The Forgotten World Page 9

  ‘Tell me, John, how is my good friend Goyder?’ the premier asked him.

  ‘Well, I think, Sir Henry,’ said North.

  ‘I must get up there again one of these days. That bracing air.’

  The group paused before exhibit 2712, and the premier placed his heavy arm across North’s shoulders. North seemed to wilt under the weight.

  There were speeches. Sir Henry waffled on about the independence of industry and the workings of free institutions and the need for the nation to stand on its own two feet, to shrug off the yoke. This was followed by more geological jargon, at which Harv Selby yawned shamelessly. The upshot of all this formality was that exhibit 2711 received a green ribbon. Polite applause. North’s ungainly nugget had achieved third prize in the category of Combustible Minerals, as opposed to best black coal, best splint coal, best bituminous coal and so forth.

  A photographer from the Sydney Morning Herald moved through the hall taking pictures of the winners, daguerreotyped for the newspaper. The size and palpable ugliness of exhibit 2711 took his fancy, but he needed some contrasting object in order to achieve a sense of the proportion. Glancing around our weary group he asked whether one of us would stand beside the nugget.

  ‘We can do one better,’ said Ossie Farnell. Together he and Douglas hoisted me up by the armpits and sat me atop the meteorite, like a jockey astride a misshapen donkey. The other men stood about it while the photographer disappeared beneath his hood. Edwards gave these proceedings a sour look, but no longer had the will to object. I looked around, expecting to encounter North’s displeasure, but by that stage he also seemed not to care what happened to his nugget. In fact, after we had had our fun I don’t know what became of it. Third prize wasn’t what North had coveted. He had been busy behind closed doors where, we later learned, offers had been made and deals brokered. Sir Henry Parkes had lobbied on North’s behalf and secured him the contract to supply all the coal for the New South Wales Rail Authority. This was a big business coup. So while he may not have thought much of his green ribbon (he later gave it to Edwards who hung it in his site office), North returned home on the train a much wealthier businessman than when he had set out.

  When we arrived back at Central Station for our afternoon train we found Clancy resting on a bench waiting for us.

  ‘Where the devil have you been?’ Douglas asked.

  ‘Looking for a girl,’ Clancy chuckled.

  Douglas cuffed his ear and herded him onto the train. Sitting at the back of the carriage I tried to wheedle out of Clancy what mischief he had been up to, but he wouldn’t say. He merely looked contented with himself. Later, as the train moved past the wooden buildings of the city he said to no one in particular, or else his own reflection in the window, ‘One of these days. One of these days …’

  I could not decide what he meant by these words. Only, by the sounds of it, that I would not be included.

  For the miners the trip to Sydney had been a great diversion from their ordinary routine. As our train slowly chugged through Faulconbridge, Lawson, Weatherboard, I was struck for the first time by the blueness of the air, its thin, distinct chill in my lungs, and the vast panorama glimpsed through the trees. There was no card-playing on the return journey. Rather the men slept, their mouths open and jaws slack. We pulled into Katoomba to see the blue, silky smoke of cooking fires rising in the air. I felt a clear, clean sense of coming home. My yard. My small, safe patch.

  NINE

  Violet Kefford was growing up and Clancy had taken notice. He had taken notice of her clothes, and the way she filled them. He had taken notice of her hair, particularly when she wore it in a long brown braid down the length of her back. He noticed the neatness of her fingernails, the smoothness of her neck where the skin rose behind her ear to a few fine wisps of hair.

  Had Violet noticed him, as something other than the target of Miss Husband’s helpless fury? It was hard to ignore the frequency with which she strapped him. One day, about halfway through that school year, Clancy surprised Miss Husband by catching the strap and snatching it out of her hand. Startled, she stared at him, until that awkward moment passed and Clancy handed the strap back, slowly offering his palm once more.

  Violet always liked to see the good in everyone. It was one of the things I admired in her, but that day it was not necessarily the good in Clancy that attracted her. It was his resistance. Clancy had inherited his mother’s fine features and blue eyes, whereas I – with my big honk of a nose and protruding ears – was our father’s son. I wondered how I might make Violet notice me, too, as someone other than Clancy’s weekend accomplice. Clancy was more than willing to talk to Violet, to tease and mock what he saw as her airs and graces. And she responded to him, whereas for me to utter a few words to her was a feat I had not mastered. A part of me would rather sit near the edge of a cliff than talk to Violet Kefford.

  Clancy realised that his own schooling was over one day when Miss Husband, her Scarlatti fever playing up again, demanded of the class, ‘Who has stolen my strap? I know one of you has stolen my strap.’

  The board was covered with awkward equations and Clancy had got one of them wrong. Not just wrong, but insolently wrong. Everyone knew it was Clancy who had taken the strap, yet no one was brave enough to dob him in, least of all Joshua Morgan, who was indeed in awe of Clancy. In fact, Joshua, his hair greased flat with a home-cooked pomade that attracted wasps, was scared of just about everything, a condition of which even younger boys in the schoolhouse took advantage. Clancy, though, had their measure. He found himself coming to Joshua’s rescue. For a fee. The Chinese burn was his favourite form of intimidation, but Clancy was versatile. He had come up with his own version of Chinese water torture, where he would sit astride his victim, their biceps pinned under his knees, and dribble spit into their eyes. Or woodpecker torture, where he would similarly hold them down and tap on the same spot on their sternum, or their forehead, until they screamed, he hoped, in madness.

  The day before, I had watched him throw the strap off the cliff at Tri Saxa Point. He dared anyone in the schoolyard to tell Miss Husband. No one did. Not even Angus. The schoolhouse, Clancy felt, could teach him nothing further. He simply declined to attend any more.

  To impress Violet, Clancy took to showing her how high he could climb the highest trees. He showed her how fast he could run, how far he could jump, how agile he was, but somehow the message didn’t seem to be getting through. Violet had the most beautiful green eyes, and he dearly wanted to find a way to communicate this to her. They were of a green to make him feel weak and fluttery in the stomach, as if he was wading through a strong river, although translating this into words was no easy trick. I should know. What was the message? He wasn’t sure. He dearly wanted to wrestle with her. Wrestling was associated in his mind with laughter. It was a form of affection. He didn’t see that it was also associated with power. Woodpecker torture. He yearned, for some reason, to wrap her plait around his neck, just to see what that might feel like. He often asked my advice on these matters, but I had none to give. My only compensation was that I was as tall as Violet, while Clancy was a few inches smaller. At thirteen, Violet was already taller than her own mother. I didn’t know to what advantage I could put this. And any advantage, which was the wrong way to think about it, was undermined by a big nose and protruding ears.

  Then Clancy stumbled onto the idea of giving her gifts. Someone had lately given his mother a posy of wildflowers and this seemed to make her happy; she had placed them in a cup on the window ledge and changed the water daily. Last Christmas someone else, or maybe it was the same person, gave her a jar filled with ginger in oil. Clancy wondered why someone would give something that tasted so awful as a present. Yet when the morning sunlight hit the jar it glowed a lovely gold, and the meals Ann cooked with it for us tasted like nothing we had ever eaten in the valley. Food, she believed, was the making of civilisation, not the random feeding of the beast. Clancy hated the ginger. But sparked by thi
s idea, he gave Violet a couple of buxom bottlebrush torn from their shrubs, then a bunch of leaves with some peculiar veins and warts on them. She thanked him politely. Yet there was something missing from Violet’s reactions. Clancy couldn’t put his finger on it. Miss Husband hadn’t covered this in the lessons when she berated the class on their manners.

  Clancy was the best climber and fastest runner in all Katoomba. What he couldn’t understand was why Violet wasn’t interested in the fastest runner in all Katoomba.

  Over time, as I got to know her better, I discovered the reason behind Violet’s apparent detachment. As it happened, she liked Clancy’s sense of humour, but that wasn’t all. She found him intriguing. He was a mystery. He had adventures. But Violet had ambitions of her own. She wanted to finish her schooling, so far as Miss Husband was able to teach her (Violet knew the answer to any equation written on the slate board), and find a position that would allow her to help her own mother with the raising of Violet’s numerous siblings. The rest would take care of itself. The rest, meaning all the vague situations her mother had alluded to, usually involving and ascribed to men. Usually involving tactics for her avoidance of them. There was plenty of time for that. In time she would meet a decent, hard-working man like her father. Not a young ruffian like Clancy Wilson. Violet’s father, Tom Kefford, made it his mission in life to keep young ruffians away from his daughter. I knew Tom Kefford a little, because Douglas had had dealings with him in the purchase of a dunny can for Emma’s comfort down in the valley. Originally from County Cork, he worked for the Department of Main Roads, forging the goat track westwards, trying to cut new ways of descent down onto the Bathurst Plains.

  Tom Kefford had a finely tuned nose for injustice. That is, injustice towards himself. If anyone thwarted the ambition he had for his family, or their standing in the community, then he would crack heads in retribution. Good would prevail. Plus he had the fists to match his sense of right and wrong, like a couple of great hock bones. Clancy was clearly on the side of wrong.

  Still, in spite of her parents’ clear guidance and her own good sense, Violet liked Clancy. She liked his air of freedom and rebellion, so contrasting was it to her own notion of duty. She liked his chaos. If perhaps I sensed this I might have tried to cultivate my own sense of chaos, but it was not in my personality. Violet and I had more in common than to differ between us, namely books. We liked learning. Clancy scoffed. Once or twice in the schoolhouse I glanced up to find Violet studying me with those still, green eyes. I would give a lurch of incomprehension, feeling the heat in my cheeks. What was she looking at?

  When I’d told Clancy what he’d missed at the Geological Exhibition in Sydney he yawned in my face. He wasn’t interested in what the great turd had looked like on its little rostrum. He had been out exploring the feverish city.

  When, a few days after the exhibition, my picture appeared on page thirteen of the Sydney Morning Herald, sitting atop the grisly black nugget, Exhibit no. 2711, with jockey, Clancy said it looked like I had laid it. This deflation of my experience hurt me greatly, but I didn’t know how to preserve it in my memory, so in the end it did, indeed, shrink. My mother cut out the picture and kept it between the pages of her Bible until it went yellow and was eaten by silverfish.

  Topside, the life of the town was of constant interest to a ruffian like Clancy, now no longer a schoolboy. My life in the valley was a dull one by contrast. While I was busy collecting firewood, water or lumps of mutton, there was always some development or other to engage the floating bubble of Clancy’s attention. There were new stores and shopfronts and awnings under construction, with jinkers laden with logs passing along the road up and down the mountain, hansom cabs and curricles, and builders’ carts loaded with timber and supplies. For Clancy these were opportunities. A carpenter with his back turned, and too many rasps or saws or chisels to know the exact number, was fair game in Clancy’s economy. The baker’s cart, unguarded for a moment, while the baker was inside the teashop making a delivery – who would miss a loaf?

  Indeed, the gifts Clancy gave to Violet, by and large, he stole, even from Wei Sing, his mother’s employer. Like the other entrepreneurs of Katoomba, Wei Sing would box Clancy’s ears if he caught him at the cart. But boxed ears were no deterrent. Clancy would dance around him, laughing, then run off, cackling to himself. On the occasions when I was around to see this, Wei Sing would turn to me and say, ‘Him, you friend, him trouble man. You crack him smack smack.’

  I liked the way the Chinaman talked, but didn’t correct him as to my relationship with Clancy. Wei Sing had complained to Ann often enough, and Ann had chastised and threatened Clancy to no avail. He did what she said only if it suited him. Wei Sing and Clancy had an unspoken rivalry of skills: Clancy’s sleight of hand and speed versus Wei Sing’s intuitive apprehension.

  Once, during a lull in hostilities, Clancy asked Wei Sing the proper method of inflicting a Chinese burn. I was curious to learn this as well. Wei Sing said words to the effect that it was a time-honoured rite of passage we couldn’t possibly understand, so instead he would teach us the Chinese shackles.

  ‘What’s that? Show us.’

  Wei Sing placed his two index fingers together and bade Clancy do the same. Then he gripped Clancy’s fingers in one fist so he couldn’t release his hands and gave him a cuff across the ear that set his hair flying. A truce was a transitory thing.

  Wei Sing didn’t approve of the way Clancy treated his mother. He came up with a clever ploy to subvert Clancy’s thievery. If ever he suspected that Clancy was loitering with intent he would snatch up a lettuce or a pumpkin, whatever was to hand, and say to Clancy, ‘Here. Take. Eat. Give you mother.’ After a while I could see all the excitement had gone out of it for Clancy. What did he want with a sonky lettuce?

  The only thing Clancy really had to worry about was staying out of the way of Constable Clout, and for this he had developed an extra sensibility fuelled, in no small part, by Wei Sing’s awareness of that fellow. If Clout was in the vicinity, Wei Sing would tip his nose at Clancy, who would vanish like a shadow on a cloudy day. Mostly.

  One mild September day, fleeing the scene of a crime down the mud of Katoomba Street, Clancy ran smack into the iron midriff of Constable Clout. Clout, brushing some crumbs from his moustache, had just stepped out from a teashop in Bursill Lane beside the Oxford Printing Works. Both were bowled over. Clout kept a grip on Clancy’s breeches. I backed into an empty doorway, watching from across the street. There was a brief struggle, unsavoury language. Clout rose to his feet. On the youth’s person the constable discovered a bun, freshly lifted from the baker’s cart. Aha! Stolen merchandise.

  ‘Do you know people used to be sent to the gallows for this?’ Clout thundered.

  A few pedestrians stood around, gawking and tutting. The young people of today!

  With a solemn sense of ceremony, Constable Clout dragged Clancy home to his mother’s cottage, where they found her laying tar on the shingles above the kitchen. I followed at a safe distance.

  ‘Is that not a man’s job?’ I heard Buggery Clout call to her from the street. His voice was deep and authoritative, a big dog’s woof.

  Ann looked down. There was a streak of tar at her temple.

  ‘There is no man. So I must do it myself.’

  Buggery Clout considered this. ‘I have something of yours here.’

  ‘So I see.’

  He shook Clancy by the elbow. Ann came down the ladder in an old pair of our father’s breeches torn off at the ankles where the bowyangs had made their impression. When she reached the ground Clout still had her son in a firm grip, the fingers manacled about his elbow. I crept closer behind a bush.

  ‘This little lad,’ said Buggery, ‘is what we call a delinquent.’

  ‘Don’t waste your Latin on me,’ Ann replied tartly, wiping her tarry hands on her trouser legs.

  ‘He is a thief.’

  ‘What has he done now?’

  ‘He removed mer
chandise from the baker’s cart without paying for it.’

  ‘Is this true, Clancy?’

  Clancy nodded like a boy who suddenly understood that being the fastest runner in Katoomba wasn’t going to do him much good this time. He thought he could appeal to her softer side by looking pathetic.

  Clout added, ‘The Chinky Chonk seemed to be of the opinion he had stolen goods from him too.’

  ‘Oh Clancy, don’t you know that Wei Sing is the one who puts food on our table?’

  Clancy shrugged. He didn’t like the food Wei Sing put on their table. And he didn’t like her angry tone. He had his head bowed, listening to their discourse.

  ‘The boy needs a man in his life,’ the constable said.

  ‘His father is elsewhere.’

  ‘In the valley?’

  Ann examined her fingers, which were still sticky with tar, saying nothing.

  ‘With the Shadies,’ Clout went on.

  ‘With his work.’

  ‘Shadies, nevertheless.’

  ‘They are good people.’ It was as if her fingers were webbed like a duck’s foot.

  ‘I see. No man then. Apart from the Chinky Chonk.’

  ‘I’ll take care of Wei Sing.’

  ‘It must be a strange thing, to work for the likes of the Chinaman.’

  ‘Not so strange.’

  ‘By strange I mean hard to understand him.’

  ‘We understand each other.’

  Constable Clout pulled at his buttons. It was a pleasant afternoon. Patches of blue through the mist. The woman was not unattractive. This, at least, was what I saw in his face. He was enjoying himself. ‘By strange I also mean demeaning.’

  ‘No. That isn’t so.’

  ‘Mmm. What is demeaning differs for everyone. There is more the issue of the recalcitrant here. The law, you understand.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I could press charges. There would be a fine. Or worse. I understand your situation – a woman on her own.’