Illywhacker (16 page)

“It’s not a secret,” Henry Lightfoot said. “It is too wonderful,” he teased, “to be a secret. It is too extraordinary. No, no, dear Molly Rourke, ’tis no secret any more.”

He had never called her Molly before. The blush spread down her neck until it seemed it would take possession of her shoulders.

“Everybody,” he said, “all Ballarat knows.”

“Oh,” she dared look up. She held him with her bright green eyes. “And do they now, Mr Lightfoot?”

“Indeed, Miss Rourke. Indeed they do.”

“And what secret is this?”

“They say,” he whispered, “you wear a belt to stop you going mad.”

She did not leave the bar. She stayed working. She gave correct change. She counted the money in the till at closing time. She helped Patchy wash the glasses in the public bar.

I had this in common with Molly: we had both pretended our fathers dead, although for different reasons. And while Jack had heard of Mrs Ester, he knew nothing of her father or Walter or Sean. He knew nothing of the electric belt, Dr Grigson, or that Molly had risked her mortal soul by marrying him in a Protestant church.

And although there were many times when she came, teetering, giddy, her hand in his, to the very brink of confessing her faith, she could not. He made it impossible. He had no time for Catholics. This is not to say that he would not, journeying down to Colac to visit his backers, make a detour to Koroit, that Catholic town, drink in the pub and be a good fellow amidst Murphys and Keoghs and Hanrahans, but that he carried a schoolboy’s prejudices with him and was always only a hairbreadth away from those sing-song insults that Protestant children call out to the Catholics on the other side of dusty streets: “Catholic dogs sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs.” He was for Australia and the Empire, had voted Yes to conscription and regarded Archbishop Mannix as nothing less than a traitor.

And in Cocky Abbot, that dimple-chinned, ruddy-faced giant, he found a kindred spirit. They could relax together, in their certainties. They were both big strong men in their fifties, men who had begun life poor and ended up rich. They trusted each other’s money. They trusted each other’s size and their hands, when shaking, fitted together like two halves of the one puzzle. They were, as the farmer put it, practical.

They sat together on the veranda of the Abbots’ homestead late in the afternoon and rolled up their sleeves in defiance of the chill in the evening air. Had you seen them, sitting on their rattan chairs, you would have shared their conceit, that they were two of a kind, and you would be wrong. For the farmer was a harder, tougher man, ruthless in a bargain and with a head for figures not suggested by his slow countryman’s drawl.

“This aviator bloke,” Cocky Abbot asked, kicking off his boots in a manner Jack approved of, “is he practical?”

The autumn rain had turned the landscape green but at six in the evening it was laid over with a rich golden mist; the farmer’s sheep looked like splendid creatures, not the daggy-bummed animals Jack McGrath loathed.

“Is he practical?” mused Jack. “I’d say so, yes, my word I would.”

“I’d say there was a definite quid to be made in this business.”

“That’s his point.”

“But my question to you, Jacko, is this: why would we need to go to the expense of building a factory? Now look at your costs. Three hundred pounds for the land. Say another three hundred pounds to put up some sort of shed. Then you’ve got your labour. You need specialists, I take it, skilled men, mechanics, fitters and turners and so on. Before you’ve got a penny coming in you’re probably up for, call it two thousand pounds.”

“This is right, Harold.”

“And who’s to say you have the best aeroplane? We won’t know until it’s built and flown.”

“That’s true,” said Jack, but looked miserable, passing his hand over his folded face. “But everything’s a risk. Life is a risk.”

“Life is a risk, you’re right, man. But we’ve both got where we are by not taking more than we need. Now what does your aviator say to importing a craft?”

“I never asked him, but his point is that we have an Australian plane.”

“For Heaven’s sake, we’re all in the Empire together. I meant a British plane. One we know will fly. Do you follow me? It’s a question of risk versus return, and there’s no doubt the poms are more experienced than we are. My suggestion to you is: why wouldn’t we set up an agency for the best craft available?”

“Talk to Badgery. Talk to him. Listen to him.”

“I’ll listen to him,” said Cocky Abbot. “I’d like to meet him anyway. I believe I knew his father. There was a Badgery here in ’96. Tried to sell us a cannon.”

“That’s the man all right, that’s him.”

“An interesting man,” said Cocky Abbot. “I often think we made a great mistake not listening to him.”

The electric belt that had saved Molly now damned her. It forced her to flee Ballarat with cheeks still burning and eyes downcast before her fellow coach passengers.

Molly had laboured late into the panicked night, filling five pages with her careful copperplate, but she could not bring herself to be precise about her shame which was, to spell it out, that all of Ballarat was peeking, smirking, at what lay underneath her skirts. Her father went over and over his daughter’s letter, searching with his blunt broken fingernail for a place where he might get a purchase. The pages, however, would give up no secrets and remained as mysterious and inviolate as marble eggs.

Melbourne frightened Molly. It was too noisy, too grand. She sought a country position. Had she waited—she had money enough—she might have found a position in a good Catholic hotel. But she could not wait. She must have it settled. In all of the state of Victoria, it seemed, there was only one position, that of barmaid at the Grand Hotel in Point’s Point. Sensing, correctly, that her faith would go against her, she told the employment agency that she was not a Catholic.

It was only after she arrived in Point’s Point that she understood what a dreadful thing she had done, only after she met the fiercely Protestant Mrs Pearson did she realize that she would never, as long as she stayed in the town, be able to attend Mass and that, even worse, she would be expected to attend services with the Presbyterians.

She resolved, on that first day, that she would tell the Pearsons the truth when they realized how invaluable she was. And certainly, with Mr Pearson half crippled with a stroke and Mrs Pearson too scatterbrained to keep the business together, there was far more to do than simple barmaiding, although it was this skill that gained her the love of the town or, at least, the Protestant half of it. She was, as Mrs Ester had clearly seen, a commercial asset. She ran the dining room, kept the accounts, cleaned six bedrooms, served behind the bar. She was not yet eighteen years old.

If she softened her natural vowels a fraction in keeping with her role as a Protestant lady, she did not put on dog or act in a snobbish manner. If she laughed too much or talked too much or swung her arms or ran when she should have walked, it only seemed to make her more attractive. Her cheeks burned. Her eyes, even in that dismal Presbyterian service, were feverish with secrets she could not share.

The town approved of her courtship with Jack McGrath who may not have been the town’s only teetotaller but was certainly the richest and the best-liked one. As everyone said, he had not a
nasty bone in his body. Molly yearned to lay all her twisted secrets on him. Yet when, behind the small wooden pavilion on the river flat, a building known locally as the “Football Stadium,” Jack McGrath attempted a bit more with his hands than she had expected, there was a great deal more than maidenly modesty to make her leap back from her beloved, her face colouring, her voice shaking.

Molly did not intend that the belt should ruin her chances of marriage. It would have to be done away with; yet it could not be done without. She still, in spite of the belt’s magnetic forces, had palpitations of the heart. She did not associate these upsets with the moments when her mind strayed into that minefield, her betrayal of the one true church. Rather, it seemed to her, it was a question of heights. Sometimes, on a high stool in the hotel larder, reaching for a ham or a string of onions, she was overcome with something that was not quite vertigo. It was as if two seconds had been snipped from her life, and the remainder, the past and the future, roughly pinned together. She felt a tiny explosion, a little jump, followed by a wild galloping of the heart. She did not dare think of what would become of her without the belt and yet, if she was to marry this big gentle man, she knew it would have to go. Who, after all, wants to marry a mad woman?

So, on a Tuesday morning in November, just one day before her wedding in a Protestant church, Molly Rourke went out walking in the hour before the sun had entered the valley and when the dew lay thick on the grass and fell from trees on to the tin roof of the Grand Hotel. She walked along one side of the single street. She walked past the last of the new macadam where Reilly’s cow stared mournfully at the bracken and blackberries in its neglected paddock and then, just past Crooked Creek, took an old footpath said to have been a Chinese millrace in the 1850s. The path, so she had been told, followed the river to the big swimming hole and the falls beyond.

She had never been along the path before and she did not like it now. She did not like the blackberries that grew along it, the prickly acacias that bent, heavy with dew, across it. She did not like the small dry scurrying sounds amongst the untidy wet floor of the bush. She picked up her skirts and held them tightly to her. She stopped, continually, trying to hear the sounds her beating heart were overpowering.

Black cockatoos filled the air above her and their harsh screeching seemed only to echo the hostile nature of the bush. If she had seen the brilliant scarlet on their tails she would not have thought it beautiful, but rather a confirmation of danger, like the red spot on a black spider.

The path rose higher above the river, along across a rock face. At one place there had been a fall. There was a small gap in the track, easily cleared by children, but when Molly Rourke jumped it was as if the fires of Hell, not a tangle of blackberries, lay below her skirts.

She did not like being so high above the river, but she hurried on (not swinging her arms) until she found herself above the swimming hole; the falls spilled off one end like water from an overfull bowl. People had told her stories of things being swept off the falls and how they were never seen again. It was dangerous, they said. Once a child had been swept away and not recovered.

The water moved blackly over grey rocks. She did not wish to descend, as the children did easily, the rock steps that led to the water’s edge.

She stood on the path above, twisting her hands, and young Dave McCorkell, squatting a little further up the hill with two dew-wet rabbits in his hand, thought she looked like a princess in a fairy story. Her long grey dress had a sheen like the underside of gumleaves but it did not camouflage her form or even, with the skirt clutched to her, hide her tiny feet.

He thought he heard her praying, but whatever the words she spoke he never heard them, or if he did hear them they were driven from his mind by the force of his feelings as he watched her hitch, first her skirt, then her petticoats, and remove, in a flurry so confusing he could not be sure of what he had seen, a garment of some type.

It was a belt with some weight attached to it which, as he watched, she swung round and round. She was going to throw it out across the top of the falls, but she was not expert and the thing, whatever it was, flew out and caught itself on the lower branches of a flowering ti-tree which grew out, at an acute angle, from the bank on which she stood.

He heard her cry “Oh no,” a lonely desperate cry. He put down the rabbits thinking he would help her. But then he knew that he should not have been watching her reveal herself so completely to him, and he picked the rabbits up again.

David McCorkell was eight years old when all this took place. When he was a soldier in Cairo in 1917 he was known as the “Rabbit,” but it was not because he had once held two of them in his hands and watched a lady perform a strange ritual; it was because he had a small twitching nose and a timid manner.

He squatted on his haunches and watched fearfully, his small grey eyes riveted on Molly Rourke.

He felt sorry for the lady trying to climb the tree. He felt sorry when he heard her make small whimpering noises, was glad when she, at last, caught the belt in her hand, and felt for her when she slipped sideways and muddied her dress on the path.

When she swung the belt again he crossed his fingers for her and screwed up his face in sympathy when it caught, in mid-air, on a branch of a big old she-oak that hung above the falls.

The pair of them, Dave and Molly in their separate positions, watched Dr Grigson’s electric belt suspended twenty feet above the Sandy River. Molly, recognizing the calamity she had brought upon herself, convinced that the belt hung there as shameful advertisement for her madness which all the world could read, resolved that day that she and her husband would leave Point’s Point before the swimming season started.

When she walked back along the track she did not have time for giddiness. She was in a panic that left no room for jolts and explosions. She entered the town wet, torn and muddy, cutting across the back of O’Briens Paddocks where the tall bracken soaked her dress, slipped up beside the blacksmith’s shed, and left a large lump of mud on the back veranda (which she would later blame Archie Hearn for and abuse him with unusual heat). She made such a fuss about the little lump of mud and her outburst was so unlike her that Archie concluded, quite rightly, that Miss Rourke had the marriage jitters.

At about the time Molly arrived, torn and panting, in her room, young Dave McCorkell was suspended twenty feet above the Sandy River retrieving Dr Grigson’s Electric Invigorator.

He carried his treasure back to where his rabbits lay in a patch of new sunshine. He could not imagine what this treasure was for, but thinking about the cloudy, unnameable, unknowable possibilities made his penis become stiff. He scratched his bare legs and resolved to keep it a secret.