Dad made a big fuss of how lucky he’d been to get the house. One of his old Sunderland shipyard mates had left to try his luck on the goldfields and put in a good word with the landlord. Theirs was the end house of three joined together on Ellen Street: the closest to the fancy house perched at the street’s highest point. Dad said Fan should be grateful they’d landed on their feet, but Fan wasn’t grateful.
Of course, Ma insisted ‘your grandfather’ would have the front room to himself. It would get the best morning sun and the afternoon breezes. It was only a few paces wide – his feet might touch the opposite wall when he was in bed – but it had its own fireplace. Dad and Ma put a big chair with a cushion near the window, and another chair next to a little round table. They shouted at each other while they were doing it, Ma yelling, ‘Bugger him! If he wants to get here on his own, then let him. As long as he pays his board and lodgings, he can turn up on a bloody flying machine for all I care.’
Ma never said ‘bugger him’ or ‘bloody’ anything, let alone flying machines.
Fan would have to share the sleep-out with Tom and Ned to make room for him. ‘Your grandfather’ wasn’t here yet and already he was making them crowd up closer so they could fit him in.
‘Fan, get me a knife,’ Ma shouted. ‘A sharp one.’
The kitchen smelled vaguely of fish. Fan slammed the drawer and the window rattled.
In the front room, Agnes stood on a chair in front of the window.
‘They’re all blunt.’ Fan held the yellow handle and pointed with the blade.
‘It’s proper to hold the blade and offer the handle – you know that about knives,’ Ma said.
‘Sorry, but without Aunty Florence to remind me what’s proper, I clean forgot.’ Fan’s voice was the sharpest thing in the room.
‘Perhaps if you look at this window with that miserable face, you’ll crack it open.’
‘P’raps if you didn’t have to look after whatsisname we wouldn’t be in this stinking place.’
‘He’s your grandfather. Have some respect.’ Ma took the knife and hacked at the layers of white paint that had glued the window shut.
‘You can talk,’ Fan said. ‘So, Mother, what would you like me to call him?’
‘Call him whatever you like. Call him Grandpa, Granddad, Sir. Call him Father Christmas or the Devil, for all I care.’
Ma shoved the weight of her body against the sash. The window screeched open. Flakes of white paint fell to the floor.
‘Maybe if you’d said a word about him sometime in my whole entire life, I’d know what his name is.’
Fan’s limbs ached from being folded up for days in the steamer. Her feet craved the scratch of sand. Maybe she’d go take a look at Fremantle. She went into the yard where Tom was sorting through timber planks that were piled up by the fence. Ned was chasing a couple of chooks the other family had left behind.
‘They need names, Ned. They need to learn their names so they’ll come to you.’ Fan made clucking noises with her tongue. ‘I know. Let’s call them Mother and Grandfather.’
Ned snorted.
‘Don’t leave the house, young lady,’ Ma shouted from inside. ‘Fremantle’s not a very nice town.’
‘Bugger you, Ma,’ Fan whispered. She shut the gate behind her so Mother and Grandfather couldn’t escape.
Fan wandered past houses with washing fluttering out the front, a bakery, a butcher’s, a hotel, another hotel, yet another hotel, houses with sleepy verandas. That limestone wall that encircled the gaol, the highest wall she’d ever seen. The closer she went to the dock, the more the air stank of grog and fish. Men with inked-up arms followed her with their eyes. Fremantle looked shabby, like it had just woken up from a hard night on the rum. Fan stopped outside a laundry. A Chinese man stood on the step, smoking.
‘You lost?’ he said.
‘No,’ Fan mumbled.
‘You know how to get home from here?’
‘Think so. Thanks, mister,’ Fan said.
‘You better go before your mum come looking, yes?’
Fan nodded. She traced her steps carefully back to Ellen Street and let herself in the back door.
Ma glared with her thunder-eyes. ‘Your grandfather arrives tomorrow, and I’ve got so much to do. For once in your life, Fan, can you just be good?’
Fan left Ma to it and went back into the yard. The chooks scratched the dirt and peered at her. What did it mean, really – be good? Specially in a town with a walled gaol on the hill behind them. From the outside, its gates looked like a storybook castle, but what on earth needed a wall that big? Fan shivered at the thought of it. She cooed and clucked and chased Mother and Grandfather to the gate, threw it open and set them free onto the street.
Mostly, they walked: the length and curve of the canals, the tree-lined streets of Edgbaston where every house had picture-book gardens and six windows for only one family. Edwin was surprised at her briskness. He found it hard to keep up with her. She wriggled her hand into his and it shocked him, the raw intimacy of her rough, nail-bitten fingers. With other girls, he’d never once held their hands. Sometimes Mary Ann leaned against him, her head resting in the dip between his neck and his shoulder, and he enjoyed the slight but unmistakeable weight of her body against his – her trust, he would recognise it as, much later.
After a gill or two at the Anvil, Mary Ann grew glitter-eyed, scarlet-mouthed. The more Edwin drank the more he pushed his luck: a hand on her belly, a stroke of her thigh. She always firmly put his hand back on his own knee. But outside the Anvil, or in the spidery shadows of the bridge, they kissed and let their hands read something of each other’s clothed bodies. Eventually, after many minutes, she sighed and pressed her palm to his chest, easing him away, and he held himself within the boundaries of his own skin.
Mary Ann wasn’t like the others. He could be sitting at the Anvil, doing vicious mimicry of fat merchants and myopic account-keepers and his excise brothers would slap him on the back and buy him more gin. But Mary Ann’s silver-blue eyes stared right through his snivelling inadequacies.
‘Honest to God, Edwin, I never seen anybody carry on like such a bloody lunatic,’ she said one night. ‘I need to find myself a new sweetheart.’
When he left her at the door of the brass founder whose house she cleaned in return for board and lodgings, she turned her cheek to him and closed her eyes. He brushed his lips to her skin, her hair. He marvelled that despite the dust and grime of Birmingham, her hair still smelled sweet, a fragrance he remembered from childhood but could not quite identify: perhaps the warmth of sunlight, the sweetness of a yellow crop.
‘All these years in Birmingham and you still smell of home.’ He pressed his face to her straw-gold hair.
‘Don’t be daft.’ She slid her hand into his. ‘Scrubbing floors has wore that place clean off me.’
‘Your hair is so beautiful.’
‘My hair!’ She pretended to push him away. ‘Edwin Salt, you got a lot to learn about wooing a lady.’
The next evening as they kissed goodnight, she rummaged in his jacket pocket.
‘Not there.’ He grabbed her hand, moved it. ‘Here’s more like it.’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
Later, when he lay clammy and sleepless in his bed, even in his imagination there were things he could not make her do. Mary Ann stirred in him a longing he hadn’t felt in months. Suddenly his head ached from the noise of the Bull Ring, and his skin itched in the coal-thick air. He got up and walked along the canals, sniffing the air like an animal, thirsty for the clean smell of an open field. Instead, he found a nameless woman, compliant with gin, who knew where to put her hands.
Afterwards, he shoved her away and felt in his jacket pocket for a coin. He found one – and something else. In the foggy lamplight Edwin recognised it immediately. He paid the woman and hurried back to his room, where he wasted no time in opening Matthew Sharpe’s tobacco pouch. Inside was a lock of Mary Ann’s straw-gold hair, no wider than a finger, tied in the middle with twine.
They were married on a freezing November day in the small church of Saint Peter in Birmingham. Mary Ann wore a once-white, loose-fitting dress, not really a dress for weddings – or for winters – but Mrs Blunt hadn’t minded giving it away. Eliza had taken in the waist, taken up the hem.
‘See? Custom-made for you,’ Eliza said.
‘You should open your own tailor’s shop,’ Mary Ann said, and both women guffawed at such an absurdity.
Eliza stitched a yellow silk rose to Mary Ann’s waist. ‘It almost matches your hair.’ Eliza pushed a strand of Mary Ann’s hair away from her face. ‘You look perfect.’
There was nobody at Saint Peter’s when they arrived.
‘It’s bad luck to be early,’ Mary Ann said.
‘Rubbish. Stupid superstition.’ Eliza said. ‘Besides, I want to draw you. Goodness knows when there’ll ever be another proper bride in the family.’
Eliza positioned Mary Ann in the doorway. The crisp early-morning sun made her hair shine.
‘I never been drawn before,’ Mary Ann said. ‘How long’s this going to take? It’s freezing in this damned dress.’
‘Serves you right for getting married in November.’
‘Edwin got his first transfer. A promotion, he says. He don’t want to leave me behind.’
‘Of course he doesn’t. Now smile, please.’
Mary Ann grimaced.
‘I mean smile properly,’ Eliza said.
‘I’m trying to stop my teeth from chattering.’
Eliza drew big, sweeping charcoal strokes over the paper. Mary Ann shuffled and sighed, but didn’t complain again.
‘Here you go. See, I missed my calling.’ Eliza gave Mary Ann the picture. ‘Call it a wedding present.’
Mary Ann smiled at the sight of herself as a bride, a long train tangling with her hair. In the picture, her husband stood by her in a smart suit with his arm around her waist.
‘You got Edwin perfect, and he’s not even here.’
‘He’s always the same,’ Eliza said. ‘I’ve been looking at him all my life.’
‘Thanks for standing up with me,’ Mary Ann said. ‘I got nobody else.’
‘You’re not on your own.’ Eliza touched Mary Ann’s hand. ‘Do you know what to expect, you know … tonight?’
‘I been in Birmingham for a long time.’ Mary Ann coloured. ‘It pays to know enough to keep out of trouble.’
Edwin could see the fine hair on Mary Ann’s bare forearms bristle with cold. She looked ghost-like: white, shimmery, the sunlight bouncing off her dress. He wanted to get the wedding part over and take her to his room. He wanted to touch her bare shoulders, scoop his hands into the absence of flesh that was the curve from her ribs to her hips.
On Edwin’s side of the church: Da in his best suit, Mum in her good hat, Mary eyeing off Edwin’s old friend William Neville, the dozen or so excise men who came to cheer him along. His two brothers were at the front, standing up with him. Sam Junior, James and Edwin, the three Salt boys, identical brown eyes, identical brown hair. Small, medium and large. ‘Cut from the same cloth,’ Da trotted out his tired old joke, and everyone except Edwin smiled.
On Mary Ann’s side: Mr Blunt, the brass founder, and Mrs Blunt.
The minister nodded. Mary Ann held her head high and began her long walk into the sea of his witnesses.
In his bed that night, she cried, but not with fear. She opened herself eagerly to Edwin and afterwards he watched her as she slept. Her lips were plump and blood-red from all the kissing. He stroked her breast and she quivered, her eyes still shut while the feeling awoke her. He took another swig from the gin bottle and buried his face in her beautiful hair. She moved her hand underneath him. His last thought before the tide of feeling overtook them both: You are my wish.
The curtains were pulled across the window.
‘Too much sun.’ Mrs Molloy dabbed a wet cloth on Mam’s face. ‘We found her down the yard, asleep near the vegetable patch.’
‘For the love of God, Cath, wake up.’ Da laid another wet cloth on Mam’s hair.
Agnes squeezed Mam’s hand, but Mam didn’t squeeze back. Instead, she groaned. Her head lolled over the side of the bed and she vomited.
‘We’ve got to get her cooled down.’ Mrs Molloy grabbed a bucket. ‘Where’s the tub?’
‘She can hardly sit up in it, it’s too small,’ Da said.
‘The river, then.’
‘For God’s sake, woman, it’s too far.’
Mam groaned again.
‘Wake up, Mam, wake up,’ Agnes pleaded, but Mam wouldn’t open her eyes.
‘Wake up, Mam.’ Walter’s face was deathly white. He gripped Agnes’s hand.
Da lifted Mam up and she flopped like a ragdoll.
‘Agnes, stay here with Walter and the infant,’ Mrs Molloy said. ‘We’ll look after your mam.’
The baby wailed. Agnes picked her up. She smelled of milk and it comforted Agnes. Walter cuddled up next to her and she put her other arm around him.
Agnes prayed. She prayed to God, she prayed to the river that might be alive, she prayed to Mick McCarthy’s woman, Rosie. She held tight to Walter and Baby Cath and prayed to anyone who might know how to fix such a terrible thing.
It was dark when Mam and Da came home. Mrs Molloy wasn’t with them. Walter was asleep next to Agnes. She’d put Baby Cath to sleep in the little wooden cot. Agnes was rigid with wakefulness.
Mam seemed to loop her thin arms around Da’s neck. Her hair was matted. Da carried her to the bed and laid her down. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.
‘Mam?’ Agnes whispered. She looked like she was asleep.
Da’s face was all shadows and hollows and there was a blackness in his eyes. Agnes didn’t know a name for a look like that.
‘Mam?’ Agnes spoke louder. Walter woke up and began to tremble. Da shook his head. In the wooden cot, Baby Cath wailed. Agnes waited for Da to do something.
Da buckled in the middle. He lay down next to Mam and lifted her arm over him. The baby’s crying grew harsher and deeper and louder until Agnes realised this new noise was coming out of Da.
Agnes grabbed Walter’s hand and they waited.
Da got up and mumbled something about ‘the arrangements’. He said he’d fetch Mrs Molloy who had offered to help with ‘all of that’. He slurred his words like he did when he’d been at the Western.
Agnes curled herself up next to Mam just like Da had done. She pulled her knees up to her chest and held Mam’s hand and pretended she could feel Mam’s body rattling with snores as it sometimes did when she slept. The blanket was damp and the smell of the river was everywhere. Agnes shut her eyes and sank deep under it, deep enough to reach the place where Mam laughed and sang and called Agnes ‘love’. She watched Mam brush her hair and talk about something called snow that dropped from the sky in winter and was so cold it could make your toes drop off. She felt Mam kiss her goodnight.
‘Come back,’ Agnes said, in case Mam was only sleeping, after all.
Da said Mam’s blood had boiled over because she’d fallen asleep down the yard and nobody knew. If Agnes hadn’t stayed in that water so long …
Agnes held Mam’s hand tighter. It was limp and cold. She curled up as close as she could to her mother’s body. Come back. Come back. Come back.
Something inside Da unhinged. Most nights, Smith brought him back from the Western full of grog and muttering terrible blasphemy and things that didn’t make sense, like ‘Is this your doing, Mary Ann?’
Walter ran around the yard calling for Mam. Agnes tried to tell him Mam had died. Dead like the roos Molloy shot, dead like the snake Da killed last week, dead like leaves that fall off trees. But none of these kinds of dead explained it well enough for Walter. He bawled and pummelled his little fists into the ground.
Da couldn’t stand to hear Mrs Molloy use the infant’s name. ‘Baby Cath needs a bath. Baby Cath won’t settle.’ It sent Da into a rage.
‘Go home and look after your own husband, or did his real wife finally arrive from England?’ he shouted. The baby cried all the time, no matter what Agnes did. It was like she cried for all of them. Agnes took to sleeping with the poor little thing next to her. Cath settled easily next to her sister, and everyone slept better.
One morning a letter came for Da. It was sealed with red wax. For the first time since Mam died, Da smiled.
‘Agnes, Walter, get dressed and bring the infant.’ Da put his good hat on. ‘It’s to be done today.’
They made a motley procession. Mrs Molloy carried Baby Cath. Walter wandered ahead and complained it was too hot to be out. Da walked ahead of them.
Agnes wondered if Da wanted them all to go to church, to say some prayers for Mam. But he walked past the church and up to the small door that led to the convent. The sound of children’s chatter wafted over the walls. Da took off his hat and knocked. A nun with a pale face and stark blue eyes opened the door. Da handed her the letter he’d received this morning.
‘The governor has been very understanding about the terrible situation I find myself burdened with since the death of my wife.’ Da spoke in the starched-up voice he kept for best.
‘Oh, yes. Such a tragedy.’ The nun took Da’s hand.
‘I do not have the means to provide for all my children.’
‘We would be pleased to take her in.’ The nun turned to Agnes and smiled. ‘Most of our girls eventually find positions in service here or in the country.’
The sun blasted the convent’s shadeless entrance. Baby Cath mewled.
‘I am Sister Joseph. What’s your name?’ The nun’s voice lilted like Mam’s.
‘Like the saint,’ the nun smiled. ‘Your mam must have loved you a great deal to give you such a beautiful name.’
Agnes blinked hard to stop herself from crying. The nun wiped a tear from under Agnes’s eye with her finger.
‘And the infant? What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Catherine. We call her Cath. After my mam.’
‘Another lovely saintly name. Are you ready, Agnes?’
‘What for?’ Agnes turned to Da again.
‘Will you give little Catherine to the Sisters of Mercy so the good Lord himself can take care of her?’
‘Da?’ Agnes said dumbly.
‘Thank you, Sister,’ Mrs Molloy whispered.
It happened like a dream. The nun’s fingernails scratched Agnes’s arm as she took Baby Cath away from Mrs Molloy. Agnes tried to kiss her sister’s milk-smelling head, but she was gone – there was nothing but air. Agnes waited for Da to take Baby Cath back from the nun and explain it was all a silly mistake, that Mam would never have wanted this, that orphanages were for orphans. She and Walter and Baby Cath weren’t orphans. They still had Da.
But Da was already halfway down the road towards home.
If Da had done a long day at Henry Wood’s, it was best to keep out of his way. If Da wasn’t back from the Western by sundown, it was best to keep out of his way. If Da came back with Mick McCarthy and a bottle of rum, it was best to keep out of his way.
Agnes helped Mrs Molloy with what she could of the women’s work, but Walter seemed to do nothing except make Da angry. He cried and shouted in the middle of the night. He kicked Da in the shins when Da came back from the Western. Walter got a belting, more often than not, even if he was quiet.
Da barely spoke more than a grunt to anyone. But oh, his voice at night. Low, guttural howling worse than a dying animal. The first time, Agnes was terrified Da was being attacked by a snake, or a black. When the wails subsided, she tiptoed to Da’s bed and whispered, ‘Da? What’s wrong?’ But he didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes were closed, and Agnes realised he was asleep.
Even though she’d been ignored by God before, Agnes found herself praying again. She prayed something good would happen. Prayed no more bad things would happen. Prayed that Da wouldn’t get up one morning, put on his good hat and give her and Walter away to the nuns.
Agnes wasn’t sure if it was good or bad, but something did happen after all the praying: a letter from England arrived. Agnes put the letter on the table with Da’s rum. She looked under the bed for that old tin where she knew Da kept his other letters and things, and put the tin next to the rum. She waited and waited, but by sundown, Da still hadn’t come home, so she left the tin and the letter and the rum on the table and went to bed.
Next morning, she woke in shock. It took her a moment to realise it was Da, shaking her awake.
‘Da, what are you doing?’
‘Get up.’ She stumbled out of bed, half-asleep, and he shoved her into the kitchen. The rum bottle was almost empty and there were some letters scattered on the table.
‘What do you think you’re doing with my possessions?’ He picked up the metal tin. His voice was deadly quiet.
‘I know where you keep it, Da. I just put it on the table for you. I didn’t do anything with it.’ Agnes started to cry.
He pulled her hair. Agnes felt sick from the smell of rum.
‘Don’t you ever go near this again. You hear me?’
‘I promise, I promise.’
He let go and Agnes felt like she was on fire. She ran from the house and down the track towards the river. Ran and ran and ran.
The sheltered wedge of riverbank was almost deserted except for a couple of black children and they waved to her. Agnes waded in and slid under the water. She swam out to the edge of the cove. It was cool and still. The water took her in. Mam’s laughter like bells. Mam’s shiny face, smiling. The wiry certainty of Mam’s arms. Agnes sank into Mam’s absence like it was water so deep she’d never touch the bottom. It was Mam and Agnes together again on one of their river days and Da somewhere else, his mouth all slack and wide with his shouting, but too far away to be heard.
Brown jellyfish brushed past and suddenly it was Mam with matted hair, Mam slung over Da’s shoulder, Mam who wouldn’t wake up. Mam’s beautiful black eyes, opaque and expressionless. In the river, Mam was so close, and yet so completely gone.
Agnes climbed out of the water and started to run. One of the black girls called out to her but she didn’t turn around. The river poured from her eyes. At home she sneaked into the washhouse and filled the tub with as much water as she dared. She scrubbed until her skin was red and she could smell only soap. Afterwards she took her sodden clothes outside and shoved them underneath the pile of rubbish for burning.
The scratching sounded like a possum or a rat. The lamp was still on. Maybe Da had fallen asleep in the chair again. Agnes got up to investigate. The metal tin was on the table and Da was writing on letter paper. Writing and talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to the person he was writing to. Who was it? Why did receiving and writing letters make Da carry on like he did? Plenty of people they knew got letters when the ships came in. She had seen people in the street on mail day, some hugging each other, some crying. Agnes went back to bed. So many questions. All she knew for certain was that it was better not to ask.
Mrs Molloy came in to cook, then after one of Da’s shouting rages, she stopped coming. Mrs Smith came to cook and brought another woman with her, a woman called Annie who had wispy grey hair and bird-like eyes. Mrs Smith stopped coming but the bird-eyed woman continued to visit. Annie was there when Agnes and Walter went to bed and sometimes she was still there, fussing in the kitchen, in the morning. When Annie was around, Da’s rages stayed away. Da let Annie rub his horrible feet with eucalypt ointment. What a sight it was. Annie winked at Agnes. Annie didn’t seem bothered by those lumps around Da’s ankles. In fact, it was as if she expected all ankles to have lumps like that. Annie knitted socks for Walter and mended the holes in Agnes’s clothes.
‘Why don’t you give me a hand with the mending?’ Annie asked one evening.
‘Edwin Salt and Son, tailors of the Swan River.’ Da lifted up Walter’s hand and examined it. Walter wriggled free.
‘I meant Agnes.’ Annie handed her a needle and thread. In the dim light it was almost impossible to see properly. Da took the needle from Agnes and threaded it for her, and from then on, every night Da threaded up Agnes’s first needle. Annie started her off with hems, and praised her as she got the hang of it. As the months passed, Agnes repaired moth-eaten blankets and the worn knees on Walter’s trousers. She took up the hem on Annie’s good dress so it no longer trailed unevenly across the dirt floor. She held the finished dress under the lamp for Da to inspect. He turned the fabric over and back again and smiled.
‘Well done, Agnes girl,’ he said, and got back to his reading.
So much got mended that year.
Da married Annie in September 1877. After they got home, his new bride cleaned every window, swept cobwebs from the ceiling and dirt from the floor. She moved things around. She saved some things and not others. She hung a pretty pink curtain over the door to stop the flies coming in on warm days. Even the copper looked like it’d been scrubbed shiny. Annie was so houseproud she must have washed Mam’s dresses because they weren’t where they’d always been, behind the door in the washhouse.
Agnes ran down to the back of the block to where the washing line was strung up. Perhaps Annie had already folded them up and put them somewhere special, because Mam’s dresses weren’t there, either.
‘Where’s my mam’s things?’ Agnes said to Annie that night.
‘They were mouldy and smelly and full of holes,’ Annie frowned. ‘They wouldn’t even do for rags.’
‘You witch.’
‘I’m your father’s wife.’ Annie slapped her hard across the face. ‘Don’t ever call me that again.’
‘I don’t care what you are,’ Agnes screamed. ‘You’ll never be my mam.’
Agnes made them line up, eldest to youngest. She hushed them for good measure. Fan, Tom, Ned. Fan was tall and starting to fill out. Fan, whose real name, Frances, nobody ever used. Tom, eleven, named for George’s father and his face beginning to lose the roundness of a child’s. And Ned, eight ‘and a bit’ as he always pointed out, only a few milk teeth left and his eyes permanently fixed on his older brother. Ned, named for her own father at George’s insistence. He’d said a proper family name gave a boy somewhere to belong. Agnes went along with it, but she vowed never to say her son’s christened name out loud. He’d been Ned from the minute he’d opened his eyes.
‘How long do I have to stand here?’ Fan fiddled with her plait.
‘Be quiet, Fan.’ Agnes poked her daughter in the back of her ribs. Fan wriggled.
There was a knock. Agnes felt light-headed. She inhaled: in, two three. Out, two three. She opened the door.
The man standing on the step was much older and thinner than the father she remembered. His hand was papery when she shook it. Agnes had to blink a couple of times to be sure it was him.
‘Father. Da. Welcome,’ she said with false brightness. ‘Come in.’
He took off his hat and tucked it under his arm. Her father’s face was red and shiny, and there were deep lines around his eyes and mouth. His waistcoat puckered where the buttons stretched too tight over his sagging middle.
‘We would’ve come for you,’ Agnes said.
‘I am still capable of making my own way.’ He moved like his feet hurt.
‘These are my sons. Tom and Ned.’ Agnes pushed the boys in front of her. ‘Your grandsons.’
Da peered closely at Tom. ‘You look like your Uncle Walter.’
Tom’s cheeks reddened and Ned burst into fits of giggles.
‘We’ve got an Uncle Walter?’ Fan’s eyes widened. ‘Ma never said. You’ll have to tell me all about him.’
‘Excuse my daughter’s rudeness.’ Agnes glared at Fan, who grinned back.
‘Hello. I’m Fan. Your granddaughter.’ Fan stepped forward and extended her hand regally. ‘Ma says you might be the Devil, but I think I’ll call you Grandpa.’
All the colour drained from his face.
‘Ma, what’s happening?’ Fan shouted.
Agnes caught him before he hit the floor. ‘Fan, get him some water.’
Agnes and Fan helped him to his room. He tried to shove them away and stumbled heavily into the chair.
‘Fan, get out,’ Agnes said.
Fan didn’t need to be told twice.
Agnes helped her father out of his jacket. He grumbled and resisted, but Agnes was persistent. In the end, he slackened like a ragdoll.
‘For Christ’s sake, woman. I’m not an invalid.’
‘You collapsed, Da. Are you ill?’ She was shocked that his suit was so big on him. His eyes were yellowed, and, without his hat, it was clear he needed a haircut. Not to mention a bath. He could be any of the men who slept outside the Jetty Hotel.
‘Of course I’m not ill. Annie exaggerates, you remember how she is.’ He sounded stronger but his face looked waxy and pale. ‘Your daughter is the image of your mother,’ Edwin said. ‘It gave me a shock. Her hair. So much like Cath’s.’
‘Fan’s hair is like the rest of her. Unruly and difficult to manage.’ Agnes touched his forehead. It was still clammy.
Tom and Ned carried in an old wooden trunk and dropped it under the window.
‘This was on the front step. You got much stuff in here, Grandpa?’ Tom asked shyly.
‘Leave your grandfather alone.’ Agnes shooed the boys out.
‘They seem like fine boys,’ Edwin said.
‘Tom has the look of your brother about him.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen Walter for years.’ The smell of stale tobacco and rum made Agnes feel queasy. She opened the window up further. ‘And, before you ask, Ned is named after you, but I hope that’s where the similarity ends.’ Agnes pointed at the bed. ‘That’s where you’ll be sleeping.’ The breeze wafted the drape.
Edwin coughed violently. ‘Will you shut the damned window?’
‘You aren’t well. You need fresh air.’
‘Nothing fresh about the stink of that sea.’ Edwin tried to get up out of the chair but winced and slipped back down. Agnes tried to help him, but again he pushed her away.
‘I need a rum.’ Edwin wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. ‘Would you please just get me a drink? That’s all I ask.’
‘A drink? Nothing’s changed, then.’ George always kept a bottle in the kitchen. Agnes fetched it, and a glass, and put them on the table. He scowled at her and poured one. Drank it straight down, and the colour returned to his face. He poured another.
‘There’ll be three meals a day. Use the washhouse whenever you like. I do the washing on Wednesdays. I’d appreciate you paying your board and lodgings on a Thursday.’
‘Thank you,’ he said stiffly. ‘I won’t bother you unless I need to.’
‘Well, then. I’ll leave you to settle in.’
The breeze whipped in through the window she’d gone to such trouble to open. Her father wheezed.
‘If that irritates you so much,’ Agnes said, ‘shut it yourself.’
To the rhythms of the wharf bell and the salty wind that blew in from the ocean every afternoon, they lived their lives. George left every morning before dawn. He got shifts every day and started walking taller, making jokes again. Ned and Tom settled into the boys’ school and new names peopled their conversations: Charlie, who was Italian, and Simon, who was from Fremantle, and a Chinese boy, whose proper name nobody could pronounce so everyone called him Lee. Fan complained she was one of the oldest at the girls’ school, but Agnes insisted she went, because with Grandpa’s board and lodgings, Fan wouldn’t need to start at the brush factory for another year.
Despite Agnes’s knocks on his door every morning, her father refused to leave his room except to use the washhouse. He didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone, so she instructed Fan to leave his meals by the door and collect the plates in the morning.
Agnes told herself it was the same life, a life that ran to the timetable of the wharf bell and the tides and the weather. It was more or less the same house. But there was also the lemony smell of her father’s soap, the cinnamon tang of his tobacco, his wheezing and snoring and outhouse noises. At night she heard him padding about the house and sometimes in the morning there’d be a glass on the table that smelled of rum. All the signs were there, but Agnes couldn’t be sure if she’d recognise him in the street, her invisible father who made the house heavy with the blank presence of himself.
‘You and Grandpa never talk to each other,’ Fan said, one morning before school.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Agnes said.
‘It’s true. Honest to God, he can’t be that bad. I feel sorry for him, shut in like that day and night.’
‘No need to feel sorry for him. We put a roof over his head and food on his plate. It’s more than he deserves.’
‘I never seen you so mean. What did he do that was so horrible?’
‘Fan. Listen to me.’ Agnes gripped Fan’s shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes. ‘He is an old man whose mind and heart are failing, and we are giving him a bed because he is my father and that is what you do. You are to focus on school or else we’ll put you in service, or factory work. Do you understand?’
‘Service never did you any harm.’ Fan rolled her eyes.
‘I want better for my daughter,’ Agnes said. ‘He’s paying us some money and it helps.’
‘All right, all right.’ Fan wriggled loose from Agnes’s hands. ‘But you still never said what’s so bad about him.’
By the time he was thirteen, Walter was already a head taller than Agnes. Annie could rest her head in his armpit and reach up and pinch his cheek, which always made Walter swear. He sprouted downy hair on his arms and a lopsided smile that showed where he’d lost a tooth so long ago that nobody, not even Walter, remembered the incident. His voice sometimes cracked into the sound of a man’s, echoing Da’s gruffness so perfectly that it made Annie snap at him for no reason. Walter’s hair darkened and grew curlier. Da began taking Walter to Henry Wood’s to teach him tailoring because a boy Walter’s age should be earning his keep. In the evenings, Agnes bathed Walter’s calloused hands in salt water while Walter winced in pain. Da swigged rum and unpicked his son’s failings. Walter was slow, Walter was sloppy, Walter was lazy, Walter couldn’t hold a needle properly.
‘I’d rather take my chances with the Noongar than work for my old man,’ Walter said, after a long day at Henry’s.
‘The who?’
‘The Aborigines. They’ve got their own names, y’know.’ Walter put a smoke to his lips and blew three heart-shaped smoke rings into the sky. ‘You’re a saint, Ag.’
‘I’m not a saint.’ Agnes snapped the thread off with her teeth and handed the finished shirt to Walter. ‘You should learn properly. It’s not that hard.’
‘Saint Agnes of the Blessed Seamstresses.’
‘Shut up, Walter.’
‘Shut-up-Walter.’ He mimicked her in a high voice.
It was too hot, really, to be outside, although the back step was already in shade.
‘Bloody hell, Ag, you should hear them.’ Walter’s eyes were shadowed. ‘Him and Henry Wood going on about the promise of the new country, land, sons to carry on the name.’
‘Maybe the drink’s made them see visions,’ Agnes said. Henry Wood had bought the only patch of East Perth scrub he could afford, too close to the tannery, but it meant his children could run as wild as they wanted. Henry always talked business up, but many times Da complained about late wages or no wages at all, and Mrs Wood had gone back into service for a solicitor whose name graced a new Perth road.
‘You should do what he wants, stay in his good books.’ Agnes started on another shirt.
‘I don’t care about being in his good books. Soon as I can, I’m off up north. Or east. Or to the moon. Anywhere.’ Walter spat out what was left of the smoke. ‘Look at Da, McCarthy, Mad Molloy or even Smith. Stay in this place too long and it makes a man rotten. You can see it in their eyes.’
Agnes folded up the shirts. ‘Put them back so he’ll think you’ve done them.’
‘Thanks, Ag. I could nail ’em to the door and he wouldn’t notice, he’ll be so full of grog when he gets home.’
‘Don’t thank me. How about giving me half your wages?’
‘Now you’re imagining things,’ Walter said. ‘Ask Annie for half her wages – it’s you that does all the cooking and cleaning.’
‘You know what she’s like with me.’
‘You dunno how to handle her, Ag, that’s all. She’s bone-tired. She works day and night cleaning up after lunatics and then has to come home to the old man. You’d be grumpy too.’ Walter ran his fingers around one of the collars. ‘Perfect work, sis, as usual. You’re a saint. I mean it.’
The shouting jolted Agnes awake. She got up and followed the noise through the back door into the yard.
In the moonlight, the white shirts she’d finished for Walter had been strewn on the ground. They looked like ghosts. Someone had torn the sleeves out of the shoulders. The collars had been ripped clean off and tossed near the chook run.
‘Go back inside, Agnes.’ Da slurred his words.
‘What are you, one of Annie’s lunatics?’ Walter said. ‘Edwin Salt and Son? There is no family business, Da, and there never will be. The only family you keep in business is the one who owns the bloody Western Hotel.’
‘Your brother thinks I am easily fooled.’ The muscles in Da’s face twitched. ‘I suppose you thought it a good idea to do his work for him.’
‘What difference does it make who does the work as long as it gets done?’ Agnes’s mouth was gluey with nerves. ‘It’s not Walter’s fault he’s no good with a needle and thread.’
‘Stay out of it, Ag,’ Walter said, his face twisted with contempt. ‘If it weren’t for Annie we’d starve half the time. What kind of man lets his woman do the earning?’
Da swung his fist and hit Walter’s jaw. Walter howled and put his hand to his face.
‘Stop!’ Agnes shoved past Da and put her arm around Walter. She thought her knees would give way, she was so scared.
Da’s flat hand cut through the air and stopped dead, inches from her face. The cold air he had disturbed made her shiver.
‘For God’s sake, Edwin.’ Annie stood behind them. Her voice was shaking. ‘Leave your good-for-nothing children alone and get me a rum. I’ve just done twelve hours straight and we lost a poor young girl tonight.’
Da threw the dismembered sleeves and collars at Walter. ‘Finish those shirts by morning.’
‘Bastard,’ Walter said after Da had gone. His bottom lip was fat and bleeding.
‘Don’t worry,’ Agnes said. ‘I’ll finish the damn shirts.’
Walter winced and touched his face. Agnes gave him a big hug, just like she used to when he was little. After a while, he rested his head on her shoulder.
Walter stopped going to Henry Wood’s. He stopped coming home before nightfall and some nights he didn’t come home at all. If Walter came home smelling of fire smoke, his pale arms dotted with mosquito bites, he’d been down at the river with the blacks. If Walter came home blotchy-faced and unsteady on his feet, he’d been sneaking into the Western. Da crowed that Henry Wood was taking in more work than he had in years. Things were picking up. Da left shirt collars, sometimes a waistcoat, for Walter to finish. Agnes always did the work, even if it took her most of the night. In the morning Da picked them up without a word.
Walter said sneaking into the Western Hotel had taught him a thing or two about what kind of man Da made clothes for.
‘You’d be surprised who drinks in the Western,’ Walter said. ‘You’d be surprised what they’ll tell you about your old man, when they’re so full of grog they don’t know their arse from their elbow.’
This time Fan waited until he opened the door.
‘I got tired of leaving food for you like you’re a stray dog.’ Fan marched in before he could protest. She put the bowl on the table next to a bottle of tea-coloured liquid. His room smelled of the same malty sweetness outside the Commercial Hotel on High Street. That and stale tobacco. ‘It smells funny in here. You want me to open the window?’
‘Certainly not. Nothing worse than the smell of the sea.’
‘I love the sea. Reckon I was born in it.’ Fan pointed at the bowl. ‘Good luck. It’s Ma’s horrible soup.’
‘How does your mother make that? Is it the fruit of the horrible tree?’
‘Yes. It’s from the horrible bush in the yard. It’s a speciality of hers.’ He squinted at her like he’d forgotten her name.
‘Why don’t you and Ma talk to each other?’ Fan asked.
Grandpa opened the bottle and poured some of its contents into a glass.
‘Is that whisky?’ Fan asked.
‘Rum.’
‘Ma said you came to Western Australia to seek your fortune. My Uncle Ernest did that, sort of. He’s not really my uncle, though. He’s some other thing.’
Grandpa drank and poured himself another.
‘Who’s my Uncle Walter and why doesn’t Ma talk about him like she don’t talk about you?’
‘You ask a lot of questions.’
‘I want to know a lot of things.’ Fan looked through the books he’d put on the mantelpiece. ‘So, did you find your fortune?’
Grandpa’s big, meaty laugh was almost too big for the room and made Fan want to open the window again.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing.’ Grandpa wiped his eyes. ‘Shall we say, I await the discovery of my fortune with much hope.’
‘D’you mind if I wait while you eat?’
‘Suit yourself.’ Grandpa gestured to the other chair.
Fan had never seen anyone eat like this, shovelling it in like he’d been hungry for a month. She looked around the room. He’d made himself at home. A couple of waistcoats lay on the bed and that mouldy old trunk was open.
‘How do you like Fremantle?’ Fan said. ‘Not that you seen it much. You’re always in here.’
‘I’ve seen enough to know I loathe it. How do you like it?’
‘I miss home,’ Fan sighed. Saying it out loud made it real. ‘My dad reckons anywhere can be home, but I dunno about that.’
‘I think it’s perfectly acceptable to miss home. I miss my home too, sometimes.’
‘Where’s your home, Grandpa?’
‘On the other side of the world.’
‘Really? My dad told me you came from Victoria Park.’
‘So, Miss Johnson, we are both living away from home against our will. We are both living in exile.’
‘No, we’re living in Ellen Street.’
Grandpa’s face lit right up. ‘You are quite a wit, Miss Johnson.’
‘You talk funny.’ Fan had never heard anybody talk like him. His talking was nearly as old-fashioned as his clothes. ‘And you got a lot of books.’ Fan picked one up and thumbed through it. ‘I don’t like reading. I’d rather be in the water.’
‘Why ever don’t you like reading?’ Grandpa wiped bread around the soup bowl. ‘A bright girl like you.’
‘Won’t be much call for reading when I’m doing shifts at the brush factory next year.’
‘Perhaps you just never found a story you liked well enough.’
‘I bet you know some stories, Grandpa.’
‘I do indeed.’
‘Ma says I shouldn’t bother you on account of your failing health.’ Fan picked up the soup bowl. He’d wiped it so clean she could see the cracks on the bottom.
‘As you wish.’ Grandpa dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘Your mother wasn’t much for reading, either. You must get your love of the water from her.’
‘What?’ Fan stared at him. Maybe he wasn’t right in the head after all. ‘She hates the water. Mam won’t even get her feet wet at Semaphore.’
‘When she was little, it was like your mother was born for water, not the earth.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Ask her, Miss Johnson. And as for your Uncle Walter – well, he used to talk to blacks. He lived with them sometimes when they camped at the bottom of our yard.’
‘Lived with Aborigines?’ Fan’s eyes widened. ‘In your yard?’
Grandpa leaned closer and whispered, ‘Any time you want to hear a good story, Miss Johnson, you come and see me.’
It might have been the warm, airless day or the low-level buzz of schoolgirl whispers, but Fan couldn’t concentrate on the important dates of history. The windows were open and she could smell the salt and fish and hear the seagulls. A port is a port, Dad always said, but she longed for the familiar sights and smells of Semaphore. She drummed her fingers on the desk. The redheaded girl sitting next to her glared.
‘Sorry.’ Fan began to copy the important words dutifully into her notebook. Napoleon. Waterloo. The Bore War, she wrote and smirked.
The schoolmistress droned on. Fan drew a picture of herself: tall and gangly with a braid of scribbly hair topped with one of Florence’s flowery hats. Then Ma, her stick-arms bent, hands on her hips. Dad with a flat cap and a pipe. Then Tom and Ned, and finally a big circle around Uncle Ernest, Aunty Florence, their two children, and Sarah.
On the next page she drew a stick figure in a chair and labelled it Grandpa. Next to him another figure for Uncle Walter.
They’d barely been in Fremantle for a month and suddenly her life was crowded with strangers she was related to. If there was Grandpa and Ma and Uncle Walter, then where was Ma’s mother? Funny how Ma had never, ever mentioned her. Fan drew another stick figure wearing a long dress.
On a page by itself she wrote what Grandpa had said about Ma, and underlined it: Born for water, not the earth.
Nobody ever knocked. But somebody was knocking.
‘Maybe it’s Mad Molloy coming for Da with his rifle,’ Walter said.
‘Mad Molloy wouldn’t be so polite.’ Annie got up to answer the door. They heard a man’s voice, musical, rich. The thud of a bag. Annie spoke in the pained tone she used with strangers.
When Annie came back, her face was strained with shock. ‘Edwin, dear. There is a man at the door who says he is your nephew from England.’
‘Jesus.’ Da stood up so fast he almost fell over. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘No, father, although the Almighty would have his work cut out for him here,’ Walter said. ‘It’s a relative from England.’
Annie forced a smile. ‘I’ll leave you to deal with him, shall I? I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. I’m going to bed.’
Da went to the door. From the muffled voices and Da’s overblown cheeriness, Agnes could tell her father was nervous. After a while the two men emerged.
‘Ernest, these are my children, Agnes and Walter.’ Da waved his hand through the air as if he were a magician showing a trick. ‘My dear children, Ernest is your cousin from England. He appears to have turned up before the letter announcing his arrival.’
At the sound of ‘dear children’, Walter coughed. Agnes raised her eyebrows at him.
‘I’ve told him he is welcome to stay for a couple of nights, sleep on the veranda. Then he’ll be off,’ Da said.
‘Off where?’ Agnes blurted. She couldn’t stop looking at Ernest. He was taller than Da, with pale blue eyes and dark brown hair cut army-short.
‘Don’t know yet,’ Ernest grinned. ‘You hear about opportunities. Gold. Land. Work. After the army it’ll be paradise.’
‘If you’re looking for paradise, you’re in the wrong place.’ Walter tipped his imaginary hat at Ernest. ‘Good evening, cousin. Welcome to the land of tanneries, sawmills and slaughterhouses.’ Walter smiled beatifically at Da. ‘And delightful local villagers.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Ernest shook Walter’s hand vigorously, then turned to Agnes, lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Her cheeks flamed.
‘Hello, Cousin Agnes. Delighted to make your acquaintance.’ He smiled again. Agnes had never seen a man smile so much and he’d only been here a minute.
Da poured himself a rum. He didn’t offer Ernest one. Ernest took off his jacket and sat down. Da didn’t take his eyes off him.
Ernest looked younger than his twenty-one years and more innocent than his army service must have left him. His face was pale like a child’s, but his hands were strong and sun-browned. When he smiled, Agnes’s cheeks flushed pink under the force of his gaze. He explained he was the son of her father’s brother, Samuel – ‘Sam Salt Junior,’ he said – so Da was his uncle. Ernest rattled off names of places in India and the subcontinent that didn’t even sound like real words to Agnes. There didn’t seem a place in the world Ernest hadn’t been.
‘So, tell me about your world, my antipodean cousin.’
‘I don’t have one.’ Agnes twisted the corner of her dress into knots so he wouldn’t see her shaking with nerves. ‘I’ve never been anywhere.’
‘I bet your life here is much more interesting than my dull army existence,’ Ernest said. ‘Go on. I dare you.’
It didn’t sound like much of a world when she said it out loud. The stink of the slaughter yards that was always worse on a breezeless day. The summer so hot and dry she had to carry buckets of water down to the vegetable plot twice a day to keep their food from wilting. The rain that could come down in spring hard enough to knock trees over and bring the river out of the ground. Ernest leaned forward and paid attention like she was the Queen of England. Agnes wanted to poke him in the ribs to see if he flinched, to check if he was real.
Da had begun to nod off.
‘What about our family? Da never talks about them.’ She shifted closer. ‘He sometimes gets letters, but he never says who they’re from.’
‘Oh, goodness, there are dozens of us!’ Ernest said. ‘My Hannah, of course; my mother Sarah, my brothers, and a host of aunties and –’
‘I warn you, don’t go filling her head with stories, Ernest.’ Da yawned and shook his head to rouse himself. ‘Not much use for family here in the colony.’
Ernest nodded slowly at Edwin. ‘Of course, uncle.’ He moved closer to Agnes. ‘Nothing much to tell. All very dull. So, what about your family? You’ve got one too, you know.’
‘Well, you’ve met my Da.’ Agnes turned around. Da had fallen asleep again. Ernest winked and put his finger over his lips.
‘Then there’s Annie.’ Agnes lowered her voice. ‘Da married her after our mam died. It’s best not to get on the wrong side of her. And Walter, my brother. I worry about him.’
Ernest yawned, then apologised.
‘You must be sleepy after a long day.’ Agnes stared into her mug of tea. ‘I’m not.’
‘Unlike your father.’ Ernest pointed at Da, snoring in the chair. ‘He looks like a sack of flour.’ Agnes giggled.
‘Watch this.’ Ernest tiptoed towards Da’s chair. Agnes shook her head and gestured furiously. Ernest stood behind Da, pulled a bug-eyed face and pretended to stick his fingers in Da’s ears. Tears of mirth streamed from Agnes’s eyes. It was no good. She ran out the back into the dark.
‘What’s all this merriment, young Agnes?’ a stern voice hissed.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said, expecting Da with the strap in one hand and a face like thunder. But it was Ernest, his pale blue eyes almost ghostly in the night, laughing with her.
The following day, in bright sunshine, Agnes showed Ernest the uneven fence that had been there ever since anyone could remember. It was old now, and mended in places with wire and wood and piles of stones. Fixing that fence was the only work Da ever did on the property. While everything else rotted and faded and sprang loose, Da checked that fence once a week, rain or shine.
She pointed up to the tall trees that Walter said were hundreds of years old and showed him where the magpies made their nests every year. They peered into the well that was famous among the Molloys and the Smiths for never running dry. She took him to the spot where the Aborigines used to live, under the river gums on the edge of what used to be the river. She poked a stick into the ashes of a long-dead fire and sent tiny lizards scattering. The same group used to stay here all the time, she told him, but nobody, not even Walter, had seen them for a couple of years.
‘Maybe they come and go like the swallows,’ Ernest said.
‘No.’ Agnes pointed in the direction of a tin roof glinting through trees. ‘It’s because they’re smart enough to keep away from Mad Molloy and his gun.’
‘It’s beautiful here, Agnes. You must love it.’
‘I’d rather live in one of those fancy houses on the Terrace.’
‘Rubbish,’ Ernest said, smiling again. ‘You have your own palace and grounds right here.’
She showed him where Mam had died. It seemed such a short distance to the house. The sun blazed overhead. She told him how Mam sat down and went to sleep and died of too much sun. How Da and Mrs Molloy found her. How Agnes had been swimming in the river for what felt like hours and didn’t know how ill Mam was until it was too late.
‘I don’t know if Walter remembers.’ Agnes’s chest felt heavy. She didn’t want to cry in front of Ernest. ‘Walter never says anything. Da never talks about her. Sometimes I wonder if I made her up.’
‘I lost my father a couple of years ago. My mother sits in our house back home and says nothing, goes nowhere. That’s why I wanted to leave, see the world, make my fortune. I didn’t want to feel like I’d died before I’d lived.’
‘I didn’t know about your father. Da never talks about brothers or sisters or anything about England.’
‘Maybe forgetting is easier on the heart.’
‘I’m not sure he’s got a heart,’ Agnes said, attempting a smile.
‘So, we’re both orphans. Sort of.’ Ernest patted her hand. ‘We’d better stick together, cousin.’
The crickets sang. The sun flared white above Mad Molloy’s roof. Nobody called her cousin or looked her in the eye or touched her hand. Nobody stood behind Da and pulled faces. Agnes never lived in a palace or said Jesus or talked about Mam. Not until now. Not until Ernest.
When the sun had set completely and Da still wasn’t home, Agnes asked Ernest to write down the names of their English family.
‘I don’t know, Agnes,’ Ernest said. ‘You’ve got to promise not to tell your father, all right?’
‘Of course, Ernest, of course.’
‘Don’t worry about the old man,’ Walter said. ‘In a week’s time he won’t even remember you were here.’
‘I want to know,’ Agnes said. She put a pencil and paper in front of him.
‘Very well.’ Ernest started drawing. ‘Our family is from Lichfield, in the middle of England. Our grandfather Samuel was a tailor, the old-fashioned kind. Our grandmother – well, nobody talks much about her. She died years ago. Samuel married again.’
‘So, where’s our Da?’ Agnes pulled her chair up so close she could smell his apple-scented hair oil.
‘Probably at the Western.’ Walter blew a curl of smoke into the air.
Ernest drew a circle around Samuel, then three lines coming from its centre. ‘Your father’s the eldest, then James, then my father, Sam Junior.’
‘Draw them,’ Agnes said.
Ernest drew three circles. ‘Large, medium, small,’ he joked.
‘You missed something.’ Walter leaned over Ernest’s shoulder and took the pencil. ‘D’you mind?’
Walter drew two enormous ears on the biggest circle. He’d captured the round shape of Da’s ears perfectly.
‘My father was called Sam Junior after his father, but he was no tailor. He was all thumbs.’
‘Runs in the family,’ Walter said, holding up his own thumbs.
‘No daughters?’ Agnes said.
‘On the contrary. Our family is full of useless daughters.’
Agnes punched him in the arm.
‘This’ – Ernest drew a figure so shapely that Agnes blushed – ‘this is your Aunty Eliza.’
Dear Eliza. ‘I’ve heard that name before.’ A memory stirred in Agnes. ‘I think she used to write to Da.’
‘There haven’t been letters from England in years,’ Walter said.
‘You’d have liked her. By all accounts she was a fiery sort. The best tailor of all of them, but she was a girl.’ He drew a sad face on Eliza. ‘It’s said she spent her Sundays trudging around the Birmingham canals trying to save women of ill repute.’ Ernest lowered his voice. ‘Word was her own reputation wasn’t the purest.’
‘A scandal?’ Walter asked. ‘Now I’m interested.’
‘Eliza’s charms were as ample as her generosity to certain gentlemen. Or so said the priest who buried her.’
‘Certain gentlemen?’ Agnes’s eyes widened.
‘There may have been a child,’ Ernest whispered behind his hand. ‘Eliza may have lived with a man without being married.’
Walter let out a long, slow whistle.
‘And let me introduce you to your father’s other sister: your Aunty Mary.’ Ernest drew another line. ‘Mary had to get married.’ Ernest mimed a big curve around his belly. Agnes blushed.
‘Mary’s baby and her husband both died.’
‘Poor Aunty Mary,’ Agnes said.
‘Some said it was punishment. For –’ Ernest mimed his pregnant middle again.
‘Sounds more like dreadful luck,’ Agnes said.
‘What do they say about our esteemed father, back in Lichfield?’ Walter asked.
‘My mother and father told me he went to the colonies to seek his fortune,’ Ernest said. ‘A good enough story on its own, don’t you think?’
Ernest’s little piece was so neatly drawn. Grandfather Samuel, the tailor. Da, James and Sam Junior in three fat circles: large, medium, small. Luckless Mary dressed in black, shapely Eliza with her ample charms. Their names written in neat little oblongs. Like coffins, Agnes thought.
‘You tell a good story. Not sure I believe it, though.’ Walter finished his smoke and began rifling through the pockets of Da’s old jacket.
‘Jesus, Walter, you know Da never leaves tobacco behind,’ Agnes said. ‘Ernest, do they know about Walter and me, in Lichfield?’
‘Why don’t you introduce them to the antipodean branch of the family?’ Ernest drew a line out from Da and handed Agnes the pencil. His fingers lightly brushed her hand.
Agnes wrote carefully and slowly: C A T H. She trapped Mam and Da in a big square of land and separated it from the rest of the page with a stick fence. Then she drew two lines radiating into the blankness: Agnes and Walter. She imagined a third line growing through the uncharted page, curling around the whole family, protecting them from too much sun and the long fingers of a nun.
Agnes gave the pencil back to Ernest. ‘There you go. The family of the brother who went to the colonies to seek his fortune.’
‘You’ve got such a lost look about you, poor little bird.’ Ernest rested his hand over hers. ‘Now you know where you fit.’
‘D’you think they’d like me?’ Agnes felt dizzy from the hand-holding.
Ernest scribbled half a dozen more circles and more names-in-coffins. ‘At grandfather Samuel’s funeral, my mother told me Saint Mary’s was full to the gunnels. Brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, rows and rows of cousins just like you and me, and all those screaming brats that our grandfather’s second wife kept popping out every year like Christmas puddings.’ Ernest drew an enormous circle around the entire family. ‘The point is, all those people in the church that day were your people, Agnes. Every single one.’
Agnes stared at Ernest’s drawing. So many names, she could hardly take it in.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She rested her hand on his. Ernest gave her a kind look.
‘Of course, there’ll be another branch of the family here one day.’ Ernest looked her right in the eye again. He drew a big heart around his own name with space for another right next to his.
‘What do you mean?’ Agnes’s mouth was so dry she could barely get a sound out.
‘Hannah and me.’
‘Hannah?’ Agnes was confused. Wasn’t she one of the sisters, or an aunty, or a third cousin twice removed?
‘Hannah is my wife, Agnes.’
‘Oh.’ Agnes stared at the drawing, the scattered confetti of names.
‘She got the soonest passage out after I took up my last posting. She’s due here in February, depending on the tides and the prevailing winds.’ Ernest wrote Hannah’s name inside the heart next to his. ‘You’ll like her. She’s so lovely. Auburn hair and green eyes.’
Ernest made a curly flourish on the bottom part of the H of Hannah’s name and trailed it along the paper like the train on a fancy wedding dress.
Agnes tried not to think about Hannah or February or prevailing winds. It was only October and there was no breeze coming through the open doorway.
Work was easy to find for a carpenter with determination and a wife on the way. Every day Agnes expected to come home and find Ernest’s swag gone from the front veranda, but Ernest’s two-night stay stretched into a week, two weeks, a month, and Da didn’t say anything about it.
‘Your cousin has made a deal with the Devil.’ Walter rolled a wad of tobacco into a tight little ball and threw it across the yard. ‘Cheaper to stay here.’
Ernest charmed Annie with flattery and saucy stories he said he’d heard in the army. He sat on the back porch and smoked tobacco with Walter. Soon it felt to Agnes that Ernest had always lived with them. Da must have been happy about Ernest staying on and paying board and lodgings because he started buying more expensive rum. He bought himself a new pair of boots. He even bought new hats for Annie and Agnes. The only one who got nothing new was Walter, but Walter said he wanted nothing from the old man, anyway.
Hannah would like the trees. Hannah would find the hot nights difficult. Hannah would be able to persuade Mad Molloy to put his rifle away. Ernest wrote on a piece of paper the number of days until the Kapunda was due to arrive in Fremantle and every evening he crossed a day off, grinning, as if he was glad to see the back of it.
From early autumn in Lydney, Gloucestershire, the midwife’s cottage disappeared into the long shadows of the Forest of Dean and could not be seen from the road. Edwin found it eventually and bashed on the door.
Elizabeth Dalton had packed her father’s old leather bag with small bottles, boiled rags and some instrument in the use of which old Dr Dalton had instructed his spinster daughter before his death five years ago. Her face was all angles and red, broken veins, and her hands were cold, or so the wife of Edwin’s supervisor had told him, but he would have to trust this woman to guide the baby from Mary Ann’s hard and swollen body.
Hours later, Elizabeth Dalton emerged from behind the closed door and handed Edwin a bottle.
‘This will help her sleep. Give her as much as she wants.’
‘What is it? Gin? I’ve plenty of that.’
‘A tincture.’ Sarah wagged her finger at him. ‘It weren’t easy for Mary Ann or the poor child. Keep yourself away from her for a good three months.’
Edwin tickled his boy’s arm and the baby sleepily grabbed at Edwin’s finger. His son’s fingers were long, already an old man’s. Tailor’s fingers. The baby’s face rippled, and Edwin saw his own mother’s firm mouth, Eliza’s wide smile, Da’s squat nose.
Cut from the same cloth.
We have a son. We named him Albert, after the prince, he wrote to Eliza, and the lamplight flickered like applause.
At night Edwin kissed his wife gently, chastely.
‘Not yet,’ she whispered. ‘I’m still not right.’
‘It’s been so long, my mistress. You’re tired, that’s all. Our boy keeps you awake.’
‘Albert sleeps all the time. It’s me, master. I’m not right.’
He nestled his chin into the curve of her neck, his desire blunted by the cotton of her nightdress.
One night, stumbling in late from drinking with his excise brothers, he tickled her waist. Pinched her hard breasts. She tried to roll over. His hand clamped around her wrist. His other hand tugged her underclothes.
‘Be my wife, Mary Ann.’ His urgent, malty mouth. ‘I promise I won’t hurt you.’
She gripped the blanket while he moaned and shuddered.
Lydney, Bath, Battle, Belfast. Years passed. The divine powers of Her Majesty’s Excise had invented their own language for towns – they were dubbed ‘collections’, administrative divisions drawn on the map to indicate where Her Majesty’s wealth collected in pools like rainwater. These colonies of wealth were peopled by uniformed young men otherwise destined for the trades or the factories. For the right man, it represented an opportunity.
Dublin, Galway, Coleraine. Every place was different. Every place was the same. Edwin used to feel more solid and upright in the excise uniform but now it was tight, it made him itch, there were holes in the elbows. Worse, the distinctive shape and colour telegraphed to influential men of business that he might be clever, but he would never be one of them: he wasn’t to be trusted; he was the enemy standing between honest, hardworking men and their money.
For every new posting, the same tired story. A night journey on a train or a coach, or a ferry crossing that made Mary Ann vomit until her skin turned grey. A winding turnpike road in a bitter gale. A cottage filled with the stains and stinks of other people. At least three taverns on the walk home from the Excise Office and at least a dozen men willing to drink until closing. All for a wage that never seemed to go up and always ran out a day or two before the next one came in.
The boy born in Belfast lived one night. Mary Ann’s breasts overflowed with milky grief. The midwife explained as much as was possible to tell a man. Everything about Mary Ann’s baby was in the wrong place. The cord was wound around his neck instead of sticking out ropey from his middle, his bottom was ready first instead of his head, his lips were blue instead of pink. His death before his life.
‘Make sure she has another baby quick smart,’ another excise man told him. ‘It cured my wife.’
Every night he pushed himself furiously into Mary Ann. She did not refuse him and he took no joy from it. Afterwards he gave her a gill or two of gin and poured one for himself.
Their next child was born in Battle. As if he knew the bloodied history of the Sussex town he’d landed in, not to mention something of his own conception, little Edwin Stewart fought his way out of his mother’s heaving womb. He fought the midwife with feet and hands that looked too big for his puny body; he fought Mary Ann with tiny fists that pummelled her chest when she fed him; he fought Edwin’s sleep with screams that lasted for hours. Edwin Stewart’s eyes began blue like Albert’s, but unlike his elder brother’s they remained so. His hair was the colour of wet sand and his face looked just like Mary Ann’s. At first, Mary Ann held Edwin Stewart like she’d never let go, but as it had after Albert, a blackness came into her eyes and she stared at her son as if he were a stranger.
‘Be his mother,’ Edwin said, thrusting the child into her arms. He gave her a shove to wake her up.
‘Don’t touch me.’ Mary Ann took the infant and held him close, tight enough, but from the look on her face anyone could see there was no warmth in it.
By the time the leaves on the oak trees turned amber, another red-sealed letter had arrived. Edwin left it on the table.
Mary Ann picked it up and ran her fingers over the wax seal.
‘Is it more money this time?’
‘Next time it will be. I’m sure of that.’
Mary Ann began throwing things in Edwin’s old carpet bag. Edwin Stewart screamed and cried. He spoke for all of them.
Trains used to be what he dreamed of. Now they smelled of piss and failure. He wondered if that schoolmistress – what was her name? – had ever experienced what she talked about with such earnestness that day. Or if she’d ever been on a dark, rolling sea at night when the sky and sea soaked into each other and the sound of strangers retching rattled in her ears.
Another baby was born in Dublin. They called him Matthew. She loved him well enough at the start, but after a few days Mary Ann became grim-lipped once again. Sometimes there was no tea on the table when Edwin came home at night. Sometimes Mary Ann cried for no reason and screamed at him until a clip around the ear was called for. He recognised a pattern. He poured Mary Ann a drink and pulled on his coat. Every place different, every place the same. Whatever town this was, there would always be a tavern.
‘What do they do, cover their eyes and stick pins on a map?’ Mary Ann stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Half the men they got in Ireland are English and all the English officers are Irish. Now they’re shipping us to bloody Edinburgh.’
‘You hate Dublin. You say the people smell of peat.’ Edwin downed his drink.
‘At least the whisky’s cheap.’ Mary Ann raised her glass and drank it down. ‘Happy travels.’ She hurled a couple of his books into a bag. ‘Another bloody house too small for the five of us and other people’s shit still warm in the privy,’ she said.
‘Be careful of my things.’ Edwin downed another whisky.
‘You be careful of my things.’ Mary Ann pointed to the closed door that led to the other room where the boys slept. ‘They’ll wake up wondering where on earth we’re pitchin’ up next.’
‘Don’t be a fool. They’re children – they’ll do as they are told.’
‘Will you earn more money in the next place, master?’
‘A man died.’ He grabbed her arm. ‘They have to do the best they can with the available men.’
‘So, the answer is no.’ Mary Ann scowled at his fingers gripping her arm, then back to his reddening face. ‘After all these years, when’s a promotion coming? God knows we could use the money.’
‘Show some respect. I’m your confounded husband.’ He poured and drank another, slamming the mug on the table.
‘Husband? I wonder. All that drink, you’re not even half the man I married.’
He slapped her cheek.
Mary Ann cupped her face with her hands, the whites of her eyes moist and bright.
‘That’s the way.’ Her lip trembled. She moved close enough for him to kiss her, if that’s what he wanted. ‘Ten years, no promotion, and now they’re making you fill a dead man’s boots.’
‘I said, show some respect.’ He slapped her face harder. Mary Ann whimpered and fell to the floor.
The sight of her on the floor infuriated him. He kicked her middle. ‘Get up.’
Mary Ann pulled her knees up to her chest, protected her face with her hands.
‘Please stop.’
His eyes were hot. Her pleading made him angrier.
‘Anything else you’d like to say?’ He grabbed her arm and pulled her up from the floor.
On the table, their empty mugs sat mutely next to each other. Edwin filled them both.
‘Drink up,’ he said, before downing his and slamming the mug on the table.
Mary Ann rested one arm over her stomach, and picked up the mug with her other hand.
‘To your good health,’ Mary Ann muttered.
Edwin tipped the bottle upside down, throttled it, but it was empty. The whisky hadn’t helped. His hands hurt and there was nothing in his veins but the nauseating sense of his own smallness.
In the doorway, a small shadow: Edwin Stewart, his namesake, sniffing, staring. His eyes so blue, like Mary Ann’s.
‘Go back to bed.’ Edwin drummed the table with his fingers. ‘Your mother isn’t well.’
As is the way with bad news, it spread quickly.
The Kapunda collided with another ship and sank so quickly that the passengers never stood a chance. A few men survived, but all the women and children drowned. The waters off Brazil were warm, some people reasoned as they read the newspaper, so perhaps there wasn’t much suffering.
Ernest read the telegram and the softness in his face disappeared. He became hard-edged, angular. This would be his face now, Agnes knew.
‘You ever been on a ship, Ag?’
‘You know I’ve never been anywhere.’
‘All that water. Some days you don’t think you’ve moved because it looks exactly the same as it did the day before, and the day before that. You look for anything to tell you you’re getting somewhere. A bird. Something on the horizon. Anything.’
‘Oh, Ernest.’ Agnes rested her hand on his.
‘I think I told her I loved her when we said goodbye. I’m sure I did. I used to tell her all the time.’
‘She would’ve known. She would’ve been thinking about you. At the end.’
‘You sure?’ Ernest filled up his glass with rum. ‘I told her it’d be an easy passage. “Trust me,” I said. Perhaps at the end she was thinking, “Bugger you, Ernest! Wrong again!”’
‘That’s the rum talking.’ Agnes moved the bottle away from him. ‘Any wife would’ve been thinking about how much she loved her husband. I would’ve.’
‘You’re much too kind, Ag. Maybe I’ll turn into a lonely old drunk. That’ll be my punishment for telling her she’d be safe.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Ha. Daft. You say it flat and short, the Lichfield way. And I thought you were a real colonial girl.’
‘Your head’s going to ache tomorrow.’
‘Sweet Agnes, always concerned for me.’ Ernest kissed her cheek. He smelled of rum and cologne. ‘You are by far the prettiest thing in all this exotic land.’
The newspaper listed the names of the Kapunda’s lost passengers in alphabetical order, huddled together in a single, narrow column of print.
‘This is all I’ve got left of her now.’ Ernest held the newspaper so tight his knuckles turned white. ‘Hannah Salt. No body, no coffin, no bloody church full of people offering me their damned sympathy.’
‘I’ve got an idea.’ Agnes grabbed his hand. ‘Come with me.’
The water was wide and brown, and the tide was up high. Grey birds swooped and crickets hummed. Agnes wondered if she’d have forgotten how to get there but the smoky smell in the air brought everything swimming back. She led Ernest through the shin-high scrub along the edge of the river until they reached a tall river gum.
‘This is where I used to come with my mam.’ She led him to where a deep pool of river cut into the bank. ‘I don’t think of her as being in that churchyard. This is where she is, I know it.’
‘Oh, Ag.’ Ernest watched his footing. ‘You’re such a sweet little thing.’
‘I’ll leave you here for a while. You could tell Hannah you love her. All the things you would’ve said if – you know – if you’d known.’
‘Is this an exotic colonial custom? Most people would do that in a church.’
‘Da always says people like us were done with church years ago,’ Agnes said.
‘Since you put it like that, I’d be a fool to ignore you,’ Ernest said. ‘Don’t leave me alone too long now.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Agnes smiled shyly. ‘I won’t.’
Agnes walked as far as she could around the edge of the river to the point just before Ernest disappeared from view. Ernest stretched his arms out wide and called her name in a booming voice. Aaaaggggnessss!
‘Don’t make fun of me.’ Agnes walked further up the bank.
Ernest leaned against a tree. Agnes thought she heard him talking in a low voice, but she couldn’t be sure if it was him or the crickets. He slouched forward, his head in his hands. And then, there was no mistaking it: his dead wife’s name mingling with the river noises and the magpies and the one lone kookaburra. Hannah. Hannah. Hannah.
Agnes pulled off her shoes and walked to the edge of the water. She closed her eyes and hitched up her skirt. Her feet sank into the river sand.
It was as if no time had passed. It could almost be one of their river days: the thrum of crickets, the rustle of leaves in the trees, the cool water on her feet. Fragments of Mam glinted through shadows. A dark eyebrow. A pink cheek. Her red washerwoman’s hands. Agnes shut her eyes tighter and wished hard, like she did when she was small: Come back. Come back. Come back.
Ernest was already up and about. That halting way he whistled, starting off loud then stopping abruptly and almost whispering, pierced the other sounds of the morning: the wind rustling the tops of the river gums, the distant crunch of jarrahs falling in scrub. You’d think there’d be no trees left, the way the men with axes were at it day and night.
Agnes put on her good dress. Instead of putting her hair up as she usually did, she brushed it until it was glossy and hung in a gentle wave past her shoulders.
In the kitchen, Ernest looked at her and smiled. She blushed.
‘I’ve got something important to say, Ag.’
Agnes leaned on the table to keep herself steady.
‘There’s nothing here for me now. Thought I’d try my luck in South Australia.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
‘I feel like I’ve lost it all. Can’t lose much more, eh?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Everything here’s been about waiting for Hannah. I can’t look at the damn sky without thinking of her.’
‘Oh.’
‘Come and see me in Adelaide sometime. You’re almost old enough to travel alone. It’s about time you went somewhere. I’ll miss our chats.’
‘Me too, Ernest. I’ll miss them too.’
The evening before Ernest left, Annie had taken an extra shift and, as usual, Walter was nowhere to be seen. Da put on his hat and said he couldn’t stay, but he made a big show of shaking Ernest’s hand.
‘Thank you, uncle,’ Ernest said.
‘No, Ernest, I should thank you.’ He tipped his hat and bowed his head before leaving.
It was unusual, Da saying thank you to anyone, much less tip his hat in gratitude. He didn’t talk to Ernest much but whenever he did, it was always ‘thank you’.
Agnes had no appetite but ate anyway. The noise of forks scraping against plates was unbearably loud.
‘Dear Ag, wipe that glum look off your face, I have good news.’ Ernest leapt out of his chair and made one of his grand bowing gestures. ‘It’s good manners for the guest to leave a gift.’
‘A gift?’ Agnes couldn’t help smiling. ‘You’re as poor as a church mouse.’
‘And a widower to boot.’ Ernest pulled both his pockets inside out. ‘So, I’ve decided on something so special, no amount of money could buy it.’
‘I don’t need a gift. You’ve brought me so much.’ Was it love or pain? Whatever it was, it swelled in her chest and made it hard to breathe. Agnes took inventory. His hair had grown out of its army cut and was curlier. His face had browned in the sun. He’d put on weight around his middle since he’d been here. Then there was his nose: flat and round, a bit like Walter’s and a bit like Da’s. She wondered what it would look like to see Da, his brothers, his sisters, their sons and daughters, all lined up together.
‘I’ve decided to leave you with our family story, told so you won’t ever forget it,’ he bowed again.
Agnes’s eyes shone. ‘You come to visit all the way from England and all you have to offer is a story.’
‘Ouch! Mortally wounded.’ Ernest slapped his hand to his heart, then stood army-straight and began. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, The Tailor’s Tale by Ernest Salt:
Grandfather Samuel, the tailor from Lichfield,
He was the old-fashioned kind.
Used needle and thread, ’til he dropped down half-dead,
And his eyes were all yellow and blind.
Sons, three in all: large, medium, small.
And daughters, useless, but fair.
Sam Junior the small, no tailor at all,
Ten thumbs and he just didn’t care.
James was the medium, found tailoring tedium,
He spent all the profits on gin.
Eliza, Eliza, oh pretty Eliza,
To love her, some said, was a sin –’
‘What does tedium mean?’ Agnes asked.
‘Boredom, Agnes. Boredom.’ Ernest cleared his throat and continued.
‘Poor Mary, so sad, lost her son, and his dad
And died broken-hearted one day.
This – earnest tale –’
He rolled his eyes and Agnes groaned.
‘– is be-yond the pale,
But it’s true, every word that I say.’
He recited it again, stuck his thumbs in the air for Sam Junior, mimed a bulging belly for poor Mary.
Agnes clapped. ‘It’s perfect.’
Ernest took another bow. ‘In the army, we turned everything into a silly rhyme or a song. It broke the tedium.’
‘James was the medium. Found tailoring tee-dee-yum.’
‘Good work, Ag.’
‘Eliza, Eliza, oh pretty Eliza!’ Agnes repeated in a high-pitched voice, clasped her hands to her chest and fluttered her eyelashes.
‘Brava!’
‘Put me and Walter in the story.’
Ernest furrowed his brow. ‘I know. How about this: Agnes and Walter live on a faraway river where it’s freezing in June and hot in December.’
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t fit with the rest of it.’
‘I’m a carpenter, Ag, not a poet.’
‘Agnes and Walter live near the Swan River, as far as an ocean away,’ Agnes sang, to the rhythm of Ernest’s tale.
‘Oh, well done! You’re the family’s first colonial poet,’ Ernest clapped.
Agnes kissed his cheek.
Ernest drew back a little. ‘Come on, Ag, don’t go getting sentimental on me.’
‘Don’t leave. Why can’t you go up the Murchison or right up north, even? Come back every Christmas once you’ve made your fortune? Jesus, Ernest.’
‘Language, my dear Ag.’ Ernest fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed it under her eyes.
Agnes said it in the washhouse. She said it in the kitchen. She said it when she woke up and before she went to sleep. She said it to Walter, who said, ‘Don’t be a damned fool’, and skulked off before she’d got to poor Mary. She said it like a prayer with her hands together and her eyes shut and in the hope that, when she opened them, Ernest would walk in. She shouted it to the magpies and the river gums. She muttered it when she picked Da up off the floor after he’d had a big night at the Western. She called it down the well that never seemed to run dry and the ghost names floated back up to her, distorted and hollow.
She whispered it into the fire when everyone was out. She said the names of her family to the chooks, and they scratched and squawked and ignored her.
She tried to write it down. Agnes had never liked writing – the words always limped along too far behind her thoughts – but she whispered Ernest’s rhyme over and over until she’d copied the whole thing as best she could.
‘Reckon you’ve gone mad.’ Walter looked over her shoulder. He smelled of Da’s tobacco. ‘Might have to talk to Annie about carting you off to the asylum.’
‘Jesus, Walter, shut up.’
‘There’s something missing.’ Walter pointed to the paper. ‘He’s left Da out.’
‘No he hasn’t. Three sons: large, medium and small,’ Agnes said. ‘We see Da every day. Ernest probably didn’t think there was any point in putting him in a story.’
‘You want to know about Da, you go have a chat with Mick McCarthy.’ Walter’s eyes were dark underneath with tiredness or bruises: it was hard to know which.
‘Don’t be daft. McCarthy’s just an old drunk. I heard he’d left Rosie and gone bush.’
‘He’s sleeping rough in Howick Street,’ Walter said. ‘I been taking him and Rosie some tea and bread. He reckons the law’s after him for some evil thing.’
‘You can’t hang around Mick McCarthy,’ Agnes said. ‘Da’ll go off his head.’
‘Da can go to blazes.’ Walter lit up a smoke. With his mouth all grim and pursed up, he looked even more like Da than usual. ‘Like I said, you want a true story about the old man, go talk to Mick.’
That night Agnes blew on the window and wrote names in the condensation: Edwin, Cath, Agnes, Walter. They evaporated before she’d finished, leaving only a smear of fingerprints. Da came to the colony to seek his fortune, Ernest said, and that’s where the story ended. So where did that leave her? Agnes exhaled on the glass again, wrote her name again and watched herself disappear.
Reading Ernest’s letters was like listening to him talk. The noise of the rail yards in Port Adelaide, the five pubs on the way home. The letters came every fortnight in his scrawly writing until one fortnight a letter in different handwriting arrived. Dear Agnes, Ernest’s mother, Sarah, wrote. If I can survive the voyage from England, I’m sure you would find the trip to Adelaide very easy. You’re welcome any time, if things at home ever become difficult.
And just like that, Agnes began: a coin here, a banknote there. Small change from the tin on the mantelpiece that she was sure Annie would never miss. Coins out of Da’s pockets after his blind afternoons at the Western. Jesus, Agnes, she sometimes said to herself. You’ve turned into a common criminal.