Time's Long Ruin: A novel

By Stephen Orr

Nine-year-old Henry Page is a club-footed, deep-thinking loner, spending his summer holidays reading, roaming the melting streets of his suburb, playing with his best friend Janice and her younger brother and sister. Then one day Janice asks Henry to spend the day at the beach with them. He declines, a decision that will stay with him forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wakefield Press Pty Ltd
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781862549746

Book preview

Wakefield Press

Time’s Long Ruin

Stephen Orr’s first novel, Attempts to Draw Jesus, described the disappearance of two jackaroos in the Great Sandy Desert in 1987. His second published work, Hill of Grace, was a study of delusion and disappointment in a 1950s religious cult. His short fiction has been widely published in journals and magazines. He works as a high school teacher in Adelaide.

25n1

A Novel

STEPHEN ORR

9781862549746_0004_001

Wakefield Press

1 The Parade West

Kent Town

South Australia 5067

First published 2010

This edition published 2011

Copyright Stephen Orr, 2010

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author:                   Orr, Stephen, 1967–    .

Title:                       Time’s long ruin/Stephen Orr.

ISBN:                      978 1 86254 974 6 (epub).

Dewey Number:     A823.4

9781862549746_0005_001

Contents

Part 1

— —

Part 2

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait

    at the end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

– Walt Whitman

That all should change to ghost and glance and gleam,

And so transmuted stand beyond all change,

And we be poised between the unmoving dream

And the sole moving moment – this is strange.

Past all contrivance, word, or image, or sound,

Or silence, to express, that we who fall

Through time’s long ruin should weave this phantom ground

And in its ghostly borders gather all.

There incorruptible the child plays still

The lover waits beside the trysting tree

The good hour spans its heaven, and the ill,

Rapt in their silent immortality.

As in commemoration of a day

That having been can never pass away.

– Edwin Muir

For never was I not, nor thou, nor these kings;

Nor will any of us cease to be hereafter.

– Bhagavad-Gita

PART ONE

Chapter One

The streets of Croydon are long, washed with light on long Saturday afternoons, smelling of freshly cut grass and jasmine, the air dry, venting over-ripe compost and the third race from Cheltenham. Smelling of candied almonds and Mr Hessian’s chicken shit, piled in heaps in his backyard. Looking like the world had ended, or at least descended into a hibernation of half-sleep, of tea cosies to be crocheted and Advertiser obituaries to be re-read. Sounding of children dragging sticks along a corrugated-iron fence and someone laughing so hard they start coughing, and then someone else calling for Jack to come in for a haircut.

The streets of Croydon are wide. Hot and cracking. Starting at Thomas Street (my street) and narrowing as they head west towards the factories of Kilkenny. Streets like spines, sprung with ribs named Ellen Street and Croydon Avenue. Kept long and straighter still by power lines hanging heavily from Stobie poles like lights on an overloaded Christmas tree.

When I was five I used to think it would take an hour to walk the length of Harriet Street (although it actually takes ten minutes). I liked to think that when you got to the end you’d just drop off the edge of the world. I imagined maps, drawn in gold and red ochre inks on vellum, decorated with sailors falling into the mouths of dragons, and Mrs Brooks, the infant teacher. I knew this wasn’t actually true. For one, Dad had a world globe and he’d spend hours showing me where the pyramids and the Greek islands were – and anyway, how had God crammed a whole world of beaches, car factories and New Zealand holidays into Croydon?

I’ve lived my whole life at number seven Thomas Street – across the road from Con and Rosa Pedavoli and their healing tree, next door to Kazz and Ron Houseman on one side and the Rileys on the other, at 7A. All of them now dead or gone, leaving me alone in the house I’ve lived in for fifty-four years. Walking up and down a hallway my parents carpeted with a rich red Berber, over floorboards that haven’t smelt air since 1956, which creak in exactly the same spot every time I go to make a cup of tea or take a pee.

I remember our home being something special. I remember the day Dad removed the old wooden windows. Ron Wells the butcher came over to help him put in a set of brand-new aluminium ones that didn’t quite fit and had to be packed with timber wedges. People stood on the footpath staring through our rampant iceberg roses.

‘Jesus, he’ll never have to paint again,’ they said, and pretty soon aluminium windows were appearing all over Croydon.

Our house was built in 1910. Twelve and a half foot ceilings and a fireplace in every room. After buying the house in 1950 the first thing my father did was to block the chimneys and put a gas heater in every fireplace. Proper job. Mr Wells helped him with the flues and gas lines, and the laying of bricks in rows that never looked straight. That’s how it was done back then. No point paying someone when you could do it yourself.

We had a garden full of foxgloves and clivia, dissected with paths that were variously sawdust, gravel and weak concrete that eventually broke up. A few years ago I dug it all up and piled it in a corner of the backyard. Eventually I’ll find a use for it. In time the path went muddy and weedy and then the weeds gave up and died off anyway. By then the asparagus fern and pittosporums were dead. But the aggies and clivias are still going, just. Hard bastards. That’s why everyone used to plant them. Now people have got silver birches and box hedge they trim every three days with a little plug-in number from Kmart.

Like most homes in Croydon ours has four rooms and a hallway, and attached to the back wall, a kitchen and a laundry under a sloping roof. My father refused to call this a lean-to. A lean-to was something the pioneers had.

My room is at the front, looking out on Thomas Street. It’s the same room and the same bed I’ve slept in since my mother and father brought me home from hospital in January 1951. There was never a cot – just a wall on one side and a guardrail made from salvaged window wood on the other. A single globe hangs from the high ceiling and there is a wardrobe with a door missing (which I never found or had explained). This is the room in which my mother, Ellen Judith Page, laid me, Henry, the great disappointment of her life, on a stinking hot day. As she looked at my twisted foot and sighed (perhaps), she whispered to Dad, ‘You can get up to him.’

My mother had a club foot. When she married Dad she told him, as long as you never want children . . . I’d never put anyone through this. That is, her left foot, twisted inwards at an angle of thirty degrees.

Fine, my father replied, thinking he’d talk her around later.

So Dad got talking to Doctor Gunn, and our proper doctor, Doctor John, and the doctor who did the physicals for the police, and any other doctor, physio or coroner he came across in his work as a copper. And they all told him (he told me years later) that club foot couldn’t be passed on. It just happened: one in a million. He explained this to Mum and the next thing you know she’s pregnant. Obviously I don’t know the exact details, and maybe it doesn’t matter, but for years after she would always blame him for having ‘no idea about anything’, and he’d tell her to grow up, and off they’d go with their shouting.

I have a mental picture of the delivery suite at Calvary hospital. It’s hot. I can hear fan blades turning slowly and see nurses in starchy aprons wiping sweat from their foreheads. I can smell bleach, hair oil and a distant roast leg blowing in through rusted flywire speckled with blowies. I can see the child, Henry Page, lying on a towel, and the doctor’s expression, and then Mum looking at him. ‘What is it?’

As the chatter of a few nurses falls silent. As Dad comes around to look at me more closely.

As Mum repeats, ‘What, what is it?’

It’s not like I was born without an arm, or Mongoloid, or covered in a strawberry birthmark. It was just my foot, curving inward. What was she worried about? That the rest of my body might follow, contort, scrunch into a ball? That my mind might turn inward, losing its ability to communicate? That I might become some sort of spastic that she’d have to hide away for the rest of eternity, feeding me custard and wiping my arse as the sounds of normal children playing chasey or cricket drifted in the window?

I still don’t know.

So there’s me. Wrapped in a blanket despite the heat. In the arms of a nun. Being presented to my mother, who turns her head away. Who looks at my father and then stares down at the lino floor, worn thin in the same places by doctors and nurses bringing children into the world.

Back to Thomas Street, a few days later. I’m imagining it’s night, three or four in the morning, and I’m in nothing but a singlet and nappy. Dad holds me and sits in a rocking chair. There’s a light breeze coming in the window and I can hear it rustling the leaves of Con and Rosa’s healing tree. I can also hear a cart unloading in Elizabeth Street. Maybe spuds for Ted Bilston’s Half-Case Fruit Shop. Then the sound of a horse moving about, but being steadied. A hush: the last of yesterday’s heat rising into a Sputnik sky. A magpie squawking. The smell of coal smoke. Yes, you think I can’t remember, but I can. I can remember everything. I can remember my dad whispering, ‘How was I to know?’ and then singing:

Bring back, bring back, bring back my love o’er the sea,

Bring back, bring back, bring back my bonnie to me.

And then he lays me on my bed and goes in to Mum. She is lying awake. I can hear them talk. Again he tells her the name of the doctors, and where they’ve worked, and what universities they went to. And then he says, ‘He’s got the bluest eyes,’ and she replies, ‘And mousy hair . . . did you have mousy hair?’

‘Oh yes, but it didn’t last long.’

And then I go back to sleep, still hungry.

My story – the story of the Pages and the Rileys, of Con and Rosa Pedavoli and Mr Hessian the widower, of Adolf Eichmann and the rag and bone man – begins on New Year’s day, 1960. This is the first fragment of the story I remember. A fragment like a hundred others from the summer of 1960. A fragment I intend to recall faithfully – although if I do add and subtract a bit here and there, change the painted side of a deli from Weet-Bix to cough drops, make a sunny day overcast or give a neighbour a limp he never had, have someone die of cancer instead of a stroke – please forgive me.

We’re in the Rileys’ backyard. There’s no fence between our yard and theirs, just a long flower bed filled with pansies and lisianthus, bisected by a paved path shaded by an arbour overgrown with bougainvillea and wisteria, woven together in a curtain of colour and smell. It’s nearly lunchtime and I am chasing the Riley kids around the old trees in their yard. Someone catches me and I hide my face and count to a hundred. The Riley kids scatter, run around, squeal and eventually hide in the same spots they did last time.

Gavin, the youngest, hides behind his dad’s shed.

Bill Riley, a linen salesman, always said that us kids should never go anywhere near his shed. But one day we found the door swinging open. Strange. It was usually secured with four padlocks and there were steel bars on the window. We went inside and found the walls lined with shelves. Each shelf was packed full of new linen, still wrapped: sheets, pillowcases, tea towels, you name it. Later that night, when I told Dad what we’d found, he said that was where Mr Riley kept his samples.

‘Don’t they have a warehouse?’ I asked.

‘No. What were you doing in there anyway?’

‘The door was open.’

‘He told you to stay out,’ Dad shouted, leaning forward and threatening me with his beer.

‘But . . .’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sat back in his chair and opened his paper. ‘And don’t say anything to anyone at school.’

‘Why?’

‘Things get around.’

That was adult logic. Why would it matter if other people knew what was in Mr Riley’s shed? Anyway, I wasn’t stupid, I knew. Still, I always found it curious why my dad, a copper since he left school and a detective since 1955, was never too concerned.

That’s how neighbourhoods were back then. Now I don’t know most of the folks in Thomas Street. Now I’ve got a ballet dancer next door. He knocked down the Rileys’ trees and put in a pool. Hardly says a word. Wears his hair in a perm and lives with his younger brother.

Anyway, there’s Gavin, hiding behind his dad’s shed. He’s peeling flakes of paint off the old iron: grey, and under that green, and brown, and more grey – decades of cheap (or souvenired) paint applied in a thick icing to stop rust. A skin that burns and peels in the sun as the shed’s wooden frame sags and the whole thing sways in the breeze. The roofing letting in rain. Mr Riley covering his blankets and lace tablecloths with a tarp.

Gavin is tall for his age, nearly up to my shoulders. He sits smiling and grinning as I start to search. ‘Coming, ready or not.’ I see him, but pretend not to. He’s squeezed himself into a ball of pyjama pants, rubber boots and a fresh white linen shirt with the pins still in it, blowing around him like the torn sails of the Marie Celeste.

I stop to take a wedge of watermelon from the table and my mother pretends to smack my fingers. She’s smiling, laughing, adjusting her bra strap under a cotton frock my father thinks shows too much skin.

‘You’re not wearing that,’ he’d said, standing in our hallway.

‘Why not?’ Mum asked.

‘You’ll burn.’

‘I will not.’ She stopped. ‘This cost me a lot of money, Bob, I need to wear it before I’m too fat.’

‘Fat?’

She was struggling to pull the frock down over her bum. ‘It happens at my age.’

I dropped the watermelon and licked my fingers.

‘Let him have it,’ Bill Riley said, picking up his ukulele. ‘You’re a long time dead.’

‘He can wait,’ Mum said.

‘Let him go,’ Dad replied.

Mum looked at him. I looked at all the adults in turn. Mr Riley just shrugged and started to strum his ukulele.

Lonely days are gone

Twilight sings his song

All the happiness that used to be . . .

Next thing I knew he was kneeling on the ground at his wife’s feet. Liz Riley laughed and pushed him away. He toppled over, rolled onto his back, but just kept playing and singing:

Soon my eyes will close

Soon I’ll find repose

And in dreams you’re always near to me . . .

‘Where am I?’ Gavin called out from behind the shed.

‘Coming,’ I replied, grabbing the watermelon and shuffling off in the wrong direction.

Janice Riley jumped out from behind the water tank. ‘Hi, Henry.’

She screamed and ran off down the driveway. I went after her but she knew the deal. Go easy on Henry. She pretended to trip over and sprain her ankle; then she sat on the concrete, holding it, moaning, ‘Oh no, what are you going to do to me, Henry?’

Nine-year-old Janice was the eldest of the Riley kids. She had short, cropped brown hair that stuck out at every angle, catching the sun. She had a flat, stumpy nose and teeth as white as her mum’s piano keys. During the holidays she turned feral, getting around in a singlet and a pair of old cotton boxers. Janice always had bare feet and her skin was the colour of Jersey caramels.

Anna Riley appeared from behind a lantana hedge. She grabbed her older sister by the arm and tried to pull her up.

‘It’s no use,’ I cried. ‘I love the taste of little girls.’

They both screamed. Liz Riley stood up and looked over to see what was happening. ‘Keep it down, girls.’

But they just ignored her.

Gavin ran past me. He flew to Janice’s side and grabbed her other arm. As Gavin and Anna tried to pull their sister to safety she screamed even louder: ‘No, Henry, eat the young ones first.’

I growled and raised my hands in the air.

‘Children,’ Liz called out again. ‘Please.’

‘C’mon, Henry,’ my dad echoed, half-heartedly, as Bill Riley, still on the ground, kept strumming:

I’ll see you in my dreams,

Hold you in my dreams . . .

Anna was distracted. She stopped screaming, walked over to the garden and picked an arum lily. We all waited and watched as she smelt it, smiled, and looked at me, ‘Hey, Henry,’ before returning and holding it under my nose. ‘Nice, eh?’

I growled again and they all screamed. The game recommenced: Janice pretended to faint and the other two dragged her along the drive. I contorted my body and became a monster. It always ended this way, as though the Rileys couldn’t be separated.

I’d had enough. I came up behind Anna and grabbed her. I took the lily from her hand, ripped it in half and threw it into the garden. Anna tried to act scared but could only laugh. She fell to her knees, dropped her head onto her legs and lay back on the driveway.

‘Careful,’ I said, sitting her up, as oil from her father’s old Austin smudged on her white woollen jumper, the one my mum had knitted her.

Anna looked at me, turned serious, but then laughed again.

She always wore a jumper, no matter what the temperature. Liz was always taking it off her and she was always putting it back on. She always wore long pants. This day it was a pair of old brown cords, worn through on both knees and frayed on the cuffs. Her hair was browner than her sister’s, but flatter, manageable, turned up at the ends like a German helmet from Hitler’s war. Her face was rounder than Janice’s and her features were smoother – her eyebrows thin and rounded, like the curve of an arum lily, as they dropped onto her button nose.

I turned my attention to Janice. As she tried to get up I dropped on top of her. I held her arms down and put my face an inch or so in front of hers.

‘Henry,’ she said, speaking slowly and deliberately.

‘What y’ gonna do?’ I asked.

‘Get off.’

And what she wanted to say, If I didn’t have to go easy on you . . .

‘The little ones can’t help you now.’

‘Get off.’

She pulled her arms loose, shoved me in the chest and I fell back heavily.

Anna looked at her older sister. ‘You shouldn’t do that.’

Janice turned to me. ‘So what?’ She walked back around to the adults. Anna and Gavin stared at me for a few moments and then followed her. I sat up, crawled over to a fence post and managed to stand. Then I walked through the Rileys’ front gate to the street. I went across to our house, walked down the drive to the backyard, and shuffled into the old rabbit hutch.

I sat on a pile of old tyres, dropped my head onto my chest and closed my eyes. Across in the Rileys’ yard I could hear Bill still singing. Everyone – Liz, Mum, Dad, Janice, Anna and Gavin – had joined in.

‘Where’s Henry?’ I heard Mum ask.

‘He went out the front,’ Janice replied.

‘Where to?’

‘Dunno. Maybe the playground.’

‘Go look for him please,’ Liz interrupted.

‘Mum.’

‘Go on,’ Bill insisted, still singing.

Janice set off down the drive, followed by Anna and Gavin, holding hands. ‘Can we go on the swings?’ Gavin asked.

‘No,’ Janice replied, calling, ‘Henry, where are you?’

As the singing continued I removed a brick from the back wall of the rabbit hutch and took out a rolled-up exercise book. It was a diary and book of thoughts, a playscript and novel, an art book, a collection of scientific observations, and anything else that came into my head. I still have it, yellowed and scribbled over, covered with twenty-year-old beetroot and rice pudding stains.

I opened the book to a new page and a freshly sharpened HB pencil fell out. I ruled under the last entry and then wrote:

The Chiropracter, A Short Story by Henry Page

Janice followed Dr Gunn into his workroom. He told her to lay face down on a long, leather-covered bench. She climbed a small ladder and did as he asked. Then she felt his cold hands on her legs.

Ten minutes later they imerged from the workroom. Janice’s left leg had been turned back to front and she limped as she walked. Her right arm had been twisted behind her body and her right hand turned upwards. And worst of all, her head had been turned around to face the other way.

‘What have you done?’ she asked the doctor.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied.

‘What do I mean!?’

The doctor took two shillings from his change pocket and placed them in her upturned hand. ‘Youll be right tomorrow . . .’

The music had stopped. Bill Riley was talking quietly, as though he didn’t want to be heard by the kids, although there were none around.

‘I tell you, Bob, I’m waiting at the back of his shop with me samples when I hear this dog start to bark. I go to the window and this thing jumps up, yappin’ its head off. Then I’m lookin’ around his backyard: tyres, bumper bars, car doors . . . and then guess what I see?’

I stopped writing and listened carefully.

‘This story gets better every time,’ Liz Riley half-laughed.

‘Shut up,’ Bill replied. ‘You think I’m makin’ it up?’

‘Not all of it.’

Bill was a performer, and always had been. He’d played the Tivoli Circuit for twenty-five years, or so he told us. Once I did the sums and said to him, ‘You must have been five when you started,’ and he just replied, ‘Maybe I was.’ It all went back to when he was one of J.C. Williamson’s greatest assets: Bill ‘Irish’ Riley, singer, juggler, straight man and joker, acrobat, dancer and everything else that ever walked a stage. Until radio. He told us he struggled valiantly for a few years but by the time Mo was doing McCakie Mansion he was selling linen.

Not that it didn’t take a good performer to do that. So, like Bill always said, nothing is ever wasted. Liz had come somewhere between unemployment and six-piece flannelette sheet sets, so she couldn’t confirm or deny his stories. And apparently, all of his old programs were lost in a fire in a Semaphore boarding house he was staying in. Luckily he got out with his life and a second-degree burn that had long since healed.

But Bill Riley still looked the part: tall and athletic (apart from a pot belly that was Liz’s fault, cooking him all the wrong foods). He had a round face with big blue eyes and a bulbous nose that was nourished by a web of fine capillaries. His wild, curly hair was grey before its time, hiding ironing-board ears that stuck out like handle bars, allowing Liz to come up from behind and take a hold of him, leading him towards washers that needed to be changed and lawns that needed to be mowed.

I looked through a small hole in the wall of my hutch and saw the adults talking. Bill was standing up, clutching a barbecue fork in one hand and his ukulele in the other. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘A body?’ Mum guessed.

‘No, a glasshouse, full of whoopee weed.’

They all laughed. Dad stood up, took the fork from Bill’s hand and walked across to the incinerator cum barbecue. It was a four-foot high square of besser blocks, equipped with a grill, a flue on top and an ash-box at the bottom. Dad started to turn the chops and roll the sausages. ‘And how do you know it was weed?’ he asked.

‘I can tell,’ Bill replied. ‘I’ve been around.’ He winked at Liz and my mother. Liz shook her head. ‘Where have you been? Myer’s haberdashery?’

The two women laughed again.

‘I’ve been around. Backstage at the – ’

Before he had a chance to finish, Liz screamed and doubled over with laugher. Back in my hutch I rolled up my book and smiled.

‘I’ve seen photos,’ Bill continued. ‘The Greeks brought it with them from Calabria.’

‘That’s in Italy,’ Mum said.

‘Athens . . . Lesbos.’

‘Lesbos?’ Liz cried. ‘How did you get from Lesbos to Grant Rehn’s backyard?’

Bill just shook his head and smiled. ‘It was marryjewana.’

Just then Janice appeared at the front of the hutch. ‘Henry, what you doing in there?’

I dropped my book on the pile of old tyres. Janice turned to my mum. ‘Here he is, Missus Page.’

Mum stood up. ‘Henry?’

Janice opened the door of the hutch, came in, took me around the shoulders and led me out. ‘We’ve been looking for you at the playground.’

‘I was just . . .’

‘What?’

‘Nothin’ . . .’

Janice and I sat down at the table with the adults just as the little ones came around the corner. ‘I’m hungry,’ Anna cried, and she went over to help Dad watch the pink chops.

‘Me too,’ Gavin added, following her.

‘What were you doing in there?’ Mum asked, putting her arm around me, spitting on her handkerchief and rubbing dirt off my face.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, pushing her away.

Bill Riley leaned across the table and motioned for me to move closer. He placed his hand on mine and asked, ‘You didn’t hear what we were talking about, did you?’

‘No,’ I shot back.

‘Good, because that man is a nasty piece of work.’

‘What man?’

He ruffled my hair and winked. ‘The man from Lesbos.’

Liz was off again, laughing so hard she had to spread her legs and lean forward to get air.

‘These will never be cooked,’ my dad moaned, poking the chops.

‘I’m hungry,’ Anna repeated.

Detective Constable Bob Page had an idea. I wrote about it the next day:

Hearing the police sirens in the distance, the man from Lesbos stuffed the marewana plants in his insinerator. He threw in a match but they wouldn’t burn. They were still too green. So he fetched a can of petrol from his woodshed, returned to the insinerator and poured it on the plants. He lit another match. Bang. Next thing he’s dancing around, taking off his slippers and hosing down his feet . . .

Bill drove Dad to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. They covered his feet in cream and bandaged them. He was off work for a week. Right in the middle of a big murder investigation.

The next morning I rose early, pulling on sandals and shorts that were three sizes too small, slipping on a long-sleeved shirt that used to be part of Dad’s uniform. I rolled up the sleeves until they were just above my elbow. And then I walked around the block to Elizabeth Street, passing each of the shops in turn and shouting inside, ‘Everything alright today, Mr Bilston?’

‘Yes thanks, Constable Page.’

The shirt fell down past my knees. It didn’t matter. I was the South Australian Police in this part of the world. It was because of me that we had a quiet neighbourhood.

‘Mr Hessian, everything okay?’

As Eric Hessian looked up from fitting a pair of school shoes. ‘Yes thank you, Sergeant.’

‘Mum’s got apricots, hundreds, do you want some?’

Elizabeth Street was a miniature town centre. It was lined with dog-eared buildings containing four or five shops jammed together like roadside letterboxes. Some of the buildings were original, turn of the century, narrow, poky and musty-smelling, lacking any plumbing, lit by old yellow globes crusted with dead insects. Others, from the 1930s and 1940s, had been built with glazed brick, wide picture windows and recessed entries. The very last was Doctor Gunn’s clinic, built in the mid 1950s on the site of a row of demolished cottages. I can still remember the builders at work. I can see Doctor Gunn standing on the road, arms crossed, watching them lay bricks. ‘How much longer do you reckon?’

‘Another few weeks, Doctor.’

Where each block of shops abutted a side street, someone had come along with a brush and painted: Black Stallion Syrup for Colds and Coughs, Cerebos Table Salt, Horlick’s Malted Milk and Peters’ Ice Cream.

The names are a bit hard to recall now because they were all painted over years ago.

Warm, sweet-smelling shops, each containing small, blue crystals of life, growing, filling shelves to bursting point, sustaining the neighbourhood. Until, in the 1960s, some fella went and built a supermarket on Port Road. I remember everyone going over for opening day. Even the shop owners on Elizabeth Street, shutting up early so they could have a nosy. If only they’d known. Pretty soon their business started dropping off. It was just too easy to do all your shopping in one spot. And to get everything you needed.

Of course, everyone made a show of doing the right thing. After people had got home from the supermarket and unloaded their cars they’d get their baskets and walk around to Elizabeth Street. But where they used to buy bread and rolls and buns from Joe Skurray the baker, now they’d just buy a couple of raspberry tarts, ask how his wife was keeping, and head home for a cup of tea made from bags.

The smart ones got out quick. The Acorn deli was the first to close. The last, I think, was the post office, on the far side down near the church (which people stopped using also, but that’s another story). By the 1970s they’d all gone.

But it’s funny how the wheel turns. Now the young ones are starting to buy those shops. A group of them knocked out the wall between John Cox the bootmaker and Ted Bilston’s Half-Case Fruit Shop and built a cafe. They polished the floorboards and set up chrome-edged melamine tables. Then they made a counter out of steel pipes and marble (don’t ask) and put a coffee machine on it. So now, every Saturday morning, ballet boy next door and his younger brother and all of the accountants go down and sit in an old fruit shop sipping lattes with little serviettes wrapped around the glass.

Another lot gutted Joe Skurray’s old shop and put in a sort of art gallery. When I say art, I really mean those pictures with a few scribbles and splatters of paint. Nothing decent, like a Namatjira or some Heysen gums. Another lot bought Don and Mary-Anne Eckert’s grocery shop and started selling stuff from the 1970s: lamp shades, bean bags and loud dresses, a TAA bag and a little telly that looks like it was squeezed out of someone’s bum. Crap. Shit we threw out years ago. But apparently people buy it.

And here’s the funniest thing of all. All of those folks hired a sandblaster and removed the paint from the side of the Acorn deli. And there it was, still – a big, black stallion. They got someone to redo it and now it’s as good as new: 2’6 a bottle, Ask your Local Chemist.

So, if you live long enough, you see everything.

Which takes me back to that sunny morning in 1960, as I arrived at the end of Elizabeth Street, where the railway line cuts Croydon in half. Beyond the railway line is Queen Street, and Port Road, with its supermarkets and six lanes of traffic.

The railway crossing was manned. There’s Mr Pedavoli, Con, sitting in his four-foot-square gatekeeper’s box. He sits on a stool in front of a small, raised table covered with cups of Italian coffee, timetables, a crossword and a comb for fixing his hair every time he opens the gate. He looks up at a large timetable covering a whole wall, runs a finger along a line and then stops to listen. He lifts his head a little. He can hear Doctor Gunn talking in his workroom and the bottle-o loading his cart further along Day Terrace. He can hear birds and the breeze through the leaves of the plane and oak trees that line both sides of the track, and he can even hear heat rising from the road and the knock of the gates against their posts.

It’s time. He runs the comb through his hair, straightens his black and white safety vest, and makes his way outside. He stops a few old dears about to cross the track. ‘A moment please, ladies.’

‘There’s nothing coming.’

But Con just taps his watch. He closes the pedestrian and traffic gates and stands waiting. Then he hears a whistle and sees black smoke from a small loco labouring towards them with three over-full carriages. One of the waiting drivers calls to him – he wanders over and a man hands him a paper bag full of freshly baked almond bread. He shakes the man’s hand and then stretches into the car to kiss someone.

The train slows into Croydon. Con hobbles back towards the gate and gives the engineer a matter-of-fact wave. The train crosses the road and stops at the platform: a few people get in but no one gets out. Then Con opens the first and second traffic gates. None of the cars dare move before the gates are fully open. When he is finished Con waves them through. This is Con’s crossing. He has the neighbourhood very well trained. The only problems he ever has are with outsiders. But he puts up his hand and stops them and goes over and asks them to wind down their window.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he says, ‘according to Railways regulations, vehicles are required to stop until the gates are fully open.’

‘I realise that.’

‘I also have the power to take licence numbers and report them to the police.’

‘Just open the gate.’

‘Understood?’

I crossed from Elizabeth Street and went and sat with Con in his gatehouse. I balanced on a broken stool and he poured me a hot, black coffee. Then I took out my notebook and asked, ‘Anything to report?’

‘One,’ he replied, holding up a finger.

I took out a pencil and wrote down the licence number. ‘And what did he do?’ I asked.

Con shook his head. ‘He went through as I was closing the gates. You make sure you tell your dad.’

‘I will. He’ll pass it on to Traffic.’

‘Good.’ And then he winked, and I wondered why.

I sipped my coffee as he told me about his gout and more trouble with the neighbours over his healing tree. Then he moved on to his village (as he always did) – goats, blue cheese and weddings in the village square. When he paused to look across the tracks, to remember, I asked, ‘Why did you leave?

His face lit up. ‘Why did I leave? Well . . .’

And he was off again, repeating the same stuff I’d heard a hundred times, stopping only to check his timetable, comb his hair, close the gates and take a piss on the side of a plane tree. Returning, sitting, saying, ‘Henry, have you ever been so hungry you’d eat grass?’

‘No.’

‘Or trapped rats to make stew?’

‘Never.’

‘If you could find a rat. That’s what it was like during the war, and after. But we were the smart ones, we knew when it was time to get out.’

A hot, steamy Sunday morning. Gathering their few possessions, putting on a suit and tie (and Rosa in her very best marmalade-coloured frock) and catching an overcrowded bus to town. Getting off – by now smelling of fertiliser, chickens and second-hand body odour – and spending too much money on a taxi

Reviews for Time's Long Ruin

[dharma05_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book! Having been a young girl at the time of the Beaumont's disappearance in beachside Adelaide, I remember, it being school holidays (summer) leaning over the gate looking up and down the street, my suburb next to Glenelg Beach, looking for them! This book evoked the memories of those long hot summer days, living near the beach for me, but the suburbs in the book are where my mum grew up. I could breathe in every line and be transported back to that time. The early 1960s....I could read this book again and again. I have talked to people who read it who didn't feel overly excited about it. Maybe it is a nostalgia thing but I couldn't put it down. Stephen Orr is an amazing evocative writer. The story is disturbing but only too familiar in Adelaide at that time.