A River Town (34 page)

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.