Not the Same Sky (19 page)

‘By boat, how do you think, the same as every other soul in this place, except them who was here before us.’

And Anne thought about that—a country where every single person, that is every single person that looked the same colour as her, had come by boat. Imagine a place where everyone had been at sea for months to get there. It should be worth something after all that. Maybe she could make it worth it, if only she wasn’t so nervous.

The cook knew Anne had probably meant a different question when she had asked how she got here. She would have to tell the girl to be careful about that. Not everyone liked being asked—it was enough to know that everyone had come by boat. But she would have to be careful how she warned her—the girl was as jumpy as a flea. And it would never do to make her cry. She hated crying girls. She would broach the subject carefully, sidle up to it, as if the thought had accidentally occurred to her.

‘You know that there are people here who came for different reasons than you.’

‘Oh yes. I know that,’ Anne said emphatically.

Well that was good. ‘But they don’t all talk about it. Do you know that?’

Anne nodded her head. She did now.

‘You can have a half-day tomorrow. Walk down to see that other one who was with you. Will you be able to go that far?’

Anne thought that she would. After her first few times getting water she allowed herself to look further up and down the street. In the beginning it had been essential to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the point of her journey, but now she could let them wander a little. She was still nervous about the men building the road, but less of them whistled at her now, and not for as long. The last time she thought that one of them might have said, ‘Nice morning,’ but she could have been wrong about that. The street at the end of hers disappeared into voluminous bushes, and the other end led to more houses. From the bottom she could hear carts and carriages and horses whinnying, louder sometimes than others, depending on the wind. Anne knew her house now. She did not make a mistake anymore, not like the first day with the water, when she had knocked on a door that was not her own, then stood outside, shaking first and then crying. A man had come.

‘What’s the name of the people in the house?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well would you know the name of the cook?’

Anne did, but it wouldn’t come to her.

‘She’s Irish.’

‘Well, yes. That’s not a great help. We’ll try this one. You may just have stopped near the right one,’ he said, waving at the houses that were all different, so how could she have made a mistake.

As soon as they came to the back door Anne recognised the kitchen and ran into it. The man doffed his hat to the cook.

‘She was outside,’ he said, ‘lost.’

He did not mention the crying.

‘Thanks,’ the cook said, rubbing her hands on her apron. ‘Sometimes I don’t know what they send me.’

But when the man had gone, she stayed quiet and gave Anne easy jobs to do. The next day she told her about how the windows had been especially shipped out here from England, and that the ornament out the front had belonged to the master’s father—they were seafarers, did their business on the water, that’s why it was a boat and a sail on the glass in the window. So when Anne next went to get water, she had something to guide her back to the house. Now the cook came to the gate and directed Anne to Pitt Street.

‘See where the buggy is going, go down that street, there’s a dirt bit to go over, pass the tree covered in bats, more than out the back here, black with them. There will be a number on the house, go to the back and knock on the door. If you get lost, come back.’

Anne looked as if she needed to ask a question.

‘Go on, spit it out.’

‘When will I know if I’m lost?’

‘Merciful hour. Pitt Street has a name on it, do you know where to look for the name?’

‘Yes, I just didn’t know if it had a name on it.’

‘Go on.’ And the cook hoped that Pitt Street did have a name on it.

It was a few months later, on another of these visits, by now well rehearsed, that Anne saw the hats in a shop window. She sometimes stopped at windows and looked briefly, but just for a moment, in case a man came up behind her. Oh what feathers on the hats, oh what feathers. And a thought came to her suddenly, out of nowhere, about how she could collect the feathers that dropped all over the garden and maybe make hats. Wouldn’t that be an unusual thing. She stayed longer than normal at the window, not really looking into it, more thinking and wondering if she could indeed do something different and unusual. She felt that if she could, she would feel safer here. The window took on a new importance.

She lifted up all the lost feathers the next morning, discarding some, realising there would always be more, every morning, so she could pick and choose. She would use only the strong, unbroken ones. She collected dozens of them and hid them in her room. When she had a sufficient number, she began her first hat. She had to think of ways to sew it on to the remnants of cloth that she had spirited away, ways to stiffen the cloth, and ways to arrange the feathers, which was crucial—the lie of them, and not too many, and not colours that would clash. She had the beginning of a life now. And soon the cook came in the evenings to see how they were going, and Anne stayed up until the lamplighters lit the new lights outside. The cook found an old table for her room, and told her friends about where to get a hat for hat days.

‘And she’s not nervous now either. I can’t understand it. How would making hats make you less nervous?’

Anne asked Cook if maybe she could post a hat to someone in Yass.

‘Well, you could I suppose, if you had the address. Do you have the address?’

‘No,’ Anne said. ‘I don’t.’

CHAPTER 24

The one thing that Julia Cuffe was completely proud of was her lack of fear. She was partly proud of some other qualities, but so taken was she by her lack of fear that she deliberately cultivated it. When she had been growing up there hadn’t been much time or need to notice things about herself, and then everyone started getting hungry and sick so all attention was placed on that. It was on the boat that she first became aware of this strength, not immediately, but after some weeks when girls would say that no they couldn’t do that, but that Julia probably could. They taught her a thing or two, those girls. But some of them were much too scared for their own good. Julia had decided to take on anything. Might as well, look what had happened without her deciding. And now she was on the road to Brisbane. But she would not be afraid.

The authorities had her now. They had cut her hair and they would bring her to Brisbane where she would learn—well it didn’t matter whether she did or not, she would live and do the dirty work needed at the start of any place. There is muck under every polished thing, all kinds of muck and slime. Julia could tackle muck and slime. And rum helped. Nothing much that rum couldn’t brighten up.

Julia was put to work in Brisbane. There was no dribbling of dark here—it fell shockingly in a flash. She left her house when that happened. She met girls like herself who had come on boats before her. Not on her one. She heard there was a girl from her boat up here somewhere, but she wouldn’t want to meet her now. She would have to grow her hair as fast as she could, people pointed and shouted, ‘Short grass,’ after her. It took some time for hair to grow when it had been totally shorn. Julia did not like having no hair. There were men too, roughened and toughened even beyond what can be noticed. If you had a soul here, it was hard to find a place to show it. People could be beaten and stamped into the very ground. And no one was watching. Every night four or five or eight of them would meet to drink rum outside one of their thrown together pits. The place was clean enough. At least the heat dried up the dirt. Dry dirt was easier than mud. The numbers changed each night—sometimes one woman, sometimes two, but always Julia. She made them laugh. They watched for her coming. Who would make them laugh if she wasn’t here? Was there another among them who remembered how to make a body laugh?

But it was in this theatre one night—for that’s what she was now, a one-woman walking theatre—that she realised it was herself she was mimicking, herself she was pulling apart and laughing at and drawing others to do so too. The more she could make these people laugh at her, the easier the night went. Clearly the rum this evening was not strong enough or Julia had moved up a notch and would soon need a full bottle to do the work of last year’s half.

That was the moment—there was a choice to be made. The laughing died down. Julia had been given a choice before and didn’t think much of it. Still, who could be afraid of a choice?

Julia met a man from Somerset, Samuel, he had stolen something, she never asked what. She would have thought that she neither loved him nor didn’t love him, but that they would do each other for now because company made life easier. There were forests to be cut and a town to be built, and they knew how to do that. And Samuel didn’t hit her, which was good. A lot of hitting went on, people lashing out at something that had been done to them, at God knows what that had been marked upon their souls. The field outside Samuel’s slab hut merged into bush. Julia didn’t look at the birds, what use would that do, but sometimes she caught the flash of a red or blue wing and would have liked to find some good in what was around her.

But Julia was careful not to take any calm for granted—she had learned that. And she was right. One day Samuel was felling trees when one of them hit him. They came to get her and she knew if she got there to him he would be all right. This was an ideal optimism to face the next few weeks and it served her well, although it drove others away, they couldn’t bear it. She got him fixed up in the bed and set to waiting. She could do that. But now there was no money coming for food.

‘No need to worry,’ the men said, that was something they could do. Bring food. And rum if she wanted, but she didn’t. Her days became ordered. She found a way to get Samuel to have some liquid. She sat beside his bed, watching, waiting. She learned a terrible patience. It was suspended all around her. She was grateful for the open window through which she could see a sliver of water in the creek at the bottom of the field. Sometimes she moved her chair to the middle of the bed, let Samuel’s hand go, and stared at the water. It nurtured her patience. Sometimes she let his hand fall, to see if he would try to hold on to it before it hit the bed. She squinted her eyes when she looked at him. He was down some hole, some almighty hole, if only Julia knew how to get to him, how to pull him up.

The late evening that Samuel woke was just like the others. He did not flicker his eyelids, nor shift a finger, nor give any warning. If he had, she would have had something ready for him, tea, something. A biscuit if she could have found one. It would have been worthy of that. But there was no warning. Julia had been holding his hand and thought she felt something in it, an emotion almost. Then he opened his eyes and said, ‘You came to see me. All this way. How nice.’

It was not a voice she had heard him use before. But he closed his eyes again and when the others heard her scream they ran to her.

‘He talked, he talked,’ she screamed.

‘We know, we know,’ they said.

What did they know?

‘You don’t believe me. He talked, he talked.’

They took her outside, where she fell into a trance. She sat all night. She would not move, nor go with the woman they got to take her away. And exactly as dawn came, as the sun climbed up swallowing the darkness in the sky, exactly as the early birds, unnoticed by Julia, shook their feathers and warbled out the first tentative notes of the day, exactly as the flowers moved in the earth in readiness for opening, Samuel died.

‘Well, yes,’ Julia said, when told. What on earth could she have expected? She did not know what to do now.

They buried him quickly in a field nearby that was growing into a graveyard. Julia wore her bonnet even though it wasn’t black. No one knew much about Samuel, so there was not a lot to say. And what Julia knew could not be said. After the funeral she felt that if she didn’t leave here she would be thrown out. Who would need a woman on her own here? She could not let herself sink so low as to be thrown out. She would have to go before that happened. There could be no further down to go than to wait to be shifted from this hovel. And without Samuel, that’s what it was, a hovel. So that was love. At least she knew now. That was something. She looked out over the distance and wondered what the next months might hold. A benign voice told her that she needed to decide. It had to be her own voice, because no other had ever been benign.

One of Samuel’s friends passed by to see if she needed anything.

‘What would I need?’

The next time he called she was taking clothes from her trunk. It was still with her but was too big to move again.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to Ballarat,’ she said, ‘where the gold is.’

‘But it’s thousands of miles away.’

‘Yes, well that should be no bother to us.’

Julia would find a carriage or something back to Sydney. It would be easier there to find her way to the gold.

CHAPTER 25

Friends of Samuel’s came to see Julia off.