Fall on Your Knees Read Free

sat so straight and asked for nothing. “Where you from, dear, who’s your father?” Mostly Gaelic speakers like his own mother, yet always he declined a bed or even a place in the straw, intending that the next roof to cover his slumber be his own. Moss is the consolation of rocks, and fir trees don’t begrudge a shallow soil but return a tenfold embrace of boughs to shelter the skinny earth that bore them. So he slept outside and was not lonely, having so much to think about.
    Following the ocean a good part of the way, James discovered that there is nothing so congenial to lucid thought as a clear view of the sea. It aired his mind, tuned his nerves and scoured his soul. He determined always to live in sight of it.
    He’d never been to a city before. The cold rock smell of the sea gave way to bitter cooked coal, and the grey mist became streaked with orange around him. He looked way up and saw fire-bright clouds billowing out the stacks of the Dominion Iron and Steel Company. They cast an amber spice upon the sky that hung, then silted down in saffron arcs to swell, distend and disappear in a falling raiment of finest ash onto the side of town called Whitney Pier.
    Here homes of many-coloured clapboard bloomed between the blacksmiths’ shops and the boiler-house of the great mill, and here James got a fright, never having seen an African except in books. Fresh sheets fluttered from a line, James guided the pony onto asphalt, across a bridge where he looked back at the burnt-brick palace a mile long on the waterfront, and contemplated the cleanliness of steel born of soot.
    Plaits of tracks, a whiff of tar, to his right a dreadful pond, then onto Pleasant Street where barefoot kids kicked a rusty can. He followed the screech of gulls to the Esplanade where the wharfs of Sydney Harbour fanned out with towering ships from everywhere, iron hulls bearded with seaweed, scorched by salt, some with unknowable names painted in a dancing heathen script. A man offered him a job loading and unloading — “No thank you, sir.” New rails in a paved street mirrored cables that swung along overhead and led him to the centre of town, an electrical train carriage sparked and clanged right behind him, the sun came out. Charlotte Street. Fancy wood façades rose three storeys either side, ornate lettering proclaimed cures for everything, glass panes gloated there was nothing you could not buy ready-made, McVey, McCurdy, Ross, Rhodes and Curry; Moore, McKenzie, MacLeod, Mahmoud; MacEchan, Vitelli, Boutillier, O’Leary, MacGilvary, Ferguson, Jacobson, Smith; MacDonald, Mcdonald, Macdonell. More people than he’d ever seen, dressed better than Sunday, all going somewhere, he saw ice-cream. And at last, up the hill where the posh people lived.
    The pony sagged beneath him and cropped the edge of someone’s fine lawn as James came to the conclusion of his travelling thoughts. He would have enough money to buy a great house; for ready-made things, and a wife with soft hands; for a family that would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books.
    James was right. There were a lot of pianos in Sydney.

His Left Eye
    The first time James saw Materia was New Year’s Eve 1898, at her father’s house on the hill. James was eighteen.
    He’d been summoned to tune the Mahmouds’ grand piano for the evening’s celebration. It was not his first time in the Mahmoud house. He’d been tending their Steinway for the past year, but had no idea who played it so often and so energetically that it needed frequent attention.
    The piano was the centrepiece in a big front room full of plump sofas, gold-embroidered chairs, florid carpets and dainty-legged end tables with marble tops. A perpetually festive chamber — even slightly heathen, to James’s eyes — with its gilt mirrors, tasselled drapes and voluptuous ottomans. Dishes of candy and nuts, and china figurines of English aristocracy, covered every surface, and on the walls