The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  She couldn’t possibly remember that. Far too young. She must have seen a photograph, although Ursula didn’t recall one, and anyway, why would anyone have taken a photo of Ray’s old room? ‘His curtains had sailing ships and there was a blue rug on the floor.’

  Someone must have told her. Mam probably, at the end of things, ranging far and wide on morphine. So far gone by then, she’d thought her daughters were her long-dead sisters come to visit and she herself a girl again, waving her father off to war. Even then, with a mind fallen to cobweb, Delly McCullough could weave the lace of family like nobody else. After days of silence broken only by the rattle of lungs, the blip of machines, a clear sentence, falling into that high white room like a stone. Mam retrieving from some stray brightly lit corner what she’d worn to a second cousin’s wedding. Shantung silk, a pillbox hat, a collar of broderie anglaise. That big wedding, the one with the food, where so and so’s niece married that Greek fellow, the one who played the violin.

  ‘His was green. I remember now. And he had boxing gloves and all those books and a map of Australia on the wall.’

  Despite herself, Ursula felt a thrill at her sister’s flat reportage, the absolute nature of her make-believe. Sometimes she almost had Ursula convinced of her radio waves and other-worldly messages, as if her illness was a wildly waving antenna that now and again and despite itself picked up the dying light of other people’s thoughts.

  ‘It was just like this one though, wasn’t it? Except not orange. Wasn’t it? Urs?’

  ‘A lot of people had bedspreads like that, didn’t they? Back then.’ Despite the lump in her throat, the old habit of dealing with Tilda surfaced seamlessly. Noncommittal agreement, followed by a careful statement of fact at some harmless angle to the truth.

  ‘Come on. His Lordship’s waiting. Time to go.’

  But Tilda just kept lying there, hand straying toward the pillow. If Ursula had to watch her lay her head there, erasing the scent and hollow of the last head that had been there, she felt she wouldn’t be able to staunch the howl that was growing in all the threadbare places of herself.

  They waited in the hallway while the landlord changed the sheets, showed the floor a broom, then locked the door. Two locks, a bolt and a Yale, even though the door itself was plywood you could put a boot through and despite the fact that room held nothing anyone would want to steal.

  ‘We’ll need a room. Just for tonight.’

  The man jumped. Seemed astounded to find them still standing there.

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’ As if it was the bloody Ritz. Tilda started to insist that she wanted to stay here, in Ray’s room and no other, until the landlord pointed out, logically enough, that there was only one bed. Lezzos, you could see him thinking. Lezzo sisters, no less.

  Clutching the crate, Tilda looked ready to dig in her heels.

  ‘Listen, why don’t we just leave that here for now? We’ll have to bring our bags up anyway, before tea.’ Ursula stared hard at the landlord, who sighed, said he’d see what he could do.

  ‘What about fish and chips? Like you wanted on the train.’

  Tilda dropped the crate, raising a puff of dust. Which was why as they walked away, Ursula felt she’d deserted Ray yet again. The sun falling low and deft through the verandah windows, haloing the black fruit stamp, the raw splinters of his name. Or perhaps it was they who remained, stuck fast in dust motes, while he receded, etched sharp in detail, leaving no trace. Travelling some landscape known only to him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunset carved deep, long planes of rust, silver, purple. Old mine hills tender blue. Saltbush cauled with shadow, each stone and tree released. Things becoming what they were, no more.

  To celebrate his last day out here, he allowed himself a second beer. Felt guilty about not finishing that last stretch but he would have had to chuck it in soon anyway, his back the way it was. One false move with the post driver and he’d be frying with the dog in the back of the ute. No one to notice, not really. He’d given Sam only the vaguest idea of when he’d be back. There was Barb of course, covering his shifts at the bistro and not happy but, then again, Barb never was. Freda would be expecting him to do the cook-off for her birthday but it could go on without him. He’d made all the arrangements, digging a hole for the fire pit, rigging a kero drum for the spit roast, even baking her a cake in the shape of a handbag, stippling grey icing with a matchstick to resemble crocodile skin. If Freda couldn’t have the bag she’d seen in the window of Myer, she could at least have the cake.

  He felt bad about Charlie. He’d promised to visit after Saturday’s pensioner lunch. Charlie never attended, because of the bingo and the drinking, but Ray usually took him a bit of the apple crumble or lemon delicious he’d made to go with Freda’s dry-as-dust pasties or her incinerated roast. Sometimes a new cowboy novel or a spare cardigan. Charlie felt the cold, even in summer. Silly bugger never ate enough. But if he could be distracted, if Ray listened patiently as Charlie trawled through his newspapers, making arcane patterns from birth dates, death dates, the number of letters in a surname against the addled numbers of the funeral date of the son he’d killed, as if Charlie was a toddler and Ray was playing aeroplanes with the spoon, the old man might be persuaded into a mouthful of something sweet.

  Yet all the time he was making plans and promises, pinning himself to various points along some imaginary string of time, he’d known that well before the lunch or Freda’s birthday or his next shift at the pub, he’d be leaving Sam’s tools by the chimney. Driving far from fences and obligations. No note. Nothing much to say.

  It was a recurring sickness, this, and the only way to treat it was with doses of absence, cold and pure. Four months in one place was good going, six at a pinch. His current set-up, out the shed for shearing or shooters, in at the pub for weekends and holidays, cooking bacon and eggs, steak and eggs, chips and steak, had lasted longer than most. Didn’t like the pub. Too many people, too many dark and dirty rooms. Didn’t like taking orders from a man like Pete, in whose sudden bursts of rage against keg or wife or bar stool he recognised something of his father and therefore something of himself.

  The shed was better. Quieter at least, between meals. Even at fever pitch it was orderly chaos. Breakfast, smoko, dinner, smoko. Tea, a beer, then bed. Between these, long stretches of hot silence broken only by the shrill of the oven timer, the tick of a cooling roof. At night, the radio and his book of poems. In this way he parcelled time into pockets of ordinary meaning, gave himself a reason to move from one moment to the next. The rules and habits by which other people carved up their lifetimes let him breathe in the spaces they created, like pressing his shadow flat to pass through the wires of a fence. Days out the shed held few surprises, as long as the fridges and ovens held up. In town, he kept his eyes down, his fists open and elbows up. Kept plodding through the mire created by other people, pouring their beers, cleaning their carpets, frying their stodge, smell of beer and piss and pig rising until he couldn’t get rid of it, even in the shower. Until his own skin felt disgraced.

  That was always the beginning, his scalp starting to crawl. At the shed, rising at dawn to set bread and jelly, put cheap meat to braise on hot afternoons, he kept to gaps, edges, small allowances. A walk in the bush, a night in the desert. He did what was expected, what was required. Yet all the time some part of him floated above it, aghast, unscathed. At some point he could never put his finger on, significant only in retrospect, could be some ordinary morning or an afternoon of faltering routine, this feeling would start, tick in the brain. Work failing to soothe him, and the mere sight and sound of other people—Sam with kicks to dog, sheep or apprentice; Pete’s bloodshot trembles; Suzy’s wrinkled lipstick as she sucked down her break-time rum and coke—everything started to rankle and itch.

  Worst were big nights at the pub. Saturdays, paydays, Melbourne Cup lunches that went on until the small hours. Or sometimes just the opposite—days when nothing happened, time falling heavy, fe
rmenting in the beer carpet, building muscle. When trouble started, Ray’s job to sort it out. But Pete didn’t know who he was asking, and it wasn’t always enough, was it, Ray’s steady eye and boxer’s stance. As hats came off and chests went out, Ray couldn’t help but feel a corresponding weather, a tremble in the blood.

  One morning he’d wake to his alarm clock shrilling in its metal bucket, find once again what he knew to be true. That whatever life he’d cobbled together, in whatever place he found himself, was just a thin icing on something denser. It had the weight of dead planets, black holes. Lying in some room above some pub, watching a square of light grow at the window, fluttering through curtains someone had hung there at some point in the seventies, once pink flowers on an orange background, now the colour of old smoked salmon and speckled with flies, a day ordinary at bedtime would have become by dawn trackless, weightless, ruthless, and him useless against it, frail as the plywood walls of his room. Things that had anchored him for weeks and months beforehand, all those days graphed by cleaning, chip frying, beer pulling, being a ready sponge for other people’s boasts and griefs, on that day, it just wouldn’t be enough.

  That’s when he had to get in the ute, drive in a random direction. Find a fence with nothing to meet it, before the needle spun off the dial.

  When the fire died down, he scavenged for wood, keeping to the circle of footprints he’d made around the tent. Didn’t trust this place, not in the dark. Earth too thin, too friable. Air so dry, it gave him nosebleeds, dripping onto dirt the same colour, instantly absorbed.

  As a boy there’d always been the sense and smell of water, even in bad times when the river dried up. At home earth was the colour of milk chocolate, tinged with rust. Rich and biddable, it sprouted wheat, kids, yellow box. Unearthly crops of granite, sly rumours of gold. Sheep so fat, they looked like anchored clouds. Trees in richer people’s gardens, giving luxuriant puffs of European green.

  When he longed for home, it was never for the house itself, its wide-hipped roof and bone-pale verandahs circling rooms kept dark by curtains, by some indelible secret at its heart. His dreams were set there of course, the relentless geography of childhood sniffing him down. Bad dreams, in which he was always running, from front door to kitchen door to laundry door and back again, and he’d been swimming and he was naked but it wasn’t a game and he wasn’t a child. Heart thudding, feet snapping out a syncopation, urgent smell of bushfire somewhere and Tilda calling, Urs calling, but he couldn’t seem to break the rhythm, the skin of it. Corners sliding him in wide arcs of tree, sky, paddock, his own past trying to shake him off. Each door locked, each bearing its cross of white wood.

  No, when he thought of home, it was always of the river. Green grey, black brown, cholera coloured at flood time. Swirling curds by moonlight, like off-milk tea. River red gums standing sentinel for all its homeward flow. Old lady faces carved from bark by the roo light, grainy sheaves of hair. Ray’s job to hold the death beam steady as they rode the fence boundaries, the truck bumping and lurching and almost tipping as Dad cut wide then sharp through the dip where the creek crossed the property, flushing stragglers, pushing the old Ford right through floodwater sometimes, skirting boulders, barbed wire, drowned sheep. Dad never faltered, the truck never stalled, Dad never missed a shot.

  At the last gate, where the creek joined the river, straightening suddenly, tacking off at an urgent angle, as if it had changed its mind about the McCulloughs and was leaving them for dead, they’d stop for tea, if dawn was close. Light a fire under the old white gum where Dad had carved all their names as they were born. Ursula and Matilda on one side, Ray on the other, all by himself. Ray, not Raymond. So faint, it might have been insect scribble in the bark. No surname, all his saints’ names flayed away. A name without flourish or foothold, bald as a cough.

  Ray once dared to ask Dad why. Dad made a sound like Ray’s name, a harsh little bark. Went back to coaxing the fire, with rough hands and smoky breath.

  Ray got to sleep the way he always did on nights like these. Rolled up with the dog in his sleeping bag, he thought himself back and back, until he was lying in the crook of his father’s arm, in a way he never had. Homesickness like this lay in wait sometimes, even when there was no home to run to or away from, when even the idea of home was ruined, a roofless thing in fog.

  Here, on the brink of yet another escape, he could almost forget why he’d started running in the first place. Why he kept going. Dumb muscle by now. Tick in the brain.

  Couldn’t be avoided this feeling, only navigated, through days strung on a hum of fence wire. Dull mirror to these strings of stars.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Those shoes. They’re too small. And too brown. They’re not his.’

  Dinner was something dark and wet from the bain-marie. Fish was off, according to the landlord, although a footballer at the next table had some and it was microwaved frozen nuggets, as far as Ursula could tell.

  ‘We should call the cops.’

  Ursula spat a lump of gristle into her serviette, took a large gulp of wine. Tried to explain, for what felt like the umpteenth time.

  ‘The police had nothing to do with it, Tilda. He died in the ambulance. Of natural causes.’ She drained her glass, refilled it from the bottle she shouldn’t have bought. ‘The nurse told us, remember? That’s what the doctor’s going to write on the form.’

  Tilda snorted so loudly the footballer dropped his fork.

  ‘Yeah, right. Doctors are full of shit.’

  She leaned urgently across the table, scarf trailing in her gravy. So close, Ursula could see shreds of meat between her front teeth.

  ‘They said they couldn’t find his wallet, right? That’s because they nicked it. They do it all the time. Take all your stuff and steal your shoes and give you clothes from dead people. Then they pretend you’re someone else.’

  Her plate now empty, Tilda reached for the remains of Ursula’s roast. At the age of thirty, her sister still ate like a four year old, all bared molars and avid elbows and puffs of humid-smelling wool. Under the army greatcoat she’d kept on despite the fug of the bistro, she wore a fisherman’s jumper, her favourite Rabbitohs jersey, a pair of leopard print leggings and a trailing pink petticoat, everything that didn’t fit into her collection of plastic shopping bags, it seemed.

  Ursula knew it was the medication which, in the space of six months, had turned her sister from someone all bones and angles to a woman so bloated her eyes were like currants in a bowl of porridge, as if it was helium not lithium in those little pills. But watching Tilda’s jaws work on the soft mess of meat, it was hard not to think of some grazing animal, a blind lump of appetite which might turn nasty at any moment. Ursula stared hard at the tablecloth, counting plastic flowers. Willing herself not to turn away.

  ‘See? Do you get it now? Do you understand?’ Each question hammered in with the butt of a fork. ‘If they nicked his shoes and his wallet, that’s a crime. So we do need the cops.’ She clicked her fingers in Ursula’s face. ‘Give us your phone. They can meet us there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The hospital of course.’

  For the first time in years, Ursula wished for a cigarette.

  ‘But the hospital’s miles away, Tilda. We caught a cab remember? Anyway, it’s far too late.’

  ‘You can’t close a hospital. Or a police station. They’re open all the time.’

  With both plates wiped clean, Tilda started fiddling with her serviette, twisting it round and round her little finger until the tip turned red. When the paper broke, she proceeded to roll the shreds into little pink balls.

  ‘If you’ve finished for now, it’s time for your pill.’

  Ursula put it on the table, small and pink as the little balls of paper, one of which Tilda tried to swallow instead. So Ursula made her open her mouth and put the pill on her tongue, watching carefully while Tilda drank it down with her shandy, which was mostly lemonade, Ursula having supervised the barman, but
it was still a mistake, because by the time Tilda’s ice cream had arrived, she’d lost interest, which was saying something, and the old agitation was back. Feet tapping, knees jiggling, fingers pecking at hair, throat, coat buttons. A tendon shrilling out in her neck. Every so often she whipped round to stare behind her, as if Ray might be hovering there in his too-small shoes.

  ‘Listen, why don’t we go upstairs? There might be something on TV.’

  ‘We don’t have a TV.’

  ‘Not in the room, but there might be one somewhere else. In the lounge or something.’ She wished fervently that there was a lounge and that it contained a TV. ‘Or we could play a game. Cards. You like cards.’

  Wrong thing to say.

  ‘And that card thing. The clue. That wasn’t his either, because I know his writing and it wasn’t like that. Too small. Just like the shoes.’

  She was shouting. Heads turning at the bar. Bloody doctors. They must have got the dose wrong, yet again.

  ‘And his feet were bigger than that. Feet can’t shrink.’

  ‘Till, I told you. I really don’t remember.’

  ‘I fucking do!’ Tilda slammed her fist on the table, upsetting the glass of wine. Ursula watched the thick purple river heading toward her lap. Couldn’t seem to move.

  ‘You don’t listen. I told you like a billion times. It was that really hot Christmas, when he came for lunch and cooked for me and Harry, that creamy bitey shit. You weren’t there. He should have taken his shoes off because that’s the rule and there was dust all up the carpet and he wrote his name on the wall, like I used to, when I was sick, with the Bible, and he gave me that cake mixer thing that I didn’t like, that red one you broke. And that other time, when I was little and he gave me that big blue kitten? You were at work or something and Dad was out or maybe Mam was there but she was asleep and he had a big brown hat on, just like the second time, and I couldn’t see his face, only his beard but his boots were big and really brown. And one of his thumbs was bleeding, because maybe he hit it with a hammer, like Dad did that time except that was an axe, and it was his foot and remember it wouldn’t stop bleeding and Mam wrapped it in a towel and the blood got stuck and we had to soak it off in the bath? And there was blood on that note too, that he pinned to the kitten, for Tilda it said, and remember how I thought the blood should be blue not red? And that was blood on that card too, that brown stuff, but the writing was too small and pointy. Wasn’t his.’