Time's Long Ruin (3 page)

Not that it didn't take a good performer to do that. So, like Bill always said, nothing is ever wasted. Liz had come somewhere between unemployment and six-piece flannelette sheet sets, so she couldn't confirm or deny his stories. And apparently, all of his old programs were lost in a fire in a Semaphore boarding house he was staying in. Luckily he got out with his life and a second-degree burn that had long since healed.

But Bill Riley still looked the part: tall and athletic (apart from a pot belly that was Liz's fault, cooking him all the wrong foods). He had a round face with big blue eyes and a bulbous nose that was nourished by a web of fine capillaries. His wild, curly hair was grey before its time, hiding ironing-board ears that stuck out like handle bars, allowing Liz to come up from behind and take a hold of him, leading him towards washers that needed to be changed and lawns that needed to be mowed.

I looked through a small hole in the wall of my hutch and saw the adults talking. Bill was standing up, clutching a barbecue fork in one hand and his ukulele in the other. ‘Well?' he asked.

‘A body?' Mum guessed.

‘No, a glasshouse, full of whoopee weed.'

They all laughed. Dad stood up, took the fork from Bill's hand and walked across to the incinerator cum barbecue. It was a four-foot high square of besser blocks, equipped with a grill, a flue on top and an ash-box at the bottom. Dad started to turn the chops and roll the sausages. ‘And how do you know it was weed?' he asked.

‘I can tell,' Bill replied. ‘I've been around.' He winked at Liz and my mother. Liz shook her head. ‘Where have you been? Myer's haberdashery?'

The two women laughed again.

‘I've been around. Backstage at the – '

Before he had a chance to finish, Liz screamed and doubled over with laugher. Back in my hutch I rolled up my book and smiled.

‘I've seen photos,' Bill continued. ‘The Greeks brought it with them from Calabria.'

‘That's in Italy,' Mum said.

‘Athens . . . Lesbos.'

‘Lesbos?' Liz cried. ‘How did you get from Lesbos to Grant Rehn's backyard?'

Bill just shook his head and smiled. ‘It was marryjewana.'

Just then Janice appeared at the front of the hutch. ‘Henry, what you doing in there?'

I dropped my book on the pile of old tyres. Janice turned to my mum. ‘Here he is, Missus Page.'

Mum stood up. ‘Henry?'

Janice opened the door of the hutch, came in, took me around the shoulders and led me out. ‘We've been looking for you at the playground.'

‘I was just . . .'

‘What?'

‘Nothin' . . .'

Janice and I sat down at the table with the adults just as the little ones came around the corner. ‘I'm hungry,' Anna cried, and she went over to help Dad watch the pink chops.

‘Me too,' Gavin added, following her.

‘What were you doing in there?' Mum asked, putting her arm around me, spitting on her handkerchief and rubbing dirt off my face.

‘Nothing,' I replied, pushing her away.

Bill Riley leaned across the table and motioned for me to move closer. He placed his hand on mine and asked, ‘You didn't hear what we were talking about, did you?'

‘No,' I shot back.

‘Good, because that man is a nasty piece of work.'

‘What man?'

He ruffled my hair and winked. ‘The man from Lesbos.'

Liz was off again, laughing so hard she had to spread her legs and lean forward to get air.

‘These will never be cooked,' my dad moaned, poking the chops.

‘I'm hungry,' Anna repeated.

Detective Constable Bob Page had an idea. I wrote about it the next day:

Hearing the police sirens in the distance, the man from Lesbos
stuffed the marewana plants in his insinerator. He threw in a
match but they wouldn't burn. They were still too green. So he
fetched a can of petrol from his woodshed, returned to the
insinerator and poured it on the plants. He lit another match.
Bang. Next thing he's dancing around, taking off his slippers
and hosing down his feet . . .

Bill drove Dad to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. They covered his feet in cream and bandaged them. He was off work for a week. Right in the middle of a big murder investigation.

The next morning I rose early, pulling on sandals and shorts that were three sizes too small, slipping on a long-sleeved shirt that used to be part of Dad's uniform. I rolled up the sleeves until they were just above my elbow. And then I walked around the block to Elizabeth Street, passing each of the shops in turn and shouting inside, ‘Everything alright today, Mr Bilston?'

‘Yes thanks, Constable Page.'

The shirt fell down past my knees. It didn't matter. I was the South Australian Police in this part of the world. It was because of me that we had a quiet neighbourhood.

‘Mr Hessian, everything okay?'

As Eric Hessian looked up from fitting a pair of school shoes. ‘Yes thank you, Sergeant.'

‘Mum's got apricots, hundreds, do you want some?'

Elizabeth Street was a miniature town centre. It was lined with dog-eared buildings containing four or five shops jammed together like roadside letterboxes. Some of the buildings were original, turn of the century, narrow, poky and musty-smelling, lacking any plumbing, lit by old yellow globes crusted with dead insects. Others, from the 1930s and 1940s, had been built with glazed brick, wide picture windows and recessed entries. The very last was Doctor Gunn's clinic, built in the mid 1950s on the site of a row of demolished cottages. I can still remember the builders at work. I can see Doctor Gunn standing on the road, arms crossed, watching them lay bricks. ‘How much longer do you reckon?'

‘Another few weeks, Doctor.'

Where each block of shops abutted a side street, someone had come along with a brush and painted:
Black Stallion Syrup
for Colds and Coughs, Cerebos Table Salt, Horlick's Malted Milk
and Peters' Ice Cream
.

The names are a bit hard to recall now because they were all painted over years ago.

Warm, sweet-smelling shops, each containing small, blue crystals of life, growing, filling shelves to bursting point, sustaining the neighbourhood. Until, in the 1960s, some fella went and built a supermarket on Port Road. I remember everyone going over for opening day. Even the shop owners on Elizabeth Street, shutting up early so they could have a nosy. If only they'd known. Pretty soon their business started dropping off. It was just too easy to do all your shopping in one spot. And to get everything you needed.

Of course, everyone made a show of doing the right thing. After people had got home from the supermarket and unloaded their cars they'd get their baskets and walk around to Elizabeth Street. But where they used to buy bread and rolls and buns from Joe Skurray the baker, now they'd just buy a couple of raspberry tarts, ask how his wife was keeping, and head home for a cup of tea made from bags.

The smart ones got out quick. The Acorn deli was the first to close. The last, I think, was the post office, on the far side down near the church (which people stopped using also, but that's another story). By the 1970s they'd all gone.

But it's funny how the wheel turns. Now the young ones are starting to buy those shops. A group of them knocked out the wall between John Cox the bootmaker and Ted Bilston's Half-Case Fruit Shop and built a cafe. They polished the floorboards and set up chrome-edged melamine tables. Then they made a counter out of steel pipes and marble (don't ask) and put a coffee machine on it. So now, every Saturday morning, ballet boy next door and his younger brother and all of the accountants go down and sit in an old fruit shop sipping lattes with little serviettes wrapped around the glass.

Another lot gutted Joe Skurray's old shop and put in a sort of art gallery. When I say art, I really mean those pictures with a few scribbles and splatters of paint. Nothing decent, like a Namatjira or some Heysen gums. Another lot bought Don and Mary-Anne Eckert's grocery shop and started selling stuff from the 1970s: lamp shades, bean bags and loud dresses, a TAA bag and a little telly that looks like it was squeezed out of someone's bum. Crap. Shit we threw out years ago. But apparently people buy it.

And here's the funniest thing of all. All of those folks hired a sandblaster and removed the paint from the side of the Acorn deli. And there it was, still – a big, black stallion. They got someone to redo it and now it's as good as new:
2'6 a bottle, Ask your Local Chemist
.

So, if you live long enough, you see everything.

Which takes me back to that sunny morning in 1960, as I arrived at the end of Elizabeth Street, where the railway line cuts Croydon in half. Beyond the railway line is Queen Street, and Port Road, with its supermarkets and six lanes of traffic.

The railway crossing was manned. There's Mr Pedavoli, Con, sitting in his four-foot-square gatekeeper's box. He sits on a stool in front of a small, raised table covered with cups of Italian coffee, timetables, a crossword and a comb for fixing his hair every time he opens the gate. He looks up at a large timetable covering a whole wall, runs a finger along a line and then stops to listen. He lifts his head a little. He can hear Doctor Gunn talking in his workroom and the bottle-o loading his cart further along Day Terrace. He can hear birds and the breeze through the leaves of the plane and oak trees that line both sides of the track, and he can even hear heat rising from the road and the knock of the gates against their posts.

It's time. He runs the comb through his hair, straightens his black and white safety vest, and makes his way outside. He stops a few old dears about to cross the track. ‘A moment please, ladies.'

‘There's nothing coming.'

But Con just taps his watch. He closes the pedestrian and traffic gates and stands waiting. Then he hears a whistle and sees black smoke from a small loco labouring towards them with three over-f carriages. One of the waiting drivers calls to him – he wanders over and a man hands him a paper bag full of freshly baked almond bread. He shakes the man's hand and then stretches into the car to kiss someone.

The train slows into Croydon. Con hobbles back towards the gate and gives the engineer a matter-of-fact wave. The train crosses the road and stops at the platform: a few people get in but no one gets out. Then Con opens the first and second traffic gates. None of the cars dare move before the gates are fully open. When he is finished Con waves them through. This is Con's crossing. He has the neighbourhood very well trained. The only problems he ever has are with outsiders. But he puts up his hand and stops them and goes over and asks them to wind down their window.

‘Excuse me, sir,' he says, ‘according to Railways regulations, vehicles are required to stop until the gates are fully open.'

‘I realise that.'

‘I also have the power to take licence numbers and report them to the police.'

‘Just open the gate.'

‘Understood?'

I crossed from Elizabeth Street and went and sat with Con in his gatehouse. I balanced on a broken stool and he poured me a hot, black coffee. Then I took out my notebook and asked, ‘Anything to report?'

‘One,' he replied, holding up a finger.

I took out a pencil and wrote down the licence number. ‘And what did he do?' I asked.

Con shook his head. ‘He went through as I was closing the gates. You make sure you tell your dad.'

‘I will. He'll pass it on to Traffic.'

‘Good.' And then he winked, and I wondered why.

I sipped my coffee as he told me about his gout and more trouble with the neighbours over his healing tree. Then he moved on to his village (as he always did) – goats, blue cheese and weddings in the village square. When he paused to look across the tracks, to remember, I asked, ‘Why did you leave?

His face lit up. ‘Why did I leave? Well . . .'

And he was off again, repeating the same stuff I'd heard a hundred times, stopping only to check his timetable, comb his hair, close the gates and take a piss on the side of a plane tree. Returning, sitting, saying, ‘Henry, have you ever been so hungry you'd eat grass?'

‘No.'

‘Or trapped rats to make stew?'

‘Never.'

‘If you could find a rat. That's what it was like during the war, and after. But we were the smart ones, we knew when it was time to get out.'

A hot, steamy Sunday morning. Gathering their few possessions, putting on a suit and tie (and Rosa in her very best marmalade-coloured frock) and catching an overcrowded bus to town. Getting off – by now smelling of fertiliser, chickens and second-hand body odour – and spending too much money on a taxi to the docks. But being rewarded when they saw their ship. As big as an iceberg. Smelling of eucalyptus and freshly mowed lawn. Packed full of a thousand others like them: people who could see the future.