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.
"Hey, Tim, what youse got on yer sandwiches this morning?" Mick asked, winking heavily at the others.
"Gee, Mick, the same as always, jam," Tim answered, holding up untidily hacked white bread with thick amber jam oozing out its edges.
"What sorta jam?" Mick persisted, eyeing his own sandwich unenthusiastically.
"Apricot, I think."
"Wanta swap? I got sausages on mine."
Tim's face lit up. "Sausages! Oh, I love sausage sandwiches! I'll swap!"
The exchange was made; Mick bit clumsily into the apricot jam sandwich while Tim, oblivious of the grinning regard of the others, disposed of Mick's sausage sandwich in a few bites. He had the last wedge poised to eat when Mick, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, reached out a hand and grasped his wrist.
The blue eyes lifted to Mick's face in helpless, childish question, fear lurking in them; his sad mouth dropped slackly open.
"What's the matter, Mick?" he asked.
"That bloody sausage sandwich didn't even touch the sides, mate. How did it taste, or didn't you keep it in yer mouth long enough to find out, eh?"
The tiny crease to the left side of Tim's mouth quivered into being again as he closed his mouth and looked at Mick in apprehensive wonder.
"It was all right, Mick," he said slowly. "It tasted a bit different, but it was all right."
Mick roared, and in a moment they were all writhing in paroxysms of laughter, tears running down their faces, hands slapping at aching sides, gasping for breath.
"Oh, Christ, Tim, you're the dizzy limit! Harry thinks you're worth at least sixty cents in the quid, but I said you weren't worth more than ten, and after this effort I reckon I'm right. You couldn't possibly be worth more than ten cents in the
quid, mate!"
"What's the matter?" Tim asked, bewildered. "What did I do? I know I'm not the full quid, Mick, honest I do!"
"If yer sandwich didn't taste like sausage, Tim, what did it taste like?" Mick grinned.
"Well, I dunno. ..." Tim's golden brows knit in fierce concentration. "I dunno! It just tasted different, like."
"Why don't youse open that last bit and take a real good look, mate?"
Tim's square, beautifully shaped hands fumbled with the two fragments of bread and pulled them apart. The last piece of sausage was squashed out of shape, its edges slippery and sticky-looking.
"Smell it!" Mick ordered, glancing around the helpless circle and wiping the tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand.
Tim brought it to his nose; the nostrils twitched and flared, then he put the bread down again and sat looking at them in puzzled wonder. "I dunno what it is," he said pathetically.
"It's a turd, you great ding!" Mick answered disgustedly. "Christ, are you dim! You still don't know what it is, even after taking a whiff of it?"
"A turd?" Tim echoed, staring at Mick. "What's a turd, Mick?"
Everyone collapsed in a fresh storm of laughter, while Tim sat with the small remnant of sandwich between his fingers, watching and waiting patiently until someone recoverd sufficiently to answer his question.
"A turd, Tim me boy, is a big fat piece of shit!" Mick howled.
Tim shivered and gulped, flung the bread away in horror and sat wringing his hands together, shrinking into himself. They all moved away from his vicinity hastily, thinking he might vomit, but he did not; he just sat staring at them, grief-stricken.
It had happened again. He had made everyone laugh by doing something silly, but he didn't know what it was, why it was so funny. His father would have said he ought to be a "wakeup," whatever that meant, but he hadn't been a wakeup, he had happily eaten a sausage sandwich that hadn't been a sausage sandwich. A piece of shit, they said it was, but how could he know what a piece of shit tasted like, when he had never eaten it before? What was so funny? He wished he knew; he hungered to know, to share in their laughter and understand. That was always the greatest sorrow, that he could never seem to understand.
His wide blue eyes filled with tears, his face twisted up in anguish and he began to cry like a small child, bellowing noisily, still wringing his hands together and shrinking away from them.
"Jesus bloody Christ, what a lot of bastards you dirty buggers are!" the Old Girl roared, erupting from her back door like a harpy, yellow and purpie pansies swirling about her. She came across to Tim and took his hands, pulling him to his feet as she glared around at the sobering men. "Come on, love, you come inside with me a little minute while I give you something nice to take the nasty taste away," she soothed, patting his hands and stroking his hair. "As for you lot," she hissed, sticking her face up to Mick so viciously that he backed away, "I hope you all fall down a manhole arse-first onto a nice iron spike! You oughta be horsewhipped for doing something like this, you great myopic gits! You'd better see this job is finished today, Harry Markham, or it won't be finished at all! I never want to see you lot again!"
Clucking and soothing, she led Tim inside and left the men standing staring at each other.
Mick shrugged. "Bloody women!" he said. "I never met a woman yet what had a sense of humor. Come on, let's get this job finished today, I'm sick of it too."
Mrs. Parker led Tim into the kitchen and sat him on a chair.
"You poor flaming little coot," she said, moving to the refrigerator. "I dunno why men think it's so bloody funny to bait dimwits and dogs. Listen to 'em out there, yahaing and yawhawing, real funny! I'd like to bake 'em a dirty great chocolate cake and flavor it with shit, since they think it's so bloody funny! You, you poor little bugger, didn't even throw it up again, but they'd be spewing for an hour, the walloping great heroes!" She turned to look at him, softening because he still wept, the big tears spilling down his cheeks as he hiccoughed and snuffled miserably. "Oh, here, stop it!" she said, pulling a tissue out of a box and taking his chin in her hand. "Blow yer nose, booby!"
He did as he was told, then suffered her ungentle ministrations as she tidied up his face.
"Christ, what a waste!" she said, half to herself, looking -ax has foes,, tfcesv she threw the tissue mto the kitchen tidy and shrugged. "Oh, well, that's the way it goes, I suppose. Can't have everything, even the biggest and best of us, eh, love?" She patted his cheek with one ropey old hand. "Now what do you like best, love, ice cream and choccy syrup all over it, or a big bit of jam pud with cold banana custard all over it?"
He stopped sniffling long enough to smile radiantly.
"Oh, jam pud, please, Mrs. Parker! I love jam pud and cold banana custard, it's my favorite!"
She sat opposite him at the kitchen table while he shoveled the pudding into his mouth in huge spoonfuls, chiding him for eating too fast and telling him to mind his manners.
"Chew with yer mouth closed, love, it's 'orrible looking at someone slopping their food around in an open mouth. And take yer elbows off the table, like a good boy."
Four
Mary Horton put her car in the garage at six-thirty that evening, so tired that she could hardly walk the few feet to her front door without her knees trembling. She had pushed herself furiously all day long, and succeeded in deadening all sensations save weariness. Mrs. Parker's house was evidently finished; the red brick exterior had entirely gone, replaced by wet, green-gray stucco. The phone began to ring as she closed the front door, and she ran to answer it.
"Miss Horton, that you?" rasped her neighbor's voice. "It's Emily Parker here, pet. Listen, can you do something for me?"
"Certainly."
"I've got to go out now, me son's just rung from Central and I've got to go and pick him up there. The builders finished this arvo, but there's still a lot of their stuff in the backyard, and Harry said he was coming back to clean it up. Just keep an eye on things for me, will youse?"
"Certainly, Mrs. Parker."
"Ta, love! Hooroo, see youse tomorrow."
Mary sighed in exasperation. All she wanted was to sit down in her easy chair by the picture window, put her feet up with her before-dinner sherry and read the Sydney Morning Herald as was her nightly custom. She went through to the living room and opened her liquor cabinet tiredly. Her glassware was all Waterford hobnail, exquisitely graceful, and she took one of the long-stemmed sherry glasses from its place on a polished shelf. Her preference was for a medium-sweet sherry, which she mixed herself by pouring half a glass of dry Amontillado and topping it up with very sweet sherry. The ritual completed, she carried the glass through to the kitchen, and then out onto her back terrace.
Her house was better designed than Mrs. Parker's; instead of a back veranda she had a high, wide patio of sandstone flags, which fell away on three sides as a terraced rock garden to the lawn fifteen feet below. It was very pretty and in the heat of summer very cool, for an overhead trellis covered one side of it completely with a roof of grapevine and wistaria. In summer she could sit beneath the thick green canopy, shielded from the sun; in the winter she could sit under bare gnarled branches and let the sun warm her; in spring the lilac clusters of wistaria made it stunningly beautiful, and in late summer and autumn the trellis hung heavy with great bunches of table grapes, red and white and purple.
She walked soundlessly across the flagstones in her neat black shoes, for she was a cat-footed kind of person and liked to approach people silently so she could see them before they saw her. It was sometimes very useful to catch people off guard.
At the far edge of the patio was a balustrade of white-painted wrought iron in a grape pattern, just two or three feet of it on either side of a flight of steps leading down to the sweeping stretch of lawn below. Noiseless as always, she stood with her glass balanced on the top of the balustrade and looked toward Mrs. Parker's backyard.
The sun was dying down to the horizon of the western sky, w
hich she faced, and had she been the kind of person whom beauty moved, she would have been awe-struck at the prospect before her. Between her back terrace and the Blue Mountains twenty miles away there was nothing higher; even the hills of Ryde did not obstruct her outlook but rather enhanced it, lending it a mid-distance perspective. It had been well over the hundred during the afternoon and even now was close to that, so there were no clouds in the sky to score a splendid end to the day. But the light itself was beautiful, deep yellow and faintly bronzing, tinting the greenest things more green and everything else amber. Mary shaded a hand over her eyes and scanned Mrs. Parker's backyard.
The young man of the morning was sweeping a cloudy heap of cement dust toward a pile of trash and builder's remains, golden head bent absorbed over the simple task, as if he liked to give everything, even this, all his attention. He was still half-naked, still as beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful in the last limpid light than he had been in the first prickling sharpness of day. Drink forgotten, Mary stood in lost loneliness watching him, not aware of herself, not conscious that she was possessed by an emotion alien to her whole being, neither guilty nor confounded. She simply watched him.
The sweeping finished, he lifted his head and saw her, waved a cheery hand in her direction, then disappeared. Mary jumped, heart in mouth, and before she could stop herself she had crossed to the row of camphor laurels between the two back gardens and was slipping through a space in the paling fence.