The Denniston Rose (5 page)

UP THERE THEY will sit around their mean little coal fires in their mean little houses and swap yarns all night, but you will never find them telling my story. I myself must tell if anyone is to hear. My story is more for a fine log fire blazing on an open beach, a fair tot of moonshine aboard and a handful of free-roving spirits to listen. Think of me, then, telling in this way, my boots to the fire, my back to a log of driftwood, a warm man on each side to block the draught, and two or three fire-lit faces enjoying the tale.

Oh, I made a bad mistake, yes, I admit, coming up to that cold, tight town on the Hill. It was not my place. No. But for the moment there was a need to lie low, understand? And how could I know Jimmy had changed so? Also the gold.

So. Listen. A new name, I thought, would give me a fresh start. Evangeline Strauss is fine enough, but too often used in not so pretty
times. That is the name of a sad child, Evangeline Strauss. My two past husbands called me Evie, and both came to bad ends. Angel, that Jimmy called me, was for a bawdy house not a coal-mining town. Lenie, now, is a plain, hard-working name, but at this time, you understand, I was in my prime, with high blood. I needed something more bold, more with spirit, for this ugly place. But with rich potential. Some name to keep my spirits up and attract notice. So: Eva. Eva Storm it was. Good, no? Storm on the Hill.

But to start, no storms. I lived quiet and soft, to see what was what and who was who. Jimmy, that lovely singer and teller of tales, was lost to the drink and pity, pity, all self self, for his lack of a right arm. Yet there was money in his pocket and a secret in his eye. Where from came that money if not from the colour? You would all understand, being followers of the colour yourselves, that here was a mystery I must squeeze out of that bawling bag of tears Jimmy Cork. Billy Genesis, scarred inside and out (I’ll come to him later), was in on it too, I could smell that much. Meantime that sad man Jimmy moaned all day and drank with Billy and his friends all night. I had to be out! Outside in fresh air. Some new thing or go mad!

My work at Hanrattys’ lasted one month. Hauling hot water and stoking someone else’s fire is not my style, you understand. But they liked my Rose, I could see that, and pitied me for being with Jimmy, so looked the other way when I dropped soot on the floor or filched a potato or two.

‘Oh, you poor soul,’ says Totty Hanratty, sighing at me with her big blue eyes. ‘Take this heel of bacon home for your pot, and some barley why don’t you,’ and she’d hand over kitchen scraps I’d be ashamed feeding to chickens. She was a poor fish, Totty, so I thought, fagged out with babies, two living and one in the belly. It was only kindness that I show the man of the house a lively bit of ankle for a change of diet.

‘Now now,’ says Tom Hanratty (a fine fat fellow with bushy brown beard and hands like plates). ‘Now now; I am a family man.’ But the grin splitting the bushy beard said different, so I showed a bit more of my wares out behind the lean-to, flashed him a smile or two of my own, you know? And he came to it readily enough. A ‘good’ man, I have found, a respected fellow who is well provided at home with food and family, is often the most hot-blooded when it comes to a bit of fun.

(And here I pause in my yarn for a moment to dig my two warm men on either side with my elbows and give them a wink, to show I appreciate them anyway, even though they are not so well provided with family and food.)

So, then, Tom Hanratty was first choice, a good meaty man. With Totty about to give birth and so pale on it, who knows he might need another wife soon enough. To be mistress of a saloon and guest house would suit my talents well, and a dally with Tom was good enough sport to persuade me to stay for a bit.

With Totty I made a mistake. Women I judge not so well. Pale she may be, and washed out, and a fine way of talking, but tough! That Totty was boot leather when it came down to it.

One night, very late, and a month into my work at Hanrattys’, she comes over to the room they call the saloon. For what reason she came, who knows? Maybe bit of noise. I like to enjoy my pleasure with a cry out or two, you understand. It’s hard to remember sometimes, children asleep and so on. Not to mention wives. Tom has me on the floor and we are in the middle of a high old time when she walks in with candle in hand.

So. Tears, I expect, and sighs. No no no. Lady T. Hanratty turns to ice. So quiet she speaks. Not to wake the precious children, no doubt.

‘Tom Hanratty,’ she whispers. My big Tom standing with head
down, poor fool, most hang-dog, trying to tuck in shirt-tails and whatnot. I have to smile. What I feel comes quick out on my face, it’s how I am, you know, but that smile was not my best idea. Totty comes for me, big belly out in front, fingers all claws to get at my throat. They fasten there and begin to squeeze. I am a well-built woman, no? Strong like a man, but I tell you, that little woman has me pinned and gasping.

‘Tom, go upstairs!’ she whispers. He goes like a lamb. I made a mistake with that man — no fight at all. Like a lamb, he goes, leaving me with this cold and dangerous lunatic. Totty’s eyes never leave mine to see is he going or not.

‘You,’ she hisses, steady and still as a snake, ‘you evil woman! Oh, I have seen you rolling your big dark eyes and heaving your bosom at my poor Tom.’

Her poor Tom! He was willing enough, I would like to shout into her sharp little face, but she has my voice-box in her claw and no sound can come out, let alone breath in.

‘Casting your filthy spell,’ she whispers, all ice (fire is easier, you know, when it comes to a fight), ‘when I am tired and heavy and not able to give my husband his needs.’

Oh, her fine talk! I was itching for a good fight but when she lets go my throat and takes up the poker, to drive me out the door like some stray dog, I can see this woman is crazy, no? Truly crazy mad. I tell you this, I was halfway across the Camp before I could draw breath easily. It was in my cold bed, Jimmy still out drinking, Rose in her box back in the cave, before natural sounds came out of this poor bruised throat.

Now. You should know that no one treats me like that without they regret it later. Her fine husband Tom was willing. I gave him a good time when the wife couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Where’s the harm? But I lose my job, Hanrattys’ door is closed, so is their food
cupboard, and Mr Hanratty turns right around to walk the other way if I even come in sight! But I will have my revenge, and plan so.

And now comes my big surprise, which lifts my spirit like a sea-bird catching the wind. Oh, what a fine day, just when I am feeling bad, knowing a child is on the way, no doubt Tom Hanratty’s, as Jimmy is limp as a frog nineteen nights out of twenty. And in no state to provide for a child, which will have to take his name, I suppose.

So I am in poor spirits this day. Also hungry, and my chickens, like me, without feed. Rose, on the other hand, is always fed. Doors fly open to my pretty Rose — she has her head screwed on tight, that child. But selfish, my daughter, when it comes to sharing.

Well. This day I am over the other side of the Camp looking for feed for my chickens. Nothing grows up there. I am like a chicken myself, scratching the poor rock for a few greens. Over this side is one big house, among the tents and huts, belonging to the man they call Con the Brake. So I knock on this fine big door, to see if maybe the wife has scraps for my chickens. You see how low I was, begging at doors? The woman opens up. A big lady, Mrs C, with some look in her eye — not sharp, not kind, but dangerous. Something is familiar in that look.

‘Well,’ says Mrs C, kind enough, ‘there are some cabbage stalks and peelings. Come around the back door, for my floor is polished.’ That is the kind of woman she was, you see, who polishes a floor while living in a sea of mud and coal. It was a big house, as I said, with a kitchen and two, maybe three other rooms. In the kitchen, there, up at the table like lady of the house, is Rose, wouldn’t you know? She nods at her own mother as if I am some stranger. Oh, it was vexing! I could have hit her.

‘Sit down, Mrs Jimmy Cork,’ says Mrs C, all smiles, but with this dangerous something flowing underneath to put me on edge.
‘Sit down. I am Mrs C. Rasmussen, wife of Con the Brake. There is tea in the pot, and a scone too. Your Rose has left us one or two.’

The way she said her name, ‘Mrs C. Rasmussen’, so proud and ringing, had me thinking.

‘Well,’ I say, sitting to the tea and scone, ‘I have a name of my own and it is Eva Storm. My arrangement with Jimmy is temporary, I hope.’

She gives me a look, very proper. ‘Jimmy Cork is not the father, then?’ Her eyes rest on Rose, misty and soft like a faithful dog. There is no sign of any other child in this clean kitchen. I look at her belly, but who could tell in all that swell? So she loves my Rose, I can see, for want of her own, and this may be useful.

I do not say if Jimmy Cork is the father. It is not her place to ask.

Well, she talks a little of who is who, and I am enjoying the talk. She is a woman of spirit, too, I can see, with a laugh to bounce off the log walls. I risk asking about Tom Hanratty, with a wink, and she winks back and smacks her lips like a bawdy, before the proper manners take over again. So. I am learning things. I know the Hanrattys have covered up the scandal. And I know that Mrs C is not as fancy as she might want to be.

And then the moment to lift my spirits.

There is a crashing of boots on the back porch and the sound of water being splashed about.

‘My husband is home for his dinner,’ says Mrs C, standing. It is an invitation to leave, no mistaking that. Rose is on her feet and out to the porch.

‘Hey hey hey!’ roars the big voice I know so well but thought dead. ‘Wait now, little flower, I am black with coal still!’ More splashing. Mrs C is caught between two hard things. She wants me to leave, wants Rose to stay. My head is buzzing, this way, that way.
So! My heart — hammer hammer. Hard to keep all this inside. Not to show, you understand.

‘Well now, up you come, Rosy, Rosy tickle my fancy!’ says Con the Brake. Roaring in the door, singing some song, comes the big man, my daughter laughing on his shoulder. ‘Bella, guess what?’ he says, then sees me. He stops, puts Rose down. Smiles. Not a flicker. Oh, this man is good!

‘So, you are Mrs Jimmy Cork, I think,’ he says in his thick voice and holding out his hand, like he was some king receiving a subject. ‘I have met your daughter already, so you can see.’

His clear friendly look would fool a whole jury and judge, but it’s him all right.

‘Mrs Jimmy Cork is just leaving,’ says Mrs C. ‘We have already taken some tea together.’

The way she calls me Mrs Jimmy Cork brings me almost to spitting. It is harder almost than life itself not to crack her one, but then I would lose all advantage. The big woman puts one hand firmly in my back and moves me to the door.

At the door I turn back to look hard into Big Snow’s eyes. ‘Rose, come home now,’ I say, smiling still at Big Snow. ‘I see you have both taken a fancy to my daughter. No doubt we shall be seeing much of each other.’

Off we go, Rose dragging her feet, my blood singing with possibilities. Who would have thought my trump card would turn out to be Rose!

ROSE THOUGHT HER father was supposed to be rich. Before they came to the Hill, almost every night down at the beach her mother would tell how her father was away digging gold out of the ground and that he would be richer even than Goldie Brash who found the big nugget, and that he had a bag filled with gold. Rose imagined it in big lumps glowing like hot coal, inside a clean flour bag, swinging over her father’s shoulder as he walked over hills and valleys coming to get them.

But at Denniston her father wasn’t rich at all. Sometimes he went to work at the mines — ‘make-work’ he called it, or ‘girlie-work’. Sometimes he stayed in bed all day crying or groaning while her mother shouted at him to get up, and often he ran away up to Red Minifie’s saloon to drink. Two friends carried him home later. Sometimes Eva invited them in and they would all laugh and shout
and stamp on the floor. Rose hid under the blankets, then, and pretended not to be there.

One night when they were all roaring at each other, crowded into the little hut, Billy Genesis tried to play hide and seek with her. He lifted a corner of her blanket and Rose could smell the drink and vomit.

‘Peek-a-boo!’ he shouted, and tickled her feet.

Rose wriggled away, but Billy lifted the whole blanket high into the air and then lifted Rose up close to his face, which was as lumpy as porridge.

‘What about a kiss, my darling? For your Uncle Billy, then?’

Rose bit his hand, hard. And slap! Her mother’s hand came sharp on that ugly face. Billy hopped around cursing bits of the Bible while Eva shrieked with laughter.

‘Now, Billy Genesis, you wicked man, choose someone your own size! Though it looks like my Rose is a good match for you!’

Rose ran for her blanket and rolled up tight in it again, and hid in a crack of the cave where big people couldn’t come easily.

One day when Jimmy was well and sitting at the table eating dinner with them, Rose asked about the gold. Her father looked at her a long time, then he said, ‘Who told you that? Was it Billy Genesis?’

‘It was her,’ said Rose.

‘Don’t bother your father,’ said Eva. ‘It’s all make-believe.’

But Jimmy winked at her when her mother went to the fire to serve the stew. ‘I have a bag of gold, all right,’ he whispered, ‘and I know where to find more.’

‘Don’t listen to him!’ said Eva in a loud voice. ‘It’s all gone down his gullet months ago.’ But Jimmy winked at Rose again.

‘Well, where is it?’ she whispered, and he looked out of the window above the bed where he often stared out, and pointed with his orange beard to the dark bush.

‘East,’ he whispered. ‘East, but close by.’ But he stopped talking when her mother came to the table with their dinner.

Another time she asked if she could have some of his gold but her father said everything in life had to be earned and she would have to find her own treasure. Then he drank again from his bottle and said that one day when his arm was stronger, and if she was a very good girl, he might take her to the place where the gold was and she could dig her own gold nuggets and she could be rich too.

‘When your arm is better,’ said her mother, in a hard angry voice, ‘and I am young and beautiful again.’

‘And can Mother come too and dig up her own gold nuggets?’ asked Rose.

‘Only believers find gold,’ said her father. ‘Your mother is not a believer.’

‘I believe in chickens,’ said Eva sourly. ‘You can depend on them.’

‘I believe in gold,’ said Rose.

NOW they have a door and three walls and a window around the little cave. The chimney is brick, not tin.

‘A step in the right direction, Jimmy Cork,’ says her mother, ‘but I will want another room by the end of the year, mind, if we are to stay.’

Billy Genesis helped them, and Lord Percy, while Rose’s mother laughed and shouted with them and teased them by running away with the hammer to build her chicken fence. Then the men chased her into the bushes and Jimmy chased her too.

Mostly Rose likes Lord Percy. He always wears a jacket and tie and sometimes a top hat, even when he’s working on the Spinner, which hauls wood up from the gorge to the Camp. He tells her stories about trolls and princes and giants and uses long words that
Rose can’t understand, but he is kind when he’s sober, and at least he doesn’t chase her when he’s drunk. Lord Percy is very tall and thin and he grows vegetables in a little garden on the edge of the Camp. Eva gives him chicken manure and he gives them silver-beet.

But Rose hates Billy Genesis. He is her enemy. Once Rose opened the door and there was Billy. He was dressed in a black coat and a bowler hat and he had a watch chain over his stomach. His smile twisted his face in a horrible way.

‘Hello, darling, give your Uncle Billy a kiss,’ he said as usual.

‘I don’t have any uncles or aunts,’ said Rose, ‘and I don’t want any.’

‘You’re too sharp for your own good,’ he said, and kissed her anyway. His lips were wet and loose and the kiss went on too long. Rose wiped it off quickly.

‘Jimmy, I’m off to town,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to — you know what?’ And winked at her father. Her father frowned and told Rose to go outside and help her mother, but she only stepped outside and then looked back through the crack beside the door. She saw her father give Billy something but she couldn’t see what or where it came from.

When they came to the door Rose ran around the corner and watched.

‘You cheat me one penny and I’ll kill you, that’s flat,’ said her father. He was red in the face and stamping his feet. Jimmy was always angry when Billy or Lord Percy rode down the Incline to go to town. Lord Percy told Rose how one time her father tried to ride down, but with only one arm, his left at that, and with a gammy knee, he lost his grip and fell off at the steepest part, rolling down and badly twisting his leg.

‘My dear,’ said Lord Percy, ‘that unfortunate gentleman was within an ace of decapitation, so close was the cranium to the rail!

Your poor father has lost his courage since that unhappy incident, and is incarcerated up here with the women and children. Needs must his friends bring him solace. And so we do.’

Rose asked about ‘incarcerated’ and ‘cranium’. Lord Percy could always oblige with a definition that made her laugh.

After a trip to town, her father and Billy Genesis and Lord Percy were drunk every day. Sometimes she saw them sitting outside in Lord Percy’s vegetable garden, laughing and throwing lumps of coal down into the gully, and sometimes they went to Red Minifie’s up by the Bins and she and her mother had a quiet night until someone came banging on their door to say, ‘Red Minifie says come and get Jimmy because his friends are too drunk to carry him and no one else can get near him.’

‘If you can bring the message you could have brought the man,’ says her mother, but she would put on her coat and go up anyway and Rose would wait in the dark house, humming songs under the blanket until her mother dragged Jimmy home and put him to bed without saying anything more. She said a lot, though, in the mornings when he wouldn’t go to work. Then she would go outside and bang hard on the nails of the chicken house she was building against the cliff behind the house. Rose would hold the nails ready for her mother, or she would go up to play with Michael, or see if Mrs C. Rasmussen, in the house made of tree-trunks, needed help with her baking.

Mrs C. Rasmussen was the fattest lady Rose had known. If Rose put her head against Mrs C. Rasmussen’s apron it went right in like soft cotton wool, and the big woman would laugh, wobbling her stomach, and hug the child and say she was only like that because she couldn’t be bothered wearing her stays today, but not to tell anyone because proper ladies always wore stays.

‘Can I look at the stays, then?’ asked Rose.

Mrs Rasmussen laughed. Her laugh rolled out thick like treacle. ‘Ah well, now, Rosie, my bedroom is another secret.’

The secret bedroom was pink. A handsome prince should live in it. Rose stroked the pink velvet curtains, which were softer than a cat. A cover on the bed was woven with coloured birds. Mrs C. Rasmussen’s stays were inside a dark carved wardrobe. They hung there like another bony woman with long ribbons trailing down to the floor. Rose thought of her own mother, who looked thinner now, even though a baby was growing inside. Bonier even than the stays. She imagined her mother hanging beside the stays in this wardrobe, which smelt of summer flowers and other stranger things.

‘Don’t be frightened, Rose,’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen. ‘Stays won’t bite you.’ And she smiled and hugged the child again and asked could she keep a secret.

‘I’m already keeping the stays a secret, and the bedroom a secret, and I can keep lots more,’ said Rose.

So Mrs C. Rasmussen pulled back the stays and other long, coloured dresses, and showed Rose a red jacket hanging right at the back. The jacket had gold shoulders and gold cords with tassels and a silver and blue star pinned to the jacket pocket.

‘Your uncle Con the Brake used to wear this,’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen, and held Rose up so she could touch the gold. Rose looked at Mrs C. Rasmussen and supposed that if Con the Brake were a handsome prince in disguise, this woman might be a beautiful princess in disguise. Or the queen. When she had her stays on.

After that, Rose called in quite often and if Mrs C. Rasmussen wasn’t too busy they would go into the prince’s bedroom and dress up in silk scarves and hats and would dance and sing.

‘Where did you learn to dance like that?’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen in a sharp voice, and Rose said the ladies where her mother worked before they were at the beach taught her.

‘It is not a dance for Denniston,’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen, but then she laughed and said, ‘Rose, Rose, we are birds of a feather and it is a good dance, for all that, and we shall dance it together in here, but it will have to be yet another secret.’

‘It’s a good thing I can remember a lot of things,’ said Rose.

‘It is,’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen, and laughed and kicked her fat white legs high in the air.

One time when Rose and Mrs C. Rasmussen had a pile of glass beads and jet and amber necklaces and a tiny pair of gold earrings on the bed and they were pretending it was Aladdin’s treasure in the magic cave, Rose told her friend about her father’s bag of gold and how she thought it might be buried under the floorboards, but she wasn’t allowed to dig down to see.

‘Buried treasure!’ said Mrs C. Rasmussen.

‘My mother says it’s a mystery where he gets the money for drink.’

‘So it is, so it is, child, but I doubt Jimmy Cork has any stash of gold.’

‘He could be a prince in disguise like Uncle Con the Brake.’

‘Well, he could, that’s true. And you his beautiful daughter. With a diamond ring.’

Mrs C. Rasmussen put a sparkling ring on Rose’s thumb. The child looked at it, then closed her fingers around it. She looked up again.

‘My father says I can’t share his treasure, I must find my own.’

‘Whispering is no use, Rose — I can’t hear what you’re saying.’

‘I must find my own treasure.’

Mrs C. Rasmussen gathered up the necklaces and put them back in her velvet box. She gently prised open the child’s hand, took off the sparkling ring, put the ring in the box and closed the lid softly.

‘The ring is only glass,’ she said. ‘It is not treasure.’ Then she smiled at Rose and hugged her with soft arms that smelled of bread. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you are more of a treasure than that ring, and if your father won’t share his gold at least he shares you, and that is better.’

But Rose knew only too well that a child wasn’t treasure and a sparkling ring was.

ONE morning, when they have been on the Hill about a year, the sun is shining and her father has got up and stumped off along the path to his work without any argument. Her mother looks at the sun and says, ‘What about a picnic?’

‘Is it my birthday?’ says Rose, and her mother looks at her, then looks out the window and says, ‘You’ve got a good memory.’

Rose thinks about that other picnic on her last birthday, which was the day before they came up to Denniston. She remembers her mother screaming angry words and fighting with Gypsy Mary, who Rose liked. Gypsy Mary smoked a pipe and told strange stories. Usually her mother and Gypsy Mary laughed together and slapped each other’s backs and slept in the same tent when they were not with one of the men. But this day her mother was angry about the food.

‘You greedy bitch!’ screamed her mother. ‘That scone was a picnic for the child’s birthday and you have scoffed the lot!’

‘Oh yes?’ shouted Gypsy. ‘One scone for a child’s birthday? Tell me another! For your own belly, more like, and mine is in more need! I saw Bob, who is more mine than yours any day of the week, give you a bite — and more — last night!’ And spat in the sand in front of Rose’s mother.

Screams and hair-pulling followed, the two women staggering to and fro. Then Rose’s mother, who was the heavier, had Gypsy
down on the stones beating her head against them, up and down, screeching like a wild animal with the others backing off and quieting their laughter to see such fury. Rose knew that when her mother was like this nothing could stop her, and the only thing to do was hide somewhere until it was over. She remembers seeing the blood, and Gypsy lying there without moving. She remembers the crowd of angry people waving their arms at her mother, shooing her away as if she were a stray dog.

‘I don’t want to go on a picnic,’ she says.

‘This will be different,’ says her mother. ‘Just you and me, Rosie. And maybe your father if we can find him.’

‘Is it my birthday?’

‘Near enough.’

‘Can Michael come?’

‘No. Don’t mention Hanrattys to me.’

‘Can Mrs C. Rasmussen come?’

‘That’s enough of questions. See if there’s an egg.’

Rose goes into the back yard where the chickens are scratching in the mud. She unhooks the loop of wire and goes into the little hen house and feels in the straw of the first wooden box, but there is no egg. The red hen she calls Lady Alice is sitting in the next box and she shoos the hen off. Lady Alice clucks and walks around in circles while the child picks up two little eggs. In the fourth box one brown egg is half hidden. Rose puts Lady Alice’s eggs on the ground, makes her apron into a hammock with one hand, picks up the three eggs with her other hand, puts them in the hammock and brings them inside.