He saw Ernie Malcolm stride out of Smith Street from the direction of his office. Oh, Jesus, Tim thought. I’m going to be given credit for carrying my own bleeding son to Dr. Erson’s. And yet there was a change in manner here. It made you wonder the way Ernie was walking in his light grey suit. He didn’t look as open to any rumour of brave service, any chance for civil pride, as he usually did.
There was a child in the store with a note when Ernie stepped in. Ernie offered no background greeting, but concerned himself with the labels of the biscuit cans, the hams, the treacles and the puddings on the further wall near the storeroom. But Ernie’s reading of labels was only a way of banking some urgency he had in him.
The child left. Ernie looked at Tim. His head had an unusual angle. Not the angle of expecting the best of the best of all possible citizens in the best of all possible Empires. It was some other, more private and dangerous angle.
“Mr. Malcolm,” said Tim.
“Mr. Shea, I take it very badly that you impose yourself on Mrs. Malcolm in this way.”
“What way is that?”
“Certainly I am happy to pay my way, and I don’t think any man’s ever said otherwise. But I find my wife has been in a moment of illness gouged for extra money, more than due. This makes me wonder about my judgment on you. Makes me more disposed, too, to listen to other buggers whose judgment of you isn’t as high as mine. If the terms were Cash On Delivery, and you’d made them clear to me, that would have been acceptable. But Cash Before Delivery… well, they’re terms of trade I haven’t heard of before.”
Tim shook his head. “Oh, God, Ernie,” he said. “I was uneasy about that extra payment, and I never asked for it.”
“Well, you would say that. And if you do say it, what am I supposed to believe about my wife?”
“I think your wife may have been a bit indisposed that afternoon. That was behind the extra money. But I expect you to believe she didn’t pay it at my suggestion.”
Of course, he should have taken the extra to Ernie’s office, but the man from the Colonial Secretary’s had certainly put that idea fair out of his head.
“I’m not going to hang around while you do your sums,” said Mr. Ernie Malcolm, flushed. “But I expect a full accounting of where we stand at the moment and a refund. I think you’ll understand if I transfer my account here to some other shop.”
“Oh God, Mr. Malcolm.”
The fellow seemed to be pleased to have an excuse for anger though. This was the next step along the road of warnings Ernie began after the loyal meeting. It was more. A punishment for suggesting Ernie write about Missy.
“I have to caution you, there are those who think you are a pretty subtle feller, a cunning paddy. A joker behind it all. I’ll be more disposed to listen to them now.”
He tucked the fingers of one hand into the base of his vest, tugged it downwards, and walked for the door, turning at the end of course for the required final word.
“All awards for bravery are in abeyance,” he said.
Then he rushed out.
To hear his social credit cancelled in that way! Tim clutched the counter and groaned. He was in severe trouble now in his chosen place in New South Wales. A damaged son, an absent wife, a significant client, an exemplary fine. Apparitions to be dealt with by night. He was no longer the happy immigrant. The world had pretty thoroughly found him out on the Macleay.
And yet just one more dusk and Kitty and Mamie would board Burrawong in Darling Harbour, in the port of Sydney. They would drink stout beforehand in some hotel in Sussex Street and catch a cab down to the boat. Burrawong the humble, old iron midwife of all their arrivals and returns. Burrawong might plough up the coast in record time for all a man knew. Might put in by midnight Thursday.
Sitting by Johnny’s bed, Tim felt the wheels of night turn so minutely. He imagined the dark, slow weight of time seeping into the split in Johnny’s scalp. All to the good, all to the good! He kept a wet cloth on the boy’s brow. Coolness a known aid against convulsions. Beyond the window, the last light was on the river, which seemed set and inert in its dark green silty mass.
Across the room Annie slept a dignified, unfevered, steadfast sleep.
“England,” he read for consolation in the Chronicle, “pays seventy million pounds a year for Australian butter. The three criteria of good butter, as applied by judges at Agricultural and Horticultural Shows through the civilised world, are flavour, aroma and grain. Lack of farm hygiene and contaminated containers are the great enemy of these three vaunted qualities…”
The night air pressing on Johnny’s much-praised Celtic scalp was soft and warm and gracious. “Bless it,” said Tim. “Bless it!”
At the window however, Missy bowed in, pale-eyed. Tim looked at her not with a sense of terror but with something more familiar.
“Out to sea,” she said genially, though he wondered was it a threat.
He felt the room itself reach down into a trough, like a hearty old steamer taking on the first complexity of the open Pacific beyond the New Entrance. Like an echo of the sea, a spray of air broke over him. The square, unseaworthy room whirled, and again he saw Burrawong by day, in the blue Pacific with the two distant Kenna sisters, the known and unknown one, Kitty and Mamie, grinning at the rails. As the room bucked, Annie and Johnny kept solidly to their cots. Anchored. He saw a sky of stars, but then the window took a swing down and caught Red Kenna’s loud fire-lit kitchen. “Well, you don’t expect me to take the bugger too seriously,” called Red to him.
Shudder. Another wave taking the room. Albert Rochester galloped through Glenrock up a hill. Serious but intact, carnation in lapel, on his way to Mrs. Sutter. Johnny ran with strange Lucy into some surf as three agile rats came over the windowsill, but then couldn’t be seen. Missy re-entered from the hallway and passed by Johnny’s bed. A normal tread. She hadn’t come to point any doomy finger. When the room pitched, she fell in her black dress from the window.
All stopped rolling. Tim stood up in relief and Johnny snorted.
“Dear God,” said Tim, sitting down and picking up the Chronicle, which had fallen to the floor from all the room’s gyrations.
“Oh, Kitty,” he pleaded.
While his son swam down to profounder sleep.
Tim woke on the floor of the children’s room in the silken first light. The children slept heroically. Give them a medal, Mr. Malcolm, you old bastard.
He remained stiffly where he was and could soon hear energetic hammering from somewhere outside.
Oh he knew! They’d started again the daily work of putting down the planking over the pylons of the bridge. It had happened suddenly after all the work of sinking columns, and now less than seventy yards from his door, the bridge had taken on a surprising reality, making its first small but conclusive flight above the river. Perhaps three dozen men in flannel shirts and big hats hammering and bolting the carriageway to the pylons and joists. Drills and auger bits spun beneath their hands. This was civilisation, and you could foresee the completed physical bridge now from what they had done. East and Central and West being made one by a lot of scrawny men with hammers. The community would come to take this convenient arrangement as a given, putting down its weight with confidence.
He went and got some tea and took it to the storefront to watch the labourers in the high middle distance. Out in Belgrave Street a number of boys appeared, running up with news-sheets in their hands. A Chronicle special, Tim could see. No bigger than a poster for a concert. Tim went to the door, opened it, and bought one. He took it back off the street and into the shade of the store to read.