He had not added Edward to his collection. He had tacked two pieces of wood together, pieces chunkier than the others, but he could never decide how to dress them. He looked at the green cloth. He would need to cut it to fit the sticks. He couldn’t bear to do so.
He folded the cloth to fit in the tin and gently taking the unclothed wooden cross that represented Edward he laid it on the cloth. Then he put the lid on. He wished the tin had a picture of a ship on it. He didn’t like the girl. A ship with white sails spinning in the sun, flying across the sea, silver, sickle-winged like a bird, to match the lovely living eye of water in the tin. That would be right for Edward.
He glanced again at the puppet with elastic choking its neck. Only yesterday he had seen the man talking with Miss Pilkington outside the school gates. In her black coat and hat she looked like an angular shadow tossed away from the night before. Matthew knew she had seen him hurry past and it seemed that in the tiny gesture of her hand in his direction she spoke of him.
The puppet shouldn’t be there with Edward and Gran and his mother. It was as if he had set one of old Peter’s snakes on the table amongst the comfortable secure disorder of breakfast. He picked it up with the tip of his forefinger and thumb and threw it into a dark corner.
When Mother completed a dress for herself she would spread it on the settee in the front room and raise the blind so it could be seen more clearly. She would disappear from work in the kitchen to look at it and touch it. Sometimes Matthew would follow her and watch her straighten a cuff, adjust the stance of the frilled collar, align a fold where it distorted the hem. She itched to show it off.
‘We’ll go to the gardens on Sunday—all of us—Gran, you and me. And we’ll visit the pavilion and eat cream cake and drink lemonade spiders. You’ll like that, Matthew?’ And she smiled and kissed him and he felt warm because of her affection and because when Mother found friends to talk to at the pavilion Gran and he would be able to go to The Stump and see Edward.
It happened as Matthew anticipated. At the pavilion in the gardens Mother found friends who took her attention and he and Gran slipped away. The Stump was an open park area. Here gathered all the soapbox orators, the mockers and debunkers of moral rectitude, the bar-room wits and advocates of direct action, the sour or bitter looking for a target, the humorists looking for fun, aggressors hoping for a brawl, watchful police and the occasional spy searching out treason. The religious fanatics exhorted the ungodly to save themselves before it was too late and the flames of Hell engulfed them in eternal torture.
‘Repent!’ they shouted. ‘Repent and be saved!’
To each fresh exhortation their audience in mock agreement yelled back: ‘Hallelujah, brother, hallelujah!’ or ‘Bless you, brother, bless you.’
Some raised their arms and shook their hands above their heads and rolled their eyes, slapping each other on the back and roaring with laughter.
‘The flames of hell will swallow the unbeliever!’ bellowed the speaker.
‘Ooh!’ roared the crowd.
‘’Ow ’orrible!’
‘Ooh! I can feel them now, scorching my toes.’ And several hopped about. The crowd roared again.
‘Believe in Him!’ chanted the speaker.
‘Hallelujah, brother,’ the crowd chorused.
‘And you’ll find Life Everlasting.’
‘Glory be,’ the crowd returned.
Gran laughed. Matthew listened uneasily. Would someone mention the little grey room on the verandah, the nothingness, the wasteland? He knew creatures did not return from death, but where did they go? What did ‘repent’ mean? He had heard Gran tell his mother that ‘she would repent it’ but the ‘it’ remained a mystery. His mother had not treated ‘it’ seriously. He screwed up his face trying to imagine fires burning in nothing. It was not possible, fires burned trees or logs or paper. Was the man right? Could they feed on people? He shuddered.
‘Gran,’ he asked, ‘can fires burn people?’
‘Of course.’
‘When they’re dead?’
‘When they’re cremated.’
‘What does cremated mean?’
‘When bodies are burned, not buried.’
‘Do they go on burning?’
‘Only till there’s nothing left to burn, I suppose.’
‘Can people be nothing?’
‘Eventually.’
‘Will there be fires in nothing?’
‘Fires can’t burn in nothing. They need oxygen.’
‘Then there won’t be fires like that man says?’
‘What man? The preacher?’ Gran laughed again. ‘Of course not. His religion is make-believe.’
Some speakers, like his teacher, trumpeted loyalty, devotion and sacrifice for the Empire and others shouted that the Prince of Wales was a pretty parasite, sucking the blood of the poor. Some brayed about the twin evils of drinking and smoking and the general corruption of the world because of alcohol and tobacco—a fool at one end, a fire at the other—and they pointed accusing fingers at the crowd. Some railed against the greed of the squatters,
