It was uncountable, the number of times the security guard had heard something like this, every day there was another story, but he decided that today with this woman he would salve his conscience for never having believed any of them. Without blinking he took out his wallet, drew from it a ten-dollar note and handed it across the table to her. Here, he said, buy the tape, and don’t come back here again. Shelley picked up the note, the tape and the petrol, and went out into the store to pay.
It was only an hour’s walk back to the car. The children were still sleeping. She put the petrol in the tank, then set to work on the hose, fitting the splayed end as best she could against the butt end of the exhaust pipe and winding a good length of duct tape around both. She stepped back, pleased. She ran the hose end through a gap in one of the rear windows and taped up tightly around it. She wound all the other windows up and ran a line of tape along the joins, just to be sure. She got back into the front seat and took a last swig from the vodka bottle.
When she turned the key in the ignition two things happened. The first was that the hose blew off the exhaust pipe again with a loud pop; the second, almost simultaneously, was that the three children woke with a start and said Mum? Just a minute, said Shelley Jaecks. She got out, went back around to the rear of the car and with more tape tried to attach the hose again. She got back in. Where are we? asked Thomas. What’s the hose doing here? asked Jake. Shh, she said. She turned the ignition again; again the hose popped off. At the fifth attempt, something in Shelley snapped. She ripped the hose from the window and hurled it into the adjoining paddock, scaring up a flock of cockatoos that had just settled there to peck for seed.
Over the years many people have loudly wondered why I started this donkey business, what made me do it, why I deigned to bend down low to help my fellow humans and set them upon my ass. It was not as if anyone told me to. On the contrary, it was in direct defiance of my superiors’ orders that I looked deep inside myself that day and found the part that didn’t want to kill or be killed but live and let live. I wasn’t the first or even the finest but once dead I became their symbol. They needed me. They called what I did mateship, as if it really were a ship, some great vessel that would carry us all out of this quagmire into some glorious imagined future, a hulk full this time not of humanity’s detritus but its best. I became an ethos, an affirmation. We are all, every one of us, men with donkeys, and at the drop of a hat we will throw all we own aside to bend down low and lift our injured up. We’re good people, we care for our neighbours, we’ll always go out of our way to help.
What is compassion? What is it for? Why do we bother? Why be selfless when you can be selfish, humble when you could be haughty? Is it that we see selflessness as a selfish thing? That the greatest danger in stopping to help is that someone might think you’re putting on airs? Maybe those passing by on the other side think helping an act of self-aggrandisement, not of mercy? Perhaps we are more concerned with seeming than with being? Or is it that we just don’t have the time, that we are too busy hurrying from one place to the next? When we see that person lying on the side of the road—attacked by thieves, usurers’ henchmen, the daggers of self-doubt, the annihilating impulse—aren’t we just worried about the complications? The business of caring is complicated, few would willingly do it. Is this why the Priest and the Levite pass by?
When Lasseter gave me his map and set me and my donkey on the way to the Inland Sea I felt like I finally had some teleology to be going on with. With its waters I would heal all, not just the ragged few; I would not be compelled all the time to turn around and help this or that person out. I’d not have to hear all these stories that were quite frankly often very distressing to me. I could push on and tell all these troubled souls that I’d be back one day soon with cures aplenty. But it didn’t work out like that. I could not pass them by. A moan, a wail, a whimper, and I was there like a dog to a bone.
Shelley dried her tears. I think the hose you use is the one you see on washing machines, I said. But where do you get it? she said. I don’t know, I said, perhaps direct from the manufacturer? It still should have worked, she said. True, I said. There was a pause. Well, I said, let’s leave all that for now: there is little to be gained from this talk of hoses. For the first time Shelley smiled.
I worked on her all afternoon. Difficult case! Resourceful Simpson! Cunning, creative, resourceful Simpson! While the children frolicked out on the paddock, back and forth I went to my pannier bags, mixing this with that, applying one thing externally, offering another internally, bringing what colour I could to her cheeks. I lay down my poultices, brought the filth to the surface. I drew out the poison, bled her of bad blood, gave calm to her confusion. I put the last of the bandages on and led a battle-weary Shelley Jaecks to the fence. Her kids were still running around out there in that beautiful late-afternoon light. Come and have a go, Mum! they shouted. Shelley let herself through the gate.
They played until the light was nearly gone; Shelley riding Murphy, the children, full of lollies and Fanta, dancing around her like dryads. Eventually I whistled him up, and, either energised by all this fun and games or desperate to escape it, he pricked up his ears and trotted towards me. The boys had made him a garland of Paterson’s curse; he arrived at the fence and put his head over. Leave the hatchback here, I said to Shelley, and come ride upon my ass. I slung the pannier bags over my shoulder. Gee-up, I said, and Murphy walked. The children followed. The rain was still an hour away; the breeze had hardly stirred. We encountered no-one on the way.
Half an hour’s leisurely journey and we were outside Shelley’s plain brick house in Melton. A bike was still in the drive. I helped her down. She asked would I stay, showed me the garage, offered provender for me and my beast. Alas, no, I cannot stay, I said; I am on my way to the Inland Sea and I have a long journey ahead. Shelley Jaecks thanked me with a few kind words and ruffled the hair of her brood.
So what will happen now? Distant from me, and hard to say. She’s been restored, and will survive. She’ll go inside, clean up the mess. Ask for mediation, go for shared custody if she can. The scars will heal, eventually. Perhaps they will pick up from where they left off? And perhaps not. The truth is it was no longer any concern of mine; I’d bandaged her wounds, brought her down through hellfire to the beach. That was the best I could do, all I could do, for all our injured, until that far-off day when I will stand knee-deep in the healing water baptising all our downtrodden in it.
3
AN UNFORTUNATE LIFE
The heavens opened. This was the rain of which I have previously spoken, and under its relentless assault we decamped to a hayshed off the Toolern Vale road. Murphy was not well. I made up a decoction of wild fennel and horehound and gave it to him two-hourly. We stayed there a week drying out. In that time I got to thinking, of how this trip might be our last and how I might set things down against my inevitable demise. I will tell of the country I have travelled through, I thought, the patients I have met, the afflictions I have seen, the stories I have heard, so that future generations might one day stand my story up against the sanctioned ones and see where their sympathies lie. I will not be afraid to speak for the people, I said, who were not afraid of me.
At last the rain cleared to showers, though Murphy was little improved. I gave him a poke and spoke in his ear: Come, my friend, let us tarry no more. He did not blink, his ears did not twitch, his demeanour did not change, but soon enough he was shuffling forward, the same old steady gait, ready for come what may.
We lunched at the Coimadai monument on a can of creamed corn a supplicant had left, then descended the winding road down to the perilous Lerderderg Gorge. We wheeled west, and began following the treed gullies of the Lerderderg’s tributaries deep into the Blackwood Ranges. None of this was easy going—the gullies were still wet, Murphy was still wheezing—but experience had told me (twenty-eight attempts!) that once through this wooded green we would come out to the flat ground that would take us all the
way to the Interior. After some days we emerged from the Blackwood Ranges just west of Spargo Creek, the bush now broken by pine plantations and clear-felled paddocks of dirt and shattered wood. We rested at a roadside stop, I gave Murphy some more of his decoction, then we pushed on. But we had not gone very far when we came across a one-legged man standing on a goat. Around the man’s neck was a rope, tied to the branch above. The goat was newly shorn. For God’s sake, Denis, what are you doing? I said. The goat won’t move, said Denis Wrycroft. But can’t you get down? I asked. Denis shook his head. I led Murphy alongside: although it was clearly an unwelcome marriage the goat was good enough not to move. Stand on my donkey, I said. He did. But what do I do now? he said. I’m thinking, I said. What about I get off the donkey and stand back on the goat, said Denis; then you get up on the donkey and undo the noose? I could not see his logic. Why don’t you just undo the noose yourself, from there? I said. I might fall, said Denis. But wasn’t this your intention? I said. Get my stick, he said. Where is it? I asked. It’s in the grass. I retrieved the stick. Now you hold one end of the stick, he said, and I’ll hold the other for safety and with my free hand I’ll undo the noose. This he managed to do. Now try to sit, I said. I can’t, he said. Why not? I said. Because of the leg, he said. I was not sure exactly in what way this prevented him sitting but he was adamant about it. Why don’t you lie down, then, I said, half across the donkey and half across the goat, then slide down backwards till you touch the ground? Denis Wrycroft accomplished this with ease. Can you walk? I asked. He shook his head.
It was in his one remaining leg that Denis Wrycroft had the gout, the other had been taken from him in the war. Walking therefore was never an easy thing, despite the government-subsidised prosthesis he had spent so long mastering. I lashed him stretcher-style to Murphy’s flank and handed him his stick. I put a rope on the goat. You’re going from bad to worse, I said. Denis Wrycroft gave me a wincing smile. From worse to appalling, he said.
Denis Wrycroft was twenty-nine and a half years old when he volunteered to fight in the war that followed the war that followed the war that followed the war to end all wars and was now cultivating the daisies he would soon be pushing up. He lived on a farm near the hamlet of Barkstead, to where I now relayed him. In its day his weatherboard cottage stood among the greenery of a well-watered paddock in the shade of two newly planted pines. But that was in its day. Time had spread that green paddock with weeds and broken the backs of the two old pines. Like most who saw me he was well disposed towards me. His so-called daughter, however, was not. A curmudgeonly woman, she could not tolerate the idea of me, much less my demonstrable presence in ‘her’ house. She drove a little blue Hyundai, and I was always very careful, on approaching, to check that the car in question was not parked in the drive.
Denis kept chickens, and always slaughtered a bird in my honour. I stood and watched for a long time as my still-drunk one-legged gout-ridden sexagenarian chased (if that is the word) his chosen chook around the pen. It was a scrawny thing he then held up, mangy, diseased-looking, flapping feebly, with little in the way of feathers left to pluck. After we had eaten it, with roast potatoes and home-grown beans, the table was cleared and I set out the stones. I had picked them up from a building site in Burnley. They gave us a précis of Denis’s present state of health and of the cures we might use. The three blue metals I arranged into a triangle, a stone at each corner, and into the centre of this triangle I put the piece of concrete. Denis put his finger on it. But before he told me his troubles and how precisely his life of late had gone from worse to appalling he felt it first necessary to repeat his entire story, in all its intricate detail, so I should be up with the facts.
Denis Wrycroft had returned from the war that followed the war that followed the war that followed the war to end all wars soon after he’d left for it, having lost his leg to a landmine five days after landing. But getting out again so quickly was a happy turn of events, given that only two days before embarking something very memorable had occurred, something that meant that for the duration of the trip, the landing and the few days bivouacking that followed, Denis’s thoughts were entirely elsewhere. This ‘elsewhere’, specifically, was the local General Store, and more specifically its front counter, and the orange curtain that hung across the door behind it, dividing the shop from the house out the back. It was through this curtain and at this counter that the vision of Mary Rose Stafford had first appeared.
Six years younger than Denis but years older than him in many other important respects, Mary Rose Stafford was a vision of womanhood. He was not the only man to open the General Store door and hear the bell jingle and look to the orange curtain with a butterfly in his heart. Mary Rose Stafford was tall, shapely, with breasts, it seemed to Denis, that had just the right proportionate relationship to her hips, as her waist did, in its way, to her neck and ankles, so that the whole thing, again, to Denis’s eyes, appeared to have achieved some mystical Golden Mean. Her face was pretty, too, but not in any sort of dainty daisy-chain way: no, Mary Rose’s beauty was of a much more ethereal kind. Even the faint brown freckles on her nose could not diminish it. Her eyes were hazel, rimmed by dark lashes, and her long hair mousy brown. She wore short skirts, and blouses with necklines that while nowhere near allowing a clue to her cleavage gave glimpses of the shallow ditches above her collarbone and the alabaster field of her upper chest.
Did I mention that Denis Wrycroft, by contrast, was as ugly as a hatful of arseholes? Of course this shouldn’t matter, but naturally it did. He’d fallen out of a tree at the age of three and a half and had his nose flattened back level with his cheekbones. He had very bad skin, few teeth and enormous muttonchop sideburns. He tried to avoid mirrors wherever he could, but alas almost everything was a mirror, reflecting his ugliness back at him, not least the fact of Mary Rose’s beauty. Denis Wrycroft never knew his father, and his mother only for the time it took him to be weaned; from then on parental responsibilities fell to the state, and after that to the charitable arm of the Christian church. For Denis the main disadvantage of being raised by Christian men, aside from the obvious risks, was that they never told him he was ugly. His mother, he was sure, would not have held back—that’s what mothers are for—but the do-gooders felt bound to do good, which in his case was to chuck him under the chin with a crooked finger and tell him what a good-looking young fella he was. This lie he believed for many years—his adoptive parents adopted it too—and it was in the spirit of it that on getting his orders to go to war he asked Mary Rose Stafford to marry him.
To Denis Wrycroft it was all perfectly natural; there was hardly a soldier who went off to fight without first putting an innocent woman in this awkward situation. So it was equally natural to him that Mary Rose Stafford, whom he had said no more than a dozen words to in the half a dozen times they’d met, had answered yes. Yes. She smiled in a way that Denis found difficult to interpret, gave him his change and slipped back through the orange curtain. Denis kept the penny she’d given him as a memento, confident it would be the coin to stop the bullet that would otherwise take his life, and prepared to ship out to South-East Asia, sure in the knowledge his love would be waiting for him when he returned.
It is debatable whether the loss of the leg made Denis’s physical appearance any worse than it already was, given the extent of his ugliness, but he could find no other explanation for his fiancée’s coolness towards him when he came back with one leg less than the two he had gone with in the summer of ’66. But didn’t he realise, she said, that she was joking, that she couldn’t have been serious, that she’d said yes just to humour him, that she was already engaged at the time—here she turned and called out through the curtain—and that she was now married, to John. John was standing in the doorway. Who on earth is this? he said. It’s just a local fella, said Mary Rose. By Christ you’re ugly, said her husband. Don’t say that, John, said Mary Rose, there’s nothing he can do.
So, contradicting his original inte
ntions, Denis Wrycroft returned from the war not to Mary Rose’s bed and bosom, as he’d hoped, but to the potato farm of his adoptive parents and had the opportunity to grieve neither the loss of his bride nor his leg before his adoptive father had him up on the tractor spraying the paddocks. This is the time of plenty, said his adoptive father: sow and we shall reap. And sow and reap they did. Denis barely had time to draw breath. In the whirring cycle of sowing and reaping that followed, through the late ’60s and into the ’70s, he hardly noticed first his adoptive father then his adoptive mother pass away, or the haste with which his hasty marriage to a local girl called Dawn disintegrated or when exactly she took off with the mechanic from Creswick, the real father, he later realised, of the daughter born four months post matrimonium. Nor, in pursuing the prosperity that service to his country would surely bring, did he see the topsoil of the farm being washed away, notice the trees dropping their branches, smell the stink of the bore water, or register when exactly it was that superphosphate salesmen became landcare consultants. The farm had gone to the dogs—the paddocks cracked, the weeds unsprayed, the potatoes all gone to seed. He applied for an invalid pension and got it: he had eczema, high blood pressure, pancreatitis; the gout in his one good leg often left him chair-ridden for days. This man whose life had always been circumscribed by a circle of loneliness was now utterly, irretrievably, alone.
Simpson Returns Page 3