Riverslake Page 6

“All right, chef,” he said, “let them go—we’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

  It was already dark when Randolph left the kitchen, dark and cold with a long ragged banner of palest gold that slit the west and only made everything more bleak and depressing. It was quiet, too, with the deadly stillness of a wet and foggy evening. For all the sound and light around them, Randolph mused, they might have been lost on the dark side of the moon. The capital city—he turned to Murdoch, who had clumped down the steps just behind him.

  “What now?” he demanded sarcastically, throwing a hand round the desolate scene. “Bed?”

  Murdoch laughed. “Hell, no—big night tonight! Come over and see the Dummy for a mo—I usually go and have a bit of a spruik to him when I knock off.” He led the way along the path of hot light that poured from the half-open door of the boiler-room. He pushed his way in, and looked around. “He’s not here. Come in, though—it’s warm, and he’ll be back soon.”

  It was a small shed, unlined, and crammed with a boiler, a furnace, and a high steel cupboard. A few old coats hung from nails on the walls and a pile of soiled magazines spilled from a box in the corner. On an old pull-over close to the boiler sat a huge ginger cat with golden eyes, gently kneading the woollen fabric with half-sheathed claws.

  The animal looked up slowly at them, blinked and ceased its kneading, and then forgot them. Randolph, warming his back at the boiler, bent to scratch one of its pointed ears.

  “The Dummy’s,” Murdoch volunteered. “He thinks the sun shines out of its dinger.”

  “It’s a decent sort of a cat, at that,” Randolph said. “You could put a saddle on it and ride it around, just about. What’s this you said about a big night tonight—something on?”

  “Going down to the grocer’s to watch the bacon-cutter at work,” Murdoch replied gravely. He laughed at Randolph’s raised eyebrows. “No—there’s a party on at a sheila’s place I know. You come along with me, if you want to. It’ll be O.K.”

  “Won’t she be crooked if you bring another bloke along without telling her?”

  Murdoch spread his hands to the glowing side of the furnace and smiled slowly at Randolph. “Not a bloke, she won’t,” he said insinuatingly. “Another sheila and she’d blow the top, but she’d never go crook at me bringing another bloke.”

  “Like that, eh?”

  “Like that.”

  They were quiet for a while, and the shed filled again with the muted panting of the furnace and the purring of the cat. Randolph stared through a chink in the furnace door at the glow inside, his thoughts rambling back over the day—his first at Riverslake. It was only hours ago that he had stood in his bleak and musty little room looking over the few insignificant marks left by the previous owner, and hating it all. Hating the cold and the strangeness, the new names and the new faces he would have to learn, the thing, what ever it might be, that led him, or drove him, from one place to another—perhaps looking for something, perhaps running away from something else. He did not know, had never probed deeply enough to learn.

  Yet here he was, only hours later, invited to a party, talking to a man he called by his Christian name and whom he knew he was going to like and value as a friend; beyond the kitchen door he could have walked about now, blindfolded, and hit nothing; and there were at least a dozen men whose names he knew, as well as a little of their lives and natures—not much, but a start. He marvelled again at the ease with which he had settled in.

  He stared at the pulsing heap of almost white-hot coals. It seemed to sway and to expand, to advance and recede liquidly, and over its violet surface flames writhed and danced. They printed strange and barbaric pictures on his staring eyes.

  “That bloody Vodavitch,” Murdoch said abruptly, bringing Randolph back with a start to his surroundings. “I dunno, I’m damned if I do.”

  “You dunno what?” Randolph demanded. “He was the one with the Pole, at mess, wasn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, what don’t you know?”

  “He put that poor beggar in tonight,” Murdoch explained. “The Pole didn’t say nothing about the Bastard’s old woman being a touch. Vodavitch made it up, just to get him hurled.”

  “What in the name of hell for?”

  Murdoch shrugged: “They hate each other’s guts, the Poles and the Slavs, the Slavs and the Ities. Screwy, isn’t it?”

  “Who told you about putting the Pole in?”

  “One of the mess-stewards.”

  “A Pole?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then he might’ve been putting the Slav in, for all you know.”

  Murdoch shrugged again. “I told you it was screwy, didn’t I?” He paused again. “Vodavitch sends parcels home to his folks.”

  “Most of them do, don’t they—those with people?”

  “He’s different. Most of them go up to the grocer’s and throw down a quid and let the grocer do the rest. Not that big slob—he hunts round for all sorts of little things he knows they want———”

  “How do you know?” Randolph interrupted him.

  “He gets me to make out the lists for him,” Murdoch said, “you know, the list that has to go with the parcel. I go over to his room once a week and do it for him—hell, you should see his room! Strings of onions and chillies hanging in the corners, gear all over the place, photos of his mob all over the walls—like the back of a flaming brothel. And in the middle of it all, the pile of junk for the parcel. He has a list, with ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ at the top, and under each name the things he’s collected for them. Elastic for the old girl’s rammies, pipe-cleaners for the old boy, reels of cotton, bits of lace and all sorts of things. And of course, piles of tucker. And all the time you’re there he talks about them, how his old man lost a leg and how his brother was taken by the Germans and how his old girl used to sew his shirts. He’s a funny customer. I hate his guts sometimes, and he stinks like a pole-cat, but when you see him wrapping up a ball of wool and writing ‘Mama’ on it, and then something else for Papa, you sort of see the kid he was before the world got hold of him.” Murdoch stopped speaking abruptly and flushed. “Soft lights and sweet music,” he said with a short laugh. “ ‘Hearts and Flowers’!”

  Randolph shrugged. “The world does some funny things to a bloke,” he said.

  “Hear me laugh,” Murdoch said.

  “What are the girls like in Canberra?” Randolph asked suddenly. “Or aren’t there any?”

  Murdoch lifted his shoulders in a curiously un-Australian gesture he had copied from the Balts. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said. “Like everything else—you’ve got to be in it to win it.”

  “The boys were talking about one tonight after we finished serving out the tucker. I just caught a bit of it—some bint called Millie. She must be a nice old bag. Warner reckoned she was in the family way. Again, he said.”

  Murdoch began to laugh, softly at first and then with full-throated enjoyment. Randolph watched him for a while in silence, a pucker growing between his eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” he demanded at length. “You wouldn’t laugh if you were the old man!”

  “You’re telling me!” Murdoch wiped the back of his hand across his streaming eyes. “Millie’s Zigfeld’s cat—that tabby-looking thing that hangs around the kitchen all day. You must have seen it.”

  “I might have. For God’s sake—the way they were talking, I thought it was a sheila. And it was only a blasted cat.”

  “It’s something you’ll get used to,” Murdoch said. “Cats, and which tom gives ’em their kittens. Tiger, mostly.” He pointed at the ginger cat. “There’s about half a dozen toms around the camp, and scores of shes. Felix’s got one———”

  “Felix?”

  “The little Balt that flattened Jerry with the pot today. He’s got a she he calls Marika. It’s up the stick, too. Ti
ger.”

  “Busy boy.”

  “Half his luck!” Murdoch said, laughing ruefully. “Oh, here’s the Dummy.”

  The twisted figure of the hunchback shot through the door and across to the boiler, spreading twig-like hands to the warmth. He seemed incapable of slow movement. On the few occasions when Randolph had seen him, he had been scuttering round with a curious sideways motion, like a crab—even the scrabble of his shoes on the concrete floor sounded like a crab on a rock.

  He sat down on a box with his back to the boiler. When he came in the big ginger cat had leapt from its nest, and now twined in and out of his pitiful legs, mewling its love and content. He looked expectantly from one to the other of the two men standing by the furnace. His quick, bright eyes twinkled under brows of unusually long and coarse grey hair, and Randolph, casually returning his glance, was surprised at the wealth of humour and understanding and kindness in the thin face. Even the hideous red blotch round the hunchback’s mouth, on longer acquaintance, seemed as if it might have been put there artificially, like a clown’s enlarged lips, to amuse rather than to horrify.

  Murdoch walked round and confronted the little man.

  “This is Bob Randolph, Dummy,” he said. “New cook.” He mouthed the words elaborately, and spoke more loudly than usually. He turned quickly to Randolph. “Just about deaf, too,” he confided. “Copped the lot, didn’t he, the poor little bastard?” He turned again to the hunchback. “We came in here, you weren’t here, so we’re having a bit of a warm.” He pointed to the door, to himself and Randolph, and then to the furnace, supplementing his words. He shivered and spread his hands to the glow, wriggling his shoulders ecstatically.

  Randolph, watching him, thought he looked very young at that moment. Tough and rowdy, with an answer to everything, yet in a second he could revert to a gesture that was left over from a childhood that could not be very far behind.

  The hunchback, who had been sitting slackly, his eyes on Murdoch’s face, was suddenly galvanized into movement. His head jerked, and his eyebrows rose and fell; his long lips worked spasmodically and his hands fluttered about him like birds in search of a spot on which to alight. One of them did, just over his heart for a second, and then swept expressively round the shed. It came to rest, outstretched, in front of Randolph.

  “Poor little blighter,” Murdoch murmured swiftly and softly. “He’s saying he’s your friend, and to come in whenever you like. He’s a good little cuss, Randy.”

  “Yes.” Randolph, overcoming a slight revulsion, took the outstretched hand. It was thin and hard and warm. He felt friendliness flow through it into his own fingers, making them tingle. “I’m glad to meet you———” he said, and paused, not quite knowing what to call the little man. “Dummy” seemed a bit bold, but after all, Murdoch had used it, and he didn’t seem to mind. “—Dummy,” he finished, and the hunchback smiled widely.

  “We’ve got to go, Dummy,” Murdoch announced, looking at his watch.

  The Dummy rose and limped swiftly across the floor. He dragged a box forward and patted it invitingly, gesturing to the furnace with raised brows.

  “No, Dummy, thanks just the same.” Murdoch shook his head. “We’re going to a party.” He did a few dance steps and tossed off an imaginary drink. The hunchback nodded with delighted comprehension of the pantomime, swaying his twisted body to unheard music.

  “Good night, fella.” Murdoch laid his hand gently for a moment on the Dummy’s shoulder, a gesture strangely tender for a man so young and seemingly so thoughtless. At the door, Randolph stopped and glanced back into the shed. The Dummy had settled on the box by the boiler. The ginger cat, its tail erect and waving ecstatically, rubbed against his legs.

  Walking through the darkness to their huts, Randolph said to Murdoch, “This girl we’re going to see tonight—you haven’t told me her name, Kerry.”

  “Didn’t I? Linda—Linda Spain.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “What would you expect?”

  “Oh, I dunno.” Linda. Randolph said the name to himself, trying to remember some girl he had known called Linda. Fair, she’d be, and tall. It sounded like willows. Cool. “A blonde,” he ventured. “Tall. Slim. Nice and cool.”

  Murdoch guffawed into the gloom beside him. “What a shock you’re in for!” he commented bluntly. “She’s dark and hot, about up to your navel and pretty plump. But she’s got something, just the same!”

  “Married?”

  “Uh-huh—her husband’s a nice bloke, too. Paul’s his name. A bonzer bloke, but hell—I don’t know …”

  “You don’t know what?”

  They had reached Murdoch’s hut, and he paused with one foot on the step.

  “You’ll see,” he promised. “Be over in about half an hour. O.K.?’’

  “O.K.,” Randolph answered. “But what’s she like?”

  “Like? I just told you.”

  “No—I mean, what sort of a girl is she?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean.” The weak light from the passage fell across Murdoch’s head. It flowed over his fair hair and his thin, brown face. It left his laughing eyes in shadow, but picked up the smile on his lips.

  “She’ll do anything for her friends,” he said, “and she hasn’t got many enemies!”

  He leapt up the two remaining steps and looked over his shoulder at the man standing below him. The echo of his laughter followed Randolph as he strode through the cold darkness towards his own hut.

  Chapter Three

  Paul Spain, waiting for the bus to take him home, slewed away from the cold wind, the collar of his greatcoat turned high about his ears. In front of him the bulk of Capitol Hill was black and shapeless in the darkness. At his back the House, which he had just left, was studded with light. Its sharp white outline was easily discernible. Every window poured a shaft into the darkness, and from the centre courtyard the four great poplars, denuded of leaves but palely gilded with the glow of the windows opening onto them, soared above the buildings until they melted into the night.

  In the parking spaces on either side of the House Members’ cars and sleek black Government limousines, their drivers dozing at the wheels, drew blotches and lines of light to their polished surfaces and held them there, flickering and twinkling. Every few seconds headlights, almost solid beams of yellow in the windy blackness, plunged and roved amongst the trees and hedges, as messengers reached the House and left it.

  Even with his back to it all, Paul Spain knew just what it looked like. The House was sitting, and to him at least, perhaps because he knew what was going on in the Members’ rooms and in the Party rooms, the corridors and the lobbies and the chambers, it was enveloped in an air, a sound of something doing. It was the heart awakened of this sprawling city that existed for no other reason than to feed to its pumping valves the departmental plasma that kept armies of girls pounding at their typewriters, kept the secretaries whispering importantly in corridors, kept the cleaners polishing and dusting in King’s Hall under the benign gilt smile of George V, and kept the Members dancing attendance on the strident summons of the Division bells. He knew it and lived for it, was never really at rest and never really happy away from it.

  Close to him, black smudges against the darker barrier of a low hedge, two men were hunched together, whispering a conversation that reached him on gusty spurts of wind.

  Yes, C.G. saw him last night at the Pakistan do … no, of course not, can’t swing it … C.P.’s secretary says the Doc’s against it, anyway … yes, it stinks.

  Paul Spain grinned wryly. He didn’t recognize in their departmental jargon his own speech; even though he could hardly distinguish their outline, still he could see them plainly—their pale, slightly intellectual faces, thin and a bit nervy, their hair cut just a bit longer than it should have been, their quiet and good clothes, and the black, initialled brief-cases under their arm
s.

  He saw them as plainly as that, yet didn’t recognize the pattern to which he conformed, outwardly at least, as faithfully as any of them. Perhaps it was because his own development in the Civil Service had been as unspectacular as theirs; so normally successful and uneventful that there had been no point at which any of them might have propped and said. “I’m changing … I’ve changed!”

  The bus turned the corner down by Westblock and searched the glistening road with fierce gold eyes as it approached. The two shadows near Spain moved to the kerb, still talking busily. And if Chif hadn’t stopped him … yes, bad show, bad show. Their voices were drowned by the grunting of the bus as it stopped. Spain swung himself aboard.

  It was not very crowded—too late for the office workers and too early for the picture-goers. He found himself a seat on the aisle, and settled into it. He cast a sidelong glance at the man in the window seat next to him, a hulking brute, foul with mud and stinking of beer and stale sweat. His eyes were closed, the lids strangely white in the wind-burned red expanse of his face. Spain’s thin nostrils wrinkled slightly as he covertly took in the gross features, the barrel chest and the big freckled hands that rested loosely on the edge of the seat between the bulging thighs.

  Spain’s had been a sheltered life, an uneventful and orderly progression from childhood and adolescence to manhood and marriage, through kindergarten and high-school to the University and his career in the Service. The man sitting next to him was as much a stranger to him as a Tibetan lama would have been—more of a stranger, for while his reading had told him plenty about the people of far-away lands, it had taught nothing of the working class of his own country.

  His mother had doted fiercely on him, her only child, and when the time came for him to choose a career, his father, a minor head in one of the departments, had smoothed his way into the Service, and unobtrusively kept his name before the heads ever since. They had a large, pleasant home, quite near, if not actually under the shadow of, Red Hill. They were welcome guests in many of the foreign embassies and legations and the big homes on Mugga Way.