A River Town

Eleven

SAVOURING BLACK TEA at last from a big mug in a respite in the living room, the deepest, most shadowy room of the house, Tim in his crazed exhausted wakefulness turned to the Argus. Ellen Burke had bought it that morning in between kindly making up the orders in the storeroom and scratching clients’ names on them with indelible pencil. What he sought, for relief from all the wakeful tangles of the day, was the normal mismatched bags of bones newspapers, the restful oddments of fiction and items off the wire and cattle sales and distant murders.

He did not get it. He turned a page and at once encountered a startling letter. This was a document so outright that it seemed to Tim to be incised into the great furriness of the heat and the burning air by the sharpness of its tone, its zest for its own argument.

“Sir,” it began.

Tim looked up from the paper and lifted his ear, as if even in this torpid air, the cries of outrage could be heard in Belgrave Street. Australis was out to cause an outcry and the most stir he could, by writing to the more staid Argus instead of the jauntier Chronicle.

Nothing though to be heard. Nothing. The Empire of Billy Thurmond, M. M. Chance, Mr. Malcolm went maligned, and no single protest pierced the walls of heat, the circle of fire, the shower of vegetable ash. In Pompeii-on-the-Macleay, the sentinels had gone to sleep.

In the shade of the peppermint tree outside, Ellen Burke and Annie lay together on a rug, wearing shifts which had been dipped in water. He went out to them and smiled. He approved of this stratagem and thought it a clever thing. The whole bloody town should be doing it. He would dearly love to dampen himself and lie there with them. But he needed to lead Pee Dee out and place him in the traces. Pee Dee, of course, in a much higher spirit of protest than Bandy’s horses. Dragging his head from side to side. Alarmed by the torrid wind.

Loading the cart at the front of the store, a very slow matter. With one or two people drifting by, one or two broiled ladies of the Macleay entering the store to interrupt his loading, to rant about the criminal day it was and buy some item—lard or flour—their households had run out of.

And then, dear merciful God, finding that amongst what must be loaded there were five butter boxes full of the plenty of the earth and the manufactures of Sydney destined for the Sisters of Mercy. Nothing for the Malcolms, though. Ernie true to his threat!

He put the feed bag on Pee Dee to distract him from the day. Some orders from East could wait till tomorrow. He was not crossing the river. He’d already crossed twice to his peril in less than a day.

At last ready, nearly fainting, to bring people their supplies. Lead Pee Dee, deprived of his feed bag and tossing his head in a way which said, “Not me, not me. And not today.” Up for a last water fill-up at the trough outside Savage’s. For himself, a fill-up with Sharp’s lemonade. The whole bottle down him as quick as half a cup of tea.

And now off! Struggle forth into mid-street, mid-heat. In Belgrave Street, no one doing business, but Pee Dee heading now—with sudden, touching uncomplaint—for West. What must it be like in the camp? But Kitty and Mamie would be lying in moistened white shifts beneath a tree, he hoped, and the sea breeze which would end this madness would reach them first.

Yet Mamie must be repenting of her emigration. Australia presenting her with all its disadvantages on the one day or in the one week. Plague and fire, heat that withered the Celtic skin.

In the haze, the Offhand came loping diagonally from the door of the Chronicle office. He wore a suit coat and a vest as always. He might have thought he was running across the street somewhere else, not in a valley in a furious old continent you knew could fry you in a second if it was not so casual.

“Tim, Tim,” said the Offhand. The normal stewed face. The temporary tan of whiskied veins either side of the delicate nose. The pink lips enriched with the thinnest blood. The Reverend Offhand.

“Did you, Tim, happen to see that letter in the Argus? Can you imagine them actually publishing such a thing?”

“What is it?… Australis.”

“That one. A robust, Australian bloody letter, wouldn’t you agree, Tim?”

His eyes were dancing away. Even today, it was all excitement and passionate opinion to him. Of course, he didn’t have to deliver groceries to West.

“I read it. The argument had a certain virtue.”

“Tim, I do not ask you as a correspondent. I am speaking about literary matters as any man speaks in the streets to a friend.”

“My mind is rather distracted. My wife is up the river in that plague or quarantine camp or whatever it is.”

“Oh, that place is a formality now, Tim.” The Offhand shook his head, but his eyes glittered still. “But tell me, don’t you hope this Australis will write again? A fresh voice in a backward place is always most, most welcome! I found it so. A bloody minor miracle, Tim.”

“The fires and the heat are likely to take people’s minds more,” Tim warned. “Do you have any news from the Upper Macleay?”

“Oh,” said the Offhand. Offhandedly. “Hickey’s Creek is ablaze, and the Nulla.”

“The wife’s sister’s at Pee Dee.” Square miles of blaze distant.

“There are no reports of death, Tim. People place their homesteads in clearings for that reason, you might remember.”

“Exactly right,” said Tim. “But the gum trees explode like bombs.”

“Will you come into the Commercial with me and toast Signor Australis?”

“Is he Italian then? Or Spanish?”

“I use the Signor loosely, Tim,” said the Offhand.

“I hope you won’t be offended, Offhand. I have all this to deliver.”

He swept his hand towards the crammed tray of the cart. “I have a fifteen pounds fine to pay off.”

“How is that so, Tim? What did you do?”

“I am reluctant to say.”

“Again, please, as a friend.”

Tim told his tale of the smooth-faced inspector from the Colonial Secretary’s.

“This is outrageous in a democracy,” said the Offhand when Tim had finished. It was a true sentiment, but how would it hold up against a magistrate’s? And what would be its place amongst the other grievances—Ernie Malcolm, the suggestions of Constable Hanney. The Offhand was taken by the surface glitter of injustices. That was the great fault of writers. Injustice never penetrated their skins too deeply, put them off a meal, or the next drink which waited for them in the bar of the Commercial.

“For God’s sake, don’t put it in your column. I am in deep enough trouble.”

The Offhand held his hands up. They weren’t much bigger than Bandy’s.

“But you can be sure that that brute of an inspector checked with the powers of the town to ensure he made no example of one of theirs. Hence the injustice which cannot be defined, but which is everywhere in our community!”

“I shouldn’t have sold him the bloody sugar to start with.”

“And he should not have been a provocateur,” the Offhand insisted. “Is the coming Commonwealth of Australia to operate by such principles? By spying and provocation? If it is, we might as well be in Europe!”

“Except that the climate is better,” said Tim, laughing, and to spite the blaze and black grit of the air.

“I shall toast Australis on my own then,” said the Offhand. “I still cannot get over the Argus actually putting ink to them. It’s bloody rich, Tim. Not you, by any chance?”

“Never,” said Tim.

And the Offhand laughed and passed on his way.

Tim and Pee Dee straggled on a mile and into Kemp Street.

“Tiptoe past the bloody police station,” Tim urged Pee Dee. Everything dormant. Birds vanished from the trees. The trees themselves, between gusts of fiery wind, looking like they were considering the desirability of themselves blossoming into flame.

And yet there was undue movement at St. Joseph’s Convent. Nuns were running by the wooden scaffolding tower from which the Angelus bell hung. Children were moving, and piercing the white heat with excited cries. My God, the poor little savages will faint if they don’t stop! Mad Johnny would run till he dropped. Unless mercifully stopped.

The Angelus tower in front of the convent. It was made of yellow painted struts of hardwood bolted together. Yellow diagonals of timbers rose to the little, corrugated iron roof, beneath which was slung the great crossbeam from which hung the bell. Rung at six o’clock in the morning, twelve noon, six o’clock in the evening. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, everyone in the convent prayed as the bell rang out, inviting even the godless New South Wales police down the road to celebrate the Annunciation. Three Hail Marys, one Glory Be. Bandy the Muslim would understand these impulses, these summonses from a tower, better than Constable Hanney. And Missy in her motherless fluid at the cop shop—did redemption call to her thus? Was someone in the town moved secretly to name her, in a bathroom or at the corner of a bar, muttering into his lapel? Daphne or Winnie or Constance. Ellen or Hilda or Dorothea. Naming her on an impulse at hearing the far-off, familiar three-times-a-day bell of the Tykes.

Methodists and the good Wesleyans of South Kempsey didn’t go for any of it, yet shared the town with the mystery for which that tower stood in its plain Macleay timbers.

Where was the sense in paying Imelda a bob a week for a full-time boarder? If they were permitted to run themselves mad under a sun and in an air like this one? Drawing nearer, he saw Imelda striking the uprights of the tower with her cane, and then standing back, pointing the cane to the apex where the seemingly white bell stood.

This white bell at the peak of the structure was not the real gun-metal bell at all. Rather it was Lucy. And in brown pants and a blue shirt, with the dirty bandage on his head awaiting removal by Dr. Erson, Johnny. Somehow they had climbed the tower to the highest side beam together. He could envisage too clearly Johnny going up with his long, pliable feet, Lucy with her crazy suppleness.

Tim drew up Pee Dee and the cart and ran into the convent garden. Someone’s redheaded brat was imitating with hooting sounds the spread-armed balancing pose Johnny took as he walked a little way along his beam and grabbed a corner upright. Tim reached Imelda, who was still whacking the corner of one of the tower’s uprights with her cane.

“Come down, you two ruffians!” she yelled. But the diagonals which someone with climbing skills might well shinny up were too steep to shinny down.

Two girls about Lucy’s age—in pinafores, strolling together, an arm around each other’s shoulder—chattered away, engrossed. To them, time out of the classroom was a gift to amity. Didn’t matter to them that there were two pupils who had got themselves to an impossible point in today’s bloody murderous sky.

Imelda panted from punishing the tower, but would not give up the practice.

“Don’t do that,” Tim called to her. “Could make them jump.”

Imelda did at least soften and decrease the tempo of her blows. Her face broiling under the black cloth, under the white band which covered her forehead for Christ’s sake. No man shall see thy brow…

“Tea,” she called to one of the younger nuns, who was standing by, clutching the huge black beads hanging at her waist from the Order’s thick black belt. “Could you ever get me tea, sister? I’m dying of parchment.”

And before the young nun runs off to do it, Tim mentally complained that parchment was something you wrote on, an animal skin. Parched was thirsty. Was he paying out all this money to a headmistress who didn’t know the difference?

Imelda stopped caning the tower altogether.

“I’ve sent a child for the fire brigade,” she told Tim. “Mr. Crane, you know. And their extension ladder. But God knows, they could be in the bush somewhere battling flames.”

To look directly up the thwarts at the two figures at the apex of the tower was too terrifying a view. He stepped away many paces and tried it from a slightly kinder angle. “Don’t jump!” he yelled. “We have some men coming. Sit still. Wait for the ladder!”

It was Lucy who looked so light up there, as if she might step out and float to ground on the searing westerly. Johnny looked solider, in possession of himself and the tower, and so more endangered.

“I will see if I can come up,” Tim yelled, pronouncing each word.

He wrenched off his elastic-sided boots.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” he said to himself, looking up again and assessing the task. Johnny always putting him up for awful trials for heroism.

He lifted himself into the angle where a diagonal beam came down and bolted itself to one of the uprights of the tower. This diagonal would take him up to a cross bar perhaps twenty feet from the earth, and then another diagonal would begin. No other way up existed. You had to admire and abhor the little buggers for having managed it in such blazing air!

He forced himself to begin climbing the diagonal. Splayed-out feet. Hauling himself on the harsh, barely-planed, yellow-painted timber. Bowed over like a bloody ape. Everything aching. And bent like this, the idea about not casting your eyes to the earth utterly impossible! He knew to all the nuns and all the children he looked graceless, scrambling and frightened. There were bloody convent urchins mimicking him. Swinging one foot out, as he had to to bypass the one which held him to his previously highest point. Up to the first cross bar. Haul yourself up on it and award yourself a breath, grasping the diagonal which might take you up to the tower’s next stage. The thing built in three sections, like the prayers of the Angelus itself. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three Hail Marys for your sins and the repose of souls. Some bloody repose up here in a sky abandoned even by the magpies!

“Careful, Mr. Shea,” cried a nun from below. Waterford accent.

“Listen to me,” he called to Johnny, who had the grace to stare down, to Lucy who was looking off into the unscannable haze. “Stay there. The ladder’s coming. Papa’s coming.”

How would he stand up there though, looking out at the seared heavens and the valley full of smoke?

His breath as good as terror would let it be, he began the next diagonal. He found he had a way with it all now. Sailors he had so admired, up in the top mast, feet on one of those ratlines. It can be learned. Ascent. He’d learned to rescue Johnny from the stern of Terara. Now in the topmost! Watch below on deck!

Shinnying on further, diagonally to the sky, calling in a voice in which people could hear the quavers. “Stay there! Stay there!” Since history showed that if she jumped for whatever reason of her own, Johnny would step out too, falling like a willing stone and getting joy from it for the instant it lasted.

There was further flutter of activity below. Horses were mixed up in it, and stupid Imelda cried, “Mr. Shea. Save yourself!” Smoky air passed in front of his eyes. Had the tower itself caught alight? One of his feet had slithered away from the diagonal. An awful shin-whack pain in that leg! He fell now and was full of terror for the instant that lasted. The thunder of the ground, punishing him on the soles of the feet. The bastinado punishment, up through the soles.

“Oh Mother,” he said, lying on his side and gulping with pain. Nuns were touching his legs in a spirit of medical experiment.

It turned out it had been another of Imelda’s inexact meanings, like parchment. In calling, “Save yourself!” she had meant Save yourself the trouble. When he could make sense of things again, he could see she had been informing him that Mr. Crane and his big boy Arnold had ridden up to the gate on the fire engine behind its two old draught horses. He had heard it as a warning though, and it had knocked one of his legs from beneath him.

A youngish nun, the Waterford one, had already begun bandaging his swollen ankle, and the pressure of the bandage was the clearest thing he felt. A second nun brought him fully to his senses by pouring iodine on his right shin below the torn and rucked-up trouser leg. Mr. Crane and his son had the extension ladder up to the top of the tower, and big Arnold was coming down first with Lucy reserved in his arms. Ladies first, as if she did not have Johnny by the scruff of his bloody will. Mr. Crane at the base of the ladder was calling out counsels at Johnny. “Stay up there, sonny!” And then under his breath, “You little bastard.”

Arnold was more lenient and brought Johnny down on his shoulders. Through the mist of all his astringent pain, Tim doubted whether this tribute to Johnny’s manliness was a wise gesture.

Meanwhile Imelda rapped Lucy once across the upper arm with her cane. Immediately a few tears fell down Lucy’s face. They weren’t passionate. The jolt of the cane had shaken them out.

“Go to the dormitory and sit on your bed, miss,” Imelda told her.

“Come here!” Tim called as she went off with that deliberateness so dreadful to find in a child.

The little girl turned and walked across, carrying her scatter of tears.

“Tell me, Lucy, what do you want done that hasn’t been? I asked you before and now have to ask again. Why do you make my son do these things?”

He knew how silly the question was. Adults always ask these questions of children who would not give the answer for another twenty or thirty years. But this particular trick of muteness could drive an adult to blows. And he could feel the blows rising in him.

She looked at him directly and he saw what she was watching in him: that he could support the idea of her falling, but not the idea of Johnny’s plummet. She lacked someone to fear her fall more than his own death. That level stare. She forgave him, she was philosophic. But she knew.

“We thought we could see everything from the top,” she told him. “Johnny’s mother down the river.”

“No. No, it’s not high enough. You must know there’s no place on earth from which you can see all the rest. There’s no height you can get to.”

She bunched her eyes. Another tear emerged under this pressure. “I know.”

“What do you want? I can’t do more.”

She said nothing.

“If you behave like this just once again,” he said, “I will let go of you for good, Lucy. I swear to Jesus! But if you stop being a mad child, I’ll keep you here and take you to Crescent Head for picnics.”

Arnold Crane delivered Johnny now to the base of the tower. Imelda began scourging him with her birch.

“No!” called Tim. “No! Send him to me.”

Imelda stopped lashing and pointed the boy towards his prone father. The boy, too, had a few stained droplets on his cheeks. They meant nothing under this sun.

“I am suspending your education, you bloody ruffian. You have half killed me. Get the Sisters’ boxes out of the cart and take them to the kitchen. I’m too crippled myself.”

So here he was, lamed, reaching up to cuff the boy behind the ear and point him to where Pee Dee stood, tethered to the fence, trying to back away nonetheless from the placid old plough horses who pulled the fire wagon.

“Give Pee Dee a whack for me too and tell him to behave!” Tim roared after the boy.

Two of the nuns were ushering children back towards the classrooms beneath the Celtic cross which stood at the apex of St. Joseph’s school hall. The young Waterford nun had finished binding up Tim’s ankle and was struggling to rise within the great black folds of her habit. A dark, sweat-drenched furze on her upper lip. A plain young woman but beautiful in her own way.

“Can you get up under your own steam now, Mr. Shea?” she asked.

Tim rolled onto his good leg and forced himself upright with his palm. She was by his left elbow, assisting. He put his weight on his bound foot but, of course, it would not take it.

“You may need crutches then,” the consecrated Waterford woman told him.

“I have a blackthorn at home,” he told her.

From the direction of the cart came Johnny labouring under a butterbox but doing fairly well. A number of older and larger boys had joined in to help him carry things. You had to admire the little blackguard. As long as Mad Lucy let him live.

Imelda herself struggled over to ask how he was, and without ceremony he said, “You might remember, Mother. I asked you to keep them apart.”

Imelda angry to be spoken to so outright in front of one of her nuns. “Well, we are not God Himself, Mr. Shea,” she told him. “We cannot enquire into each one of their seconds. We do our best. I now see what you mean. But I would tell you that there is mischief in the boy too. Children don’t have to talk to each other to make up some mad plan. They do things. It is called Original Sin. But their Guardian Angels were with them today.”

He looked at the boxes of groceries making for the convent kitchen on the shoulders of boys large and small. “I thought that was what I was paying you one and threepence a week for. So that Guardian Angels would be saved the trouble.”

She turned away, stung. Yet they always had an answer these women!

After some dawdling children went Imelda, thrashing the air with her cane. The flail of the cane, the rattle of her Rosary. The invisible ministers, the seraphim, the Guardian Angels were taking a bloody thrashing!

Through all this morning’s adventure, while climbing the hard, painted diagonals of the timbers with splayed feet, he’d had it in mind.

“Sister,” he asked the Waterford nun. “Have you heard of the young woman who died at Mulroney’s?”

“Yes, I have, Mr. Shea.”

“Do you think it proper to pray for the repose of her soul?”

The questioning made the young nun nervous. She showed it by being brusque.

“I do. We are all sisters, Mr. Shea.”

“Very good. Now do you think there is any way her soul is running amok? In what we see here. The children run wild.”

“No. I certainly don’t believe that. That’s theologically unsound, Mr. Shea.”

But you could tell she knew about visitations and was as fearful now as if she’d had one, had seen Missy inhabiting fiery ground or glittering sea.

“I am cursed with dreams,” said Tim.

“All human beings are, in this vale of tears,” said the nun. But now she was all business again. “You should wear a scapular for the proper protection, Mr. Shea. We must be on our guard against superstitious belief. Now come and have some tea like a good fellow.”

At that moment Johnny was back in Tim’s vicinity, standing some paces away. His deliveries done.

“You’ll come with me,” said Tim. And to the nun, “Thank you, I have water on my cart.”

On the second day of terrible heat, Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer visited the plague camp and declared everyone well, and clothing clear of infestation. That evening a huge cleansing wind came from the south, gusting up thunderheads with it. The sky cracked and people covered their mirrors with a cloth lest the lightning have a surface to admire itself by. Men were already going around collecting for the burned-out farms of Nulla Creek. The Argus would say that six thousand pigs had been consumed, twelve thousand cattle and as many as a thousand horses. By some startling mercy—no human fatalities.

Tim could have been one if he’d taken an unlucky posture in falling to the earth. The lunatic children could have been if they’d stepped into the air in the way Lucy looked as though she might throughout the enterprise.

On a cleansed and overcast morning, Kitty and Mamie and the other Burrawong passengers were loaded on a drogher with Burrawong’s cargo and made a slow, long passage up the Macleay. People who saw them coming ran up and down Smith and Belgrave Streets announcing it. Those who needed to meet the drogher came up to Central wharf with a strange reluctance. His foot in a sock, and supporting himself on a blackthorn, so that louts outside the Commercial called, “Dot and carry one!” Tim took Annie down there to see the drogher berth. Others watched it from their windows and under their eaves, and then pretended they weren’t much interested. But of course, you needed to be interested. Even in him an unreasonable voice asked was this slow, blunt vessel the plague’s fatal bark?

In both the papers this morning, a letter had appeared from Captain Reid:

The captain’s letter however was followed by another from someone who signed himself Sanitas, some old cow-cocky from downriver, complaining that there’d been “various improprieties” in the handling of the Burrawong during her time in quarantine at the New Entrance. The droghers which were designated to bring cargo and passengers to Kempsey were permitted to lie beside Burrawong at night, and there existed the possibility of rats infected by the plague passing aboard the droghers and thence to settlements along the river. The sanitation officer, said Sanitas, had to prevent droghers from lying beside Burrawong at night. “The capacity of the flea to travel is nothing short of prodigious…”

So the scholarly farmer continued, pealing his verbal klaxon on the Macleay. No wonder people looked warily as the drogher, laden with provisions and passengers, now neared the wharf.

Telling Annie to be careful, Tim stumbled with her down the embankment towards the river bank itself and, dear God, there was Bandy.

“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy, formally bowing, as if again they had become strangers.

“Well then, Bandy.”

“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy. “I thought the women might need help with their baggage.”

They were bound together in Constable Hanney’s accusations now, so Tim bowed and said, “Very thoughtful of you, Bandy.”

Not a dramatic landing for Mamie the emigrant, not from a drogher. At this tide, the gangplank slanted up to the wharf from the hard-laden deck. Mamie and Kitty waving from the deck, and Joe O’Neill smiling wanly too, banjo-less, a little behind them. Still tormented, poor scoundrel, by Mamie. Kitty plumply pointing towards him, tapping her upper leg. Asking what’s wrong with his?

Tim making soothing motions with his free hand.

At last, after the commercial travellers had hustled back and forth on the narrow gangplank, landing their bags of samples, the sisters struggled up to the wharf. Not even gallant Bandy could get aboard to help the sisters up such a busy plank. Kitty helped ashore by Mr. Joe O’Neill, who then boarded again and came ashore with his and Mamie’s bags. He was strong enough in his desire to carry them all the way to West.

“No fuss, I had a fall, I’ll tell you,” said Tim as Kitty embraced him. Annie hid her face from Mamie and clung to Kitty’s skirts. “I suppose you’d like presents?” said Kitty, grinning down. The girl would grow up taller than her mother. You could see it already in her four-and-a-half-year-old frame.

“I know you have presents, mama.”

“I do. I have lovely things. They are for nice girls who say hello to their Aunt Mamie.”

So all the greetings were made. “Say hello to Mr. O’Neill who comes from near where Mama and Aunt Mamie come in Cork.”

What did Annie think Cork was? The other side of the moon.

Joe had come ashore with Mamie’s sea trunk, and Bandy made certain he went aboard to get Kitty’s. As if to keep the honours even. Tim said, “Didn’t bother hitching up the old feller. I’ll get Naylor’s cab to bring your sea chest down to the residence.”

“Not at all,” said Kitty. “Mr. Habash would do it for us, wouldn’t you?”

At this announcement by his wife, Tim felt rising within him a persisting reluctance at being espoused by Habash. Better that honest Joe O’Neill labour down Smith Street with both on his back.

“No, Mr. Habash has work to do,” said Tim. “I will go and hitch up Pee Dee. It’s no trouble.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” said Kitty. And knowing who was in charge, O’Neill and Bandy were already setting off up the embankment with one of the sea chests. Up there, unnoticed before by Tim, stood Bandy’s green wagon.

“How can you make deliveries with that ankle?” asked Kitty.

“It’s difficult just now.”

“Well, Joe’ll make them for you while he’s waiting for his relatives to turn up.”

Having arranged the muscle power of the men, Kitty took Annie by the hand and mounted the ramp to Smith Street.

Smith Street, where Mamie walked past the banks, the creamery, the Good Templars’ Hall with the demeanour of a native. Typical of Red Kenna’s children, she took things as they presented. This was, he was sure yet again, a gift.

He did not mar the homecoming, the stories of the voyage, the time in Sydney, the quarantine, by telling Kitty about Johnny’s adventure, though Johnny came home from day school looking wary and frightened, suspecting that the tale had been told. He was by now bandage-less, and his hair was growing back, so there was nothing to alert the new arrivals.

Ellen Burke had made another good stew, and its pungency came in from the cookhouse and filled the residence like a solid caress. Bandy had been invited to dinner, and Joe O’Neill was ecstatic to be staying under a roof with Mamie. More or less under a roof anyhow. There was no bed for him in the house but he would spread some blankets outside by the shed. If he had any of the Irishman’s normal advanced dread of serpents, he was willing to forget it for Mamie’s sake. Big red-bellied blacksnakes had once or twice been found on the verandah, yet were timid unless trodden on. Nonetheless, made a big dent in a fellow’s composure. Joey would fight them for Mamie.

Since business proved slow in the afternoon, Tim wondered did people know Kitty had come down on the drogher? Did they fear she’d pass the plague to them along with the crackers and cheese?

Look in the Argus for plague-news and the hope of sighting a new letter to grace the day of Kitty’s return. And it was there! Page nine.

Tim laid his hand emphatically a number of times on the page. Fair enough, fair enough, Australis.

But who had written these letters? A farmer with time to think? Yet the address was Central Kempsey. Was that a mere blind? Who was this Thomas Paine of the Macleay?

He went through a list in his head. Old Burke upriver at Pee Dee had time enough and adequate disgruntlement to write these. But they were not his opinions. He was not for Federation. He was in favour purely of running Pee Dee station as he wished under a regime of free trade and low tax. So Old Burke had not written these. Borger, the farmer who had spoken up at the Patriotic Fund meeting in the Good Templars? Certainly Borger, you would think. It was pure Freeman’s Journal stuff.

Well, good for the lad, though he would suffer. He might take his cream to the butter factory and find it turned back by some fellow worried about far, far South Africa. It was the one thing wrong with the country. People were too in love with other quarters of the globe and not enough with this place itself. To an emigrant, the Macleay was sufficient kingdom. You couldn’t tell the women that, of course. Kitty loved reading the Palace news. Didn’t see any of it as political. It was purely a matter of tiaras, blood-lines, balls and regattas. If you wanted to be strict about it, as Australis obviously did, you could say that the women were abettors of the high loyalism of New South Wales. But then why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves, reading about fanciful things?

In late afternoon, more rain to soothe the burnt pastures upriver. Old Kylie from the Good Templars came around under a big black umbrella asking for donations for farmers who had lost their stock, their crops, their outbuildings. Contributions over ten shillings would be published in the list of donations to appear in both the Argus and Chronicle. Tim went into the storeroom, to the black and red cash box. He opened it with the key from his fob and took out a ten bob banknote. A green pound note beckoned to him. Ten bob contributors would be the lowest on the list. In the face of fines and threats, he would show his open-handedness. He knew the crime of vanity beckoned. People on the way to Mass calling out to him with respect and then muttering to each other that he was a good fellow and always ready to extend credit. He loved to be suspected of generosity beyond his means. Besides, poor buggers had lost their stock, their horses and cattle, and could go broke.

He took the thirty shillings, the one pound ten, out to old Kylie. Lunacy. The old man whistled and wrote him a receipt. “This is very generous of you, Mr. Shea. Not all the tradespeople are as generous as this!”

One in the eye for Ernie Malcolm.

Through the rain without an umbrella came Joe O’Neill slightly aglow and his lips a little thick. Stammery. He’d been to the Commercial to meet the natives, and now was coming to dinner carrying bottles of lager and stout cradled in his arms. If the rain kept up he would have to sleep in the cart in the shed.

“I think I’ll like this place,” he told Tim, coming into the store and shaking himself. It would have been the Offhand who pumped almost too much grog into Joe, asking him for impressions of recent events in Ireland and the British Isles. Would Ireland ever get Home Rule, or had Home Rule run aground for good on the snowy white breast of Mrs. O’Shea (a Kitty like his), mistress of the late, great Parnell? And so on. Ireland suffering mortally from Parnell’s mortal lusts, and Joe passing on the news to the Offhand on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales.

Joe had the look of an emigrant who believed he’d settled in already. A few pints with the natives had done it. With the denizens. But there was no chance that he’d make an easy voyager, the way Mamie did. When he got out to his relatives and started to live in his slab hut, the silence and otherness would get to him, and he’d be struck by a big bush melancholy.

At dinner, Joe and Mamie took the chance to tell further tales of the voyage. An extraordinary thing, a voyage of that extent. When you are on it, you think that you would be able to talk by the hour about it afterwards. But there is something you can’t convey about the sea’s repetitive sunsets and dawns, about the variations of swell, about porpoises seen off the stern, about the ferocity of sea sickness. The other mistake you made was to think that life after you landed would be as varied as that. A frustration that in giving a picture of the voyage, you made it sound as ordinary as the rest of life.

When it came to taking places at table, Mamie insisted on sitting between Kitty and Bandy Habash. Then the children down one side, and Joe O’Neill and Ellen Burke at the foot, looking a little wan together. Tim praised Ellen to Kitty, and recounted now the accidents which had marked her absence.

“Holy Mary,” said Kitty, “Pee Dee. And Angelus tower! If I’d stayed away another week, you’d all be dead!”

But tonight it seemed a comic rather than fatal possibility. Joe O’Neill flicked Johnny’s ear playfully, and even Tim found himself laughing.

A number of bottles of stout and ale had been opened with the soup, and everyone was drinking freely except for Bandy.

“Thank Christ I’m a Catholic,” said Joe, adding to the beer already in him. “Drinking’s the one thing you’re allowed. I would have made a rotten Mohammedan.”

But you could see by the way his eyes moved at the beginnings and ends of sentences and during silences that he was thinking, “Surely she can’t really like this little brown fellow?”

As for Ellen Burke, she kept dashing out to the cookhouse, just like someone covering up with kitchen work her lack of ease.

Tim said, “Now tell me, Bandy, these remedies of yours. Do they cure anything? What do you put in these things, Bandy, you sell to people?”

Kitty sank back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling; a posture encouraged by her condition. “Tim is a sort of Doubting Thomas. But I tell you, Tim, the man’s main tonic is a grand pick-me-up.”

All eyes then on Bandy. Ellen Burke’s dwelling on him from the end of the table.

“Give us a scientific exposition,” called Joe, winking, and sipping again at his beer.

Bandy murmured, “Where to begin? The chief constituents of the body in Punjabi herbalism are the blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, chyle, and semen. One element, when disordered, influences all the others through their connection.”

“Who taught you all this?” Tim asked.

“My father of course. In my homeland, there are a list of more than three hundred vegetables which can be used as cures. Some of those cannot be had here in the Macleay, though some can. We are able to get useful animal and herbal substances brought up also on the Burrawong from Sydney.”

“Any cure for plague?” called Joe. Desire and drink had made him mean.

“And then of course,” Bandy continued, “sometimes a mixture of the mineral and vegetable is required. Take the blood. We make a mixture of rhubarb and iron for our blood tonic.”

“Rhubarb and iron,” murmured Kitty.

“I feed blood tonic now and then to my own horses. For breathing problems I make up a herbal mixture to be burned beside the patient’s bed. This is moxa, which we are supplied by the Chinese herbalist of Dixon Street, and some Indian hemp, which grows wild in this valley and can be harvested by penknife. For the illnesses of women in pregnancy and for general liverishness, we use belladonna, which restores the fabric of women and is much appreciated. Mr. Nance the pharmacist, you will find, uses the same herb, the foxglove, as in Habash’s Heart Tonic.”

“A body of scholarship, Mr. Habash,” said Mamie, seemingly in awe. “A body of scholarship you carry in your head.”

Bandy gave just a margin of a smile but then swallowed it.

“It is true,” he said in a very low voice, which might have been actually beyond the hearing of Ellen Burke and Joe O’Neill, “that many people tell us that they are grateful for our remedies, more grateful than for some others they receive from chemists.”

“Sure, the chemists and doctors don’t know everything,” said Kitty.

Tim found himself treating Bandy’s exposition of his craft as a herbalist with greater tolerance now than he might have a month ago. He asked what other remedies. Bandy mentioned rhinoceros horn for older men, and ground quantities of gallstones from bulls mixed with cardamom and cinnamon. Arsenic was excellent for rheumatism and for the complexion.

Tim noticed Mamie had the hawker-cum-herbalist enchanted. The more substances he mentioned, the more his gaze turned to her.

Abruptly Ellen Burke stood up. All she could manage to say was, “Custard.” She grabbed the apron off the back of her chair and half-rushed, half-staggered out to the cookhouse.

“Oh yes,” said Mamie, rising after a moment. “I’ll help.”

Again, the amazing lack of novelty with which she moved, as if she’d grown up in this house. Her going left a silence.

Kitty whispered to Tim, “Go and see, Tim. Go on. Something’s up.”

Tim rose. Dear God, he was not as steady as he thought. Even on one leg.

“I’m just going out to lend a hand,” he told the other men.

Both Joe and Bandy bounded up. They did not want to see a lame man doing what they could.

“No, gentlemen,” said Kitty from her powerful, seated position. “You are guests.”

Outside, a light rain, softer than silk, slanted in under the verandah. He hobbled along under the covered way to the cookhouse where the fire was restrained.

From outside the cookhouse he could hear the women speaking, and a certain tightness in Ellen Burke’s voice.

“No, put it down. Let me do things, for God’s sake.”

“Would you prefer I didn’t help at all?” asked Mamie. She sounded half-amused.

“I’d prefer that you didn’t come in from nowhere, swing in on a steamer from some bloody damp heap of a place and upset friendships. That’s what I’d prefer.”

“Upset friendships. What do you mean?”

“Some things are already set up here. And you blunder in as if everything starts from your arrival. All earlier bets off! Well, that’s not the way you’ll get on here.”

Tim stepped further back into the shade of the verandah. He did not want to be discovered by them but also did not want to go.

“You’re teasing poor Mr. Habash,” said Ellen. “He’s a lonely soul, but you make him sit beside you. Only so that Joe O’Neill will pant all the more for you. Well Mr. Habash is more than something you can make use of, and he already has his friends. Don’t think of that though! Miss Importance from some shitty pigyard in Cork! Queening it in the bloody colonies, for dear God’s sweet sake!”

Tim waited through the silence in which Mamie’s temper—such to resemble Kitty’s—rose. “What a performance, miss,” Mamie ultimately said. “I’m not using Mr. O’Neill or Mr. Habash one way or another. Men use themselves and they always have and are happy to do so. Now, do you want me to help you carry in the pud or what do you want?”

But there was no sound of movement from within the cookhouse. It could be sensed that Ellen Burke was on the edge of tears or perhaps in them. She was dealing with an older, archer, and more stubborn woman.

“Your sister isn’t going to like it,” Ellen plaintively argued, “if you come in here interfering with old friendships.”

“Kitty? Kitty seems perfectly happy sitting there with her big stomach. Kitty’s troubles are over. Kitty is easy.”

“I don’t mean Kitty. Your other sister. Remember? My stepmother. Mrs. Molly Burke. A genuine lady.”

“Oh, Molly? Molly isn’t just like the rest of us. Always had the airs. All she was looking for was a chance to exercise them. And why would Molly be upset? You don’t mean to say she has a fancy for the little brown feller?”

This was fierce, close stuff, exactly like Kitty’s method of debate. Ellen could be heard frankly weeping. “We don’t want another bloody bitch in this country,” she cried. “We have a full supply already.”

Mamie turned softer now. “Stop blubbering and let me take that tray for you. Now come on, Ellen. Listen, do you love the little pagan? Is he your sweetie, is that what this is?”

There was no answer.

“Well, come on, tell a woman for sweet Christ’s sake!”

Ellen said, “You’ll marry Joe in the end, so all you’re doing is messing Bandy up!”

“It’s kind of you to make predictions, Miss Burke. I can tell you that Joe O’Neill can whistle. I don’t intend to be shackled to a mopey old bugger like him. I’d like a contest out of life! Come on, give me that bloody tray and dry up!”

“Wait,” Ellen Burke protested through her tears, “I have to put the plates on.”

With soft rain slanting down onto his shoulders, Tim began retreating up the verandah lest he be overtaken by partly reconciled women carrying pudding and custard and plates.

That night, when all his guests were asleep, worn out by good times or by anguish, as he lay beside Kitty, who was profoundly and noisily asleep, Missy again—and as was to be expected—stepped into the room from the sea. She wore a blazer, a man’s shirt and tie. She appeared to have theatrical purposes. You could tell that, since her cheeks were rouged. An overpowering sea, hurtful to the gaze, lay behind her.

Old Bruggy’s Masses hadn’t soothed away this restive spirit, who brought everything into play, the sea, his father, Bandy’s predictions, assertions and suggestions. Depending on him for her salvation and her substantiality, poor bitch. As Imelda had chosen him to supply groceries gratis, Missy had looked up through the fluids, seen him as the town’s co-operative spirit, the easy mark, the man who would go to proud and tormented trouble.

“In the name of the Father,” he said, “and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.” Then he turned away, onto his side.

This did not, however, mean he wouldn’t do something.

In a morning that was still cool, all the smoke blown away or absorbed by rain, the sort of morning which might convince emigrants of the glories of the Macleay, Tim saw Joe O’Neill come in, already washed and shaven, from his billet in the shed. The remorse of booze in him, but determined to look well and reliable.

Meanwhile Kitty lay in, but Mamie was loud and efficient, bringing the big pot into the dining room and pouring lots of tea.

Half past eight. Tim at table taking Joe O’Neill through the cash and credit books he would need to take out with him on deliveries. “Take no nonsense from the bloody horse either!”

Joe went off, making his deliveries for Mamie’s sake. Able to put his foot on the ground and to wear an unlaced shoe, Tim limped down Smith Street towards the offices of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company. The stairs were hard, but once he’d dragged his lame leg up, he asked after Captain Reid of Burrawong, and Miss Hunt who ran the front office stiffly told him that Captain Reid always stayed at the Hotel Kempsey.

Limping back towards Belgrave Street, Tim saw a notice outside the Good Templars.

A Special Meeting of the Patriotic Fund has been called to consider the following motion from Mr. William Thurmond, JP, Pola Creek:

That in view of certain recent inflammatory and philo-Boer letters published in the Macleay press, and in view of other signs of disloyalty apparent in the community, the Fund authorises its executive to produce a black list of disloyal Businesses and Employees for the guidance of the populace.

This meeting called by the Authority of Mr. Arthur Baylor, President, and Mr. Ernest Malcolm, Secretary.

No sooner read than he heard a voice behind him. “You see, you see!”

He turned and saw Ernie Malcolm standing there in his going-to-work grey suit and with a cheroot in his mouth. “This is what it all comes to, Tim, if you keep pushing the boundaries.”

“What does it come to? I’ve done nothing.”

“A mistake to take us chaps on. Enlightened and tolerant we may be to suit the age, Shea. But what we hold dear we hold dear!”

Ernie did not wait for a reply, though Tim did not have one, being too confounded. Could he be the object of such a meeting?

“Mr. Malcolm,” Tim called after him.

Ernie barely stopped and did not turn.

“Why did you write a letter praising the work of that hopeless constable? Is it some friend of yours you want to protect?”

“Letter?”

“The constable showed me. He’s gratified at it.”

Still keeping his back to Tim, Ernie said, “I hope you don’t imply anything. What do I look for, Shea? I look for a joyous bridge opening in a year of great promise. Do you understand?”

“I don’t try to push anyone into a corner.”

“Oh but you do. You are accepted as a citizen, but still you look to upset the damned balance. You can’t be a smartalec without people latching on. People aren’t stupid, you know!”

“Oh, the letters in the Argus. Can a fellow lose his name so easily? A hero one month, a gouger in another. Generous in January, traitorous in February.”

“A man can lose everything,” said Ernie, “very easily. We all live on a knife-edge.”

He simply walked away. Then: I’ll write them a letter, Tim resolved. I’ll swear a bloody affidavit drawn up by Sheridan. Those letters aren’t mine.

So he had a strategy, and for the sake of his peace anyhow he fixed his mind back on Missy, who was another matter, her own.

He limped around to the Kempsey Hotel, trying as he went not to look like an enemy of the shire. But outside Savage’s, Borger the vocal cow-cocky stood by his wagon. He strode up to Tim, took him fraternally by the elbow, and spoke in a low voice. “I have to commend you on your letters to the Argus. Masterly, old feller. Those buggers might have the battalions, but we’ve still got them beaten when it comes to turn of phrase and genuine prophetic fire.”

“Holy God,” said Tim. His ankle was in a bad way now too, bulging over his shoe. “I didn’t write those damn letters. I don’t have any grievance I want to express in public against Britain. I am not like you.”

“No, old son, I know,” said Borger, not believing him. “Australis did it. A good feller, that Australis! And from Central. Who else from Central…”

Borger continued to caress his elbow. Were people watching?

“I’ll tell you what, Tim. There are two men in this valley with the education and passion to write those letters. They both spoke out at the public meeting of the so-called Patriotic Fund. What two fellers are they, Tim? One is me. But I didn’t write the things, I wish I bloody had. The other, Tim, is a feller who keeps a store.”

“No. Don’t go around town telling people these things.”

“I tell them only to those who understand certain things. That we may have a destiny other than that of the British army in South Africa.”

This promise alarmed Tim. Borger wasn’t secretive at all. He was a talker. An enthusiast.

“Please, please,” said Tim. “I have a business and a third child coming.”

“I understand. What a society where a man can have his trade snatched away for these kinds of reasons! But I wanted to say just this. Thank you, Tim. You’re a hero to me.”

Borger sauntering away now towards the front of the emporium which was just opening its doors.

Tim called, “The last bastard that said I was a hero took his business from me a week ago!”

Borger waved his hand and smiled, “Of course, of course. It’s what they did to Napper Tandy, Robert Emmett. Ned Kelly, for that matter. You’ve got my business from here on.”

He disappeared into the emporium. If not for the sharpness of Missy’s visitation, Tim would by now have been totally put off in his attempt to speak to the captain of Burrawong. But he kept on, though his brushes with bloody Ernie and Borger made him tentative in the entryway of the Hotel Kempsey. A maid came out of the dining room to intercept him—a little as if he were an intruder.

“Is Captain Reid at breakfast?” Tim asked her.

She was an English girl, he could tell as soon as she spoke, and sounded very pleasant. Must be new, not part of the politics of the place.

“Aw, he’s up on the verandah, writing his letters.”

Her up was oop. It was his experiences that English people who said oop were honest creatures. The oop-sayers achieved no more credit with the big people than did North Corkers.

When he went upstairs, he found that the captain was not on the verandah, but someone was humming “Oft in the Stilly Night” in the men’s bathrooms. Tim looked in. The captain was giving himself another shave. It was known that he visited a woman in West. Would she now inspect him for fleas?

He saw Tim in the mirror and stopped his scraping.

“Can I help you?” he asked coldly. The manner of command.

“Captain Reid,” said Tim. Wondering himself why he sounded so bloody genial. “My wife travelled up with you from Sydney on Burrawong last week. Quite a fuss, eh?”

“Quite a fuss. Too much of one.” Now he continued to shave. “Going back and forth to the ship by drogher! I hope they don’t put us through quarantine every time we make the New Entrance.”

“If they do, we of the Macleay are put to inconvenience.”

He knew the captain would like such a sentiment.

“That’s what I tell people,” murmured the captain, caressing his jawline with the blade. “There are enough complaints already,” he said. “How did your wife find steerage?”

“She was a saloon passenger,” said Tim. “Travelled with Mrs. Arnold down, with her emigrant sister back.”

“Ah, yes,” said the captain. “If she left something aboard, you know, the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company office is in Smith Street.”

“Oh, yes, I know that. I wanted to ask about another passenger. She would have come about the New Year.”

“Not many passengers ever at the turning of the year,” said Captain Reid reflectively.

“A friend of mine tells me he saw a lad from Burrawong. Fresh-faced, wearing a blazer from a good school.”

“There was an effeminate sort of boy, yes, just after New Year’s. Visiting relatives in the Upper Macleay. A saloon cabin to himself. Kept quiet, as you’d expect. Sick all the time, I’m told.”

“What was his name?”

“A fanciful one. Alastair. Alain. Some name like that.”

These names, even though male and assumed for the voyage, went through Tim like light through a pane. Something potent was released. Its retreat left him lightened. He put weight on his bad ankle to remain upright.

The captain lowered his razor and considered Tim.

“Are you all right?”

Someone must be told and the captain was there, fit to approach Hanney without being bullied. “It’s the girl who died at Mrs. Mulroney’s. It’s the woman they call Missy, taking the ship as a boy. You must go to the police and tell them. For example, the boy’s voice. What was the voice like?”

“Well-modulated for that matter. But it wasn’t the girl in question.”

“Please, go and tell the sergeant.”

“I don’t think I want to involve myself too much with the civil authorities. What can they make of a well-modulated voice?”

“Was it English, Scottish, Irish? Was she really the sort of talker she appeared to be or was she bunging an accent on? Those are some of the things they could follow.”

“I think you’re leaping to conclusions. The boy was a boy.”

He was, very nearly, proud of the force of Missy’s performance.

“Listen,” said Captain Reid, “I was treated to the sight of that young woman earlier than most people, and it was not one of my passengers.”

“When you last saw it, your mind wouldn’t have been set up to compare the features with your schoolboy’s. I urge you to look again!”

Reid said nothing for a time and, as if he might consider using it as a weapon, slowly washed his razor. When he did speak he sounded pretty ruminative. “You’re a bloody nuisance with all this. What’s wrong with you? You’ve got a bloody bug in your mind about this woman! It’s a bloody impertinence that you should want me to take a cab to West to waste time with those great clod-hopping gendarmes! My company doesn’t want me doing excessive things in any case. They get a hard enough hammering from the Macleay rags.”

Tim however still struggling to sound desperately reasonable. “Some Macleay men—at least one of them—want her to go unnamed. It might be mere bush vanity in him. Would you for Christ’s sake consider doing what I ask so that girl can be put to rest?”

“No, I bloody well wouldn’t. They have the criminal Mulroney. I am a sailor, sir, who spent twenty-two years on the Singapore-Batavia run. I’ve seen shipmates drowned and fished them up as such inhuman lumps of rot that I became convinced rot is all. There are no ghosts to be appeased or settled. By your tone and accent you’re a superstitious man. When you talk about this girl, you see her as languishing somewhere. But whoever she was, she’s nothing now. She is nothing. Believe me.”

Captain Reid finished with his work and gauged himself in the mirror, sliding a hand along his jawline. Smooth as a baby’s arse.

“Your wife travelled saloon, you said?” It had occurred to Captain Reid that he ought to be polite to men who paid for saloon passages.

“She and her sister.”

“Well, please don’t think for a second that my convictions make me a less moral man. It makes me a more moral man. As the whole Macleay knows and is always saying—Burrawong is a difficult and somewhat older vessel. All the more reason to treasure my passengers’ lives, since life is everything and beyond is nothing. As it stands, the whole population, if you read the Argus, thinks I’m deliberately trying anyhow to spread the plague and enlarge the population of the deceased. So I wish to live quietly while I’m here. Good morning. I’m going to my room.”

For a moment, Tim had an urge to get in his way, but that would have convinced the captain he was a weird fellow.

Reid went indoors. Tim loitered a while, above the thoroughfare, seeing men open stores and put out goods. The old Jewish jeweller who spoke with a cockney accent put his trays of unaffordable wonders in the window. Missy might look in there, yearning for the gaudiness of ordinary days.

In the window of Savage’s stood a sign which said,

One sign of Bandy’s seriousness as a herbalist. If he were as sly as Savage’s, he would by now have bottled a herbal specific against the plague. But a sensible fellow like Bandy knew you could gamble with the colic, but better not dice with plague.

T. Shea—General Store couldn’t advertise pre-plague goods. Not with a post-plague wife and sister-in-law on the premises.

Back home, Mamie stood in front of the store, beaming. Plump Kitty inside, leaning against the door frame which led into the residence. She’d been waiting for him.

“Timothy, could we have a talk?” she asked.

He knew the trouble he was in, and why. She did not humble him in front of her sister, however. She was proving herself an equable partner in his decaying universe.

They went into the living room with its clock and ottoman and its bookcase: the London Illustrated News, The Standard Book of Great British Poets, Chamber’s Encyclopedia. And dimness.

“Tim, here’s a further bill from Staines and Gould. Three months unpaid. You intend to pay it?”

“I meant to tell you. I paid off Truscott and Lowe and we’re all square there. But I had an inspector from the Colonial Secretary’s. The bugger was policing the early closing business. He fined me fifteen quid for selling him sugar and shortbread.”

Beneath a frown, Kitty’s features bunched. “You didn’t tell me that!”

“Well, there was plenty of other stuff to relay, wasn’t there? Johnny’s head… This inspector turned up smiling and well-dressed and saying his wife was having a tea party…”

“The bloody Good Templars sent him,” Kitty concluded at once. “Those bastards! You put yourself forward, didn’t you? The Patriotic Fund meeting. Have to talk up like that criminal uncle of yours.”

“Not criminal. Political. But not me. A farmer called Borger puts himself forward. Not me.”

“But when you speak last, you see, Timmy, people remember. It’s the worst bloody talent on earth you have.”

They stood together there by the ottoman sofa, which was used only when worthies like the Burkes came to town. Yet this was the core of the household, the core of what was treasured and at threat.

“I see too in the Argus you gave an entire thirty bob to bushfire relief.”

“Had to. For business and compassion.”

“No. For vaunting bloody pride! That’s what. Recklessness and vanity. So speak to people about this. How else do you propose we pay the bill I have in my hand?”

“I have a number of outstandings. I will send Joe O’Neill out to ask for them. It should be a change for our customers and a good introduction to Australia for Joe.”

“Go yourself. Joe’s no persuader, for God’s sake.”

The notice of meeting at the Good Templars stood over him and the anger of Ernie bloody Malcolm. Too complicated to recount. He felt the weight of his unutterable fragility as he stood in the doorway, halfway between his store and his home fire.

“If you leave this bill another month,” said practical Kitty, “they’ll send the bailiffs.”

“I know, I know,” he told her. He wished between partners in life there could be an instant passage of mind, so that all the threatening news received in her absence could be in a second transferred to her. It was not totally deceit that made him a liar, it was the difficulty of exact translation.

“Do you think Joe O’Neill will take Mamie off our hands soon?”

“You’re very quick to get rid of my sister.”

“No. Your sister is very welcome. It just seemed…”

“My sister will never attach herself to a wet item like Joey O’Neill. Why do you think she’s in the front of the store? She’s hoping for something better. She’s not hoping for the world. But at least she’s hoping for something better than Joe bloody O’Neill.”

He gathered himself to squeeze the truth out. “I have to tell you this. Our future may depend on a motion presently before the Patriotic Fund. To make a list of the disloyal.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. She knew somehow that he could so readily be described as disloyal by those who sought to depict him that way. She had married a man who could so handily be a butt. Done it knowingly. Hard to see what possessed her. Love, of course, whatever that entailed.

“We will have to leave the bill another week,” he told her.

“The outstandings?” she said. “Our useless clients. You’ll just have to hit them hard, Timmy. I can’t go out in this condition putting a scare in them, but dear Jesus I’ll do it as soon as this child’s born.” She seemed to thrust forward a little of the belly made by the child. A claim. At the end of all the dancing, shouting, stout-drinking of the Kennas, a hardhead. “I know you. Jesus stand in the way of anyone thinking I want to be paid for what I supply! Talk to the Malcolms again, then. Find them in the morning before Mrs. Malcolm can get near the bottle.”

“She didn’t always drink. She has become a shadow.”

Kitty laughed to herself. It was half vengeance. “She can’t talk Alfred Lord T by the hour any longer. Poor ninny. She liked you in the way I do, but couldn’t get the message over!”

He began to laugh, shaking his head. She knew that in this world they were wedded, and he was gratified by her knowledge. But she understood his taste for literature and betterment and all that. Not that in New South Wales he hadn’t got into the way of all manner of slang and flash talk and saying bugger to everything. But he betrayed the voice of the aspirer in what he’d said at the Good Templars!

“We can’t have the Malcolms’ sort of people leaving us,” she told him flatly, the fun over, her hands folded on her risen abdomen.

From the store, Mamie appeared. “There’s a woman been talking to me from the door. She told me, the old whore, that she doesn’t mean any harm. She’ll be back with you as soon as the plague proves out.”

“Jesus,” said Tim. “Rank superstition.”

He thought of the sign in Savage’s window. He really should try a similar sign in his own window.

Mamie smiled at her sister and winked. “We’re totally assured of two customers. Joe O’Neill and Mr. Habash.”

Once Joe O’Neill was collected by his uncle and aunt from Toorooka, he found it was a long ride into town to court Mamie.

Joe was also finding the patterns of Australian farming harder than those of the Irish. Encouraged by the late arriving sun and the sluggish seasons, Irish farmers often slept late. But Joe O’Neill’s Toorooka uncle’s Jerseys bellowed for milking at first light, like everyone else’s in New South Wales. The rich mudflats were heavy ploughing too. So not even Mamie’s tantalisations could keep Joe awake all the time after he rode to town in the evenings. Joe would even forget to bring his banjo, though Annie thought it the cleverest thing on earth. But if he drank stout before dinner—and he always did—his head lolled at the table. When Bandy was there, Joe would try bravely to be awake.

It was an old story: an uncle in the Macleay bringing out from Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and sometimes Germany a nephew to become a slave-by-kinship. So was Australia populated. A bright fellow like Joe would sicken of it, get a small acreage of his own or even inherit his uncle’s, and repeat the eternal story, bringing out in twenty years’ time another sister’s son to labour in Toorooka. Or perhaps Joe might get sick of bush life and move to town and be a haulier like Tim. When that time came, he would certainly marry Mamie. A saving if Kitty was looking for one, a marriage to be encouraged.

Mamie would say to Joe coolly as he nodded, “You should bring the cart to town with you. Less likely to fall off a cart while you’re sleeping than off a horse.”

Tim felt he had been given a short, near-happy season of adjournment. He’d collected some money from his humbler customers but not spoken to Winnie Malcolm yet, for the loyal vote still a week or more off.

Obdurate Captain Reid had earlier today walked along Smith Creek to catch his drogher downriver to his ship. Men in the street stopped and reflected on the captain as he passed. He was going back to the plague city and bore watching. Tim found himself looking at the man in a different light too. A man not to blame, of course, but stubborn, possessed by what was called invincible ignorance. Believing only in extinction and putrefaction. Sailed off leaving Missy in the same limbo as ever. And Tim in similar postponement too—between mixed fortunes of one kind and another.

Now Mamie’s mention of the cart struck Tim as a chance to declare a holiday such as events called for. To speed as well the unavoidable bush marriage—no matter what the women said—between Mamie and Joe.

“Get the cart from your uncle on Sunday and we’ll all go to Crescent Head,” Tim told Joe. “Your cart and mine.”

“With our mad horse?” said Kitty, kindling at the idea though. “Bring your banjo, for God’s sake, Joe.”

Tim felt immediately enlivened. The Crescent Head jaunt was a journey he did for new arrivals. Had done it for Kitty seven years ago, for her sister Molly in the days Old Burke was courting her. And now he had Mamie and Joe, and—as promised—the orphaned Lucy. In return for the jaunt Lucy might feel appeased and desist from urging Johnny to high points.

“It’s the grandest place,” said Kitty. “The grandest beach.”

“We saw some long, long beaches on the way up in that rat ship,” said Mamie.

“Different to see them from the land side,” Tim argued. “Different to see them from the Big Nobby at Crescent.”

“Beach to the north, I swear,” Kitty corroborated, kindly helping him and gesturing with her plump right arm. “Beach to the south. Neither of them ends.”

“They must end,” said peevish Mamie. She suspected Tim’s impulse to set her up with Joe.

“I’ll ask the old man,” said Joe in an intrepid voice, since he saw the chance too.

The night waited, and the matter of Missy in abeyance, Reid gone, Ernie resistant, his own letters to the Commissioner trumped by Ernie’s. He had tried every avenue. Wouldn’t she in her waiting for the name to break, for her tragedy to be entitled and lodged and forgotten, indulge his modest demand for a holiday?

“So get the dray off the old fellow then,” Tim urged with a surge of temporary joy. This weekend. The last golden sabbath. He felt heady about it.

“I have a little something to tell you,” said Kitty, lying on her back, a small reddish-complexioned knoll in a white night dress without sleeves. His familiar of the night. A rock in his dreams. One day, far in another century, they would turn to dust together on the hill below the hospital in West. They would not travel around in flasks in constables’ saddlebags. These were the assurances which arose from lying beside Kitty.

“No displays of temper,” she warned him.

“Why would I display temper?”

“Why? You don’t know yourself very well.” A little dreamy laugh started up over her lips. “Mr. Habash will accompany us to Crescent Head. Mamie asked him.”

Some anger slithered up through him and out across the floor.

“I bloody well thought I was in charge of asking people.”

A repeat of laughter, partly a soft belch, from Kitty. “Mamie wants a different picnic from the one you planned.”

“Dear Heaven, her stunts. I just want to go to Crescent Head.”

“So do we all.” She reached out her hand. “I’m going to your picnic. Me and Annie. And Johnny of course.”

“I promised to take the Rochester orphan.”

“Some of us will be at your picnic then, Tim. Others of the buggers will be at Mamie’s.”

“All right, I don’t mind Habash any more.” But he minded Mamie.

“Neither do I, as a matter of fact. Shall we say one Our Father and three Hails for the conversion of the infidel or for the repose of lost souls.” It was a joke about Habash.

“Bugger the infidel,” said Tim.

He wondered though what did Bandy Habash and his infidel father and brother do on their Saturdays in Forth Street, Kempsey, New South Wales? Facing the East. Sitting on mats. What did they say, so far from their home? To what torrents or rivers of sand did they compare the Macleay.

On the Sunday morning of the picnic, at the early Mass, Father Bruggy happened to speak of the Holy Name and the common abuse of it on low tongues.

“Ireland is a Catholic nation,” he said, “and possesses a strong sense of the Ten Commandments. But there are two vices the Irish immigrant brings to New South Wales. The one, drunkenness—which shall be the subject of another sermon. The other—the undue invocation of the name of Our Lord and of his Blessed Mother. My English brother, Father McCambridge, comments on the fact that the Holy Name is most under threat from those who most honour it, the Irish emigrant to these shores. Here, his looseness with the Divine Name combines exactly with a colonial looseness of expression in general. I must warn Irish newcomers of their tendency to contribute to the general laxness of colonial, Australian expression. I would urge men to join the Holy Name Sodality, whose purpose is to stamp out the misuse of the Divine Name…”

Kitty was muttering at Tim. “Takes an Englishman to remind us of all this. Put the Holy Name up on a shelf and rent it out for day-to-day use!”

Father Bruggy said that the Holy Name Sodality would meet at the end of Mass.

“Devil you’ll join them!” Kitty told him. When she chose to obey priests she did it thoroughly. But she was discerning on the matter. Fortunately he lacked the inclination to stay behind.

After Mass, Mother Imelda and the other nuns observed a short thanksgiving period—as did their boarders perforce—and then rose and genuflected and processed out of the church. Their boarders in trim clothes and shining faces, behind them. Little Lucy Rochester amongst the boarders with her clenched features and her glowing eyes. The reformed climber. The repentant imperiller.

As already arranged, Mother Imelda brought Lucy to the Sheas. She nodded to Kitty and dragged Tim imperiously by the elbow a little way distant from the group. He could hear Annie say, “That’s Lucy, Mama. Lucy. She lives with the nuns.”

“The child,” Imelda murmured to Tim, “has listened intently to everything, and Sister Philomena is astounded by her grasp of Christian Doctrine.”

Tim groaned—perhaps aloud. He knew what would now be said. “She wishes to take instruction as a Catholic.”

Tim flinched. He had a duty by Albert. “You’re sure, Mother, she isn’t just trying to please you?”

“Mr. Shea, I have watched this occur with other children of Protestant parents. Give me some credit! I can sniff out what is genuine and what is merely opportune.”

“Her father’s so recently dead, and he would not like this.”

“If our faith means anything, Mr. Shea, it means he is now in possession of the real facts and is at peace.”

“Well, as much as I trust your discernment, Mother… Perhaps she should wait a little while. That’s what I think.” Imelda staring him down. He shrugged, touched his hat. “I’ll talk to her on our picnic.”

Mamie had filled a hamper, and it sat in the dray along with a basketful of ale and a number of blankets. Joe and Mamie, shadowed by Johnny, who for some reason liked Joe and was quiet in his presence, climbed into Joe’s uncle’s plain yellow farm cart. It too carried an ample basket of ale.

Tim went and lifted Kitty up to the seat behind Pee Dee. Lucy and Annie were already in the dray, talking. Yet so hard as ever to hear what Lucy said!

All around, the carts of other communicants of St. Joseph’s Kempsey were pulling away from the church. Young men on ponies raced each other like young men of any communion at any time. Men with pipes in their hands who waited outside Kelty’s—Kelty’s opened up to certain Romans after Mass on Sundays, despite the licensing laws—took off their hats and waved to Tim. Did they also think he’d written the Australis letters and provoked bitter Billy Thurmond to his Patriotic Fund motion?

In Elbow Street in West, they encountered an astounding and ominous sight. The postmaster was out in the spare block beside the Post Office. With an axe, he was chopping through the timber uprights of the closed shooting gallery. The postmaster a madeyed Scot named MacAllen, and he paused and wiped his brow and nodded to Tim. “The Shire won’t take action. I’ve complained and complained about lads shooting away to all hours of the evening. Armenian bugger who runs the place is only squatting on this land anyhow.”

“Fair enough,” called Tim. Though secretly he was a little surprised by this kind of lawlessness in an official. MacAllen said, “My wife sits up worrying about the children and the Sydney plague, and all we can hear is bang, bang, bang!”

“Very trying,” called Kitty, turning her short body with difficulty towards the postmaster, but then covering a laugh with her lace-gloved hand.

“Better to agree with a man with an axe,” she muttered to Tim.

As the postmaster applied himself again, the sheet of corrugated iron which had roofed the gallery fell like thunder. The postmaster stepped back and was pleased.

They rolled on, convinced that this might be a good day to be away from the town.

At the Central punt in Smith Street, Bandy was waiting for them, smiling. On the same grey he’d been riding the day of Albert Rochester’s tragedy, and the night of the illicit ride.

“Good morning, Sheas and Miss Kenna and Mr. O’Neill. Prayers completed, the day now belongs to a totally decent picnic!”

Tim looked to the cart behind, because he was curious to see how Mamie reacted to this fulsome sentiment of Bandy’s. She was rolling her eyes at O’Neill and laughing. Yet it did not seem to be in total mockery.

Annie touched Tim’s arm from the back of the cart where she sat on a pile of rugs with the white-frocked Lucy. “Bandy Habash is funny,” she sagely told him.

The exhilaration of being on the deck of a punt, all in a party, observing the thickness of fertile soil in the banks, the splendid mountains too bluely distant to show their burnt trunks.

They landed in East, Bandy leading his biddable grey and at the same time hauling Pee Dee by the bit, while Tim hallo-ed and urged. The road followed for a little way the path he and Bandy had taken to the plague camp. But went past the turnoff for a mile before itself veering back to the coast, becoming a sandy, claggy track. Ahead, between them and the sea, lay a huge mountain, Dulcangui. Covered with grey-green trees and displaying gnarls of sandstone, it rose up out of the low ground like a threat. When they reached the rise, the road now became a cutting through the mountain’s rock. Kitty took over the reins of the Shea wagon. Tim and Lucy got down to walk. Bandy himself dismounted from the grey after making a number of experimental canters up and down the stony slope. Then he put Annie in the saddle, a place that seemed to please her very much, and began to lead the way up Dulcangui.

“Watch out for snakes!” cried Tim. For he did not want the grey shying with Annie in its saddle.

To make the ascent, Tim walked level with Pee Dee’s neck, grabbing him by the harness to hold him to the mountain. After Pee Dee had shaken his head the required number of times to satisfy the Horse Union’s idea of bloody-mindedness in a beast, he allowed Kitty at the reins to gee him up the first section of road. Rocks and saplings designed for impaling lay all the way down the murderous slope which fell away from the side of the track.

Mamie strode past Tim and Lucy, her neat knees ploughing away beneath the fabric of her white dress. A bit of an athlete, this one. She went ahead and walked and talked with Annie and Habash, while Joe O’Neill, alone except for Johnny and at the rear, learned to urge his uncle’s cart up this severe track.

In country like this, the Patriotic Fund seemed barely a dent on human contentment. Yet Tim could hear Pee Dee snorting, the bugger. Just to make things interesting. Kitty tugged at him with her now-bare, red little hands and uttered both soothing and threatening non-words to get him over the hill.

Lucy beside him. The little would-be Papist. How horrified the Primitive Methodists would be.

“Well, you want to be a convert, do you?” he asked the child.

“Yes.” She walked with the gait of a grown woman.

“You wouldn’t do that just to please the nuns, eh? You can’t please them. I know it because I’m their grocer.”

He could tell by her up-tilted gaze that she knew it too. They were hungry goddesses.

“You’ll have to remember,” said Tim, “that your little brother at Mrs. Sutter’s won’t be with you in this.”

Typical of her, she said nothing.

“Well, do you think he’d mind?”

“He’s too young,” she told him. “This is a business for me.”

“Why do you want to do it though?”

“I want to have God. But I want the angels too.”

“Wouldn’t the other people let you have angels?”

“I want the Blessed Mother too.”

“You are an ambitious little woman, aren’t you?”

“I want a Blessed Mother.”

A reasonable and pitiable desire in an orphan, he thought. He took one of the lollies he was keeping for the children out of his pocket and slipped it into her hand.

“I’ll tell you this. Don’t do it too easily. And don’t do it to please anyone. Because you’re stuck with it for life then and people think the worse of you. Suspect you of all sorts of things they don’t suspect you of if you stayed Primitive Methodist.”

“I know. But.”

“But. But you have the angels and the saints?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “There’s lots of them.”

“Some people consider that a problem.”

Kitty on the reins and Tim at the halter dragged Pee Dee and the cart around a last wall of rock, and now this was the top. A vast glitter of sea could be seen from up here. Its line broken only by Crescent Head’s two famous headlands—the Little Nobby and the Big.

Down again towards the paperback swamps which lay between Dulcangui and the ocean. Bandy let Lucy lead the grey and came back to help control Pee Dee. Pee Dee fussy on the stony down-slope. Mamie climbed up beside Kitty and took a hand at the reins. You could hear the bottles jiggling in their baskets. Before they got to the bottom, two in the hamper on Joe O’Neill’s cart exploded.

Meanwhile, Lucy and Johnny, who had abandoned poor Joe for the greater excitement of the vanguard, between them led the grey down onto the corduroy road across the swamp to the sea. In the grey’s saddle, Annie still sat. Entering into a fair imitation of her kingdom.

The picnic place finally chosen was on a sward above the surf at the bottom of the Little Nobby. They could look out over the sea and then across a small saltwater creek to the twelve miles of Front Beach, and Mamie was enthused by this vigorous bright sight and was soon knee-deep in the creek with the children. Johnny, shirt off, began splashing round as he did in the river, but his strokes were interrupted by the shallowness of the creek and the playful current. Tim waded in too, his trousers rolled up. Standing still you could see mullet swim by. Annie, Johnny, Lucy kept trying to catch them in their hands.

Ashore Kitty lay on her back on a rug and under a parasol, pointing the unborn Shea child straight at the arc of blue sky. Near her, Joe O’Neill began smoking reflectively and plunking his banjo. The tune “Bold Phelim Brady” was raggedly released into the air. His boots were still on. Perhaps he had an inlander’s fear of the water. When Tim waded ashore, Joe and he began opening beer with flourishes. After the rough trip, the stuff fizzed out of the necks of the bottles.

“Porter, Mrs. Shea?” asked Joe, putting a long glass of frothy stout in Kitty’s outreaching hand.

“Oh, dear,” sighed Kitty. “As lovely as you’ll get.”

Meanwhile Bandy took the saddle off his grey’s back. Steam rose gently from the crushed, damp hair. Tim was surprised to see Bandy take his shirt and pants off too, so that now he wore only a singlet and his long, white linen breeches. The singlet was low-cut and revealed in part a smooth, brown, hairless chest. Arms not like the arms of men from Europe. Both smaller and yet more sinewy. He jumped on the grey’s back and urged it gently into the creek. It went placidly, standing to its belly in the water, seeming content amongst the little waves. Bandy turning to throw a salute to the shallows where Mamie and the children were prancing and yelling and trying to grab mullet.

Lucy now with her skirts tucked in her knickers looked more a child and less of a witness than he’d ever seen. Though sometimes she would cup up a palm full of saltwater and study it.

Having crossed the creek, Bandy put the grey into a gallop on the firm sand below the tidemark along Front Beach. All this looked splendid to Tim, half-naked Bandy leaned down to the grey mane, the lovely mare shattering its own reflection in the wet sand, and thundering away.

Whereas Pee Dee was up along the slope, turned out of the traces and eating grass as if he’d never go back to work again.

“You bugger, you’re for the knackers,” Tim casually called to Pee Dee, who disdained to stop devouring the hillside.

At last, for love’s sake, Joe O’Neill took his big boots off and rolled his trousers and went and stood in the rim of the creek. Kitty must have been able to see this from her lying position. “Look out for them sharks, Joe,” she murmured.

They ate a drowsy lunch—sardines and cornbeef, beer and ginger beer. Chewing heartily, Mamie looked across to the larger headland, smooth and green and momentous. It took up a whole quarter of the sky.

“We’ll be climbing that big feller there?”

He could see the children’s eyes flick towards the Big Nobby. Not a question that it invited you!

“You and Joe can go up there after lunch,” said Tim. It was the right sort of physical feature for courting. It demanded that hands be reached to each other. But he didn’t want mad Johnny up there.

“What can you see from the top?”

“The whole coastline of New South Wales,” said Kitty dreamily. “At a total sweep. And the air. A lens, you see. The air like a bloody telescope.”

“Can we go, papa?” asked Johnny bolt upright like a jack rabbit, on his knees. More than ready for high places again, the little ruffian.

“I’ll take you over the creek to the beach,” said Tim. “Mr. Habash might take his grey again and you can ride. But not gallop, son, not gallop. I know you.”

“But can’t the children come?” asked Mamie. It was as if she did not want to be left alone with Joe. “We can all keep an eye. You’ll be good won’t you, Lucy?”

Lucy looked up at her levelly. “I learned my lesson,” said Lucy in a way which implied canings and made everyone laugh.

Something entirely convincing about Lucy swayed Tim, as did the size of the day. He remembered too the gradual, accommodating lines of the Big Nobby.

“Then I’ll go too,” said Tim. “I’ll keep an eagle eye out. And you, Bandy. You come too if you would, and watch these little blackguards.”

He felt sorry for Joe, the corner of whose mouth conveyed disappointment. Mamie was a bugger of a tease.

“But first the tea,” said Bandy. He had made a fire a little way down on the creek. He now went and fetched the excellent tea he had brewed. Mamie stood up and asked to see into the billy he was carrying.

“There’s tree leaves in that tea,” she complained.

“That’s gum leaves,” said Tim. “Australians make their tea with gum leaves thrown in. When there’s a tree handy.”

So, it struck him now: Bandy was by habit an Australian.

They drank plenty of this tea to ready themselves for their thirsty climb. When they were finished, Tim wanting to get up there and down and have it over, they left Kitty lying on a blanket in scant shadow, with her parasol leaned across her face to give double shade. A strong sea breeze cooled her and played with the tassels of the parasol.

On the flanks on the great whale-like Big Nobby, whorls of tussocky grass made the climb easy. You stepped from one knot of grass to another. Step by step, like climbing a pyramid. Johnny kept racing ahead and looking down like a gazelle from some nest of grass. But Lucy mounted the headland beside Tim, whose hand was held by Annie. So they rose up the green slope quite easily, Joe O’Neill chattering away, to the domed top of the thing.

Bandy seemed to take care to be up there first, not it appeared for rivalry’s sake but as if he too wanted to prevent any madness in Johnny. As Tim and Annie rose higher on the great headland, they began to pick up the welcome southerly on their brows. Tim finished the climb with Annie on his back, since the child did not believe in wearing herself out. All the others were waiting on top for them, looking south, Mamie exclaiming at what could be seen. Joe had a wrestle-hold on Johnny, and Johnny struggled in it, laughing. Lucy stood soberly there like one of the adult party.

Arriving and dropping Annie so that she could take up her normal august posture, Tim saw Back Beach and its wild surf stretching away to Point Plummer, Racecourse Beach, etc, etc. You could have seen Port Macquarie except that the day’s haze blurred the scene about twenty miles south.

“Now you don’t see a sight like that,” said Mamie, “anywhere on the Cork or Kerry coast.”

“Because it’s always wrapped in mist there,” murmured Joe.

From here it could be seen that the headland on which they stood had two tops, this one and another further to the south. In between, a green saddle with grass and little thickets of native shrubs. Beneath the saddle a partially seen great rock wall fell into the sea, which grew plum-coloured in the shadow of the black stone. You could hear and partly see the ocean raging down there, making caves. Of course there was no way, having got here, the party would choose not to walk on into the saddle towards the other, lower dome. Finding a way past the spiky banksias, and so to the Big Nobby’s second summit. From there they would, of course, be able to look from safety directly down into the turmoil of rock and sea below.

“No shy-acking then, Johnny,” Tim called out. He didn’t utter any warnings to Lucy. For she seemed a changed child. She knew about witnessing angels.

As they walked down into the saddle, dragging their feet through clumps of button grass, the Big Nobby maintained its gradual character. Not like cliffs elsewhere—not a case of grass running sharply to the definite and dramatic precipice, and then the sudden fall. You knew that somewhere to their left the black cliff began. But here, because of the headland’s gentle angle and its thick grass tufts, each one a rung of its massive ladder, there was no sense that you could topple and roll.

“Prickly, prickly,” said Annie as they reached the thickets, flapping her long-fingered hands at him, pleading to be picked up. She had those delicate fingers utterly unlike Kitty’s. They came from his sister Helen, who’d married the newspaper editor in Brooklyn.

He lifted her and followed the path the others had taken. These strange, olive green banksia bushes with their black cones. Splits in the cones like eyes and mouths. “Look,” said Tim, holding one of the cones. “The Banksia Man. He’s an evil little fellow.”

Annie threw herself about in his arms with fake shudders.

They came back up out of the banksias to Big Nobby’s grassy southern crest. Ah yes, you could see down to where the grasses grew steeper and the rock layers began and the hungry surf worked away. A number of birds wheeled around the semi-circle of this rock wall. It seemed to Tim to be the mad energy of the waves that kept them up, since none of them flapped their wings. A little way up from the wall above the sea, a sea-eagle considered a dive. A sharp, pearly, commanding shape with black wingtips.

“That one there’s a sea-eagle,” he told the others. “When they dive, they bloody dive.”

“This is the place,” said Mamie. “You could have a tea-house up here.”

“A pub perhaps,” amended Joe O’Neill, who was sure to crack more ale once they got down. Lucy stood beside Joe and on the other side of him, still quiet from respect for this soon-to-be uncle, Johnny. Good. They were still. They watched the sea-eagle. Its circles had them hypnotised. It had authority over the air. It put the frenzied children in their place.

“Will you carry me down like you carried me up, papa?” asked Annie ceremoniously, at his side.

“To walk will be good for your little legs.”

“I don’t think that’s true. My little legs don’t agree.”

He heard Mamie laughing. The sea-eagle banked and Tim took a new sense of it, that it was no mere natural wonder of some kind. A sudden gust came up to them as if the bird had manufactured it for them with its banked wings. Tim felt the stirred air all around him. The damned wheeling thing had command of the day. Its very ease, he felt at once, was a frightful temptation and the young should not be exposed…

He heard Mamie shriek, and Habash cry, “Stop this!”

Somehow the bird had by its malign circling and its sending a breeze engendered something unspoken but at once mutual between Lucy and Johnny. In all their campaigns, had they ever exchanged a word? If they had, no one had heard it. They planned it as if by fishing in each other’s mind.

This was their venture now. They were running down the incline of the headland, their hands clasped. Johnny could be heard laughing in between Joe’s shouting, but Lucy was silent. It was such an inviting slope, and from some angles you found it hard to imagine or give credence to the drop, the indented face below, the Nobby’s true, black sting. So piteously confident were they of their impunity, that seeing them you were possessed by an absolute panic of pity. Pity could be heard in the way everybody howled.

Now they all followed—Bandy, Joe, Mamie. Then himself, dropping Annie’s hand, since she could be trusted. All the party running with their heels thrust forward to avail themselves of the holding power of the grass. All yelling direly. Pleas not to be remembered afterwards word by word. Simply a general, frantic, fatherly pleading of the two little buggers running hand in hand. Ahead the feverish sapphire sea, and a sky of acid blue. Tim feeling his ankle yell at this strange usage as he ran madly towards the gulf. The younger men and the one young woman still ahead of him, all helplessly shrieking. Nooooooooooo! So steep now where the children were, and Johnny leaning back, Tim saw with hope, but Lucy thrusting skinny shoulders forward. Welcoming the fall. And still hands locked. Soon they would go flying over together. This beat the stern of Terara. This beat the Angelus tower. This so clearly a venue worthy of their shared will that he cursed himself for allowing anyone but Mamie and Joe to approach this climb.

But when the result seemed obvious, Johnny simply sat on a tussock. The grasp was as easily broken as that. Lucy sailed out alone. Shrilling but not with terror. And vocal now she had taken to the air. So close to the fall of the cliff was everyone that they saw only the first liberated segment of her fall. Tim continued down the awful grade and yanked Johnny upright by his collar. Johnny’s face was ghastly. He had been playing. Had expected her to sit too after the joke had been played out. Look, we are reformed! You only thought we were playing the old games!

Nonetheless, Tim couldn’t stop himself striking the boy on the head in a kind of horror and gratefulness. Bandy was working energetically around the rim, the only one not screaming and exclaiming. He wanted a better view. To see if Lucy was frolicking or fluttering in and out on the waves in that chaos down there. Everyone, whimpering and pleading, worked their way around the edge as Bandy had, so that they could see into the cauldron.

“There is nothing,” Bandy yelled against the wind. “Nothing to be seen.” The hugh masses of white there contained none of Lucy’s whiteness or white fabric. She had been swallowed.

Above them, Annie—who had had the best view—was wailing for him to come back.

It was Bandy’s idea to rush down the hill and alert Crescent Head’s four families of fishermen. Tim followed, arriving back down to the bottom with stark-eyed Johnny and with Annie just in time to see Bandy and two fishermen put out in a rowboat from the creek.

Kitty was standing, frowning at the boat. She turned. “How could this happen?” she asked in reproach.

“How could it be bloody stopped?” Tim howled so furiously that both children began to sob.

By Bandy’s later report, the fishermen rowed him around right up as close as the surf would let them to the face of Big Nobby’s cliff. They were so long coming back that Joe, Mamie and Tim climbed the Nobby again and looked down on them. You could understand why such a scrap had been devoured without trace. Such a bullying, sucking, rending sea. So much chagrined. Bandy could be seen down there, standing in the dory, agilely shifting his stance at each swell.

The boat returned to Front Beach in late afternoon, and by then Tim and the others were in place to give it a bleak welcome. The offspring of Port Macquarie convicts, these Crescent Head fishermen. The younger fisherman came to speak to them. His father utterly leathered and browned, but Viking blue eyes glittering in there amongst the creases, kept quiet.

“See, a kiddy like that. Would be taken straight down. Tumbled over and torn out by water getting away. Straight out to sea. Only a long way out there would she be thrown up again, see. Ought to come up on Back Beach in the long run.”

The rugged fish-takers and eaters didn’t want demented people from town hanging around to spoil with questions a tranquil evening meal. And because they knew it was no one’s child who had fallen into the gulf, they were very honest about the chances.

“Could she be crying for us somewhere on a beach?” asked Tim.

“No, she’s drowned. You can bet on that. She drowned, and nothing to be done about it.”

After midnight, Tim woke so vastly angry and walked so heavily up and down the bedroom in his bare feet, hoping his fury would wake Kitty. It had of course been a dreadful journey home over Dulcangui, with Annie gone tearfully asleep in Kitty’s arms on the blanket in the back of the cart and Johnny still and staring. In their trance of surprise and grief, their suspicion that there was something further to be done they hadn’t done, they did not once, these two queenly folk Kitty and Annie, complain of the roughness of the mountain or the jolting of the corduroy road through the paperbark swamps.

There had been a comedy, an awful one given the history of the day. Unsupervised, Pee Dee had made a feast of cunjevoi root which lay along the banks of the creek at Crescent Head. The root was succulent and poison, and most livestock had the sense to avoid it. Not Pee Dee, and it had got to his bowels. Mamie had had to sit beside Tim with an opened parasol while Pee Dee blurted, farted, and bucked his way up and down Dulcangui.

“Bandy,” said Tim as they crossed the Macleay by punt. “Could I leave you to take a note to the priest? That Bruggy feller? He’ll tell Imelda.”

Strange not to ask Joe, but in this tragedy Bandy seemed more trustworthy.

“I will do that,” said Bandy, bowing a little in the saddle. Shaking his head. No one could believe the day. The brain had to be shaken into accepting it.

Tim knew he needed to face the police, the sharper civil priesthood, the real binders and loosers. They would certainly be confused into their normal suspicions if he and Bandy presented themselves as joint reporters of Lucy Rochester’s supposed drowning. But he himself would be less ashamed somehow to face the constables than the priests.

“You send me though I am not a Christian,” Bandy remarked.

“You’re a better poor bugger than most Christians, and if you give him ten bob for two Masses I’ll repay you tonight out of the cash box.”

After making town Tim and Joe had found the younger constable minding the station, the one who had no grievance yet, and he had taken their deposition without showing any tendency to define blame.

“You can ask the nuns,” said Tim. “Always given to climbing things. Mad on heights.”

As if he had not killed her by keeping her out of his house.

And now he woke enraged over that.

And of course she woke, sitting up awkwardly, using an elbow, and watching him stamp around.

“Timmy, what is it?” she cried.

“I would take her in!” he accused her. “I would bloody take her in. But she couldn’t be fitted for Kennas. This is something fairly regular on the Macleay. Jerseyville pub could not be fitted either. For the sake of Kennas. Kennas marrying, Kennas arriving, Kennas suiting them-bloody-selves!”

Kitty looked appalled, but he could see with a perverse further annoyance that she didn’t intend to fight the matter. “Oh Jesus, Tim. Not all that at this moment. We all feel badly enough.”

“I should have stood up. I should have stood up to your sister. But she wanted everyone on that mountain for the vanity of teasing the hell out of poor Joe.”

“It’s not Mamie’s fault, Tim. Be a sensible fellow.”

“So mother and father departed from Lucy. Mrs. Sutter wouldn’t give her the time of day. We hived her off on Imelda. No wonder the poor brat took to the air like a bird!”

Kitty struggled to an upright stance now and came towards him. Seeing this fraught little woman, he wondered how she could ever have been considered beloved, this hard creature who hadn’t room for orphans. Who had wheedled him into having no room.

“Our own child will be cursed, you bloody know!” he told her. “That child you have there. Bloody cursed!”

Kitty so nakedly alarmed. She moved in and tried to embrace him. He fought her off.

“No, no,” he yelled. “Facts are facts!”

He still hoped she would combat him, that there could be mutual screaming this intolerable night. But she was both so measured and so frightened of him.

“Timmy, listen to me. I am too busy giving life to one child without carrying the blame for another. None of us took her there from ill will. She was at Crescent Head as a kindness.”

“Then she was killed with bloody kindness. A pretty miserable bloody kindness.”

“I won’t have this, Timmy! You’re going mad in front of my eyes. Pull back, for Jesus’ sake.”

He thrust his long, long finger at her. “We will not be let off this, Kitty. We will not be forgiven this.”

With a strange exaltation he saw how he distressed her. Her face bunched in pain. Good! Bloody good! Did the world operate for her convenience? Did the tides of pain flow to suit her awful, freckled, pushing clan?

“Oh God!” she roared.

He hoped that Mamie on the back verandah would be awakened and suffer for all this. Taking children to a precipice so they could watch her play off Bandy against Joe O’Neill.

Yet he had not thought it likely that Kitty would so easily accept his condemnation, take it upon her frame. Which now looked far too small and too much at risk. Her face cracked and an awful cry came out.

“For mercy’s sake don’t judge me, Timmy! The world’s full of orphans, but they don’t go flying off cliffs!”

Her cries seemed to raise an echo somewhere else in the house, an outburst on a higher, weirder pitch.

“Johnny,” he told his wife.

He left Kitty, turning into the corridor and so into the room where Johnny was sitting up in his sleep wailing, while Annie, who had been jolted awake by everyone’s rage, complaints, defences, uttered more usual sobs. Kitty went to comfort her daughter while Tim shook Johnny back to the world and said the usual, blessed things.

“All right, Johnny darling. You are here with Papa. You didn’t fly off.”

But Lucy had of course, and no one could get beyond that.

“You see, you see,” Kitty called to him as she caressed Annie to sleep. “John stayed, he’s here, here. No earthly reason she couldn’t have been. Here on solid ground. No reason.”

Staying indeed seemed at once to Tim the most important achievement miscreant Johnny had ever been responsible for. Staying proved his innocence of real malice. It had been a joke to him. He had sat down at the end. While Lucy flew off seriously and with intent.

Now that Johnny was fully awake he had nothing to say to his father but sat rocking in his arms. “I’ll stay with him,” Tim told Kitty. He looked at her dim, night shape. His beloved accomplice. It was all certain and fixed and nothing could be done. Between them and in concert with others they had encouraged Lucy to embrace the thin air.

Kitty said, “You’re the one who must rest, Tim. You’ll only grow madder still.”

“Bugger it, woman!” he warned her, and so when drowsiness overcame Annie, Kitty went off. Johnny leaned into Tim’s arms and began to sleep with a few complaining moans. How unfair to the child it had been to begin screaming at night. He saw now that attaching blame was an exercise best pursued in morning calm. They would need to watch John and ensure Lucy had not done for him, for young John, the thrower at cricket stumps, the circus performer.

Un-sleeping Tim held Johnny in the dismal hours and for the sake of his own much-needed stillness of mind he began to think of certain protocols of the living which must somehow be attended to.

First of all, he went and pulled on a shirt, his drawers faintly yellowed in the Macleay’s muddy water in which the women washed them, grey coat and pants. Old hat with the required sweat around the band. Ruined forever in shape by too much rain followed by too much sun. But part of the habit worn in the valley of the living.