A River Town (45 page)

“I hope to Christ you didn’t mention me!”

“Ah, you think I have a poison touch, don’t you, Tim. No, though I do mention certain businesses in the Macleay district
which have been singled out, and so forth. But Tim, let me say, for any harm I’ve done you, please accept this.”

He took an envelope from his vest pocket and pushed it into Tim’s hands. “There’s fifteen pounds in there. It’ll pay for some things.”

“No,” Tim said. “I can’t take this.”

But the Offhand had skipped backwards, waving his hands. Already making for his sulky and Mrs. Flitch. “Won’t take it back, Tim,” he called.

He untethered and jumped aboard his vehicle so fast that for Tim to chase him to argue would have been out of kilter with this afternoon, this plain plague resurrection on which the first grand drops of rain were beginning to fall.

Tim went to Kitty flapping his arms like a helpless bird.

“Fifteen quid,” he told her.

“All contributions welcome,” she said, grinning, reaching up and drawing him down towards her breasts, her paunch. Their child readying itself in secrecy. He noticed Johnny staring now, an unlikely, still gaze.

“He has not been himself,” said Kitty.

In the world again, he did not like the counter so much, did not like to stand there at the mercy of whatever person entered. It had in any case proved an unwise procedure in the past. Women to whom he made deliveries now were of course possessed by a fear that he had not been long enough in quarantine. They would call out from deep in the house, “Just wait, Mr. Shea. Wait in the yard. I shall leave the money on the back step, and then you can come up and collect it.” Was Ernie finding the same, and in his grief did he care? Did people look fearfully at pages he had audited and passed his finger down.

In the residence dining room one mid-afternoon, a conference was called around the table. Kitty sat close to him. He noticed how sure she was that the omens had lifted from him, how exultant to have him back, certified by Erson. He and Kitty sat together at the top of the table. At the side of the table Bandy and Mamie sat, Mamie with a languid hand on her fiancé’s forearm.

“Bandy’s been reading Irish history now,” said Mamie, and
Bandy—not wanting to be showy with his knowledge—murmured, “The plantations of Ireland. Cromwell crying, ‘To Connaught or to Hell!’ ”

He was such a willing enthusiast for his new fidelity, his new systems of loves.

“We need to circumvent the hatred they have always had for us,” said Bandy like a Fenian. “Your wife and I, Tim, have devised an arrangement.”

“From here on, the accounts at the supply houses will be in Bandy’s name,” Kitty explained. “He’ll receive the bills and underwrite them, though we’ll pay them. I think it’s generous in a big way and that he’s a total white man.”

“Not in exact terms,” said Tim, and everyone laughed.

Kitty said, “See, we have that safety net. Bandy’s our long stop.”

Bandy beamed diagonally across the table at Tim. The services he had been threatening to offer Tim from the start, the system of generosity, was now in place, and Tim and Kitty such poor beggars they couldn’t refuse it all. And gratitude was the only right emotion. But Tim felt resentment. Even of Mamie, so recently landed and now with an edge on her sister.

“Ernie Malcolm promised me a reference,” he said, and the three of them, the two sisters and Bandy, looked at each other and pursed their lips at his gullibility.

“We are a family now,” said Kitty. “A wonderful thing to have the strength of it behind a person.”

She caressed Tim’s shoulder, an indulgent caress. As if she believed his quarantine, the daily fear of plague which had occupied him in the old barracks, had left him incapable for the time being.

Bandy and Mamie rode together to Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Father Bruggy in his golden cope, raising up the species of bread which masked the substance of Christ. In a gold monstrance for the adoration of the engaged couple.

Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the sparing of Tim and the discovery of each other. Plus thanks for the conversion of the infidel. Mamie’s charm had done what the Crusaders couldn’t.

At these times, the children asleep, Kitty and Tim were left
alone at the big sandsoaped table, the broad surface of their marriage.

“You don’t say much,” said Kitty. “What do you think of Bandy? As regards Mamie, is what I mean.”

“I think it could be recklessness. To have a Muslim father-in-law. And what about poor bloody Joe?”

“Oh, someone will get sick of seeing Joe stand around calf-eyed and marry him just for the chance of educating him. That’s how it happened with you.”

“A just point,” Tim said. He stood up to pour Kitty more tea.
Tay
, she called it, like a peasant. But that hadn’t stopped her understanding the way things went in New South Wales.

She asked, “What would you think if I told you Bandy’s already put up cash? That I’d borrowed the whole of our debt from Bandy? The little feller’s rolling in it, you know. A wealthy young man, not a drinker. No women to spend money on. No children. And seems to think we are his relatives.”

“I’d say I don’t want to depend on him.” In fact he felt the beginning of tears. Have I travelled so far to be someone’s tenant all over again?

Kitty shrugged, reached for his wrist, and put her head on its side. “It’s happened, I’m afraid. We signed an agreement letter. Something had to be arranged, darling. Something had to be managed! Be angry if you have to be.”

But he couldn’t manage anger. Anger was for those lucky buggers who had some power left. “Dear God! Was this before or after Mamie agreed to marry the little individual?”

“Fair play, Timmy! Do you think I’d sell my own sister? Only the bloody nobility do that sort of thing. No. She always thought he was Christmas. I mean, Tim, can you see Mamie lying still for being an item of sale?”

“I thought she was just pretending to like the hawker, see. Just to get at Joe.”

Kitty shook her head with such energy. “From the first time he came into the plague camp, down the river selling things. From that time, she thought he was Christmas.”

“So how much did you borrow, Kitty?”

“It was a full two hundred pounds.”

Again, it was too large a sum to remonstrate over. All he did was drink his tea with its rum lacing. He’d need a lot more rum. “Bloody mad,” he then said sombrely. Yet he felt both exhilarated too, as well as tethered. “We are bound to the little fellow for eternity.” He uttered it like a matter of fact. “But two hundred. Why did you need so much, for God’s sake?”

“Because. I have bought Elliott’s old store in East.”

He stood up without knowing it. East! There was joy in that idea. The river between him and his Central foolishness. The idea of the river sliced through him now, dividing him, putting all that was foul on the further bank.

“Jesus, is this really true?”

“We’ll primp the place up. Great deal more space than here. When the bridge opens … well, we’ll be on the pig’s back!”

All too much, too fast! In a rush, the tide ran out and left him stranded.

“Did you think I’d be dead?” he asked. “And you’d never have to account to me?”

She wouldn’t answer and her cheeks reddened, bringing forth a freckle or two. She rose from the table, waddled inside, came back with a large dossier of documents and slung them down in front of him. “I kept this for you, Tim. Read this and don’t insult me.”

He fingered the dossier. A marvel how much had been done in a period of quarantine. Her arts of business let free by his absence. There wasn’t any question about that.

“Though you’d be much better to wait till morning before addressing the details,” she advised him.

Tim wanted to know. He felt indeed too tired, even a little sore-headed for business.

“How much interest is the little Punjabi asking?”

“There is no interest. He says it is a crime to charge interest to members of his family. He wants repayment and a tenth part in the business, that’s all.”

In East, though, they would draw on the populations of Dock Flat and Pola Creek as well as on flasher residences on Rudder’s Hill. It was an idea! Again the waters commenced to run and he was excited in spite of himself.

Before they went to bed, he visited his sleeping son and daughter.
Annie’s cheek, and the scar line on Johnny’s head. Johnny still slept like someone concentrating for a dive. He’d been chastened, said Kitty, and spoke in his sleep. Each day perhaps half his soul went down the cliff with Lucy’s.

He touched the boy’s head. “We are going to East,” he whispered.

He saw one day, while passing the creamery in Smith Street, Ernie Malcolm in a dove-grey suit, somehow apt for the season of mourning, passing down the pavement and entering the staircase to his offices. The
Argus
had carried a piece,

The gist was that Ernie had chosen to lose himself in his accounting.

So at last Ernie had been declared brave in his own right, and as senselessly as Tim had first been.

Tim had imagined unleashing the girl’s name the second after his release from the plague ward. But a Saturday and Sunday followed his release, and so he had secreted Winnie’s envelope with the photograph of boy-impersonating Missy in the
London Illustrated News
, the 1891 edition with the flood marks and the views of Uganda ceded to Britain by Germany in exchange for Heligoland. Having lived and been returned to the great turbulence of events, he was too stupefied for the first few days, but by late on the Sabbath he had begun practising a false hand on scraps of paper. Because he must write his own letter, as he saw it. Winnie was not here to rescue Missy. He was the living rescuer.

It began to strike him too that he needed to retain Missy’s picture with Winnie’s contrived handwriting on the back.

On Monday morning he wrote his letter on some Aberdeen Line notepaper he’d been keeping since his emigration voyage more than ten years back. The moist Macleay air had by now spotted its creaminess with little discs of brownish stain.

The letter said that the Commissioner of Police for New South Wales, situated in Sydney, who sought a name in the Mulroney case, should enquire from Tyler’s Theatrical Company, presently touring somewhere in the Australian colonies or perhaps in New
Zealand. He said what the young performer’s name was, and added that she seemed to have a repute for playing the role of Young Arthur. He posted this communication in its staged hand at Central Post Office, together with Kitty’s renewal of subscription to
The Messenger of the Sacred Heart
, the Sheas’ credit being at least better with that divine organ of mercy than it was with Truscott and Lowe.

Missy’s name would be uttered at the Mulroneys’ trial, and the order of things thus restored. He had at last a sense that Missy was now a redeemed vacancy. His dreams were a jangled mess of things from the plague hospital, and he was content that they should be. Missy no longer entered. Her plain name had saved him, and he had taken her as far as could be expected of ordinary flesh. There was still a distance which she could perhaps take him. For that reason he had retained her photograph.

The affianced Mamie, walking over to Savage’s Emporium on some business for Kitty, ran into her sister from up the river, Mrs. Molly Burke. Molly had come to town with her husband and daughter, and without rushing to report to their relatives in the general store or to introduce Old Burke to the new immigrant, they had taken rooms at the Commercial. Though the two sisters embraced, Mamie later said there was something about the meeting which did not measure up. It did not resemble the previously imagined reunion of Mamie with the grandest and most successful Kenna.

That evening the Sheas, Mamie and the children were eating a normal meal when Old Burke and Molly
did
appear at the back door. Molly was chastened, embarrassed at having been seen to creep into town.

“We thought you were worried about Timmy and the plague,” Kitty remarked, winking. They had not heard about it though, and now were informed—chiefly by Kitty and Mamie. All Tim did was hold his hands up and say, “Clean bill of health.”

“Not here on pleasant business,” Old Burke growled through his clenched pipe. Sitting at table and humbly accepting tea, it didn’t seem as if he was going to be infallible on any subject at all tonight. They sat severely apart, Old Burke and the Molly he had
so strenuously courted in the store. They were not a united camp. This fact at once paired, allied and reconciled Mamie and Molly. Molly’s hand reached out to Mamie’s wrist, wriggled it.

“So, my little sister,” said Molly. “Here!”

“No other place,” said Mamie. “And very glad I came.”

But the sisterly jollity still seemed forced and silences intervened. Some sorrow had overtaken Molly. She did not even comment on what she must surely by now know—that her sister was engaged to the hawker.

“Look, might as well say it,” Old Burke soon announced. “We are putting Molly and Ellen on the boat. That’s the situation. I expect it to go no further than your ears, but Ellen has conceived.”

He shook his head and wiped his eyes.

“Some lop-eared boundary rider from Comara,” he said.

“How long?” breathed Kitty. Tim wanted to know too. Could it have been when the girl was in his care? Was this too on his slate?

“Seems to’ve been some time in December last,” said Molly.

All the women exchanged glances. They knew the perils, the hair’s-breadth nature of things. Was Flo or Missy present in the room to gaze quietly down on the constant risks of womanhood revealed here?

Molly said, “Thank God for Croydon.”

Tim realised she meant a suburb of the great capital down the coast.

“That’s Saint Anthony’s Home for Fallen Girls at Croydon we’re taking her to,” Molly explained to her newcomer sister.

“So you’re going to Sydney?” asked Kitty. “With the plague raging there?”

“Well, you did,” Molly told her a little testily. “Would you have Ellen stay on at Pee Dee until she shows, and bring her to town then?”