Listening to Mondrian (8 page)

‘No, it’s OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could learn to play it.’

‘Maybe you could and all,’ I heard Mum say in a put-on Irish voice from the other side of the door.

After that, it felt even more like I didn’t really live here any more. It was too much of a hassle to get the stuff to the op shop and the tip, and so it all stayed in the middle of the floor (it’s still here now), with things slowly spreading from one pile to another.

And so the month disappeared. If I still sometimes thought stuff like ‘A bit of broken mirror – I could make fire with that!’ or ‘There’s that rusty fishing knife in the garage . . .’, I was mostly thinking of my new life, the one I’d have in Perth. No school – I’d just hang out with Dad – travel round in the van to wherever he was playing. There’d be all these chicks at the gigs – I’d grow my hair and get a couple of earrings . . . Maybe the band would take me on as a roadie; it was a pity I wasn’t musical (I’d had a few goes at the whistle but it just made this high lonely noise, like the wind).

And then it was a Thursday afternoon, the assignment was due in the next day, and I didn’t even have a shoebox, let alone all my convict belongings. Leave it till after tea, I thought, the garage had a light and I’d just grab some of the camping gear and some wire and bolts and stuff. Oh, and write a couple of letters. Ms Pap wanted some letters in the box, she said, to show the research we’d done. As if!

It was just on dark, and Mum was sitting down to watch the News when the TV and light went off.

‘Quick, Dan,’ she said, ‘nick out and get the fuse – here’s the little torch – and I’ll look for the fuse wire.’

But when I went out to the fuse box I realised that the whole street was in darkness. As I looked out over the town I saw . . . well, I saw nothing, because it was completely black.

Now I should have said that there was a dreadful wind that evening – I could feel it tearing at me the minute I opened the door, and I could hear it rushing through the branches of the pine trees all around our house. It sounded like the surf, it was so loud and kind of pounding.

‘Quick, come inside, Danny!’ I heard Mum yelling through the kitchen window. ‘A branch might fall!’ Just then there was a great flash of lightning, and a boom of thunder.

I pelted back in. By now, of course, Mum had realised what had happened. ‘Thank Christ for Seamus,’ she said. I thought she’d really flipped, and then she said, ‘I thought you might be needing a bit of candle for your project, so I went to buy one, but they made me take a whole box. I know they’re here somewhere, give us the torch . . .’

The torch. It wasn’t in my hand.

‘Oh well,’ Mum said, ‘they are here somewhere.’

We stumbled around in total darkness, like a game of blind man’s bluff. Suddenly the house was unfamiliar. Doorways, the dresser, a chair at an angle became things to crash into. I remember at one stage our feet hit something and we fell together in a pile. It was the first time we’d touched in ages. ‘Bloody skateboard!’ Mum said. Then down there, on the floor, with the storm crashing at the windows, we started laughing. ‘On top of the fridge,’ Mum finally said. ‘That’s where convicts keep their candles.’

We lit all six of them, three up each end of the kitchen table. The fuel stove was going, Mum was cooking one of her oxtail stews. Potatoes in the oven. We were warm, and wouldn’t starve, but it really was a bit scary – not the thunder and lightning, but knowing that the pine trees were huge, and far too close to the house, and shallow-rooted in the sandy soil, and the wind could easily bring one down. It was obvious that that was the cause of the blackout: trees had brought down the lines all over the town.

‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘it’ll be a good excuse to tell Ms Pap.’

‘Come again?’

‘Why I can’t get my convict stuff together. Why I can’t write my letters.’

She started then. ‘What letters?’

I told her and she went on to ‘Why do you always leave all your homework till the last night?’ Then bit her lip. Since the fight, it was as if she really
had
decided that it was
my
homework,
my
life,
my
future.

‘But you might as well,’ she urged, ‘write the wretched letters tonight. I mean, Ms Pap will just make you do them for Monday. And it’s not as if there’s anything else you can do.’

When she said that, I thought, We’re stuck together tonight. I can’t disappear to my room and listen to music, she can’t sit in the lounge and watch TV, we are together for a whole night with none of the toys of the twenty-first century to help us not to talk to each other.

So that’s how I started. In the dark kitchen, with the stove going, the smell of stew, the crashing surf noise of the wind through the pines, the flares of lightning through the window, the boom of the thunder, the flicker of the candlelight, me up one end of the kitchen table, and my mother up the other. And half a world between us.

Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
24 January 1832

To My Mother,
I hope you are feeling good. Though I have been in this country
for more than a year, this is the first chance I have had to write
to you, as up until now I didn’t have a pencil.

I will tell you of the trip over here first. The boat we travelled
on was very overcrowded. All of us were treated and fed
very poorly, resulting in numerous deaths from scurvy and
other causes.

Shortly after I arrived in Sydney Town I got into a fight
with some of the other prisoners. I swear to you it wasn’t my
fault but when you are new in a place, people pick on you and
test you out to see what you are made of. So this group of three
men began to taunt me, laughing at the way I speak and
saying Ireland is a boghole, and I began to argue back, and the
next thing I know we are all fighting on the ground and an
overseer arrives and the others say I started it. As a result I
was sentenced to 12 months in an ironed gang and sent to
work on the new road at Victoria Pass. That was sheer Hell –
working in leg irons, breaking rock, grubbing out massive tree
roots, carting huge blocks of sandstone for the culverts. We
rose at daybreak and worked all day, and at night slept in bark
huts (5 or 6 men to a hut) inside a stockade.

Anyway, I do not wish to worry you, and that is over now.
I have been assigned to a Master called Mr Mace and I arrived
at his farm yesterday. The farm is out on the western plains,
beyond the mountains, and I am told it is 650 acres of which
5 are cultivated. At the farmhouse, there are two other men in
service (one of them kindly gave me this pencil) but I am to
work alone as a shepherd at the other end of Mr Mace’s land.

I will finish now, as there seems little point writing when
I do not know how I will ever post this to you.

Your Son, Seamus Murphy.

Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
17 April 1832

Dear Mother,
I hope you are well. It is three months now since last I wrote to
you but there is little News, as one day here is very much the
same as the next.

I have a little hut of bark and thatch, and my job is to keep
an eye on the sheep by day and herd the flock into their pen at
night in case the dingoes get them. It is easy work, compared to
building the road, but boring and lonely, for my only companions
are the sheep and the flies, the snakes and mosquitoes.

Once a week Mr Mace rides out to check up on me and
bring me supplies. I am entitled to 1 pound of beef or mutton
a day but he sometimes brings kangaroo instead. This meat is
very rich and has a good taste, a bit like oxtail. The problem
is that in the hot summer months the meat is flyblown within
hours, so I subsist on damper-bread and fish that I catch in the
nearby river.

So that is really all I can tell you of my life here, for
nothing ever happens. Sometimes at night when I am in the hut
I think of our cottage, by itself on the hillside. After Dad died,
I guess you and I got used to the loneliness, but it’s a different
feeling, to be alone here.

I write hoping that one day I might meet someone who
can take my letters to you. As an assigned servant, I have no
money, and just one small box of belongings. I play the tin
whistle that you gave me, but as you know I have no musical
Talent. Remember Dad, and how he would play his fiddle for
all the dances!

Your loving Son, Seamus Murphy.

Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
17 July 1832

Dear Ma,
Since I have come here I have realised how important it is to
read and write and I am thankful that you forced me to go
to Father Malarkey, and learn. Though I still do not know how
I will ever send these letters to you, it is a comfort to me, just
to write them.

Tonight there is a tremendous Storm, and I am afraid. I
could not have said this to you, at home, but here sometimes
things are frightening. Do you remember how the sea would
crash against the cliffs, on our headland? Well, here sometimes
it feels as if the very land is our enemy. And I feel like an alien
in it. I wish you were here.

Love from Seamus.

‘Here,’ Mum said. We’d eaten the stew and spuds as I’d been writing, and she’d made a pot of coffee. ‘A dash of the Irish,’ she said. And blow me down if she didn’t get out the bottle of whisky she’d won in the Volunteer Bushfire Brigade Christmas raffle and pour a slurp into each of our mugs. Now this was weird – Mum being against grog as she is – but what was even weirder was that she passed across a letter that seemed to be written exactly to me, Seamus.

c/- St Josephs Presbytery
Ballyfermough
Connemara
17 July 1832

My Dear Son,
Father Malarkey has kindly offered to write this letter for me,
for as you know I have no schooling, and he says that if I send
it care of the Governor of New South Wales it may reach you.
It is some years now since you left, to go to the city, and then
after your trouble, they took you far away, and though I have
not heard from you since then and sometimes wonder if you
are still alive, I just want you to know that I think of you and
pray for you.

We are all struggling by here, as usual. His Lordship has
raised the rent again and the MacBrides have been evicted. Last winter was the worst I ever remember. I think of you there in
the sun, and I know it seems wrong to say this, but at times I
think we should all break the law and be transported, for no
punishment could be worse than what we endure. Still, I should
not dwell on our troubles, for I know that your time out there
will not be easy, amongst the snakes and the heathens. And we
hear tales of savage beatings, and I pray that you are safe.

Oh my Son, I was never able to talk to you when you were
here, and now it is so hard, for I have to speak through miles
of distance. And I know that you thought that I was a nag and
a shrew, for I sent you to learn your letters, and I forced you
and I pushed you, because I did not want you to be like me,
and stuck in a place like this for ever. But while I harassed you
under my roof, I never told you that my heart would catch
every time you walked in the door. So that I would hide my joy
in you by picking on your faults, until one day you were gone.
And now your Absence is a continual source of Grief to

Your Loving Mother.

I think I’d read the letter a couple of times – maybe first as me, and then as Seamus (or perhaps the other way round) – when I became aware of the way my mother was sitting. Her body was tense – not tight, like how she gets when she’s angry, but just perfectly still and alert. As if she was listening to something.

A tap dripping? I wondered. A mouse? Or did she think she could she hear some sort of intruder, maybe fiddling with the flyscreen on the bedroom window? Or was a branch from one of the pine trees splitting in the wind?

I listened hard myself, but I couldn’t hear anything. ‘What?’ I started to say, but my mother instantly reached across the table and put her fingers on my lips, to shush me. Obviously whatever the noise was, it wasn’t worrying her.

After a few minutes – I couldn’t bear the suspense – I scribbled her a note: ‘What are we listening to?’

‘The silence,’ she wrote back to me.

As I read it, I suddenly realised. While we had been lost in time, the wind had dropped, the storm had ceased. With the electricity still out, there was none of that hum you get in a house, from the refrigerator, the other appliances. It must be late, I can remember thinking, because there was no traffic on the street. The only sound was of that deep quietness that comes before snow.

Talking of time shifts, it’s now the last day of the year. Countdown to blast off.

I said at the beginning that I’m not always sure where the reality stops and the invention starts (how did Mum make up the same weird priest’s name that I did?) and since that night I’ve sometimes felt kind of haunted, but in a good way, by this bloke I made up. I mean that since then, I’ve felt Seamus in me, known him as part of me. And through him I know that I can do it alone. Just me, and my piece of wire, my nails, my broken mirror, my tin whistle. Or me and my skateboard and whatever fits into my backpack.

At the same time, I know that because I
can
do it, I don’t have to. Yet.