I’ll be seein’ you, the drover said, returning the pat on the back. He was going down to Tharwa in the afternoon, he came from there, he would not come back for a year or two, but you said things like that.
So long, Barney, said Hagan. So long, Bill.
Then he went out into the slush. The rain dribbled down, dribbled down, and the ruts coming up to meet, because you were drunk, because Furlow said, and damn Furlow, money or not, to sober up on the way. He felt just that, splash splash the mud. She waved her hands, they always did, though only as a formality, and you went straight ahead, if you saw a blonde hand waving out of a window-pane. But he did not see her. The windows were blank. A feeble hen had come round to the front and was picking at a garden bed. Dead. The house was dead. There was no sign.
A brand-new Ford came bumping along the street, swerved, cast up a spray of watery mud on Hagan’s overcoat. The yellowish, cheerful face of a Chinaman looked out from the steering wheel, tried to frown, but smiled. The car bumped over the ruts and down the hill.
Hagan swore. To be run over by a bloody Chow right in the middle of the street. It made him angry again. He scraped off some of the mud with his fingers and flicked it back on to the road. He looked at his fingers stupidly. They were thick and hard, with a mist of reddish hairs on the back. He would like to feel that Chinaman’s jaw. He would like to finger a paste brooch or to probe beyond swan’s-down into a region that was mysteriously pink. But instead he continued uncertainly down the hill, and when he reached the store there was the truck waiting to take him out to Glen Marsh.
They stood about in a little aimless group behind the urinal. There was Andy Everett, and Willy Schmidt, and Arthur Ball, besides Rodney Halliday. Willy Schmidt was chewing a liquorice strap from Quongs’, so that his ordinarily wellformed pink, if insipid, mouth had become a blue-black smear.
’Ere, said Willy suddenly, you can ‘ave a piece of this ’ere strap, Andy. I’ll give you ’alf if you like.
Andy Everett was throwing stones at the corrugated iron of the urinal wall. The stones went bang, bang, and plumped down into the mud.
I don’t want your strap, Andy Everett said. I’d’ve taken a bit if I wanted to, but I don’t like lickerish strap.
He continued to throw stones.
Of course ’e’d’ve taken a bit, laughed Arthur Ball. An’ so ’ud I.
Willy Schmidt went very red.
Rodney Halliday stood apart, he was with them, but just a little way off, kicking a hole in the ground. It gave him a queer, horrible thrill to hear Andy Everett speak like that, to hear the omnipotent smack of the stones, and to wonder what would happen next. They always went behind the urinal in the break. Rodney watched the face of the clock, knew it would happen in so many minutes now, the hands turning, the heart. Then they would go down to the bottom of the yard. His heart fell. He hated Andy Everett and Arthur Ball. Willy Schmidt he just despised, sucking liquorice there, with the strap dangling from his mouth. Willy Schmidt, like Rodney himself, merely hovered on the edge.
Andy had stopped throwing stones.
Rodney still looked at the ground. He wished that he had not followed them down the yard. It would be so easy to go and play with the girls. He lay in bed at night and said, I shan’t go with Andy Everett any more. But he went. Once he woke from a dream of Andy pulling out his teeth, that were as big as logs, and he lit the candle, and his face was yellow in the candlelight looking over at the mirror at the other side of the room, his face dancing in reflection and wet with tears. The silence was a ticking clock, substance a great shadow that bent down over the bed, the form of Andy Everett past and present and inevitably future.
Look at Green-face there, said Andy Everett.
It was dull behind the urinal. There was nothing to do. He felt a sudden contempt for Rodney Halliday. You could see it coming on his square red face. Rodney saw it. His stomach quailed.
Green-as-grass Halliday, chanted Arthur Ball.
Willy Schmidt sniggered through a liquorice pulp.
Rodney kicked at the ground. You could not say anything, because your throat, that hot swelling, and a sick tingle in your stomach, or turn, because to-morrow came, and you followed them down the yard. He hated Andy Everett’s face under the cropped hair, he hated the red mottled skin, his hands were very strong and muscular because in the evening he helped his father milk the cows.
What shall we do to Mumma’s boy? asked Andy, taking him by the arm.
The face was very close, those red spots, and the body hard as it pressed against your side. There was a lingering smell of cows on the old serge coat that Andy Everett always wore.
Give ’im a windmill, chanted Arthur Ball.
Once upon a time you resisted windmills, fought against the sharp twisting of the hair above your ears, and they all laughed, but you fought, and then it was no good. You did not resist. You let it happen. The ring of faces, with Willy Schmidt putting out an adventurous hand, and the toothy mouth of Arthur Ball, and Andy Everett’s bullet head. If you tried hard enough you became a thing, a dull whimper that did not come out, or only half, because they must not know.
I’ll give ’im the windmill, said Willy Schmidt.
But they all gave the windmill in turn, Andy Everett holding his arms, Andy Everett’s body pressed up against his back. They said you got lice from cows. Perhaps Andy Everett would give him lice. He did not care. Perhaps they
would tear out his hair by the roots. Willy Schmidt had now gathered courage enough to give him several windmills in succession. He darted about from foot to foot, chewing wildly at the liquorice strap.
There are times when you’ve got to run your head against the inanimate agents of pain. Even though you know you’re mad, that they cannot feel, it is some relief to your feelings to increase that pain by venting them on the feelingless. It is desperate but necessary. So you kick the chair, so you bang your head against the wall. And it was in much this spirit that Rodney Halliday burst from Andy Everett’s arms and gave Arthur Ball a crack on the mouth and Willy Schmidt a kick on the shins. But then he was afraid. At once. It is only a momentary and stupid respite to attack the agents of pain.
I’ll break your bloody neck, roared Arthur Ball.
And Rodney Halliday knew that, metaphorically speaking, his bloody neck was as good as broken, knew he was lying on the ground with Andy Everett sitting on his chest and his ears singing from repeated clouts. There was a bell that rang erratically in his head. What have you done to your coat, all that mud, his mother said. He did not cry. There was no breath in his body. Or breath had curdled. There was a hard kernel of petrified breath that would not come out, and the bell ringing.
Better leave ’im. There’s the bell, said Arthur Ball, a thread of blood trickling from his lip.
Andy continued to deal monotonous clouts.
That’ll teach you, he said.
Then he got up grinning slowly, slowly wiping his
hands. The small knot unravelled itself, the threads trailing across the yard, Andy and Arthur and Willy, their heads turned back, their faces still intent on reluctantly relinquished pleasure in the form of Rodney stretched still on his back.
P’raps something’s up, said Willy nervously at the door, but after all it was Andy’s fault, it wasn’t him, he hadn’t wanted to.
Then Rodney got up. Andy grinned. The three of them went inside.
It was over, Rodney Halliday said. He would go inside and do arithmetic. But it was over for the day. He tried to brush the mud from his coat. He was aching. He was bleeding. He was also free. And he would go home for lunch and read that book on Columbus till it was time for afternoon school. There was no break in the afternoon. He used to run home as fast as he could. Sometimes they chased him and threw stones. But he could really run very fast. And now there was a feeling of exhaustion and of triumph, almost like leaving the dentist’s in at Moorang, only Mother was not there to buy him an ice-cream. Instead he would go inside and wrestle with sums.
They did not look when he went in. They bent their heads over exercise books. Only some of the girls had a look. Emily Schmidt tittered behind her hand, because it was Rodney Halliday. She whispered to Margaret Quong. But Margaret Quong leant over her book, doing a leaf design in the margin, not looking up. And Rodney sat down. It was arithmetic. One of his knuckles had lost some skin.
If A and B are given a bag of one hundred and eighty
apples, said Mr Moriarty, writing it up on the board. And A eats two a day, and B eats three, and after a fortnight they are joined by C, who eats seven, how long will it be before they’ve emptied the bag?
He spoke in a dry, precise voice, like chalk dust falling. Or he paused and you heard a wheeze that Willy Schmidt could imitate, though of course not loud enough for the old cow to hear. The chalk squealed on the board. Margaret Quong writhed and drew down her head, like a tortoise, into her jumper neck. One hundred and eighty apples, breathed Willy Schmidt. Somebody had upset the ink. Somebody made a smell. The stove crackled. The clock said a quarter past.
The school at Happy Valley was built like the rest of the town, with a purpose, and not for beauty. It was also built without regard for time, that had already made considerable incursions on its body, softening its joists, weakening its joints, blanching its colour, and scoring its face with cracks. The school was squat and completely drab. It lay on its square of bare yard with the two lavatories at the end, one for Girls and one for Boys, and almost seemed to totter a bit when the wind came down from the mountains and struck its side. A corner of the corrugated-iron roof flapped in the wind. It ought to be seen to, Mr Moriarty said, but as nobody saw to it, a basin continued to stand in the corner of the larger schoolroom to catch the water that fell inside.
In the smaller room sat the younger children with a pupil-teacher, a young Miss Purves, who suffered from chronic catarrh and chilblains on the feet. Altogether her time was pretty well taken up in straying from her nose
to her feet, with dabbing and scratching, and rolling her handkerchief into a smaller ball or hanging it out to air on the desk. She had another handkerchief stuck through an armlet, as a kind of reserve, but this she seldom used. She just used to dab and scratch, or rest her receding chin on a cold hand.
The big children were dealt with by Ernest Moriarty in the larger and more imposing room, that smelt of a coke stove and clotting ink and settled chalk. When it rained you could hear the water dripping down into the enamel basin from the roof that nobody came to see about. But the room was not so lugubrious, in spite of Mr Moriarty sitting in his overcoat and scarf, for the sake of his asthma, he would have said, sitting there correcting exercises with his bluish hands. It was not so lugubrious. There were maps of Asia and Africa, and a larger one of Australia over the desk. And you could lean on your elbow when you were bored and wander up the Ganges or wonder about Irkutsk. There was also a stuffed fox in a case, and some jars of spirit containing various snakes. And somebody sometimes brought some flowers.
Rodney Halliday sighed. A and B and C. Sharing apples with Andy Everett and Arthur Ball. He experienced a mild shiver of recollected discomfiture, from contact with Andy’s body that smelt of cows. And he could not do sums. If you leant on your elbow and waited till it died, you were lost in the Indian Ocean’s turquoise glaze, you jogged across a saffron steppe east of the Caspian Sea, and the plain of India was a field of blood. But his knuckle no longer hurt. It was numbed from paying tribute to A, B, and C. He sucked
his knuckle. His breath was a silver cloud, in spite of the restless coke stove his breath sailed out silverly into the Yellow Sea, beyond this the god’s face in the encyclopaedia, and a bearded cinnamon-tree, and a god squatting on a kind of plant, like Margaret Quong. He looked across at Margaret Quong, who sat, not on a lotus, but on a bench doing sums, and she was good at sums, she was the best, she was thirteen, and she helped her aunt make up the books at the store. He would like to play with Margaret Quong. She had a soft voice. But she was thirteen, and he was only nine. She was also a girl. So he had to go down with Andy and Arthur and Willy behind the lavatory, and you knew, and you knew. But you did not think of that. You turned over a page in the mind till A, B, and C were facing you. It was better like that.
It was better like that, said Ernest Moriarty, correcting an essay by R. Dormer on the Cow and Her Relationship with Man. She kept on saying, it’ll kill you, Ernest, and look at the screw, it’s shameful the way, and a man with all those years of service, and if you got that job up on the North Shore we could easily keep a maid. The Cow is a useful animal. She gives us meat, milk, and menewer. In the evening the Cow went slowly home and they milked her dry. She was content. He was content, of course he was content. He had his stamps. He was secretary to the Moorang Philatelists’ Society. Only Vic, sitting in the front room, said that the sofa was wearing out. She was still very pretty, like those evenings in Marrickville when they licked stamps together and he touched her hand. And then he could not restrain himself, and he had to go home, and
perhaps the people in the tram knew why he was wheezing, and it was uncomfortable to walk. The Cow has an udder with four tits. I don’t want to complain, she said, only I’m fond of you, only it’s for your own good. He wrote and nothing happened. He showed her the letters before he sealed them up. And nobody came to mend the roof. It made him feel bad, in spite of those new powders, and at night he could hardly breathe. So he could not very well do more than write. Poor, pretty, pink Vic. It made him proud to possess her, not physically, that is, because that always made him wheeze, but to know that she was there, like the three-cornered Cape of Good Hope blue and the surcharged German New Guinea. He arranged R. Dormer’s exercise book on the pile. It was very neat, a perfect square of exercise books with a rubber on the top. There were four pencils and a pen in a little wooden tray in front of the ink.
I’ve finished that one, Archie Braithwaite said.
Then he cringed back on the desk. Andy Everett had given him a kick.
Turn to page ninety-four. Example number thirty-six.
The Cow resumed her laborious Relationship with Man.
The Yellow Sea and the Red Sea, and the Blue Pool near Moorang, where you went for picnics in the summer, if it was a good summer, if there was no drought, but if there was a drought. Arthur Ball had blood on his face. The way your knuckle stung as it landed on Arthur’s teeth.
Emily Schmidt smelt her handkerchief, passed it to Gladys Rudd to smell. Her lips spelt Parma Violets behind
her hand. Emily Schmidt smiled in a vastly superior way and played about with her ring.
It was dull, because this was school, because the feverish chant of the younger children burst in a thin unison through the wooden wall, intensifying the monotony with a twiceoneatwo, twicetwoafour, twicethreeasix, seeming to paralyse the progress of the clock. And there is no monotony so desperate as the activities of A, B, and C, nothing so definitely guaranteed to work havoc with the nails or to make you groan inwardly at the endlessness of time. Until, with the ultimate gesture of a formal hand, the clock points beyond these deserts to a luxuriance of sound and motion and sensation suddenly revived.
Conversation became intricate at twelve o’clock. Somebody banged the door. Somebody dropped a book. Somebody bounced a ball. Then they were going out. Their voices distributed themselves in the open air as they started to walk home, or ran. Rodney Halliday ran very lightly up the road as hard as he could go. He drew his legs up under him and jumped a ditch. He ran on past the wire fence, under the telephone wires, under the truculent murmur that telephone wires have, and a knotting of small birds.