Tim (2 page)

Thrown on her own resources at the age of fourteen, she had shared a room at the YWCA with five other girls, and worked as a salesclerk in David Jones until she completed a night secretarial course. At fifteen she had commenced work in the general typists' pool at Constable Steel & Mining, so poor that she wore the same scrupulously laundered skirt and blouse every day and darned her cotton stockings until they contained more darns than original fabric.

Within five years her efficiency, unobtrusive quietness, and remarkable intelligence took her from the general office to the post of private secretary for Archibald Johnson, the managing director, but during her first ten years with the firm she continued to live at the Y, darn her stockings over and over again and save much more than she spent.

When she was twenty-five years old she approached Archie Johnson for advice on investing her savings, and by the time she was thirty she had made many, many times her initial outlay. Consequently, at the age of forty-three she owned a house in Artarmon, a quiet middle-class suburb, drove a very conservative but very expensive British Bentley upholstered in genuine leather and paneled in genuine walnut, owned a beach cottage on twenty acres of land north of Sydney, and had her suits made by the man who tailored for the wife of the Governor General of Australia.

She was very well satisfied with herself and her life; she enjoyed the small luxuries which only money permitted, kept almost totally to herself at work and at home, had no friends save five thousand books which lined the walls of her den and several hundred LPs devoted almost entirely to Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Handel. She loved gardening and cleaning house, never watched television or went to the movies, and had never wanted or had a boyfriend.

When Mary Horton let herself out of her front door she stood on the stoop for a moment, screwing up her eyes against the glare and checking the state of her front garden. The grass needed mowing badly; where was that dratted man whom she paid to barber it every Thursday fortnight? He had not come for a month, and the closely cropped green velvet surface was becoming tussocky. Most annoying, she thought, really most annoying.

There was a curious thrumming in the air, half a sound and half a sensation, a sort of faintly heard
boom, boom, boom
that seeped into the bones and told the experienced Sydneysider that today was going to be a very hot day, up over the century. The twin West Australian flowering gums on either side of her front gate fluttered their blue, sick-led leaves limply downward in sighing protest against the hammer of the heat, and Japanese beetles clicked and rattled busily among the suffocating masses of yellow flowers on the cassia bushes. A bank of magnificent red double oleanders flanked the stone-flagged pathway leading from the front door to the garage; Mary Horton set her lips together tightly and began to walk along it.

Then the duel began, the struggle which recurred every morning and evening of summer. As she drew level with the first beautiful, blooming bush, it began to shriek and caterwaul in an incredible volume of shrilling sound which rang in her ears until it set her head reeling.

Down went the handbag, off came the gloves;

Mary Horton marched to the neat green coils of the garden hose, turned its faucet full on and began to drench her oleanders. Gradually the noise dwindled away as the bushes became saturated, until there was only a single basso profundo "breek!" emanating from the bush nearest to the house. Mary shook her fist at it vindictively.

"I'll get you yet, you old twirp!" she said through clenched teeth.

"Breeeeeek!" answered the cicada choirmaster derisively.

On went the gloves, up came the handbag; Mary proceeded to the garage in peace and quiet.

From her driveway it was possible to see the mess that had once been Mrs. Emily Parker's pretty red brick bungalow next door. Mary eyed the havoc disapprovingly as she hefted up the door of her garage and glanced idly toward the sidewalk.

Walton Street's sidewalks were lovely; they consisted of a narrow concrete path and a beautifully kept, very wide stretch of lawn from path to curb. Every thirty feet down each side of the street there grew a huge oleander tree, one white, one pink, one red, one pink, in successive quartets that were the pride of Walton Street's residents and one of the chief reasons why Walton Street was generally a prizewinner in the annual Herald garden competition.

A massive concrete carrier was parked with its idly revolving drum slapping against one of Emily Parker's sidewalk oleanders, and a chute was discharging gluey gray gallons of concrete on to the grass. It dripped from the sad, petrified branches of the tree, it ran and oozed sluggishly into pools where the lawn was uneven, it slopped onto the paved path. Mary's mouth was a thin white line of vexation. What on earth had possessed Emily Parker to poultice the red brick sides of her house with this disgusting substance? There was no accounting for taste, or rather the lack of it, she reflected.

A young man was standing bare-headed in the sun, dispassionately watching the desecration of Walton Street; from where she stood some twenty feet away Mary Horton gazed at him, dumbfounded.

Had he lived two and a half thousand years before, Phidias and Praxiteles would have used him as model for the greatest Apollos of all time; instead of standing with such superb lack of self-consciousness in the backwater of a Sydney street to suffer the oblivion of utter mortality, he would have lived forever in the cool, smoothly satin curves of pale marble, and his stone eyes would have looked indifferently over the awed heads of generations upon generations of men.

But here he stood, amid a slushy concrete mess on Walton Street, obviously a member of Harry Markham's building crew, for he wore the builder's uniform of khaki shorts with legs rolled up until the lower curve of the buttocks was just visible, the waistline of the shorts slipped down until . they rode his hips. Aside from the shorts and a pair of thick woollen socks turned down over the tops of heavy, clumping workman's boots, he wore nothing; not shirt or coat or hat.

Momentarily turned side-on to her, he glistened in the sun like living, melted gold, legs so beautifully shaped that she fancied he was a longdistance runner; indeed, that was the cast of his whole physique, long and slender and graceful, the planes of his chest as he swung toward her tapering gradually from wide shoulders to exquisitely narrow hips.

And the face-oh, the face! It was flawless. The nose was short and straight, the cheekbones high and pronounced, the mouth tenderly curved. Where his cheek sloped in toward the corner of his mouth on the left side he bore a tiny crease, and that minute furrow saddened him, lent him an air of lost, childlike innocence. His hair, brows, and lashes were the color of ripe wheat, magnificent with the sun pouring down on them, and his wide eyes were as intensely, vividly blue as a cornflower.

When he noticed her watching him he smiled at her happily, and the smile snatched Mary Horton's breath from her body in an uncontrolled gasp. She had never gasped so in all her life; horrified to find herself spellbound by his extraordinary beauty, she made a sudden mad dash for the haven of her car.

The memory of him stayed with her all through the crawling drive into North Sydney's commercial center, where Constable Steel & Mining had its forty-story office building. Try as she would to concentrate on the traffic and the coming events of the day, Mary could not banish him from her mind. If he had been effeminate, if his face had been merely pretty or he had exuded some indefinable aura of brutishness, she could have forgotten him as easily as long self-discipline had trained her to forget anything unwelcome or upsetting. Oh, God, how beautiful he was, how completely, appallingly beautiful! Then she remembered Emily Parker saying the builders would be finished today; driving on doggedly, everything in the quivering, shimmering mist of heat around her seemed to dim a little.

Three

With Mary Horton gone and the garden hose rendered impotent, the cicada choirmaster in his oleander bush emitted a deep, resonating "breeek!" and was immediately answered by the diva soprano two bushes over. One by one they came in, tenors, contraltos, baritones, and sopranos, until the beating sun charged their little iridescent green bodies with such a singing power of sound that to attempt a conversation within feet of the bushes was useless. The deafening chorus spread, over the tops of the clattery denizens of the cassias to the flowering gums, across the fence to the oleanders along Walton Street's sidewalks, and into the row of camphor laurels between Mary Horton's and Emily Parker's back gardens.

The toiling builders hardly noticed the cicadas until they had to shout to each other, scooping trowel-loads of concrete from the big heap Tim Melville kept replenishing and throwing them- slurp!-against the chipped red brick sides of the Old Girl's bungalow. The sleepout was finished, all save a final coat of stucco; bare backs bending and straightening in the swing and rhythm of hard labor, the builders flowed steadily up and around the house, bones basking in the wonderful warmth of summer, sweat drying before it had a chance to bead on their silky brown skins. Bill Naismith slapped wet concrete on the bricks, Mick Devine smoothed the splashes into a continuous sheet of coarse-grained, greenish plaster, and behind him Jim Irvine slithered along a rickety scaffold, sweeping his shaping trowel back and forth in easy curves that imparted a swirling series of arcs to the surface. Harry Markham, eyes everywhere, glanced at his watch and shouted for Tim.

"Oy, mate, go inside and ask the Old Girl if you can put the billy on, will you?" Harry yelled when he gained Tim's attention.

Tim parked his wheelbarrow in the side passage, gathered the gallon-capacity tin billycan and the box of supplies into his arms, and kicked a query of admission on the back door.

Mrs. Parker appeared a moment later, a shadowy lump behind the veiling darkness of the fly-screening.

"Oh, it's you, is it, love?" she asked, opening the door. "Come in, come in! I suppose you want me to boil a kettle for them 'orrible warts outside, do yer?" she went on, lighting a cigarette and leering appreciatively at him as he stood blinking in the gloom, sun-blinded.

"Yes, please, Mrs. Parker," Tim said politely, smiling.

"Well, all right then, I suppose I don't have much choice, do I, not if I want me house finished before the weekend? Sit yourself down while the kettle boils, love."

She moved around the kitchen sloppily, her salt-and-pepper hair crimped into an impossible battery of waves, her uncorseted figure swathed in a cotton housedress of purple and yellow pan-sies.

"Want a bikkie, love?" she asked, extending the cookie jar. "I got some real grouse choccy ones in there."

"Yes, please, Mrs. Parker," Tim smiled, pawing in the jar until his hand closed on a very choco-latey cookie.

He sat silently on the chair while the Old Girl took his can of supplies from him and spooned a good quarter of a pound of loose tea into the billy can. When the kettle boiled she half-filled the billy can, then put the kettle on to boil again while Tim set out battered enamel mugs on the kitchen table and stood a bottle of milk and a jar of sugar alongside them.

"Here, pet, wipe yer hands on the tea towel like a good bloke, will yer?" the Old Girl asked as Tim left a brown smear of chocolate on the table edge.

She went to the back door, stuck her head outside and bawled, "Smoke-oh!" at the top of her voice.

Tim poured himself a mug of coal-black, milk-less tea, then added so much sugar to it that it slopped over the top of the mug onto the table and set the Old Girl clucking again.

"Christ, you're a grub!" she grinned at him forgivingly. "I wouldn't put up with it from them other bots, but you can't help it, can you, love?"

Tim smiled at her warmly, picked up his cup and carried it outside as the other men began to come into the kitchen.

They ate at the back of the house, where it began to curve around the newly erected sleepout. It was a shady spot, far enough from the garbage cans to be comparatively free of flies, and they had each arranged a small, flat-topped cairn of bricks to sit on while they ate. The camphor laurels between Miss Horton's backyard and Mrs. Parker's leaned over them thickly, with a shade dense enough to make resting there a pleasure after working in the baking sun. Each man sat down with his mug of tea in one hand and his brown paper bag of food in the other, stretching his legs out with a sigh and snorting the flies away.

Since they started work at seven and finished at three, this morning break occurred at nine, followed by lunch at eleven-thirty. Traditionally the nine o'clock pause was referred to as "smoke-oh," and occupied about half an hour. Engaged in heavy manual labor, they ate with enormous appetite, though they had little to show for it on their spare, muscular frames. A breakfast of hot porridge, fried chops or sausages with two or three fried eggs, several cups of tea, and slices of toast started each man's day off around five-thirty; during smoke-oh they consumed home-made sandwiches and slabs of cake, and for lunch the same, only twice as much. There was no afternoon break; at three they were gone, working shorts thrust into their oddly medical-looking little brown bags, once more clad in open-necked shirts and thin cotton trousers as they headed for the pub. Each day led inexorably to this, its culmination and high point; within the buzzing, latrine-like interior of a pub they could relax with a foot on the bar rail and a brimming fifteen-ounce schooner of beer in one fist, yarning with workmates and pub cronies and flirting ster-ilely with the hard-faced barmaids. Homecoming was total anticlimax after this, a half-surly submission to the cramping pettiness of women and offspring.

There was a rather tense, expectant air about the men this morning as they sat down to enjoy their smoke-oh. Mick Devine and his boon companion Bill Naismith sat side by side against the high paling fence, mugs at their feet and food spread out in their laps; Harry Markham and Jim Irvine faced them, with Tim Melville nearest to the back door of the Old Girl's house, so he could fetch and carry when the others demanded. As junior member of the team, his was the position of menial and general dogsbody; on Harry's books his official title was "Builder's Laborer," and he had been with Harry for ten of his twenty-five years without promotion.