Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  He’d never built anything on his own before. He didn’t like to ask the other men for one more thing, even advice. Late at night he sat up in the kitchen working out how to do it, drawing diagrams on the backs of Agricultural Bank envelopes.

  Sometimes when he sat at the table and saw the lamplight pooled over his scraps of paper, he thought that this was the only terrain he could ever really work. Beyond the light were his books ranged along the top shelf of the dresser. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Scott, Stevenson and Dickens. He didn’t have time to read them now, but he felt their presence. It crossed his mind that this was where he was really most at home, in the idea of things.

  Winter was well and truly over before he came to finish the shed, perched on the roof, hammering in the last nails. It was spring again, and still no pigs wallowed in the boggy earth of the clearing. He’d been working all day on the roof, it was late now, almost dark. He was always late. Across the clearing Ada and the girls sat watching from the verandah steps. There was a sense of ceremony in their waiting. All winter long the roofless shed had sat like a small ruined monument in their landscape. Even now it didn’t look quite like other piggeries. Even they could see that. It was too high, too tottery, like one of their skinny cows. None of them spoke.

  Out of the corner of his eye Frank could see them on the steps. Their pale female faces, pale pinafores glowed in the half light. Maybe this was what made him lose concentration for a moment. Sitting there like a row of birds with their beaks open! He was dog-tired, stiff, sunburnt, from crouching all day up here. He took a swipe at the final nail and mysteriously—there were many mysteries in the course of Frank’s carpentry—smashed straight down on his thumb.

  He dropped the hammer with a clatter, and fell foward, the whole structure swaying a little beneath him. He raised his head and howled God! The dog barked crazily at the foot of the ladder. He sat still, clutching his hand, his eyes closed. The little girls thought he was crying, and stole towards him as he descended the ladder. Ada came to meet him with a teatowel she had grabbed. Something in her face made him wheel away from her and stride off into the bush, grabbing the axe as he went. The dog sloped after him, its ears flat.

  ‘Another pair of hands’ That’s what he said to himself as he slashed his way, one handed, through the bush. To share the burden a little. He might get somewhere then. If only he had a mate, a partner. A son. He thought of the Robertson brothers, bachelors, with ninety acres cleared. Or Violet McKay, as good as a man, who swung her last born in a basket from a tree and with the rest of her tribe brought the harvest in. Took charge of the dairy, served up hot scones with freshly churned butter if you so much as set foot on the place.

  What did Ada do? Mooned about. There were certainly no scones for tea. Ada rested like a lady in the afternoons. After the boy, she seemed like half an invalid. Headaches. Women troubles. He’d never known a woman could be so much at the mercy of her cycle. She seemed to spend her mornings doing the washing, stirring away at the great iron tub under the trees, hair flying, grim, perplexed. She was always trying to keep the girls clean. She fed the chooks, collected the eggs. Kept the stove stoked with the wood he chopped. She could never get the hang of the axe. She never left the clearing, she was afraid of the bush. She was afraid of snakes, fire, the dark, of getting lost. Afraid of bloody everything. Kept the girls close to her, made them nervous and fanciful. They’d be useless like her if he didn’t take a hand to them soon.

  Who me? she said, that one time when he asked her to catch the mare. It escaped, and was lamed. Now the cart stood rotting in the clearing. No point in going over that. It boiled down to this: she couldn’t take the life. It was a common enough story in the district.

  He held his hand in the creek and after a while the pain subsided and the sound of the water soothed him. Then the guilt started. He was dismayed at his disloyalty. At the savagery of his thoughts.

  After a while the girls followed their mother inside. They stoked the fire for her while she lit the lamp. They ate the stew made from the rabbits their father trapped. Their mother ate nothing, just drank cup after cup of black tea. The moon hadn’t risen yet and outside was a thick darkness. Ada stacked their plates but didn’t go out onto the verandah to wash them. The girls knew that she never went outside at night if their father wasn’t here. They washed their faces at the kitchen table in the enamel basin filled with water from the kettle. Ada put out the lamp to save kerosene and took the girls with her to sleep in the big bed. The wind rattled the little house.

  They heard his tread on the verandah and the dog noisily lapping up water. They could sleep then.

  He always came back.

  Only once he nearly left them.

  One Sunday at the height of summer they walked down the powdery track through the dunes to the ocean. It was too hot to work, too hot to rest in the house. Even Ada was driven out. Frank had to piggy-back the girls across the burning white sand of the beach. Ada wrapped herself up in towels like an Arab woman, swathing even her face, and crouched well clear of the water’s reach. The endlessness of the horizon reduced her to misery. But Frank in the water became rough and playful, rising like a walrus out of the depths to catch at the girls, water and mucus running down his moustache. Afterwards he went for a swim by himself, a vigorous breaststroke, feeling the sting of all his cuts and bites healing in the salt water.

  But this Sunday he swam out too far and was caught and carried further out by an unseen current. He stopped swimming, and trod water, facing the shore. He raised his arm once or twice, casually, as if to say hello. But there was nobody to save him, no party of Sea House holiday makers, no passing boat on that blank horizon. Ada threw off her coverings and ran up and down the beach. The dog chased her, barking. The little girls stood in the shallows and watched him. He kept on bobbing, as if he were riding a bicycle, watching them back. They thought they could see his face. He wasn’t agitated, he was alert and thoughtful. It was as if he was deciding something. He trod water, making up his mind. The girls didn’t take their eyes from him. They knew that if they did they wouldn’t see him again. Suddenly the wind started up, a wave came in his direction, then another and another, and with what strength he had left he was able to catch a ride into the shallows.

  He waded out of the water towards them, a little defiant smile on his face, as if to say What, were you worried? Don’t I always come back?

  In the end they survived because of the Sea House.

  In 1930 the old hotel burnt down to the ground and was sold for a song to an English couple, the Tehoes. Some people, it seemed, still had money. The Tehoes built another hotel, a great brick and timber two-storey English manor house. Frank and Ada could see the chimneys and the dormer windows winking through the tops of the trees. Frank did some labouring on the construction, though by then the work was almost too much for him. There was hardly any part of his body, ribs, legs, back, hands, that hadn’t been injured by war or labour.

  Reg Tehoe opened a public bar, liked to yarn with the locals if any of them could spare the money for a beer. By this stage of the Depression few could. Prices for crops hardly covered cartage costs. The bank kept their cream cheques to pay off their debts. By 1933, more than half of the settlers had walked off their blocks. They couldn’t sell, couldn’t pay their interest and the bank foreclosed their loans.

  Frank sold eggs to the Sea House and firewood and a few fresh vegetables. But Madge Tehoe had plans. Riding trails to the sea, holiday cottages. She eyed off Frank’s block. Every few months she offered to buy another few acres from him, virgin bush or the sour sandy paddocks he had so painstakingly cleared. By ’35 all that was left was the house and clearing. Their livestock was reduced to the chooks and the dog. Frank never did get his pigs.

  They survived, though Frank’s health was broken and Ada didn’t speak any more.

  Frank told the girls that he believed their mother was homesick. He decided to take her back to England. They would all go,
he said, things couldn’t be worse in England, and Irina could jolly well put them up. All these years she’d lived like a queen in the house in London, the house of Ada’s parents. The girls could have a decent education at last, he told Ada. All that remained was to sell off the home block to Madge, and they could buy their passage to Southampton.

  Then he fell sick. He lay all day on the old couch, tended by the women. He was too tired even to read. Now that there was no more work to do, now that the great adventure was over, he wanted to ask Ada to forgive him. He wanted to say to her that he had thought he was one type of man when really he was another. But Ada stood and looked out a window, from a place too far for him to reach. The doctor, Bly, came, walked up the track from the Sea House carrying his bag. He’d been a medical officer at the Somme, where Frank had fought. They had some good conversations, if short because the doctor was so busy. The best conversations Frank had had in years.

  The doctor told Frank there would be morphine when the time came.

  There had to be some point to it, Frank thought, as Ada stood looking out the window. Her hands were swollen and worn, she’d given up wearing her wedding ring. Her hair was still thick black and untidy. He could still, so easily, be proud of her. There had to be some point to the force that had drawn them together. What? What was it? he asked one of his daughters who was sitting beside him. This was something he might talk over with Bly when he next called. Perhaps it worked itself out in the following generations. His daughter bent over him, wiped his face.

  It isn’t over yet, he told her.

  VISITORS

  Strangers ride into town.

  Here they come, in a cloud of dust, bumping over the gravel on the road to Nunderup.

  There were two of them, two young men, dressed alike in black narrow-brimmed hats and black coats, longer and blacker than those Australians wore. They looked like emissaries or the members of a religious sect, but in fact they’d simply used the same Arab tailor to outfit themselves for this journey, in haste and without knowing what to expect. They were hot. Their coats were powdered with red dust.

  They were riding in the cab of an old Ford utility with a local carrier called Bickford. Behind them they could hear their suitcases sliding around with the milk cans, and the incessant barking of Bickford’s spidery black dog.

  Where had they come from? The cab was filled with the foreign smell of them, Bickford knew it, he had served in Egypt in the AIF. It was in the food, the soap, the skin of the women, something spicy and sweetish that got into your sweat, your shit. Close up they were young, mid-twenties. Officer age and class. One was wiry, dark as a Gyppo, the other fat, spoke like a Pom. What had brought them here? They weren’t the type to work in the timber mills. Out of the corner of his eye Bickford watched the fat one wipe the sweat from his hands with his neckscarf. Soft hands like that on a man turned his stomach.

  All things come in twos, thought Bickford. Fat and thin, old and young, dark and fair. Good years and bad years, hot summers and cold winters. Crook and well, happy and blue. Peace and war. Married and single. His whole life could be fitted into it. Sometimes when he was on the road he could swear he saw everything in pairs, bush and paddock, horse and buggy, man and dog. Sometimes it clicked in his head and wouldn’t stop. They passed a wooden shack with a fallen chimney and a flock of crows roosting on the roof. Bickford spat out the window. His place. Had to walk off it in ’32. Going on for five years now. Success and ruin. Heaven and hell.

  The sun had gone down. Clearings were darkening around giant dead trees. The fat passenger, shouting above the din of the cab, asked Bickford if he knew a family called Clark in the area. Bickford said nothing for a mile or two, trying to put two and two together. At least he knew they weren’t from the Bank.

  ‘Old Clarkie, he passed away last year,’ he shouted back at last.

  Leopold was suddenly weary. He shut his eyes for a moment. He had been here before, a long time ago, he was re-entering a scene. The rattling cab, the barking dog, some horror being revealed as the light faded on an empty road. The same landscape he could swear, the blocked-out horizon, the stricken trees, the desultory cows. The end of the world. He must have dreamt this, or he was dreaming now.

  But Aram was here, wedged beside him. Leopold opened his eyes and studied his friend’s profile. He had spent every day of the past year with Aram. Everything they saw or did was shared. Sometimes he wondered if the world he saw was the one reflected in Aram’s dark gaze.

  In the dream however he had been alone.

  What did they think when they were deposited with their suitcases in the driveway of the Sea House? In this light the apparition of an English manor house rising out of the wilderness was almost surreal. They stood looking around them at the tennis courts and rose beds and terraced lawns, while beyond, like a country to be conquered, lay miles of uninhabited bush.

  Bickford took his tobacco pouch from the pocket of his army shirt and started rolling a cigarette. The fat one tried to offer him five shillings for the ride, but Bickford shook his head.

  Laurel and Hardy, thought Bickford as he watched them set off down the driveway. Jekyll and Hyde. He lit his cigarette and headed for the bar. He wouldn’t have said no to a beer if they’d offered to shout him one, but they were foreigners and didn’t know the way to do things here.

  The black dog lay down to wait outside the bar.

  An English countrywoman, authentic in every detail, brogues, tweeds, pearls, right down to the spaniel yapping at her heels, gave them directions to the Clark farm with raised eyebrows, faintly amused. ‘I wouldn’t call it a farm exactly,’ she said, ‘not these days.’ She waved down at the valley. ‘If you meet young Edith on the track, tell her to hurry up. She waits on tables here.’ What was her accent? Not county, not English at all. Australian genteel? She had a good-looking girl’s face gone puffy, and girlish shoulder-length blonde hair. She studied the cut of their coats in the twilight, her head to one side. ‘You can always stay here, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s off-season, we’ve plenty of rooms.’

  ‘They won’t last two nights down there,’ Madge told Reg over pre-dinner sherry.

  The dark one especially was rather attractive.

  Down the brick stairway they went, following the gravel path, into the Honeymoon Gardens, famous throughout the South West, though they did not know that. They thought they were walking into an oasis. The air was fragrant and damp beneath great white-trunked eucalypts. Birds swooped into the spray of sprinklers hissing over banks of lawn. There was a whirring sound, then a throaty staccato. Leopold held up his finger. This was one of the wonders he had promised Aram, the Australian laughing bird.

  At the bottom of the garden, following the woman’s directions, they turned right, crossed a wooden footbridge and found a rough track that wound its way up through shadowy bush. Suddenly light and wind burst into their faces, they had emerged at the top of a massive escarpment. They clutched their hats. A great silver ocean lay before them. There was no sign of any human presence. They seemed to be standing between sky and water.

  Edith was late. She ran with the skirt of her baggy black uniform bunched up in one hand, a pair of shoes in the other. This was both to save shoe leather and for speed—she was faster barefoot. She was nearly seventeen but away from other people and for lack of more adult diversions she still pretended she was running first in a race, leaping the ruts with breathtaking skill …

  She looked up and saw them. Two men, strangers, about to descend the track she was climbing. Two black silhouettes, one fat, one thin, against the iridescent sky. Had they seen her? She stood still.

  The fat one was leading, one hand splashing about to counter-balance his suitcase. And strangely, though Edith had never met him and had no warning of this visit, she knew at once who he was. The other one moved as smoothly as if he were descending a staircase, looking around him. He saw her first. He tapped the shoulder of the fat one, who looked up at her and waved.

/>   Edith never knew why she did what she did next. It was a reflex action, like a worshipper entering a church, or a peasant in the presence of kings. She crouched down and put on her shoes.

  Soup had been served when at last she ran into the dining room. ‘I know, I know, you have overseas visitors,’ Madge Tehoe hissed. ‘But I shall have to dock your pay for this, Edith, Mr Tehoe will insist.’ She stood back to look at Edith, her evening face all sharp and gleaming. ‘And who might they be, these young men, may I ask?’

  There weren’t many diners, four tables, but she was forced to stand at the sideboard watching over them until they were done. All the long evening, as they leisurely chewed and turned their glasses in their fingers and slowly slowly wiped their mouths on their napkins, Edith wondered what the visitors would be doing. She saw them standing around the lamp on the kitchen table, huge and exotic in their black clothes. Holding their black hats, bowing towards Frances and her mother.

  ‘Aunt Ada? I am Irina’s son, Leopold.’

  She saw Leopold kissing her mother’s hand.

  They were lying in the girls’ narrow iron bedsteads. Frances said that she and Edith would sleep with their mother. Leopold apologised once again for arriving without warning. The girls’ room opened off the kitchen, and smelt of the fried eggs which Frances had made for them, her forehead glinting with nervous sweat. As they ate, old Aunt Ada came and went, came and went, until Frances took her off to bed.

  Leopold thought of Ada as old, although her long, loosely-plaited hair was still dark, and she was younger than his mother. Ada had an old woman’s air of anxious preoccupation, her hands clenched, her eyes shallow and troubled. She kept offering them cake, jam, vodka, none of which appeared. All they could see was a pan of dripping and half a loaf of bread on the table. The visitors drank tea from thick china mugs, but Frances drank from an old condensed milk tin with a beaten-down edge. Leopold fancied a slice or two of fried bread sprinkled with salt, but did not like to ask in case they should run short. He assured his aunt that he had eaten his fill. ‘My mother was always telling me not to overeat,’ he said cheerfully. But Ada did not seem interested in Irina.