The White Body of Evening by A L McCann

anyway and the three of them – Paul, Ondine and he – were going to Germany, to live in the forest, just as soon as they were old enough. It was their pact.
    To Paul, the arc light made the whole scene look as if it had suddenly been bathed in blood. In a miraculous transformation the celebrating crowd had become something frightening and hateful, yet the boy was mesmerised. The play of darkness and light and the postures of jubilation and drunkenness before him invited his imagination to run wild as he saw things that he had never dreamt of before. Men dressed like clowns capered along the street and beggars stumbled in and out of gutters; some of the faces looked like skulls, others like dogs’ heads, or masks, or people he thought he knew but couldn’t place. People drank, vomited, kissed, jostled or just moved through the crowd like lunatics or oblivious sleepwalkers. They were all jammed together, moving as one, yet still so alone, and the whole seething mass was soaked in the ghastly red light of its own blood.
    But then, as some time passed, the crowd thinned and another transformation occurred. At first it had been a violent sea of bodies, but now it was a series of gentle flows and eddies. Slowly the flood dissipated and, as Robert took Paul’s hand and made to leave, the boy was engrossed by the sight of a sparse assortment of stragglers inhabiting a deserted, rubbish-strewn street. There was something eerie about it. It made him think of a painting he’d once seen depicting the aftermath of a great battle in which the field was strewn with bodies and debris. He wanted to stay and keep looking at the carnage and the forlorn sight of lost souls, but his uncle was now anxious to go and gently pulled him away from the street.
    “We have a bit of a journey back home, Paul,” Robert said.
    “Will Ondine still be awake?” Hamish asked.
    “I doubt it, young fella,” he replied, smiling to himself.
    In the distance, somewhere near the river, a cracked voice was singing, hopelessly out of tune.
    With no thoughts of ‘er yesterday,

But dreams of a mighty state,

Great ‘mid the old grave nations,

Divine in ‘er aspirations,

Blessed be the men who brought ‘er,

Freedom’s starriest daughter,

Outa the night, inta the light.

The power and the glory,

For evermore.
    “Amen,” another voice yelled out at the conclusion of the song, prompting a burst of boisterous laughter that rippled along the banks of the river.
    As the century ended, as the clock struck twelve and other people cheered and hugged, Anna held her daughter on her shoulder. Ondine had wanted to go into the city as well, but her mother, not feeling hardy enough to tackle the tumult, decided that Robert would have his hands full with the two boys. Albert was scheduled to work the Melbourne–Geelong line and wouldn’t be home until late, so rather than spending such a significant night alone, Anna went next door to the McDermotts’, where a group of men from the wharves and their families had gathered to celebrate the arrival of Federation.
    For a while Ondine played with the other children, leaving Anna to chat and have a glass of cider. She was taken by the easy sociability of these working men and their open, if slightly uncouth manners. Since Albert’s troubles, Jack and Sarah had been warm and supportive neighbours. When Albert lost his job at the insurance company they continued to interact with unembarrassed candour, and when he found work again as a train conductor, Jack slapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him on his return to the “ranks of the Southern Cross”.
    The fading hours of the nineteenth century had gripped Anna with nostalgia, homesickness and regret. She thought about her father, who had died two years earlier, and her mother who, at the age of sixty-three, had refused to move to Melbourne and instead raised herself in revolt against a country she hated and planned her return to Germany to pass away in