Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (2 page)

I guess that makes us a gang.

A
ND WAITING
with them in the pub these last twenty-four hours are their sixty-two prisoners – waiting on them, pouring them drinks, serving them Sunday roast lamb and mint sauce, napping in corners, flirting with them, singing to them, toasting them, laughing with them, badgering them for dances and autographs and yarns of their adventures, sniggering at Dan’s pack of saucy playing cards, bathing Steve’s feet, doing what they ask. And the few here not their friends – Curnow, the schoolteacher; Stanistreet, the stationmaster; Bracken, the local constable – admire their manners and do it anyway. Well, maybe not Bracken. So he admires their weaponry and sits quiet.

And they are hospitable, amiable, insistent hosts.
Dance faster, Mr Curnow, in your soft schoolteacher’s boots. Cheer up, Mr Stanistreet, what’s a torn-up rail on a steep culvert, one train more or less? Drink up, Mr Bracken
. Whoever heard of such well-mannered, responsible outlaws?

Now, for your entertainment and pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, the Kelly Gang brings you the famed acrobat and juggler, the Great Orlando! Watch him toss and catch those four whisky bottles he’s helped empty!

This rowdy crowd is anxious to curry favour and restless in the policeman’s vicinity. Dan and Steve, even Joe, are uneasy too. They want to keep Bracken handcuffed. But he, the leader, is feeling magnanimous. He winks as he tops up Bracken’s glass.

‘In case you’re wondering,’ he shouts to Bracken over the din of the concertina and the tipsy voices roaring the Kelly Song, ‘I’ve confiscated the fancy throwing knives and the key to the lion’s cage.’

T
he signal rocket from Dray’s Peak arcs into the sky, rises with the lion’s swelling roar and slowly flares across the membranes of his vision.

So the Peak contingent is in place and quietly waiting, too. Everything can begin. He wishes it could start now while he is still alert and optimistic, making his rounds like a general, moving back and forth from the verandah to the bright ruckus of the bar and the parlour and to the bonfire outside. And to the dark patch of bush behind the pub.

He sips from the eagerly proffered drinks, he listens (for a panicky train whistle, for the shrieking scrape of brakes, for a crash), he chats, he shakes hands, he slaps shoulders, he ruffles children’s hair, he snatches moments to sit and think things through. And every fifteen or twenty minutes he treads a path through the winter weeds to the same broad twisted gumtree trunk, its crown charred and hollowed into a turret by some ancient bushfire, and in the shadows behind it, in the clay around its roots, he urinates.

The image of the flare fizzes on his nerve impulses long after its smoky trail has drifted off and the tapering growl is just a shiver on the air and his exposed skin.

A
ll the time lately these dreams he’s younger and back with old Harry Power sticking up a Cobb & Co. on the Sydney Road. So real the dust dries into bogeys in his nose, the sun drums on his shoulders, the horse twitches and swells under him. An old coarse-maned strawberry roan.

The strange thing is, this coach turns and chases him. Off roads, across deep streams, up loose gravelly slopes, defying terrain and gravity. And it’s packed with fuzzy pock-marked marskmen, turbaned troopers, fierce crack-heeled renegades in scraps of uniform ripped from mutilated white men, all smirking and firing weapons from the coach. Others, heroes’ stolen medals stuck everywhere (on their crotches! in their hair!), spitting purple phlegm through filed teeth, encircle him with some lost regiment’s artillery, and from high up every gumtree a grinning sniper snipes. All air around his head crisscrosses hot with bullets. Creasing his cheeks, his chin, his scalp. Oh, there’s one through the tongue! The ear!

Wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t up to his stirrups in mud, if his gelding wasn’t galloping backwards to the enemy, if this Martini-Henry hadn’t turned into a droopy oxtail in his hand.

In real, waking life there’s this certainty of who’s coming after them this very minute, who’ll try to kill them when he gets there – in five minutes, or thirty, or one hour, or six – who has no choice now. He more than knows this fact; he’s counting on it.

Hare
. Hare’s in as deep as he is now. This is his affair too. Hare’s with him and after him for the duration. For as long as it takes.

Hare’s coming and he’s waiting. They’re all waiting with their new rapid-fire Winchesters, their shotguns and revolvers, their kegs of gunpowder, their maps and schemes and friends, their rested horses, their body armour. All these tricks up their sleeves. Just thinking about the train arriving and Hare’s face when he sees them makes him grin and shiver at once. Does Hare also feel that twinge in the groin? That niggling, always-needing-to-piss sting?

A
ND
H
ARE
’
S
special Queensland blacktrackers have to be coming too, those barefoot bush shadows with their osprey eyes. This whole train crash is for their benefit! And also for his special Victorian troopers, the pride of Melbourne’s lowest brothels and the shady side of Collins Street. And not forgetting those adventurous special correspondents, the gentlemen of the press,
ta rah!

He likes to think of Hare jolted from his after-dinner cognac and Havana in the smoking room of the Commercial Hotel, Benalla, by the telegraph message that his special informer, Aaron Sherritt, had been most specially murdered. Fop and spy, apple of each other’s eye. If Aaron’s corpse doesn’t bring Hare running, nothing will. Hare is shocked. Hare is disturbed. Yes, Hare is also raring to go.

So, you special squeaky-voiced Superintendent, not long now.

He’d swear you could almost smell Hare’s anxious cigars, hear those praying-mantis limbs propping and pacing. Oh, that dampness on the forehead, that lank moustache and undertaker’s pallor will never do for the Queen’s languid hero.

And if by chance Hare lived, what a lovely hostage he would make. Easily worth an outlaw’s mother.

I
n answer to that handsome black-haired lady in the corner … Madam, in this world and the next, these are the ones I hate:

I hate Constable Thomas Lonigan, shot clean through the temple, dead but not forgiven.

Senior Constable Hall, yes, that fat, gutless pistol-whipper and sly bribe-taker.

Constable Flood, horse-thieving bastard and hypocrite.

And that trooper’s farthermost orifice, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick, drinker of brandy-and-lemonade, dirty fighter, lying bully of women and children, poisoner of my name, corrupter of the law, perjurer before God. Even the Victorian police force has kicked him out. What more can I say? If he weren’t such a spunkless rabbit I’d call him my worst enemy for starting all this.

Oh, and Judge Barry, Judge Barry, Judge Barry.

Not Hare, oh no. He will be my prize, my joy, our saviour.

S
O WHERE
did that leave Aaron? Charming, smooth-haired, smooth-voiced Aaron Sherritt, Australia’s friendliest man, shot through his easy-going heart and brain just last night?

Somehow he couldn’t hate Aaron. What he had felt was stronger and more bitter, but that was when Aaron was still alive. Today, right now, he was almost indifferent. Aaron was as much a part of this place as he was. He was just the other side, the side he’d never understand. The constantly obliging side. Every man’s mate, every young girl’s lover. The cool, dead, agreeable moon.

A
ND CURSE
me for thinking just then: my father, Red Kelly. Not saying it but thinking it. Put him on the list for weakness, for having no stomach for prison, for puffing up like a snowman in passive protest, for languishing, squelching, on his bed. For dying of dropsy, an old man at forty-seven.

Laying him out in our hut at Avenel, she and I left imprints every spot we touched. Rolled him over and corked him up to stop him seeping, like a five-day drowned man.

No Requiem for my soggy father.

Oh, mother, truly his name just burst into my head like a blast of duckshot. I’m only eleven and a half. Oh Jesus forgive me.

A
ARON WOULD
play a roo-gut banjo fretted with slivers of box-tree and overlaid with possum parchment. While he twanged, he sang a song about me that Joe dreamed up, them both harmonising, Joe thrumming on his bush bass made from a tea-chest and a broomstick strung with twine.

Aaron sang a sweet, wild song about me in the cold nights and still we killed him. In the firelight we’d do the polka to it to keep warm. A shotgun blast in the head, another in the chest. His pregnant wife, fifteen, wailing and kissing his mashed innards. Praying his forehead back to smoothly normal, unhappening the brain-bits on her stroking hands, the red spray patterning the air, the wall, the door jamb and fanning out like a lyrebird’s tail. Well, he was a treacherous young banjo player. When in the mood he’d dance with stones in his boots – didn’t mind, no coat or scarf, kicking up the frosty grass like a dervish. Liked the girls young; I said to him about Mary Hegarty, she’s only just thirteen! He said, so what, I’m not superstitious. Went to gaol once for concussing a passing Chinaman with a rock, and for mistreating a horse. A treacherous banjo player and a heedless dancer.

Knew how to make you laugh, though, if you were in the mood.

M
assacre, there’s a word. Worse than killing, worse than murder, worse than slaughter. Massacre’s what they said we did.
What I, the monster, did
. ‘The Massacre at Stringybark Creek.’

But is it a massacre if they’re shot going for their guns? If they’re police? Just because the police aren’t as good as us doesn’t make it massacre. Anyway, massacre sounds like killing many more than three. (Maybe ten and over.) Massacre sounds like butchering the innocents. Massacre has the soft, crispy-moist, knife-blade sound, the stabbing, hacking, ruptured-vein sound. Massacre sounds like Indians slashing and scalping in the night. Massacre sounds like dead women and children, not armed troopers. Massacre surely doesn’t sound like four men against four men. Massacre sounds like you relish flesh explosions and mutilations.
The sort of thing a maniac does
.

Can it be a massacre if you let one go? The only one who surrenders when ordered?

Would it be a massacre if the police had killed three of us instead?

Can it be a massacre if everyone’s Irish?

Battle
is the word I’d use for a fair fight. One side against the other.

Massacre
… juicy word, though.

W
as that the train or a rumbling and ringing in his ears? His imagination or thunder or just his hungry lion?

What this place needed was a watch-peacock. Better than any dog for warning when the police came by. No police spy much less a uniformed trooper ever snuck up on Eleven Mile Creek without their peacock giving the alarm. Simple city coppers just off the boat shat themselves at that sudden banshee scream from hell or somewhere very like it in the spooky outback dark.

He must keep thinking ahead, anticipating Hare and his ploys. There was no end to Hare’s brainstorms, the best so far being his setting up policemen as horse thieves to try to tempt the gang’s old business streak (as if the police didn’t have proper horse thieves like Flood in their ranks anyway!) and dispatching that group of pretty horsewomen as police spies – this complex entrapment fancy of course going badly wrong, or badly right, depending on your view. (The Royal Melbourne Show dressage champion so impressed with Joe’s
piaffe
that she strutted with him into the billiard room of the Royal Mail Hotel and stretched out on the baize might be of two minds on this.)

But the plan that took the cake was sending along those Irish detectives disguised as priests who offered to hear this gang of Catholic boys’ confessions. Presuming that by now their Mick killer-leader would surely be seeking absolution.

Not so.

Maybe some men weren’t meant to be released from guilt or obligation. Maybe some couldn’t bear the sacrament of penance for sins they saw as necessary. Or maybe there were one or two simply beyond acquittal or forgiveness. Just like the lion would never make a watchdog – not distinguishing between friend and enemy, human and animal, hating every thing. All the time roaring that urgent, meaty need.

Air!

Breathing the trees, the winter grass, the old, cold, quartzite breath of rocks. Northerly breeze in his moustache whisking away lion, monkey, camel, horses, smoke, music, whisky, laughter, hoofprints, youth, ancient familiar whiffs of ammonia, cartridges and pistol barrels, dying pleadings and bodily whimperings. Breeze dry as a magistrate’s eye. Breeze maybe too thick to hear a train through! There was some winter plant here smelled like semen. The scent on the verandah was more a taste, like yeast and hops and salt, and there was another female smell like warm gunmetal and blood in the mouth. In the air, the sound of some invisible tinkling nightbird and the creak of frost-chilled wood and rock. Too cool for crickets but a mad frog somewhere nearby answered the concertina.

He can taste their secret in the northerly wind, yes. Her impossibility. No names.

Mrs C.

T
HIS IS
how she introduces herself: ‘Good afternoon, would you come and hold my horse’s thing?’

The lady loves the chase, and is famous in the district for hunting on this dark bay stallion. She rides Lord Byron so hard over such long distances that sometimes he doesn’t have time to piss. When she makes her request it’s a Monday afternoon – I’m employed shaping foundation stones – and Lord Byron’s been holding on since Saturday’s hunt.

This time his bladder’s paralysed from the strain. Looks to me like colic, only worse. Two stablehands are struggling to hold him. He’s groaning and slick with sweat, sighing, kicking at his swollen belly, peering with a longing, uneasy expression at his flanks.