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

longer on marriageable pay.
    Up to forty trains a day were put together at Harden. Pairs of rails descended through switching levers at junction points leading to pairs of rails at the lower end of the shunting yards where the trains were assembled. A braid of points, switching levers and signal lamps stood between life and death. A shunter died here a month ago. Weeks before that, a man lost a leg. The messenger boy running with Pearl’s letter was lucky to be alive the way he came flying over the rails with his flapping satchel, looking neither to left nor right. Every few minutes goods wagons were uncoupled and released, brakeless, down the incline. They did not travel fast, but there was no stopping them once released as they clanked over points and rumbled past shunters before juddering on the buffers of the next wagon in line. The background noise of the yards was the clash of steel plates slammed against steel plates, an orchestration to Marcus of the gods’ thunder, and in later years he would also say, though never dance to it, jazz.
    Marcus pulled the letter from his pocket and read it again. It showed that Pearl knew his work roster to the day and the hour. No guessing how she’d poached it – there was no other way of getting the particulars except by bashing the ear of a telegraphist hunched over a Morse key persuading distant roster clerks to divulge a man’s duties in dots and dashes.
    Her plan, she wrote, was to travel to the Milburns’ camp near Bribbaree and visit Luana, who was living there now with her son. The Milburns’ camp was on the Forbes–Stockinbingal Line, newly opened, where Marcus was rostered to work the week up and down.
    ‘I could wring her lily-white loveliest of necks.’ He grinned contortedly as he folded the letter away. ‘She’s a flaming, conniving, brass-haired terrier.’
    Anyone looking at Marcus’s face would say there was a flush of sullen anger there. He was being drawn in a direction outside his control. Marcus was a man who habitually complained about what he liked, just as his grandfather had – a cold beer aching his teeth, a plug of bitter tobacco to be rubbed into blooming life. The look was hungry as he scanned Pearl’s loping script and stared into the ripped-open envelope as if there might be something more in there, a few grains of the white dust of Tottenham to exonerate him, fine as icing sugar, so that he could lay blame on the country itself for his weaknesses, on Australia with its connecting rails and worn hills whose promise soured Marcus Friendly to a craven low.
    Each night was competitive in the barracks over who dished up the best stew, who was the dab hand at baked apples. Marcus had arrived there a month ago, a loner from the Western Line exiled to the Southern. His damaged career was an object lesson in the barracks’ classrooms and railway night schools across the state. Marcus attracted gossip, malice, pity and the vindictiveness of those who kicked a dog when it was down. Marcus Friendly downed? If so, where was the hope for anyone fomenting the idea that if you ever wanted to be yourself, the truest throw of yourself, you had to excel yourself. A demoted driver was a bloke to beware, equivalent to a drunk on a dry or a bankrupt plutocrat prickling with resentments – equivalent, you might say, to a traitor to a cause, a principle or an idea no longer worthy of espousing owing to authority having stamped it out.
    Here’s where Marcus got what he needed from being despised. Compressed to a fist of hopelessness was to have a capacity to enlarge himself.
    That Marcus attracted the interest of those with an inclination to rescue him from his own worst despondencies hardly occurred to him. He was blowed if he knew who they were, if they existed. And if they did exist, he was no friend to condescension. They were in the category of Canon Harris’s homilies.
    That night in the Harden barracks Marcus’s boiled potatoes were almost