The Pickup

Chapter 25

For a while Australia looked promising.

What’ll we do there?

Plenty. A country with opportunities, all kinds. Developing. It will be good, for you, you know, very much like your home place.

She shook her head, laughing. I’ve left that home place.

Julie went along with him to someone who had connections with someone else who knew the Canberra representative in the capital, to give particulars of her own background that might count favourably; wife a citizen of a fellow Commonwealth country, legal and fiscal provenance impeccable, standard of education high.

What about those people, the man at your father’s place, that time, who was going to Australia. He was the one who was even taking his black driver with him, you remember the talk.

I’ve no idea where they are.

There was the summon of his black eyes.

Your father knows.

She raked her hair up the back of her head through splayed fingers; he stood before her as he had when he emerged from under a car in a garage: here I am.

I can’t ask my father.

His silences distressed her more than any argument between them would have, they were retreats into thoughts that barred her; he who had been refused so often had unconsciously taken on for himself the response of refusal.

She went to him where he was suddenly rummaging in the canvas bag — he had never completely unpacked, not allowed her to do it for him, it was there ready for departure from this place, his home, standing week after week, month after month, in the lean-to room. She bent over him, her arms going around his waist and her cheek against his bare back. To her, the essence of him, the odour of his skin, overcame his silence and received her. She wanted to say, I will do anything for you, but how could this be formulated when she had shown there was something she could not?

It wouldn’t do anything for us except humiliate us. He’d say no, he wouldn’t even think of embarrassing his colleague, his corporate mate, accepted in a country in high standing … expecting him to recommend some immigrant he’s seen once at a lunch party and who was the husband of a daughter whose father had told her she must go to hell in her own chosen way — those were my father’s lovely farewell words to me!

I wrote the name of the place they were going to. Somewhere in here, it is. Perth, it was Perth. I think so… a bit of paper …

The bit of paper was not found. Without the reference from Perth the processes of application continued, the periods of waiting while documents went back and forth.

Entry to Australia was not granted.

Julie was confusedly angry. Apparently with the Australians; with herself for not having been able to ‘do anything’ for him that — in fact, in contradiction — would have been unlikely to have made any difference.

He kept contingency plans for the next country, concurrently with every application that failed. They have enough trying to keep out others from the East, they don’t need people like me. That’s all. That’s it.