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CHAPTER FOUR: THE VOLUNTEER POSTMISTRESS.

Grandma Wilson and Uncle Charlie waste little time before moving to their retirement home on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. They are gone, in fact, within a week of Josh and Kathy's arrival.

Kathy has been understandably preoccupied with settling into her new home, but there is a limit to how long she can delay before visiting her sister.

The two are not inclined to see eye to eye on too many subjects. They appear to have little in common--more than that, if the truth were to come out, Kathy doesn't really like Liz all that much, doesn't like the big sister she thinks of as her big dumb sister.

Their lack of having things in common even extends to their appearance--they don't look at all like sisters. Liz looks very much like her father whereas Kathy doesn't look a bit like him, but she does resemble her mother and to a degree which strikes the notice of most people.

But not withstanding their many differences, Kathy has nevertheless made a date, has set a time for tea and scones with Liz and her two daughters, Judy and Sally.

Upon entering the house, Kathy cannot help but notice the furniture. She not only has a lot more of it, but it’s better quality too. That’s hardly surprising since Liz has a long history of greediness and selfishness. It is little wonder indeed that she would end up with most of the furniture and mostly the best furniture.

But it is precisely the furniture than can make the plain box shape of a room come alive and look good. This makes not only the interior of Liz’s home, but her whole house look much more appealing than my crummy, slummy-looking place.

That was the harsh but simple reality that was now staring Kathy unflinchingly in the face. The old Vespeman house, left almost bereft of furniture, was showing many of the hallmarks as well as the earmarks of slum-dom. No matter how you looked at it, it was cheap and nasty.

On the one hand, this should not have been a problem, because Kathy had lived in such houses before; but, on the other hand, she had never owned one before. This was, therefore, a step up after all. Yes indeed! It was definitely a step up. She felt almost convinced of the strength of this line of reasoning, and so she almost believed it. Almost, but not quite, because things had also been better in the past and the future then had looked more promising.

When she and Arthur were first married, everything seemed rosy. They had a beautiful, four-bedroom home overlooking all of Launceston and part of the Tamar valley. That house was even grander than the fancy houses his two elder brothers owned.

Arthur's eldest brother was an accountant who earned lots of money. His other brother was a high school teacher. Arthur, by contrast, had flunked out of high school. Imagine that: he, the son of a high school headmaster, a headmaster who was ever willing and available to act as his personal tutor. He could tutor Arthur in math, in science, in history, in anything, because he knew everything about everything.

But, according to Arthur, his father was a pompous know-it-all. His impatience at their tutoring sessions was like a never-ending expression of contempt for Arthur's lack of intelligence, was like an endless series of knuckle-rapping punishments.

Kathy and Arthur lived in their hillside mansion for only six short but glorious months. After that, she fell pregnant, with Theo, and was unable to keep working. The rent on that up-market address was high. To pay it required both their incomes. For that reason, they had to move out and find something crummy but affordable.

With Kathy's thoughts and focus of attention now returning to the tea party, she notices that Liz has graced her kitchen table with a fancy embroidered table cloth, and sitting atop this are plates of scones and cakes and an extra-large pot of tea.

Liz seems ebulliently happy. She will soon steer the conversation in a particular direction and keep it focussed on a subject close to her heart. This, the exciting good news she must share with Kathy, concerns her newfound popularity, which is evidenced by the many men friends she now has--in prison. She can talk of little else:

"Unlike what most people might think, they are really a great bunch of guys. I write directly to three of them, but I also redirect their letters to prisoners in other prisons. They are really grateful that I can do that for them."

"I bet they are!" said Kathy, with a none-too-subtle admixture of cynicism in her tone of voice.

Liz appears unperturbed, is still smiling effusively. With the excitement of a child, she hands a letter to Kathy with an implied invitation for her to read it. The letter is surprisingly well written considering its place of origin. It is signed 'Peter'. The spelling is almost perfect, with only words like 'to', 'two' and 'too' being always spelled as ‘to’ and often inappropriately so. The lettering is straight, smooth and neat.

This forms a sharp contrast to what Kathy was expecting. She had once, years ago, read a postcard, which Danny Badden had sent Liz from Melbourne. The lettering on that had strongly resembled a monkey scrawl, while the spelling and grammar were equally atrocious.

Kathy was always a much better student than Liz or anyone else in her family for that matter. She was earning straight A's in grade school and junior high, but strangely perhaps, she dropped out half way through the ninth grade.

"Peter is even interested in coming to live up on the Sugarloaf when he gets out," said Liz, to her still highly skeptical sister. "When I told him the Copper Road was the one and only road in and out of here, he said, 'That's fascinatin', darlin'!' --he always calls me that--and he wanted to know more about it.

He wanted to know absolutely everything about it. He was really very interested in what I had to say. I think he's really very impressed with me. He said more than once that I was clever. He always listens to me, to what I have to say. He is such a gentleman."

"But why do you have to redirect all these letters and pay double postage?"

"Well, they aren't allowed, you see, and so they can't write to each other at all--that's where I come in. They need my help and they can't do anything without me."

"But if these criminals aren't allowed to write to other criminals in other prisons, then what you are doing has got to be highly illegal."

"But why do you keep on calling them 'criminals'. They really are nice guys and Pete is innocent anyway--the cops just have it in for him."

"Oh Liz, how could you be so naive! This is such foolish nonsense!"

"You don't like my friends! You have never liked my friends!" Liz now appears hurt. She has descended quickly from a state of euphoria to looking embarrassed and upset, deflated and depressed. "Why don’t you like my friends?"

"They are not your friends, Liz!"

"You are always against me and anything I do. You are such a wet blanket!"

"Liz," said Kathy, now more sympathetically, "these guys are criminals because they are in jail. Now, you probably have to commit at least ten crimes before you even get caught. At that point they only sentence you to probation in any case. By the time you are actually put behind bars, you have to be a habitual criminal, a REAL BAD GUY! For heaven's sake! You can do better than this. Are you so desperate for a man that you have to resort to playing in front of a captive audience."

Liz now grimaces with apparent pain--an apparent pain of considerable intensity, which, after a brief instant, is transformed into an angry outburst.

"Who are you to talk! WHO ARE YOU! You are just a snob! You marry the headmaster's son just to climb up the social ladder, and he turns out to be no better than a worthless deadbeat."

It is now Kathy's turn to be cut to the quick. She is suddenly reminded of something, and assailed by feelings of embarrassment powerful enough to be physically painful. Is it only the truth that hurts? Had she really seen her husband, Arthur, as a means to an end, as her ticket out of the working class, as her transport down off the mountain?

The simple answer to that question was a resounding 'Yes'. She had indeed. What's more, she had been entirely conscious of all of the above, because it was simply a deliberate strategy, which she saw as the best possible option available to her at that time.

And yet her plan, as carefully considered and calculated as it was, must have contained locked deep within it a fundamental flaw, because it simply didn't work. Seemingly powerful forces had raised insurmountable obstacles to block her every attempt at forward or upward movement--had thwarted her at every futile turn and had now dragged her all the way back to the harshest possible reality: the point of zero progress, the very place she had started out from.

At fifteen, Kathy had been unable to cope with the humiliation of having to wear a worn out pair of tennis shoes to school. She had to wear those for the simple reason that she had nothing else to wear. They were the only shoes she owned at the time, and, as tennis shoes, they were in no way similar to the cool and fashionable Reeboks and Nikes, which would become popular decades later.

Kathy's radical solution to her footwear problem was to simply abandon the promising prospect of school in favor of dropping out and getting a job. With the money she earned, she would buy a whole wardrobe full of new clothes, and shoes too, fancy shoes, high-heeled shoes and even stiletto-heeled shoes.

Real prosperity was unknown to ordinary, average people until after World War II. During the fifties, some of that post-war prosperity even found its way onto the Sugarloaf, but Kathy's father could easily spend the highest-priority share of that money on alcohol.

Her father was her mother's first husband. Uncle Charlie was her mother's second husband and not a real uncle or any kind of blood relation to Kathy or Liz (well, probably not, but who can ever be sure of something like that without a DNA test}. A characteristic of babies is that you can normally tell who their mother is, but as to who their father is--that could be anyone’s guess.

In any case, at their mother's insistence, they addressed him as 'Uncle Charlie' but their real father had died of kidney failure, which stemmed from Cirrhosis of the liver, which, in turn, resulted from his long-term abuse of alcohol.

In a teenage Kathy's estimation--an estimation that was not to change appreciably in later years--alcohol was like the linchpin of mining. It was like an essential oil, which lubricated the myriad moving parts, the gears and wheels of the mine's complex infrastructure.

The miners, as she saw them, were always either mining or drinking. That's virtually all they ever did and it was all just as simple as that: If they weren't mining, they were drinking; and if they weren't drinking, they were mining.

The wages of mining, in her estimate, were roughly equivalent to the wages of sin. In her grandfather's time, it was death from the black lung: The women, typically, would nurse their forty-year-old invalid husbands, who would then die at about the age of forty-five. In later years it was mostly the alcohol that hurried them into an early grave.

The simple dollar value of the wages of mining was actually considerably above the average wage at that time. And yet this numerical quantity seemed abstract, irrelevant and even meaningless, because there was rarely any spare cash available to buy such nonessentials as girl's clothing.

Kathy's father was from the old school. He knew that real men were "bloody good drinkers", who could hold their liquor. Real men were always head of the household and would never take orders from a mere female.

Using these same standards as a yardstick, Uncle Charlie was not even a real man, and yet he did at least have his health and savings enough for a beachside retirement. He was softer and gentler than most of the others, though some said he was cold, aloof and even anti social.

He was not anti social in the sense of committing crimes against the community; he was anti social merely in being unwilling to go to the pub and socialize with the beer-swilling brigade. But the meaning of the term ‘anti social’ had become blurred in their minds.

His rejection of them was viewed as offensive because it contained an implied insult (i.e.) that there was something wrong with what they were doing, with the way they lived their lives. And there was the further implication that, by not participating in their ‘improper’ behavior, he was trying to assert his superiority over them.

But who was he to talk. He didn't even put money on the horses on a Saturday, the way normal men do. He didn't even smoke. He was without normal vices. He was like a Sunday school teacher. And that's probably why he allowed himself to be henpecked. He was a Nancy boy at the very least, and, perhaps deep down, he was some kind of homo? That probably explained his lack of masculinity and why he was such a misfit that he found it necessary to avoid people.

He did in fact spend most of his spare time at home in the garden or the workshop where he indulged his hobby of carpentry. Kathy didn't even know him very well, but there seemed little doubt that he had bestowed upon her mother an immeasurable gift--a future.