You’ll Never Walk Alone

An Excerpt from Mervyn Webb

It was a Friday afternoon in the first breathless days of February 1963. It was the kind of Queensland day that seemed to shimmer upon its own heat. The air clung to the skin like damp linen. Even the sea itself, though restless and blue, had lost its coolness. I knocked off work early, surrendering as much to the tyranny of the weather as to fatigue. Wynnum, for all its promise of sea breezes and coastal relief, lay heavy under the sun that week. The salt wind from the bay did its best to stir the air. It felt as though the whole town was holding its breath beneath a glass dome.

Wynnum in summer had its own music: the creak of boats at moorings, laughter of children somewhere down the street, and the faint, far-off cry of seagulls over the tide. I paused for a moment, letting the world settle around me. I thought: If heaven has a smell, it must be like this. It must smell like salt, grass, and home.

Air-conditioning, that modern marvel and my current work to install, had begun its march through Brisbane suburbs. It was a symbol of new prosperity, a talisman against discomfort. Those with a lot of money flaunted it as proudly as a motorcar or a swimming pool. But for the rest of us, the sea and its breeze were blessing enough. I had half a mind to stop by Manly baths for a quick dip before tea, to let the day’s sweat and grit be washed away. But duty tugged at me instead. Launa, my mum, and Dad were expecting me to visit. Beverley, my wife, would be waiting at home, with the new baby growing fractious in the heat. Little Lloyd, pink and wriggling, with fists forever clenched, had arrived only months ago. I loved him with a fierce and private pride. I was still learning the delicate art of fatherhood. Lloyd was a miracle. Not of birth of our own, but of grace. For years, Beverley and I had tried and waited, hoping each season might bring the change that never came. Those were hard, quiet days. We did not speak much about our disappointment. To speak of it was to give it shape, and we preferred our sorrow unspoken, folded neatly between the days like a letter we could not bear to read again.

It was an unwritten rule in our family that if you didn’t speak of it, then it never happened at all. Silence, in its strange way, was our means of survival, our way of smoothing over the cracks that might otherwise have split us wide open.

When the word finally came from the adoption agency that a baby boy was to be ours, my wife, Beverley, wept. They were not the loud, dramatic tears of shock, but deep, trembling ones from a place too sacred for sound. I remember the day we first saw our son: pink, perfect, impossibly small, with hair fine as spun sugar and eyes that blinked up at us, weighing our worth. Beverley held him as if he were a glass ornament that might dissolve at her touch. For me, the love came more slowly and quietly, but no less certain. It crept upon me day by day, like the tide advancing without fanfare. Soon, I could no longer remember what my world had been like before his small weight rested in my arms. Beverley, patient and practical as ever, bore the heavier part of it. I liked to think my presence steadied her. We had no shortage of willing hands for the baby.

My younger sister Noleen was coming for the weekend to lend Beverley a hand. She was eager, full of that bright, bustling energy only the young possess. It was almost her birthday too; she was turning fourteen in just a few days. In our family, that was the grand threshold of adulthood, or so our father declared. “Fourteen,” he’d say, “time you started earning your keep.” In our world, childhood ended not with candles on a cake, but with the first whiff of a pay packet.

I told myself I’d make it home before sundown to help with feeding and settling the baby. That thought alone was enough to turn me toward Launa and Dad’s in Haig Street. Tomorrow, however, belonged to the sea. I planned a fishing trip out on the bay with a few of the boys, a proper outing aboard my Launcher, my sixteen-foot pride and joy. It was small enough to handle alone but sturdy

enough to dance with the chop when the tide grew wild. The Yellowtail Bream had been biting well, thick schools moving through the deeper channels of Moreton Bay. They brought with them a riot of marine life. The bay was alive, teeming, and it called to me as it always had. Dad, of course, would have something to say about it. He had the heavier, older, better tackle, always did. His domain under our Haig Street house was an emporium of chaos and treasure, a museum of things too valuable to throw away, too peculiar to use. He was a hoarder, though he would never admit it. To him, every scrap of rope or rusty hook had a purpose known only to himself. He kept his hand-caught beach worms, wrapped in old news, in an icebox that smelled of damp earth and devotion. “Best bait in Wynnum,” he used to boast. He was probably right.

I always brought something for Launa when I visited, a small token. It was a habit formed in the days when gifts were rare, and affection was shown in gestures rather than words. That afternoon, it was a record: the soundtrack from the movie musical Carousel. I had no use for it, but I knew Launa would adore it. Launa had a soft spot for Shirley Jones. She said there was a kind of purity in her voice that made even the saddest songs bearable. With heat rising off thepavement in shivering veils, I thought of the story of that musical: Billy Bigelow, the rough carnival barker; Julie Jordan, the mill girl who loved him past reason; and their daughter, poor Louise, haunted by a father she never knew.

There was something in it that always struck close to home. That blend of hope and ruin, of love marred by its own stubbornness, lingered. It was in its way the story of so many men I’d known, good men too, who worked hard and failed harder. They lashed out at life, not because they despised it, but because they could not make it yield. Yet, there was redemption, too. Billy, one day, returned from the dead; a chance to right what he’d done wrong and tell his daughter she was not alone. That act of grace, the father’s touch upon the child’s heart, lingered with me as I walked. I suppose I hoped, in some small, unspoken way, that little Lloyd, one day grown, might look back on me and find something worth forgiving, something worth. The sun was beginning to sink. The air was still golden and thick with salt when I reached Launa and Dad’s gate. The sound of cicadas rose in a steady chorus, and the sky above the house shimmered like beaten brass. Our family house on Haig Street now bores a modest nameplate.

It read Edlaun, a curious word to strangers but sacred to us. Edlaun was created by joining my father’s middle name, Edward, and my mother’s name, Launa. Thomas Edward is my father, and Launa is my mother. It was as homely and heartfelt as the two of them. The house itself, which we built with our own hands, was unremarkable by any grand measure: timber boards, a tin roof, windows that rattled in the bay winds. Yet it was made beautiful by my mother’s touch. Along the front fence, Launa planted her beloved gerberas, row uponrow of them; a riot of colour that could have shamed any carnival. Gerberas are a symbol of happiness and innocence, of beauty that asks nothing in return. The yellow blooms spoke of cheerfulness and friendship; the warmth Launa gave freely to any soul who passed. The pink, of adoration and tenderness; the affection she could not always say aloud. The red, of passion and strength; her fire, her fierce love, her temper when roused. The white, of purity; the better part of her that believed goodness was its own reward. And the orange, radiant as sunrise, was her laughter: bold, bright, and sometimes fleeting.

Excerpt From: T.W.S Armstrong. “Maiden Webb.”

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