Liberty Page 3

‘I … I …’ I stammered.

  ‘Cúl tóna,’ Will muttered a curse in the old tongue under his breath.

  ‘What was that? You talking that savage language, you Irish dog?’ the soldier challenged Will and I winced at the boy’s foolishness for using the old language to aggravate the situation.

  ‘It is the language of my father and my father’s father,’ Will said defiantly.

  The man pulled up the musket from his side and in one lightning-fast movement shoved the handle into Will’s stomach, knocking him to the ground. With another blow he brought the butt down on the crook of Will’s shoulder while landing a steel-capped boot in his back. I felt my chest constrict and my breath came out in a rush.

  The soldier wiped his brow, turned and marched back to the door, calling his men to follow him.

  ‘We’ll be watching you,’ he shouted back into the room. ‘If there are rebels among you, we will find out and you will go the same way as that scoundrel Irish Dog Orr, who, over in Carrickfergus this lovely sunny day, swung till his necked snapped. It was a beautiful sight.’

  As soon as they had gone, I fell down beside Will who was groaning on the floor. I touched his shoulder, crying.

  ‘Will, talk to me,’ I sobbed. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, just a little bruised,’ he panted, forcing a smile. ‘The whisky in my belly dulled the blow.’

  In that moment, relieved that he was not gravely hurt, I bent forward and kissed him on the mouth. The room stood still as did my heart when William Boal kissed me back.

  ‘Pie! Pie! Pie!’ they chanted all around the hall.

  The mood was feverish. Almost every person from Bandaroo Flats was present, dressed in their Sunday best. But after an afternoon of partying – beer for the men and shandies for the ladies – the collars were getting sweaty and high colour was pinching people’s cheeks. The laughter had crept up to a gentle roar and everyone was having a marvellous time, especially the four boys lined up along the long trestle table on the stage with a mountain of meat pies in front of them.

  Although a good pie-eating competition was always a winner at a function at the town hall, I found the spectacle somewhat disgusting. Almost fully grown men sitting in their church shirts, stuffing pastry, meat and gravy into their mouths like ravenous beasts, the overflow spilling down over their lightly fuzzed chins. Ugh. My brother, Murray, was the town champion, sitting on a record of seven pies in the allotted time of ten minutes. The big clock on the wall, not far from the Queen’s portrait, was ticking over and the crowd was chanting ‘Pie! Pie! Pie!’ like a bloodthirsty audience at a gladiator slaughter as Murray and the three other young men shoved warm pies into their mouths, trying not to gag, tomato sauce running like blood over their lips. I felt my stomach turn.

  The dinging of the finish bell was met with a roar and cheer as Murray stood up to be crowned the champion once again, with a result of seven and a half pies eaten. A new Bandaroo Flats record. The prize was a meat tray from Ted the butcher. Murray shot a look at Walter Leary that was filled with victory. I had to look away because it was so sad. How did poor Murray think there was any triumph in eating more pies than that horrid prig of a boy? Was that the only way he could feel avenged for the years of bullying? Walter Leary had treated my family with such disdain over the years because his father owned half of Bandaroo Flats and he figured himself as some kind of ‘prince’ of the district, lording it over those of us who felt the sting of a bad year of crops or the loss of livestock. My older brother had kept challenging the former pie-eating champion for a year now, beating him on the podium every time there was a town assembly. It was embarrassing and a bit pathetic. If the only comeuppance that the Leary boy got was to be the runner-up at these gastronomic events, then the world was not fair or equitable, and Walter would have to wait until the afterlife to get his just deserts for being such a vile human being.

  ‘And now,’ said Mr Jamieson, the principal of the local primary school, ‘while you boys get yourselves cleaned up, we will welcome our guest of honour to the stage: Fiona McKechnie.’

  Again, the crowd cranked up a flutter of applause and I blushed as I took to the stage, feeling completely embarrassed and self-conscious. Mr Jamieson plonked a wet kiss on my cheek as he shook my hand.

  ‘Give us a song, Fi,’ someone shouted from the back of the hall.

  Mr Jamieson clapped his hands for attention the way he had for the seven years I’d endured at the small schoolhouse on the outskirts of town.

  ‘Now listen up, you lot,’ he called. ‘I’m so proud of this young woman. I’ve known since her first day of school that little Fiona was something special. A girl with big things in her future. And we’re here today to congratulate her as she heads off to the big smoke of Brisbane to attend university.’

  More applause as I twisted on my feet, looking down at my shoes.

  ‘And not only is she going to university, she is going to university to study Law. Law! I’d warrant that’s a first for a girl from Bandaroo Flats, perhaps the entire Darling Downs region. Yes, I’d warrant that. Quite an achievement.’

  ‘Thanks, Sir,’ I muttered.

  ‘A few words, Fiona?’ he asked and stepped back, leaving me to face all the dishevelled and partied out townsfolk.

  ‘I … um … thanks everyone for coming to wish me luck. It’s pretty exciting. And scary.’

  All their faces were turned toward me. I felt their eyes. My face was deepening to a dusky red.

  ‘I want to thank Mr Jamieson for making me work so hard at school and all my teachers and really … well … most of all, my dad.’

  I looked through the sea of faces, my gaze resting on the man standing closest to the door as if he was prepared for an emergency getaway. My father was a big man, his greying rust-coloured hair sticking up and around his face like dirty fox fur, his face showing his discomfort. He had his signature pipe sticking out the side of his mouth.

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for him, bringing up two kids on his own these past few years and I’m going to miss him so much when I go … and … you too, Murray.’ I sniffed back the tears and shot a look to my brother who was mopping the pie-residue from his white shirt and looking more than a bit nauseous. ‘And Laura, my very best friend in the world.

  ‘But I want to make you proud,’ I said, trying to sound more confident. ‘All of you. I want to make a difference in this world and I think that really starts with justice and the idea that we’re all equally deserving of it.’ I shot Walter Leary a pointed look.

  ‘Give us a song,’ another voice piped up.

  ‘Yeah, Fi, a song!’

  The crowd began a light chant and I rolled my eyes and sighed as I caught sight of Laura Bell pushing through the crowd with my battered but beloved guitar. I pulled a fake angry face at her as she handed it up to me with a cheeky wink.

  ‘Seems like I don’t have a choice.’ I laughed.

  ‘I came prepared.’ She laughed back at me, flicked her dark hair over one shoulder and gave me an encouraging nod.

  I draped the strap over my head and shoulder and tested the strings. I looked out at all the people urging me on, wishing me well. I hated playing to a human audience. Singing and strumming to the cows at home was where I was most comfortable. And I changed the lyrics to fit with the circumstances.

  The crowd clapped. It began to feel good. Everyone was so happy. Everyone except that wide-shouldered man at the back door. He looked positively miserable.

  ‘I’m leaving in an FJ Holden,’ I sang and struggled to fit the new lyrics into the music and the crowd gave a collective laugh. I felt my belly heave as I glanced again to the back door.

  Dad had gone.

  The next day Dad, Murray and I sat in silence for the first part of the journey. I rested my elbow on the car window ledge and felt the breeze dance through my hair. The Holden, watched by sle
epy cows munching yellowing grasses, bumped over the gravelly roads leading to Toowoomba.

  Dad was quiet. I was waiting for him to break the heaviness between us.

  ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ he said. ‘We could just turn around. No one would think less of you … You don’t have to prove anything.’

  I gave a long sigh. I loved Dad so much but he could also be infuriating. ‘I want to go, Dad. This is really important to me. I want to do it for Mum.’

  He fell silent again and we drove on, turning the dust behind us, leaving the wide open expanses for the jumble of houses leading into Toowoomba, just under an hour from home. It wasn’t until we started down the long, steep descent of the Range, toward the flood plains and beyond to the city of Brisbane, that he spoke again.

  ‘She’d be so proud of you, Fiona,’ he said softly.

  Tears pricked my eyes and I looked out the window, letting the wind whip them away.

  ‘She would, you know, Fi.’ Murray leaned in between us, speaking softly.

  Mum would have been proud of me. She really would have. And oh, how I wished she’d been there to see me head off to university. Her father, her hero, had been a barrister in Edinburgh and she had often talked about his greatest cases. The time he defended a man accused of being a bank robber who turned out to be a kindly and generous ben- efactor of an orphanage who’d simply had the misfortune to look exactly like the guilty party, a long-lost identical twin. And another story about the time my grandfather had accused a high court judge of corruption and been sent to prison for a month himself for his outspokenness. The judge in that case was eventually dismissed, proving my grandfather right. My mother had told me so proudly that barrister Simon Fergus was a man who upheld the principle of justice even if it meant wearing the punishment. These stories had sparked my own interest in law.

  Murray started whistling and I imagine it was to distract him from the tears because I could see in the rear-vision mirror that he was very glassy-eyed. I wasn’t sure if it was the mention of Mum or that he was going to miss me. Probably the Mum thing. ‘It’s a shame Laura couldn’t come,’ I said, adjusting my brand new, white-plastic frame sunglasses. ‘I wanted her to see my room at the boarding house.’

  ‘She said she was busy.’ Murray shrugged. ‘I dunno. She’s always busy with the new job at the pub.’

  ‘Well, you can tell her all about it, hey?’ I smiled.

  ‘Maybe it was too much for her,’ Dad said sadly. ‘It’s almost too much for me. God, I’m going to worry about you, Fi. In the big smoke, all alone.’

  Dad coughed hard as if he had a bone stuck in his throat. My dad did not cry. Even when Mum died, he just went into himself and turned to wood. Sometimes when I hugged him I could feel the splinters.

  University. I imagined the scent of dusty books and polished wood and an atmosphere of intellectual vigour. Instead, my first minutes on campus saw me breathing in cigarette smoke and hot dust and feeling like I’d stepped into a circus. And it was truly terrifying. My legs shook like a newborn foal’s.

  I was the first woman in my family to set foot on university soil. And I’d made it here, in my squeaking new shoes, on a scholarship. There was no way my father could afford to send me and I would never have asked that of him. So the day the letter with the University logo arrived in the mailbox had been the best day of my life. It was my ticket out of the confines of my father’s expectations. I had run a leaping-and-dancing lap of the farm, waving the letter and shouting great whoops of victory, making the cows look up and frown even more deeply than my father. He had made it very plain that he expected me to do nothing more with my life than find a nice man off the land and raise a head of cattle and a swarm of children. He hadn’t even wanted me to catch the bus to Toowoomba to go to the high school. ‘Girls don’t need high school,’ he’d blustered. ‘It’s just a waste of time when all you need to know you can learn on the farm from your mother. Find a nice fella who thinks the world of you and raise a decent family.’ I’d cried and carried on until finally he relented and let me go to high school. My mother had sweet-talked him, telling him that more opportunities were opening up for girls and that I should be encouraged to use my brain. My mother knew it was my dream to chase a career in law. She had always wanted to be a doctor but that was an all-but-impossible goal. Mum believed me when I told her I dreamed of a life in the city and the chance to do some good in the world. She sometimes called me the little arrow to her bow and she said she wanted to shoot me as high and far as I could go. For Mum and the memory of her, I was determined to make my mark. The scholarship sealed the deal for Dad. He made jokes about there being something a bit ‘unladylike’ about a daughter who wanted to go off and study law. But I could tell by the way he told everyone in town, long and loud, that his girl was going to be a city-slicking lawyer, that he was deep-down as proud as punch.

  Despite this, in my father’s mind university was just a place-holder until I found a husband and he made it very clear that he was only allowing me to go because a tertiary education campus was a fine place to meet a top-quality suitor. For me, however, university was going to be a springboard into my own self-determined future and I didn’t need a man to help me do that.

  On my first morning at university I found the enormous campus bustling with energy and excitement. It was Induction Day. There were so many young people, all dressed in colourful, modern outfits, making me seem like a bit of a country bumpkin in my new black patent shoes, stockings and knee-length plaid skirt. Many people were also quite a bit older than me. I wasn’t used to being the youngest at school.

  Not knowing anyone, I pressed nervously through the crush of students flooding the walkways between various buildings on campus. I had my acceptance letter, which showed me where I was to go, and a map which I turned this way and that as I tried to navigate my way past the Student Union block toward my destination. People around me were shouting and clapping hands together in the air. It sounded like I was in the middle of some civil riot. Lots of the young men had full beards and long hair and, in a strange contrast, many of the girls had short hair, really short hair. Beatles short hair. My own orange frizz had been tamed into a neat bun at the base of my skull. I looked like a dowdy middle-aged librarian.

  I walked past all the city kids with their brash exuber- ance, imagining pointed stares and laughter behind my back. I was wearing unfashionable, square glasses and my father had made me promise to wear stockings on my first day so that I would make a good impression on my lecturers. The day was blisteringly hot and I could feel the nylon sticking to my legs. Part of me wanted to run back to the little room at the Young Ladies Boarding House, my home away from home during school term, and hide under the terribly uncomfortable bed.

  With my hair springing up and out from my forehead like loose wire in the stifling humidity, I knew I looked like the odd person out and even though I just wanted to cry, I kept walking, staring down at my ridiculously formal shoes, the ones I had been so excited to buy. Everyone else was wearing worn sandshoes or sandals. Some kids were sitting on steps, reading books in the sunshine. Others were smoking cigarettes.

  My top lip and forehead were beading with sweat, turning my face powder into a paste. Dad had warned me about wearing make-up to uni. ‘It might give people the wrong idea about you,’ he’d said as I’d rolled my eyes. I really didn’t think a little powder over my spots and a dab of pink lipstick would be noticed; looking around I saw plenty of girls wearing make-up.

  I was fast learning that what was considered fashionable in my small neck of the woods was not so acceptable in Brisbane on a university campus. This Dorothy was not in Kansas anymore!

  ‘You look lost,’ said a voice at my shoulder, startling me.

  I turned to see two boys and a girl who looked unlike anyone I had ever met or spoken to in Bandaroo Flats. They were like characters from a book. The young man closest to me
, who I soon discovered belonged to the voice, wore glasses with old-fashioned, round steel rims, just like John Lennon. He was tall, well over six feet, had dark shaggy hair, a square jaw, and pale, smooth skin with a light fuzz of stubble on his chin and a bemused look on his face. He wore army pants and a tight white t-shirt. The other boy was sloppy but handsome-looking, almost pretty. He was shorter, blond, and was chewing gum and wearing flared jeans with peace symbols drawn on them with cracked paint. The girl was in a figure-hugging, short, white crocheted dress and had leather sandals on her feet; her rust-coloured hair was loose, catching the sun like flames. I’d spent years fending off cruel comments about being a redhead and this was the first time I had ever seen a girl who managed to make her ginger hair look glamorous and cool. She was looking straight past me and over my shoulder at the other students pushing and shoving along the covered walkway. I was intrigued. She seemed ethereal, like a thistle about to be blown away on the breeze. The girl looked back to me with a broad smile.

  ‘I’m Agnes. Hi there.’

  Her voice had the soft lilt of a Scottish accent. It was so pleasantly familiar, like my parents’ voices. I’d been born in Edinburgh but arrived in Australia as a baby so had escaped a Scottish drawl.

  ‘Hi … um … yes … I am actually,’ I said with a little laugh of embarrassment. ‘Lost.’

  ‘You a fresher?’ the taller man asked.

  I scrambled to decipher the word. I presumed it was short for freshman, something I’d come across in my reading, although I was pretty sure it was more of an American term. Fresher must have been the local campus slang.

  ‘Yes. Day one. All ready to fill my brain with tertiary knowledge.’ I said it as a joke but realised that it hadn’t come across as that; instead I’d sounded like some green goody-two-shoes. They all stared at me.

  ‘I mean … yes … I need to find my way to the Law faculty.’ I tried to redeem myself and gave a self-conscious cough and tried to burrow behind the fake-leather satchel that I was pressing into my chest.