Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Read online

  AND CURSE me for thinking just then: my father, Red Kelly. Not saying it but thinking it. Put him on the list for weakness, for having no stomach for prison, for puffing up like a snowman in passive protest, for languishing, squelching, on his bed. For dying of dropsy, an old man at forty-seven.

  Laying him out in our hut at Avenel, she and I left imprints every spot we touched. Rolled him over and corked him up to stop him seeping, like a five-day drowned man.

  No Requiem for my soggy father.

  Oh, mother, truly his name just burst into my head like a blast of duckshot. I’m only eleven and a half. Oh Jesus forgive me.

  AARON WOULD play a roo-gut banjo fretted with slivers of box-tree and overlaid with possum parchment. While he twanged, he sang a song about me that Joe dreamed up, them both harmonising, Joe thrumming on his bush bass made from a tea-chest and a broomstick strung with twine.

  Aaron sang a sweet, wild song about me in the cold nights and still we killed him. In the firelight we’d do the polka to it to keep warm. A shotgun blast in the head, another in the chest. His pregnant wife, fifteen, wailing and kissing his mashed innards. Praying his forehead back to smoothly normal, unhappening the brain-bits on her stroking hands, the red spray patterning the air, the wall, the door jamb and fanning out like a lyrebird’s tail. Well, he was a treacherous young banjo player. When in the mood he’d dance with stones in his boots – didn’t mind, no coat or scarf, kicking up the frosty grass like a dervish. Liked the girls young; I said to him about Mary Hegarty, she’s only just thirteen! He said, so what, I’m not superstitious. Went to gaol once for concussing a passing Chinaman with a rock, and for mistreating a horse. A treacherous banjo player and a heedless dancer.

  Knew how to make you laugh, though, if you were in the mood.

  Massacre, there’s a word. Worse than killing, worse than murder, worse than slaughter. Massacre’s what they said we did. What I, the monster, did. ‘The Massacre at Stringybark Creek.’

  But is it a massacre if they’re shot going for their guns? If they’re police? Just because the police aren’t as good as us doesn’t make it massacre. Anyway, massacre sounds like killing many more than three. (Maybe ten and over.) Massacre sounds like butchering the innocents. Massacre has the soft, crispy-moist, knife-blade sound, the stabbing, hacking, ruptured-vein sound. Massacre sounds like Indians slashing and scalping in the night. Massacre sounds like dead women and children, not armed troopers. Massacre surely doesn’t sound like four men against four men. Massacre sounds like you relish flesh explosions and mutilations. The sort of thing a maniac does.

  Can it be a massacre if you let one go? The only one who surrenders when ordered?

  Would it be a massacre if the police had killed three of us instead?

  Can it be a massacre if everyone’s Irish?

  Battle is the word I’d use for a fair fight. One side against the other.

  Massacre … juicy word, though.

  Was that the train or a rumbling and ringing in his ears? His imagination or thunder or just his hungry lion?

  What this place needed was a watch-peacock. Better than any dog for warning when the police came by. No police spy much less a uniformed trooper ever snuck up on Eleven Mile Creek without their peacock giving the alarm. Simple city coppers just off the boat shat themselves at that sudden banshee scream from hell or somewhere very like it in the spooky outback dark.

  He must keep thinking ahead, anticipating Hare and his ploys. There was no end to Hare’s brainstorms, the best so far being his setting up policemen as horse thieves to try to tempt the gang’s old business streak (as if the police didn’t have proper horse thieves like Flood in their ranks anyway!) and dispatching that group of pretty horsewomen as police spies – this complex entrapment fancy of course going badly wrong, or badly right, depending on your view. (The Royal Melbourne Show dressage champion so impressed with Joe’s piaffe that she strutted with him into the billiard room of the Royal Mail Hotel and stretched out on the baize might be of two minds on this.)

  But the plan that took the cake was sending along those Irish detectives disguised as priests who offered to hear this gang of Catholic boys’ confessions. Presuming that by now their Mick killer-leader would surely be seeking absolution.

  Not so.

  Maybe some men weren’t meant to be released from guilt or obligation. Maybe some couldn’t bear the sacrament of penance for sins they saw as necessary. Or maybe there were one or two simply beyond acquittal or forgiveness. Just like the lion would never make a watchdog – not distinguishing between friend and enemy, human and animal, hating every thing. All the time roaring that urgent, meaty need.

  Air!

  Breathing the trees, the winter grass, the old, cold, quartzite breath of rocks. Northerly breeze in his moustache whisking away lion, monkey, camel, horses, smoke, music, whisky, laughter, hoofprints, youth, ancient familiar whiffs of ammonia, cartridges and pistol barrels, dying pleadings and bodily whimperings. Breeze dry as a magistrate’s eye. Breeze maybe too thick to hear a train through! There was some winter plant here smelled like semen. The scent on the verandah was more a taste, like yeast and hops and salt, and there was another female smell like warm gunmetal and blood in the mouth. In the air, the sound of some invisible tinkling nightbird and the creak of frost-chilled wood and rock. Too cool for crickets but a mad frog somewhere nearby answered the concertina.

  He can taste their secret in the northerly wind, yes. Her impossibility. No names.

  Mrs C.

  THIS IS how she introduces herself: ‘Good afternoon, would you come and hold my horse’s thing?’

  The lady loves the chase, and is famous in the district for hunting on this dark bay stallion. She rides Lord Byron so hard over such long distances that sometimes he doesn’t have time to piss. When she makes her request it’s a Monday afternoon – I’m employed shaping foundation stones – and Lord Byron’s been holding on since Saturday’s hunt.

  This time his bladder’s paralysed from the strain. Looks to me like colic, only worse. Two stablehands are struggling to hold him. He’s groaning and slick with sweat, sighing, kicking at his swollen belly, peering with a longing, uneasy expression at his flanks.

  This lady pushes her brown hair from her eyes, rolls up her sleeve, oils her arm and plunges up into Lord Byron’s sheath. He’s well retracted from pain and nerves. She frowns. ‘Got it,’ she says, and, grunting, hauls it all out and drops it across my hands.

  ‘Hold on,’ she tells me.

  And then the boys and I all need to hold on very hard. Lord Byron trembles and skitters and lurches us back and forth across the paddock because she’s got this veterinarian’s metal catheter, Jesus, it must be five feet long, pointed at the business end, and she oils it too, and grabs him, pushes it inside and forwards and threads it ever upwards.

  A terrible shiver overcomes Lord Byron. Suddenly we’re up to our shins, nearly floating in the downpour, and shivering almost as much as him.

  ‘There,’ says Mrs C. ‘Watch your boots.’

  A SHOUT breaks his trance. They’re urgently calling him back inside. His heart spears into his gullet in anticipation of something. What? The worst news. But this spasm is only the shock of remembering something: he kills people.

  Then how come his prisoners’ faces smile at the killer like courtiers?

  And the cause of this noisy crisis? Old Martin Cherry, the roustabout and axe-sharpener, wants to show him his black cockatoo! This bird is supposed to always say, to have never since it was an egg until this second refrained from saying, ‘Bail up, you bastards, I’m Ned Kelly!’ So Martin and his drunken mates allege. So now, as if he had nothing better to do, he finds himself sitting in the parlour’s best armchair admiring a tattered old cockatoo and gracing it with a bishop’s smile. And its wrinkled crocodile eyes glare sideways through him as if he were its worst enemy on earth.

  It refuses to speak. ‘Give it some brandy!’ orders Ann Jones. Someone pushes a glass under
the bird’s head; it blinks at the fumes, pokes in a tentative grey tongue, raises its crest pugnaciously, lowers it again, glances away, still says nothing human.

  Time is standing still. All around him crowd these blurry, nodding, eager-to-please faces. Grubby children, too: Dick and Emma Reardon’s five kids. Waiting for the cockatoo’s momentous declaration, he’s nodding too and slipping back into his trance. Within seconds he’s left the fuggy parlour and the cockatoo’s audience for the company of Kennedy, Scanlon, even Lonigan, all of them attending their own Requiem Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral. The policemen sit Irish-cheeked and pomaded in the front pew alongside him as well as lying waxy-stiff in their coffins. Oh, the sweet incense and the serious spit and polish! Kennedy and Scanlon are solemn in their dress uniforms and new posthumous medals but that creature Lonigan leans across to him, eyes his crotch and winks.

  ‘Ned! Ned!’ Mrs Jones is beaming brandy fumes at him. ‘Say hello to your namesake! Give him a walnut!’

  Now Kennedy and Scanlon get to their feet at Stringybark Creek, dust off their pants, stretch, wipe scabs from their faces, click tongues for their horses, shake hands with him. Black cockatoos rise like shrieking stormclouds from the stringybarks as the policemen trot off cheerfully. ‘That was a good one, Ned. You had us there, you old bastard,’ etc. And with crisp manly salutes, canter off to their families.

  Kee-ah, kee-ah. The loudest wailing cry he’s ever heard. It’s his namesake screaming.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Jones, make it a double.’ He tosses down the brandy, blinks and laughs at something private. Jesus, he forgot. It couldn’t be St Pat’s. He’s read in the Argus that Kennedy’d had Baptist rites.

  What’s this in his other hand? Walnut shells? Jesus Christ. ‘Give me another, Mrs Jones. I’ll have what the bird’s having.’

  Can’t bear the guilt of her in Pentridge – knowing the hard bluestone damp, the cold carbolic stink, her dark weevily loneliness.

  At least the Yank can’t get at her there. No passing trooper, drover, neighbour, hawker, miner, uncle, cousin, husband drunkenly chasing her, heaving his dinner at the wall, waving shotguns, horsewhips, cursing, threatening, burning the house down if she says no.

  A notorious mother, that’s a thing.

  That’s my mother you’re doing that to.

  The American twenty years younger than her presses his body against hers. Bumps her right there in front of us. Look away, look out the door, look back, he’s still doing it, pressing. She’s not moving. Her hand on his arm nonchalantly stroking hairs has blood around the nails from gutting rabbits. She won’t look at any of us.

  A string of entrails slithers to the floor and Dan’s dog leaps in one fast slurp and gulp.

  On sullen nights I start awake. The squeaking bed, the oaths and grunts, the shock of a stranger’s vowels, and whining kids amid the slops, the slaps, the creaks and free-for-all – all overhung with waves of rum – and now someone’s pissing in the pot. Romance.

  You’re my mother he’s doing that to.

  Keep the gutting knife under your pillow. Do it!

  Ladies and gentlemen – thank you, thank you – I’ve been asked to relate how I got started in my outlaw ways. Young John Jones over there asked me that very question; only a boy, so you can’t blame him for his ignorance. Johnny, keep out of the sherry and listen. You might learn something.

  Well, they locked up my mother, didn’t they?

  Police’s version has me evil from the start, born into a bad-blooded family on both sides, to be stamped out like rabbits, like some sort of plague. They tut-tut about my riding with Harry Power the bushranger at fourteen and holding up the squatter McBean. And the fight with the Chinaman named Ah – pardon me, ladies – Fook. Couldn’t make those charges stick but they went on my record just the same.

  But, don’t laugh, it was a pair of calf’s – excuse me again – testicles that first landed me in gaol. Got me six months in Beechworth, truly.

  This summer day I’m with Ben Gould and my uncle castrating calves when Gould suddenly wraps up one prize set in a quickly scrawled note which says Try these instead. He just tells me, ‘Here, give these to that old woman Jeremiah McCormack.’

  Everyone’s in that odd, sour mood that castrating brings on. Also a bit edgy in the heat, and blood-speckled. I’m still fourteen, feeling my oats, more muscle than brains then. There’d been some disagreement earlier over us borrowing one of McCormack’s horses. Well, I ride up and hand over the parcel. And I’m so dozy I stick around. McCormack starts spitting chips, says he can welt me or any of my breed. Throws the balls splashing in my face. I’m jumping off to accept the challenge when his wife whacks my horse in the flank with an ox bone. The horse jumps forward and my fist comes into collision with McCormack’s nose and causes him to lose his equilibrium.

  I didn’t twig the real thing that Gould was needling him about, that the McCormacks were childless, that McCormack couldn’t do his marital duty. Wonder how many of these other scars and cranium dents I owe to raucous misunderstandings and blissful ignorance.

  No, really, it’s no joke. Disorderly conduct, plus obscene behaviour. A serious affair. It brought me to the attention of that avid reader of the Police Gazette, Senior Constable Hall. You know how the Gazette summed me up? ‘Subject to riding horses.’ How’s that for an epitaph?

  Thank you, thank you.

  ROBBING THE first bank is like the silkiest good dream. Hovering above myself, watching me doing it, hearing this half-stranger’s sharp voice ring out. Me but not me inside, here and there but not entirely there or here. There I am pointing the bloody gun and giving the orders. Here I am looking into the worst fears realised in those clerkish eyes.

  There I am – hello! – suddenly the man in charge of Death and Money.

  Naturally, the real pleasure’s in the handing over of the cash. There’s no neater transaction – I love it. They hand all their money to me; I take all their money from them. Hmm. Would they jump to it quite so briskly if I weren’t the country’s most famous killer? And the dream is suddenly complete. Nothing goes sour, like in a real sleeping dream. No disappointing tricks – the money doesn’t turn to air or turds or feathers in my hand. I take the lot. I heft the bags. Yep, the cash is absolutely there. Take a look: the notes are stacked; the coins are heavy, round and perfect; no missing chunks, no blue uniform (no Fitzpatrick!) looming in the corner to blast my hopes. New notes, soft chamois bags of gold dust. And I don’t say no to worn notes either, good assay samples, title deeds, promissory notes, mortgages, anything sealed or signed or stamped with Her Majesty’s porky profile; it’s all bank business, embossed by the other side, rich people’s stratagems.

  So – make a bonfire of the ledgers and the poor men’s debts and canter off with the rest, these swollen bags of luck. I took a risk. Let the grapevine spread the word: yes, I’ve pulled off this coup. And the other boys weren’t bad either.

  Feels right for once. Officer in charge of retribution, the official bogeyman. Bursting from my cave, storming down from the grim and barren ranges, throwing lightning bolts – Woo-woo! – through the rainbow and onto the sunny plains. I’m the wearer of the green and gold and no complaints. No more chasing the centaur’s shadow. I’m it. I am it. Oh, Jesus, banks are fun.

  The papers said Joe and Dan and Steve and me were always a gang but that’s not true. We got stuck with each other at the killings and had to quickly get organised.

  Before then Aaron was a friend. I was really closer to my next brother Jim than to young Dan. The gang could easily have had Aaron, Jim, my cousin Tom Lloyd Junior and Wild Wright as well. They just weren’t there at that moment. Jim was shearing in the Riverina, Tom was scouting the police for us a mile north. Aaron, well …

  We were all selectors’ kids growing up around the town of Greta. We were just acquaintances – the Greta Mob. Once we’d made a name we were promoted by the police and papers to Gang. But kindred spirits was all we were – mostly Catholic boys
and girls and brothers-in-law and people’s sisters and mothers and grandads. Everyone bar the police, the squatters and the Chinese diggers. They were all their own gangs. You can’t tell me the police aren’t a gang! The squatters!

  First awake some mornings, I gaze at the ruffled, sleeping heads of – so the Age and Argus reckon – the country’s, the Empire’s, greatest scourge. That mouth-breather Dan, dribbling in his sleep, looks thirteen or less, and his downy cheek when he wakes – from lying on his saddlebag – stays tattooed with his pillow’s stitching well into the afternoon. Steve, fluffier-faced, a few orange bristles on his chin, snores softly with one eye eerily half open, a wary cub, a jacket of his father’s wound around him as a comfort. Soon these two’ll be cackling around the fire, elbowing each other, punching arms, pinching food, preparing for another day of continuous eating, whistling, spitting, smoking, competing with their guns and farts and dicks – and occasionally, suddenly, remembering to be serious and responsible outlaws.

  In their overheated way it was the papers that defined us, presented us as sure things, as blocks of type. And when they declare you to be so-and-so, then you become it. Strange the way they make you famous or notorious before you are – and then you are in spades.

  Until the killings, even Dan and me we weren’t that organised. Weren’t as smart as they claimed we were and then savagely attacked us for becoming. We took things as they came, drank and played the goat too much. But I guess we four were always flash. The best riders and shooters ended up together. And we had the steel of grudge; we were the Micks who hit back twice as hard. I guess we chose ourselves, the ones with umbrage. And we did get smart, didn’t we?

  We chose Aaron too. Make no mistake, he was good at it, seemed well worth choosing. Maybe even worth the second chance we gave him. Rode well, fought well and told a better joke than me. Had more looks and charm than all of us, except maybe for Joe.