The Following (7 page)

Socialism as a creed was on a sliding scale, that was the trouble. At one end, Marcus’s and Tim’s end, it created opportunities for free men to better themselves in their own way – socialism with a vote. At the other end it became violent, where socialism told men what to do and be – men to be killed just for the idea of what they weren’t, plug a copper, do it.

Nobody predicted the body of the state getting hateful itself. The New South Wales government, new in this world, was invented by the workingman’s own imagination, argued under their gum trees, on their clay-gold creekbanks and in their co-operative clubs, railway barracks and underground miners’ crib rooms, in engine drivers’ change rooms and by resolutions during party conferences at Trades Hall, and given connection to history at the School of Arts.

They seemed to have had it all, but when the vote went against their leaders, their leaders changed parties. It was like that dream where you were strangled by your own hand. Everybody had that dream now.

That there was a strangler – a public strangler – in their midst, acting on their behalf to make the law whole, was just to bring it down to democratic daylight.

Each week now there was a meeting in the anteroom of the newspaper offices. The plan of a big strike was underway. A striker and a Wobbly might meet themselves in the one person turning the corner of a street.

Marcus was getting this lesson in his love life, too – how you could be seen one way, yet be another, and not be able to escape what had not yet actually been acted out. For he’d heard Miss Harris had them as good as engaged.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Timmy,’ said Marcus. ‘You don’t stand in a public street and raise a weapon against the law, screaming abuse to draw attention to yourself and then blow out the brains of a copper, expecting to get a round of applause.’

‘The copper had his back turned,’ agreed Tim. ‘He was doing his paperwork at the end of a long day. If a principle is in a person, tied up in a job, you don’t kill that person to get rid of the principle.’

‘Not by our lights, brother. They practically begged to be hung,’ said Marcus. ‘But if you want to know if I could have sent them to the gallows, even believing what I do – believing they should have been hung – I don’t know.’

‘You mean, say if you were a judge, Marc?’

‘Say I was Caesar. It’s a good one, isn’t it, cob?’

‘It’s a perfect Plato,’ said Tim, bandying words from Philosophy Down the Ages, held weekly at the School of Arts with a rotating leader, and Marcus one of them. Tim wondered if Marcus was stepping into politics just to find out how far an honest, ordinary man could give himself to the needs of State.

Marcus said nothing about Luana left with Bub, money sent when he could, meetings with her when trains went through. Last week he’d given her an envelope of notes. As they talked, Ron Kristiansen looked on from the footplate while Bub, seven years old, imitated Marcus in a fit of glowing temptation. It was a terrible thing. To be born into knowledge as your father was hung. And yet not to know it quite yet. For on that day Bub’s father still lived.

Until stopped by his mother with a curt little smack, Bub copied the one step to the side and one step back that Marcus made in his anxiety to be of help to Luana.

‘For God’s sake, show him, take him up on the engine,’ said Luana. Thin, worn, shrill, she had not eaten more than a crumb for weeks on end. A flame that licked her was all her sustenance, a flame of burning chill that demanded, for its life, ideas be stronger than feelings.

With Bub scooped up, kicking and twisting, Marcus showed him the engine – the big wheels, the moon lamps, the grinning cowcatcher. Ron Kristiansen stepped down from the footplate, giving the impression of diplomacy in a balanced exchange with a child as witness.

The next time Marcus looked along the platform he saw Ron and Luana standing together outside the Ladies’ Waiting Room. They had the famished look of a higher ardour, religious, or, as Marcus dared think now, political.

Luana and Bub had gone on to Tottenham that day. Marcus swore he would look after the boy. An orphan knew an orphan’s wants. But something was to emerge in Bub like a snake from where it was throttled to death in the father. Luana could not control him. She would make another life to save herself, to bury herself in.

Marcus narrowed his eyes, knuckled them, rubbed them red – so tired they were from nights of reading, study and locomotive driving overtime. He lowered his voice and looked at his hands for a moment of mystification.

‘Everyone reckons they know the choker,’ he said. ‘They think the worst of their own best friends. The town’s hopping with the thought of it. We all think he’s one of us, but which?’

‘Whoever it is must be off his flaming lid,’ said Tim. ‘It would have to go with the job. You would have to ask the candidate, “Are you off your flaming lid, mate?” If you are, sign on the dotted line.’

‘We ask it of someone to do it for us,’ said Marcus.

It was possible almost to inhabit the thinking spaces of that gnarly Irish–Australian head.

‘You think he was on the train, Marc? You think you and Ron Kristiansen brought him over?’

‘I do,’ said Marcus.

‘Say it quietly, then.’

‘After we pulled in last night, and the passengers got down, I looked back along the platform, and you know how it happens, Timmy, how a face jumps out? One face in a hundred? A bloke – stocky, stolid, face like the moon – flushed, pink, rosy, red – a bushfire red, sweating, a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, carrying a sack. That’s what knocked me, the sack told me everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘A constrictor knot, in the neck of the sack.’

‘What was in the sack?’

‘When I walked home I went down into the back lane behind the police residence . . .’

‘You were trying to prove . . . ?’

‘That he might have been the dunny man, mate, but didn’t have a cart.’

‘Fill me in, Marc. You’re getting ahead of me.’

‘There’s a side window, a kitchen window. Imagine the copper, McHale, pouring a drink, a drink pale as Lourdes water, the bloke tossing it back. Imagine a man standing on a chair, the shape of a rope in his hands, nine turns up the doubled lengths, they say, is the way to go with the knot because a cat has nine lives, and this knot’s for the last one of them, while others say there’s thirteen turns, as it’s the unluckiest knot, bar none. Except I’ve heard eight turns is best, Timmo.’

‘Eight – what’s that mean as a number?’

‘Eight is seven plus one, the start of a new rule, a new order, the death and the resurrection and the life ever after.’

‘Well, I never.’

‘Imagine shadows on the wall, magnified, from a point near the ceiling six feet down to the floor, a twist of fingers knotting a rope. My bloke takes a bow when it is done. You might remember how I said, Tim – there was a bloke I knew – courtly, unbothered –’

‘I know which bloke you knew, Marc. The Dutchy, the Deutsch, the Boche. Change the subject, Marc. If you think he’s the one, I feel sick. The way you talked about him he was good, a good man.’

‘He’s the same man,’ said Marcus. ‘Whatever he is.’

‘My thinking can’t go that far, Marc. You are the one, so watch it. You are the bloke, Marc. You are the chosen, brother. Get us through to the end, wrap us up worthwhile. They’re waiting inside there for you, in the meeting room. Don’t go the other way, Marc. Stuff a rag in it. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Want a smoke?’ said Marcus. He rolled one, flared a match, took a drag, passed it over. Tim looked at the lung-buster between his fingers before handing it back.

‘No, but thanks,’ he said. ‘Chuck it in the gutter. I’m through.’

Normally Tim was a fumatorium with smoke coming out from under his shirt collar. But he knew the power of absolute limitations. The man with the crutch always did. It was the same when he’d shot the hat, according to Marcus, that might have had a head under it, the one that turned out to be a paper bag floating in the wind, as Tim knew all along it was.

Tim was fixed on finding whatever was practical to stand against in Marcus, yet without breaking their bond.

Marcus went into the meeting. Tim went back to his line-caster.

As Marcus sat through that meeting, pondering decisions involving the railways; the government; the unions; the accursed, doomed Wobblies; the war and the conscription referendum dodging between yes and no, it was as if the man who was the bit player had the choices of history. The handsome, sooty man wearing a suit and tie.

Marcus emerged from the meeting after five hours of rotten wrangling, compromise and vituperation to sum it all up. They sat on the park bench again, the late afternoon sun burning a hole in the clouds.

‘It’s a strike,’ said Marcus. ‘We’re all going out. It’s the big one.’

S
OME MONTHS LATER A MESSENGER BOY
ran through the Harden rail yards jumping rails and dodging rolling stock, looking for the fireman Marcus Friendly. When he found Friendly oiling an engine, working himself out from under the wheels of a locomotive, he produced a letter from his canvas satchel.

‘Watch how Friendly takes it,’ he’d been tipped by the depot clerks. ‘Wait around for his flaming reaction.’

Marcus Friendly – the engine driver who’d been demoted to fireman for his role in the strike. Other men had caved in, accepted lesser conditions to hold their post and retain their gold watches. They were often married men with hungry mouths to feed. Some, like Ron Kristiansen, were not.

Marcus wiped his hands on a ball of cotton waste and took the envelope between two fingers. He delayed ripping it open while the boy stood there. The pink, decorated paper and the name of the sender, Miss Pearl Dease, of Tottenham Rail, had the Harden office talking.

‘Anything else, sonny?’

‘They said, gee, you’d want to send an answer.’

‘I’ve got an answer for them all right.’

‘What?’

‘Tell those old maids I’ll knock their teeth into their arses if they make a donkey of you ever again.’

Marcus watched the boy go then tore the letter open and flicked the pages flat against his knee. Pearl. She was the one. It was in plain daylight, the stumble of explanation expressed in a sudden touch.

Marcus and Pearl had met up at Tottenham when the strike was in its first weeks. It was after the worst game of the rugby season when Marcus played inside-centre.

‘Is this who I think it is?’ She’d wrapped her arms around his muddy neck and taken him by the waist, pulling him close so that he felt the whipstick life of her.

‘Not married?’ she’d said.

‘Not yet,’ answered Marcus, holding her eye. His engagement to Aileen Harris had never been an engagement, and now, holy smoke, never would be.

Marcus and Pearl dragged each other along through the back lanes of Tottenham after that cold, wet, rambunctious game, taking the long way round because Marcus didn’t want to be seen in the streets, the few there were. When they stopped now and then, their cheeks blazed and their breaths tangled.

Tottenham was a town still under the spell of the murdered constable and the two men who had shot him. It was six months since they were hung in Bathurst Gaol.

There’d been a head-knocking stubbornness to the game owing to the names of the two towns standing for such arguments, conflicts and rages as could never be resolved. Bathurst players were from the railways, Tottenham players from the mines. Each town stood for something in workingmen’s hopes, but the players themselves did not exactly share the same hopes and fears. Not everyone playing for Bathurst was behind what was done at the end of a rope there, and hardly anyone playing for Tottenham, surely no-one at all anymore, wanted the world smashed wide by bloody revolution, anarchy and uproar.

Marcus and Pearl went to Marcus’s room at Telfer’s boarding house, where a silky-oak dresser weighted against a doorhandle secured privacy, though not discretion. A knock at the door and the querulous voice of Aileen Harris asked before she stole away, ‘
Marcus? Are you in there? Marc?
’

After leaving Telfer’s without answer, Aileen had waited for Marcus in the dining room of the Railway Hotel, and then, when he didn’t appear as arranged, went to the station. There Marcus appeared and made his goodbyes just as the football special blew its departure whistle, blaming his lateness in seeing her on a blow to the head from a high tackle and the hickeys on his neck from being throttled in a scrum.

Now Marcus with a confused grin stood in his overalls, a dented two-gallon oilcan at his feet, considering his share of happiness with a love letter crammed in his pocket. When he considered Pearl Dease and the days that were, and the ones to be, caution had no play with him.

Marcus’s life principle, earnestly put, was to organise for the sake of the workingman’s cause. He said no to enlisting in the AIF for this reason. A voluntary army was his choice. Equality over all his testament. A workingman’s government was his faith. He defended as citizen the principle men fought for with guns. Poison-pen letters, eggs and rotten tomatoes thrown at him would not change that. Better to stay. Make the fight here.

The railways as a principle of organisation shaped Marcus’s understanding. His ideals had brought him down in the big strike and destroyed his expectations. He was no longer on marriageable pay.

Up to forty trains a day were put together at Harden. Pairs of rails descended through switching levers at junction points leading to pairs of rails at the lower end of the shunting yards where the trains were assembled. A braid of points, switching levers and signal lamps stood between life and death. A shunter died here a month ago. Weeks before that, a man lost a leg. The messenger boy running with Pearl’s letter was lucky to be alive the way he came flying over the rails with his flapping satchel, looking neither to left nor right. Every few minutes goods wagons were uncoupled and released, brakeless, down the incline. They did not travel fast, but there was no stopping them once released as they clanked over points and rumbled past shunters before juddering on the buffers of the next wagon in line. The background noise of the yards was the clash of steel plates slammed against steel plates, an orchestration to Marcus of the gods’ thunder, and in later years he would also say, though never dance to it, jazz.