The Following (9 page)

Marcus used tested strategies in his shovelling work to keep up steam. He didn’t need to crack the firebox door seal until the moment when the pressure needle started creeping back. That way the boiler had a reserve of pressure, a long-held breath that could be expelled in a surge of drive. On the next downslope he started shovelling. It was money in the bank. How it was spent was up to the driver. Every misjudgement Kristiansen made registered as a pressure gauge not meeting its mark, a tardiness with the driving wheels, and Marcus noted it.

At the rear of the train were two men – Kenneth Tarbett, train drover, and Gregory Acorn, guard. Why Acorn chose a driver for his loathing was a commonplace gripe. The railways service was an aristocracy, what came behind the front and down to the rear must be lesser. To balance, Acorn took what he could from the freight van when it offered – a trussed turkey into a sack at Christmas, and when they went down to Sydney, every brazen time, a sack of oysters, upwards of 200 pounds, trolleyed across from the Perishable Goods siding at Central and along the station concourse then up the platform and into the goods van leaving for the West.

Kenneth Tarbett’s was another sort of gripe altogether. He belonged somewhere better. Thanks to Bert Shepherd of Harden, he was putting himself right. He’d fallen in love. Calling with armfuls of flowers, paying court to Aileen Harris, the one name he never mentioned was Marcus’s but never forgot that he came after Marcus in Aileen’s heart.

On they went slowly. The line branched from the Main Southern Line, then branched again. They reached Stockinbingal on dark. After sending off passengers and turning out livestock into holding paddocks, the mixed goods was a ghost train manned by the men left to it. They slept by the side of the track, each with his own campfire and a shovelful of stars overhead.

They were brought together imperishably in the morning when they reached the long, shallow incline where the ballast trucks waited. Smoke came from the fettlers’ tent kitchens, where the Deases and Milburns cooked bread, cakes and mutton stews in their cast-iron ovens.

In the subsequent enquiry it was ruled that the mixed goods had been reported cancelled. So there was no reason why the navvies should not have released their empty wagons to run back down the slope towards the gravel pits when they did, rolling stock to the power of gravity given over.

The cockatoo Fiver climbed up on the clothesline screaming, ‘Maaarcus!’

Pearl and Luana bounced, as they had as children, in excited display, hop-stepped, piano-key-tapped along the ironbark sleepers towards the oncoming, slowing, huffing engine bringing Marcus and Ron Kristiansen forward.

Pearl and Luana did not see the shadow of the loosed wagon heaping behind them, cresting, building speed. At the last second Luana did see and, with her instinct for shadows, jumped.

Pearl went running forward, happy as sunshine, as Ron Kristiansen leapt from the footplate and dived to save Pearl at the moment they both lost sight of the sky, as a dark weight came down on them, the heavy, almost silent weeping creaking empty weight of the ballast wagon being the last of anything they knew.

I
T WAS A DESOLATE CAMP
. Paper daisies lay scythed along the trackside. Men held Marcus back from the rails. He drove his hands into a cinder heap, rubbed ashes in his face, tore at his thinning hair, tore at his shirt, tore at the cotton threads, tore at the buttons, kicked his boots against angle iron until his toecaps broke, and bruised his knuckles against a water tank.

There came the groan of Pearl’s father, Bob Dease, and her mother’s shrieks that were for ever horrified now, and Luana’s father, Kedron, drumming his ribcage, and Luana’s mother, too – that Englishwoman who married the man from the Inverarity Swampland Block – crying out to the Lord of green pastures to show pity.

At the door of the Milburns’ tent Luana sat pale as a bone, still as a bittern in the marshes, watching from a three-legged stool and holding her boy, Bub, so tightly around the ribcage he could barely breathe.

Marcus saw the train drover, Tarbett, busy with the navvies getting on with the bitter work. The attention Tarbett gave to the job was unlike anything Marcus knew of the unctuous man, and he felt there was hope in the world, although he himself was denied it.

At the cemetery plot you never saw men dig six feet down the way those navvies did when they dug the grave holes, square-sided as a tool chest, in the clay.

If Pearl had been born in the years before the Deases and Milburns ever knew the meaning of a siding, a trestle bridge, a high embankment or a spark-throwing engine passing in the night, she would not have been charmed – none of this would have happened. She would still be alive. But Pearl, you were sorry for anyone who hadn’t lived to the end of a pair of rails running through the bush.

Marcus gathered Ron Kristiansen’s effects and looked in Ron’s diary, as he must now, to protect the living, to find a letter from Luana in which he read a declaration of Wobbly intent.

Marcus burned Luana’s letter in the firebox while the engine stood on the rails – brakes locked, firebox open. Ron’s diary and Luana’s dangerous intentions burned sheet by curling sheet as Marcus gulped the scorched air.

Luana clutched Bub and asked
why
of this boy, so burdening him with the question that only an act of wilful destruction, in New Guinea, years later as a soldier in World War Two, would set Bub Maguire, son of a hanged man, free.

The One Big Union that Maguire had preached as violently as possible and Luana and Ron Kristiansen had followed as a catechism was ash in the firebox flames. Luana barely had Bub now. She barely had sanity.

The mourners set off for the bush graves set away from each other as they still are, tended in remembrance, although not for always, on the dry ground with funereal wattles blooming each August.

The cockatoo Fiver did not come back to his cage and Bob Dease said that if he got hold of that bird he would wring its neck for pity.

C
ARE OF THE BIRD PASSED
to Kenneth Tarbett, who took Fiver to Bathurst, and when Luana came there to live he carried the cockatoo over to her in its cage, to the weatherboard cottage in the poorer part of town that he so despised because he’d been born there. He’d taught Fiver to say, ‘Gimme a billycan of beer,’ ‘Who’s for a smoko, boss?’ and ‘Marcus Friendly’s the Railways Commissioner.’

No surprise whose line that was.

Aileen Harris had learned that she hardly knew who she dealt with, when she’d thought of Marcus as a marriage prospect. She told her dear friends her news, that Kenneth Tarbett was the most thoughtful and considerate young man she had ever met, and how devotedly he loved her.

I
T WAS A LONG TIME
before Tim met Luana. He’d almost given up on it, but not quite, for he returned to his hot run of thoughts when he least expected.

He was driving a rented sulky. A woman and a burly boy sat in the shade of a tree. The boy flicked pebbles at the horse.

What a surreptitious little bastard
, thought Tim.

The woman had a basket with shreds and patches of fabric spilling out the top. A sewing basket. She was a seamstress, going from house to house, stuck with a kid.

Tim still did not think, though:
Luana
.

Though he did think his heart might break if she didn’t meet his eye when he spoke to her.

‘A lift, mother?’ he offered.

She ducked her head, scorning a man’s interest disguised as kindness, as she must have thought. Gathering her basket, brushing her dress clean of twigs and dirt, she took the boy by the hand.

‘No, thank you, mister. We can walk,’ she said, and they set off. Tim gave the reins a flick and they went along side by side – woman, boy, horse and sulky. She was limping. The boy kicked stones ahead of her. She was limping and her basket was heavy. It was a hot day.

She can take me or leave me
, thought Tim,
but she won’t know I’m a confounded cripple if I don’t get down and insist on helping her
. So he stayed where he was, his crutches under the seat, flicking the reins lightly to keep the horse moving.

He looked down on her skull of tight, dark curls bobbing along, scrolled like an engraving of the sea. A dusty road stretched ahead of them.

When she stopped to shake a stone from a shoe, he waited, and before she started walking again, tipped his hat brim. ‘I suppose I don’t have all day, then,’ he said.

At this, she gave a cautious, relinquishing smile, made her decision and climbed up beside him. The way she held her basket, keeping its contents in, the way she furled her dusty skirts around her legs, ready for the adventure of getting up on the sulky, showed her spirit. The boy kept walking.

As they went along sitting side by side, the two of them, they said nothing. But that was all right. It was a lucky advantage for Tim, that hired sulky.

What Tim knew, in that first acceptance he was ever shown by a woman without a trace of pity in it, was that he knew her. Knew this stranger. Knew this woman in the way the heart knows. He never gave Luana Milburn, island princess of New Killarney siding, a second thought. So fickle is the heart supposedly. And so big.

Her voice, not mellifluous, was husky. She looked up at him. He’d never seen a face so bright for looking at – dark eyes, full lips, small determined chin.
We could do great things together
, he thought, excitement getting the better of him, as it sometimes did.

After a while the boy grabbed a stone and raised his arm in Tim’s direction.

‘I dare you,’ said Tim, affable as the boy came closer until he was almost under the wheels. Tim reached down and grabbed his arm, and the stone fell out of his hand. In one swift jerk, using the strength of ten, Tim hauled the boy up and dropped him flat on the sulky seat. There was a woof of the lungs.

Then it was her turn. ‘Oh, my goodness, Bub – look at you,’ she laughed, scooping the air from her lungs, hoot after hoot. The boy scowled. Tim chuckled.
If two can do great things together, three only triples it
, he thought. Except with this little tyrant it felt like divide and rule.

Then it came to him, ‘Bub?’

And so it was her. Luana as described by Marcus. The son by Maguire. The needles and threads. The tight curls, the small determined chin, the clear lustrous eyes, the creamy coffee-coloured complexion. It beat the band – as falling in love with a stranger he’d betrayed the woman he’d been faithful to since first ever hearing about her and then was restored to her faithfully.

And so they began. Something right was established between them. An easy agreement over small things – to keep their minds off a few big concerns, the visions, the very large, wide-spreading sorts of visions where the world of heartache was unified as one. Let these two be unified as one, heartache be damned.

When they reached where she was going, Bub jumped down and ran off. Tim grabbed for his crutches, lying under the seat unnoticed, there was no way now of avoiding it. A bloody cripple revealed. He helped her down.

Seeing how it was for Tim only made Luana think more of him, she would tell him in time, that he was stronger than she’d thought, to have the strength she’d already seen in him, and the strength for his disadvantage too. Thus she began to love him.

Each day after that he visited her, on that wrong side of town. From shyness or fear of losing advantage, it was a while before he told Marcus. By then it was settled: there would be a registry office wedding. Tim’s happiness knew no bounds, and Luana was the one who said, ‘Our best man shall be Marcus.’

Y
OU COULD AVOID RUNNING INTO
someone in a country town for years on end, but if you wanted never to see them again the job was harder. Aileen and Marcus managed to avoid meeting again until well into the 1920s.

Seeing Marcus coming down the street Aileen crossed to the other side, dreading the correct greeting Marcus chose, not letting her get away.

‘Mrs Tarbett, if I’m not mistaken!’

Her son, Warner Tarbett II, was a six-year-old wearing a lace collar and a flopsy bow tie.

‘By Jove, here’s quite the little man!’ Marcus took a shine to the kid, he didn’t know why, except Warner had a look of intelligence and curiosity.

As time went on, Marcus and Aileen found themselves on the same hospital board committee, arguing the same advancement, the same efficiencies and kindnesses. It was possible to speak with each other face to face over committee tables, but outside the committee rooms it was bitter disparagement. Aileen stood on the opposite side of politics from Marcus. Always had done, she wanted it known.

‘Lilywhites!’ she said with scorn – of the demoted men after the big strikes, and Marcus Friendly prominent among them. Those men and Marcus were marked for life. They were back in the railway service in their former roles but without seniority or former rates of pay. Welcomed back, so they ought to be grateful – let them remember what looking out for themselves at a time of their country’s need meant to their country in terms of reward.

A
N OLD
I
RISHMAN HAD WASTED
his words. Marcus called them back. Equality, justice and a fair deal for all. Easy to say, harder to get. It was now the 1930s. Poverty was a word unspoken, through a surfeit of pride, but a condition of life – plenty still went without food or a job and Marcus looked out for them.

Wearing suit coat, tie, waistcoat, gold fob watch, with a grey felt hat pulled low on his forehead, tilted up at the back, Marcus was never without a cigarette burning between his fingertips and a length of string in his pocket. His face was carved from soot. Meeting by meeting, sentence by sentence of argument and resolution, Marcus rebuilt the union.

Walking the railway yards of Harden and Granville under the yellow moons of station lamps, he tested how far along a line of ambition a man could go and still keep hold of the two ends of a question.

A starveling boy on a rickety bed of sacking looked out on the same stars as a fabled king.