The Man in the Shed

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Tessa seems to have gone off all right.’

  In the morning Tess was very quiet. She had no colour. It was impossible of course but she appeared to have shrunk, as if each tear she cried had contained a piece of flesh. She sat at the table with her bad wrist in her lap. Warren and Keith were still asleep, so we tiptoed around like shadows. After breakfast Mum told us to get dressed—she had an idea, and hurried us along to brush our teeth. We were leaving the house when Bron allowed the flyscreen to snap back on its hinges—and the fright stopped us in our tracks.

  Out on the road the plan faltered again. Mum took Tess by the hand and looked to the road behind. There was no traffic for a hundred miles—at least that is the way it felt. ‘Has everyone a set of legs?’ she asked.

  We walked along without making a race of it. The one car that came along stopped. The farmer was headed a short distance, to the store where we got our groceries. He was surprised to hear we were headed for the coast. Mum told him, ‘We have a young lady here with an arm that needs seeing to.’

  The farmer scratched his nose. He wished it were tomorrow. Sunday he was taking his family to Southport. Tell you what, he said, if we were still on the road on his return from the store he would drive us to the coast. Otherwise we might as well stay on the road and try our luck.

  Luck took the shape of Keith’s ute. It crept up behind, its fat wheels sucking up the tar.

  Warren sprang out. A light joke on his lips, he said, ‘Now where is this lot of nomads headed? Same place we are, I hope.’

  Without a word Mum lifted Tess into the back of the ute, among the bits of animal fur and clotted blood from last night’s shooting. She hauled herself in—me and Bron followed.

  I barely remembered anything of the passing landscape which we must have passed all those weeks earlier. Tess lay in Mum’s lap. Her hand flopped on the end of her wrist and she held it up not so much because she wished to show it off, but because it was more comfortable that way. Mum stroked Tessa’s hair. Otherwise she was lost in her thoughts.

  Soon we entered the outer suburbs. We struck the first set of traffic lights and, after that, the malls. Again there was the sniff of the coast. A light breeze that we never got further inland. Bron said she wanted an ice-cream, but we passed the ice-cream parlour on the green light and drove to a newish building with tinted windows where Keith, I later heard him tell Warren, had been treated for the clap.

  The X-ray revealed a clean fracture. Now that it was pointed out, the bend in Tessa’s arm seemed obvious and we wondered how we could have missed it. Warren said he could have sworn it was a sprain. The nurses took no notice. If anything they were short with him—and Warren was asked three times by as many nurses how it had happened. Then I heard one of them behind the curtains quietly ask Tessa for her account.

  The arm was to be set that afternoon. Mum stayed with Tess. Warren gave me and Bron ten dollars. He pointed out the hotel where he and Keith planned to hole up, and left us to roam.

  That evening as we drove back towards the foothills it seemed to me that we were driving away from everything that was sensible and sane. There was Warren’s work, and home, and no overlap, and no way of anticipating what was to happen next.

  It was a week later that the ute pulled up early afternoon. Keith didn’t come inside the house. It wasn’t worth thinking about at the time—only a clue in hindsight. Warren roughhoused his way through the flyscreen, gave each of us a filthy look and made his way to the refrigerator. He took his time in telling, and after he finished he sat staring at the floorboards.

  The company developing Ocean Views had gone bust—or been placed in the hands of receivers—and for the time being cash was on hold. I didn’t like the sound of ‘for the time being’.

  I heard Mum and Warren, later that night, making plans in the living room. Mum was doing most of the talking and for once Warren was listening.

  ‘This is no place for children. How much have we saved up?’

  ‘A thousand … twelve hundred,’ said Warren.

  ‘We will need a car. Not a ute, mind you, Warren,’ she said. ‘My children have travelled in the back of that thing for the last time.’

  That was the end of Keith. We didn’t see him again.

  We bought an early model Holden. We tried it out first. There was a seat for everyone. Warren changed the points and plugs, rustled up a retread from somewhere—and we were roadworthy, heading back for the coast, where we turned south, stopping along the way at building sites for Warren to go and enquire after formwork or carpentry. We stayed in camping grounds and did our washing in laundromats. Mum got work house-cleaning, so we would stay in a place for a few days—never more than a week—until we had petrol money.

  It made no sense. Buildings were going up everywhere, but at every site Warren went to the back of the line. Further south, and men gathered outside the sites; they sat on the fence like a line of still vultures, waiting for a job to come free. Whenever we pulled along outside a building site, and Mum sent Warren across to the foreman’s office, the men on the fence line watched without any talk in them; only their heads moved to watch Warren’s return to the car.

  ‘Guess what? Last month they wanted formworkers,’ he said, getting back in the car. Always last month. I wondered how long, how much longer this was going to go on, and why we didn’t just pack up and fly home.

  Then one night we had to make a choice between somewhere to stay, and petrol; Mum kept driving south through the night, and the new day dawned in Taree.

  Me, Bron and Tess untangled ourselves from the back seat, and sat up to find we had arrived in a park or public domain. We were parked on the edge of a field. Near a huge tent were elephants and horses. A man in tights walked along a rope. I looked at the map and found we were in New South Wales. The doors cracked as we tumbled out, and from the front seat Mum stirred.

  Then we saw Warren coming towards us from one of the caravans parked in line. An older man in a white singlet and braces followed after Warren, who looked keen and ready with news.

  ‘Wake up your mother,’ he said. ‘I think I may have something.’

  But he did it himself; he was clearly excited. He leant in the driver’s door and said, ‘Marilyn. Payday.’ He shushed up then because the man in braces had drawn near. Mum got out of the car. She tried to smooth out the creases in her dress. There was the matter of her hair too. I caught her sneak a look in the fender mirror. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Heaven help me.’

  The stranger nodded at her, and took each of us into account. Then he made as if what he had to say gave him no pleasure at all. We heard him apologise to Warren. He said he had misunderstood their earlier conversation. He had been so long in the circus business he had forgotten what a form-worker was.

  ‘I had in mind juggling, the wire, something of that order,’ he said. ‘But what you are about to tell me is that you’re not a circus performer.’

  Warren nodded, and studied the ground. He raked his toe back and forth in the grass.

  The circus man seemed to be taking stock of the situation. He looked at each of us, again. ‘Still,’ he said. He twirled a finger in his ear, and while he was doing that he gave Warren a good going over. He walked around him twice, which is what Warren had done before buying the car. Now the man said he might have something after all. Mum smiled at Warren, and he took her hand.

  Many years ago, in Italy, the circus man had seen a useful sort of stunt which he had, for some time, meant to introduce to this hemisphere. Maybe that time had arrived; but only if Warren, of course, was interested. Warren checked first with Mum. She nodded, and Warren was given the privilege of saying, ‘Okay then.’

  We were travelling north again, through towns we had passed in a single night—Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Coffs, Ballina.

  Warren had his own tent. On its side was a picture of a strong man with curly hair and black moustache, and the words ‘Man of Steel’. Kids up to the age of twelve
paid two dollars for three punches to Warren’s stomach. Clearly the man who had hired Warren had not been telling the truth. Bron and I had gotten friendly with one of the acrobats who said the last ‘Man of Steel’, a Hungarian immigrant, had developed kidney trouble, and the circus had left him in hospital in Scone, New South Wales.

  ‘Light hail on a tin roof,’ was how Warren described his day’s work. But at night our caravan reeked with the liniment Mum rubbed into his stomach and sides. Slowly he began to soften, like one of Keith’s roo skins after a steady beating. The job was taking it out of him. No sooner were we in a new town and he suffered the runs.

  At such times we left Warren in the caravan, alone, and Mum would take us on a walk in the strange town.

  ‘Luckier than most kids your own age to be seeing the world,’ she said. We didn’t feel lucky though. We knew we should be in school, and in a strange kind of way it was unsettling not to be found out, or even to feel we faced that risk.

  In Ballina, Warren said he didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up. We heard him groan at night when he rolled onto his sore ribs. He had become a nervous man. The drop of a pin turned his head. The circus manager came to our caravan to say he was pleased with Warren’s work, and to ask whether the kids needed something to occupy their time. Mum herded us under her wing and told the man the children were her concern.

  ‘We want to go home,’ Tess blurted, and the man chuckled. He poked his head inside the door and took it all in in a sweeping glance. ‘This looks homely enough to me,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse Tessa,’ Mum said properly, but the man waved a hand at her, and walked away.

  ‘We will be out of here by June, Tess,’ Warren said. ‘June, I feel, will be time enough.’

  We were prepared to believe it. We had something to look forward to—a means by which to mark progress. It was only three weeks off.

  But June arrived, and nothing happened. None of us even had the heart to mention the fact of it being June. Not even Tess. We were in Southport, very close to where we had set out. Some of the terrain I recognised from the times we had ridden in the back of the ute. Not only had we lost our place on the calendar but we appeared to be going around in circles.

  We had certain games and rituals to push ourselves on. At night, as we lay on our mattresses, Tess asked Bron to describe her teacher, Mrs Marshall, whose class Tess was to have started this year. Then she asked Bron to describe all the kids in her class, which Bron did, fitting out a name with a set of eyes, hair and skin colouring, and habits, so no two were the same. It ended this night when Warren sat up in bed at the other end of the caravan and sent an empty liniment bottle crashing against the wall above our heads. Mum yelled at him to control himself, and Warren slapped her.

  I showed up at Warren’s tent the following afternoon. I had to push through a flap and Warren looked up, saw it was me, and went back to reading his newspaper.

  ‘Jimbo. What do you want?’

  What I wanted was not easily put into words. A short while passed before Warren glanced up again and cottoned on.

  ‘Christ’s sakes,’ he said.

  ‘I paid.’

  ‘So you paid, Jimbo. That’s a dollar to the circus, and a dollar to me.’

  It didn’t make any difference, and he shook his head. He was leaning against a table, rolling back and forth a small pebble underfoot. Then he said, ‘Never. Not in my wildest dreams did I ever think it would come to this.’

  He looked up then, and said, ‘What the hell. Let’s get it over with. Three shots.’

  He stepped onto a small raised platform. I tried to see him in the same light another visitor to the tent might, but I couldn’t get past the fact it was Warren.

  ‘Do you want the full works?’

  I said I did, and Warren said, ‘Okay, then.’ He folded up his newspaper and slapped it on the table. Steadying himself he closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment. Then he started to recite with a strange accent, ‘My name is Saffrez, last of the desert tribe of Assyrian strongmen …’ I noticed his hands bowling into fists at his sides, and was concerned that he might be forgetting who had paid here. But he collected himself, and carried on. ‘Hit me, the great Saffrez. And watch your sickly knuckles turn to dust …’

  Warren’s elbows fanned out from his sides and he tensed his stomach muscles. He waited with his eyes closed for the punch, for me to get my money’s worth. Perhaps all along I had known I wouldn’t throw a punch, but what surprised me was my total lack of desire. And at some point when Warren realised that nothing was going to happen, that he had tensed himself up for nothing, he sat down where he had stood. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I never imagined …’ He dropped his face into his hands. Then he shoved his hand out. ‘Go away, Jimbo. Don’t look at me. Leave me, please. Go to the beach with your mother.’

  In the end I think we were glad to be walking away from it all, the yawns of the sedated lions, the pink candyfloss and the alcoholic clowns.

  The shadows from the buildings had almost reached the line of dried foam above the wet sand. A knot of swimmers looking for excitement kept between the flags but well shy of the heavier waves. Me, Bron, Tess with her cast wrapped in plastic, and Mum, stuck together in the same channel, bobbing like corks, taking it in turns to check the arrival of the next breaker. There was no way out beyond the waves. No calm for a horizon to sit along like a painted line. Nothing but movement and foam as far as the eye could see.

  And then, without warning it seemed, we were being dragged along a channel parallel to the beach, fighting it at first, then not bothering. None of us was unduly concerned. ‘Look, Taranaki,’ Bron said, of the spit of sand jutting out from the beach where we might scramble ashore. Meanwhile we did just enough to keep afloat. There was no question of us getting cold.

  In time Warren showed. Mum was first to spot him by the parking meters above the beach. I think we had all expected Warren and were nervous at the prospect of him trying to wave us back between the flags to where he imagined safety lay. He was still in his circus outfit, and we watched this wild figure try to stay abreast, burning his feet on the hot sand as he stepped gingerly between the tidy Japanese sunbathers. None of us said a word. We were comfortable for the moment to just tread water. We were waiting to see if Warren would join us.

  who’s that dancing with my mother?

  We were living in Napier at the time. My father pulled the keys down from the hook in the kitchen and my mother asked where he was headed.

  ‘Up the coast,’ he said, and my mother went on slicing the ends off the beans for the meal she now knew he wouldn’t be around to eat.

  ‘Allie,’ my father said by the kitchen door. ‘I feel like being alone for a while.’

  My mother quietly emptied the colander of beans into the sink. She turned around to face us both.

  ‘Just say where it is you are going.’

  My father looked at the keys in his hand, and turned down the challenge. He crossed the lawn to the Hunter parked in the driveway. My mother followed as far as the porch. There she stopped, as if the lawn was a slippery area she would rather not cross, and yelled out, ‘Why can’t you say it, you lousy stinking coward?’ My father settled behind the wheel and backed down the driveway. My mother raised her hands to her face. Then she noticed me; and that seemed to be the last straw.

  ‘What are you looking at … goddamnit.’

  From being hurt, she wanted to be forgiven. It was a confusing moment. Her face screwed up with anger, and she drew me over and said, ‘Hug your mother, Charlie.’ I was happy to, of course, but when I looked I noticed she had drawn herself into two parts: one I hugged, and the other—her proud face—had already turned with a thought to something inside the house.

  I followed her inside, through to the living room. She walked directly to the bookcase, where she pulled out a thick book on flora. Most of our books were on plants, lichen and mosses. My father worked in the ecology division of the DSIR.

/>   The book fell open, and the photo of my father fell out. It was taken near the snowline. There was no snow in the photo but you could tell from the rocks and the lichen grown over them that snow was not far off. My father had on his hiking boots. His arm was draped around a woman, an Australian. She was a plant illustrator, who had come here for dinner one night, a long time ago.

  My mother studied the photo. She seemed to be trying to prise a bit more from it than the contents were prepared to tell. I couldn’t say what she found. Perhaps it was because the photo was deliberately vague that she got so angry. She tore the photo into quarters and watched them settle over the carpet. My father’s head was now severed, his whiskery smile even more of a mystery.

  My mother stepped back and almost fell over. She had forgotten I was there. She swore, then smiled bravely. ‘Know what we’re going to do, Charlie? No. Second thoughts, I’m not going to tell you. Let’s make it a surprise.’

  Our town held few surprises, although it was useful to pretend otherwise. I was just as happy not knowing in any case, because we ended up at Chee’s.

  Some of the pub crowd had wandered across the road and were trying to chat up the Chinese girl behind the counter. The girl blushed and smiled out of politeness, but you could see she didn’t know what the men were on about, and I thought it just as well.

  We took the table by the window. Cars were leaving spaces outside the hotel. One of the men at the counter came over and sat at our table. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he said.

  My mother turned and looked straight into his face the way it is said to be cruel to do with dogs. The man said, ‘Jeeesus,’ and got up as quickly as he had sat down. Our meals arrived. My mother hardly touched her fillet.