Impressive Couple

Brother and sister briskly crossing Barkly Street, fine, handsome pair. Neatly dressed in fashionable black—office skirt and blouse and double-breasted woollen jacket, both hands pocketed the young man. How they have bloomed, a fetching couple; well-matched husband and wife an observer might have thought. In some corners of the globe men and women still married within their ethnic group and culture. Look on after them! Stand and stare as they proceed up Albert Street on a march; they were unaware of the observation. Stand and stare, watching until they have stepped up onto the footpath and passed into the shadow beneath the bridge. How far they had come. How very far! How far gone their poor, pitiful mother had been to leave two young children behind like that; to give them no consideration. The signals and the alarm at the freight crossing at the bottom of their street, immediately adjacent our own, had been introduced after Neda, one of the two schizophrenics in Bab’s circle. (The other, Desa the Serb, had bloodied our fine chesterfield one day after forgetting her tampon.) Neda the full-form embodiment of Ana Karenina by the rails, watching the wheels of the wagons and timing her leap under. Her house was one off the Avenue corner, 90-100 metres from the line. Two minute steady walk. Twenty years before Bab had had that same train in mind after rash words from husband Lazar. You not find it (the document in her safe-keeping that was required), nemoj me cekat kuci! don’t await my return!... Would the thought of her two small children orphaned have given Bab pause? Had the document not finally turned up would she have wildly dashed away? We were two off Montgomery Corner; half a minute from the line. (Waiting out a train was the other factor; the haulage was infrequent there.) Our post-war community was over-represented in the psych ward at the local hospital. We were wild, fierce, reckless, often in the news. Violent explosions had made us notable; our volatile politics unsettling the old Australians. (Disintegration of the country was still decades off.) Neda and her husband Ivo were either Croats proper, or Dalmatian. Ivo was older, turned lumpy in early middle-age; unhappy marriage. Denied their mother’s love this impressive young pair of survivors. Bab had begun minding them a few years before the tragedy and continued later when the widower remained. Bab’s kindness and loving would have helped; at the time somehow it had all failed to sufficiently register. Catastrophe was impossible to accept in youthful years, needed to be warded off. Josko was short for Josip perhaps (Tito’s given name); sister Marianna. Not easily dislodged from the deep, securely buried memory of forty-five years past.