The Mary Smokes Boys (12 page)

He laughed at himself. He watched the night until the lights of the flats and hills gave no more perspective and he was sitting in a box of floating ornaments, earth and sky and he, all floating as in the fancy of a childish mind. Then came the dawn.

GREY SLEPT LATE INTO THE MARCH AFTERNOON THEN set out for the big highway and the Helidon freight yards for a night’s work.

After two hours loading and unloading seed, poison and a few cars of cattle and horses, he pencilled KL142, the last car of the penultimate train of the night, into the logbook and took it to his father who was talking with the train driver.

“There you go, old man.”

“Did you get em all right?”

“Yep.”

Grey sat down on the bonnet of his truck and watched thirty-three cars of freight squall into the east. It was half-past eight. The night had become cool with the promise of rain. Bill North came to sit beside Grey and though he was silent, Grey could tell the prematurely old man had something to say. He rolled a cigarette with nervous hands, and his pale-blue eyes, that always seemed to betray some deep inner weakness, skittered about the night. He picked at the stained calluses on his hands.

“You know, boy, I’ve been thinkin you might be better off goin to work in the city, or somewhere else other than Mary Smokes. Gettin yourself a proper job.”

Grey nodded.

“You’re young. I reckon you must know what kinds of jobs are out there for young men. Somethin you don’t have to work
too hard at. Somethin where you’re somebody … So you don’t end up like your old bloke.”

Apart of Bill North’s heart had been missing or was twisted and he had been incapable of loving his children as a father. But he had come to respect Grey as a man. And the man’s sincerity moved the son. It upset Grey to hear his father confess to him like this, but he could not object. To have told the man he was doing all right in the world would have been such an obvious lie as to make the shame of it greater. All Bill North’s hopes for the future now lay in a change to the government’s pension laws and a doubtful claim that had not come through in six months since it was lodged.

“You must have thought of it,” Bill North said. “Of gettin out.”

“I have, old man. I spose I have.”

“Seriously? You’ve thought seriously about it then?”

“Yes,” Grey lied.

“I’m glad to hear it. You don’t have to tell me what you’re thinkin. Work it out for yourself, then just get up and go. Nothin’d make me happier.”

“All right.”

“There’s no future in a town like this anymore, boy. You stay here, you don’t make somethin of yourself now, and people less than you will be treadin on you all your life.”

“I know it.”

“You’ve got to think about providin for a woman one day too. There’s always that. Women don’t want to be poor.”

The night before Angela last left for her sister’s, she and his father had fought. It was late and they were shut in their room, but Grey could hear plainly through the walls their fighting over things that marked the narrow limits of their affection.

“I did go to the doctor,” Bill North had said with as much force as unvoiced speech can have. “He’s ordered pills that will work better.”

“And your drinking all night, do you think that’ll help?’ she
said with perfect hypocrisy. “You know, I don’t feel like a woman anymore!”

Grey knew the things they fought over did not become serious if there was enough money and material comfort to atone for them. That night he had gone into Irene’s room and found her lying awake in the dark. He sat down on the end of her bed and told stories to keep her from the argument. Eventually he fell asleep beside her.

“You’re a bright boy,” Bill North said. “Even the blokes here at the railways give you a natural respect they never give me. I don’t pretend to talk to you as a clever man, but I’ve seen things. I’d talk to Irene too, only she’s young. That poor girl.” Grey watched his father’s hands tremble. At any other time he would have put the trembling down to want of drink. Bill North clenched his fists to make the trembling stop. “Damn it, I should do better.”

Grey stood up and put his hand on his father’s shoulder to end the talk.

“Don’t worry about me, old man. I’m workin somethin out.” He lied again for the sake of peace.

 

WORK AT THE freight yard meant driving through Haigslea, past Vanessa’s. Most nights nothing came of that, he would finish too late. Tonight he called her from a public phone box on the roadside and told her he might be around.

“Last train is late, boy,” said his father when he got back. “You go if you like.”

Grey was happy. He was bodily tired, fifty dollars up and free of obligation. He was not concerned about leaving his father now. The train to come was just a handful of cars.

 

HE STOPPED BY the Sundowner bottle shop on the way. He hid his truck on a dirt road behind Vanessa’s house.

“I didn’t expect you for another hour.”

“I got off early. Here.”

He handed her a bottle of ten-dollar sparkling white wine. She put the bottle in ice on the coffee table. She took two crystal glasses from a cabinet.

Vanessa’s house seemed very fancy to Grey. Leather lounge chairs, polished teak cabinets and carpeted floors.

“Come sit down,” she said.

She folded her legs beside her on the lounge, revealing much of her tanned thighs. She wore her white frilled cardigan, and a gold crucifix hung around her neck. Her church clothes. When she was home Vanessa was a regular at the Friday night service at the highway’s boxcar Presbyterian Church. There the travelling minister spoke his excited sermons after the manner he had seen on television to a gathering that was outnumbered three to one by the crowd across the asphalt at the hotel. Vanessa smelled of church. Grey had not been in years but he remembered the smell. He wondered was it beeswax candles, or the starched clothing of the elderly, or the varnish on the pews.

“Irene’s got one of these,” he said, touching the crucifix where it rested on Vanessa’s bare skin. “A nun gave it to her. Hers is Benedictine.”

Vanessa smiled doubtfully. She did not know what Benedictine meant. In that country, expressions of orthodox faith were almost non-existent. Those who did not remember Grey’s mother and the old Irish and Russians of the district thought Irene’s religiosity uniquely childish and fantastical.

“This?’ she caught his hand. “It protects me.”

“From what?”

“Those who would cause the innocent to sin.”

He smiled.

“You know, I admire you–going to church when your folks aren’t here to force you.”

“They have spies. If I hadn’t gone tonight they would have heard about it. Anyway, you don’t admire it. Everyone who says that says it condescendingly.”

“You’re wrong.”

She smiled provocatively. “How come you never go? You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”

“I have belief. My God is present late at night, in silence, in running water, with people in pain.”

Vanessa looked at him with bemusement.

“Churches these days are different. The one I go to in the city draws four or five hundred to every service, most of them under forty, and there’s even a stage for a band, and a café. It’s fun. You should come one day.”

Grey sighed.

“Don’t you sometimes think we’re meant to suffer–that we’ve brought it on ourselves? The sin is in us and it’s just a trick of time that means we must wait to commit it.”

“How awful!”

“Yes,” he said.

He lent across her body and took the wine from the table.

“Drink?”

“Sure.” She picked up a glass. “Tell me something, Grey.”

For a moment he thought this was going to be something serious. He did not feel like speaking seriously tonight.

“How did Flagon Norman get his name?”

Grey smiled and took his knife from his jeans and unfastened the file and levered the cork. He filled Vanessa’s glass.

“On the night of our school graduation he stole a flagon of goon wine and disappeared into the woods. The police found him the next day asleep on the creek. And his mother had dressed him up so nice in his father’s old tartan coat and green tie. I spose he got scared. He wasn’t used to so many people. Once he left the hall he would have just walked till he fell. He’s got bad eyes. He’s near blind at night. But he hung onto the flagon. He was nursing it when they found him.”

Vanessa could not stop giggling.

Then Grey told her the story of when Raughrie Norman drove his first and only car into the ground:

“No one told him you had to put oil in it. He was between
Mary Smokes and Toogoolawah when the bearings blew and it seized up. He just got out and left it on the road and walked.”

So the night flowed away, with talk of inane local things and of ill-defined future plans of escape that Grey did not believe. Worn out with the night’s work and pacified by the wine, he fell asleep in Vanessa’s arms before anything they had wordlessly planned had happened. The call of a freight train woke him. It was after eleven.

Vanessa’s parents were at a government function in the city and they would not always pay for a motel. They might be back any minute now depending on how late the thing ran.

“I spose I’d better go.”

“I guess so,” Vanessa said, rousing herself from sleep.

“You know, you can come home with me if you like.”

“How?”

“Tee it up with a friend. Give someone a call and get them to cover for you. You can say you stayed at their place after church. Say you felt lonely.”

“I couldn’t. I’ve only got one girlfriend here and it’s too late to call her now.”

“It’d be good if you could.”

“Really, I couldn’t.”

“Well, I should go.”

She said goodnight and kissed his lips.

He walked down the stairs onto the road.

 

THE SOUTH WIND blew a light spray of rain across the plain and the asphalt glistened in the moonlight. Grey’s eyes wandered up to the highway, to a billboard he had not seen before, that announced a recently arrived church. He wondered if it was a branch of the church Vanessa had spoken of. The church’s billboard presented a prosperous-looking travesty of Christ: his hair as well-kept as a banker’s, and the wounds of the Cross like neat red medallions in his hands.

On the street her voice came after him and then the fast shuffle of her feet.

“Grey! Maybe I will come. I guess I will.”

He stopped and waited for her to catch up.

“How far away did you park?

He pointed to an empty street.

She giggled, tickled at the trouble he had gone to for her.

 

ANGELA WAS STILL awake when they arrived at Grey’s house. She sat in the living room reading a magazine by lamplight. A bottle of brandy and one of sleeping pills sat on the table beside her.

“Grey, you should tell me when you’re bringing friends home. Forgive the state of the house,” she said to Vanessa.

“Vanessa, you know Angela.”

Vanessa did not say anything. She was still a little drunk from the wine. She had sipped the last of the bottle in Grey’s truck.

“Hello, Mrs North.”

Grey smiled at Angela and she smiled back. She did not ever call herself Mrs North.

“Bill’ll be here shortly,” Grey said. “The last train was pulling out when we left Haigslea.”

“There’s food on the stove if you want it,” said Angela. “Leave some for Bill.”

Vanessa said it was sweet that Angela waited up for her husband.

Grey smiled.

They moved into the kitchen and he opened the lid on a pot of beef stew.

“Want some?”

Vanessa eyed the contents of the pot with suspicion and shook her head.

He walked down the corridor and opened a crack in Irene’s
doorway and saw her swathed in white sheets, lying facing the wall and window, her dark hair spilled across the pillow.

“Is she asleep?’ Vanessa whispered.

Grey nodded.

They went to his bedroom and sat down on the bed. He lit the bedside lamp.

“Why don’t you have decorations on your walls?’ she asked. “It’s depressing, Grey. Like your name.”

He looked around the room. He had not realized.

“What sort of a name is Grey anyway?”

“It’s Greywood. My mother gave it to me. After the woods she used to walk on Mary Smokes Creek.”

“I’m sorry.” Vanessa wondered if she had offended him. “I was only joking.”

She kissed him. He did not feel what a man was supposed to feel. Perhaps it was the wine. She shifted closer and he moved his hands under her blouse and she pushed him down on the bed. He turned off the light. In the dark she stretched out across his body and kissed him again and a pain came to the small of his back.

In time all the lights in the house were off. Grey heard his father come home and after that there was quiet. The blue light of the moon came in through the window. Outside, the wind rose and the branches of the stringybark bent to touch the house. The branches were like rain on the corrugated-iron roof.

 

VANESSA WAS ASLEEP. Grey got out of bed and opened the door to see what the crying was. She was crouched in the dark beside his door. Her head was against her knees that were in her arms. Moonlight arced across the hall from the living room and lit her tiny feet.

“What’s the matter?”

He whispered so as not to wake the house. He knelt on the floor beside her. He put his hand on her cheek that was wet with crying and pushed a tear-soaked lock of hair behind her ear.

She brushed his hand away and stood up. She ran out the door and across the yard in her nightdress.

Eccleston’s grass moved in long fluid waves and she stood at the edge of it. When she saw that he followed she crawled through the wire. She ran further away. He called into the wind. He pulled the wires apart and stepped through.