The House That Was Eureka (15 page)

Yet Evie still is Evie.

So when Evie saw a face in her cupboard late that night she decided to clean the cupboard out. She’d been meaning to do it for ages.

Getting up then, pulling the edges of her body back out of the night, Evie opened the cupboard again, and it was just a big, dirty, triangular closed-in space, containing only an old fuel copper and a broken push-mower and bike tyres and rusted paint tins and flagon bottles encrusted with sediments of poisonous-looking liquids.

Turning her back on the heart, closing her mind to the heart, Evie started pulling all the junk out.

Crouching in darkness, for some reason underneath a bed, Noel heard singing.

…A copper said to me:

Do you belong to the doley-oh mob?

Well come along with me!

And he grabbed me by the collar,

And tried to run me in.

So I upped me fist

And I knocked him stiff

And we all began to sing…

Then Noel heard silence, and it was the silence of hatred.

An echo of the words Evie had screamed at him floated for a second, but as Noel lay there hearing his own breathing, hearing the despot’s breathing, he knew it was the hatred given out by the old woman and himself that made this silence that seemed to last for hours.

Then suddenly there came the bullet bangs, and the voices, that even in this dream he recognized as being those customary bullet sounds and voices he was always dreaming. He could never make out what the voices yelled.

Noel climbed out from under the bed. That was odd, because usually the dream stopped at this point: Noel in this dream knew he was dreaming, so expected his dream to end but it didn’t. He climbed out from under the bed, and that part, though dream, was also true this time, for earlier in the nightmare Noel had fallen out of his bed and rolled under it. Noel climbed out, and recognized his own room, and that was a shock, for he felt he should be in some other, but similar, room. That poster of Bob Dylan shouldn’t be there.

As a child, Noel used to sleepwalk. He hadn’t done it for years, but this night he did.

Noel was scared. His dream was full of running men but he was alone. They were out on the balcony, here in the room, he could hear them in the back room, hear them on the stairs, but Noel was scared stiff and quite alone.

He ran to the balcony and crouched down, and there were men down there in blue uniforms shooting up at him; and so he pulled out his gun and shot down into the street at the men who were shooting at him. Only he didn’t shoot: he tried to, and the blood inside him became a thin tepid trickle that wasn’t strong enough to hold his arm up, to hold the gun up, but the trouble was it wasn’t a gun it was only his arm.

Panic then seized Noel, wild panic, he was frozen inside this lump of noise and movement that surged around him and he jerked now, struggled, freed himself from the lump and on all fours he crawled through his bedroom, through running legs, past Mum’s room, down the stairs, through the legs of the others running up and down, blue legs suddenly as well as brown legs and bare legs, legs in long white underpants and blue serge legs too, past a bullet that flew past him hitting plaster that sprayed upon his hair, white chalk flying in clouds inside the darkness; pausing now, on the landing, he heard the despot breathing through the noise.

‘Noh!’ The sound the despot made for Noel’s name.

‘No!’ screamed Noel. ‘No!’

Refused the call and crawled on down on all fours like a cringing dog, still holding his gun, his gun that wasn’t real, crawled down through the diningroom where men were hitting men and men were wrestling men and there were more blue men than other men and the blue men were winning easily now and Noel wanted to help one of the other men who was kneeling there, but Noel was terrified, and just a boy.

In the kitchen a shadow loomed, thrown up by flickering candlelight, and the shadow went to snatch him but the boy scuttled now, fast, maybe a cockroach, close to the floor as low as a beast he scuttled out of the grab and through the half-open kitchen door, stood up and opened the scullery door and slipped in there to escape.

In his scullery, Noel breathed, for the act of standing up had woken him. Noel stood there in his pyjamas, trembling from the effort, shaking still from the terror of the dream, from the fear that stayed in him still (that would stay in him for ever). And in him with the fear was a dirty feeling.

Noel saw the wide green eyes of the young man who’d been kneeling in the diningroom, forced to his knees beneath the blows from a pistol-butt that rained down upon his head. Kneeling, the young man was, but trying to stand, his hands crawling up the wall, trying to get a leverage; and there was blood running freely from the man’s arm, and as the hands moved up they left their pawmarks, stamped in blood.

Noel had seen the young man, and not helped. Noel could have risen up, taken the blue man by surprise, smashed his fists into the pistol-butt, pulled out his own arm here that was a gun, pulled this gun out and shot the blue man, at least hit him with the gun, but Noel was a cockroach running this way and that, mad-scared between the legs, look-after-his-own-skin.

Noel stood, breathing. Taking in air to his lungs. Still only half-awake, shivering in June in pyjamas without his duffle-coat, hearing clunks next door that he didn’t recognize as Evie clearing out junk, but which drew him.

Awake now but still a zombie, still stuck in his dream, Noel performed an action which made his arms and legs move in a familiar way, taking any mind that Noel had along with them.

Noel walked shivering over to the corner of his scullery and crouched down near the old fuel copper, there in the corner. He felt under it, pushed in under the gap, and pulled out all the bricks that were loose, not mortared in, they’d obviously been shifted before. Then Noel’s body crept through the hidey-hole, till he was under 203’s copper, and next his body slithered out, while Evie just watched.

Noel says nothing, he just gets up.

Evie says nothing either.

She’s accustomed by now to Noel popping from nowhere, and it’s dawn, and Evie’s exhausted, standing on the copper, keeping her balance despite tiredness as she tries to clean out this damned cupboard.

Noel shivers.

Evie has her arms up high, trying to straighten the rusting old tin chimney that Noel has dislodged in his crawling, and as she shoves the chimney, this thing falls out pat into her hands.

Legs stiff, feet stuck to the top of the copper, fear cold, like time all around. A hurry and slowness. And suddenly his face. Thin and white around the dark eyes of his fear and hurry as he grabs from her the gun.

‘That’s my gun,’ Noel says, and disappears.

Evie lay down then, and didn’t get up till she’d heard Ted and Mum leave. The girls were in the kitchen, and everything was so noisy and messy and normal that Evie wondered if the night had happened. Then, as she went to put the milk back in the fridge, something about the fridge door caught her eye, and her stomach turned over, as if she’d just gone too fast in a lift.

On the fridge door they had a set of those plastic magnetized letters, for Sammy to learn her alphabet with. Sammy played with them a lot, writing her name and everyone else’s names, and Maria and Jodie would sometimes write four-letter words.

This morning there was a name there, but it wasn’t anyone Evie knew.

noBby wesTOn

Evie read, and felt her stomach lift and drop fast. ‘
Who did that?
’

The girls giggled at her fierceness.

‘Whose name’s that?’

But the girls giggled more.

Evie shook Maria, for she was sure from her face that it was Ree that had done it, but Maria just laughed and pulled away, then grabbed her lunch and was off out the front door, Jodie at her heels.

Evie looked at Sammy. But Sammy couldn’t know. Was just laughing because the others had, because Evie being so wild looked so funny. Evie didn’t usually get wild like that.

Surprised herself at her wildness, Evie paused, tried to think why the letters upset her, and then suddenly anger gripped her again, anger at living in this bloody place where, ever since they’d come here, things had kept pulling at her, making her feel. Evie swiped her forearm across the fridge door, sending the bright-coloured letters flying off into air, and then they fell upon the floor, a scattered jumble, spelling no name.

‘I’m going to tell on you!’ Sammy said.

‘Who’ll you tell?’

‘Mr Man!’

‘You and your
Mr Men
books!’

After the battle was over, Mrs Weston stepped out onto the street. She could do it now for they were gone now, vanquished, the feet of the children that skipped out their two-four time in crotchets upon the pavement, skipped to steal her son, to stop her living.

She was hungry, it was four days now. Four days since anything but black tea. And hungry too was the boy in her house, a thin, white-cheeked boy who’d run in as a fugitive to lie upon her floor.

‘Get in here, boy,’ she’d said. Hiding him beneath her bed, knowing he’d be safe here because no police would question
her
, she was the policemen’s accomplice.

‘Scab, scab!’ screeched Job the parrot, ever quick to pick up new tricks. ‘Give her a stab!’

Stepping out through her gate onto the pavement, her neat black shoes had been polished that morning as they were every morning, come fire, come hail, come revolution, whether she was going to step out that day or not. In her dizziness from the hunger she wondered who the thin boy was, but whoever he was he was the cause of her stepping out now to buy food for she wouldn’t have done it for herself.

For the first time in her life, for this fugitive beneath her bed, Mrs Weston is partaking of an act of charity, but it is too late.

‘I don’t take charity!’ She didn’t give it either.

Many years before this, standing on her roof under the bruised sky of a southerly buster, with all the slates flying off around her head, she’d defied the heavens who had given her a bank teller then taken him away, leaving her with just a sickly son and a piano and a parrot. ‘I don’t believe in you!’ she’d screamed into the sky. Throwing off five generations of Methodism in one sentence, she’d defied her God to prove he was there by making her fall, taking her up to heaven to be with her bank teller, whom she’d loved. But nothing had happened.

After that, she expected nothing, gave nothing.

But wanted to give a soup now at least with the three shillings she’d hoarded in the piano stool (she was too much herself to keep it in the tea caddy like the rest of Liberty Street), wanted to buy with her last money in the world some food for the fugitive, whoever he was.

He looks a
nice
boy, Mrs Weston thinks.

Over the hills and far away in dizzy hunger.

Her mind sent far away too by the children’s feet upon the street, by the effort of being a traitor.

(
‘May we come through here?’ the nice Police Inspector had said
.

‘Oh, yes,’ she’d said, making her first betrayal
.)

‘I must tell my son,’ Mrs Weston stepping says, ‘I must tell him that I’m hungry.’

But he’s most unsympathetic these days, her son. Argues late through the night, tells her to get the widow’s pension, then she won’t need next door’s rent. Take the pension. That’s charity. And socialism too, brought in by that man Lang. She’d rather live off the rent from the Irish bog. He’s no son of hers. This last week, he hasn’t even spoken to argue.

Mrs Weston steps but her feet seem to take her nowhere, she still hasn’t reached 203.

203, Lizzie, hussy. The way she jumps around the street with her safety pins flying. I’d rather see him dead than let her have him.

But my nice fugitive.

…‘May we come through here?’ the nice Police Inspector had said.

‘Oh certainly,’ had answered the betrayer.

…On her first night in Newtown, Evie had worked one thing out: if a gang wanted to break into 203, this is how they’d do it: in the kitchen door, but if they can’t do that, over the scullery roof and/or through the balcony partition (though that would mean that they’d have had to break into 201 first; unless the owner of 201 was an accomplice of the gang)…

After the battle was over, Mrs Weston walked down the street that was dead quiet now the battle was over. 203 was a mess. Barbed wire, bits of sandbags, blue metal, bricks. Over the front door, half-swung-down, was a flimsy wooden sign.

THE EUREKA STOCKADE

Ah yes, remembered Mrs Weston stepping off to buy a lamb shank, that was in the past, the Eureka Stockade.

Have you ever been to Crazy Land

Down on the Loony Pike?

There are the queerest people there,

You never saw the like!

The ones who do the useful work

Are poor as poor can be,

And those who do no useful work

All live in luxury!

ANON,
THE TOCSIN
, 1930S

On the day after the gun-dawn, Evie went to CYSS. There were new big signs up on the wall:

FIGHT CUTS TO
CYSS FUNDING

STOP GOVT ATTACKS
ON NEWTOWN CYSS

The only person who seemed to be around was that project officer girl who wore glasses.

Sharnda watched Evie come in. It’s that medium girl, she thought. The girl of medium height and medium build, with in-betweenish, brownish hair cut medium length with a fringe. Sharnda had noticed her a few times lately but had never got around to talking to her because Evie was always busy having the video camera explained to her by Roger.

(‘Another of Roger’s little groupies,’ Sharnda had grinned to Di.

‘He can’t help his looks,’ Di defended him. ‘He doesn’t really lead them on.’

‘I know,’ Sharnda said. ‘I only hope she keeps coming, that’s all. The sooner he finds someone other than
me
to hang around after him with the sound stuff, the better.’)