Hill of Grace (15 page)

Nathan marvelled at the novelty of Bob and his son sparring, superimposing it on his own tea table and becoming depressed. William discussing bum lust and operetta, laughing, accepting and returning criticism, sarcasm wrapped in love – sharing his thoughts about the heavens, inviting him into his study and showing him around. Sons as friends, or sons as a source of disappointment.

After tea Nathan and Phil walked down the hill to Kilburn station, waiting beside a bed of neatly clipped geraniums as a Maori in white abattoir boots peeled a tangerine, ate it and sucked the juice from his fingers. An express went past and Nathan said, ‘N-class.'

Phil looked at him, unsure, and grinned. ‘You one of those, train types?'

‘What's that?'

‘You know,
the Bayer-Peacock special was fitted with new bogies in
nineteen forty-one. Prior to this . . .

' ‘No. I needed a job. Preferably not in Tanunda.'

‘Thank God for that.'

On their way to the city, Phil stared out the window and said, ‘My father and trains . . . generally he leaves it at work. Could you imagine the Romans obsessed by their carriages?' As they slowed through the Adelaide workings he cheered with the sight of city lights. ‘Anyway, it'll be a solid trade for you, Nathan. Solid. Like me . . . happy and well the Laxette way . . .
when your child is crabby,
naughty or nervy
. . .
tiny squares of nice-to -take milk chocolate
. . .'

Nathan showed his employee's pass as they walked onto the concourse. Phil said, ‘Watch this,' and approached a man in a neat, blue uniform who was standing in front of a full-wall timetable in oak, with destinations and times clicking over frenetically beside a giant four-sided clock. ‘Kilburn,' he began. ‘Our movie at the Savoy Theatrette finishes at ten fifteen.'

The lines on the older man's brow furrowed. After a pause of a few seconds he said, ‘Platform nine, ten twenty-nine.'

‘We can't make it in fourteen minutes.'

‘If you don't dawdle you will.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

‘It's my job.'

They briefly stopped at the men's and then set off, laughing at a sign that said GENTLEMEN – CHECK YOUR DRESS. Climbing the stairs at the city end of the station they crossed North Terrace, up Bank Street into Hindley. With time to spare they stopped at Sigalas' Milk Bar and Phil shouted Nathan a spearmint milkshake (‘Available No-where else in the Southern Hemisphere'). Staring into the freshly polished vitrolite wall tiles, Nathan couldn't imagine ever returning to the valley again, couldn't believe that was where he was from, and had to return to. Couldn't even recall much about Lilli and their night together, although if anything could still draw him back . . .

Settling into the Savoy late enough to avoid the newsreels, Nathan chewed popcorn and drank Coke he'd bought on an advance from his wage. As the Three Stooges flickered, Phil farted and the lady in front of him complained. ‘It's only natural,' Phil replied, explaining he had trouble with his bowels, as Nathan lay back and cackled in his hand. And when Mo started in on Larry and Curly he put his head back and looked up at all the phosphorescent stars glowing on the ceiling and thought, Where have I been?

At one point Phil leaned over and asked, ‘Do you
really
believe in God?'

‘Yes.'

Stopping to think, reaching over again and grabbing his arm.

‘Have you ever done it with a woman?'

Nathan paused. ‘Yes.' Unsure if Phil would actually believe him.

‘Which is better?'

‘What?'

‘God or fucking?'

‘Each has its own – ' ‘Liar.'

‘What about you?'

‘I'm a masturbating atheist. If I haven't screwed a woman by twenty-five I want you to shoot me. Does yours have a sister?'

‘No.'

‘You lot have a bent for that, eh? You could find me someone.

Blonde and big-breasted. Sieg heil!'

Nathan kicked him and the lady in front looked around. ‘Sorry.'

The boys reclined, watching the Stooges fuelling a rocket with olive oil. ‘You could bring down more than streudel on Monday mornings,' Phil continued. ‘Are you convinced I'm a degenerate yet?'

‘No.'

‘You will be.'

They made it to the station on time and the man in blue was still there. ‘Platform nine,' he reminded them as they walked past.

Phil shook his head. ‘A truly amazing man.'

Nathan stayed on at the Drummonds that weekend, helping Phil with his lines, learning to lay solder in straight lines, candying almonds on a Sunday morning of hymns and Hebrews avoided.

Back in Tanunda, William reclined in the back row of Langmeil with his arms crossed. He could see Pastor Henry's eyes searching for him at the front, moving back over the congregation until he found him. Happy that William had come, but obviously concerned that he'd changed his seat. William had never moved more than a few inches in fifty years.

William himself, refusing to acknowledge the Elders, imagined Nathan inside the pulpit beside Henry, forming a duo like Laurel and Hardy, reading one-liners from a script which moved the congregation away from a reality which daily faced them: the End of Days. The film monkeys Larry and Mo choking on their lines as they burnt.

Back at the Drummonds, Bob was concerned. From the way Nathan had talked about his father, he guessed it was more than fatigue which had kept the boy back. ‘It'll have to be the rare exception,' he'd said, and Nathan had replied, of course, I'm going to miss out on seeing Lilli, so much for your yeast. Bob had had a situation like this before with a boarder from Tailem Bend who ended up staying every weekend, always ready with excuses.

Eventually he asked the employment office to find him somewhere else. In that case an alcoholic father, but he couldn't let these things become his problem. He'd only reluctantly taken Nathan on, as company for Phil (he and Rose could barely keep up with their son anymore).

Phil spent the rest of the morning trying to convince Nathan to join the chorus of
The Whitehorse Inn
, but Nathan said he'd never be allowed.

‘Why?' Phil asked. ‘It sounds like some sort of cult. You sing a few songs and say a few corny lines and the audience laughs, how hard's that?'

Nathan shrugged. ‘
He
would say, it doesn't praise God.'

‘Bloody hell, it doesn't criticise him either. It's an operetta. There's no discussion of the purpose of life.'

‘Exactly.'

‘So if that's the case – ' ‘I didn't invent the religion.'

‘He'd never know.'

‘No.'

Phil tempted him with a few bars of the title song but it wasn't enough. He cut his losses by showing Nathan a journal he'd started keeping of graffiti from around the uni toilets. Whenever he had a spare twenty minutes he'd lock himself in and scribble. Graffiti, he claimed, fell into either one of two categories: the extremely profound or the extremely perverted. He could prove this. He showed Nathan tracings of pornographic pictures he'd made on specially purchased tracing paper. And then he read a selection of work he'd copied from the Barr Smith library dunnies:
Where was God at Treblinka? Josie can suck your
eyes from your sockets, cheep, 127 496
. All of the poetry Dryden had missed, he explained.

Nathan thought about them, Lilli and Phil, and what would happen if they ever got together. She'd have him worked out in no time – words, words and more words – or would it just be an explosive miasma of smut under the arc lights of the Barr Smith unisex?

At two a.m. the following Wednesday, Nathan was woken by Phil's alarm – his room-mate turning over, switching off the light he'd left on and kicking an analgesics text off his bed.

Nathan got dressed and had breakfast with Bob, who was busy sucking back a last minute Turf and coughing enough to wake the dead. They walked to Islington, as they did every morning, gathered their tools and boarded the employees' carriage for their trip to Peterborough.

They emerged from the loco depot behind 523 steam, a heavy engine with all the streamlining of a Glen Miller selection. Passing the tallow works and sheep paddocks of Salisbury, Nathan had to work hard to convince himself he wasn't headed home. Bob showed him a map of the state rail network, extending out from Adelaide in every direction like lantana, and Nathan knew (as surely as the crispness of the long, black lines) that his choices were becoming almost infinite.

Smithfield and Roseworthy, Wasleys and Hamley Bridge, lines shooting off here and there towards disused copper mines and the crabs of Port Wakefield, here the Nullarbor and via Hawker to the endlessness of the inland. Bob knew them all, having fixed every fridge and cold-store on the network. ‘Once you hit Quorn, things change,' he said. ‘Saltbush and gibber plains. But apparently there's things living out there. Country God didn't bother about.'

Burra to Terowie was an endless stretch of mallee, saltbush and corrugated plains stretching out orange against a sky of cloudless blue. Languorous melaleucas branched at ground level into explosions of purple and white pom-poms, their form reminding Nathan of black and white photos from school atlases, narratives of deluded explorers (megalomaniacal Germans with visions of inland seas) and stories of the big JC himself, talking with wallabies in the form of the Devil.

Peterborough was the last junction before the line headed east towards New South Wales. Beyond the border the world stopped, dropping vertically into a dark chasm of space they'd also described at school, full of half-human, half-dead vampires, lakes of fire and comets smashing into each other, sparks and showers of hot lava and an atmosphere of sulphur dioxide which could dissolve lungs in an instant.

Arriving in the Peterborough yards their carriage was detached and shunted and the loco reversed into an old round-house. Like the Islington loco depot, it was black with the smoke of overworked trains, boilers lit and fed in the early morning ready to pull cattle-f rolling stock and dining cars with farmers off to town in suits that barely fitted. S.A. Railways men oozed from their carriage ready for work: relief crews, track work teams, a couple of diesel apprentices, smug in the railway hierarchy above refrigeration mechanics.

Bob and Nathan spent the afternoon stripping down and re-assembling a compressor full of bulldust. After cleaning up they were fed lamb in the William Webb Memorial Cafeteria and sipped long-necks of West End in the employees' van. Just after dark they went for a walk through town, looking in the sort of shop-fronts Nathan was mostly familiar with. A shoe shop with workboots and casuals, slippers and ladies' formals. Bob laughing, ‘My mum used to have lace-ups like them,' as Nathan smiled, ‘They're still catching up,' tasting the spearmint milkshake of Sigalas' as Joe Aronson and his Synco Symphonists echoed down main street, Peterborough, into the front bar of the Commercial Hotel, through into the men's with its noticeable lack of either profound or filthy graffiti.

Settling into a small park of perfectly manicured Kentucky bluegrass, Bob looked up at the sky and said, ‘That one, I know, is the Big Dipper, and that one the Bear.'

‘The saucepan constellation,' Nathan pointed, knowing exactly where to look for it.

And God, up there somewhere, perhaps. Bob refused to give voice to these thoughts, although he sensed Nathan shared the dilemma of the bedside drawer – unresolved feelings which Phil had rationalised out of existence. ‘You could form anything out of the stars,' Nathan offered.

‘How's that?'

‘Dot to dot.'

Like imaginary weather trees, drifting across the sky, seen by some but not others, portents of rain or disaster, gods with mouths zipped up or not there at all.

To Phil it's just so much gas, Bob thought. ‘Yes, that's an area of interest,' he said. Feeling small. Unable to mention God. (As William couldn't avoid it, at that moment drafting a speech he planned to read out in church, under the nose of those who'd deny the good news.)

Nathan and Bob walked back via a bakery smelling of pies and pipe loaves and a Christedelphian shopfront promising a public lecture,
Did Jesus Look Like This?
, a picture of a Neanderthal in Messiah's clothing. A mechanic laboured late into the night on someone's new Holden as his dog sniffed stobie poles.

They settled into bunks in the employees' van. If a star is a million miles away, Nathan thought as he drifted off to sleep, then what is God up to? Some time during the night they were coupled to the loco and taken home. Nathan woke with the world passing by in a dark blur, the certainty of static sleep passing away with everything else. He sat up and opened the window to let the wash of air pass over him.

Bless Dad . . . I know, but bless him . . . bless Mum, Lilli, Arthur . . .
bless Bob and Rose, and Phil, give him the ability to sing in tune.
Walk beside me . . .

Through the concourse with its departure times like so many stars in the firmament; and only the big fella in blue having the whole picture.

Chapter Eight

Nathan caught the late train to Tanunda after work on Friday night. He stared into small, weedy yards as his train picked up speed and he felt his mood drop. The smell of diesel and oil wasn't enough to save him from the thought of Tanunda. Getting off the train, William took him by the arm and said, ‘You have remembered, the children's devotion?' And in an instant a cold fog descended on Tanunda Station, weighing him down in a gravity of things he'd tried to forget. Such as Bluma smelling his jacket and asking if the Drummond lady had been washing his clothes and, if so, with what, seeing as she probably had better – Bluma's leftover slices of Lux compressed together in the eternal drive for economy.

He spent Saturday helping out with the pruning, his mind drifting back to Adelaide, into Bob's shed and through a forest of cracked footplates and torn upholstery, mingling with stale smoke from the Ardath cigarettes Bob smoked. Going inside early he spent an hour on Ohm's law and electrical circuits. William arrived to watch over his shoulder, suggesting solutions. But again Nathan was dreaming Co-Co and Bo-Bo diesels, cabbage boiled senseless (avoiding any suggestion of sauerkraut), served up on best china in the Webb cafeteria. Bluma, returning from a quilting-bee in Angaston, brought home flake and vinegar-soggy chips as a sort of consolation prize, but the homecoming was soured by William refusing to eat anything cooked in a hundred per cent animal fat.