The Following (8 page)

Marcus pulled the letter from his pocket and read it again. It showed that Pearl knew his work roster to the day and the hour. No guessing how she’d poached it – there was no other way of getting the particulars except by bashing the ear of a telegraphist hunched over a Morse key persuading distant roster clerks to divulge a man’s duties in dots and dashes.

Her plan, she wrote, was to travel to the Milburns’ camp near Bribbaree and visit Luana, who was living there now with her son. The Milburns’ camp was on the Forbes–Stockinbingal Line, newly opened, where Marcus was rostered to work the week up and down.

‘I could wring her lily-white loveliest of necks.’ He grinned contortedly as he folded the letter away. ‘She’s a flaming, conniving, brass-haired terrier.’

Anyone looking at Marcus’s face would say there was a flush of sullen anger there. He was being drawn in a direction outside his control. Marcus was a man who habitually complained about what he liked, just as his grandfather had – a cold beer aching his teeth, a plug of bitter tobacco to be rubbed into blooming life. The look was hungry as he scanned Pearl’s loping script and stared into the ripped-open envelope as if there might be something more in there, a few grains of the white dust of Tottenham to exonerate him, fine as icing sugar, so that he could lay blame on the country itself for his weaknesses, on Australia with its connecting rails and worn hills whose promise soured Marcus Friendly to a craven low.

Each night was competitive in the barracks over who dished up the best stew, who was the dab hand at baked apples. Marcus had arrived there a month ago, a loner from the Western Line exiled to the Southern. His damaged career was an object lesson in the barracks’ classrooms and railway night schools across the state. Marcus attracted gossip, malice, pity and the vindictiveness of those who kicked a dog when it was down. Marcus Friendly downed? If so, where was the hope for anyone fomenting the idea that if you ever wanted to be yourself, the truest throw of yourself, you had to excel yourself. A demoted driver was a bloke to beware, equivalent to a drunk on a dry or a bankrupt plutocrat prickling with resentments – equivalent, you might say, to a traitor to a cause, a principle or an idea no longer worthy of espousing owing to authority having stamped it out.

Here’s where Marcus got what he needed from being despised. Compressed to a fist of hopelessness was to have a capacity to enlarge himself.

That Marcus attracted the interest of those with an inclination to rescue him from his own worst despondencies hardly occurred to him. He was blowed if he knew who they were, if they existed. And if they did exist, he was no friend to condescension. They were in the category of Canon Harris’s homilies.

That night in the Harden barracks Marcus’s boiled potatoes were almost disintegrated, too soft to mash. It was shameful to spoon them out, blue and broken with their black eyes floating in water. Getting on with the serving, men all waiting for their share, Marcus found his stew skinned black at the bottom of the cast-iron pot. It was because of Pearl pinking his thoughts that he’d let the flames sizzle. If he’d never opened her letter, he reasoned, he still would have burned the stew. The flaming postmark would have been enough.

A wave of heat came from the oven, where a sugar-crusted, spiced dish of apples was ready, glimpsed through the half-open stove door. Somebody had come in and made ready while Marcus was in the washhouse, scrubbing away at himself. Marcus recognised the style of the arrangement, the way cloves studded the Grannies, as if the space between each was measured with a micrometer. Marcus knew from this vision of perfection who his driver was to be for the week: Ron Kristiansen.

Marcus chose a seat at a bench table where the shunters sat, spooning up their grub wordlessly and passing around the black billy. He was unlikely to be bothered by conversation there, knowing that the drivers would leave him alone and the shunters would show him their wordless respect. In their chapters of tradition their fathers had spoken of Marcus’s old man, Patrick Friendly. Marcus could well be a shunter himself before too long, passing down the ranks of demotion – from fireman to engine cleaner and then out the loco shed door into the shunting yard. If he survived he would finally be left – a derelict of his former self – scooping butts from station urinals and drying them out on a steam radiator, skulking off in the dark to sleep under a culvert, satisfied just to hear the engines’ bigness as they passed over him.

If Pearl missed him at the Milburns’ siding, she had written, she would follow him up to Forbes, getting a ride on Les Milburn’s trike on the Saturday when Les went to Forbes for the Rugby Union. There she would get the chance to look Aileen Harris over while Aileen, for her part, was ‘not the sort to admit knowing her’, nor would Aileen ‘ever ask about her, or pry, no matter what anyone said concerning a fettler’s daughter getting ahead of her’.

When it came to high character, Aileen won hands down, Marcus supposed. When it came to spirit, Pearl had the licence to rule. But do your maths, friends, Marcus argued to himself. He had known Pearl before he knew Aileen. As far as the calendar of the years went, not in the precedence of the older woman’s hopes. Marcus had seen the ring for Aileen, which he could not afford, and prepared the speech for Canon Harris based on the possibility of restoration to his old level of pay. Aileen had coached him that far. That Marcus was a Mick was a fact the parson would take his time to think about. It was a delay tactic built into the situation. But the ring looked dusty in the jeweller’s window. It had intention, not passion, in its glow.

The day Pearl gambolled up to him after the match against Tottenham had been the day he was overdue to make a surer move towards Aileen. The day was etched in resentful memory in Aileen’s mind, with craving in Marcus’s. Within an hour of Pearl’s murmuring hello into his muddy ear they’d become lovers – Marcus slain by his old-time, wayside attraction to the obvious notice of his friends and Aileen’s friends, and to Aileen’s bitterness. It would be, from now on, political.

The railway special for the big matches brought supporters to football grounds radiating out more than a hundred miles from Bathurst. Aileen loved those rides in bunting-decorated carriages. After the match and an early tea in a railway hotel, she and her chums would ride home together, she and her crowd, getting back to their beds last thing at night or at rooster-crow, singing and knitting socks and scarves for soldiers and falling asleep in each other’s innocent laps. Marcus wanted what they had – a brand of assurance, of belonging, of owning. Something demeaning drove him from it.

A
FTER SCRAPING HIS PLATE AND
scrubbing it in the greasy sink, Marcus stepped outside for a smoke before pudding. A yard lamp gave enough light to allow him to slide the letter from his pocket and look over it again. The rustle of scented paper was the promise of her. The smudge of ink where the franking stamp twisted brought her up, clumsy with earnest desire. His own greased thumbprint showed the mingling of blood between them. The blue-filmed whites of Pearl’s eyes were huge as sky curving over him. The forthright bigness of her handwriting hammered his heart. She was a large-breasted, slimly built woman slipped to her nakedness, and he wanted her badly enough to court ruin.

Men put their spoons down as the driver, Ron Kristiansen, entered the mess room, late for the first-course pickings. Ron had been in there earlier, daintying-up that dish of Grannies. Marcus had missed him but now met his eye. Ron Kristiansen and Marcus stared at each other for a withering, black moment.
So it’s you
, each of them seemed to acknowledge. After that a mental switch was pulled and they got down to their feed, scab and beaten hero.

The way they were assigned to each other on a mixed goods train supposed a malign influence on the roster. It would never have happened if Barney Atkinson was in full cry. He would have kept the two men apart. Marcus was made Kristiansen’s fireman more than he liked. It was how things were done against him, but all the same, he experienced bitter surprise on learning it was him again. Marcus did not think, as he might have done, that somebody such as Barney Atkinson, senior roster clerk, was working on him to put Kristiansen straight or to keep an eye on him and bend him to a better way of thinking.

Seeing that the two men believed they could read each other’s thoughts, it was possible that Kristiansen reported to the authorities on Marcus’s every nuance of silence. Marcus, having no-one to trust, reported Kristiansen’s silence to himself.

For many months the chief commissioner had kept Marcus’s name on his desk and tapped upon it with a disdainful finger. Humiliations and tense accommodation to circumstances followed him around the state. Marcus and Ron. Day and night. As back (inside centre) and forward (second rower) the two played for the same rugby team. And they never spoke one bloody word directly to each another, unless other people were around with whom the matter of their differences was not to be shared, when they made sure to meet eyes and speak a few carefully rehearsed lines as they did here at Harden or on the playing field.

After the washing-up Marcus lost at cribbage. A lack of concentration caused by Pearlie’s letter and by Kristiansen’s cool balance at cards warned him to take more control of himself. If he was to recover, overcome and excel himself, he needed himself.

Marcus surrendered three shillings, disturbing the play of a decent hand. Four groups of four played at two bench tables. Marcus sat in one group, near the open door, where the cold stars hung over the shunting yards and the sleeping town listened for the passage of night trains rollicking through the hills, one side towards Cunningar and the other to Demondrille. His next day’s driver took care to stay as far away from him as he could, over near the windows. Kristiansen won every hand he played.

Around nine o’clock the coal range gave out the smell of burned sugar and baked apples. It was not forgetfulness in the apples’ cook as it was when Marcus burnt the stew; it was cause for a round of appreciation among the blokes that these second helpings were sweet as the first lot.

Ron Kristiansen stood at the baking dish doling out Grannies and smooth vanilla custard. The shunters with their low, square chests and Biblical beards lined up for the fare. The baked apples were split like fat women’s corsets.

‘Custard?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes, thanks, mate,’ answered his fireman.

Marcus Friendly took to the hot custard like a philosopher spooning down poison. Mate. The word used with compunction.

Next day, mid-afternoon, the two railwaymen slept on the shaded side of their engine on a bypass line near Cootamundra. It was hot and hard on the gravel at the side of the tracks, and how they slept. The driver used three jute sacks folded like a narrow mattress while the fireman threw himself on the rough ground to wait it out.

Sleep was obliviousness to conflict. Their wake-up alarm was the daytime express going through on the Southern Line like a comet hurtling into the sun. Good luck to those who travelled that way; it was the artery of the nation. Then they got the signal to move along. Then were stopped again.

Kristiansen kept a notebook diary. Honour bound Marcus not to look in it. Their silences were like the earth made to crack open. If Marcus could help it there would be no conversation to record between them, not even the percussion and underlining of silence as a rhythm to plot. So why bother looking, even if tempted.

It was learned when they came to the branch that it was hardly worth the trouble sending a train through the Stockinbingal Line for the next few days. There’d been a flash flood after a thunderstorm, work was set back. That work went slowly. A man on a shovel was not as useful as he was before the war took men away. So the mixed goods service was stranded in the Central West.

Sharp points of ballast made a gravel rash visible and pitted skin when Marcus showered under the flapping hose of the overhead water tank with his clothes in a puddle at his feet.

Watching him, the driver thought:
What’s this bed of nails trick, some kind of test for the bloke? How many nails does he need? Doesn’t he know it’s not worth it? Drive a nail, don’t suffer it.

Kristiansen was single. There were men with as many as a dozen kids who were sent down the ladder to stay under him. He didn’t try and justify his point of view. That was the point. His air of right was beyond it, and now it came to Marcus that Kristiansen was a Wobbly. The tight-mouthed man of principle enacting the role of scab. He’d known it since seeing him huddled with Luana, just hadn’t allowed it in his thinking.

When it was time to build steam again, Marcus stood dripping in the cab wearing his wet clothes, allowing his shovelling work and the hot wind to dry him. He considered if Kristiansen was ready to die. He must be, to persist against such ultimate warnings as rope offered – eight turns, the sliding knot. Wobblies all over the world biting their tongues.

Marcus had been Ron Kristiansen’s teacher in the railwayman’s craft. The Irish master on the footplate, the Viking understudy at the firebox door. When the pair brought a train over the Blue Mountains, tackling the hardest hills on a blizzardy night, you could hear the hooray go up among the immortals of the railway service. But not anymore. There was a gritting of teeth in that underworld. The dead were unhappy. These mocked-up mates would never be mates again except in the formal application of the word, denoting two men with a job that neither could do on his own.

The job itself asked for a standard that overrode differences. In the doing of it they would die for each other quite possibly, though with a curse on their lips from their opposite ends of belief in the same thing – iron ore made steel, animation gathered in steam.

Moving at last, cranking along rails buckling in the heat, they kept their eyes on the country they travelled through and on the rails ahead, not chancing a look at each other. Bleached grasses, eroded gullies, grey box trees along the creeks filled their vision as they avoided the knock of elbows.