Read Online The Following by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online Page A

married men with hungry mouths to feed. Some, like Ron Kristiansen, were not.
    Marcus wiped his hands on a ball of cotton waste and took the envelope between two fingers. He delayed ripping it open while the boy stood there. The pink, decorated paper and the name of the sender, Miss Pearl Dease, of Tottenham Rail, had the Harden office talking.
    ‘Anything else, sonny?’
    ‘They said, gee, you’d want to send an answer.’
    ‘I’ve got an answer for them all right.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Tell those old maids I’ll knock their teeth into their arses if they make a donkey of you ever again.’
    Marcus watched the boy go then tore the letter open and flicked the pages flat against his knee. Pearl. She was the one. It was in plain daylight, the stumble of explanation expressed in a sudden touch.
    Marcus and Pearl had met up at Tottenham when the strike was in its first weeks. It was after the worst game of the rugby season when Marcus played inside-centre.
    ‘Is this who I think it is?’ She’d wrapped her arms around his muddy neck and taken him by the waist, pulling him close so that he felt the whipstick life of her.
    ‘Not married?’ she’d said.
    ‘Not yet,’ answered Marcus, holding her eye. His engagement to Aileen Harris had never been an engagement, and now, holy smoke, never would be.
    Marcus and Pearl dragged each other along through the back lanes of Tottenham after that cold, wet, rambunctious game, taking the long way round because Marcus didn’t want to be seen in the streets, the few there were. When they stopped now and then, their cheeks blazed and their breaths tangled.
    Tottenham was a town still under the spell of the murdered constable and the two men who had shot him. It was six months since they were hung in Bathurst Gaol.
    There’d been a head-knocking stubbornness to the game owing to the names of the two towns standing for such arguments, conflicts and rages as could never be resolved. Bathurst players were from the railways, Tottenham players from the mines. Each town stood for something in workingmen’s hopes, but the players themselves did not exactly share the same hopes and fears. Not everyone playing for Bathurst was behind what was done at the end of a rope there, and hardly anyone playing for Tottenham, surely no-one at all anymore, wanted the world smashed wide by bloody revolution, anarchy and uproar.
    Marcus and Pearl went to Marcus’s room at Telfer’s boarding house, where a silky-oak dresser weighted against a doorhandle secured privacy, though not discretion. A knock at the door and the querulous voice of Aileen Harris asked before she stole away, ‘
Marcus? Are you in there? Marc?
’
    After leaving Telfer’s without answer, Aileen had waited for Marcus in the dining room of the Railway Hotel, and then, when he didn’t appear as arranged, went to the station. There Marcus appeared and made his goodbyes just as the football special blew its departure whistle, blaming his lateness in seeing her on a blow to the head from a high tackle and the hickeys on his neck from being throttled in a scrum.
    Now Marcus with a confused grin stood in his overalls, a dented two-gallon oilcan at his feet, considering his share of happiness with a love letter crammed in his pocket. When he considered Pearl Dease and the days that were, and the ones to be, caution had no play with him.
    Marcus’s life principle, earnestly put, was to organise for the sake of the workingman’s cause. He said no to enlisting in the AIF for this reason. A voluntary army was his choice. Equality over all his testament. A workingman’s government was his faith. He defended as citizen the principle men fought for with guns. Poison-pen letters, eggs and rotten tomatoes thrown at him would not change that. Better to stay. Make the fight here.
    The railways as a principle of organisation shaped Marcus’s understanding. His ideals had brought him down in the big strike and destroyed his expectations. He was no