Читать книгу Dark Clouds on the Mountain - John Tully - Страница 5

Dusk had come and gone and a single light blazed over the street from Ma Dywer's front step. Wet darkness lay over the city, starless, moonless, windless and cold; so still that he could hear the beat of his heart and the sizzle of blood in his temples and the occasional drunken shout from some client of Ma's 'Blue House' though it was a quiet night by Ma's standards. Even the seagulls were subdued. He was conscious of the weight of the knife in the pocket of his 'Bluey' as he loitered patiently in the shadows, knowing that his quarry must pass by on his way home from the Blue House.

If he poked his head round the corner he could see that dubious waterfront hostelry: part bar, part brothel, part gaming rooms, famous (or infamous) across the seven seas depending on your point of view. Ma presided over it all, the diminutive descendant of brawling Irish convicts, big-busted and brave, formidable in her furs and feathers, with a gimlet eye for money and an embarrassing notebook full of customers' names, high and low.

When his victim came, he would strike without mercy: 'It's him or me,' he thought, running a thumb across the edge of the knife he'd fashioned so lovingly at work from a mechanical hacksaw blade. He flattened himself into a doorway to escape the rain and the attentions of chance passers-by, but he need not have worried. The streets were deserted. Behind the sandstone facades of the Georgian buildings were gaunt warehouses, workshops, offices and factories cramped together, where spare, rangy men in short-backand-sides haircuts made jams, stored wool, or poured molten metal into moulds. Here, too, secretaries in nylons with seams typed letters on heavy steel machines - Imperials and Remingtons - and giggled as they passed Ma's on their way to lunch. When they had gone home, another class of women drifted to the street: whores who plied their ancient trade in rooms by the docks or turned 'knee-tremblers' against the walls. The man had occasionally lain with them, hating himself for his cheap and joyless spasms, for his betrayal of his far-off woman. But there had been no powdered harlot tonight, filled as he was with lust for a larger death.

Sullivan's Cove - the second site of Mother England's Van Diemen's Land penal colony - was clogged with the masts of ships, because sailoring and stevedoring were labour-intensive trades in those days and ships came from all over the world for the apples, the zinc, the paper and the wool of the dark island. Dark because of the forests, dark for the great black rains that would come howling in from Storm Bay, dark for the waters full of peat from the button grass moors and desolate mountains, darker still from the history of this island. Tasmania had begun as a place without pity or hope, as far away from Europe by sailing ship as it is today by rocket to the moon. Along the way, the Aboriginal inhabitants were almost completely exterminated; regarded as pests like the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine that once roamed the forests. The man knew little about this history and cared less, but he too felt the darkness.

In 1948, the ships were tended by an army of wharfies and Salamanca Place rang with the rattle of the winches, the crash of steel on steel, the harsh cries of the gulls and the sorrowful songs of the ships' sirens as they set sail for Liverpool, San Francisco or Bremen. The smell of coal smoke curling low on the broad estuary mingled with the cold, damp, lonely smell of the bush on the winter wind. Today in the twenty-first century, when denizens of affluent countries catch intercontinental air flights as if they are buses, Tasmania still seems an impossibly remote place. Sixty years ago it was as distant as the moon, and immigrants, like the earlier convict exiles, seldom returned to their native lands. The island itself was separated from mainland Australia by the three hundred storm-racked miles of Bass Strait, graveyard of ships and once a lawless frontier of sealers and pirates. The man had crossed it aboard the coal-fed SS Taroona, shuddering across the crests of the enormous waves of the Roaring Forties under the vast and ragged sky, figuring that Tasmania was just about as far as he could get from the old country. And danger.

The bush pressed in on all sides around Hobart Town and sometimes in summer the hot breath of the wind blew from the forest with the smell of sparks and smoke on it. It was a hard place, forever redolent of the penal colony it had once been. There were pockets of gentility like Lower Sandy Bay where the posh people were more British than the British and whiter than the King, but just a few miles out from the city, farmers lived on beaten earth floors, snakes slithered in the undergrowth, and the ghosts of the massacred Blacks watched the interlopers from the summits of the hills. In inner-suburban Wapping, the working poor teemed in their rookeries, mindful of the epidemics of cholera, dysentery and bubonic plague that had carried off their kin until recent times.

Behind the city reared the Mountain, the mute watcher of all, over 4000 feet high, dark with timber and stippled with the white boles of dead trees. The man had gone there once, only to flee, uneasy at the alien sadness of the place, so unlike the birch woods and marshes of his native land.

Far upstream, where the Derwent boiled through narrow ravines, gangs of men - among them ship-jumpers and 'reffos', Poles, English, Italians, Scotsmen, Germans, Russians, Dutchmen, Ukrainians, Irish and Welsh, 'Balts' and 'DPs'*1 of all nationalities from the post-war camps of Europe - dug tunnels and canals and threw up dams to generate electricity to industrialise a dirt-poor state that still lived on the fruit and wool sent to Mother England. Occasionally there were brawls, but generally they got on well enough, despite the ubiquitous racist argot of the native-born who spoke of 'New Australians' as wogs, dagoes, Eye-ties, frogs, squareheads, Polacks and the like, and demanded that newcomers should 'speak English why don'tcha'. This was the milieu where the young man lived and worked, permanently baffled by the language, yet earning his living by his diligence, great strength and solid practical intelligence.

Now he had come to Salamanca Place at night, when the winter rain thinned the sweet smell of hot jam and the burnt stink of a foundry's hot metal that hung thick in the alley. There was a faint rumble of machinery from the IXL factory where fruit and sugar bubbled in huge vats, stirred by workers in white hats. The man had peered in from the street and thought he'd like a job like that. Further away was the foundry in Montpellier Place, but the man was scared of the leaping sparks and the running metal. 'Wouldn't do that job,' he thought, though he was a hard worker with great, calloused labourer's hands. Here and there, a windowpane rattled from the factory's vibrations but the sandstone walls, cemented by convict masons over a century before, rose up sturdy and unyielding into the dark sky. It was very cold and his leg hurt from the old wound where a bullet had smashed the bone. Not as cold as home, but cold. He cupped his massive hands round his cigarette, seeking warmth. Soon, Ma's Blue House - the bar at least - would close and the sailors would roister away to wake up the ships lying asleep on their bellies on the cold water. He'd been in Ma's place earlier and watched Aldo Martinuzzi, the Italian carpenter, through the warm fug of sweat, beer and cigarette smoke. Martinuzzi had stood in his immigrant's loneliness against the back wall, lifting his glass and smiling politely, slightly bewildered, at his Aussie companions' jokes, uncomfortable in such disreputable surroundings yet craving their acceptance.

Even in Ma's, through the reek of beer and the pissy jakes and the cheap talcum powder on the hussies touting for trade, the carpenter could smell the jam factory. The smell made him sad. Reminded him of his mother. Soon afterwards, he had left, making his excuses to the Aussies who'd dragged him down here for what they called the football, leaving behind the concrete bucket and the dogman's whistle in the dark gorge where they worked. He knew they'd carouse till dawn, going on to beer and cards at the back of the Coronation Bar or in the bowels of the Ship Hotel under Collins Street. Perhaps they'd fight with Danish or Dutch seamen, maybe with knives. They might even get their leg over for free, one said with a lewd wink. Martinuzzi wouldn't stay long, though. He had a wife and child at the top end of South Street, a narrow treeless lane that ran at right angles down to Salamanca Place, crammed with the families of wharfies, ships' firemen, sailors, foundrymen and carters.

The man who waited for Martinuzzi had booked into a lodging house in nearby Kelly Street, full of bedbugs, drips from the rain and the ingrained smell of fried mutton and BO. Another class of lodger might have labelled it Dickensian, though no books ever crossed its threshold. Now he hid in the alley, straining the air though his thick moustache, sniffing the aroma of boiling raspberries and sugar. His mother had cooked up great steaming tureens of blackberry and redcurrant jams, and the rain in the birch trees outside the windows had been warm and scented with summer. The back of the house was covered in flowering ivy and daffodils grew in the dark soil fortified with cow shit. He loved the redcurrant jam. His pretty mother would ladle it with a wooden spoon into lines of waiting jars, the smell tormenting his stomach, and when a jar cracked it left a blood-red smear across the kitchen table, part jam, part blood from where he'd cut himself trying to scoop up the hot syrup when his mother wasn't looking. She'd hugged him in her rough way, her tears dripping onto his cropped blond head in the silence of the past.

The past was silence. Try as he might, the man had never quite remembered his mother's voice, but the smell of the jam in the alley brought it back, light and silvery, laughing still over the gulf of the years, cutting through the darkness. She'd laughed despite the rain and it had always rained in summer in the old country, the great drops clinging to the broad leaves of the birch trees and running thick like mercury down the pungent spikes of the pine leaves. Now, shivering in this Antipodean alley, the man was stunned to find himself weeping like he had never done since he was small. He pulled his hat brim down low so that chance passers-by might not see his weakness.

He need not have worried. The winter rain fell steadily from a moonless sky, pitter-pattering on the flagstones and trickling down the sandstone walls. All decent folk were snug in bed. He cursed himself for behaving like a woman, and wiped with rough paws at the tears that were already washed away by the rain. If only sin might be so easily washed away. He struck a match and peered at his watch. Eleven o'clock. It was a good watch: booty of war, he remembered. The bell struck the hour in the post office clock over in the city, muffled by the fog that crept silent as a cat down the estuary. The Bridgewater Jerry, they called it, after a small town upstream. The man smiled and clutched the knife tighter. It was a good knife that he'd sharpened patiently, night after night in his tar-papered hut up in the mountains, between shifts on the dam. It was sharp enough to cut the hardest wood like butter, let alone human flesh. He suddenly cocked his head and swore, the tears forgotten. From along the street, he heard a woman's drunken titter and a man's lecherous grunts as they stopped to eat each other's faces under a streetlight, all beer and powder and moustache. He relaxed as the woman broke free of the man's embrace and led him by the hand across the street towards the wharves, leaning over as if against a gale-force wind.

The rain had turned to sleet, then to snow, but still the man waited, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands, his breath steaming in great clouds. He was used to discomfort, whether it be from crouching behind the plough in all weathers or waiting patiently with his rifle on guard duty. The snow muffled the click of the Blue House's door opening and closing, but every so often, the man would peer quickly round the corner of the alley. Yes. A tall figure was walking towards him. Martinuzzi! He could tell from the slim shoulders and the careful way the man walked over the snow-covered stones. Precise steps. As precise as his movements when he sawed timber or hammered nails into formwork on the dam, or cradled a Sten gun and grenades.

The man crept back deeper into the alley and flattened himself against the wall. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the knife, holding it with the blade pointing upwards as they'd taught him to do all those years ago at the camp. Martinuzzi approached the alley, hesitated, and then plunged quickly into the gloom, whistling, perhaps to give himself courage against the dark. What was that jaunty tune? The man had heard it years before in that windy city on the shores of the Adriatic. What had they called it? 'Bandiera Rossa', that was it. A Red song in a city infested by Red bandits. They'd even sung it when they were put up against the wall at the back of the sugar factory at San Sabba.

He stepped out silently when Martinuzzi walked past and without hesitation drove the knife into his back, just where he knew the heart would be. Martinuzzi sounded more surprised than hurt, but before he could swing round, the man had wrenched out the knife and, almost in the same movement, reached up and sliced at the carpenter's windpipe. Martinuzzi collapsed, a scream gurgling in his ruined throat. The pigs had done that when the man's father had slaughtered them in the ramshackle hut by the birch trees, but they'd caught the blood to make sausage. Martinuzzi's blood splashed out in great gouts. Wasted. But the will to live is strong. With one hand clutching his throat, the carpenter rose up and clawed at the murderer's face. Just at that moment a car turned around in the street outside and its headlights shone directly down the alley, reflecting off the swirl of snowflakes. The murderer saw dark patches on the snow, like redcurrant jam on his mother's stark white tablecloth. Then all was black again, the car coughing away up past the foundry and the sleeping Parliament House.

The man slashed again with the knife and Martinuzzi's sleeve rode up as he shielded his face. On his arm, the man knew, was the tattoo of the hammer and sickle. 'You try to kill me,' the man muttered. 'I kill you. I kill you good.' Martinuzzi slumped to his knees and the man fled, the blood pounding in his ears, not even noticing the slippery steepness of Kelly's Steps in his haste. Behind him, the carpenter had pitched forward onto his face, his life draining away into the snow. The man melted away to his sour room. The aging slattern who ran the boarding house in a gin-fuelled stupor would not have noticed his absence. Now, he could bring his woman to this place at the opposite end of the earth; raise a family, free of the old fear.