Currawalli Street (7 page)

Johnny sees again that man's face from long ago as he watches the older rider talk to him now, eyes darting from side to side. They are not the furtive looks of a man expecting danger but the exhausted glances of a man expecting death. There is resignation in his voice, only a hint of it, but Johnny can tell that he has almost given up.

Johnny asks, ‘Is the fire after you?' Their horses move in a very subtle, fluid dance.

The man looks at him, evidently finding some comfort in knowing that Johnny understands what is happening. ‘I don't know for sure. We have been travelling as a group. I assume it is me because my horse has been growing tenser. Normally she is calm around fire. It could be my wife or one of the children but I don't think so. They know nothing of this element of fire. My understanding is that a fire only ever comes after someone who is aware of what it is doing. But, who knows?' He smiles grimly in the reddening light.

Johnny leans forward. ‘Then you must keep travelling. I hope you reach the train line.'

‘I hope so too. I'll put them on a train and then ride the other way. Maybe I will be able to find a fresh horse at the station. Hopefully the fire will follow me and not the train.' He wheels his horse about and
looks at the carriage that has thundered up the track ahead of him.

‘Good luck to you,' Johnny says softly. The man nods even though he could not have heard the words. He and his horse are bathed in the red light of the distant fire. They disappear into the dust.

Johnny quickly turns off the track and heads out across the line of flames that he can now see clearly in the distance. There are bushes and trees for a few miles but then he comes onto a sandy embankment that runs the same way he is headed. This is a riverbed, usually dry, that periodically fills with water and appears as if the river has been running strongly for years. He follows it past the skeletons of tree trunks and large rocks that look like the smooth skulls of giants. The line of flames is now behind him, headed away, and so he slows the horse to a walk.

Up ahead he soon sees a road sitting in the afternoon light. Johnny breathes a sigh of relief when he hears the hooves striking gravel again. The feeling surprises him. He looks back at where he has just come from—the dry riverbed, the unbending gum trees, the still smoke—and then he thinks of the people trying to escape the fire. The memory of that night ride with his father, and then of that riderless horse, with its weary head bowed, standing in the ashes. He breathes out again. It is behind him.

He looks on down the road in the direction he will ride. There is dust ahead that indicates travellers. He keeps moving forward and tries to make out what is throwing up the cloud of dust. Then he pulls the horse to a standstill. He looks again and smiles.

Coming towards him are two wagons.

T
he smell of the bush is in the air. Nancy, walking down the front path at number twelve, stumbles unexpectedly. She curses, using a phrase of her mother's; in fact she sounds like her mother when she says it.

Three years ago her left leg started to stiffen up and now she favours the right. She is getting used to not standing straight. Sometimes she doesn't notice anymore. Eric says he can't tell at all. Whether he is telling the truth or not, she doesn't know. Although standing crooked in itself doesn't anger her, she finds that she is now prone to sudden bursts of fury and sometimes tears. The tears are inexplicable. In the past, her anger would always evaporate unspoken with the wind, but now it demands that she give it form. And Eric, who nearly always takes the brunt of her rages, suffers it patiently and with a quiet dignity.

She is forty-two years old and has, for most of her life, been accustomed to people saying she is, at the very least, pleasant-looking, if not beautiful. At about the same time as her leg stiffened, the compliments
began to dry up. She wasn't worried at first. And truth be told, worry is not the right word; it is a concern that this part of her life has arrived too early. There are many shining gifts that come with age, her mother had said. Wisdom, patience, dignity. But worry, concern, anxiety also arrive. And they are certainly not shining gifts, Nancy thinks.

She walks out the gate and slowly across the street. The gravel sounds like shallow water under her shoes. The sun is hot again, gum leaves are blowing down the street. Halfway across, she turns to look at her house.

Hume and Hovell ivy, that has runners like thin fingers and leaves like tiny green hearts, thrives in this type of weather and has grown quickly across the top of the veranda. The corrugated-iron roof is painted red. Long strips of thin board painted yellow cover the exterior walls and keep out the wind. The window frames are white. The most impressive things about the house are the ornamental struts that vertically connect the eaves of the roof to the walls. Each one has been individually carved by Eric into the silhouette of a face in profile.

When the wind isn't blowing, he sits in his wooden chair on the back veranda and carves. Slowly he is working his way around the house, taking down and working on each strut in turn. There is one strut every ten feet and so far there are five faces staring out at the world. They are the faces of people who lived in the village where she and Eric were born and where they continued to live after they were married. As she passes she always nods hello to Michael the baker and blows imaginary kisses to Colin the brickmaker's son, who left the village to make his name as an actor. He was easily the most handsome boy in the county and that made him a figure of derision and ridicule with the other boys.
Before he left, he kissed her. Colin was her first love. He joined a repertory theatre company and became exactly what he wanted to be: a famous actor.

Wattle trees lean against the front windows and their branches scrape gently at the glass when the wind blows. Eric likes this because he is used to sea winds creating a noise. That is how he measures its strength. It is information that he no longer needs to know but doesn't like to live without. He is used to the music of canvas rippling and swelling or the whistling of the wind rushing around a funnel or bulkhead. Nancy knows that it gives him comfort to hear it. On still days, he becomes lethargic, but when the wind blows strongly he walks more quickly, achieves a lot more, talks louder, gets more excited about things. So Nancy doesn't mind the branches brushing against the windows.

The front yard is shaded by an old currawalli tree, the home of the indistinct grey apostle birds. Johnny from next door has told her about these birds. They are all of the same family, and they stay in the one tree for generations and make it their family home. They love to play together and make lots of noise and their behaviour keeps Eric and Nancy amused and enchanted—they have even given four of the birds the names of their parents, all long gone in a land far away. Saying their names out loud is a comforting thing to do. She especially likes to hear her mother's name on Eric's lips. Jean. It touches her in a way that she will not allow anything else to touch her.

As much as Eric had been hardened by the sea, so had she, but not in the same way. Not by a cold North Sea wind but by a cold Scottish bed. Not by an endless, landless horizon but by an empty chair opposite her. She kept herself to herself, the same as any sailor does. But
it was not Nancy's manner. Now she has become one of those people who is so warm and natural that you would assume she is an old family friend. You may be surprised to find that not many people know her very well at all. That's the way she prefers it.

Rose is standing in her garden staring down the street at the church. From across the street Nancy can see that she is crying and she calls out so that Rose might have an opportunity to wipe her eyes before she comes close. As she walks through the front gate of number nine, Rose is dabbing her cheeks with the corner of the yellow apron she is wearing.

‘I'm sorry, Nancy. I've got something in my eye.'

Nancy holds her arm so that they are wiping the tears together. ‘Rose, can I be telling you something while we are alone? It won't go any further and you can take it for what it's worth.'

Rose looks at her closely and nods.

Nancy tells her about the woman who lived ten houses away when Nancy was a child. ‘She could do nothing right: she cried all the time; she had no husband, no family to speak of, but she could see things. It was the one thing that she did well.'

‘What do you mean?' Rose asks guardedly. Nancy lowers her voice.

‘She had premonitions, pictures of things that were going to happen that she saw in the clouds, in cups of tea, in fruit that had rotted and split open.'

‘Why are you telling me about her?'

‘You remind me of her in some ways. I just thought . . .'

‘I don't see things in tea-leaves, if that is what you mean.'

In fact, Rose has thought about telling Nancy or even the reverend from church about her vision, but she thinks neither would be ready for the torrent of words that would flow out of her mouth once she began to speak. She has made the cold decision to stay silent for now.

Nancy releases Rose's arm and drops her hand away. ‘No. Of course not. I'm not saying that you do. You remind me of her, that's all. This woman told me that my father would die on a Tuesday morning after chopping firewood. He did, leaning over to light his pipe, resting on the axe.'

‘How old were you?'

‘Seven.'

‘That's young.'

‘Not really. Not in our country. My mother had a proper job by the time she was seven. She started out sweeping the steps for the post office when she was four. So I wasn't expected to be a child for too long. I was carrying my weight by six. At seven, I was old enough to understand the principles involved in visions. It was part of our lives. We talked about it the same way we would talk about the river rising or the apples ripening.'

‘Thank you, Nancy, for explaining all that to me,' Rose says briskly. ‘Now, I don't want to talk about these things anymore. Tell me something else.'

‘Um . . . let's see. Eric and I went to the Savoy Hotel and had a piece of coronation cake. It was very nice. Have you tried it?'

Rose shakes her head. ‘No, but Kathleen's mother has sent her out the recipe from London. She said it was in all the newspapers over there
at the time to help celebrate the king's coronation. I promised Kathleen that we would make it together. Will you help? You're the only one to have seen it.'

Nancy laughs. ‘Yes, of course I would like to help. When?'

‘Come over this afternoon and we can look at the recipe to see if it needs something exotic. I'll ask Kathleen. I think she is getting a bit concerned for her husband. He has been away three days now.'

Nancy shrugs and then says, ‘Tell me again about those bulbs you showed me.'

The truth is that Kathleen isn't worried about Johnny's safety. But there is a portrait that has to be finished in six weeks' time, and a letter has come from the bishop's attaché asking about the painting's progress and whether the bishop will be needed for another sitting. Kathleen knows that Johnny will have it finished in time, but she is always anxious when there is a date looming in the distance.

Johnny works on his paintings in the spare bedroom. When Kathleen goes in each day and looks at the canvas, she is always struck by how incomplete it looks. But it is always the same. She always worries and Johnny always finishes in plenty of time.

Now she walks into the room again and over to the canvas. This is Johnny's biggest painting yet. Not in size; in the importance of the sitter. The bishop is the same man that Janet talks of with such abhorrence and from the few things that Johnny has said about the sittings, Janet seems to be right to want to set the dogs on him.

Not that Johnny says much to her. He keeps his work to himself. As a
man who grew up working on the land, finding himself earning most of his money sitting still with a paintbrush in his hand does not rest very easily on him. And so he tends to leave it in this room as much as possible.

But one evening a month ago while she was massaging his back, he mentioned to her with a shadow in his voice that the bishop wanted another painting done. One that the Church didn't need to know about. As the sittings for the official portrait progressed, the bishop explained to Johnny the type of painting he wanted. Johnny would tell Kathleen only that it was grand and very strange. She assumed it was something he did not want to share with her. But if he did the painting as the bishop asked, they would have enough money to think about visiting her family in London.

Kathleen looks out the window at the street. She and Johnny go to church every Sunday as much to support the reverend as anything else. Thomas is a new friend and they don't like to think of the church being empty. Johnny has a fairly solid picture of God and he suspects that a church isn't necessarily the place God is going to be on a Sunday. Kathleen has always gone to church, and questioning God has never come into it. Church was just something you did before Sunday lunch. It gave you a chance to think about the night before without being disturbed.

This room is the cleanest in the house. Its walls are white and the window is large and looks out to the west. Johnny needs the dust to be kept away because it sticks to the oil paint and darkens the colours, so Kathleen comes in twice a day and wipes all the surfaces. And it gives her a chance to look at the progress of the current painting.

She likes the smell of the paint. She likes the smell of turpentine on the rags; it gives the room an atmosphere of industry and reminds her
of her father's back shed, where he keeps all his woodworking tools.

The floors throughout the house are Baltic pine and drenched in linseed oil. They run the length of the room from the back wall to the fireplace. Johnny always sits while he paints and his chair is made of black snakewood. It is a straight chair, thin like an old man is thin, and strong like a young man is strong.

The easel is covered in smeared and dripped paint which sometimes shows a strange beauty and mystery, elements that Kathleen cannot define in words. Johnny said to her once that a teacher at art school had told him that there are things much deeper than what can be seen or spoken of. Things that can only be measured by what is felt. He didn't know what that meant. Neither does Kathleen. She likes to have an explanation of the things she appreciates. She is uncomfortable with the unknown.

Thinking she hears a noise at the front door, she walks out of the room and up the hallway. The sun is coming in strongly through the glass panel above the front door. Without pausing she pulls the door open. There is no one there. Across the street she can see Nancy standing with Rose. She thinks about what chores she has left to do and whether she can leave the house unattended for a while; deciding that she can, she goes back to the sideboard in the dining room, moves aside the folded embroidered tablecloth that Johnny's mother used for best, and takes the recipe for King George the Fifth's coronation cake out of the celebratory coronation mug that her mother sent her. Queen Mary watches her stonily from the side of the mug. At the front gate, Kathleen sees Maria coming down the road from number sixteen, leading her horse.

‘Hello, Maria,' Kathleen calls.

‘Hello, Kathleen,' says Maria. ‘Do you know if Alfred is about?'

‘I don't. Is there something wrong with Margaret?'

‘Who can tell? There may well be. I don't understand her. I've never had an animal like her.
Mannaggia
! I'm more used to donkeys. At least you can tell what they're thinking.' As she comes closer to Kathleen, she lowers her voice and becomes conspiratorial. ‘Ever since William borrowed an automobile from work and brought it home last week, she has been strange. He put it in the backyard next to her for the night. I don't think she liked it.'