This Red Earth Read online

  I am happy as a boy. Riding into the sun.

  BERNIE

  ‘This is wrong.’ Mr Heany stabs the stack of catalogue proof pages with a finger, bad smell under his nose. ‘What is this slinky and svelte for summer, Miss Cooper? Slinky is not a Chalmers word. It is not a word at all.’

  ‘Ah, slinky …’ I cast my mind back through my shorthand notes for Lingerie, to these slips he’d been told to push beyond the Young Miss market, because we’ve got half a warehouse full of them, and remember his original comfy and cool. I don’t think the mothers of this State want comfy and cool if they’re going to spend 15/6 on cheap and nasty Jap satin rayon that will stop up the airholes in your perfolastic girdle and broil you before you’ve stepped out the front door. I tell him: ‘Yes, I think I recall Foy’s used something similar last month for theirs, the taffeta rayon, so you came up with “linky” – which suggests comfy, in a graceful sort of way, and er, cool, too, like a cat.’ I am so full of it.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, that’s right,’ he smiles, not at me, but at his own evil genius, and when he smiles like that he looks like Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula. I want to add: Yes, Master, soon, soon you will be Supreme Overlord of Department Stores and every Australian lady’s housekeeping will be yours! And just as I’m thinking that, an almighty clap of thunder shakes the whole building, southerly buster belting into Sydney, flickering lights and all.

  I squeak out an, ‘Excuse me please, Mr Heany,’ and make a dash for the ladies’ down the hall, lock myself in and exhale with my back to the door. I’ve been in this job nearly five months now and I hate it, hate it, hate it. Hate that I seem to be very good at doing things I don’t like – pointless, useless things – and doing them very well. I should be grateful, it’s such a good job, half the girls here would kill for any three T’s position in the offices of the top floor, Monday to Friday only, perfect job to have while you’re awaiting promotion to matrimony: no typing, can’t even break a nail. It could be a foot in to working in advertising properly too. A career. If I wanted to do that. And I couldn’t think of anything more shameful at the moment, other than announcing to Mum and Dad: ‘I’m not ready for marriage right now because I’d like to try my hand at prostitution for a while.’ Whoring against my own sex. If you don’t buy this vanishing cream or have an agitating spin wringer, you’re not a proper wife, mother, woman. And woe betide you let anyone see your flabby, disfiguring fat stuffed beneath that perfolastically fragile, stem-like waist. Giving you problems you don’t have but that only a department store can fix, while no catalogue even acknowledges that you wear underpants – everyone else in the family does, except you. You wear thirty-seven different types of euphemism.

  I step across to the sink and press my forehead to the coolness of the mirror above it, don’t know where I fit in to the picture. But I do know I can’t keep going on and on with this dithering, blithering whingeing that’s threatening to overrun me. Be realistic: I’m an ordinary girl with no specific talents or ambitions. Apart from a demonstrated aptitude for advanced blarney, I have certificates in level one accounting and stenography, as well as a diploma in dressmaking abandoned halfway through because I lost interest in it. Maybe I should go back to business college to try for university matriculation, see what it’s like, see what I might do, and I said as much in the face of Mum’s ear-bashing over poor Gordon last night. Matriculate! she squawked. What on earth for? Perfectly valid question, to which I have no answer but maybe . . . Dad wasn’t interested in the discussion, if you could call it that; he was out of sorts all day, went to bed before ‘ Singapore Spy’ at eight, and he never misses his serials of a Sunday after tea. Barely said goodnight. That’s punishment; his disappointment is a ten-ton load, even if he is a little bit to blame for it, for thinking I’m God’s gift. And who can blame him for that? Not even Mum does, for all her carry-on. Because, whatever it is I do, he knows too well that there’s a lot worse things can be done to upset Hughie, on first name terms with God as he is.

  It’s also not a reason to get married, to make Dad happy, or to give Mum something to stick in the beaks of the Catholic Daily gossip-mongers. I wouldn’t do that to Rock, much less to myself. Because … Because … Because I miss him already and he’s only been gone a day. I run the tap and splash my face. Better get used to missing him, hadn’t I. He’s not going to last long on the Young Miss market, is he. Saying I’m not ready now is saying no for all time.

  Fat raindrops are splattering the window next to the mirror, and I look down through them onto the chaos of Pitt Street, people running through the traffic, taken by surprise, umbrella-less. Tears taking me by surprise. Oh Hughie, what have I done?

  ‘Bernie, you in there?’ Tap, tap, tap on the door of the lav. It’s Yoohoo, otherwise known as Edie Peterson. ‘Yoohoo,’ she chirps with another tap to make that clear. One of the chirpiest people I’ve ever met, but I don’t want to open the door to her. She’s twenty-seven, the oldest of us top-floorers, and the idea of possibly still being here when I’m twenty-seven makes me want to jump out the window. But she is also one of the loveliest sorts you’d ever meet, and as it possibly wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to spill my beans to a sympathetic ear at this minute, I unlock the door and swing it back.

  ‘Yes, I’m in here.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she frowns to match mine. ‘Cattle dog strife?’ she asks, supposing I’ve had trouble with Mr Heany over the catalogue. I wave vaguely, not sure what strife to begin with. Then she throws a pair of bathers at me. ‘This’ll cheer you up.’

  I hold them up by the shoulder straps. A white Jantzen, skirted. It’s a lovely cut, and I am a little bit cheered. The Jantzens are always a lovely cossie, you could be built like a brick and look great in one. Twenty-five shillings and you get what you pay for: style and functionality wrapped in Lastex, the miracle yarn. It is too: Nothing swims like Lastex. No moral quandary about that claim. Maybe I could go and work for Jantzen, or Lastex … In America …

  ‘Bernie?’ I am aware that Yoohoo has been chirping away, no doubt about where and when I am to parade this – that’s her job, organising the parades, and balls, dinners, bridge club, all the public events. It was she who spotted the form of these pins during a staff tennis social when I first started in accounts. But she says: ‘Did you hear me? You’ll have to get yourself to Broadway by eight am sharp.’

  ‘Beg pardon? Am? What for?’

  Yoohoo rolls her eyes. ‘The photograph – for the Summer Sensations programme.’

  ‘What! Me?’

  ‘No, the little purple fairy standing behind you. Of course you.’ Then she frowns again, concerned: ‘You look a bit pale – that time of the month, is it?’

  I shake my head. ‘No.’ Sigh and spill: ‘I think I’ve only let a wonderful man walk out of my life – ride a motorbike out of it, actually, at speed.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Yoohoo wraps an arm around my waist, gives me a squeeze. ‘Tell me all about it tomorrow? No time for a natter now. Will you be all right for the photo?’

  ‘Yes.’ I suppose so. Mum will be so pleased to see these pins sensationally programmed, scattered across the city in a thousand handbags. That might just give Dad cause to smile.

  Yoohoo gives me the address, and a final chirp: ‘Plenty more fish in the sea, Bernie – plenty.’

  There are one million of them in Sydney and they’re all on Pitt Street, bang on five, and it’s still raining. The throng is so chock it’s either barely moving or I’m fighting against the tide rushing for Central. I only have to get halfway round the block into Elizabeth Street, but at this rate I’m going to miss my tram.

  I do miss my tram, watch the Coogee Bay disappear around the corner of Hyde Park from the wrong side of Liverpool Street. Poo. Fifteen minutes till the next one, and I’m not going to wait in the rain, so I pop down into Museum Station, under the park, to browse the paperback stand of the magazine man there. ‘Evening, Miss. Nice weather for ducks,’ he recognises me, and nods
at the stand to his left: ‘Some new books just in today, American.’ He uses the term ‘books’ loosely and the term ‘American’ as if they might be a bit suspect, and I know what he means: if we’re going to read rubbish let it be Australian rubbish, not more ma’ams on cowboy ranches in She Braved the Wilderness. These Yank ones here are all crime stories, though, and I never go for them anyway. I give the magazine man a smile: ‘Well, at least they’re not Japanese.’ And he chuckles, ‘Very good, Miss,’ as I do my patriotic duty choosing The Stockman’s Daughter, not wondering how many times that title’s been rehashed as I hand over my sixpence, or if I’ve read it before. Wouldn’t matter if I had: they’re all the same.

  Back up on the corner of the park, I’m faced with a far tougher decision: whether to turn right to the stop on Elizabeth, where I will be sure to get a seat on the tram; or left, the shorter distance up to Oxford, where I can wait in the shelter. I choose left: I want that seat; I want to give my heart and mind up to the stockman’s daughter for the whole trip. I run through the rain, cold rain in the warm air, glorious, and only just make it, ding ding ding, sliding into the middle of this soggy toast rack on tracks. But I don’t get further than Jane Willoughby gazed out across the – when I’m interrupted.

  ‘Hey, Bernie!’

  Stuff Jane back in my handbag, automatic reflex, can’t be caught reading this sort of thing by anyone I know. But it’s only Colin Quinn pushing through the sardine pack; I’m doubtful he can even read. He once put a handful of slobbery mandarin pips down the back of my school blouse in primary, last seen pouring a bottle of beer over his own head after his squad won the junior surf boat champs. Boys will be boys and surf club boaties will always be especially mental. But this one is wearing a suit, and a tie, in town. I’m intrigued.

  ‘Hello, Colin, you’re a long way from home.’

  ‘Yep,’ he says, very pleased with himself. ‘I got a new job today.’

  ‘Oh?’ That makes me soften a little. Colin lost his job with Howard’s Automotive a couple of weeks ago, for his twenty-first birthday, not because he’s a blockhead but because he’s due adult wages now. Dad was disgusted by it; money-grubbers like Howard sack at twenty-one and hire a fifteen year old the next day as if it’s best business practice. Colin might be a boatie, but Dad’s heard he’s a good mechanic; so I ask him, more for Dad: ‘What job did you get?’

  ‘Working on the trucks for the AIF,’ chest puffed out even more above me. ‘At the army depot in Marrickville.’

  ‘Oh?’ I blink with the shock. ‘The army army?’ That is, not marched off into this national service conscription thing?

  He rolls his shoulders, awkward. ‘Not really, not you know, but, um, yep.’

  Oh. I can already hear the argument with his own father not going too well. Mr Quinn is of the same mind as Dad – they have a drink at the Bay on Saturday afternoons – only Mr Quinn more so; he’s Irish ex-army, emigrated here to get as far away from Britain as physically possible, wouldn’t be seen dead at any returned services things because there’s always toasts to the King.

  Colin’s already bracing for it; he says, somehow defensive and aggressive at once: ‘I’ve signed, can’t take it back now. Anyway, I’m not sitting round while others get going.’

  ‘What others and going where?’

  He reels off half-a-dozen names, most that I haven’t said two words to since primary, and after my ‘What on earth for?’ he gives me a list of reasons that sound like they might be slogans off an AIF advertisement. The Empire needs them. This time it’s different. It’s about the freedom of the civilised world. It’s about protecting what their fathers fought and died for. ‘It will be this city, this land, our country at stake this time if we don’t.’ He is excited and he doesn’t care who on the tram hears it.

  My head is saying, You really are mental, but my heart is with him as he speaks: he really does think he’s doing the right thing. I even envy him for a moment, envy his purpose. He’s set his course. His country is giving him a rifle. But millions of twenty-one-year-old Germans are getting rifles too, aren’t they. I’m suddenly so lost in the hugeness of what he might be getting into, I barely hear him ask me to the pictures tomorrow night.

  Still, the lie is automatic: ‘I’m sorry, I’m busy.’

  He says: ‘Are you and that Brock bloke going to get engaged or what?’ Doesn’t care who on the tram hears that either. A demand, hanging there above me off the roof rail like a great ape. Arrogant boatie. As if I don’t know you call us Jackaroo and Jillaroo behind my back.

  ‘None of your business.’ I shred the question with the tone of my voice and pull out my paperback. But I can’t read a word. Stomach churning over with greasy pork chops, with everything, as we rattle down Anzac Parade. Colin takes a seat across the way as the tram begins to empty and I stare blankly out the window at the rain, at the road, and back down at the words in my hands, at the lines of type, making my world neat and small between them, and certain with gratitude that this war has nothing to do with me or mine. It won’t touch Rock. It can’t, can it. He’s a long, long way away in a different direction altogether. At any rate, his father would kill him first, and my father would murder him twice. I would go in for triple if I had to. I might not be ready for marriage, but if anything happened to Rock, I –

  ‘See you, Bernie,’ Colin says, hanging off the roof rail again as we near the terminus, looking like a boy, just a boy, and I reply, ‘Take care, won’t you,’ hoping he can hear that I mean it sincerely, before he heads west and I head north.

  But every step I take up Heartbreak Hill the greasy-chops churn gets worse. As if the world is expanding beneath my feet. Like the universe expanding in that story Rock read me from one of the secret-rubbish magazines he buys – Extravagant fiction today, cold fact tomorrow – that we are just a hunk of rock flying round a star that’s flying through space inside a balloon that’s constantly being filled with more and more nothing. That he said might actually be true for once, minus the red-scaled lizard men from another galaxy that invade Earth after the balloon goes pop. Funny then, but now … an unsafe feeling, and I don’t know quite where it’s coming from. I stop halfway up and look back over Coogee, at the long stretch of bay surrounded by Heartbreak Hills in every direction, lights flicking on in the banks of flats above the baths, above the cricket oval, above the little colonies of Californian bungalows, all still there … thousands of greasy pork chops on the stove …

  It’s only Coogee on a grey evening giving me a chill, and I am absolutely drowned-rat soaked. I look up at the ten or so yards of Heartbreak’s steps left to go, up to my street sign. Arcadia. Nothing bad ever happens in Arcadia, does it? It’s heaven on earth, on the bluff between Coogee and Gordon bays. A little Californian heaven on earth, Mrs Zoc’s strawberries and cream gable next to our gumdrop green, lolly boxes with an eyesore ute out the front. It’s home.

  Where onions are on the stove, with garlic, coming from Mrs Zoc’s. An instantly comforting smell; I wish Mum would be adventurous and use a bit of garlic, until this nose discerns that it’s Monday in heaven on earth and Mum has cooked shepherd’s pie: the most comforting smell in the world.

  That is, until I open the door and I hear her screeching from the kitchen: ‘How could you, Bill!’ Pot slamming against the sink. ‘What about the building society payments?’

  I can’t think what Dad might have done to his building society payments, his housing loan, big fat point of pride with him that he even has one, not to mention the home that goes with it, but he’s done something all right. And he’s angry too, fist slams the table as I walk in on them: ‘I have no choice!’

  Mum’s cheeks are fuchsia with rage. ‘We all have choices.’

  Dad spits through his teeth: ‘My conscience doesn’t.’

  Both of them in such a fury they either don’t know or don’t care I’m witnessing this … argument. They never argue. Not like this, not seriously. Unsafe feeling is now fully fledged fear.
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br />   ‘Mum, Dad, what? What’s happened?’

  Mum doesn’t look at me; she’s too busy goring Dad. ‘You tell her, Bill. You tell her.’

  But all he manages to get out is: ‘Bernie love, I–’ before Mum tells me anyway.

  ‘He’s enlisted. Your father has enlisted.’

  ‘Enlisted?’ I almost relax my panic: that can’t possibly be true. Mum’s lost her cumquats. Dad’s forty-seven years old; fit for anything as he is, it can’t be true. Keep out of this war now, son.

  But it is true. I can see it in his eyes. It’s not disappointment there, is it. Nothing to do with me at all. A terrible sadness, grief that was put there before I was born, grief that does break my heart as he says: ‘I’m sorry, Bernie love. I–’

  He walks past Mum and out the back door, closing it gently behind him.

  GORDON

  ‘Well, look who’s here.’ Jim Fletcher turns at the bar: ‘It’s Gunner Did.’

  Jim is a contractor for Carlyle’s, Dad’s and my contractor, and I’m Gunner Did, a name Jim’s called me since I can remember, for the boy who was gunner do this and gunner do that, and usually I did. A year since I’ve seen him and he hasn’t changed; doesn’t look any different from the big ringer that used come up to the verandah of wherever it was I was doing my schoolwork, wanting me to box him, Come on, Gunner, have a go. Only now, he’s holding up a schooner to me.

  I smile, ‘G’day,’ but shake my head at the glass; I’m looking for Dad, but he’s not in this Court House line-up of townies, a dozen or so, the butcher, the baker, the blacksmith. I look at the clock above the bar: half-past six, half-past closing time, which is as relaxed here as every other rule, unless the union made it. Sergeant Brant will be in for his tea shortly, and Dad’ll have gone by now, if he came in to town at all.