by Kate Lyons
It took the threat of missing breakfast to get her into bed. But nothing would shake her sister’s conviction that the old man in a cheap sports coat like this one, emerging from the toilet and struggling to do up his fly against the sway of the train, was the same man Tilda claimed had followed her five years ago to the foyer of her housing commission apartment, who had somehow scaled ten storeys to stare in at her bedroom window, an elderly human fly. At the time she’d been just as convinced that this was the same man wanted by police for attacking three women in the city while they slept. To prove it, she’d cut out the identikit picture from the newspaper. Shoved it under the nose of neighbours, shopkeepers, librarians, everyone she met.
Tilda followed that poor man for weeks, to his pub, his golf club, his place of work. Stood at midnight in his front garden, screaming out her truth. Ursula saw the man in the waiting room of the police station when she went to pick up her sister, to try and explain, with the support of a thick folder of hospital documentation, that this sort of thing always happened when Tilda went off her medication, always at the same time of year. How it didn’t matter that the man Tilda had been harassing—late middle age, ruddy complexion, thinning ginger hair—bore no resemblance to the description of the rapist—youngish, olive-skinned, heart-shaped tattoo. Neither of them looked anything like Ursula’s ex-partner Simon either, who was ash-blond, tall, with pale grey eyes. Didn’t stop Tilda from splashing turps across his artworks, stealing his shirts for the sniffer dogs, nicking his photograph from Ursula’s wallet and pinning it to the local library noticeboard, the word rapist slashed across it in bright red crayon. On certain days, in Tilda’s universe, everything and nothing was true.
Dawn was the colour of her fingertips, ice blue. In this light, objects felt rarefied, as if strained through muslin, each milky floorboard, each grain of dust. Yet nothing stood revealed.
She drained the last of the whiskey. Lit one of Ray’s rollies, the stale tobacco making her cough. With hands still strong with the memory of sewing and bread kneading and pastry making, all that useless history rising up, she ripped at the coat lining until it gave. Tucked inside was a little hanky, tied at the corners, like something a bald Englishman might wear on a grey shingle beach. She fumbled at it, cursing her clumsiness, Ray’s Boy Scout knots, his Russian doll secrets, out loud, for anyone to hear.
What tumbled out were teeth, rattling like seed pearls in her palm. She counted them, counted them again. All there, five of the seventeen that had come through in a child of four. Those remaining were protected from sugar and accidents and brushed religiously by Ursula. Those still to come, sleeping in raw red gums, Tilda being a late starter even at something so elemental, had surfaced in the weeks and months after Ray left home. The hot swelling soothed by Ursula with a thumb dipped in honey, the earache rocked away in Ursula’s bed. Now, against all odds and despite years of neglect and countless Mars Bars and hospital pap, Tilda’s teeth were white and strong.
She shook her palm. The teeth blurred, multiplied, posing more questions. The day dense with them, no horizon in sight.
Before climbing back through the window, she opened the door of the cocky’s cage. The stupid thing just cowered there, regarding her with one gnarled eye.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dawn. A day all his. Light like cream.
Piling Sam’s tools beneath the wrecked chimney, he checked the ute from tray to glove box but everything else, including the fool of a dog, belonged to him.
At the last minute and because he was in that sort of mood, he aimed a gibber at the sheep skull. Got it down second go. Tying an old blue oil rag around it like a bandanna, he propped it on the handle of the shovel. Left it watching there, grim and jaunty, as he got in the ute and backed away. When an old pay slip fluttered down from the dashboard, he paused, engine running, his precious petrol ticking away.
Leave a note. The right thing to do. Wish Freda happy birthday, ask her to look in on Charlie, maybe give him the old clothes he’d left out the shed. He could also point out to Sam, who’d go into orbit when he realised he was minus a cook, that by rising at three this morning and working by hurricane lamp and car headlights, he’d done what no one else had managed in a year. He’d finished the fence.
In the end, his pencil stayed cocked behind his ear. No note. No point. No sign he’d ever been here, except this wire twanging off in the rear view, spare and true. A job worth doing. Dad in his head. The rhythm of that voice, gravelly, ponderous, keen as the wheel ruts he was following between creek bed and mine workings, rocked him slowly toward solid ground.
By seven am, he was on back roads, crossing other properties. At each gate he checked his bearings. Sam’s place was northeast, the old mine northwest. The place he used to call home roughly south. Always his pole star, flinging him wide and away.
Keeping to fence runs and stock trails, he plotted east below the border, avoiding the main drag in case of meeting someone from Sam’s. It was the long way round, and with all the gates, slow going, on tracks little better than overgrown goat runs, rubbly grooves that petered out entirely sometimes, and he was forced to drive through long grass, flushing roos, emu rocking like stately bustled ladies in front of the ute. When he was far enough away, he’d loop down and join the road proper. Head for one of those drop-offs Charlie was always going on about, drawing his mud maps on stray bits of newsprint and pressing them urgently into Ray’s hand.
Before the car accident which had killed his son and turned him from drink to God, Charlie had haunted the corner of these three States in a wild haze of money schemes and whiskey fumes. Every few weeks he’d call the feed company he worked for, lie elaborately about blown tyres and missing parts, then hole up in a pub. Charlie had stashes of petrol and water everywhere round here, or so he said.
After the top-up, Ray’s map was blank. Could cross the border at Hungerford. Always work up north, even at this time of year. After that, if he found he was in the mood for buildings, water, people, he could strike west then south, head to Adelaide the long way round.
For now it was enough to be on the move again, to be alone again, travelling tracks called Dry Lake Road, Dead Horse Road, heading to places called Dotted Lake or Garden Vale, dry grim jokes. With every lurch and bump, he felt his old life shaking free. A small dot behind him, receding and unregarded, the cook, the fencer, the barman, mopper-up of beer and dreams.
In tune with his abdication, the land shed height and colour as he went. Sage green, blue green, grey green of saltbush, blue bush, mulga and mallee, sudden yellow of late blooming Dead Finish, everything growing more muted and exhausted the further he travelled from homesteads, bores, proper roads. The place scouring, flensing, paling to snake colour, bone colour. Something seen through old lime wash, grown stubbornly back through.
Green just a tired rumour here, in this dry and final closing down.
At the last gate before the highway, in a place so drought and fire ravaged, earth was the colour of steel wool, he smelled burnt hair. A lamb, collapsed in the shade of the post. Tiny, blackened, earless, too far gone to move or bleat, it regarded him through one boiled-looking eye. Next to it, the ewe, unrecognisable, architectural. Black ribs, crisp whorling of fleece, already collapsing back to earth.
It was only while he was rummaging in the ute tray for his shovel, wishing for something quicker and cleaner, that he remembered Sam’s gun. He’d hidden it so well, wrapped in a pillowslip and stowed beneath his seat, that he’d missed it when he was packing up. He swore, batting down the dog. Didn’t have a licence for the rifle. Had only taken it so he could have some fresh meat while he worked.
Too far to go back now. Not enough petrol, not without the top-up. And he couldn’t have left it by the chimney anyway, he now realised. Wouldn’t have been safe. Although it wasn’t loaded, the bullets were locked in his strong box. He’d heard enough of Dad’s stories to know not to travel with a loaded gun. Men shooting mates, men shooting pets. Kids shooting fathers, farmers blas
ting their wives to bits over the Weetbix. Guns going off in cupboards, all by themselves. And there was always Uncle Len.
Ray had heard that story ever since he was old enough to sit up. It had been told so often, at Christmas and funerals and family gatherings, that by the time he was thirteen, the facts had been worn to nubs in a swamp of detail, and those were a moveable feast. Sometimes it was high summer, sometimes spring flood. Sometimes banks or politicians were to blame. Once, it was a nagging woman that sent Len out to the far paddock, at dusk, all alone. Shocked silence and nervous titters round the kitchen table at that. Eccentric, that’s what they called Dad’s sense of humour, back then.
Sometimes it was dawn, but mostly sunset, and Len usually lived until they got him back to the homestead, and there was always a death scene in the bedroom, Mam and Aunty Sheila crying on Dad’s shoulder, neighbours collecting like awkward flotsam on the front verandah, everyone useless and hopeless and helpless, except Dad. It was always Dad who found him, Dad who braved heat or creeks or rampant bushfire, Dad who ran shoeless, hatless or waterless to call the doctor and fetch the truck. Aunty Sheila mad with grief, Dad’s shirt soaked with the dying man’s blood.
The facts of it were simple enough. Out checking stock, code in hard times for shooting the last of his cows, Len had crawled through a fence while trailing a loaded gun. Somehow managed to shoot himself in the head. Careless, stupid, but not criminal, not sinful, not compared to the other stories Ray had heard while hidden under the kitchen table as a child. The bank debts, the gambling, the mortgage foreclosures. The children lost down wells or locked in fridges, the women dying in childbirth while some black sheep cousin drank himself senseless in a pub. Against all these, Len’s fate seemed ordinary, almost innocent, at least in the dense ledger of fate, penance and retribution the family history entailed.
Yet there was something about this story. The angle of it peculiar, too intimate. Dad’s telling of it lacking his usual bluster, tinged always with a hangdog air. Seemingly doomed to repeat it at every family gathering, like some figure in a myth. With every retelling, changing something, shifting something, moving the story in tiny, irreversible degrees further from the truth. By the end, a story so layered with contingency, it seemed unrecognisable, even to Dad himself. Every detail so deft yet so changeable, as if Dad was telling the beads of the story in ordinary daylight while letting the texture of it fall, amorphous with dust motes, into that twilight world under the kitchen table. A landscape of clenched knuckles and ticking feet.
Shorn of plot, dates, reliable weather, only the images remained. These had the rimy glow of half-awake dreams. The gun-metal light of a winter sunset. A man gaunt as his fences, hollow-eyed as cattle. So thin by then, their hipbones had shuffled through the hide. Like broken umbrellas, Dad said once, planting a picture that never went away.
When he was too big to sit under the kitchen table, bored too with the talk there, always more concerned with wheat and weather than the wilder terrain Len’s story gestured toward, he’d avoid the house altogether, slam out the back door. Taking Dad’s gun from its hiding place in the wood box, he’d sit for hours on the chopping block, drawing trajectories in the dust. Trying to winnow the bones of it. Drought, dusk, gun. For the first time, he began to realise how words could describe some tiny and untenable corner between what had happened and what was true.
At sunset, the hour when, if he averaged Dad’s retellings, Len had most often died, he’d head for a section of fence hidden from the house. He tried everything, crawling forwards on his belly, shuffling backwards, twisting himself to unnatural poses, even hanging his head upside down. Never quite worked. When he was older, he would come to understand it, that particular arrangement of gun, dusk, dying landscape. Not then.
In the end he used the shovel on the lamb. Felt more honest to look the poor little bugger in the eye.
He’d hit the road proper and a rare patch of bitumen and he was fiddling with the radio, looking for weather, finding only strung-out country and western, a pastel sadness swelling and fading between low-slung hills, so at first he didn’t see the figure up ahead.
When he did, he thought he’d imagined it, the way he kept seeing wildlife crouched in bushes by the side of the road. Even when he’d shot past and pulled up in a flurry of dust, while he sat there waiting, engine humming, watching in the rear view what had looked like a grown man in heat haze shrink to a lanky, knock-kneed boy, he still refused to believe it. There were lots of kids in baseball caps and baggy jeans, lugging skateboards, wires sprouting from their ears. Just didn’t expect to see one all the way out here. Then the boy reefed off his cap and Ray saw the red hair, the freckles standing out like flares.
He drew level, and Ray had time to see the layer of dust and sweat on him, the skin of his cheeks scalded with sun, before he walked right on by.
‘Oi! Mick! Wait. It’s me.’
Even after he’d edged the ute forward and cracked the passenger window, Mick just kept staring straight ahead. Didn’t seem surprised to find Ray way out here, in a place where neither of them should be.
‘Mick? You all right? What’s going on?’
He mumbled something. Got chucked, is what Ray thought he heard, above the engine noise. No way he was going to turn her off, with the petrol getting low.
‘Why? Who’s out the shed?’
Mick shrugged. Even through petrol fumes, Ray could smell him. Breathed out beer, pungent weed. And still his foot hovered over the accelerator, as if he could pretend he was still travelling, had never stopped at all.
‘How’d you get all the way out here?’
‘Got a lift.’
It was like pulling teeth. Reluctantly, Ray killed the ute, praying he could get her started again.
‘And?’
‘Bloke was drunk. Nearly had an accident. I made him let me out.’ Without the shudder of the engine, Ray realised it wasn’t the ute but Mick who was swaying. Face burnt, eyes red, from crying, dope or dust, couldn’t tell.
‘Ray, you got anything to drink?’
Ray wanted to shout, what sort of idiot gets himself stranded way out here, with no car, no food, no water, no hope, except that someone like Ray might come along? Instead he started up again, opened the passenger door.
CHAPTER SIX
‘Here. Ever heard of these?’
Mick’s sleeve was silver with snot. He used the hanky but five minutes later he was sniffing again, a dreary punctuation to the disintegrating road. After Ray gave him some water and stale biscuits from the glove box, it was crunch, slurp, sniff.
‘You got a permanent cold or what?’
Allergies, he snuffled. Allergic to work, Ray reckoned, as the truth came out, in dribs and drabs.
The night before, Mick had gone to town with one of the men. Headed for the pub, where, on strict orders from his mother, Sam had forbidden him to go. No problem once there. Barb never bothered to check ID. He’d spent all his pay, then rolled in at dawn with the same twit who’d given him the lift. Turned up late to morning shift again, still drunk or stoned or both. That smell of stale beer round him, those lobster-coloured eyes. He’d spewed in the shed sink. Couldn’t help it, been spewing all morning. Must have a bug. Ray said nothing, just lit a cigarette.
Of course, the drain had arced up, what with Sam’s ad-hoc plumbing, and then the whole system went down. Also Mick’s fault. Always sticking tea leaves down the sink. With the contractors on site and his new shed half-done, Sam had to drop everything, get down there with his electric eel. And then, because that Pommy cook Sam had hired to do the dinners was work to rule, there was no one to fix breakfast. No one except Freda, who had enough to do, with three kids, five horses, her superannuated chickens, her B&B business and that vegetable patch of hers which kept dying in the heat.
Mick didn’t say any of that last bit of course. Just whined on about his stomach. That’s why he’d needed to have a smoke behind the shed. His mum swore by it, apparently, when you
were crook in the guts. Ray, steering silently round craters and sink holes, thought about Mick lounging around with a lighter near all that LPG. What with the drains and the salmonella and the bits of money that kept going missing from the office, the whole day put off Sam’s tense calibration, it must have been the final straw.
‘OK. Let’s get him on the blower. He’s probably calmed down by now.’
But when Ray reached for his phone, Mick knocked his hand away.
‘Nuh. Don’t. He hates my guts. And I gotta go home. To Bourke.’
Anger battled it out with Ray’s own reluctance to speak to Sam. ‘Yeah, well. I told you. I’m not going that way. Turning off before that. Heading out there.’ He pointed out toward some unnamed track heading to some other horizon he hadn’t decided on yet. Another border, yet another fresh start. That new minted feeling he’d had this morning already leaking away.
‘It’s me mum, Ray. She’s in hospital. She’s really crook.’
In the six months Ray had known Mick, his mother had been sick at least once a fortnight and at least five of his grandparents had died.
‘Isn’t your place somewhere this side of town anyway?’ No answer. More sniffing. ‘Well, Sam said it was. So the turn-off’s got to be somewhere round here.’ Mick rolled his window down and stared out. ‘Easiest thing, I’ll drop you home. You can sort it out from there.’
Mick shrank down in his seat. Didn’t speak again for half an hour.
The fuel gauge had started blinking yellow, the warning light. Ray worried about muck in the tank, a blocked line. Prayed it was just dips in the road. Trying to winkle the details of Charlie’s drop-off out of memory, recall the shape of the little map Charlie had drawn for him on a bit of newsprint still marking a place inside one of his books back at the shed, he drew a blank. What had the old man said? Dry creek, third bridge after the first junction, a track bearing left. Dead tree, red rag, pile of painted stones. But he’d been so distracted by the kid that he’d hadn’t been paying attention. They’d passed a junction but that was way back, and since then, no cairn of rocks, no trees at all. The threads in Charlie broken long ago. Now and again though, and without warning, elaborate memories rose to the surface, finely layered, entire to themselves. Floating free, like intricate scabs of rust. At the core of Charlie’s particular madness Ray believed there might be a single can of fuel.