Tim Read Free

bushes was useless. The deafening chorus spread, over the tops of the clattery denizens of the cassias to the flowering gums, across the fence to the oleanders along Walton Street’s sidewalks, and into the row of camphor laurels between Mary Horton’s and Emily Parker’s back gardens.
    The toiling builders hardly noticed the cicadas until they had to shout to each other, scooping trowel-loads of concrete from the big heap Tim Melville kept replenishing and throwing them – slurp! – against the chipped red brick sides of the Old Girl’s bungalow. The sleep-out was finished, all save a final coat of stucco; bare backs bending and straightening in the swing and rhythm of hard labour, the builders flowed steadily up and around the house, bones basking in the wonderful warmth of summer, sweat drying before it had a chance to bead on their silky brown skins. Bill Naismith slapped wet concrete on the bricks, Mick Devine smoothed the splashes into a continuous sheet of coarse-grained, greenish plaster, and behind him Jim Irvine slithered along a rickety scaffold, sweeping his shaping trowel back and forth in easy curves that imparted a swirling series of arcs to the surface. Harry Markham, eyes everywhere, glanced at his watch and shouted for Tim.
    ‘Oy, mate, go inside and ask the Old Girl if you can put the billy on, will you?’ Harry yelled when he gained Tim’s attention.
    Tim parked his wheelbarrow in the side passage, gathered the gallon-capacity tin billycan and the box of supplies into his arms, and kicked a query of admission on the back door.
    Mrs Parker appeared a moment later, a shadowy lump behind the veiling darkness of the fly-screening.
    ‘Oh, it’s you, is it, love?’ she asked, opening the door. ‘Come in, come in! I suppose you want me to boil a kettle for them ’orrible warts outside, do yer?’ she went on, lighting a cigarette and leering appreciatively at him as he stood blinking in the gloom, sun-blinded.
    ‘Yes, please, Mrs Parker,’ Tim said politely, smiling.
    ‘Well, all right then, I suppose I don’t have much choice, do I, not if I want me house finished before the weekend? Sit yourself down while the kettle boils, love.’
    She moved around the kitchen sloppily, her salt-and-pepper hair crimped into an impossible battery of waves, her uncorseted figure swathed in a cotton housedress of purple and yellow pansies.
    ‘Want a bikkie, love?’ she asked, extending the cookie jar. ‘I got some real grouse choccy ones in there.’
    ‘Yes, please, Mrs Parker,’ Tim smiled, pawing in the jar until his hand closed on a very chocolatey cookie.
    He sat silently on the chair while the Old Girl took his can of supplies from him and spooned a good quarter of a pound of loose tea into the billycan. When the kettle boiled she half-filled the billycan then put the kettle on to boil again while Tim set out battered enamel mugs on the kitchen table and stood a bottle of milk and a jar of sugar alongside them.
    ‘Here, pet, wipe yer hands on the tea towel like a good bloke, will yer?’ the Old Girl asked as Tim left a brown smear of chocolate on the table edge.
    She went to the back door, stuck her head outside and bawled, ‘Smoke-oh!’ at the top of her voice.
    Tim poured himself a mug of coal-black, milkless tea, then added so much sugar to it that it slopped over the top of the mug onto the table and set the Old Girl clucking again.
    ‘Christ, you’re a grub!’ she grinned at him forgivingly. ‘I wouldn’t put up with it from them other bots, but you can’t help it, can you, love?’
    Tim smiled at her warmly, picked up his cup and carried it outside as the other men began to come into the kitchen.
    They ate at the back of the house, where it began to curve around the newly erected sleep-out. It was a shady spot, far enough from the garbage cans to be comparatively free of flies, and they had each arranged a small, flat-topped cairn of bricks to sit on while they ate. The camphor laurels