The Following (11 page)

‘Here’s where the arcade comes in,’ said Tarbett, ‘a screened space between two lots of rooms, overhanging eaves in a house facing north giving shade in summer, letting sun through early in winter, climbing up the inside walls. It’s a verandah inside a house.’

No verandahs were allowed under postwar austerity rules that the bloke himself had brought in, so argument was pointless – there would be no verandahs, whatever anyone thought. There would be an arcade.

Don Devlin did not speak of the job as a rushed job, but they all knew that if the house wasn’t finished in time the bloke would never live there. It raised the question: ‘The bloke was born in a bark hut. He’s lived in railway barracks all over the joint. The last few years he’s lived at the Kurrajong Hotel in a room where you couldn’t swing a cat. Why does he need a house at all?’

‘It’s none of your business,’ said Don.

Marcus Friendly sat under a tree and watched them work. They liked seeing him in the shade of the old yellow box tree, the honey tree, talking to Tarbett with plans spread over a card table, blueprints held down by a rock. He took an interest in details but kept his distance. He was one of those old-time, working-class serving members whose climb through the workingman’s ranks from railway sheds’ apprentice to national secretary of the union to parliamentarian and wartime cabinet minister had won him the honour he craved – to sit in the place where the worker was king, on a leather bench in the Commonwealth of Australia’s parliament, in Canberra. First as a backbencher, then as Munitions minister, then as Treasurer, War Cabinet member, and then, just before the war ended, stepping up to the top job that was lately taken from him, leaving him this shell with a need for shelter.

Tarbett cajoled the men, demanding a standard of finish they’d hardly thought they could meet before the job started. They learned that Tarbett could be grateful, admitting, in his own way, that he didn’t know everything. As the weeks passed, Tarbett admitted that he never needed to say anything twice to any of Don’s men.

‘You bastards are good,’ he said. ‘You are bloody good.’

‘As if we didn’t know it,’ they answered, though not in those words. In fact, with no words at all.

At smoko each day Marcus set the billy on a fire of sawhorse offcuts. Signalling it was ready, he threw in a handful of tea-leaves. Ross Devlin, Don’s fifteen-year-old, ran over and carried the billy back to the men.

Ever since Ross was born – since a son was born – Don Devlin had spoken of taking on his son as his carpentry apprentice. Don liked seeing Ross and the bloke getting on. Each generation threw their achievements to the top of a pile from where it was easier for the next to take off. In Don’s family the connections went back to immigrants from Ireland. So did the bloke’s.

‘Show him the stone, Roscoe,’ he said one day. ‘Tell him the story.’

Ross shook wood shavings from his hair and took the sharpening stone from the toolbox – a smooth grey block, chisel-scooped. Don had carried it in his carpenter’s pouch since his apprenticeship days in the 1920s, when his father had given it to him after his father’s father had passed it on.

‘It’s from the old country,’ said Ross, showing it to the bloke.

‘The Emerald Isle,’ said Marcus. ‘One day you’ll go there.’

He made it sound like a promise, a prediction. He had that sort of faith in his own statements. You could see why. The smallest impulse he’d ever felt had been magnified into proof of it.

The men coo-eed for their billy. Ross left the bloke holding the stone, warming it in his hands. As the hours went by Ross did not know how to ask for the stone back. He did not want to ask for it back! Over the weeks that followed he felt a satisfaction. The bloke could keep the stone for as long as he liked, leaving Ross with a feeling of being big in the world, just to know the bloke had something of his and was warming it.

‘Where’s that sharpening stone?’ asked Don after a couple of days.

‘Back in the toolbox,’ said Ross, waiting for his father to say otherwise. When he didn’t, Ross felt his place in the world expand out from his father’s, more, out from the bloke’s even, and the world the bloke knew, expanding the wishes of a boy to make a life unlike theirs but without betraying them (although he did not think of that).

The men didn’t gossip about Marcus Friendly much to anyone – not to their families, not to their mates. Around him they displayed discretion, although it became fairly widely known who they were building for. Not just the bloke, either, but for a woman.

The site was in New South Wales across the Federal Capital border, east of Queanbeyan near the railway line. It was on farmland, on a rocky ridge. In the mornings when the men came to work they found sheep droppings all over the place. The bloke was paying for the job out of his own pocket. He’d bought the land from a woman called Rosemary MacKinlay and her husband, Bruce. Farther back in the title search it was owned by a prominent swell, Sir William ‘Billyum’ Wignall. Before that, by the bantamweight bigmouth, Bounder Morrison.

The MacKinlays were landed types, cousins, they let you know, of ‘the Bounder’.

They rode up on the next ridge, using binoculars to see what was going on. They were not the sort who’d ever voted for Marcus Friendly – they were the sort who had voted him out. The day he’d lost the election to the other side was the happiest day of their lives. ‘The Bounder’ was not the poet of the working class. He’d taken to workers with a poisonous pen, mocking them as lazy, venal, whining and quaint.

The MacKinlays’ liking of a curly-haired Irish Catholic boy of working-class attachment was however unrestrained. They played on his excitement, the light in his eyes when Ross first saw equine flesh with its mahogany hide. The horsey young wife, Rosemary, put him on a biddable mare and trotted him around in a circle. Soon enough Ross jumped logs, pranced and reared.

‘You are a natural rider,’ said Rosemary MacKinlay.

‘It’s great,’ said Ross.

‘Bless you,’ she said.

‘Watch out for those people,’ said his father. ‘They’ll suck your blood out.’

Another of them, a visitor from up north, was Bounder Morrison’s son, Kyle, the original in the ten-gallon hat, ‘Prince of the Dryblow Races’, a born-to-the-saddle, handsome young coot (as his father once described him), now sun-wrinkled and approaching middle age.

The men good-dayed him riding past. Tugging his hat, Kyle Morrison angled his head as if they’d thrown a bucket of water over him. His horse stepped over timber offcuts by lifting its knees and putting its feet down like half-shelled coconuts.

Marcus said, ‘Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, sit like his grandsire cut from alabaster?’

‘Search me,’ said Don.

M
ARCUS
F
RIENDLY WAS SICK
. You could see it in the looseness of his suit coat over his frame, in his wheezy lungs. Some days he didn’t get out of the Holden, just rested his chin on his forearm and called Ross over.

It was the voice Ross remembered wrapping around him like a scratchy blanket – the wartime speeches, hale and commanding on the radio, soft as wind through the grass to a boy of seven or eight or nine.

Friendly spoke about rebuilding the nation to make it last, that he would move mountains to do so. To Ross it was literally proved. While the whole country listened on the ABC, Marcus Friendly had pressed the plunger on the first big explosives charge in the Snowies in ’49. It was, at the time, a momentous impression the bloke made on a kid as Ross stood in the school playground, watching the speakers of the portable amplifiers ruffle as the blast went off. There was a feeling of being brought into the care of the bloke.

To Don, proud of his son for recognising it, easy himself with Friendly in conversation, the bloke was a man apart. It went with the job he’d risen to. For the fact of the matter was that the success of a politician as a man reduced him as a man. When a politician said ‘fight’ or ‘build’, it was not in the way a man fought, bloody knuckled, or built with the force of his hands and the blow of a hammer.

A politician was a man apart, with power lent to him while it lasted, a sack of bones in a suit coat thereafter. Talk about having your blood sucked out.

Marcus Friendly was a backbencher now. Backbenchers were sad, unhealthy blokes, eating too much, exercising hardly at all, working with words on paper that got swallowed up or thrown out or changed or forgotten or ripped into squares and spiked on a nail in a dunny.

Nothing was exact in politics. It was why revolutionaries were born – to cut it sharply out. To ‘build’ in organised politics was often to destroy. An exact measurement could be trusted on a building job; it served, gave shelter. Nobody came along afterwards and knocked the work down, as happened in the cabinet room; or after an election, as it had to Friendly; to a party like his with an ideal of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Yet with all that said, all the sadness and depletion rolled up, Don and the men were on the bloke’s side – every one of them – even the lone blazing-red commo among them.

When you looked into Friendly’s eyes, he remained the bloke, so in the end it made no difference who did what with their muscle, who was hard, who was soft, who was lean and sinewy, or who had congestive heart failure through sitting around on couches in the House of Reps. They loved him. They loved the grey man.

It was said, back in the First World War, that he’d died, that something in him had died, someone close to him had died taking him down, but that that particular death (of a woman he loved) released him into the calmness of his capacities. As if someone had whispered to the bloke, who was broken,
this fits
.

Whenever there was a problem getting supplies, Friendly located whatever it was that was short. He made trunk-line calls and wrote letters, and soon enough sheeting iron, seasoned hardwood, scarce plumbing fittings and even scarcer window glass arrived on a goods train. Of course, Warner Tarbett II rejected anything not up to scratch, whatever trouble the bloke took, yet he only seemed to arouse amusement and affection in the bloke’s eyes.

Away down the bottom of the long gully there was a siding where the trains stopped. The bloke could be seen having a word to the train staff while the carters loaded materials onto a lorry to bring it the thousand or so feet up the winding track to the house on the ridge.

T
HE MEN CAME OVER TO
Tarbett’s point of view one by one. They decided that any house they built would be a place that would last, whatever they personally thought of its look. They would build no other sort for the bloke and his missus, if that’s who she was, a woman they didn’t know but speculated had him gripped by the braces while time ran away from him like sand down a grate.

‘Speed it up,’ said Don.

Admiration and striving mixed with despair were the marks of the job. Friendly, they had the impression, was waiting for the house to be finished before he allowed himself to be finished. It gave the feeling that each nail they drove was a nail in his coffin. That being the case, if they went slower, would he live longer? It gave a new slant to bludging. If they never finished the house he would live forever.

Visible progress didn’t mean all that much to the men as everything moved forward at a steady pace with their heads down in the understanding of how work went. Some days saw more progress than others as framing advanced, wall sections went up, trusses were set high into place, and the bloke could see a shape emerging.

He walked around appraising angles, his thumbs in his trouser tops, felt hat tipped back from his forehead, his handsome dog face the colour of mud. They guessed how it was for him bending his whole life towards the end of something for the greater good, putting his concentration into one important part to the exclusion of his personal wellbeing nigh unto death.

A job – any job – dissolved detail into a coming shape, and later, when all was done, there was a feeling of the shape happening of its own accord and the sweat and bone-ache of the individual who made it happen of no apparent matter. The bloke had had his eye on the future in that way, even now – the way a father, thought Don, had his eye on his son.

There was something Warner Tarbett told Don from growing up in Bathurst – that the bloke’s old-time secretary, Luana Milburn, had no children from her marriage to the press relations man, Atkinson, but had a son, Bub, by a Wobbly, Maguire, who was hung in Bathurst Gaol in ’16. That son was the digger Bub Maguire, who’d taken a grenade in the face in New Guinea in a muddy, leech-infested canvas tent town not far down from the Owen Stanleys in 1942.

D
ON DIDN’T LIKE WOMEN COMING
onto the worksite unless it was a mother, wife or daughter bringing a bite of smoko that a man had forgotten. Sometimes a girlfriend came swanning up, intruding into the place of work, daring to be denied and not being denied as her man introduced her to Don. Then it was made clear that, her errand over, it was time to vamoose.

The day the woman came who they’d all talked and speculated about – Eunice Shepherd, a nursing sister at the district hospital – Don did not send her back. On the dusty track winding up from a thousand feet below, where the Holden spat gravel and surged upwards, she made her first appearance. She came most days thereafter and was silently agreed on by Don as exempt from the woman rule.

‘Shep,’ they called her.

She had a white, pinched, fluttery manner, but there was something more to her – yeah, a sweet figure, and when she smiled a softness was there, colour came into her cheeks.

The men liked her. Liked looking at her. Liked the way Shep took on the bloke and his architect over what a kitchen, bathroom and sitting room should have for the comfort of the bloke and for more than just a bloke.

Just by speaking in a quiet manner Shep got her way, and they all were slain. They all went giddy on her – every man jack of them, married or single, had a flame flickering for Shep, including Warner Tarbett II, who sucked his lips and listened without interrupting as she charmingly and subtly told him off.