natural, in spite of the long estrangement, for his daughter Isobel to attend the funeral, taking with her her two daughters, Dorothy, seventeen, and Olwyn, the frail younger child.

The children's father, Bede Moy, had also been invited to the obsequies by the sorrowing widow, Mrs James, but being a man of sensibility he found himself unable to get away from the Bank. He wore a black silk armband and tie, and an expression of cour-ageously controlled distress; but in his heart he was jubilant and anticipatory. Now, surely, Isobel's share of the Jackaman fortune would come to her in a lump sum. Her husband had long decided in which securities he would invest it.

At the same time, Mr Moy frequently found himself with a bitter taste in his mouth. He was jealous. The Dockers' Union had buried his own father; a shilling a week insurance had disposed of his poor mother. Isobel's father, son of a Cockney ragman, would be laid away as though he had been a king.

On his way back to the Bank, after seeing his wife and daughters off on the train to Sydney for the funeral, he saw the little dwarf, the Hanna lad, swinging along whistling like a blackbird.

‘G'day, Mr Moy,' he said, with what Mr Moy considered an impudent jauntiness. He scarcely came up to Mr Moy's middle, and yet he was probably as old as Cushie. Growing up! Mr Moy made a mental note to prevent Cushie's seeing the little fellow any more. Further friendship was not quite the thing between his Dorothy and the grocer's son.

The boy was wearing a navy serge suit as though he had been to some business interview. It must cost MacNunn a fortune to have the lad's clothes specially made. Even in the stiff, well-brushed suit, the short massive legs with their slight angular peculiarities above and below the knees were noticeable. Yet the face with its pugnacious features and retroussé nose was humorous and intelligent. Mr Moy, feeling charitable because of James Jackaman's death and its consequences, asked affably, ‘How's the job situation, my boy?'

Jackie's face continued to look up at Mr Moy with apparent optimism. ‘No luck yet, but Dad says it's just a matter of waiting till something suitable comes along.'