The situation there was even better than the picture Ali had painted. The foreign workers were well respected, they had taken jobs no-one else wanted, and their boss had given them two big old houses to live in, out on the edge of town. When the end-of-work siren blew that day they all trooped off together down the road. Javed and the three others were given beds at Haidar’s, a big old farmhouse surrounded by sheds and paddocks; you could see the other farmhouse in the distance. That evening a big fire was lit in the backyard and a goat roasted on a spit. There was singing and dancing, stories. It was late when they all went to bed.
Javed took his place in the slaughterhouse with a numb willingness. His first week’s wage was no sooner earned than spent—and every week’s wage after that. Haidar knew a hawaladar, a money dealer, back in Sydney, and every month via this hawaladar the men in the two houses would send their money home. This was the marker that gave measure to the days: every fortnight pay day, every month dreaming up a new password—mountain, cloud, sky—then giving it and the money to Haidar; then a few days after that the phone call to his wife (Tell the dealer the password is appletree). Then the same thing over again. Before he knew it, months had passed, and, before he knew it, a year.
Javed hated the abattoir, the moaning cattle, the endless slaughter, the dull thud of death. There was no sense of time passing in any meaningful way. When the new spring came he dug up a little patch of ground, spread it with manure and planted a handful of tomato seeds he had saved and dried. It was not so much to eat the summer crop—they had food enough—but for the simple pleasure of watching them grow. At the end of the day, in the twilit stillness, he would take his bucket and water the seedlings that were now pushing themselves up through the earth. The others in the house laughed, but Javed ignored them: he knew they were jealous. They too had come from farming families, stretching back through the generations, and like him they yearned to sow and reap. The weather warmed, his tomatoes grew, but even as he tied them to stakes and the little green globules swelled, he knew he would not see them ripen.
He had heard about other work. Some of the men had begun to talk about the fruit-picking trail to the west, where you could double your earnings. Haidar argued against it: why give up a job, a house, on the chance of making more money elsewhere? But Javed’s mind was fixed. He packed his bag and with five others headed west. They got a lift with a truck driver as far as Wagga Wagga, then split and took separate lifts further west. Javed travelled with Sameer, a surly creature who spoke little and who ate the food he’d brought without sharing. They arrived in Mildura just before sunset and waited outside the post office. The others didn’t arrive until three in the morning, by which time Javed and Sameer had been stared at by passers-by, harassed by teenagers and questioned by the police. They all walked to the river and found a park where they slept as best they could until the magpies woke them.
They found their way to a vineyard out of town and were no sooner through the gate than they were given a bucket and began bumping along on a trailer out towards the day’s pick. The work was hard, the heat worse and the bucket took forever to fill, but when they retired to their hut at the end of the day they had to agree that, yes, they had earned more here in a day than they ever would in the abattoir.
Javed worked that place for three weeks, then another vineyard for two weeks after that. In February he was picking nectarines at Tooleybuc, then peaches down at Nyah. In early autumn there were wine grapes at Red Cliffs and Robinvale, in May and June oranges and mandarins back at Tooleybuc. Come winter and nothing to harvest he found work pruning, roaming back to Mildura in the north-west and down through Swan Hill and Echuca and the central vineyards near Avoca. In spring there was citrus again, then the first stone fruits of summer. At Swan Hill he had found a new hawaladar to help him transfer money home, and every month he would make the journey there with the cash he had earned. He locked himself in a phone box, rang his wife, gave her the new password—mountainsky, rivergorge, highplain—spoke briefly to his children, then stood weeping until someone told him to move.
Javed was earning more, but the travelling never stopped. And it was difficult to socialise: to pick the quota he had set himself each day he could not stop to talk. He entered his own little world—eye, hand, bucket—and in the evening only ate and slept. He felt like a man sleepwalking. In every town there were well-meaning people lobbying on his and the others’ behalf—to get full citizenship status, to be reunited with their families, to become genuine members of the community—but it always felt like a lot of talk. For all his advocates’ good intentions Javed was still travelling like a hobo, a pack on his back, his clothes unwashed, his face and hands weathered and worn.
One summer he decided he’d had enough. He hitched a ride to Melbourne, met a young volunteer and slept on the lounge-room floor of his share house. He found a job driving taxis—he knew how to drive a tractor, a truck, but for this kind of driving he had to learn again. People abused him. One night two young men beat him senseless, robbed him of the little cash he had and smashed all the windows of the cab; he was not welcome here, they said, and should go back to where he came from. Javed had three broken ribs and was liable for the damage. Weeks went by, he couldn’t work; he suffered nightmares and terrible headaches. One day he scribbled Thank You on the back of an old envelope and left.
He caught a train to the end of the line, jumped the platform without a ticket, then looked for a lift north. An old panel van picked him up. The driver was a wiry man with lank grey hair and a grizzled beard. His name was Mick. There was a can of bourbon and Coke clamped between his thighs. The inside of the van was full of rubbish, there was a thick layer of dust on the dashboard and a collection of birds’ feathers stuck behind the rear-view mirror. Mick asked Javed where he was from and what had happened. Javed told him. This country’s fucked, said Mick. Javed could not bring himself to nod.
Mick was going to Mildura for the grapes, as he did every year; Javed said he would go there with him. The usual work was waiting: the same bucket, the same grapes, the same pickers’ hut, the same hard bed. Javed worked alongside Mick for a few days but then the sound of his voice started to grate. Javed knew he meant well, they all meant well, but in the end he was better off alone. He would work from first light to last, save every cent, go to the hawaladar in Swan Hill and give him the money, the password, make the phone call, clear his conscience for another month. But one day he stepped into the room at the back of the Swan Hill shop and saw that something had changed. The hawaladar could not help him, he said, the government was watching, they didn’t like it, Javed would have to go to the bank.
He didn’t want to go to the bank—there would be a thousand questions and he wouldn’t have the answers. He walked to the edge of town until he came to a park and sat on a bench to think. Three young locals had followed him. While one stood sentry at the entrance to the park the other two cornered Javed, tore the pack from his shoulder and took out the bundle of cash.
They had not hurt him, at least, and he still had two hundred dollars, his living money, in his wallet. With a long stick he poked the pack out of the tree. He started walking out of town. He had no idea where he was going. He reached a river, crashed his way through the scrub along its bank and came out into an open paddock. He crossed this paddock, jumped a fence, crossed another. The river seemed to be chasing him; no sooner was Javed clear of it than there it was again. Occasionally out on the open ground he came across a shallow billabong, left behind long ago when the snaking river flooded, and beside one of these he made camp. He lit a fire, warmed a can of beans, filled his billy and put it on the coals.
He watched and waited for it to boil but then he heard footsteps approach. A farmer had raised the alarm. The policeman asked to see Javed’s papers—It’s just a routine check, he said—while the farmer and a younger cop looked on. Javed’s papers were in order, but his English let him down. He thought they were taking him back to the camp. He turned and
jumped into the billabong, thrashing his way out towards the middle. He couldn’t swim: he had never been able to. The older policeman took off his jacket, gun belt and shoes, raised his eyebrows at his colleague, and dived in after.
It was a very sorry-looking Javed who was eventually dragged to shore. They started interrogating him again—Why did he run away? Where were his papers? It took Javed a while to prise the waterlogged wallet from his pocket and the wet document from that. The older policeman, now squeezing out his socks, shook his head and smiled. His colleague unfolded the document and examined it carefully; he nodded and handed it back. In words spoken too fast for Javed to properly understand he reminded him of his rights and obligations under Australian law. The farmer fetched a blanket from his car. Javed could stay there the night, he said, so long as he didn’t frighten the sheep. The senior policeman gathered up his things, and the three picked their way back across the paddock.
Javed stoked the fire. Between two trees he strung a washing line and hung his clothes out to dry. He wrapped himself in the blanket. Everything in his wallet was wet. One by one he lay his papers, the money he’d hidden from the thieves and his precious family photographs out on the ground in the afternoon sun. That seemed like a good plan. He pulled the blanket around him, and, using a log for a pillow, lay down to sleep. By the time the clap of thunder woke him, the wind was already up; his papers, banknotes and photos were fluttering everywhere, up over the paddock and beyond the tree line. Then it rained. It belted down angrily out of the sky, hammering him and everything around. A flock of sheep looked on.
So you ended up with nothing, I said. Javed nodded. And now you have found yourself here, under this rotunda, in this municipal park, in this godforsaken one-horse town? Javed nodded again.
I rummaged in my pannier bags and took out an assortment of things: the rabbit foot, the bottle cap, the Federation Penny; fenugreek for the gut, St John’s Wort for the brain. The street was quiet: I danced and chanted. In time Javed got his colour back. My biggest challenge was to stop him shivering, so I could get the assuasives down.
But where will you go now? I asked. Home to the mountains, he said. Home to the mountains? What could I do? I could not get him permanent residence, a decent job, an English class, a family reunion, respect. I could not set him a place at our table. A quick trip to the Hindu Kush was beyond me. I saddled Murphy, refilled the hole.
We made a pretty sight: the Afghani, the donkey and me, clip-clopping up the winding road to the top of Mount Buangor, to take a look at the view. Javed sat sidesaddle, like an old hand, flicking Murphy’s rump. Up we went, up and up. He told me of his home in the mountains, his family, his friends. He told me the story of Nasrudin, smuggling donkeys over the border. We laughed, the best medicine of all. There was a lookout at the top; a bench seat, a picnic table and an information board. I gave Javed my prescription and left him to the view.
Was it wrong to leave him up there, high on that mountain peak? Should I not have brought him back down to the plains, to the patriots and the pedants, the little-minded enquiry officers, the form-filling, the sneering, the jeering, the hypocrites, the holier-than-thous? No. He will find time for his own down-going—Murphy and I, we were already out on the plain.
5
THE QUIET GIRL
I shouldn’t have done that. Nine hundred and ninety metres above sea level, up a winding road, with an enthusiastic Afghani whipping your hide. Murphy knew it a moment of great import and gave it all he had but now that we were back in the lowlands, just the two of us, on those straight roads through the stubble fields towards the vanishing point, he had slowed to a snail’s pace, wheezing and panting for breath. I slowed my pace to match. The distant markers—a tree, a ridge, a farm shed—took so long to come towards us we might have been moving backwards. I gathered some pellitory from the side of the road, made up a decoction and force-fed it to him. It’s to ease your wheeze, I said.
The memorial at Joel Joel was our next stop, in a paddock at a junction of roads past Warrak, Ben Nevis and Crowlands. I hoped to find offerings there. We were already finding drier air: a powder-blue sky above and a powerful sun approaching its zenith. Murphy’s coat had got up a sheen. I’m not sure what I would do if one day he lay down beside the road and died. Give him a kick, I suppose. But if he got so stubborn as to never move again—I mean never, ever again. What would I do then? Find another donkey? They say they run wild in the great deserts of the Interior; he is not so special as all that. But I have become fond of him, his sombre eyes, his mute expression, his slow, plodding ways. I doubt I could go on without him. It’s true I’ve had carnal relations with him—as repugnant as this may be—but it’s lonely out there on the road and the nights are often cold. In a duplicitous world Murphy’s unvarnished simplicity has always been a source of comfort and warmth.
We travelled all day along a minor road that chased a gully north-west. The late-afternoon shadows lengthened, the dead gums lay themselves down in black: very solid, very precise. Murphy’s footfall grew louder, the whole world grew louder, chattering its otherworldly noises before lights-out and sleep. It was almost brandy hour but I could not stop: I needed to make Joel Joel before nightfall. Murphy had other ideas. Like a dog accustomed to bringing its master his slippers as in the good old days many dogs did, with the lengthening shadows, the dancing gnats and the change in volume of the earth’s myriad sounds, my beast thought evening was at hand. Soon his master would make camp for the night and soon take the weight from his back. He stopped; I poked him. If it were not in contravention of the laws of physics I would say he then stopped even more.
It was a while since I’d used the carrot and the stick: an old trick, tried and true. The former I hung from a second stick, on a piece of string, a couple of inches from his nose. This stick I held in my left hand, the whacking one in my right. Years of practice had made me very adept at manipulating these two sticks, like rubbing the tummy and patting the head. Shake, whack; shake, whack. This normally had the effect of moving Murphy forward a step or two, either in pursuit of the left hand’s reward or in flight from the right hand’s punishment, but could sometimes inexplicably leave him standing there while he made up his asinine mind. I want the carrot, he thought, with his own brand of donkey logic, but although, he went on, it is only inches from my nose I know that to get it I will need to make an extraordinary effort which it is not in my nature to make. But if I do not make this effort and get the carrot—and the carrot is very tempting, no doubt—then chances are my master will whack me and I will have to step forward anyway, if I am not to be whacked a second time.
The desire not to be whacked was as strong in Murphy as the desire to eat the carrot but neither, separately or in combination, was stronger than his desire to stand there and do nothing. It was natural in him. I could dangle the carrot in front of his nose and whack his arse from now until eternity but it would not change his ways. I have learned this much through my long association with him: each morning he will learn his idiocy anew. Damn, he will say to himself, feeling the stick on his rear again, someone is whacking me, I should move out of the way. And then: Now look, where did that come from, right there, in front of my nose, a nice juicy carrot, it’s as if someone had put it there on purpose so I could have reason to get away from this stick. Then: Ouch! Someone is whacking me! Then: Look, a carrot! Then: Ouch! And so on. The day darkened, the stars came out, the moon hoisted itself into the sky. Step, stop; carrot, stick. Carrot, stick; step, stop.
It was late when I saw the headlights approach; I could not let any more time get away. I hailed down the truck and asked the driver if we could ride in the back. My name is Simpson, I said, and this here is my donkey, Murphy; we are on our way to the Sunset Country, then north, to the Inland Sea. A nervous, distraught-looking man, he said he could take us as far as Murtoa. He let down the ramp. Cattle had been in there, or sheep perhaps; it stank of manure, and damp straw was piled up in one corner and covered by a tarpa
ulin. He bolted the gate; we moved away. The road hummed. Murphy began braying, stretching his neck and flattening his ears. I tried to quieten him, fearing the driver would abandon us, but he only brayed all the louder. He has smelled the excrement, I thought, and become prey to some obscure animal lust. Then I saw the tarpaulin move. I bent down and pulled it back.
Her name is Laura, that’s all I can get from her: a teenager, dark skin, full cheeks, a bloodshot look in her eyes. The driver was reluctant to part with her at first but in the end I bribed him with the few precious dollars I had. I said what was done was done and it was now between him and his God. He said he wasn’t sure he had a God: I said he should find one. He asked where he might look and I told him in his heart. He did not understand. You could at least say sorry, I said. Sorry, said the man. A weaselly-looking thing with a grey goatee, flannel shirt and dirty jeans. The transaction concluded, he drove away. I tied the girl to Murphy’s back and led her in off the highway to a picnic ground by a creek where I cleaned and dressed her wounds. Laura, she said, and fell silent again. I gave her a nettle and rosemary douche and a poultice of ragwort for the bruises. I harvested some horsetail from down by the creek and made a strong decoction from it. She suffered my ministrations uncomplainingly, like the patients I have dreamed about.
Simpson Returns Page 6