Free The Following by Roger McDonald Page B

corsets.
    ‘Custard?’ the driver asked.
    ‘Yes, thanks, mate,’ answered his fireman.
    Marcus Friendly took to the hot custard like a philosopher spooning down poison. Mate. The word used with compunction.
    Next day, mid-afternoon, the two railwaymen slept on the shaded side of their engine on a bypass line near Cootamundra. It was hot and hard on the gravel at the side of the tracks, and how they slept. The driver used three jute sacks folded like a narrow mattress while the fireman threw himself on the rough ground to wait it out.
    Sleep was obliviousness to conflict. Their wake-up alarm was the daytime express going through on the Southern Line like a comet hurtling into the sun. Good luck to those who travelled that way; it was the artery of the nation. Then they got the signal to move along. Then were stopped again.
    Kristiansen kept a notebook diary. Honour bound Marcus not to look in it. Their silences were like the earth made to crack open. If Marcus could help it there would be no conversation to record between them, not even the percussion and underlining of silence as a rhythm to plot. So why bother looking, even if tempted.
    It was learned when they came to the branch that it was hardly worth the trouble sending a train through the Stockinbingal Line for the next few days. There’d been a flash flood after a thunderstorm, work was set back. That work went slowly. A man on a shovel was not as useful as he was before the war took men away. So the mixed goods service was stranded in the Central West.
    Sharp points of ballast made a gravel rash visible and pitted skin when Marcus showered under the flapping hose of the overhead water tank with his clothes in a puddle at his feet.
    Watching him, the driver thought:
What’s this bed of nails trick, some kind of test for the bloke? How many nails does he need? Doesn’t he know it’s not worth it? Drive a nail, don’t suffer it.
    Kristiansen was single. There were men with as many as a dozen kids who were sent down the ladder to stay under him. He didn’t try and justify his point of view. That was the point. His air of right was beyond it, and now it came to Marcus that Kristiansen was a Wobbly. The tight-mouthed man of principle enacting the role of scab. He’d known it since seeing him huddled with Luana, just hadn’t allowed it in his thinking.
    When it was time to build steam again, Marcus stood dripping in the cab wearing his wet clothes, allowing his shovelling work and the hot wind to dry him. He considered if Kristiansen was ready to die. He must be, to persist against such ultimate warnings as rope offered – eight turns, the sliding knot. Wobblies all over the world biting their tongues.
    Marcus had been Ron Kristiansen’s teacher in the railwayman’s craft. The Irish master on the footplate, the Viking understudy at the firebox door. When the pair brought a train over the Blue Mountains, tackling the hardest hills on a blizzardy night, you could hear the hooray go up among the immortals of the railway service. But not anymore. There was a gritting of teeth in that underworld. The dead were unhappy. These mocked-up mates would never be mates again except in the formal application of the word, denoting two men with a job that neither could do on his own.
    The job itself asked for a standard that overrode differences. In the doing of it they would die for each other quite possibly, though with a curse on their lips from their opposite ends of belief in the same thing – iron ore made steel, animation gathered in steam.
    Moving at last, cranking along rails buckling in the heat, they kept their eyes on the country they travelled through and on the rails ahead, not chancing a look at each other. Bleached grasses, eroded gullies, grey box trees along the creeks filled their vision as they avoided the knock of elbows.
    Marcus used tested strategies in his shovelling work to keep up steam. He didn’t need to crack the firebox door seal until the