Hill of Grace Read online

  Nathan looked at her and rolled his eyes. ‘Graffiti.’

  William stopped eating soup and wiped his mouth. ‘Graffiti?’

  ‘You know, “Playford couldn’t run a raffle”, “The end of the World is …”’

  Silence. William shook his head. ‘What would be the point of that?’

  Bluma slapped him on the arm. ‘You have your cuttings.’

  ‘But they’re facts. Things actually happening.’

  Nathan shrugged and started eating his egg noodles. ‘These are people’s opinions. I suppose he thinks people are more honest in the privacy of a cubicle.’

  For the first time, Joseph Tabrar showed some interest in proceedings. ‘There are limits to what people can say, and think.’

  His wife Ellen looked strangely at him. ‘Like what?’

  ‘C’mon, look around, this country bans more books than any other.’

  Nathan offered Lilli’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover as an example. Ellen looked at Joseph, convinced he was only skirting around bigger issues. ‘What else?’

  Joseph smiled and shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Your friend Phil,’ he said to Nathan, ‘is a rare sort, stick with him.’

  Ellen still wasn’t happy, but guessed it was best left until later. William, comfortable in his spot at the head of the table, wasn’t so coy. ‘Joseph, you mean things happening here?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here, around this table?’

  ‘William, if everyone at this table could say exactly what they thought …’

  William pursued him like a dog. ‘What are your concerns then?’

  ‘I’m concerned that you’re full of … you’re telling lies.’

  ‘What lies?’

  ‘God throwing people into burning pits? What about the children? What about the millions who’ve never heard of God?’

  William stood up, leaning over the table. ‘That’s why we call for missionaries.’

  ‘I’m concerned that you’re brainwashing my children.’ Looking at Seymour but stopping short.

  William opened his arms graciously. ‘Take your children then, I won’t force anyone to do anything.’

  Ellen looked at her husband and shook her head. ‘Have you finished?’

  Joseph lowered his head. William sat down. Silence. He pointed his finger at Joseph. ‘Don’t be afraid to say it … if you don’t agree with me.’

  Joseph stood up and walked off. Ellen stood to follow him but Mary cleared her throat. She sat down and William whispered, ‘I won’t have people say I’m a bully. I’d rather one person who believes me …’ Looking after Joseph.

  In the silence that followed everyone was waiting for someone else to leave. Nathan kept his eyes down, feeling like he was already copying out Hebrews. Bluma was a lemon tree, sending out roots at the base of a giant, stone wall, seeking shelter from the wind but unable to grow in the absence of sun. Joshua said, ‘We’re with you, William …’ starting a chain of joined hands. Seymour didn’t know what to say. ‘Joseph’s a good Christian.’ Later pleading with William to forget today’s business, if only for Ellen. Like most, he explained, Joseph was uncomfortable trusting in the prophecies of the Bible.

  William led them in prayer and then said, ‘My play is finished, if anyone is interested.’ Outlining the story and asking the children to stay with him to workshop ideas.

  Arthur led the others through a tour of his garden. Standard and spray carnations formed a sea of colour around an experimental hydroponic set-up. Arthur showed them how he dissolved nutrients in a tank of water which fed into pipes watering individual pots. Mary was surprised to find the plants growing in sawdust and crushed quartz, although Arthur insisted Tanunda topsoil was as good as anything. ‘Growing chrysanthemums this way, we could supply the valley for Mother’s Day,’ he smiled. ‘And beyond that …’

  The adults arrived back in William’s yard to find the banner raised, Joshua’s two youngest fighting the breeze to keep it aloft. Arthur’s ark was moved and quickly filled by an audience hushed in anticipation.

  William stepped forward and read from his script. ‘“Play for the Apocalypse, a children’s drama in progress. Blessed is he who hears these words and keeps those things which are spoken, for the time is at hand …”’

  Sarah Heinz and Vicky Hicks took the stage, a dead square of grass between William’s myrtle and Bluma’s vegetables. ‘The scene is a department store,’ he continued. ‘Sarah and Victoria are at the sales.’

  ‘These shoes are a steal,’ Sarah began. ‘I’ll look six inches taller.’

  David Hicks approached and helped her try on the imaginary shoes. ‘I can give you these cheaper than sale price, if that’s what you want.’

  Arthur’s ark sparked with fits of laughter. ‘C’mon, Sarah,’ Catherine called, ‘you can always give them to your mother.’

  ‘There was more to this salesman than meets the eye,’ William said. David looked at the audience and smiled like a pantomime villain, greeted with boos and hisses and a pickled onion thrown by his younger brother.

  ‘These will do just fine,’ Sarah continued. ‘Can I have an account?’

  William continued with a not-so-subtle description of the accounts we all keep, and how they’d have to be settled with the big finance manager in the sky. ‘In the end it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle …’

  The girls passed through a succession of departments: whitegoods and cosmetics, jewellery and women’s fashions, receiving discounts from other salesmen (played by Joshua’s sons), stumbling around with arms full of imaginary parcels, stopping for coffee, complaining about their husbands and laughing at those less fortunate, relegated to the Woolies basement. Finally they sat down for a rest, taking off their shoes and rubbing their feet. Nathan walked towards them, picking up imaginary cans from the ground and smoking someone’s leftover butts. ‘Spare a penny?’ he asked, grinning and doing his best Quasimodo.

  ‘The beggar who appeared before them was also not what he seemed,’ William read. ‘His smell repulsed them. His manner sickened them.’

  ‘A penny?’ Nathan repeated.

  ‘Go away, you repulsive creature,’ Sarah began, turning up her nose and looking away. Vicky felt in her pocket and found a penny, giving it to him. ‘There.’

  Sarah frowned. ‘I can’t believe you gave him that.’

  ‘It’ll do him more good than me,’ Victoria replied.

  William’s narration went on to explain how the beggar then gave them some advice. How all the wars of their time were signs, how Luke had predicted nation would rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom. How earthquakes and famines and floods had also been predicted. How the only way to escape the terror of their times was to give up worldly things and surrender to Christ. ‘Which of you will throw away your parcels?’ Nathan asked.

  Sarah looked at Vicky. ‘He’s simple.’ She stood to gather her parcels. ‘Coming?’

  But Vicky looked to Nathan. ‘I’ll walk beside you …’ And leaving her parcels behind, exited stage left with him.

  Sarah shook her head and strutted off in the opposite direction.

  ‘And so Christ saved another soul,’ William read, beaming. ‘At the End of Days no one shall stand before the pearly gates with his account unsettled. Christ is the greatest book-keeper of them all.’ And that was the end of Part One, William explained, stepping up to take a bow with the children. Bruno Hermann, watching from his kitchen window, shook his head and said, ‘Next he’ll be building a church.’

  Nathan excused himself early. William, feeling more than ever in charge, threw a few mulga logs on the fire and asked where he was going.

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘We haven’t finished here.’

  William was aware that small stirrings could cause an avalanche; he was interested to see if he could keep the momentum going. ‘I was going to ask if anyone wanted to stay on … we’ve more than enough.’

  Seymour bit his finger
nails and looked over to Mary. She smiled at William. ‘We should get the children home,’ passing the ball to Catherine Heinz. ‘Yes, it’s too cold to have them out late.’

  And William, looking back at Nathan. ‘Go on then.’

  Curt. Nathan feeling the need to explain himself. ‘Mr Drummond said he’d like some … yeast.’

  No reply.

  Standing, disappearing up the side of the house. Passing Joseph and Ellen sitting on the front porch, under galvanised iron rusted through, patchwork sun settling on their hair and face. ‘See y’ Joe, Ellen,’ Nathan mumbled, jumping his great-grandfather’s picket-less side fence and heading up Langmeil Road.

  Nathan could smell chimneys smoking – burning eucalyptus and melaleuca, ti-tree and old shingles salvaged from deserted cottages. He floated in a snowdome past rusted mangles and crankshafts displayed on the porches of ironstone cottages with sage and rosemary in pots. Quaint, he thought. But if that’s what people wanted. Like the Davy Clarke Singers, always choosing the pretend over the real.

  Back on William’s porch, Joseph sat with his hands in his lap. Ellen was turned into him, holding his hands and looking into his eyes, lost on the High Eden Ridge – on hills of green velvet pulled tight, clumps of gum trees where their parents’ parents hadn’t reached with sharpened axes. Ellen looked at the whiskers growing out of her husband’s nose and said, ‘Joseph, what do you want?’

  He turned to her and replied, ‘I want you to listen.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Me first, mother second.’

  ‘Joseph, if we accept their help – ’ ‘Charity.’

  ‘No. If we accept their help we can’t say, Oh good, you’ll babysit, but you’ll have to let them stay up, no baths, no smacking Chas if he pees in the hallway.’

  She smiled. Joseph leaned forward. ‘How much longer?’

  She shrugged. ‘When we’ve saved enough.’

  ‘How much do we need?’

  He knew she thought it was his fault. Low-skilled worker. They’d warned her; and when she’d shared this with him he’d said, ‘And yet, if I was a chicken boner, a Lutheran chicken boner …’

  She released his hands and leaned back, watching a shunt in the distance pulling grape bins towards Seppelt’s. ‘It’s really about William, isn’t it?’

  He used his hands to express his disgust. ‘It’s about how your dad allows William … have either of them asked me, you, but when it comes down to his … play, “Oh, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t force them to do it.”’

  ‘Fine, I’ll tell them: church okay, Mr Apocalypse …’

  He shrugged. ‘He’s a nut case.’

  ‘Eccentric.’

  ‘Nut case.’

  ‘When they grow up they’ll look back and laugh.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  When they got home that night Mary started saying the same thing. ‘Joseph, don’t be so precious, it’s an outing for them.’

  Ellen took her mother’s hand. ‘It’s not a case of being precious, Joe feels no one’s bothered asking him.’

  Mary shrugged. ‘If the world ends it ends, if not, we’ve helped Willy empty his cellar. The kids love the play …’

  Joseph frowned. ‘It’s what the play’s about.’

  ‘Why should you care? It could’ve been Snow White – doesn’t mean they’ll turn into dwarfs.’

  He wasn’t sure whether Mary was unconcerned or if it was one of her ways of getting around him. ‘I’ll put on a play,’ he continued. ‘I’ll get William to play Satan, the children can be fallen angels.’ Imagining the backdrop of an inverted cross, goat heads tied on with twine and a pentagram of his very own blood.

  ‘Now you’re just trying to make a point,’ Mary said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It wouldn’t bother me, Joseph.’

  Ellen shrugged and returned to a pot of boiling noodles. ‘You decide, Joseph.’

  He stood behind her. ‘And if I keep them home, will you stay with us or go to William’s?’

  No reply.

  Nathan sat on a fallen log beside the North Para River. A bridge ran nearly directly overhead, its stone piers rumbling as cars and trucks passed by. He looked out over the low, soggy paddocks, full of sedge and weed, periodically flooded by storm-water – according to William, only good for the ching-chongs and their rice. Something his father said every time they went collecting mushrooms. A childhood of vitamins in a brown paper bag, William listing them alphabetically as their pants and socks got wetter and wetter. At which point William would pass on the family story of how Anthelm had encountered Aborigines out here, two or three dozen, in loincloth and war-paints, their women with mutilated breasts and their children hungry.

  (In reality, before Anthelm had embellished the story for Robert, a single elder walking with his son, wearing an old suit from the government camp at Willunga, on the coast.)

  Anthelm, in his usual way, had tried to shoo them away but when this failed, approached them, saying how it was his land now and how there were places provided for the native. Places where they’d be introduced to God and agriculture, learning to grow food and raise livestock in ways they’d failed to work out for themselves. ‘Out,’ he called, shooing them again.

  The son in the suit, wearing a bowler hat with cigarette stubs he’d collected in the band, laughed and said, ‘Has the Kaiser come with you?’ Or words to that effect.

  The elder led them towards the creek and, through his son’s broken English, explained how his father was buried here, and where is your father buried?

  ‘Posen,’ Anthelm replied, thinking how he’d been chased out of his own native land, and of how that’s just the way life was. ‘The police will remove you if they find you,’ he said, but the old man just started gathering wood for a fire. ‘I will fetch him, I will fetch the policeman,’ Anthelm continued, as the son sat down and removed a pair of leather boots he’d found on a doorstep somewhere.

  Unable to convince them, Anthelm sat down with them, eating his own mushrooms, eventually sharing them and trying to explain this Jesus fella the son had heard so much about. ‘Soon he will return, and if you have listened to us you will be saved.’

  ‘Saved? How saved?’

  ‘From Hell. From eternal punishment.’

  The son’s eyes had lit up. ‘Ah, we have a story like that.’

  ‘It’s not a story.’

  Apex would be closing. Nathan jogged towards town, along a dirt road of crushed sleepy lizards, of endless corrugations bordered with a white-work of winter irises, finished with masses of pink flowering sorrel and harlequin.

  The photos on the wall of the bakery showed a nineteenth-century cottage with multiple chimneys smoking from wood-fired ovens. They showed the same scene, taken every few years, all featuring the owner, Peter Fechner’s grandfather, standing in the same spot with the same pose, his handle-bar moustache unchanged through the years. Photos showing stability, cooks and store-girls inheriting their parents’ jobs like real estate. Stability. Endless slabs of coffee cake and bienenstich walking out the door in warm paper bags.

  Until Ute. Years ago Ute Hrirbar did to the Apex what Picasso did to portraits. Ute was the first and last of a new breed of dec orators in the valley. A painter by trade, he’d deserted off-cream, mauve and pale blue for orange and every green from Brunswick to Aqua-tint.

  And it was all the Fechners’ fault. They hadn’t bothered checking his work before they hired him. When he’d said, ‘Something fresh, with a touch of the modern,’ they thought he meant melamine and wood veneer. Instead, he’d started off with the exterior in Hi-Gloss white, ‘Apex’ in stencilled plastic letters (raised above pink lights) in the style of Himmler’s ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. Inside it was lino all around, a thousand mis-matched lady bugs glued down onto polished cedar floorboards. The walls were striped red, white and blue with an imitation chrome finish around the door and window frames. Within months it was known as Fechner’s Automat. When he was asked to explain,
Ute said, ‘It’s twentieth century.’ The Fechners refused to settle and a lawyer was brought in to strike a compromise. The Fechners still planned to redecorate their shop. The daily question from tourists – Isn’t this a German bakery? – suggested sooner better than later.

  Lilli wrapped the yeasts and put them in a bag. Placing them in front of Nathan she said (in a mock German accent), ‘Also in ze valley, ve have bratwurst and leberwurst.’

  Nathan smelt the bag. ‘You’re paranoid.’

  They locked up and walked with Thea, Lilli’s off-sider, down Murray Street towards the Tanunda Club. The girls walked ahead, Nathan relegated to little brother status, and when a couple of cocky’s sons looked at their bums and whistled he started to feel like excess baggage. The girls joined arms and talked between themselves; Nathan couldn’t believe she was meant to be his girlfriend.

  They stood at the back door to the club. Thea’s bar-man boyfriend was quick with a few bottles of beer, seeing her off with a bite on the ear and some mock heavy breathing. Nathan followed behind again, settling for an occasional swig from Lilli’s bottle. At one point she turned back and said, ‘Nathan’s dad’s waiting for the Messiah.’

  Thea looked back at him and said, ‘He’s one of those idiots with the pamphlets?’

  And Lilli: ‘He wrote the pamphlet.’

  They sat on a pile of bricks behind the railway station as Thea described her boyfriend in terms of a Cary Grant persona and Johnny Weissmuller physique. Nathan wasn’t really expecting Lilli to respond with a glowing account of his own body, knowing that this was something the girls probably did in private. Still, some sort of acknowledgment of his existence would have been good.

  ‘I’ll have to go in a minute,’ he said, but Lilli just replied, ‘Why?’

  Things should’ve been different. They should have been defacing library books or ripping at each other’s clothes on the banks of Jacob’s Creek. They could have been back in the Langbein grandstand, back into William’s plonk he thought he’d gladly steal for her any day.

  The girls were whispering. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. Suddenly Thea looked at him. ‘Heard you fucked up your exams?’