Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online Page A

is he going to divert the sugar? How will he ensure it?”
    â€œUse your noddle, Else. There’s going to be the dirtiest, biggest strike you’ve ever seen on the Townsville waterfront, and it’s going to take place in exactly nine weeks.”
    â€œBut Mason can’t use union policy to feather his own nest. He’ll be jailed.”
    â€œYou don’t think he’d be such a bloody fool, do you, as to come forward himself? No. What happensis another bloke who’s the registered company name goes to Northern Sugar, points out that their stuff is rotting away on the wharves—he waits a week or so before he approaches them, see—so that they’re desperate—and makes them a fair offer. It’s got to be fair”—Harry sounded regretful—“so that they’ll come in on it.”
    He rolled over on the dune gazing across the road to where the salt-marsh soil, brownish-grey loam with salt crystals, mothered sedges, Noogoora burr, tassel blue grass, and gilgais. On the skyline clumps of Burdekin gidgee lay like green clouds among the she-oaks and paper-barks seeking vanishing point within the sand couch and bunchy spear grass. He picked a blade of couch and chewed it reflectively.
    â€œSee this,” he said after a while, pulling a fistful of spiny daggers from the sand, “this stuff’s got a funny name. They call it fescue grass.”
    â€œDo they? I always thought it was just called beach grass.”
    â€œNo, that’s different. More feathery and hanging somehow. This is tough and wiry.”
    Elsie turned eyes filled with questioning surprise upon him.
    â€œI didn’t know you were interested in things like that.”
    â€œOh, I’ve known the name of this grass since I was a kid. Why, I could tell you any type of tree you caredto point to all round this place. I ran wild along the coast here when I was a nipper.”
    â€œYou never mentioned it, you dark horse.”
    â€œNo reason. But magging about that strike made me remember. I left here when I was sixteen. The old man took the family down to Brissy for a while, but things was real bad just after that, and he couldn’t get work any place. He had a smashed-up leg that kept bothering him and he spent half his time in an’ out of quacks’ joints trying to get it fixed. Got it up here, too, but there wasn’t any compo for the shindy he collected it in. Ever hear about the riots up here?”
    â€œBut the Americans weren’t here then,” said Elsie mischievously.
    Harry tweaked the lobe of her delicately whorled ear and his thick features broke into an incredibly kind smile.
    â€œCourse you wouldn’t have. I was only seven at the time and you was just somethink your mum and dad dreaded.”
    He ruminated awhile, perhaps to expunge this idle persiflage from his mind, for what he remembered was a serious business, chaotic and frightening.
    When he resumed speaking Elsie lay perfectly still, watching the blue spaces washing over the coast, the flocculent clouds, and feeling the hollows in the sand slide more and more into the outline of her body.
    â€œYes, I can remember it pretty well, looking back.It was one Sunday night just after the end of the war. We were a pretty hot old place then with the I.W.W. licking the poor mugs into activity. ‘Fellow worker!’ they used to say and you felt bloody good, I remember dad saying, as if you was actually somebody. Anyway, this night the dad had a row with mum and round about eight he marched out of the house in a real rage and took me with him to the tree of knowledge in Flinders Street. Now you must of seen that. It’s still there.”
    â€œThat’s so,” assented Elsie. “I catch the bus there every afternoon.”
    â€œWell, when we got there, there was some big bloke addressing the crowd. Giving it to them proper, he was, saying they ought to go up to the lock-up and haul