Free The House That Was Eureka by Nadia Wheatley Page B

to be fed up already. Every time she stepped out to do her shopping she had to walk through a double picket line of sour-faced, jeering people. And the kids had started throwing mud at night at her windows, and dead birds and things over her back fence.
    ‘D’you reckon?’
    ‘Why, what do you think’ll happen?’
    ‘I dunno. But something. I reckon the cops will get into the act soon. Maybe not here, maybe at one of the other houses the UWM’s picketing. Look, it stands to reason. We’ve won over two hundred cases in Sydney since February. Just by picketing, threatening the landlords, that sort of thing. So d’you reckon the State is going to let us get away with it?’
    Nobby shrugged. He didn’t think like Lizzie, in political words, he didn’t look to the future. He hadn’t had much time for politics at all till six months back, when the boss had turfed him out of his job. But when that had happened, all the things the Cruises had been spouting for years suddenly seemed right.
    ‘I dunno. So what’re you going to do?’
    Lizzie was quiet. She plaited a long strand of hair, then unplaited it. She liked it messy, around her face.
    ‘If you swear not to tell anyone,’ Lizzie said, ‘I’ll show you something. Something Mick doesn’t know about, even Ma doesn’t know about. Swear?’
    Nobby nodded. Held his hand out. Lizzie spat in it. Held out her own hand and Nobby spat. Then they clasped hands. That was the way they’d always sworn.
    Lizzie pulled free then and closed and bolted the scullery door, checked that the curtain was right over the window, then pulled a big, old tin trunk out from the bottom of a pile of other trunks and tea-chests and suitcases.
    ‘It’s Pa’s. He brought it when we came from Ireland.’ She fiddled with the lock, pressed it upwards a special way, then sideways, and it opened. ‘I worked that out years ago.’
    Inside the trunk were books, old photos, a moth-eaten black coat, and something in an old, soft, brown bag that Lizzie now pulled out gently, as if it was a baby.
    ‘Here.’
    It was in two parts, the rifle and the bolt. Sparkling like new though clearly as old as the hills.
    ‘Every six months or so when he gets drunk,’ Lizzie said, ‘he locks himself in here and sings to himself and greases it. I’ve watched him through the door-crack. It goes like this.’
    She slipped the bolt in, fitted it together. Then pulled out an old tobacco tin of bullets, slipped one of them into the magazine.
    Lizzie’s face was soft as she stroked the rifle. She was far away, caught in a lovely jumble of the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution…
    And at the forefront of the barricades is Lizzie Kollontai…or is it Lizzie Connolly…her long black hair streaming back from the face that glows like a flame beneath the fires of the burning buildings…at the forefront of the barricades stands Lizzie, the inspiration of the struggle, the fierce fighter for freedom who works tirelessly, day and night, even now reloading to fire upon the enemies of the workers’ revolution…
    Lizzie took the bullet out, took the bolt out, packed the gun back in its bag.
    ‘So now you know too.’ It made Lizzie feel close to Nobby, sharing her secret.
    But Nobby was shocked. Despite the years spent knocking around Mick and Lizzie, Nobby’s mind was still linked to lace doilies, camomile tea, Job the parrot, the sound of the piano, and Saturday mornings spent polishing the silver. He’d never seen a gun before; except of course for policemen’s guns, but they were always closed away in leather holsters, bouncing on the cops’ behinds.
    ‘Feel how heavy it is.’
    But Nobby didn’t want to touch it, even when it was asleep inside its bag.
    ‘It won’t come to that,’ Nobby said, feeling cold in his stomach, feeling fear in his blood.
It won
’
t come to guns
.
    ‘No, of course it won’t,’ Lizzie agreed a bit sadly. Apart from Eureka, it never
had
come to guns in Australia. Or not as