Paper Daisies Read Online Free Page B

beyond me. A good match. Joyfulness. He was such a joyful child.
    Rain remains incessant …
    Not a cloud in the sky today. I stare into the sky until I can no longer see.
    Time is marked by the opening and closing of the front door. The undertaker and his assistant come and go, taking her away with them. Then comes Reverend Ainsley, the new vicar, whom I don’t really know, so I don’t move from Mama’s desk to greet him. Then a cohort of the Queensland Parliament arrives – the hardest boiled Protectionist cohort. I hear their voices, possibly half-a-dozen of them. ‘John, John, bad luck. So sorry to hear about Ellie, old man. So sorry.’ And that dispensed with, the commiserations quickly fall to what will be the certain death of the colony after the first of January, when the newly formed Commonwealth conspiracy of southerners will rob Queensland of its trade tariffs and its Kanaka slave labour force. I can’t hear Pater’s responses; perhaps that’s my imagination. He is never quiet on such issues: he is the Minister of Agriculture, self-proclaimed despot of Central Queensland, and you’ve never heard hypocrisy until you’ve heard John Wilberry decrying the injustices of the proposed Immigration Restriction Act. How else do you break a shearers’ strike unless you can bring in black slaves?
    Their voices rise, the drone of massive, overgrown wasps. ‘What is this Australia for?’ I hear one above the rest. ‘We will never agree on taxation rates – we can’t even agree on a standard railway gauge. The only state that we will become is one which is destroyed. We’re still getting back up from the collapse of ’93. It is insanity.’
    Insanity. Whose fault was the collapse of ’93? Melbourne bankers, who have only one goal in mind: to ruin Queensland, by withdrawing capital, provoking all manner of strikes, which only in turn encourage the nuisance that is the Labor Party, and push up the cost of wages. Whereas in God’s country, shearers and stockmen and canecutters should work for free, because they are so bloody privileged to be allowed to be Queenslanders at all, and any such thing as a federal bank is satanic. I can’t sit here a moment more. I shall go out to the greenhouse; I shall look over Mama’s trays of seeds.
    â€˜Ben.’ I am stopped halfway across the back verandah. ‘Benjamin, isn’t it? Sorry to hear about your mother. The worst.’ My eyes are blinded looking back into the shade; I see the shape of the head, bald, and a voice I vaguely recognise, now asking me: ‘Still at the roses and all that?’
    â€˜What?’ Roses? For a second I don’t understand what he’s referring to, as I’m not particularly interested in roses, and then when I do understand him, when I hear the trace of mockery, I walk away, into the greenhouse, and I shut the door behind me.
    â€˜Ben – Ben, old matey.’ I hear Cos, my old matey, at the window. Cosmo Thompson. My oldest friend. Bothered to turn up, good on him. But by now I can’t speak at all. I am flicking through Mama’s packets of seeds: carnations, coreopsis, cornflower … ‘Come round when you’re ready,’ he says. ‘We’ll get nicely schnigged.’
    I nod. Yes, I will want to get nicely, arselessly drunk soon. After the funeral.
    One hour folds into the next until the sun is rising again and I am dragging on a suit. I am not much a part of the day; it’s all more of the same, but with Protectionist party wives, and some Labor members of the Legislative Assembly, good on them for bothering. Faces, hats. Shaking hands I barely touch. I have more to say to the elatum in the brass vases. I stare at the casket: willow wood and silver plate; she’d have liked the wreath: Mrs Farenall designed it, she and Mama were friends, laughing over teacups and dividing boat orchids for winter. Cos