A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  —That big bugger, said Jelly, a big bugger himself in some ways. The inquiry agent?

  —Yes.

  —All this flooding … he might get stuck here now.

  —Damn him.

  —Yes, said Jelly precisely and delicately. In fact he broke the word neatly off the body of language in a way he rarely did. It might be a sign that he was not finished with serious advice.

  —Look, I’ve been meaning to say. You can’t just expect to disappear, you know. It’s not just enough to come to some dead place like Myambagh. I saw posters for you. Your family has put up posters all over the place. They decided not to call you a missing person, but they sent a poster to every police station. A photograph. Asking them to be so kind as to put them up at the Town Hall and the Post Office … A friend of mine who’s in the police here brought them to me and says, Isn’t this your friend? And I say, Yes it is. And he asked me if I think you want these posters put up. And I say I reckon you don’t. He knows you’ve got no record, because he checked. So he just gave the posters to me and I disposed of them. There are pictures of you hanging all over New South Wales, except in Myambagh. Myambagh always wanted a distinction of its own, apart from floods. Well, this is it. The only bloody place with a council chambers that doesn’t have your picture. Imagine!

  She felt flushed with gratitude, though, and it was partly to herself. She had chosen her protector so infallibly.

  The timidity she’d harbored about carrying dynamite across Myambagh vanished now. She imagined the detonators neatly packaged away from the explosive. The two lovingly insulated from one another. Instruments of high office.

  Jelly left ahead of her, lumbering away into the murk. She had dropped the Esky to cling to him for a while before he left, and he’d said, Thank my friend the copper. He’s took a bit of a risk. Though I suppose he could always say they were mislaid.

  She closed the door but did not lock it, since Myambagh people feared not looters, only the flood. In the quiet, drenched streets she was delighted by the weight of the plastic-handled load, by the way Jelly’s scheme had claimed her. Her gnarled shoulders ached and itched, as often when she carried weight. This message of pain from the old world could be examined for a while and connected by a thin filament to the new.

  Burnside was waiting for her in the dining room at the Railway. He looked well settled in, as if he’d had a pleasant breakfast with the other guests and had diverted them with tales of the construction industry. Shirley had just finished cleaning up and wiping down the filigreed plastic tablecloths. The place was still. Even today all the Monks and Escapees were scattered around households and public buildings in Myambagh, repairing for time-and-a-half the water damage of the past flood even while this one brewed and threatened.

  Burnside rose, leaving behind his coffee, and stepped toward her.

  —Been on a picnic? he asked, but did not wait for an answer. I could get stuck here now if you don’t …

  —I’ll get your papers. Wait there.

  First she carried Jelly’s Esky up the stairs and onto the upstairs verandah. Jack boasted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century graziers, cowcockies, drovers, sawyers and bullockies used to play cricket up here. The fieldsmen in slips and covers had to catch the ball clean to prevent it soaring over the balcony, into the street or onto the railway lines. A young Aboriginal was always employed therefore to stand in the street below and retrieve hoiked balls. Thus on the Railway Hotel verandah, and on other hotel verandahs in the antipodes, a three-dimensional game of cricket had been devised, height coming into the equation as well as length. A sub-fieldsman scouted the road and the steel lines, looking for the ball in thickets of paspalum grass by the goods yard, while upstairs the batsmen ran run after run and the fieldsmen leaned over the balcony screaming, Get it, you black bastard!

  On this broad roof, the rain sounded like riveting guns. Kate found that someone had been into the annex—perhaps Shirley, who in between her high-cholesterol mode of cooking cleaned and set up rooms as well. Mattresses had been laid on the boards. Blankets and sheets were folded onto each mattress. On the orders of Jack and dark-eyed Connie, an emergency dormitory had been made. Kate wondered if Jelly knew matters at the Railway had reached such a degree of preparation?

  A cupboard stood at the far end, suitable for the explosives. But Jelly had contemplated a vacant verandah. Nonetheless, for the moment, she decided to be obedient. He had said it was not volatile and it was his place to know. He must know of all these blankets and sheets, of the coming population of Murchison’s Railway Hotel’s normally unpeopled verandah.

  Now she went to her room and closed the door. The air was cold and a dim blue, but she lay uncovered on the bed for a time and revived the flavor of her habitual Chifley dreams. No fur in the dream, though. No feather. Just motion above Australia’s absolute surfaces.

  Guthega had argued one night that the way a kangaroo’s lungs hung down behind its ribs and the flab of the belly meant that the very motion of bounding sucked air in. Making light of the earth, or as Guthega had it, traveling like shit, itself caused the lungs to fill. There was never a gasp. All kangaroos, said Guthega, were marathoners.

  Her throat closing up with desire, Kate imagined that state: the more you flew, the more you breathed. Flight made of you one continuous body of air.

  After daydreaming about breath and flight then, she got up and took Burnside’s envelope from the dresser. Blindly she signed every document, canonical and civil, wherever there was a penciled cross. She did not read them. She knew what they said. She was relinquishing all control, equity in and claim against Kozinski Constructions, Kozinski Development, Kozinski Building Services, Kozinski Industrial Waste Corp, Vistula Trust and Cleaning, and so on. On the letterhead of the annulment document, St. Patrick trampled on a snake. She signed that document very quickly, loyally remembering Uncle Frank, his well-canvassed hatred of canon lawyers.

  She put all the documents back into the envelope, stuffing some of them so that their neat creases were erratically rearranged. She carried it all downstairs. The malign exactitudes, she imagined, stung the flesh of the fingers.

  Burnside was standing waiting for her. He smoked but he was not utterly at ease. She offered the envelope to him with a speed he didn’t expect, so that he half fumbled it, clamping the cigarette in one corner of his mouth by contorting his lower lip. Opening the thing, he looked at every page, quickly. Seeing the repeated signature—she had even consented to sign the papers with her married name—he was pleased. But it was against policy to tell her.

  —Wish you’d seen your way to sign them yesterday. Even if the highway isn’t bloody blocked, I’ll get stuck in Dubbo. Radio says the airport there’s closed.

  —It’s a small inconvenience, she told him in a tone which implied he shouldn’t think of making further complaints. Because signatures could be revoked at this stage. Envelopes could still be whisked out from under his elbow and documents ripped up.

  She said, Don’t forget to ask Jack for your bill before you go.

  He stared at her, nodding his head as if reaching a new assessment.

  —Whatever in the fuck did Paul Kozinski see in a slut like you?

  But he held the envelope tightly in both hands. He would get a commission of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could afford to be offensive now he’d assured himself of that. She had an idea he was even wondering whether he should punch her.

  —You should live with better people than this. Paul would be surprised to see you living here. I realize it’s the shock of what happened, but …

  She turned away, leaving him. It was time for her to begin her last short season at the beer taps.

  She felt usurped to find dark-eyed Connie behind the bar.

  Connie said, You settled things with that big bugger out there?

  —Yes. He’s leaving.

  Jack emerged from the keg room. He said with a crooked smile, Connie’s taken over th
e beer taps.

  —Too early to start handing out free beer to flood victims. Jack’d start now if I let him.

  —Darls! Jack appealed, offended to have his business sense so discounted.

  —Australians don’t understand business, Connie stated. That’s why the country’s in such a bloody mess. Jack’s a sentimentalist. With my father’s money.

  Anger overcame Jack. His neck turned red and a stammer broke from his lips.

  —Darls, I’ve never wasted a dollar of your old man’s …

  —Because I watch you, that’s why.

  Her bruised eyes were permanently wakeful.

  —Man’s got his pride, Jack reminded her.

  —There won’t be any business anyhow today, Connie said almost leniently. Better get going on the sandbag filling, if that’s what you want.

  Jack kissed her, whispered something to her and then went to dress for the outside world. The bulk of Connie’s argument as he left the public bar was to tell those kids to stop that or she’d bloody well stop it for them.

  In the dining room, pulling on the gumboots from Dunnegan’s Country Stores while Connie’s children stared at the big television set, Kate looked out under the long verandah across the pavement she or Connie hosed every morning but which was now hosed free of charge. Burnside was backing his car and turning its head eastward, very confident in that solid downpour. It seemed unlikely to Kate, though, that behind the veil the highway had sustained itself all the way to Dubbo. On the other hand, she could imagine him swimming the flooded sections, the envelope held in his teeth.

  Sixteen

  THE ROAD ahead of Jack’s truck was at first empty, since the river had subverted the highway. But as they drove across town, they did encounter other vehicles traveling slowly, hubcap-deep and all within the diamond of space Jelly had once drawn for Kate on a sheet of paper by the bar. One end the Cobar railway line, its adjacent side the highway, and then the two lines of levee. The Myambagh parallelogram in the inland sea, by a deadly river which now had ambitions to swallow the earth. Against that possibility, people rushed by in their four-wheel drives and station wagons, spraying water, anxious about the coming night, unwilling yet to sedate themselves with drink.

  The showground entrance boasted of the Myambagh Annual Agricultural Show, nominating dates from the previous April, the April which had been occupied by the other Kate.

  The wooden produce halls amidst which Jack steered his truck showed the same patchy yellow as the railway station. He parked by the central ring where in brave days the prize bulls and stud rams paraded and the show horses reared and competed. Now the ring was covered with a hill of sand dumped there without much design by tiptrucks. More men and women and children than you would have thought Myambagh contained filled hessian bags by shovel from these mounds, or else tied the bags with twine.

  This appeared to Kate like wonderfully hard work. She advanced with Jack onto the showground and reached for one of the wet shovels which lay unclaimed on one of the lower mounds, not waiting at all—as Jack had to—to pay respects to those who required it of him amongst the organizers of the melee.

  Joyful at this last Myambagh labor, Kate worked all dim afternoon, as the flesh of her hands turned soft on the downpour, as the shovel and the bag and the twine with which she tied the mouths of her sandbags began painlessly to bear away her skin. Jack came around with medical tape again and again.

  —Giz a look at your hands, Kate love.

  He would tie up the damaged fingers, making small regretful noises with his lips. He tried to fortify the knuckles and joints, where the flesh was most at risk, with dressings of plaster. But the work and the rain defeated all that. Adhesive, clogged with sand and water, hung like strips of flesh from everyone’s hands. The gloom grew astounding. It quenched all reflections. Kate began to shiver. An officious middle-aged man came around shouting that a new idea had been devised.

  The French Revolution must have been like this, Kate thought, remembering something heard in a cool classroom in Sydney on a day of humidity. How Robespierre, shouting like this, possessed of a new plan, brought Danton to the blade.

  At the transport depot, to which the man was pointing, there was a gigantic shed, a hangar. Sand was being dumped there, indoors, where volunteers could work out of the rain.

  In near-darkness, under a sky choked by cloud, Kate loaded herself into a truck and sat amongst young women and high school students and beefy family men. The journey seemed to revive everyone, cause chatter and the comparing of damaged hands. Everyone was tired out, but in a feverish insomniac way. The communal efforts against water had put them in ecstasy. When they arrived under the great iron roof, they were eager to work again. They congratulated each other that the sand wasn’t as water-laden and not as heavy to shovel. The sand was in the bag, the dynamite on the verandah. Her life, ignoring the nullity of it, was under startling control. For a woman on the edge of renouncing Myambagh, she felt narcotically static, an utter citizen.

  An ambulance officer, Maltese crosses on his cap and the shoulders of his shirt! He came round dressing damaged hands more competently than kind Jack. He came to Kate and asked her to stop the shoveling, and he looked down at her unloosed grip and began to weep.

  —You are all trying so hard, he stuttered.

  He felt she had sacrificed her hands for Myambagh. For the integrity of the polis.

  Jack had by now gone somewhere, out in the dark. Building a levee of sandbags behind or on top of the earth levee. As Jelly had predicted, sandbags were essential to Myambagh.

  A muscular sixteen-year-old came up with a mug of tea for her.

  —You’re a tiger, he said.

  He made her stop and sit down on a cable spool. She drank the sweet tea. It made her imaginative. Somewhere the bags she’d filled were holding out the water. Down by the wheat silos, along Bardia Street, beyond Lusitania Drive, and by the fences of the cemetery behind which the dead all kept their soggy graves, strict in their denominations. Resting on her cable spool and exalted with exhaustion, Kate saw Gus Schulberger make a tentative entry into the shed.

  His head was bare and his black hair spiky with rain. Judging from his hunted look, the peculiar stealthy gleam of his green eyes, he had not come to fill sandbags. A young constable from Myambagh police, holding a quacking two-way radio, passed him, and Gus looked frankly furtive. The dead giveaway furtiveness of an honest man who lacks the front for deceit. He panned his face away and shaded his eyes till the boy had gone out with his barking radio into the weeping dark.

  Sideways then he saw Kate and rushed across to her.

  —Tough weather, Kate.

  She could tell that he was very pleased to have found her. He wanted to know where Jelly was. Wearing no raincoat, he steamed like a dog, and even smelled a little like one. He had a pleasant canine musk.

  Jelly was at the Palais, she told him. Taking down the names of evacuees.

  She could imagine Jelly at the desk, full of all the gravity of rescue, an electoral roll open in front of him, and telephones to connect him to the Emergency Services and the police. This was not his chief task in life. It was a holiday from his chief task. If you thought about it like this, pausing, you could taste in this dense, weeping night the rumor of Jelly’s reduction to ordinariness.

  Gus asked, Jesus, Kate, where’s the Palais?

  She told him Wrangle Street. An old cinema and dance hall. The Pentagon of Myambagh floods.

  Gus shook his wet head. Fascinated, she watched the roostery feather of wet black hair which extended from the back of his skull.

  —Listen, could you show me the way?

  Amongst the sandbag fillers, she had earned such credit that she had only to mention to one of the middle-aged supremos that she was going.

  —I’d think you bloody well would, love. Have a few hours’ sleep, eh.

  The rain had diminished in force, but could afford to now that it had gingered up the river and set waves of wate
r moving across the plain. Kate was pleased in a light-headed way to find that Gus led her to the small furniture truck in which Chifley and Menzies had traveled to their employment with the Australian coat of arms in Wagga. In her dream catalogue of everything associated with Chifley, this truck had had its place.

  Courtly in his way, Gus opened the passenger door for Kate. When he entered the cabin from his side and put his hands to the wheel, they trembled. He sat for a while, absorbing the good fortune of finding her, adjusting himself to the strain of not yet having found Jelly.

  —I nearly got washed away crossing Tabramore. There’s fifty yards of bloody torrent there, Kate. And I tried it and stalled in the middle. Desperate bloody times. High center of gravity, these things. It was beginning to shift and tilt. A bloke with a tractor drove in and hauled me out. I don’t know his name. He’s my brother for life, that bugger.

  She heard a clicking, pawy stirring in the back of the truck.

  —Do you have the animals? she asked in hope.

  —It’s all drenched in the back there.

  —Is it the kangaroo?

  —That’s right.

  Kate turned her head to the little window which gave into the enclosed back of the truck. It was jammed however about two inches open, and could not be pushed further.

  —Bloody magneto’s wet! Gus yelled as he tried again and again to start the engine.

  When at last it caught he set the wipers going, though they made no difference, and drove away amongst the runny Impressionist images of showground and racecourse, past the Henry Lawson Primary School, up Dandibong Street and into Gunningbar, heading west past the Captain John Eglington High School. Kate tenderly rubbed her abraded hands. More than she expected: her dream coming back like this, smelling damp and sounding tentative, fixed in her presence by floodwater.

  —So you have the kangaroo, you mean?

  Gus said, Jesus!

  He meant the rain and the condition of the world.