The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  ‘Tilda’s got a letter in her coat. It explains everything. And if she causes any more trouble, just take her to the doctor early. She needs a new prescription, not more therapy.’

  She started up the car, turned the blinker on. ‘Thanks Harry. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Wait though. When are you going to be back?’

  ‘Not sure. I’ll ring again.’ She turned the phone off while he was still talking, threw it in the glove box. Pulled into the stream of traffic, heading west.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It got easier once she’d left the town where the man who wasn’t Ray had died. As if the place had a rubber band attached, the fraying knot of a stranger’s days and habits, singing with electricity. Just the hum of new tyres on potholed road.

  Only when she’d passed the last pub and street sign and hit real country, cotton, cotton, wheat, more cotton, did she feel free. Not happy but on her own.

  Stopping for coffee and petrol in the town where two of the TAB slips had come from and where that old Lotto ticket had been bought, she found the pub and garage open, the newsagent closed down. Couldn’t face the pub, the dusty beery gloom of it and, anyway, what would she say? Whether a man short or tall, blond or greying, nearly old or almost young, had once placed a bet there, two months ago?

  At the service station, a soupy love song was in full cry over the outside speakers. Near the bowser, a fat Labrador that someone had once pampered, mournful now, a weeping sore on its head. She turned her back on it, trying to block the music out, trying to find the catch for the petrol cap. Everything sealed in plastic in these brand-new cars. She didn’t know how to check the oil or water either, or even if you had to. Hadn’t driven a car in years.

  A man at the next pump watched her fumble for a while. Then he walked over, took his hat off, bent down, worked some invisible lever until the petrol cap popped up. Put his hat back on, walked back to his truck. Didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her. As if he’d been waiting there just to perform that small service. As if even he, a stranger, knew she was somehow less than a real person, having left, in this latest of so many leave takings, some vital part of herself behind.

  Going inside to pay, she saw, in the sliding glass doors, what he must have seen. A woman shorn of ballast, features. A tall, nun-like woman in a bunchy black coat. Standing there, a banana in one hand, a box of Milk Tray in the other, she urged herself to hurry, to choose something healthy after all the stodge and whiskey of the last few days. But perversely, now she was on the brink of it, she felt capable of no momentum at all. People moved around and behind and through her reflection, carrying loaves of bread and tins of cat food, jangling their keys. People with somewhere and someone to be.

  So are you, Ursula. So are you. She forced herself to join the queue at the till.

  She should be good at this, having done it so many times. She’d seen her escaping self clearly since she was fifteen years old. In her mind’s eye, with the ruthless clarity of childhood, she’d been a girl in crisp relief moving through a self-effacing landscape, teachers, boyfriends, angry fathers, mad sisters, even the rambling brutal landscape of childhood, everything diminished by an unerring aim and determined velocity, scattering neatly out of her way. In turn, she’d believed she would become a woman bound by no compass, with no fixed destination, no organising thread.

  Real life was more complicated. You trailed it behind you, leaking things you couldn’t afford to lose. At fifteen, she’d thought she was taking everything that mattered, all those evening dresses and race-day outfits copied from the pages of waiting-room magazines. Thought that the angle of a hat or the fit of a jacket was somehow more important than what she was leaving behind or the spotty youth she was running toward. Where on earth she’d thought she was going in all that Melbourne Cup finery, God only knew.

  In the end, that first escape had imprisoned her, for years and years. With shame, with lack of money. With silence and lies.

  At twenty-nine, the skin of things had seemed less important than shedding those layers of silence that had accumulated during those last years at home. Mam sick for the first time; Dad in a rage, at drought, debt, a world that wouldn’t, despite all his fury, bend to his will. Tilda beginning her long slide to incoherence. Ray gone, the fatal hole at the centre of things. All that silence, festering in hot curtains and dark rooms and beneath the steep angles of roof and verandah, summoned, creeping out, seeping in. Threatening to make her soft and insubstantial as Mam, a thing which Dad could batter himself against. By then all she’d needed was a clean space, a way to look bare-faced at some gaping absence in herself. Clothes didn’t matter at all, as long as they didn’t lie or constrict.

  She’d left home a week after Ray took off. Took off was how Dad put it, consigning Ray to another footnote in the family history, one of the lost McCullough boys. All those fourteen, fifteen or sixteen year olds beguiled by shearing or circuses or boxing tents, who’d strode off into some version of Dad’s heroic distance, never to be seen again. Never disappearing entirely. Lingering, at dusk, in the faltering space between stories, gates and margins, invoking a sort of greedy dread in those left behind.

  Ursula was too angry, too frightened by then to be fobbed off with another of Dad’s tall tales. When pressed, he admitted there’d been an argument, down by the creek. Which was how Tilda had been knocked unconscious, lost most of her teeth. Ray’s fault of course. Dad’s voice getting louder as he told it, the story growing colour, filling in its own blanks. Ray had stolen money, the pay Dad got for working on the roads. Working his fingers to the bone. But why would Ray steal money? He never had before. And what would he spend it on, seeing he didn’t drink or gamble, and he didn’t care about bikes or clothes or cars, only books and horses, and he had a horse, she’d bought him one. And there wasn’t a bookstore in town and he could get any book he wanted at the library. And what about school? His exams.

  Gone shearing probably, Dad told her, as if it was an explanation. Or fencing, or fruit picking, depending on which time of day Ursula asked. Then he was doing a bit of work with a mate of a mate, on a property out west. But where and how did he get there and for how long? And without saying goodbye?

  Dad went back to chopping wood, although it was Christmas and nudging a hundred in the old currency. He’d be back, Dad reckoned, when he’d sorted himself out. Be the making of him. The making of what exactly? A man like you? Axe raised, face purple, Dad turned but she stood her ground. When he lowered the axe, deep into the heart of a log, she walked off, through thick, unbearable silence, toward the house. As if a boy of fifteen, in the space of a single afternoon, could decide to become a man.

  In Ray’s room, she sat on the bed, looking at his open cupboard. His winter coat still hanging in there, his good pair of trousers folded on the chair. His knapsack and work boots were missing, along with his blue heeler puppy, his poetry book and all the housekeeping money from the pantry tin. A hollow in his pillow, smelling of peppery sweat. A hollow in her heart.

  Retrieving the key to the back shed from its hiding place in the flour tin, she unpacked her old suitcase, left all her fancy dresses to moulder along with the rats. While Dad raged and Mam stood in her bedroom doorway, crying, in silence, great gouts of it, as if silence was leaking out of her, etching funnels between nose and chin, Ursula packed a pair of sandals, two cardigans, three old shifts. At the last minute, she grabbed Ray’s photograph off her dressing table, leaving behind the silver frame.

  Then she walked off down the driveway, leaving Dad shouting on the verandah, Mam in half-shadow behind the front screen door. Didn’t turn around, even when she heard the patter of feet behind her, Tilda howling as she caught her fingers in the slammed front gate. The first bend, then the second, and she saw herself disappearing into the elbow of the road. Joining the ghosts, out there on the fringe.

  She walked next door, a three-hour slog. Using the bit of money she’d made from dressmaking and her job at the chemist, she b
ought the ancient ute Tangello had for sale in his front yard. Drove to town, first to Old Alf’s shack and the footy oval and the feed barn, then to all three of Dad’s favourite pubs. Men turning, hat brims shaking before she’d even finished asking. Nuh, haven’t seen him, hasn’t been in. Hasn’t bought a drink or asked for work or thumbed a lift.

  After that, she went to every property within walking distance. Bothered gruff men on tractors, knocked at screen doors where other women stood in shadow, faded and worn as Mam. No one reported stolen food or money, no signs of someone dossing in a shed. Back in town, she was told at the police station where she tried to file a report that she hadn’t waited long enough, hadn’t suffered enough. Not yet. Boys his age do this sort of thing all the time, she was told. He’ll turn up, when he gets hungry or runs out of money. They always do. Except for those who don’t. All those lost McCullough boys.

  By the end of that first day, she’d given Ray’s description to so many people and so many times that even to her, even then, he’d started to recede. Young, blond, tall, blue heeler puppy, scar on his thigh. In the face of so many blank faces and shaking heads, he’d already started to seem like someone she’d made up.

  At dusk, at the last garage on the edge of town, she filled up the old ute with petrol, bought a map. Drew a circle on it marking towns a week’s hitchhike from home. She drove that circle three, four, ten times, arriving in towns just like the one she’d just left. A wheat silo, a Royal Hotel. Peering into pubs and shop windows, trying not to think of Ray in Dad’s old blue shirt, in his worn-out boots, plodding those empty roads she’d just travelled, without coat or money or even food for his dog, she talked to every housewife or farmer or schoolchild she came across, made a nuisance of herself at little weatherboard police stations and truck cafes. One fat-bellied cop watering the lawn outside his little weatherboard police station started waving when she drove by. Every second day, she’d ring to see if Ray had come home. If Mam answered, a trembling silence. If it was Dad, she just hung up.

  When those first places came up blank, she drew new circles, wider and wider, until her map resembled a scribble of failed orbits, a string of black holes where Ray hadn’t been. Another phone box, another pub. Another blue heeler dog. She’d followed one for an hour once, trying to see if it had a kink in its tail. Got a nipped finger in return. In sun-addled milk bars, she ordered grey hamburgers and drank an early form of cappuccino, Nescafe shaken with milk. Poring as she ate over local newspapers, until the list of people born, married, sick, dead or dying formed a knot in her throat along with dry lumps of mince.

  On hot afternoons, when no one knew anything, everything was shut and she was at a loss as to where to go next or what to do, she sat clutching Ray’s photograph on town park benches, in the shadow of stone memorials boasting in imperial measure of stolen land and long-dead sheep. Began to know the desolation of empty civic spaces. Their thin sandstone light.

  The old ute got to her to Sydney before it died. Thinking to lose herself in a boil of people who weren’t Ray, she got a job working weekends at a pub, another at a wedding outfitters, making alterations to richer people’s clothes. Keeping to small detail and even stitches, returning at night to her little flat by the railway line, where she tried not to wait for the phone to ring, watch the TV news. Tried not to spend money, to save it against the day she found Ray even though she told herself she wasn’t looking any more.

  She’d been stupid enough to think it was over. Didn’t know that like some sort of tropical fever, this would recur for years and years. That she would continue failing to see him, at cafes, in rest rooms, on beaches and trains. A boy jostling ahead of her through morning rush hour, a head taller than the crowd. A brown nape of neck, on the back seat of a disappearing bus. A boy with a lope, a hat, an earring, a blond boy dyed dark, with a sly spring to his knees. A boy sleeping rough in a King’s Cross doorway, in a string T-shirt like a shopping bag, his pale flesh like unripe fruit. Too young. Too old. Not Ray.

  Her answer was to run away. For a while, she changed schools and jobs like they were hairstyles, men like they were jobs. After she got her degree and did her teacher training, she lived in seven different cities in as many years. Sydney, Melbourne, then Brisbane and Perth, then three months in London, followed by six months in Europe with a teacher friend. Ray in every suntanned blond backpacker, in every homeless or lost-looking boy.

  Back home, she left again, almost immediately, heading as far west as you could without falling off. In schools where there were more flies than children and where in summer the thermometer rarely fell below a hundred degrees, Ray’s ghost grew younger. A gap-tooth smile, brown skin, a shock of white blond hair. In Sydney, during a brief stint of unemployment and an even briefer and more aimless love affair, she saw Ray at the cinema. Something about the ears, the earnest Adam’s apple against the flicker of the screen. As he got up to leave, she climbed over the knees of the man she was with, raced up the aisle and into the foyer, only to find someone too old, too drunk. Too sad.

  There were other near misses, other failed escapes. Other men. At fifty-five, she should have known better. Being such a getaway artist herself, she should have seen Simon’s packed suitcase on top of the wardrobe in the spare room for what it was. But she’d believed him when he told her they were old things he was taking to the charity shop. Love made you stupid, enclosed you in some sort of warm-breathing tunnel, and at the end all you found was some blinking, blinded, junket-pale version of yourself.

  Six months ago, with Mam gone and Simon gone, with Tilda so far gone she was almost out on the other side, she’d barely escaped filling her pockets with stones, leaving for good. But she didn’t. Couldn’t. Too much to do. The funeral arrangements. Real estate agents, solicitors, contracts, phone calls. Dad had decided to sell the property, out of the blue. She had to clean things, sell things, throw other things out. Find a rental place for Dad while the sale went through. She drove that long road home in Simon’s old Volvo, on Christmas Eve. On the way she stopped at Kmart, bought Dad some new clothes. The nurse she’d hired after Mam got sick for the last and shortest time informed her he’d let himself go. His shirt buttons all missing, his trousers covered in jam.

  In the end she failed to leave, because of small things, minor irritations. Lack of pills, the impossibility of finding an open chemist, in a country town, on Christmas Eve. The town in drought, Twenty Bends Creek just a chain of muddy pools. The homestead oven electric now. In the end, because she was too stubborn, because she wasn’t a coward. Because there was still a tiny bit of hope, even if she’d created it herself.

  Before the funeral and the trip home, she’d gone into Harry’s room, what used to be the spare room before Simon came, then the room where Simon kept his painting things and his empty suitcase and his spare clothes, then the room he retreated to when he was up late painting or didn’t want to disturb her, then finally the room where he slept alone. A room once white and monk-like, smelling of turpentine and clean astringency, now littered with the arcane and the fuzzy and the nearly useless. Harry’s belongings, nearly all of it second-hand. Bit like Harry himself.

  Digging through the mess of ethnic doodads on Harry’s desk, she unearthed his laptop, which he’d tried to rusticate with greenie stickers and a scree of joss-stick ash. She didn’t own a computer. She used one of course, at work or in the library, but refused to have one in the house. Because of Tilda, she told herself, reasoning she had enough on her hands without letting her sister loose on the web. But really, because of herself. Because she was afraid that if she reopened that old black hole of longing, it might swallow her whole.

  The password was easy. The Dalai Lama smiling beatifically from a poster on Harry’s bedroom wall. After that, a few choice words, a few clicks and there they were. The lost and the missing, the longed-for and sought-after, still waiting, still gone, but multiplied now, a millionfold. She recognised a few, from her obsessive scouring of local papers and police re
ports, years ago. Men with jug ears and flamboyant sideburns and wide lapels. Girls with blue eye shadow and mushroom perms, wearing boob tubes and butterfly shorts. Young boys never to grow into raw cheekbone or jawline, their Adam’s apples tender in a pale stalk of neck. Caught forever in their terrible grainy buck-toothed ordinariness, with their poignant haircuts and shark-grin braces, some missing since 1954. The glare of history and cheap photo stock bleached out freckles and identifying scars. Leaving only sadness, even that fading beneath the crisp language of the police reports.

  Last seen wearing, last seen walking, last seen driving. Last heard calling from a payphone in 1975. Disappeared from school, from a bus stop, at a beach, while buying milk or cigarettes. Last dressed in a blue bikini, an orange headband. Leaving a shoe, a baby. A car abandoned beside an outback road.

  Watching herself as if from above, she clicked faster and faster, going deeper and deeper, digging into scrubby forests or holes in sand dunes behind some isolated beach. The serial killer with his baker’s dozen, heads and hands cut off. Young boys, their bones jumbled up with those of their pet dogs, buried in shallow graves.

  And beyond that, out past the newspaper stories and official reports, like some giant dating service gone horribly wrong, the others. Those who were searching. People like her, who’d lost someone and were therefore endlessly missing from themselves. On badly designed, lurid-lettered, long-scrolling websites, they uttered their plangent, ungrammatical little cries for help. Searching for, I need to contact, need to know. I have stomach cancer, I have liver cancer. My aunt, my stepfather, his adopted son. All those random missed connections, a lost letter or a late train, imploding down the years. Her name was Rhonda, she used to work at Myer. My grandfather, a baker by trade. He liked ballroom dancing, cryptic crosswords and antique clocks. Looking for me mate, bloke called Jug, his dog called Jot. A gun shearer, nicknamed Eskimo. Last seen in Cunnamulla or Auckland, last met drinking in a pub in Gulargambone. Long grey hair, gold tooth, six foot four. A heart-shaped, a dragon-shaped, a woman-shaped tattoo.