The Following (2 page)

Old Friendly grabbed Marcus by the arm, pulled him to his feet, making ready to thrash him.

‘Were they up there, were they, boy?’

Marcus told him yes, they were up there, father and son. ‘But they never took nothing but enough cuts for them in need.’

‘Who might that be?’ leered the old Irishman. ‘Them sluts and monkeys of the railway camps? Get your mind orf of them, Marcus. Struck, were they? I’ll strike you,’ said the worn-out old orator, missing his mark with a jerky swipe.

Marcus ducked under the eaves of wattlebark, wove round the posts of tattered messmate, then came back and stood his ground.

On the bush table newspapers, soiled teacups, bread crusts, bowerbird and bush mouse droppings spread around, the paraphernalia of a chaotic mind in the axed-out wilderness.

Light winked from a square bottle on the table.

Friendly drew up with a hee-haw expression. ‘Where did that pottle come from?’

He pulled the cork with his teeth, spat it on the packed earth floor, held the bottle neck under his nostrils, giving a sniff of misgiving – then drank with a heedless swallow.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Thin as dew on a wire, but oh with a barbed effect. They can’t buy me so easy.’ He grinned, his white lips pulled back from horsey molars. ‘Salty, sour – there’s minerals in this, and it’s oily,’ he appraised, complaining about what he suddenly so massively liked.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
S
ERGEANT
Robert McHale was told an embellishment of a lie – that the boy had seen a bullock driven at the headlamp of a train, quartered on the rails hardly before the red lamp of the guard’s van departed around the next bend of the line. And what old Friendly said, McHale accepted.

McHale, a man inclined by temperament to bear false witness in a court of law, rode out from Bathurst and up to the Wolffs’ bush camp with a case against them. But something happened to soften him, given a bowl of stew, thick with onions, browned in flour, and a dish of potatoes baked in a cast-iron oven on a bed of sparkling coals.

‘What do you know of the brand NK?’ asked McHale, gravy juices running down his chin.

‘It is the brand in your dish,’ said Albert Wolff.

It came with a bottle, McHale confessed to Marcus years later, when Marcus was a man to crawl to, confide in and look to for comfort – a square bottle with a velvety feel down the throat when the stuff was took at the invitation of the father, who seemed to shine from too much drink, from a liquid that seemed to replenish itself in a man’s fist.

‘Was it true spirits, you would have to wonder?’ recalled McHale. ‘Intoxicating, for a cert, cloudy and they said made from turnips, but you never had dreams like them but woke with a head crystal clear. More like a cure, I would call it, or an anti-dote. But to what? Anyway, as was my duty, I reported them.’

To have reported those names, the Dutchy Wolffs’, in among so many names in his week’s reports to Sydney, was to stir the bull ants’ nest. For when McHale’s report reached the office of Edmund Fosberry, Inspector-General of New South Wales Police, the big man himself made a visit to McHale in Bathurst. A country copper was never so honoured by the head of a public service. Fosberry told McHale that Wolff and son had come to New South Wales to do a job of work. It was an unspeakable job of work, unsuited to mortal men. Did McHale understand?

McHale did not understand, but said, as Fosberry made a looping sign, as with an end of rope, and made a bight in that rope, and bound that bight with a slippery turn, ‘Oh, but I am starting to, sir.’

‘Knowledge of the Wolffs’ whereabouts,’ said Fosberry, ‘is an imperative of police duty. Not to be spread around.’

‘I do understand,’ said McHale, his flesh creeping, ‘but what am I to do, when they break the law?’

‘The law is never so tight as it doesn’t have loopholes,’ said the chief with a feeble smile.

McHale rode out to New Killarney and told Marcus’s grandfather that if he valued civil relations with the force he must temper his war on the Dutchies. Old Friendly thought of that bottle of stuff, which gladdened the blood, and Marcus was sent to tell the Dutchies they could have their beast.

M
ARCUS FOUND THE WOLFFS IN
the rows of his grandfather’s corn, driving off cockatoos with sticks, the birds wheeling back across the Western Line in noisy hundreds.

See what we’ve done for you?
the Wolffs seemed to say.

Marcus got down from his pony to tell them they could keep what they took. The old Dutchy pulled a length of cord from his pocket.

‘You vant?’ he said, dangling the cord in Marcus’s face while his son drove the last cockatoos back past the corn, except for one, haughty and watchful, that roosted in the highest part of a dead tree.

‘You vant? You vatch.’

Marcus watched as the old Dutchy tied two ends of the cord in a lumpy knot. It seemed to gather life, that knot, and take motion, sliding like a mouse through his fingers and coming out into the pale of his hand then scuttling all the way back through his fingers. It was alive, peeping as if aware. Then old Fritz Wolff doused its life with a jerk.

Marcus saw how it was done. The old Dutchy kept a tension on the ends to make sure the knot hung slightly down as he ran it along. He never pulled hard but turned his head away, as if it was not his doing, that it was only the rope that had the task in hand.

The world was run by knots and methods of knots, demanding the agreement of a nudge or a tweak, and if you didn’t slant them, or snug them, or roll them they would not be right. Everyone from railwaymen to priests, storemen and underground miners had their knots of trade: end-stoppers and eye-splices, tassels, sinnets, round turns and half-hitches, occupational hitches and working bends.

Marcus had trouble stopping his pony from throwing its head back, and the Dutchies knotted him a hackamore, a bridle, from a few ends of hemp in a minute or two. Tied with a diamond knot, the hackamore fitted against the pony’s cheeks and controlled a head-tossing habit.

‘Adios,’ said Marcus, jamming his hat on his head.

Off he went, pounding along the trackside to the fettlers’ camp, whooping and hollering with the railway embankment running level past his ear.

I
T WAS THE DAY
B
OB
Dease drove his hand-trike along the rails approaching the Pinch, sending cockatoos up in scattered formations.

Clamouring the disturbed air for a place in the flock, one bird tumbled from the rest, squawked, fell bang on Bob and clawed him on the work singlet, rotating like a hag’s tits in a willy-willy as Bob pumped the trike handles.

On the corner of the Pinch, just past the Cone Hill tunnel, Bob laughed and roared, and the bird let go, fell to his feet white as a bucket of snow, heavy as a ham, its yellow crest flattened by the wind Bob made with his muscular exertions until he slowed on the long curve towards New Killarney siding, where he scooped it under his arm and it stayed there, glaring.

One hand on the cocky’s feathers, the other feeling for his watch, Bob declared he’d shaved thirty seconds from the five-mile measured section between Crystal Creek, Cone Hill, the Pinch, and New Killarney siding. The trike slowed the length of the siding with the stunned white prize on show. The bird raised its crest in the sun, looked at Bob’s daughter, Pearl, then at her friend Luana Milburn, and then at their friend Marcus Friendly.

‘Maaarcus,’ the bird was heard to croak.

‘You can thank those Dutchies of yours,’ said Bob, ‘for their work in scaring-up birds. Along the straight near the water tank there’s blood on the ballast from their butchering. I couldn’t see for them buggers for a while.’

‘Can we keep him?’ said Pearl.

‘Or I’ll wring his neck,’ said Bob.

‘He’ll be ours for ever, they live to a hundred,’ said Marcus.

‘“Ours”, the three of them’s,’ said Bob, turning aside with disdainful wonder.

They called the bird Fiver and kept him on a chain crimped to his leg at the end of the kitchen tent poles.

S
AY
F
IVER WAS FIVE YEARS
old when they got him that year of Bob’s five-mile, record-breaking pump. It means that today, when the railways are mostly all torn up, the cockatoo is one hundred and ten years old.

Fiver sits in a wire cage on a brick pathway under an old wisteria walk overlooking a railway embankment one thousand feet below, near Queanbeyan, New South Wales. He is guardian of an architectural work, the Friendly House, designed by Warner Tarbett II and built by Don Devlin, master builder.

Fiver is familiar as tumbleweed to those who tend the Friendly House as if Marcus Friendly still lived there – though the fact of the matter is that Marcus never did spend a single night there, in that house conceived ‘as the hard, physical equivalent of a tent’ in the words of Harry Johnstone’s M.Arch. thesis.

Bald, scabby, blue-skinned with the vestige of a yellow crest like a stroke of dirty crayon, Fiver waddles onto the parched ground where galahs and topknot pigeons come for seed. Who knows what a bird thinks; who knows what a bird knows at a hundred and ten?

Fiver throws his head back and screams it: ‘Maaarcus!’

P
EARL
D
EASE HAD A FLAT
, freckled face and eyes turned up at the corners. Her ginger hair was tied back in common twine. When hot and bothered, she would burst from her overalls with rounds of swearing and laughter. Luana Milburn had short black hair growing in stubby, tight curls all over her head, hardly more than a quarter of an inch long all over.

Luana’s father was the dark-skinned Kedron Milburn, the ganger from Inverarity Swamp, north-western New South Wales, and her mother, Tilly, the gaunt, nervy Englishwoman who turned her back on privilege to marry a man of race.

Marcus Friendly wore a swaggering armour of short pants and braces, a pair of stiff, poorly made boots, no socks, and an overlarge pudding-bowl hat. He was a winning little prick, said the girls’ fathers in coarse confidence to each other: Might they grow old with liking him? Might they as old men in their cold cots feel the warmth of rolling out Marcus Friendly’s name?

Pearl swung herself up onto Marcus’s pony, Stout, fitting herself to Marcus’s spine as they cantered along a dray track, and Marcus held the pony’s head correctly with his Dutchy hackamore.

If Pearl ever went to a place without a railway line and a fettlers’ camp, she wondered why it felt so empty of the life that mattered. ‘There is no way out of this dump,’ she’d say, even of places that were famous beauty spots. Pearl shivered in the steaming heat when the Deases went on their New South Wales Government Railways travel warrants to the Far North Coast. A crane and a pair of buffers hanging over a shining estuary marked the end of something big.

‘Take me
home
,’ she wailed, a temporary sort of place even so, but where the moon turned rust to gold and storms dragged skirts of rain through lightning flashes, smelting grey ballast green.

When Pearl’s parents talked about towns where they’d lived in the days before they ever knew the meaning of a siding, a trestle bridge, a high embankment or a spark-throwing engine passing in the night, Pearl was sorry for them. It was as if they’d confessed to imposturing royalty by admitting they had once been ordinary, outside the railway life altogether and not quite ashamed of themselves as Pearl would be ashamed of herself if she had not iron, soot and wayside wildflowers in her hair.

Marcus, an orphan, whose childhood from infancy was spent on New Killarney’s rough selection, said there was rarely a winter’s night when he didn’t hear the shriek of a fog whistle back in the sandstone ranges.

Marcus, Luana and Pearl – each was called to the railway life. Three bright-eyed kids, they stared into cracked platform mirrors wondering who they were, dreaming of who they might become. In that inheritance, whatever it was, they would never be alone or undefended.

The Deases lived in a tent. The Milburns, half a mile down the track in an acre of bracken fern, also lived in a tent. Both welcomed Marcus to their skittles of purloined veal and pots of nettles boiled with watercress – but the Deases’ tent was the place for the boy.

It was airy in summer, warmed in winter by a coal stove and hanging carpets blocking drafts, moonlight thrown on a canvas roof vivid as lamplight. Marcus liked the way the flap of the tent cut the sky like a metal ruler. They read Wild West novels passed on by fettlers who traded them.

Luana, visiting from her lesser palace, sat on a wooden stool wearing the striped dress her mother made her with trochus shell buttons, the frugality of its folds spread around her, island-princess-like. When she took home papers thrown from the trains, her father, Kedron, could be seen sitting on a stump inspecting the pages between his fists, a proud man who could not read a word and signed his name with a cross.

Marcus’s grandfather, dirty beard forked in the wind, foul mouth chattering, beckoned to passengers to throw their bounty from the passing trains. It was real work pushing the aches in his legs to make an accumulation of treats. At Christmas whisky bottles were dangled from carriage windows on lengths of cord – he seemed to spurn them, after a certain day, when he got his fill from the Dutchies, with their bewitching poison, as he crowed that you never knew what was enough of something unless you had too much of it.

There was ginger beer, lemonade and plum cakes, too, sewn into padded parcels and thrown for children to catch.

Pearl caught a pudding coming through the air like an artillery shell. She touched the fruity treasure to the ground with a spurt of dust. Hanging from the windows of the Western Mail, passengers gave a cheer for her tomboy ways and catcalled the old miser dancing for his pay.

Wearing the textures of their bar-soaped, sun-dried cottons, Luana and Pearl roamed free as sunshine on the lumpy earth. Their mothers called them to get away, to scram from the navvies who shouldered their picks and crowbars and came over for conversation, making the girls laugh into their big, dirty faces. Navvies were the ones who built the embankments, dug the cuttings, laid down the tracks. If anyone had a right to the spoils of the earth it was them.