In an effort to relieve some of this loneliness, Denis now hobbled off every morning into the nearby town to drink at the pub and bet on the horses. He became a familiar sight between there and home and each time he collapsed by the side of the road the local police would pick him up, lecture him and drive him home. But the next day he was at it again. He became increasingly dishevelled, and increasingly a victim of bad health. He was now carrying a goitre in his neck the size of a grapefruit. The next time he collapsed, out on the Korweinguboora road, the police chose to take him not home but to the emergency department of the nearest hospital where, a few days later, the long-lost so-called daughter decided to re-enter his life—just as, conveniently, Denis looked about to depart it. She had come to ‘put his affairs in order’, she said, as she stood beside her so-called father’s bed, which was another way of saying she’d come to pack him off to the Golden Years Private Nursing Home, inherit the ‘family’ farm and build her dream home on it. Here, with her cats and knick-knacks, Robin would live out a leisured retirement, the remainder of the property being sold off to fund it after her so-called father’s demise, surely only a few months away.
But Denis Wrycroft was no fool, it was just that life had a habit of making him look like one. After he had celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday with a simple cake- and-candle ceremony in the games room at Golden Years, Denis discharged himself, moved back to the farm and bought a small flock of angora goats that he penned in the paddock nearest the house. The daughter thought his mind was failing, which gave her good reason to hope soon his heart would too. But Denis’s goats were part of a wider plan to which only I, Jack Simpson, was privy, and this plan was to do in his twilight years what he had wanted to do for the previous thirty-seven, and that was to woo and marry the widow Mary Rose Pate, née Stafford, the vision of whose transcendent beauty had not left him since his eyes had caught it and his heart recorded it all those years ago.
Now as for Mary Rose Pate’s husband, John, the man behind the orange curtain, he had confidently thought he could avoid the messy side of that very messy war by pleading his skill as a bookkeeper, a job he held at the Victoria Barracks until late 1967 when, while crossing St Kilda Road one day, he got hit by a tram. From afar the one-legged flat-faced Denis Wrycroft watched Mary Rose Pate née Stafford mourn her loss, return to the shop with her parents, run it alone after their passing and, upon its sale to the city couple who would turn it into a tearooms, move to a rundown miner’s cottage near Barkstead. She painted it a bold yellow and blue, ran a banksia rose over the trellis at the gate, and began to make a modest living selling blueberry jam and hand-knitted angora jumpers at the local Sunday markets. One of her main suppliers for the wool needed to knit these jumpers had, as it turned out, for the past few years been the farmer Denis Wrycroft, the ugly twenty-nine-year-old she still remembered (not without a certain affection) from the mid-1960s. Mary Rose Pate liked to shear Denis’s goats herself, to attain, as she said, the best-quality fibre, and this is why Denis Wrycroft had taken the whole goat to her house that day and not just its already-shorn fleece.
With a goat on a rope in one hand and his walking stick in the other, he arrived at Mary Rose Pate’s house around noon. The sun was on her back verandah; her new black labrador puppy flipped and flopped around their feet. At sixty years of age her beauty was if anything more radiant to Denis’s eyes than it had been all those years before. Mary Rose Pate sheared the goat, with long sensual sweeps of her arm, and bundled the fleece to her breast. She paid him for it and suggested they have a drink, to celebrate the transaction. She opened a cheap bottle of wine—and that was where the trouble started.
They talked of Life, its forking paths, and how one leads to another but never to the one you hoped for. They talked of many things. It was not until they’d finished the second bottle that Denis finally put the rope on the goat. They were both a little drunk. Thank you for the conversation, said Denis, sadly. Mary Rose smiled, and gently touched his arm. This was Denis’s cue (as he saw it) to pull her violently towards him, kiss her on the lips and bury his tongue in her mouth. Mary Rose Pate didn’t know what to do. Forget the past, said Denis passionately, still clutching her to him, come and live with me and be my companion till death. Mary Rose Pate peeled him off her. Thank you for your offer, she said, but I’m not sure that I can. Denis looked at her with moist eyes, sighed, then turned away. Ah, Life! Mary Rose Pate watched him go—he was not a bad man, he was just so impossibly ugly.
Denis made his way homeward—a long journey for a man in his condition. He walked the gravel verge of Barkstead Road, opened a gate, cut across some paddocks, then turned down a back road towards home. A little way along he tethered the goat to a road post, and sat down with the aid of his stick. He spent a long while like that, thinking. He got to his feet, and, in a complicated series of manoeuvres, set the goat under the branch of a nearby tree, took off its rope bridle and rein, climbed aboard, and, with the aid of his stick, stood up on its back. He threw one end of the rope over the branch and made a noose with the other. He put the noose around his neck and whacked the goat with the stick. But the goat wouldn’t move. He whacked it again. This was a goat that would have put a donkey to shame. In the end he whacked it so hard that the stick flew from his hand and landed in the grass.
It was a complicated business, the stones, the ritual, the diagnosis. We did not finish until well after midnight and by this time Denis’s other goats were poking their heads in through the kitchen window, asking to be fed. Throughout it all Denis sat glumly, his moist eyes gazing at the pattern of stones on the table, listening to my droning monody. I will not give a full catalogue of his ailments here, it would take me the better part of a week, but besides them the man had a broken heart and what cure was there for that? With a jerry can of water from the Inland Sea anything was possible but that was still a long way ahead of me yet. All I could do in the meantime (all I have ever really done) to alleviate the blights upon the bodies of their victims left by those spiteful diseases Fate and Time was to administer my poultices and potions, my incantatory fictions, my sideshow bombast and quackery as best I could. And this I did, to Denis Wrycroft’s satisfaction, from the serving of dinner and on into the night. Is that better, Denis? I asked. A little, yes, Denis said.
The next morning I boiled great bunches of Scotch broom, gorse and stinging nettle that I gathered from out on the paddocks and over the following two hours decanted from this a small quantity of essential oil that I then administered by spoon homoeopathically to the patient. I held his head back to get it down. We must have looked like two old monkeys picking their nits. I then listened for a while with my homemade stethoscope to the interior of his skull. Little was stirring there. A bit of shellfire, otherwise all silent. I put on the poultice of mud and blood and called Murphy to the door. It is a ritual we have been through many times and Murphy knows it by heart. I put a bandage around old Denis’s head and hoist him onto Murphy’s back. Like a well-trained pony at a children’s fête Murphy does without bidding his business. Me holding the slack rein and walking beside we take old Denis on a tour of his battlefields, up the main track from the house, along the north-eastern fence line, around the far northern boundary, past the empty dam, the windmill and the trough, then back along the main track home.
By the time we have completed the tour, the mud and blood have seeped out through Denis’s poultice into the bandage and begun to run down his face and he is back in the paddy fields and the shellfire with Mary Rose’s penny in his pocket again. At the back verandah he dismounts Murphy with a spring in his step that he has not felt for years. He looks almost handsome. He turns around, I turn around (let the whole world turn around!) and we both look back at the paddocks through which we have walked. There are many who disbelieve my miracles; there are the faithful few who do not. It’s up to you. All across Denis Wrycroft’s useless paddocks a verdant carpet rolled.
Back inside, I had barely begun the next part o
f my voodoo when I heard the Hyundai in the drive. Murphy was still tethered to the back verandah post. I could hear the so-called daughter’s footsteps on the gravel and the screeching sound of her voice. Soon there would be trouble. I’ve been with Jack Simpson, he will say. Shut up, she will say; there is no such person, it’s just voices in your head. And how do I know, Denis will counter, that you’re not just a voice in my head?
I untied Murphy. In my flickering black-and-white cowboy dreams I have sometimes got him up to a gallop. From down in the gully, behind a stand of trees, I could see the so-called daughter on the back verandah, scanning the paddocks for a sighting. I quietly cluck-clucked Murphy forward, and watched her turn back inside.
4
THE JOLLYLESS REFUGEE
The weather had cleared, the going was easy. The clip-clop of hooves on bitumen is a crisp, invigorating thing. I was on the back roads again, as far away as I could be from people and their problems, skirting around the back of Creswick, the Tullaroop Creek gully on my right. Of the scenery there was little to report: the same receding road, pasture paddocks, some cows, fewer trees. I hoped to reach the town of Lexton before evening fell on what was now my thirteenth day. I knew a park there, a rotunda, a picnic table and a tree, my perquisites buried beneath.
Though the weather had cleared, Murphy’s pulmonary problems had not: he still struggled for breath, still had that glassy look in his eye, and would sometimes disconcertingly stop without warning in the middle of the road to rest. There was no point me trying to goad him along; he would not move until he was ready. I just had to stand there and take in the scenery, watch a cow jawing its cud or a falcon on a wimpling wing. It was all peace and quiet out there when the clip-clop stopped—I might have been the only human left on earth. Sometimes I think I am, and that all these others are mere simulacra of what a human could be. But what is a human? Don’t ask a donkey. Of all the questions you may ask your ass—Did I say you could stop? Are you looking at me? Could you go a little faster, please?—this is one you should refrain from asking. They have no aptitude for metaphysics. By a campfire one night, brandy-drunk and in a profound state of existential crisis (I lived and yet did not live; was flesh and yet not), I put this question to my special companion. His response was not to give me doe eyes or a monologue from Kant, but to drop his member from its sheath and piss a great puddle on the ground.
I have not bothered him with such questions since—but such questions still bother me. What is a human? What are they for? I have spent my life, my first and second, fixing them up, getting them out of trouble, but I am no closer to understanding. Do they have a higher purpose, other than the one of asking? And these lumpen proles, these ‘battlers’ I keep bumping into, what are they here for and do I care? Was I really the holy ministrant back there in Shrapnel Gully, as accounts of me later would have it, or was I just putting on airs? Who was I helping, the wounded in body, or me, the wounded in soul?
It was a hellish, horrible place. But what made it most hellish was the knowledge that we were playthings, and while we ducked the singing shrapnel and looked for a toehold in the mud our leaders were pushing miniature versions of us around a big table in their ships offshore. Has anything changed? Are those bumbling aristocrats any different from today’s elected aloof? Planning campaigns in a headquarters far removed, issuing orders for more cannon fodder, collecting data on the wounded and tendering for advisors to interpret the figures. But that’s not the worst of it. This new generation of soft-skinned generals have turned their forebears’ follies to their own marketing ends. We’ve become the symbol of the nation! Thrown to our deaths by indifferent men, our courage and laughter in the face of adversity now sells their snake oil for them. It gives some backbone to their spineless, snivelling, jellyfish souls.
Technically I was a deserter back there in the Hellespont; I should have been blindfolded and shot. I did what I wanted, I was hoeing my own row. When your bosses are a bunch of brainless buffoons, what else can you do? I spotted Murphy and put a bandage bridle on him: no-one told me I had to. I went up the gully and brought a wounded man down: that was my idea. The Indians called me Bahadur, Bravest of the Brave; they wept when I took my predestined bullet and put wildflowers on my grave. I talked to them many times, in their camp at the foot of the gully where they liveried their mules. They spoke to me of their ancient teachings, of the man who went to the Palace of Death and the things he was told there. They instructed me in self-knowledge, gained by stern reflection and selfless acts of social duty. They told me of their hierophants, and of how my soul was a thumb-sized thing that would transmigrate elsewhere later. But above all my Hindu teachers made me see the transience of this fleshly existence and the possibilities of a life beyond. (How strange, then, Lasseter’s vial.) The Indians would have burned my body, if they could, but fighting was bad that day. I lay out on the track, my ghost hovering above. While no-one was looking I sneaked back in. They say the soul not ushered to Paradise is destined ever after to be errant; it wanders the countryside, blabbering. So it was.
Night was falling over Lexton as we made our way to the park in the centre of town. The council hadn’t mown the grass for a while; Murphy started mowing it for them. I tied him to the picnic table, took off the pannier bags and dropped them under the pine. They are ubiquitous. Grown from seeds souvenired from the one that once stood above the happy hunting grounds of Gallipoli, cultivated in returned servicemen’s greenhouses the length and breadth of the land, ceremoniously planted in parks and reserves, their seeds scattered by cockatoo shit and the wind, in many parts of the country Pinus halepensis is a weed. This one was planted in 1968, the year the Lexton Tigers won the flag by a kick. I always sought them out, these pines, whenever I needed to sit and think, like Buddha under his Bo Tree. After making camp I untied my entrenching tool and dug up my store to see what I’d left. In the Lexton hole I had buried—twenty, thirty years ago?—a bottle of brandy, two ampoules of morphine, a pair of socks, a note to myself (Be patient) and a book. It was The Lucky Country by Donald Horne, in a Penguin paperback edition. My dog-ear was still in it. The night air was coming down; I threw a blanket over Murphy and an extra layer of clothing on myself. I snapped an ampoule, uncapped the bottle and by the light of the little penlight torch that a manic-depressive retail assistant from Ardeer once gave me I read the book and drank the brandy until the gentle hand of Morpheus led me through the Gates of Sleep.
It took me a while to realise where I was, where I was going, indeed, what I’d become. I was an ass: dull, clumsy, ignorant. On my back I carried the whole nation and every sickness in it; every canker of the heart, every affliction of the soul, every mortal wound. This nation, strangely enough, looked like it had been cut from plywood, though it was much heavier to carry. You could see the Gulf and the Bight, the spear of the Cape and the long sweeping line of the west; the capital cities, moderately spaced. Over this map the blighted teemed, mostly around the growth areas of the coastal fringe, like ants on a picnic table. Had there been an observer to observe these things, no doubt I would have looked like one of those clowns in the circus, when on top of a broomstick they balance a ball, and on top of that ball a table, and on top of that table a lawn mower, with a birdcage on top of that. Indeed, the cut-out island continent with all its people was not all I, the ass, had to carry, for balanced atop that were its mightiest hopes, deepest anxieties, most poignant delusions. On top of this I somehow managed to keep from slipping the egalitarian ideal. On top of that tolerance, fairness. And then, most extraordinarily of all, on top of all that, I had to balance a statue of Murphy and myself, cast in bronze, our cargo a stiff-legged soldier hanging on for dear life. I also had the sensation, in this dream, that I had been travelling for a long time, though in the context of world history not that long, and that I still had a long way to go. The path up to now had been reliably straight and relatively unrocky, which was lucky, given my burden, and throughout the course of my journey the sky was alway
s blue. I never slept, as such, but my waking was a kind of sleeping: every moment I spent in a somnolent state, like a koala full of leaves. Perhaps, I thought, it was this happy, half-sleeping state that allowed me to carry my monstrous burden and yet not feel any pain?
In the dream I was just thinking this, how my burden seemed excessive, how tranquillised I felt, when in the middle of the road there appeared two haystacks, identical in every way. (Asses must go through this sort of thing all the time.) Though while stationary I felt even more keenly my burden and though my weariness and hunger were great, I determined to stop before these two haystacks and examine them carefully for any differences. There were none, so far as I could see. They were the same width, the same height, the same depth, and therefore presumably the same volume. The aroma coming off them both smelled, to my ass’s nose, the same. There were as many steps to one as to the other. I could not decide between them. Just as I was about to cast my vote for the stack on the right, I saw something in the stack on the left; just as I was about to decide on the stack on the left, I found the same thing hidden in the stack on the right. Obviously I would have to eat from one of these stacks—I was very hungry, my burden was heavy, there was a long way to go—but which one was it going to be?
Every time the sun dropped towards the western horizon another sun rose in the east. This was repeated, again and again, with only a momentary shadowing of the sky to distinguish the passage of time. Weeks passed, then months, and still I stood before the stacks. I was starving, but at the same time strangely sated. Standing before the haystacks knowing I could eat whichever one I chose, anytime I liked, right down to the ground, gave me enormous inner satisfaction. What reason was there to move? Years passed, and still I stood there. The haystacks didn’t change, they still looked and smelled as fresh and inviting as before. I faded away, faded away almost to nothing, I was a mere shadow of the ass I had once been. Then a traveller came down the road—I’d not seen anyone for years. Well, here’s a sight, he said: two lovely haystacks, big and fresh and waiting to be eaten; and here an ass, standing before them. Tell me, ass, he said, why don’t you eat your fill? I turned my skinny neck towards him. But I am, I said, in my way.
Simpson Returns Page 4