Currawalli Street (13 page)

Kathleen wakes and sees that she has slept alone. As she slips down the hallway and peeks into the spare bedroom, the early morning sun is coming through the window above the front door. Johnny is staring at the painting; the brushes have been washed and are standing in an old jam jar on the shelf.

Kathleen continues on to the kitchen and stirs the coals in the stove until the flames come to life. She fills the kettle then places it on the hot plate, and sees on the kitchen table the teapot that Johnny has used in the middle of the night to replenish himself. She feels a momentary
pang of guilt for not being awake to look after him, but that goes out the door with the tea-leaves. The kettle is boiling by the time she has the cups and milk ready and a piece of heavily buttered bread on a plate. She looks down at the plate. Out of a whole tea service it was the only piece of crockery that survived the trip from England. It wasn't the wild sea but the carriage trip from her mother's cousin's farm to Currawalli Street that did the damage.

She carries the painted tray of tea and bread back into the studio. Johnny has heard her in the kitchen and when she returns he is sitting facing the door. She looks from him to the portrait. She can tell that it is finished by the look in his eyes. He looks exhausted. The face in the painting looks fresh and young as if it has stolen all of Johnny's energy and life force. She puts the tray down on the shelf next to the jam jar of brushes; she and Johnny hold each other and she feels even more his exhaustion, so she pulls away quickly and pours him a cup of tea. He smiles the smile that first attracted her to him on a country Sunday morning and eats the bread then drinks his tea in four gulps. He is thinking about pouring himself another cup when she takes his hand and leads him out of the studio, along the hallway into the bedroom. He sits on the bed and pulls off his slippers as she closes the curtains to block out the sweet morning sunshine. He is asleep before she has finished drawing them. She finishes undressing him, pulls the blankets over him and then closes the door behind her.

She stops and looks at the light pouring through the window above the front door, illuminating the length of the hallway.

‘A family lives here,' she says to herself.

The cooler evening air runs up Currawalli Street a little easier after the sun has gone down. The unscorched scents of the bush are more distinct; they mix with the cooking smells that float out of the houses. Maria likes this time when she and William sit alone on the veranda. She can hear the clatter of the dishes being washed by the children, the barking dog behind the pub, farm workers finished for the day calling out to each other in the distance, and William next to her, sipping his cup of tea.

She sometimes asks William what he is thinking about. William figures she only asks him because she expects him to have reasonably noble thoughts in his mind. He never has noble thoughts in his mind, so he never answers. He just smiles absently at her. Which makes it worse. She thinks he is deep into a line of philosophical thought that can't be shared with her.

But this evening when she asks him, he is inclined for a moment to tell her exactly what it is he is thinking about. Liquorice. But he thinks
better of it and smiles absently again. She nods and puts a hand on his shoulder as she passes by to supervise the kitchen cleaning.

William is thinking about liquorice because he has been told that liquorice is one of the supplies you are given in the army if you are sent to war. It is said to have a calming effect. The sound of shells isn't as bad if you have a mouth full of liquorice.

He thinks about the army every time he reads about a coming war. War is one thing he has never experienced. Maybe his life will be incomplete without that experience. He used to feel this way about travel. That's what led him around the world.

But going to war is different. Or is it? Some days he thinks it is something best avoided and some days he thinks it is an experience that shouldn't be missed. He has two children and a good wife but they would be able to fend for themselves if he went away for a while. And this war will probably all be over quickly: if he doesn't go at the start, he will most likely miss it.

He is almost decided. He just has to find a way to tell Maria. He'll ask Morrie how to raise it. That will also give them something to talk about.

Two weeks have gone by and Morrie and Lazarus are at the pub again. Lazarus has a tin bowl of water on the veranda with his name on it. Morrie too is making good use of his mug. He has been here three nights in a row. He easily stays inside his limit of three mugs of stout for the whole evening and doesn't come close to getting drunk. To Morrie, what is addictive is the evolution of the conversations around
him. Just as a family has a running dialogue, so do the drinkers at a hotel. Every sentence is connected to its predecessor, even sentences spoken the night before. A brother-in-law's name does not need to be inserted because it is known by everyone, and each listener has access to a library of knowledge about most of the subjects being discussed in the room of that pub.

Morrie now knows that the man standing over by the window is Joseph, who works for the farmer Edward from down Choppingblock Road and Edward stays up late and reads out loud. He also knows that Joseph's sister Edith is off to South Australia to chase a man who declared his love for her two years ago. To the annoyance of her family she didn't pursue the matter until now and Joseph suspects it may be too late. The South Australian man's name is Ronald and he is a friend of Joseph's and so whenever Joseph mentions Ron, Morrie is able to gather up all this information and locate Ron as one of the characters in the conversation.

Morrie believes, although he will never tell anyone, that this knowledge is what soaks into the walls and the woodwork of a place. Any place. He went once with his father to the house of an actor where a murder had been committed years earlier after long episodes of family violence. He could sense the cruelty straightaway and tell which room the murder had been committed in. He doesn't pride himself on being any more sensitive than the next fellow. He thinks any human being can sense things like that. Birds would not sing outside the window of the murder room, yet they were active everywhere else. They knew something bad had happened there; it makes sense that he would know it too.

Daniel, who always leans on the far windowsill, under the clock, works in the city for the police as a clerk and he lives near the Choppingblock Hotel with his parents. Like Morrie, he drinks very little and stays out of most conversations. But when Daniel does speak Morrie always listens, and already he knows a fair bit about his work. There is a gangster, Bert Brady, who was recently living at this very hotel but left suddenly and whom, it is said, the police are trying to convict of a murder. Not a particular murder, it seems to Daniel, but any murder. And now, so he has heard, they have a murder at a race track that they have no killer for, and as Bert Brady is a gangster, he does some of his business at race tracks and he might have known the victim, then this looks as if it might be a suitable crime to aim at him. And who knows, he might have done it. So whenever Daniel mentions Bert, Morrie knows who he means.

As more men join up there are now six mugs hanging from hooks above the bar. He thinks about it as something he should do. Still, he would like to drink a few more stouts from his mug before it is hung up there.

Morrie looks over at the farmer Edward. Every night he drinks his two mugs of beer before heading home. Edward tries to be a friendly fellow but when he thinks he is demonstrating bonhomie he is actually displaying his nervousness. And so every man in the bar knows that the one thing Edward truly is, is nervous. On the farm, he stops breathing whenever he moves from one job to the next. And no matter how slow he tries to go, he always ends up rushing, as if the tasks are rafts and he has to swim frantically from one to the next.

At the pub he prattles on loudly as if he is talking over the top of a
crowd, even if there are only one or two people involved in the conversation, and laughs like a drowning man thrashing about. He has a preselected store of subjects so he is never left having to perform off-the-cuff patter. He is unaware of the value of silence or that more things are explained in the pauses between sentences than in the words themselves. But at the end of the night when he does stop talking, a look of sadness crosses his face as if he has been defeated again. Morrie likes him. He sees a fellow struggler making a determined effort to be out in the world.

Morrie also likes Peter, another fellow that no one else talks to very much.

There is no doubt that Peter is a strange character. He asks a lot of questions and always listens carefully to the answers, as though conducting an interview. His hair, longer than the fashion, is tucked into his collar and he always wears the same brown coat. Because he never stops asking questions many of the men grow uncomfortable with him, but Morrie finds him invigorating. He tells Peter things about his life that he has never had to form into words before; he tells him about Gwen and how grief appears at odd times in his day. He talks about his childhood, about his family, and about being unpopular and misunderstood. He suspects that Peter knows something of these things as well.

For his part, Peter says that he comes from up north and that his parents have gone back there. He screws up his face when he answers a question; his words sometimes don't make sense, but sometimes they are as clear as a bell ringing.

Then quickly, he always finds another question to ask. Morrie assumes that he is hiding something.

Not that it matters in a bar. Everybody is hiding something.

*

It is now June and the weather has turned. The clouds are much denser and keep the sun's light off the currawalli trees. The rain now takes longer to soak into the dirt of the street and so there are many puddles to step around. Kathleen understands this type of weather more. She looks out the front window at the sun struggling against the grey sky.

William and Morrie are walking down the street. William's conversation is animated and high pitched. He laughs and touches Morrie on the back when a good point is made. It is the first time that William has been outside in his uniform. He took it off before he came home from enlisting but Maria has asked him to wear it so the children can see what he has become.

He and Morrie are just walking to the little road and then coming back again; William says he wants to wear in his new army boots but Morrie knows that he is embarrassed and nervous about wearing a uniform and so he wants someone to walk with. Morrie is pleased to accompany him because it is another indication that their friendship has reached a new level. Ever since William joined up, they have talked together more easily and openly. Men have always been like that. Put a finishing date to a friendship and suddenly they are good at being friends. Put a finishing date to a marriage and suddenly they are good at being husbands. Put a finishing date to their life and suddenly they are good at living.

The two men pause under the apostle birds' tree. William has some crusts in his pocket. Morrie is surprised because he has never seen
William do this before. They watch the antics of the birds for a while, laughing out loud and calling to individual birds to come forward.

At the front gate of number sixteen, Maria watches the two men as they resume their walk down the street away from her. It is the saddest thing she has seen. She wipes a tear from her eye with her apron.

Kathleen, who has been writing to her sister, now comes outside to stretch her legs and catch the wind. Johnny is across the street helping Alfred and Walter erect the framework for the roof of the new house. She knows that he can't do much but he wants to be over there helping. As she stands on the front porch, touching her growing belly, she watches him hold the horses still while Alfred and Walter unload some timber from the wagon. He leads the horses away and notices her looking across at him. He waves just as William and Morrie appear. They have crossed the street directly from the apostle birds' tree to avoid the puddles and parade proudly past the men working. Just then, the sun goes behind some clouds and doesn't come out again. The light changes. Kathleen looks at William's uniform and then at her husband. His face looks momentarily stunned, his eyes still locked onto hers.

Rose sees the two men walk past her window and for a moment she drops her head to her chest. Then she rushes out the front door and looks up the street—not in the direction that William and Morrie have gone, but towards where they have come from. She is looking for Maria. Kathleen sees what she is doing and suddenly both women are hurrying up the street to number sixteen where Maria stands sobbing at the gate.

The true cold of winter has arrived and the colours of the street have changed. The greys of the currawalli tree have now changed to the khakis of the uniform. Cedric has already gone, and William has just left. The reverend's friend, Robert, is in uniform and just waiting for dispatch orders. Morrie is now talking abstractly about going too.

The sun has long gone and the rain has greedily replaced it, arriving in the morning and pouring relentlessly for most of the day.

Janet stands at the front window of the manse.

Her father said that rain always pours harder near a church. Of course Janet knows this can't be true, but sometimes it feels like it. The relentless drops hitting the glass affect her clarity after a while. She does not like to stay inside for too long. She never has.

And just as the rain is changing this street, her other world is changing too. There is a man, Charles, who wants more than she has grown used to offering. She is toying with the idea of inviting him to become involved in all of her life but she still feels uncomfortable with such an idea. She likes Charles. Enough to think about him when she is away from him; something she has never done before.

Her world, once still, is now spinning. She is waiting for it to stop raining because she is going over to have a cup of tea with Nancy, describe what she is feeling and see if Nancy knows what it all means. The solution that she normally employs is to run away. But that doesn't feel right this time.

She has talked to Nancy before on a number of occasions and Nancy said to watch out; there will be a man she touches who she doesn't want to let go of. Perhaps that man is Charles. But she has doubts about whether she is ready to not let go.

She first met Charles a year ago, both friends of somebody else. It may have been a dinner party. She thinks it was. He says it was at a stage show. He can even say what song they were singing when he looked across and saw her. But she now knows enough about him to not believe everything he says.

They met again two months ago at a restaurant where he was the friend of the guest of honour. Against her better judgement, Janet talked to him all night; people were leaving at the end of the evening before she turned to greet them.

What Charles is, he won't say. Janet laughs to herself at this. He knows he doesn't have to explain himself to her; he knows that she is already so interested in him that she can't extrude herself.

It is a situation that Janet always worked hard not to end up in; but now that it is here, she finds it quite exciting. Not that she would ever tell him, but she suspects that Charles holds her heart.