The Following by Roger McDonald Page A

her boy, Bub, so tightly around the ribcage he could barely breathe.
    Marcus saw the train drover, Tarbett, busy with the navvies getting on with the bitter work. The attention Tarbett gave to the job was unlike anything Marcus knew of the unctuous man, and he felt there was hope in the world, although he himself was denied it.
    At the cemetery plot you never saw men dig six feet down the way those navvies did when they dug the grave holes, square-sided as a tool chest, in the clay.
    If Pearl had been born in the years before the Deases and Milburns ever knew the meaning of a siding, a trestle bridge, a high embankment or a spark-throwing engine passing in the night, she would not have been charmed – none of this would have happened. She would still be alive. But Pearl, you were sorry for anyone who hadn’t lived to the end of a pair of rails running through the bush.
    Marcus gathered Ron Kristiansen’s effects and looked in Ron’s diary, as he must now, to protect the living, to find a letter from Luana in which he read a declaration of Wobbly intent.
    Marcus burned Luana’s letter in the firebox while the engine stood on the rails – brakes locked, firebox open. Ron’s diary and Luana’s dangerous intentions burned sheet by curling sheet as Marcus gulped the scorched air.
    Luana clutched Bub and asked
why
of this boy, so burdening him with the question that only an act of wilful destruction, in New Guinea, years later as a soldier in World War Two, would set Bub Maguire, son of a hanged man, free.
    The One Big Union that Maguire had preached as violently as possible and Luana and Ron Kristiansen had followed as a catechism was ash in the firebox flames. Luana barely had Bub now. She barely had sanity.
    The mourners set off for the bush graves set away from each other as they still are, tended in remembrance, although not for always, on the dry ground with funereal wattles blooming each August.
    The cockatoo Fiver did not come back to his cage and Bob Dease said that if he got hold of that bird he would wring its neck for pity.
    C ARE OF THE BIRD PASSED to Kenneth Tarbett, who took Fiver to Bathurst, and when Luana came there to live he carried the cockatoo over to her in its cage, to the weatherboard cottage in the poorer part of town that he so despised because he’d been born there. He’d taught Fiver to say, ‘Gimme a billycan of beer,’ ‘Who’s for a smoko, boss?’ and ‘Marcus Friendly’s the Railways Commissioner.’
    No surprise whose line that was.
    Aileen Harris had learned that she hardly knew who she dealt with, when she’d thought of Marcus as a marriage prospect. She told her dear friends her news, that Kenneth Tarbett was the most thoughtful and considerate young man she had ever met, and how devotedly he loved her.
    I T WAS A LONG TIME before Tim met Luana. He’d almost given up on it, but not quite, for he returned to his hot run of thoughts when he least expected.
    He was driving a rented sulky. A woman and a burly boy sat in the shade of a tree. The boy flicked pebbles at the horse.
    What a surreptitious little bastard
, thought Tim.
    The woman had a basket with shreds and patches of fabric spilling out the top. A sewing basket. She was a seamstress, going from house to house, stuck with a kid.
    Tim still did not think, though:
Luana
.
    Though he did think his heart might break if she didn’t meet his eye when he spoke to her.
    ‘A lift, mother?’ he offered.
    She ducked her head, scorning a man’s interest disguised as kindness, as she must have thought. Gathering her basket, brushing her dress clean of twigs and dirt, she took the boy by the hand.
    ‘No, thank you, mister. We can walk,’ she said, and they set off. Tim gave the reins a flick and they went along side by side – woman, boy, horse and sulky. She was limping. The boy kicked stones ahead of her. She was limping and her basket was heavy. It was a hot day.
    She can take me or leave me
, thought Tim,
but she won’t