The Denniston Rose (18 page)

‘Well, Bella!’ says Mrs Hanratty, and she smiles too. ‘Not long, now!’

‘Any day,’ says Mrs Rasmussen, and heaves her body over to the bed.

‘Just smell this manuka!’ she says to Rose. ‘It makes your heart glad to be alive!’

‘No it doesn’t,’ says Rose.

‘She’s down in the dumps today,’ says Mrs Hanratty.

Rose looks at the little white flowers. She pulls two off and drops them on the floor and looks up at Mrs Rasmussen. The two women look at each other.

‘She knows?’ says Mrs Rasmussen.

‘Her mother was here yesterday.’

‘Out of the frying pan,’ says Mrs Rasmussen.

Rose looks up from picking at the flowers. ‘What is out of the frying pan?’ she asks. Neither of the women answers, and Rose starts crying and asks why she and her mother can’t stay at the tree-trunk house.

Mrs Rasmussen pats her hair and sighs. ‘Well, sweetheart, I’ve offered to take you until your mother finds her feet, but it’s not so simple …’

‘Why can’t she come too?’

Mrs Rasmussen sighs again. ‘Ah well, there it is.’ Then she says she must get down to the schoolroom, the children will be running riot, and gives Rose a quick kiss, not her usual hug, and goes downstairs.

‘We could stay here,’ says Rose. Mrs Hanratty puts the tray on the bed and sits down.

‘Listen, Rose,’ she says. Rose knows she is going to say no.

‘We all love you, Rose, and are trying to do our best for you and your mother. Your mother is an independent woman who will go her own way. She wishes to live with Billy Genesis, who has been … kind … to her.’

Mrs Hanratty’s face is not kind at all. Her eyes, which are usually warm like brown toast, look more like burnt raisins.

‘Your mother,’ she says, ‘wishes you to live with her. Billy Genesis is willing to have you both, so that is what will happen. A child cannot choose.’

‘He’s not kind to
me
!’ says Rose.

‘Well … perhaps there is some good in him and perhaps he will be a better man with a woman in the house. And Rose, you can come and visit as often as you like.’ But Mrs Hanratty’s face is black as coal as she picks up the tray and goes out. The baby is crying again.

Rose wants to cry too so someone will come and pick her up and tuck her into a pram and wheel her away. She climbs out of bed and goes to the window, walking softly so as not to bounce her face. The nightgown, which is Elizabeth’s and has little pink flowers, is too small for her. It pinches her armpits. She looks out the window and sees Brennan running across the yard from the schoolroom to the dunny. Then he runs back and looks up and sees her. He waves and she waves back. He doesn’t stop and stare with his mouth open or anything, just waves.

She looks down Dickson Street. Over the roofs she can see the big chimney of the Powerhouse smoking and she thinks of her own chimney standing all alone with the ashes of the house around it and her treasure inside it. Her feet are cold on the wooden floor so she goes back to the bed, still treading softly. On the end of the bed is her slate and chalk, where Mrs Rasmussen has left it. She picks all the white flowers up from the floor and arranges them in a circle on the slate. Then she counts them. Thirty-seven.

37 she writes. And then she draws a chimney on its own, with no curl of smoke and no roof.

ROSE LOOKS THROUGH the open door. Inside, the little room is dark. There is one window, high on the wall.

‘Go in and see,’ says her mother, so she steps inside, but carefully in case there are nasty surprises.

‘I can’t see out the window,’ she says.

Her mother snorts. ‘I might have known you’d find fault. Your Uncle Billy has gone to a great deal of trouble.’

‘He’s not my uncle.’

Rose sits on the little bed. There is a box beside it, and a chest in the corner for her clothes. On the floor a rag rug in colours of mud and coal. She looks down at the rug. Billy Genesis is watching from the doorway.

‘Well, say thank you,’ says her mother. ‘There’s not many little girls have their own room specially built for them.’

‘Thank you,’ she says without looking up.

‘Don’t I get a kiss?’ he says in a funny way: too loud.

‘Billy Genesis, don’t start that,’ says her mother, raising her hand to him. Billy catches the arm and twists it back. ‘The mother will have to do, then,’ he laughs, and kisses her hard in full view of passers-by.

‘The door goes the wrong way,’ says Rose.

‘Speak up, child,’ says her mother, and then she says to Billy Genesis, ‘I don’t know what’s got into her; you usually can’t stop the chatter.’

‘It’s all the change,’ says Billy. ‘But she’d better get used to it quick.’

‘The door,’ says Rose in a louder voice. ‘It goes outside. Anybody might come in.’ She looks hard at Billy Genesis.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ says her mother.

‘My room isn’t joined properly to yours.’

‘I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ says her mother. ‘Of course it is.’

‘Look, madam,’ says Billy Genesis. He goes out her door and puts his big red hand on the other door and pushes it open into the main part of the house, to show how easy it is to get there.

Rose looks at her mother. ‘Why don’t you sleep here with me?’ she says.

Her mother looks away out the door. ‘I’ll be next door with your uncle Billy.’

‘He’s not my uncle.’

‘We’ll have no more of this!’ shouts her mother. ‘We’re lucky to have a roof over our heads.’ Her voice is edgy and rough. Rose knows her mother wants to hit her, but won’t because she is so ugly and burned.

‘Now, come next door when you have done sulking,’ says
her mother, ‘and we’ll have our tea.’

Rose goes to the door and shuts it hard. It nearly catches her mother’s skirt. She goes back to sit on the bed. Something about her mother is different. She doesn’t like the different thing. She wants to be back in their messy little house at the Cork end of the Camp. This room is too empty. It’s like a little prison. She thinks about the princess in Rumpelstiltskin, locked alone in the attic until she had spun all the straw to gold, and she thinks about the poor little princess in the tower. She goes to the corner and drags the chest across the floor. This floor has proper floorboards. You could hide treasure under them. She pushes the chest until it is under the window and then she climbs up and looks out.

She can see right across the Camp. She sees Mrs Rasmussen’s shadow in the window of the log house. Mrs Rasmussen is lighting a lamp; Rose sees her turn to pull the curtains and her black lumpy stomach is all edged with orange. Rose sees, in the distance, past the charred ruins of the men’s quarters and the tents of the new people, a single black chimney standing on its own.

She remembers about tea and gets down from the window, but leaves the chest where it is.

In the night Billy Genesis comes into her room and does things to her. He says she is a lovely girl and a pretty girl but he hurts her.

Rose shuts her eyes and thinks about her treasure.

Next morning she gets up quickly before Billy Genesis or her mother are awake. She thinks about school and she thinks about her ugly face. She wants to go and get her treasure but she is afraid. The chimney is waiting, like a birthday present, but also like a dark man. The dark man picture is stronger so she decides to get her treasure another day.

She walks into Hanrattys’ yard and looks up at the window of the room where she used to be. No one is at the window. She
knocks on the door. Mrs Hanratty has floury hands and a pink face.

‘Hello, my chicken,’ she says. ‘Have you forgotten about the new school-house?’

‘No,’ says Rose. ‘Can Michael walk with me?’

‘He can indeed,’ says Mrs Hanratty, ‘and show you the way. Now, where is that boy?’

She gives Rose a piece of warm bread to eat while she shouts upstairs for Michael to get a move on. Michael comes and fidgets around while his mother buttons him into his coat and puts on his gloves. Michael is looking at her.

‘Stop staring,’ says Rose. ‘It’s rude.’

‘It’s not,’ says Michael.

‘Yes it is.’

‘Boys are allowed to stare at girls,’ says Michael.

‘Who says?’

‘I just know.’

Michael stares at her.

‘The scar’s still there,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she says.

Michael comes up close. Rose stands still while he reaches out one finger and touches her face.

‘Does it hurt?’ he says.

‘No.’

‘Does it hurt there?’

‘No.’

He taps harder. ‘Does it hurt now?’

‘Don’t,’ she says.

Mrs Hanratty takes Michael’s shoulder and shakes him. ‘Michael Hanratty, you cruel little boy!’ she says. ‘Look what you’ve done now! Poor Rose.’

Mrs Hanratty smiles at Rose and wipes away her tears. ‘Boys!’ she says.

Michael is still staring at her. ‘I was just testing,’ he says. ‘I won’t let anyone else hurt you.’

Rose says nothing.

‘I’ll bash up anyone who hurts you,’ he says.

Rose looks out the window.

‘Or stares at you,’ says Michael.

‘All right,’ she says.

‘Go on, off to school the pair of you,’ says Mrs Hanratty, and she whispers to Rose, ‘Don’t take any notice of that boy. He’s a natural ghoul. Your scar hardly shows at all.’

‘What’s a ghoul?’ says Rose, but Mrs Hanratty has run upstairs because someone is screaming.

The new school-house has two rooms: one for the big children and one for them. There is a new teacher, Mr Stringer. He has to run from room to room looking after them all because Mrs Rasmussen is away until her new baby is born.

Mr Stringer is tall and thin, with no moustache or beard. His hair sticks out this way and that like an old broom. He keeps patting and smoothing it but it stays stormy. He moves his legs back and forth when he talks, as if he wants to go to the dunny. One of his boots squeaks.

‘Hello, Rose,’ he says, ‘I am Mr Stringer.’ He puts his hand on her shoulder and turns her to the class. She wants to run away.

‘We must welcome Rose back,’ says Mr Stringer. ‘Some of you are new and have not heard about Rose. Her house was burned down and she herself was burned trying to rescue her father. Rose is a hero.’

Rose smiles at the class but not all of them smile back.

‘Come and sit with me,’ says Brennan.

‘She’s sitting with me,’ says Michael.

‘Not only a hero,’ says Mr Stringer, ‘but a popular companion, I see. At the moment, however, we have more than enough desks in the junior room, so each pupil will occupy a double desk. Spread out, children! Work, not talk, is the rule.’

He wags his head like a jack-in-the-box, but a smiling one, and runs back next door in his squeaky boot. The children all giggle.

Brennan leans over. ‘He’s funny, but he’s nice,’ he says. ‘He teaches us good things.’

Then Brennan starts copying his sentence without saying anything about her face.

One day, after Rose has been back at school for a while, Brennan and Michael come down to the Camp after school to see her new room. They lie under her bed and pretend they are British soldiers at the Crimea and the Russians are waiting outside to kill them. Then Michael stands on the wooden chest and jumps right across her room onto the bed, and Brennan does too, and Rose nearly gets there, so the boys move the chest closer because she is a girl.

‘You’re lucky to have a room of your own,’ says Michael. ‘I have to share with Elizabeth.’ He screws up his face.

‘
I
have to share with Rosser and Andrew and David,’ says Brennan.

‘Why doesn’t your mother stop us making a noise?’ says Michael.

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘Well, you’re twice lucky then. My mother’s always there.’

Then the boys start fighting because Michael says Rose got well from his mother’s nursing and Brennan says Rose got well from Granny Binney’s medicine and no one down at Denniston knows much, and Michael says the miners at Burnett’s Face are stuck up.

‘And your father drinks,’ says Brennan.

‘So does yours,’ says Michael.

‘I mean the demon drink,’ says Brennan.

‘Who cares about Chapel wowsers?’ says Michael.

‘Who cares about Catholic drunkards?’ says Brennan.

‘Anyhow, my father’s not a drunkard, he just sells drink.’

‘That’s worse.’

‘Is not.’

‘It’s tempting the weak.’

Then they both stop and look at her because her father was a real drunkard and weak, and he’s dead, and now her mother is living with another drunkard.

‘Your mother is living in sin,’ whispers Michael.

Rose says nothing.

‘Your mother will go to hell,’ he says, ‘and burn in eternal damnation.’ He screams and dances around the room as if flames are burning him.

‘But Rose will be all right,’ says Brennan.

Michael goes on dancing and Brennan laughs at him.

Rose screams very loudly and the boys stop still to look at her. Another scream comes out of her mouth before she can stop it. She tries to dance like Michael, whirling and screaming.

‘Billy Genesis!’ she screams. ‘Billy Genesis! Billy Genesis!’

The boys watch her. Then they join in, laughing and screaming: ‘Billy Genesis!’

Rose whacks the bed with both fists and the boys join in too. ‘Billy Genesis! Billy Genesis!’ Laughing and whacking.

‘Billy Genesis is uglier than a toad,’ says Michael and makes a horrible face. Rose screams with laughter.

‘Billy Genesis does hot farts,’ says Brennan. ‘Billy lights his furnace with his farts!’

The three of them roll around on the floor.

‘Billy Genesis still wets the bed!’ shrieks Rose, and the boys laugh and shout and do rude things with their willies.

Then they all lie still on the bed.

‘Let’s find something to eat,’ says Rose, and they all go over to Mrs Rasmussen’s.

THAT YEAR, 1884, was short on celebrations, long as a hungry child’s reach on misery. Far as anyone can remember the only two good things in 1884 were the opening of the Track and the birth of Bella’s baby, and both those events carried their cloud.

After the fire the Company built a new men’s quarters twice as big, and began filling it with any labour that might be recruited in Westport. There was the occasional fit young adventurer among them, who fancied that a spartan life at Denniston would somehow stiffen the sinews for the Game of Life ahead, but on the whole these men were dregs: past their prime physically, unable for one deplorable reason or another to hold down good work elsewhere, and now desperate enough to come to the cold and windswept coalfields of the plateau.

Josiah Scobie, with a deputation from Burnett’s Face, was down
knocking on the mine manager’s door more than once. In one week there were three accidents, one of them nearly fatal, and all, according to Josiah, the fault of sloppy work habits and untrained men.

Eddie said the Company had promised a new recruitment drive in England next year.

‘Next year will be several lives too late!’ stormed Josiah, squaring his shoulders and setting his feet apart in the boxer’s stance that became his trademark later, on the hustings. ‘Eddie, you must not send this riff-raff down the mine! It is not in anyone’s interests.’

Eddie Carmichael was a great man for reason and compromise; the only one who could take on Josiah and once in a while come out a point or two ahead.

‘Look, Josiah,’ he said on this occasion, ‘what say the Company puts you on to train the new men? We’ll pay you the deputy’s rate, and you take them for a week before they go down on their own. Eh?’

‘I couldn’t train these men if you gave me a year. Two years. They are not miners and never will be. The Company should be ashamed putting good workers at risk.’

The miners standing behind Josiah nodded and rubbed their hands and stamped their feet in Eddie’s cold office, like corralled horses waiting to be let out into a more familiar landscape.

‘They are not exactly queuing up to come to Denniston,’ said Eddie. ‘There are other mines now, less isolated, less harsh …’

‘Don’t give me that whitewash, Eddie.’ Josiah was getting going now. ‘The Company is sitting on the best seams in the country up here. Let them pay men a bonus to work the Denniston mines and they’ll get their men. And keep them.’

And so it would go on. Arguments and threats, reason and counter-reason, with no progress made. Eddie’s point was that the
Company couldn’t afford to recruit miners from England; that competition from Australian coal was too fierce; the Company was running at a loss. Mr McConnochie would have to sell out, and then they might all be out of a job. Josiah and his men reckoned the Company could be more competitive if they employed qualified men at proper rates and got a decent day’s work from them. They had a point. Almost every day, somewhere on the plateau, part of the operation would shut down with damaged equipment or damaged men. And mostly the shutdown was attended by a knot of angry miners accusing a group of indignant Camp people, with more often than not a scuffle and a few punches thrown.

The cold and the mist did nothing to lighten moods. Anyone with two eyes could see confrontation was on the way.