Between My Father and the King (3 page)

‘Done it.'

We ate a few of the plums on top, not because we wanted very much to, but to make sure we knew our rights and could claim them if necessary.

‘We could have had a go on the hammock while they're away,' my sister said. I agreed. ‘We could, too.'

How shabby the hammock had looked with its grey canvas that had bare patches; and the ropes were frayed. I had my mother's sense of danger.

‘It's an old hammock anyway. You could come a cropper.'

‘But we could have a go on it, just to see.'

‘I bet they only pretend they like being in it.'

‘What'll they say when they see we've taken their plums?'

‘They're ours.'

‘But they're on their side, and they always eat them. The Browns used to.'

The Browns were the people who lived there before the Connollys. How far away they seemed! Suddenly we remembered the time the Browns shifted and the Connollys came in, and the between time when the house was empty and we sneaked inside and stomped up and down on the bare floor.

I sighed. It was true. Even as long ago as the Browns, the plums had not been ours to eat.

Then my sister thought up a more formidable question for she, too, had a sense of danger.

‘What'll Dad say? He said they were the Connollys' plums. In law.'

‘In law?'

‘In law.'

I giggled.

‘They're not the Connollys' plums now, are they? Here, have one.'

We had one each. We threw the stones over the Connollys' fence.

‘Now they can grow their own plums.'

Recovering a little from our drunkenness we sat on the grass and leaned against the fence.

‘What are we going to say?' my sister asked. ‘Should we tell?'

I considered.

‘No, we needn't. Why should we? In spite of what everyone says they're our plums. The Connollys would look pretty funny coming in here and saying, “How dare you pick the plums off your own tree!” Let's not tell. Let's keep it dark.'

How I wished, suddenly, that we could do just that; keep it as dark as we could, that is, bury and forget it. I felt bleak. The
sun had moved, in that way the sun has when the clouds are big as paddocks. It had gone in and both my sister and I felt lonely as we did sometimes when our mother went into one of the rooms in the house and shut the door behind her, to say she didn't want anyone at that moment but herself, that she had other things to do and think about; other things and other people.

When our mother saw the pile of big blue plums in the kit she looked puzzled but because parents, who are said seldom to know their own children, may also seldom know their own fruit trees, she smiled and said vaguely,

‘How nice the plums are this year. No blight at all. I could have sworn they had blight.'

She made the jam, put it in the jars, sealed them, and put them in rows in the kitchen cupboard.

With a feeling that there were too many people in the world or at least that the Connollys had come home to swell in a menacing way the existing number of people, moreover that all the neighbours were crowding into their gardens, mowing their lawns, staking their dahlias, that there would never be any escape from them or from the mysterious ‘other' people and things that beckoned my mother, like the sun, into secret rooms, my sister and I went out, boldly, to gauge the lie of the land, to prepare our defence, if necessary. We went out by the plum tree. Dick Connolly was lying in the hammock. I wondered if he had noticed the plums had been picked. He did not see us and I did not like to say, Hey, and I could not get away with the adult ruse of coughing or clearing my throat, and because he was known as my ‘boy' and I therefore had the responsibility of attracting his attention, I decided to throw a pebble. It was really a stone but I thought of it as a pebble. He jerked the comic from his face and looked over at me. No. I did not care for his red face and his crooked nose and the way, as he looked at me, his face grew redder; I suppose because he recognised me as his allotted ‘girl'. I felt my face grow
red. It was different to stare and poke faces when we were alone but with my sister there I felt I had to accept him as my property, and find excuses for him, but that was all too much for me. His stare was greedy.

‘Dickie Make-Jam,' I said, feeling silly. And then in my mind from right eye to left eye I saw the pale boy Corbie from up the road flashing by on his silver and black bicycle.

‘You people are going to cop it from my father,' Dick said, nodding towards the kitchen window where the scene-shifters were at work ready for the performance of the evening meal.

‘Someone's picked our plums.'

‘They're not your plums.'

‘Someone's been and gone and picked them. And do you know who that someone is, green eyes greedy, it's you.'

I gasped at his cheek, and he did too, for it was a lot for Dick Connolly, the quiet one, to say.

Then inspiration came to me. We had been listening to the wireless, to the funny programmes.

‘Oh,' I said, ‘someone has 'alf-inched your 'unter. Oh that such wickedness could be!'

A blissful smile crossed Dick Connolly's face; he glowed like an apricot. He too had listened to the funny programmes.

‘Shake yourself, and show us the scoundrel you are!'

Delightedly my sister and I wiggled a hula-like circuit.

‘Some treacherous toad has tampered with Pop's ticker.'

‘You mean some wretched rascal has rifled his repeater?'

Silence. Then my sister and I and Dick Connolly whispered in unison,

‘The watch, the watch.'

‘I am innocent, I swear it.'

‘She is innocent. She swears it.'

Then we stopped play-acting and stared at one another and the idea was born, bigger than plums and their roots and their
blight, more appetising than plum jam, even on hot scones or in jam tarts with pinched pastry ears; and it was the next weekend over scones and plum jam that we, the Connollys and the Todds, hammock-swinging, mouthing, swallowing, clinched the deal, the distribution of parts in plays original and borrowed that would be, as it were, the first rung on the steps leading down to our Hollywood swimming pool.

Did it happen this way? The land lay like stone, and one night, all night long, rain pelted down on it the way people, they say, hammer hard on a stone to find blood. And in the morning the land was cut in two by a deep flow of creek, dotted with red weed — Gavin Highly's creek.

But all this was a long time ago. I did not know back then that hearts could be laid out like land and cut in two by storms coming out of the sky, or that dreams could be thrown, as Gavin Highly threw the ashes of his fire or his oyster shells or his old tins and bottles or his scraps of food, deep into the dark flowing divided heart to be buried there. I did not know, and my brother did not know. We cared more about plums — ah, they were yellow and dusty blue and hung on trees, over Gavin Highly's fence, and in the early autumn the sun burned on each plum till its tight yellow or blue dusty skin gave in and rolled up like a blind to let in more sun. The plums split and were ripe and we ate them and, if Gavin
Highly caught us, all he said, in one breath, was ‘Hop-it-you.' I think he understood about plums.

He lived alone; apparently, he had always lived alone. The story was that he had been up Central, living in a rabbit burrow, where a rabbit kept house for him and he invited ferrets, kindly ones, in for afternoon tea. But of course that sort of story couldn't be believed by realists. Still, it was true that he had never lived in an actual house. A tent, yes, and huts and, when he was small, in a room with an iron bed, top and tail at night with brothers and sisters, but never a real house. His dwelling now was a hut with a hole in the roof to satisfy the needs of smoke wanting to go out, and with old bulging beer barrels, corseted by rusty iron hoops, placed at strategic points around the outside walls to act as downpipe and spouting. There wasn't even a step to the door. Going inside was like climbing a mountain, though I had never been inside and could only guess. People said that there were books everywhere, on shelves, under chairs, on chairs — the chairs were two — and tied with binder twine in bags under the bed. Gavin Highly collected and loved books. No one had ever really seen these books, but hearsay had it that they were worth thousands of pounds and, if ever Gavin wanted to have his dream and live in a proper house with a proper downpipe and spouting and taps inside and waste pipes under the sink and hot water, why, all he'd need to do was sell his books.

And the selling, word went around, would have to happen very soon, for Gavin's hut had been condemned by the Health Inspector, and if he had no money to buy a house he would have to go to jail or to an old people's home, where he'd eat boiled mutton all the time and no oysters. And folks knew how much Gavin Highly liked oysters — indeed, he ate so many that he could have become one. He was in league with them, surely. But then he was the kind of man who is in league with many things — almost everything except people. For him there was no way, it seemed,
of being in league with people as he was with the birds, shabby starlings, their feathers worn and shiny green from flight; or with the frogs that in early autumn made the creek vocally sinister with their croaking, handless and cold, their pale-yellow-and-cream ballooning throats propped upon the surface of the water; or with the trees, willows that knew whenever their limbs failed, and lived near the creek, so as to be able to drop their dead parts down for burying.

Was that why Gavin Highly, too, lived so close to the creek? Tip, splash went the ashes from his fire every morning; whizzbang went the pork-and-bean tins. Till the Health Inspector made a visit. He was a narrow man, like a shadow, the sort of man who slips under doors and through keyholes, or else how could he have known that our dog, Lassie, slept in our bedroom?

‘I have had complaints,' he said to Mother on one visit, ‘there are dogs in and out of your windows. You have a . . . lady dog, I understand.'

Yes, the Health Inspector was a sneaky sort of man, and I felt sorry for old Gavin Highly when I heard my parents talking about him.

‘They say the place is a disgrace. Full of books and oyster shells,' a lady said to my mother. This lady came and drank tea and then knitted tea cosies and hotwater bottle covers for bazaars, while Mother watched and wished that she could knit and crochet; but I did not like the knitting woman. Come to think of it, I wasn't much in league with people, either, and so I pitied poor Gavin Highly having to sell all his precious books or else sit in jail with a bowl of bread and water. But I soon put him out of my mind, for a little while anyway. My brother had a new sled with a patented speedometer that read, true or false, ninety miles an hour.

One morning, it was autumn and the little polished acorn bullets were knocking down hard on the roof of the shed, and it was breakfast time, with my father eating porridge, my mother sewing a quick patch onto Dad's work pants, my brother putting the kindling wood in the coal house, and me still sitting, past porridge and halfway through bread and treacle, and suddenly my father stopped eating and said, ‘Today's the day.'

A silly, obvious remark. Of course today was the day — for me, the day of sycamore windmills. The sycamore seeds were brittle and thin as a fly's wings, but they could whizz, and today was the day of whizzing. But I knew that my father was not talking about that.

I took another piece of bread and treacle.

‘You have hollow legs,' my father remarked absently, but in my curiosity about today's being the day I felt no special pride in this anatomical wonder, which my father quite frequently assured me that I possessed.

He continued, ‘I hear Gavin Highly is selling his books today. He's making quite a fuss about it, advertising and all that. There's a van calling to take them to the auction room, and this morning an expert is coming to look at the collection and price it. Half the town'll be there for sure.'

How could I forget that day? There was a light-blue morning wind blowing and thistledown flying loose along the tops of the clouds and larks going up and down, up and down, in the shining lift of the sky.

Poor Gavin Highly. I did not see anything that happened, but I know, I tell you, I know that it happened this way.