The Mary Smokes Boys (11 page)

“You don’t believe it. I know when you’re lying, Grey.” She
stood up and brushed the earth and leaves from her skirt and shins. “Come on, let’s go.”

It was too hot to fish anymore. They made their way back through the wood.

They stopped to rest on a buttressing quandong root. Irene had carried with her the last exchanges of the conversation on the creek.

“It doesn’t matter anyhow. I own you. All things belong to the people who love them most.”

 

SHE DID NOT go to school. She waited at the gate until her brother’s truck was out of sight. She walked across the disused railway tracks, stopping to scratch the nose of a long-haired highland pony that lent over rusted barbed wire. She walked past the sweet-smelling sawmill to climb her favourite fig tree. She stayed cradled in a massive bough, daydreaming, half-sleeping through the afternoon until Eccleston’s truck pulled up beside her.

“How long’s school been taught in trees?”

She shrugged and smiled.

“Where are you going?”

“Into the hills to check traps. You want to come?”

He had meant this as a joke. Girls were uncomfortable around him at the best of times, without the sanguinary facts of the way he made his living. He had an intimidating frame, and he was half-caste. He knew parents told their children even worse stories about half-castes than full-bloods.

But Irene smiled and climbed down.

He put out his cigarette and cleared the seat for her.

GREY DROVE TO BIZZELL’S SERVICE STATION AT THE southern edge of town. The owner, Frank Bizzell, was a hermetic and nervous man of sixty odd years who was frightened of missing anyone’s money as they rolled through Mary Smokes. On a whim he would ask Grey to keep the service station open until midnight rather than close at a sensible hour. Then Grey was meant to sleep in a fold-out iron bed in the back room, to guard the money. Bizzell did not trust him to take the cashbox home.

There were three old latch-handle pumps out front braced by transplanted palms. The palms and a shabby wooden toilet and one yellow-flowering wattle tree were festooned with Christmas lights regardless of the season. Bizzell lived in Ipswich now and after a certain hopeless hour there was no one to stop Grey doing as he pleased. When it was quiet he would sit and read newspapers from the rack.

He read again of the man who had been killed on Highway 54. The newspaper said the “violent event” was still unresolved and likely ever would be. He thought how someone could drive a man off the road here in the middle of the night and be at the far north coast or the desert the next day. He put the paper down and looked toward the invisible highway. He wondered why the man in the newspaper story was killed. Drugs. A gambling debt. Perhaps he was a police informer. And perhaps he was killed for nothing–idiocy and boredom. You could not know. You could not assume anything had a meaning anymore. And those perhaps-murderers
had fled into oblivion and impunity on the highway that even now might be concealing them at unmemorable stops, amidst people in transit who did not recognize that anyone belonged to any place, and so could not tell fugitives apart.

He was near asleep in his chair when Angela came in to the counter. He checked the clock on the wall that showed three empty revolutions must be made before midnight. Angela’s hair was out of the careful place she always set it. Her eyes were bloodshot and weepy with tiredness.

“I thought you were at the restaurant,” Grey said.

“No. It’s just old Minh and his wife tonight. I’ve been to Toogoolawah, to the bridge club.”

No money ever changed hands and no serious cards were played at the house party called the bridge club. Instead it gave occasion for a number of the district’s bored wives to get distractedly drunk.

Angela put an orange juice on the counter.

“Also a packet of menthols.”

Then Grey remembered Irene. He had forgotten to collect her from school. No doubt she had waited.

He took the cigarettes from the stand behind him. Angela handed him a ten-dollar note and leant on her elbows on the counter.

“Are you all right?’ He put her change down in front of her.

She stayed leaning on the counter, now with her head on her forearms. She was drunker than even her eyes had told.

“How did you get home?”

“The bus. I took the bus.”

There was a late-night bus that passed through Toogoolawah, but Grey was sure it made its last trip an hour ago. The road from there to here was completely unlit. She must have walked, else fallen asleep at the Mary Smokes bus shelter and only now woken up.

“Sit down for a bit.”

He took a chair from the back room and set it down beside her.

“How are your bridge friends?”

“Tolerable. Barely.”

He could imagine. He had met a few of them.

Angela picked up a women’s magazine and began leafing through it. She stopped at a picture of a European prince having his boots shined on a cluttered street, perhaps in the Americas, while his heavily made-up princess looked on smiling.

Angela sighed. “I’d polish boots forever if just for one day someone would polish mine. Just once to feel important.”

Grey could think of no response to such a strange remark.

She collected her cigarettes and juice from the counter and stood up.

“I’m all messed up tonight, Grey. Don’t take any notice of me.”

“Why don’t you rest here a while?”

“Can I smoke?”

“Sure.”

She sat down again and lit a cigarette.

“Thank you. You’re very kind. I’ve told you that before. You have a kind face, you know?”

He forced a smile. Angela dragged heavily on her cigarette.

“Can I say something serious to you?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not well suited to family life, Grey. That’s why I chose badly the first time around–a husband, I mean. I didn’t choose a proper man but a criminal. You know, he couldn’t sleep in the moonlight,” she laughed. “He was crazy. He’d sit alone at the saleyards where he worked, all night long in a two-metre square dogbox and watch the empty road and drink. I couldn’t have chosen worse. It sort of ruined me for everything that came after. I hope you understand.” She sighed. “Do you have an ashtray? And I was pretty enough when I was younger. Plenty of men would’ve had me.” She stared out the window. “I’m not much of
a mother to Irene. I don’t need to tell you that. Anyway, she has no time for me. That’s natural.”

“She likes you.”

“Oh yes, very mildly. I’m not a good mother, Grey. I’m not a companion to your father, either. You know that too. Though I try, with my limited abilities. I was pretty once,” she repeated sadly. “Once I could’ve had anyone. You want to know something ridiculous? I thought since at least one beautiful girl had loved your father, well–that he would look after me.”

Grey did not say that marital happiness was as foreign to their house in the time of his mother as it was now, more so; so foreign that neither he nor Irene knew what gestures it made, only that it was absent.

He wished he had remembered Irene tonight. He wondered what she was doing. Probably mopping out the kitchen of the restaurant, tired by now with the work and with trying to understand Minh Quy’s broken English.

All at once Angela became embarrassed by what she had said. They fell into a long unbroken silence. Grey looked out the window and lapsed into a desultory gaze over the outskirts of town. The grass and sorghum, the iron pylons …

“I can take you home if you like.”

“What time do you finish here?”

“Not till twelve, but I can shut the place up and drive you.”

“No. Thanks. I’ll walk.”

“It won’t take two minutes to close up.”

“Could you?”

On the drive he thought about going to get Irene, but guessed she was asleep at Amy’s.

 

WHEN GREY RETURNED, the service station was enveloped by silence. The clock lost its power to describe time, and the shapeless hours of time out of time were coming. Those hours came falling in the dark outside to isolate the roadhouse from the world of sleeping men and women awaiting tomorrow.

He sat on a step of concrete at the back of the service station and looked up at the Milky Way. Sirius burned brightly in the northeast. He could not name the other stars without Irene. There was no point watching the road. Nobody else was stopping. He lay against the wall beside the back door to observe the vigilance that at this hour became absurd. There was no one coming and no one to watch him waiting for no one to come and so no reason to stay.

He did not know he had fallen asleep when her voice perforated his dreams.

“You forgot me.”

“I’m sorry. You should have asked Minh to take you home.”

He rubbed his eyes and looked inside at the clock. The restaurant would have closed long ago. He knew now she had gone to Amy’s house and stayed up with her in order to make him worry. And he had fallen asleep.

“Let’s go. I can get up early and come back. I wonder should I leave the truck here, in case old Bizzell comes by in the morning. I can get Ook to drop me back.”

“Leave it here. I feel like walking.”

So he left the floodlight on and left his truck parked out front as it should be and they walked home in the dark.

 

IRENE TIED HER hair and walked barefoot on the asphalt. She carried the new shoes Grey had bought her that had given her blisters. He took a squashed packet of cigarettes from his jeans and lit one. No cars passed them. At the bottom of Solitary Hill they looked up and saw the giant white drive-in screen. Then came the plain and glistening crops. Then they were home.

 

ANGELA WAS DRUNK and asleep and their father was at the railway. Grey and Irene lounged in the living room in a breeze that ebbed and flowed through the house. The walk home had more excited them than made them sleepy. It was half-past two. Irene lit a kerosene lamp. The house had electric light–and
electricity when Grey or Angela remembered to pay the bill–but the girl had grown up with firelight.

He knew he should send her to bed as tomorrow was another school day. But they talked of their mother. As always he was disappointed at how little he remembered. He wanted to tell his sister stories from his own experience, but most of what he had, that formed any kind of narrative, were second-hand accounts. And his own few stories she had heard many times. He had used them up. He possessed fragments now, flashes of isolated detail.

He told her that their mother could speak Irish.

“She spoke it to me sometimes.”
Ish misha
Grey, he remembered. That was all.

He stood up and went to a red-painted tin chest in the room where Angela lay insensible between a bottle of bourbon and the same magazine full of aristocrats, film stars and business people she had flicked through at the service station. He returned to the living room and handed his sister a leather-bound quarto.

“Here,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s our mother’s. Grandma said this is her writing–a few poems and notes, but mostly lessons in Irish.”

Irene’s dark eyes ran across her mother’s handwriting. The writing was made at the same age she was now. She palmed a photograph that fell out of its place in the pages and onto the floor. The photograph was the same Grey always kept, that he had used as a bookmark since he began perusing the notebook without comprehension a fortnight ago.

“Do you think I follow her?”

“Grandma saw a resemblance.”

Irene ran her fingers around the rusty edge of the photograph then placed it back in the notebook.

“You have her smile,” Grey said at last. Then he felt he must be dreaming. As she knelt on the floor before him in the
attitude of study, he realized that mother and daughter were all but identical. She shifted her feet beside her, raised her face and furrowed her brow to ask what he was looking at. The vision did not vanish.

How had he not seen it before? Were he asked to describe their common features he would have been at a loss; besides the polarity of their hair colour, their mother’s eyes were blue where Irene’s were darkest brown; and where their mother’s skin was golden and perfect, Irene’s was pale and her cheeks were wind-burnt red. Yet for all that, he saw now there were certain habitual gestures–the eyes-closed smile, the furrowed-brow frown–gestures that recalled his mother perfectly.

She was attempting to pronounce the letters her mother had written as though they were Australian English letters. Then she affected an Irish accent. Grey was sorry that there was no one to teach her. He might have learnt once, but he had been lazy; when his mother had spoken to him in that language he had pretended not to hear her. Now he wished he had not been lazy. He imagined what it would be to speak with her in a language no one else, not Angela, not the town, not even their father, would understand. Such could never be a dead language. Irene looked up at him and made her mother’s frown.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No.”

 

SHE WENT FOR a bath before bed and Grey sat on the rise behind the house. He had not slept and there was no point going to sleep now. He would walk soon to get Eccleston to drive him. The wind came through the leaves of the stringybark and lemon tree. He looked away, but then looked back through the glass where the orange bathroom lamp lit his sister. With her back to him she took off her dress. There was nothing without the window but sorghum fields and grassland and so no reason for shame and she never drew the blind. She coughed and let go the tie in her hair. He watched her undress and run the shower.
Her body glowed in the lamplight. Her body that had so long resisted time–as though informed by her innocent spirit–tonight was not quite the body of a little girl. She coughed again into her hands. Was she getting a cold, even in summer? With the thought an unaccountable tenderness came over him. He had allowed her to stay up too late. She stepped into the water.