‘I hope to be around for a few years yet, Peg,’ I snorted. ‘No rush is there?’
‘Not your life, you goose. This ... this ... mayhem.’
‘Hardly mayhem, dear.’
‘Naked and unconscious. In the Kombi. At Redcliffe. And at your age?’
‘Yes,’ I double-snorted. ‘Should have gotten those curtains fitted in the old bus after all, eh? Funny, the oddities life throws at you.’
‘So this is an annual thing of yours now, is it? These oddities, as you call them.’
Dogs can scent a coming storm. My storm scent was twitching. Luckily, Peg always telegraphed her building rage with her left eyebrow, which lifted up and down with gathering frequency. I won’t say some parts of my anatomy beneath the lemon-smelling hospital sheet didn’t shrivel at the sight, but at least the agitated brow gave me some warning.
‘Now, darling—’
‘Don’t darling me. I had expected to see out my years with a husband who aged gracefully. With someone I could share some time with. Not an old cop with a death wish. You can’t let it go, can you?’
I had no answer to that. We were silent in the room for ten minutes before the eyebrow lowered and she got up. She dropped a heavy bag on my swivel tray.
‘The books you asked for,’ she said, and left.
Peg was right, of course. It got me thinking. Ever since I’d come to Queensland, people around me had got killed. Last year it was the raconteur Westchester Zim. A week ago, Father Dill. I was a deity of death. A death lord of the underworld. I looked down at my spherical waistline holding up the hospital sheet. Yes, I was the original Under Belly.
Then the nurse brought me a custard tart and I got back to business.
I took the books out of the bag, and there she was — Mary MacKillop. Blessed Mary, as Father Dill had cryptically said.
I read the story of her life with awe. What an extraordinary woman. Born in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 1842 to Scottish immigrants, she’d dedicated her life to educating poor children with the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, constantly on the move in Australia and Europe, full of courage and hope.
My son had been on the internet, and inside one of the books I found a print-out of a feature story from the Brisbane Courier published in February 1883. It was written by Julian Thomas, a pen name for John Stanley James, a journalist who had pioneered fly-on-the-wall newspaper writing in Australia. He also wrote under the name ‘The Vagabond’. In the feature my son had discovered — titled ‘An Australian Order’ — Thomas had done an in-depth first-hand account of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, and had actually interviewed MacKillop, the woman most likely to become Australia’s first saint, in South Australia.
‘We are welcomed by “Mother Mary”,’ he wrote, ‘the superioress and founder of the order.’ She had given him a tour of the order’s ‘refuge for fallen women’.
‘It is far better that we should take these children, and bring them up properly, than that their mothers should neglect them to be reared in misery and vice,’ she’d reportedly said. Thomas told MacKillop that it appeared to be a great struggle to keep the Sisters of St Joseph running, to which she’d replied: ‘But if we gave this up, what would become of the poor creatures?’
MacKillop had regularly faced difficulties with both the church and state bureaucracies of the day. She was excommunicated for supposed insubordination, but this was later reversed.
And, incredibly, she’d attempted to spread her good work in Brisbane, arriving in this rough colonial town in late 1869, just a decade after Separation.
‘In the northern colony I heard a great deal of the good they [the Sisters of St Joseph] had done, but for some cause or other they incurred the displeasure of the late Bishop Quinn,’ wrote Thomas. ‘A controversy as to his authority ensued. I remember a dear friend of mine, a Catholic priest, once saying to me, “We have to obey our Bishop, but we needn’t love him.’”
So Mary suffered grief in early Brisbane. Why didn’t that surprise me? I thought of that Catholic priest over at South Brisbane having his own ideological stoush with the bishop not long ago. And his church was St Mary’s, too, wasn’t it? The more things change ...
Still, I was fascinated with Mary. She was beatified in 1995 by Pope John Paul II, and one miracle had been attributed to her. But she needed two for canonisation, a second ‘intercession through prayer’.
Just last winter she’d been made patron of the Brisbane Catholic archdiocese.
I put down the paperwork and closed my eyes. Saints. Miracles. A little tin box. The crucified Father Dill. For someone who’d decided to simply dip his toe back in the religion of his past, I was suddenly all at sea in faith. Maybe Peg was right. Maybe it was time I let it all go and looked to the future.
When I opened my eyes Jack was back in the chair beside the bed. He had just appeared. Miraculously.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Nice to see you, son. Still twitching?’
‘Tweeting, Dad.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘Got another few from your friend.’
‘My friend?’
‘The murder tweeter.’
‘Ah yes. What do they say, son?’
‘“Ding-dong, you’re dead.’”
‘That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?’
‘And, “For whom the bell tolls.”‘
‘Good movie. Gary Cooper. Ingrid Bergman.’
‘Whatever,’ Jack said.
‘Come to think of it, didn’t Bergman play a nun in The Bells of St Mary’s?’
‘Dunno, Dad.’
Then he left.
I made a quick call on my room phone. I rang the imaginatively named council engineer Barrie Barry. I was put on hold.
While I was waiting for Barrie Barry, I flicked through one of my MacKillop books and something caught my eye. A phrase. Don’t know why. For no reason.
I crooked the phone between my ear and left shoulder and held the book open. I read a paragraph about Blessed Mary and her time in Brisbane. I read of the hardship. The sacrifice.
Then I dropped the phone and it bounced clean off the bed.
Mary MacKillop, future saint, had for a short time lived in South Brisbane.
In Gibbon Street.
~ * ~
8
While I was waiting for Barrie Barry in King George Square, I wondered where everybody was. The square was empty, except for King George on his horse and the two lions guarding City Hall. I could see people over at Roma Street, and others in the Queen Street Mall, but bubkis, diddly, nada, in the square.
Then I wondered why, as I crossed Adelaide Street earlier, it was close to thirty degrees in Greater Brisbane, and yet sitting in the newly renovated square, denuded of trees and fountains, it appeared twice that. On top of it all, I couldn’t see a darned thing through the glare that bounced off the new square’s giant pad of concrete or tiling or crushed glass or whatever it was. The clock tower was all ghostly and shimmering. If anyone ever wanted to orchestrate a world-record attempt at cooking eggs, this would be the place. It was a frying pan. The King George Skillet. I felt like an ant under a naughty boy’s microscope, and he had a face like Beechnut.