We stayed a week at Malakoff Creek. On the eighth day with Laura still wan we set off, she now riding sidesaddle, me walking ahead with the rein. We travelled all day and as evening fell made our way to the hall at Navarre, an old fibro building with an elegant marble monument at its entrance. The key, as always, was under the mat. There was a musty smell inside and a mausoleum echo. Beneath the honour roll I made up a bed. On a bench in the kitchen off the main part of the hall the Navarrans had left tinned food, pickles, two bottles of brandy and half a dozen sad-looking carrots. I fed Murphy, ate some pickles, opened the brandy, drank.
Days passed. Then one evening, a visitor: glassy eyes and a putty nose. He was her brother, they needed to talk. He knelt beside her in the hall and put his ear to her lips. He said he was taking her home. Home? I asked. We left her sleeping, and sat together out on the step.
She rang me a fortnight ago, he said: scared. It had taken this long to track her down. They came from outback western New South Wales, a long way from here. A couple of years back Laura had got into trouble, stealing, so they put her in juvenile detention way down in Wagga Wagga but she fell in with a bad crowd there. She went to Newcastle, then up to Queensland. She found a boyfriend, an older fella, and lived with him out past Gympie. He was a motor mechanic; they lived out in the bush doing drugs, mostly pot, and whatever else came through. One night Laura tried to rob the roadhouse so they put her back in again. I’m just telling you, said the brother.
When she finally got out on conditional bail with assurances to every authority figure who sat down in front of her that she would return to her family, Laura now, he said, broke bail and hitched back to Newcastle where she stayed in a big share house on the edge of town. In the driveway was a car up on blocks, a kids’ swing on the lawn. Laura had a bungalow—a shed, really—out the back and the twenty-three-year-old unemployed spray painter from Gosford who on her first visit there had his way with her had his way with her again. She had just turned fifteen. The bungalow was dank, with spiders in the corners, and Laura would lie on her back and watch them working their webs while the spray painter did what he wanted. The bungalow was very hot in summer; Laura put an old blanket up over the window and used an old fan she found in the hard rubbish to move the air around. Everyone was on the dole or doing piecework and there was always something going on with the cops, the courts, a parole officer or social worker, and these dramas made up most of the conversations around the table. Laura knew this was not her family, and if it was a community it was not a good one, but she had cut herself off so much from her real family, her real community, that she didn’t know how to get back.
The brother found her in Newcastle and brought her home but she had trouble settling. What are you scared of? he said. She said she wasn’t scared of anything, she just needed a little time. This was the beginning of her quietness. She went back to school but she did no work; if a teacher asked her a question she would turn her head and look away, far away, past the middle distance to something beyond. The teachers called her parents in and they consulted a social worker who in turn called in a liaison officer; adults were moving at all angles around her, meeting, conferencing, splitting up, regrouping. She took up with a local man she met one day in the street, a miner, a scruffy-looking man ten years her senior. Against the protests of her parents, her brothers and her sisters she moved into his shack outside town. There was good money to be made at the mine but her boyfriend was hardly ever there; he had a greater liking for staying at home, sleeping in late, sitting outside the shack with a beer in his hand and throwing a stick for the dog. Laura spent most days doing the same.
One day a woman from welfare arrived, accompanied by a local policeman. While the policeman took the miner aside and gently reminded him about the laws governing the age of consent, the welfare officer sat with Laura and reminded her about her responsibilities to herself and her community. The visitors left. The dust had not even settled when the miner began hurling abuse, accusing her of lying to him about her age. Laura was indifferent. She did not love the miner, but she did not hate him either. The next morning they packed everything into the Commodore and drove south. They’ll be back tomorrow, the miner said, and they’ll want to take you from me. They drove all day, slept in the car and late the next day crossed the border into Victoria. He had a mate who worked in the cannery at Shepparton and this mate got him a three-day shift. They slept on a mattress on his lounge-room floor. Laura lazed around the house, wandered the streets, sat in the parks, did nothing. One day outside the supermarket an open, honest-faced woman asked was she all right. Laura looked at her for a moment and thought about answering but instead, like at school, looked away.
One night a couple of weeks after that the miner came home late. He was sleeping with a girl from the cannery. He told Laura this the next morning, straight out, thinking that by doing so he might get the upper hand. When he didn’t come home again the following night, Laura crawled into bed with his friend, a big, awkward man who smelled of bacon and cigarettes. When she next saw the miner she hurled a bottle at his head, slammed the door and went to the pub and got drunk. Later she let a group of men take her to a spot down by the river and do whatever they liked. When they’d finished they dropped her out on the edge of town. She hitched a ride with a truck driver as far as Seymour where she slept under a picnic table until the sun woke her, then she walked to the roadhouse and asked around for a lift. The next driver tried to touch her; Laura started crying. He panicked and pushed her out at a roadside stop near Kilmore. She spent the rest of the morning sitting under a tree. Around lunchtime a car pulled in and a middle-aged couple got out to stretch their legs and dump some rubbish in the bin. The man got down on his haunches and asked could they do anything to help. His wife stood a little distance away. On the edge of the city near Campbellfield, Laura asked the husband to pull over. The woman thought she wanted to vomit and turned around to see, but Laura was already out walking. Are you all right? the man called after her. Leave her, Greg, the woman said.
Laura crossed the car park to Campbellfield Plaza. It was cool in there; people were wandering around, browsing the shops, eating their lunch. She sat on a mock-antique park bench and started to beg. People gave her a wide berth. Eventually a man came over and sat down beside her. He looked like a nice man, a tradesman, in his thirties. Dirty overalls and leather boots. His name was Niall. He gave her a five-dollar note and invited her to stay at his place, he had a spare bed, no strings attached. Back outside they threaded their way through the car park to his old Toyota tray truck with motorbike parts in the back. He had to clear the junk off the passenger-side seat before Laura could get in. His house was back off the highway, near Donnybrook. They followed a dirt road through rough, rocky paddocks to a brown-brick veneer sitting on its own in a paddock surrounded by other paddocks, with a big tin shed off to one side. There was a trail bike out the front and a petrol drum with a hand pump on top. Niall led Laura inside. It was a single man’s house. He explained how his wife and kids were now living with a new bloke near Whittlesea. He showed her a picture of his eldest boy, blu-tacked to the fridge: he had a mullet just like his dad.
Niall had a single bed in the spare room with a teddy-bear mattress on it and he set Laura up in there. That night he cooked a big pot of pasta and after the meal they sat outside in the warm still air, drinking cans. Niall said she didn’t have to stay, he understood, but the room was hers if she wanted: better here, he said, than sleeping rough. Laura gave no answer to that but Niall guessed she had nowhere else to go. That night on her bed in Niall’s spare room in the glow of moonlight from the curtain at the window Laura listened to the distant sound of cars on the freeway and, late, a goods train clattering past.
She spent a month there; Niall didn’t touch her. He spent his days tinkering with his trail bike out in the yard and sometimes, suddenly, going off in his truck to ‘do a job’. Laura slept in, wandered around half-dressed until lunchtime and in the afte
rnoon watched television or Niall working on his bike. They usually had their first can about three. One day she said she was going into town; Niall dropped her off at Upfield Station, at the very end of the line. She came back late in the afternoon with cash and a sixpack. Niall didn’t ask. She did the same thing a few days later, and twice the following week.
Then one day Laura said she had to leave. Niall told her he knew a bloke who did a run sometimes to the Mallee—maybe she could get a lift with him? A few days later a truck pulled up out the front. The sun was just up. Niall said goodbye to Laura still wearing his underpants and T-shirt and picking the sleep from his eye. They didn’t touch. The truck drove off into the warm morning; Niall stood and watched it go.
It was a small cattle truck with a drop-down ramp on the passenger side. The driver, a thin, weaselly-looking man, was off to pick up some beef cattle from Murtoa. Laura knew from the moment she stepped up into the cabin that this would not be a free ride. He started saying things, filthy things, things Laura knew before the day was out she would have to submit herself to. Why? Because. Why because? He took out his mobile phone and spoke to his mates, and near Beaufort he turned off the highway and followed a road for ages until they came to a driveway marked by two white-painted tyres. Facing the road was an auction sign with weeds growing high around it and down the end of the driveway a farmhouse among a cluster of trees.
The truck pulled up outside the house. There were weeds here too, and cans strewn around the yard. The driver explained to Laura what was going to happen next but that she shouldn’t worry, they would all chip in and give her some money after to help her get home. He walked around to the back of the house and reappeared, pushing the front door open from the inside. It had dropped on its hinges and had to be scraped across the floor. He stood on the front step and lit a cigarette. Soon two men in a white ute arrived. They greeted the truck driver, shook his hand, glancing up at Laura sitting in the cabin. From the back of the ute they took out two slabs and four bags of ice—they dragged a cut-down diesel drum out of the shed, smashed the ice into it and arranged the cans on top.
Later that afternoon the driver woke Laura and led her to a bedroom inside where a dirty mattress had been laid on the floor. What followed went on for a while and when it was over it was nearly dark. The men pulled another half-drum out of the shed and lit a fire in it. In the bedroom, Laura drifted off to sleep—a kind of wilful fainting. The men had thrown a blanket over her, she could feel the blood and whatever else seeping out onto the mattress. She curled herself into a ball. There was enough moonlight on the window to find its way through the blanket she had now drawn up over her head and when she blinked her eyes open this light looked blue, almost ocean blue, and seemed to swallow both her eyes and the room. She wanted to know what they’d left down there but couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
Out in the yard, the talk was subdued. The three men were discussing what to do with her. One said they should leave her, she could find her own way home; another said they should drop her off in the nearest town; the third, the driver, said no, they had to get rid of her, he would take her out to the quarry on Readings Road. The others deferred to this, not least because it wiped their hands of it. They drank a little longer, not talking, then put Laura in the back of the truck and covered her up with a tarp.
Give her to me, said the brother: I want to take her home. Let me fix her first, I said. The brother said he didn’t believe in me or my miracles and I said he should look me up in the history books where both were well attested. What history books? he said. I told him about Shrapnel Gully, the bullet in the heart, Lasseter’s vial, the Inland Sea, the waterbirds wheeling and the shoals of silver fish shifting and breaking under a caramel moon. (Of course he believed in me: how else could he see me?) You must let me take her with me, I said: I will find the healing waters, bring her home renewed. People are always saying that, he said. He got up to leave; he said nothing else. I stood and watched the old station wagon go.
We set out soon after from that place, under an unforgiving sun. Broken roadside scrub, paddocks scraped clean by scraggy sheep, the creek gullies raw wounds, a horizon so low it seemed to hit you from behind. Laura now sat atop Murphy with an almost regal air, brushing away flies with a switch. She had gained weight, and Murphy sank noticeably further under it each day. We passed through Morrl Morrl, then followed the Wallaloo Creek gully north past Callawadda to Marnoo and on towards Rupanyup, where I had been well supplied in the past. The altar slab there is a granite block in the main street of the town. But there was nothing: no food, no money, no candle burning.
We removed to a camp on the outskirts where before a crackling fire I divided the last of the food. Laura ate hers in silence; I drank the last of the grog. Thalassa! Thalassa! The Inland Sea!—these are the words I rock myself to sleep with now, each exhausted night. The Inland Sea, Jack, the Inland Sea, one day you will find it and fill the vial, the jerry can, the drum; one day you will return with palm fronds waving to anoint the foreheads of the ill, the poor, the crippled and insane. All those struck down will be raised up.
Late next morning Murphy woke me. It felt like someone had pulled the curtains back on our dingy, firelit room; everything was flooded with air, space, light. It took me a while to take it all in: the roadside stop with its scrubby tree and concrete table was part of a much bigger landscape of sky, fields, road. Murphy was still tethered to a nearby sapling. The fire was still smouldering, a mound of grey ash. But Laura was gone.
I found her in the adjoining field. She had pushed through the barbed-wire fence and made a track through the grass which I followed until I came to a clearing with her lying in it. It was not until I’d sat her up that I saw she was bleeding again, red rivers down the insides of her thighs and a thick congealed puddle on the ground. Her face was livid; she fell into my arms. Laura? I said. I wiped away the muck and tied her to Murphy’s back: a floppy, lifeless thing. No, I had not cured her, her wound was deeper than my quackery could ever know—a deep fissure, right down to the core. And now, what now? O fateful day that I found her in that truck!
I diverted to a nearby district hospital, one day’s walk away, where a nurse had once been kind to me with a box of bootleg pethidine. But there were no cars, no people. Perhaps it had closed for the day? I stepped back and forth in front of the automatic doors until my head began to spin. I cupped my hands: down the corridor in the distance I could see the reception window but the shutter was down. No, I thought, this hospital has not closed for the day, or for that matter the week or the month; this hospital has closed for good.
Then the strangest thing. The sky darkened; there was a shrieking buzz, and the locusts hit. We took shelter in the doorway; I tried to prise open the glass doors but they were too strong or I was too weak or both, so I broke a window and crawled inside. I could hear the locusts screaming and the sound of them hitting the windows. I moved down the corridors, my feet scuffing the patina of dust. Back at the front door I pushed the green button but there was no power, so I smashed the glass with a chair. Murphy and Laura were where I had left them, Laura still limply clutching his mane. I whistled him up; he followed me inside.
6
THE FALLEN TEACHER
We made our way through the empty corridors and in a single-bed room in the sunniest wing I made us a kind of home. A strange little ménage. Eventually the locusts stopped. I attended to Laura with the things I had, then went searching through the building to see what else I could find: medicines, drugs, all the things I had desperately disbelieved. But everything had been taken. It was a dismal place, with a fetid smell of mould and damp, dog shit in the corridors and bird droppings on the walls.
In the very last room in the far south-west wing, to my surprise I found a sign of life. I heard what at first sounded like a low animal growl and imagined a pack of guard dogs grown hungry and wild, ready to rush out and attack me. But as I moved closer I recognised a few words, and the odour wafting
down the corridor was also distinctly human: stale air, sweat and piss. Still, I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me when I put my head around the door.
He had certainly made himself at home. There was a bed made up with pillows, sheets and blankets. He’d also found himself a trolley tray, on which lay the scraps of a recently eaten meal. Strewn around the room were his possessions: junk to the amateur eye but to the gentleman in the bed undoubtedly all items of great value. The gentleman in the bed. It is difficult to paint a picture of him without resorting to caricature. He had a full beard, flecked with grey, and his wild hair reached past his shoulders. His eyes were both frightening and frightened. He looked me up and down—my tattered old military garb, the Red Cross brassard on my arm, toes sticking out of my trench-rotted boots. Where’s your donkey? he said. In a room in the other wing, I said. I was hoping to meet the donkey too, said the man. Perhaps I will bring him around later, I said. Do you know how long I’ve been here? he asked. I said I couldn’t guess. Two years, he said—he was, he said, in another room for a while but it was too bright and sunny in there. He spoke too loudly, as if to an audience. He was quite content, he said, he had everything he needed, whenever he got bored he would go for a walk in the grounds. But what is wrong with you? I asked. He had to think about this. Something had broken in his head, he said, a big rubber band as he liked to think of it that had been pulled too tight and then at some point had yielded: you could almost hear the thwack.
At first the marriage breakdown and divorce had, he said, failed to upset his equilibrium, believing as he did that the more stars you have in your eyes the longer it should take for the darkness to extinguish them. When at the age of twenty-eight he left the city to take up a teaching appointment in a nearby town he could hardly see the road, so many stars did he have. He settled into the little weatherboard school with the asphalt playground and gave himself to it, body and soul. He was much loved. He met, courted and married the local MP’s daughter, herself a teacher, and together they bought a cottage in the centre of town from the front gate of which the soon-to-be-ex-teacher could wave and smile to the passing parents and children and bask in the warmth of their glow. It was all very nice. He felt that all was well with the world, that his country was a happy one and that he was lucky to be living in it, that his government was a beneficent one and his fellow citizens were honest, hard-working and selfless.
Simpson Returns Page 7