The Following Read Online Free Page A

Swampland Block.
    T IM A TKINSON WAS LAME AFTER contracting infantile paralysis as a child, and he jerked his body along at close to a running pace with crutches, iron hoops bound in padded leather supporting his upper arms.
    When Tim Atkinson and Marcus Friendly rambled Railway Town streets, arguing their points of view like Socrates and Plato, Marx and Engels, or, more likely – as Marcus said – like Mutt and Jeff spouting pitiful nonsense, Tim gleamed with sweat over the hardship of his limbs but never admitted the impediment.
    This was the life in the years after Marcus came in from New Killarney and his grandfather’s wasteful care.
    Marcus was like a son to the Atkinsons, a brother to Tim. ‘The Catholic cuckoo in our Baptist nest,’ said Barney Atkinson, a roster clerk in the railway service who declared Marcus’s grandfather the crustiest old miser to ever walk this blessed earth.
    Marcus and Tim shared a bedroom until they were eighteen, when Tim was given the sleep-out on the north-side verandah and Marcus the sleep-out on the south. From then on they lived the lives of men – working, eating, thinking, sleeping, waking, working.
    Tim made Marcus a promise. Whatever happened in their lives he would stick by him. ‘That goes both ways,’ said Marcus, and they shook on it.
    Marcus could go for a while without mentioning Luana and Pearl, then be fired into wondering what the two were up to since the last time he’d had a letter or heard news of them through the Flying Gang. Tim wondered if he would ever meet them. Talking about Pearl, Marcus’s voice thickened, his words slowed, his eyes took on the look of a lover.
    ‘Brother,’ said Marcus. ‘You ought to see them. They are trouble together. Batting blokes off, giving them a taste of their tongues. Pearl does it with laughter, right into their faces. Luana’s a spitfire. The bloke who takes her on better know what he’s in for.’
    Then one day Marcus said, ‘Luana does the most beautiful, intricate needlework you could ever clap eyes on.’
    The picture he gave, of Luana sitting on a stool wearing trochus-shell buttons on a cotton dress falling open, in the door of a tent with a pressure lamp throwing light on her needlework, inflamed Tim’s thinking as he pictured someone he’d never met or knew anything about. Marcus summoned from the trackside tents a life of grab and get. Everything Marcus knew, Tim knew just as well, yet never yet had the taste of it.
    Twist and thrust, bend and twirl, was the mode forced on Tim. His upper body was muscled like Don Athaldo’s of Condobolin, his lower limbs disobedient. Along, but not up, was his destiny. He could never get over fences or up steep slopes the way Marcus could. While Marcus played rugby Tim patrolled the sidelines, giving advice to the ref, agile as a swamp wallaby.
    Heckled by the crowd for getting in the way, Tim spun around to impress a smile on a hostile bunch. ‘
Voil
à
!
’
    One day he would show them. But that smile was not so gallantly scornful as he wished. He was always on the lookout for one in particular. Luana. He wondered if he would know her if he met her. Luana! Out of nothing he stood up for her against slanders. He asked himself what love was, what love’s power was, when it roused a bloke’s feelings from mystical mists in the sandstone cuttings and two girls running through bracken fern.
    Bob Dease’s trike derailed on the Pinch the year Marcus left New Killarney, throwing Bob and his billy cans, crowbars and oily wrenches into a nest of low-growing blackberries. Disciplined and demoted for reckless use of Crown property, Bob was sent out West. The family went with him, the Milburns followed. They lived in a camp near Tottenham now. The cockatoo Fiver circled the claypans and mulga flats, coming in at night to a cage. Tim had leisure for this hot-eyed reading when Marcus was away, and time to put the letters back. The girls were not married, he learned, but Luana had a