The Following Read Online Free Page B

boy to a man named Maguire, a union outcast, a miner who deserted her for a greater cause – direct industrial action, anarcho-syndicalism and death to parliamentary notions.
    Lone voices in the bush had the power of prophets with their own words megaphoned back at them. Tim read Pearl’s letter on Marcus’s dresser. Luana had some of Maguire’s fever in her. Luana. She asked for nothing, wrote Pearl. Every Christmas the Milburns travelled to the Swampland Block, their paradise and recompense. Tim in his mind went with them, hovering over them.
    ‘She asks for nothing,’ he thought. ‘What could I give her?’
    Everything, was the answer, but he would have to wait, as people did who had ideas about changing the world and made preparation. Tim’s range was modest by a revolutionary’s standard. It stretched only as far as taking hold of Luana, whispering in her ear, talking of what his love could offer. Safety, was what he’d tell her. Safety.
    Tim and Marcus led separate working lives. Marcus was promoted from engine cleaner to fireman in the railway service and often away, staying in barracks at Eveleigh, Dubbo, Goulburn or Murrumburrah-Harden on the Southern Line. Tim worked as a typesetter at
The Whistle
, never getting away much at all.
    Both paid board at home, and every time they won a wage increase they paid more. Mrs Atkinson had known the mother Marcus never knew. From her, Mrs A., Marcus gained his fullest sense of that dependence of heart in one person, all that a mother could give. But he could never quite reach the feeling altogether.
    Mrs Atkinson had loved to dance as a girl, but she and Barney had forsworn the pleasure. Dancing was the greatest perfection denied to Tim, though he tried and made progress, but not much, and so Marcus said he didn’t need dancing either. If he wanted someone he’d do his best with palaver.
    On Saturday nights socialism was the topic of those who stood around in the half-dark listening to the thump of the piano, the paddle of soft shoes on the waxed Town Hall dance floor.
    Marcus leaned on the fence, enjoying a supper passed to him by Aileen Harris, the Anglican canon’s daughter. He kept his eye on her through the kitchen window while drinking tea, eating pound cake, smoking shag tobacco and talking about the workingman’s ways of improvement by thrusting his left fist into his right-hand palm, a few emphatically minded blokes and young women pressing around him.
    At the end of the evening when Miss Harris came out, bunching her apron in her hands, Marcus pulled a length of cord from his pocket and tied a few knots, hitches and bends for amusement. The Whatnot Knot and the Tom Fool Knot and various cats’ cradles – ‘Like visions in a delirium!’ Miss Harris shrieked.
    Her piled red hair and moon-white skin were elements of Marcus’s whim to get to know her better, but without putting a foot wrong. She came from the class that had swallowed the cream of an education. She had travelled to the old country with her father following the death of her mother when she was sixteen, returning with a plum in the mouth and strong opinions, but she held back from them, allowing Marcus his forum.
    ‘My father would put you right,’ was all she allowed herself.
    T IM AND M ARCUS HAD CLASSES at the School of Arts, Marcus studying for his fireman’s and engine driver’s tickets, Tim for his printer’s ticket and improving his written English for the day when he’d move to the editorial desk and lash out with words of his own, expressions more heated than those penned by
The Whistle
’s editor, he swore, that he was obliged to set in type.
    On Thursday nights the friends shared a bench in a class of Dr Walter Kitchen, the littérateur who wrote in
The Whistle
under the name ‘Mercurius Rusticus’. They chewed through Shakespeare, Johnson, Macaulay and Carlyle, Gibbon, Scott and Shaw. Kitchen took a liking to Marcus and looked to Tim as a lesser hope, even as Tim was