job to grind them in the mortar and make them into a pill or a cream.
When she wasn’t grinding away at the mortar and coughing at the fine powder that floated out, or rolling the pills in sugar, or washing out bottles, Nance had to serve in the shop. The customers frightened her. Half the time she’d never heard of whatever it was they were asking for, let alone where in the shop to find it. Enmore was full of people too poor to go to the doctor and some of them didn’t realise Nance had no idea what to do for a nasty chesty cough, or the big red stye on their eyelid. She asked Mr Stevens or Moira, but she felt stupid to be forever pestering them. Then there was the worry of handing someone the wrong package and killing them.
Moira was the apprentice she was replacing. She’d done her Finals but was staying on for a week to show Nance the ropes. At the end of each day they went over the dockets together. That was another worry, if they didn’t come out right would she have to make up the shortfall? Some of the things on the dockets were a mystery and finally she asked, What are these FL things?
Oh, Nance, keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake, Moira said, and jerked her head to tell Nance to follow her into the back room.
Look, she said, they’re french letters, you know anything about them? No, well, they go over the feller’s willy. Stop the babies coming.
She laughed. Moira was a coarse sort of person, though not when Mr Stevens was about.
Know what a willy is, do you, Nance? Country girl like you? You’d have seen the bulls and that?
The bulls and the horses were all Nance knew about sex, apart from Tom Vidler’s kiss at the Tamworth Memorial Dance.
The fellers are awkward about coming in and asking, Moira said. Needn’t be, in my view. I like a feller with a french letter in his back pocket.
Nance felt like an innocent fool, but at least now she understood about the young men who’d come in expecting to be served by Mr Stevens and got her instead. They’d stammer out a request for a comb or a pair of shoelaces. Blushing, mumbling, spilling their change. Later she’d see them lurking outside and when Mr Stevens was behind the counter they’d come in again. They’d wall themselves off from the women with their shoulders and murmur together.
Moira showed Nance the place under the counter where Mr Stevens kept the FLs. There were things for women, too, that you had to know about. Little pieces of sponge with a string that you soaked in vinegar, and the Housewife’s Friend. Kind of a foamy thing you put up yourself, Moira said. Terrible mess on the sheets.
Monday to Friday she got to the shop at one and was there until seven or eight at night. There was another pharmacy next door and they played the game of who could stay open longer. On Saturday and Sunday she had to be at the shop at nine in the morning. At one o’clock she could go home, but she had to be back again at six and stay till whenever the shop closed. Saturday nights were busy, sometimes they didn’t close till ten. There was no morning of the week when she could sleep in. No complete day was her own, not even a full afternoon. Her life before pharmacy seemed a mad luxuriousness of time.
For the first weeks her feet ached so she could feel the bones against the floor. At the tram stop there was no seat and there were nights when she sat down to wait on the footpath, feet in the gutter like a tramp. She was past caring.
Eventually her feet got used to it, but she didn’t. Did you have a nice day, dear, Mrs Glendon asked every evening. Nance tried to smile, tried to eat her dried-up dinner, too tired to be hungry. Mrs Glendon had left school at fourteen, had never worked outside the home. Nance training to be a pharmacist seemed wonderful to her. How could Nance tell her, It’s awful! I don’t understand the lectures! And Mr Stevens rouses on me if I’m not back at the shop on time!
Each day she put on the white coat again knowing there was nothing ahead of her but loneliness and exhaustion. She wished she’d never won that prize at the Intermediate, never attracted Mr Crisp’s interest, never squeaked that pass at the Leaving. She hated every day, went to sleep with her wrist still tightening around the movement of the pestle, and on the other side of the too-short sleep there was another day like the last one.
By the time Nance was desperate enough to write to Bert and Dolly to tell them how awful it was, it was too late. Something terrible had happened to the stock market in America a while earlier, and now everyone all over the world had lost their money.
She knew from what Dolly and Max wrote that things were bad in Tamworth. No one had the money to buy anything, so shops were closing all along Peel Street. The commercial travellers who had been the backbone of the Cally’s income stopped coming. People on properties still came into town but they didn’t go to the Cally for the four-shilling dinner, or even to the Greeks’. They brought a sandwich from home. Out at Goonoo Goonoo there was no more polo. The King girls had to wangle jobs at David Jones. At the Cally they’d let go all the staff except Arthur and Con, and they were only kept on because they were willing to work for board and keep.
Thank God you have a job, Nance, her mother wrote. Lucky we got you in there in time. Nance knew she was saying, There’s nothing for you here.
She wouldn’t have known any of it from her father’s letters. Bit of a downturn, that’s all, he said. Things are bound to look up any day.
As an apprentice Nance was paid sixteen shillings a week. Bert had paid the first year’s university fees in advance and he sent her money every month. Now each cheque was smaller than the last. Still enough for her board, but not much else. Ever since she could remember she’d been able to have plenty of good food, a new dress now and then, the pictures on a Saturday afternoon. Now there was no money for new clothes or shoes and the pictures were a luxury she had to scrimp for. At the Glendons’ there was no more butter, only dripping. No more chops, now it was scrag end in a stew and a lot of potatoes. Bacon once a week, the rasher thin enough to see through. Getting the tram from the university to Enmore came to seem an indulgence. She walked, and ate her sandwich on the way, so she hiccupped all afternoon.
But she had a job, no matter how badly paid, and if you had a job you had to hang on to it. Every day she saw long lines of skinny men standing with their heads down outside the church soup kitchens or holding cardboard signs saying they were clean and honest and would do any kind of work. When Mr Stevens needed a delivery boy, the queue of people went down the street, and they were mostly grown men.
In the short days of winter, the wait for the tram home was dark and cold, the wind spiteful as it sliced up Enmore Road. One night she watched the tram light coming towards her, the rails gleaming, the road slick with rain. The trams had been a little adventure in the beginning but now they were the emblem of the hard machine of her days.
I could step out in front of it, she thought. That would put an end to the misery and the loneliness and the feeling that every day would be like this forever. It would hurt, she supposed. But if she was lucky it would all be over in a second.
In the moment she stood with that choice, she was free of everyone else in the world: what her mother wanted, what her father said, what Mrs Glendon thought. It was just her, Nance Russell, alone with eternity. She’d have prayed, if she had the words for a prayer, or believed there was anyone to hear it.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die. They were the words that rose out of memory.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
She’d sat in that hot classroom while the blowflies droned against
