The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  Instead, he put the potatoes and the peeler in a bowl, arranged them in her meagre lap, then hurried back to the stove.

  The news had ended and Mick’s show had come on, black and white monkeys in a field of mist. Mick resorted to banging the side of the TV, upsetting the coat stand which plunged right through the window, turning the picture to a blizzard of snow.

  ‘Fucking piece of shit.’

  ‘Mick. Don’t swear.’

  ‘Well, we need a proper aerial, Mum. On the roof.’

  ‘Yes, well, we need a lot of things. We can’t afford it, not right now.’

  Ray didn’t say that to install an aerial you’d need to fix the roof in order to have something to attach it to. He just said, without turning around, ‘I can have a look tomorrow. If you want. I’m going to town anyway, to get my mail.’

  ‘No. Please. I don’t want you to spend any more money on us.’

  ‘They don’t cost that much.’

  She levered herself upright, looking serious. ‘No, really. I feel bad enough about those bills you paid. I’ll pay you back, though. When I get back to work.’

  The idea seemed to exhaust her, and she slumped down, the peeler dropping into the bowl. Ray, unable to stand Mick’s banging and swearing any longer, walked over, wrenched the remote off him, propped the window open with some books, secured the coat stand aerial inside it, adjusted the rabbits-ears to some knife-edge calibration where the picture was semi-clear. Went back to the stove.

  ‘Ray? Why don’t you sit down for a bit? You’re making me dizzy, rushing around.’

  ‘Yep. In a sec. I’ll just get this on the pip.’

  When he couldn’t feasibly do anything more to the curry, when he’d wiped every surface and rinsed every dish and washed his hands, he sat down, choosing the furthest edge of the lounge, eyes on the screen. Eagles now, soaring through clouds of fuzz. The sound fading entirely, the aerial knocked off kilter again after Mick banged out the door in a sulk, fumbling in his pocket, saying that the show was boring and he thought he’d heard the dog bark, and he’d better check the chickens, there might be a fox. Ray had heard nothing, and his hearing was good. Lily sighed as they got a whiff of dope through the open window.

  ‘I meant it, you know. About paying you back.’

  ‘No rush, Mrs Jones. Wasn’t that much.’

  ‘Call me Lily. Mrs Jones makes me sound about a hundred and two.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. OK.’

  He could smell the curry catching and in a minute the rice would boil over. He should get up but it seemed rude, after he’d only just sat down.

  ‘It was a mistake, anyway, that big bill. You didn’t owe all that. Another Jones. It’s a pretty common name.’ A feeble lie but she seemed to buy it, or was too tired to argue.

  ‘My name isn’t really Jones anyway. That’s just Mick and his dad. All the bills, and the house, they’re in Gary’s name.’ She went silent, picking at the dirt on a potato. He stared at a shark on the TV, longing for a cigarette. Not knowing what to say. Best he could come up with, a full five minutes later, was, ‘So what did you do? For work. Before.’ She didn’t answer, just made a little noise. Stupid, stupid. He’d upset her, talking about before and after like that.

  ‘Lily?’ The name seemed too small and delicate for his big fat mouth.

  When he turned to look at her, he realised she was asleep. Snoring softly, her head dropping toward his shoulder. He swung back to the TV. Some stupid game show now, the sound blaring suddenly as the wind caught the aerial, and he couldn’t reach the remote to switch it off.

  Slowly, she tilted, came to rest, first on his shoulder, then in the hollow of his neck. She smelled like flowers, or perhaps he imagined it because of her name. Sweet grease or something fruity, underlain by the faint smell of vomit and medicine.

  When Mick banged back in, bringing with him a sultry waft of dope, his eyes widened at the sight of his mother sleeping on Ray’s shoulder. Ray, manoeuvring himself out from under her, replacing his shoulder with a cushion, raised his finger to his lips.

  She didn’t wake up, even later, when he carried her to the bedroom. Inside her little nightie she felt like nothing at all. Just air and flowers. Skin and bone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Dreaming of deserts, she woke somewhere hot, dry, voluminous. The walls porridge coloured. The sky through venetians slatted swimming-pool blue. A sound like hail.

  Hooking up the blind with one toe, she saw a cocky edging along a palm tree frond too green and limber to be real. It tapped its beak on the glass, screeched, flapped away.

  Then she remembered. The crash, the storm. Limping along in her wounded car for what had seemed like hours, following Max’s tail-lights through sheeting rain, wheels sliding through acres of dust turned to rivers of mud.

  As they reached a gate and a mailbox, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Half an hour later, a clearing, a long low house, the patch of grass in front shocking green after all that red. A beachball-shaped woman bounded up, making a winding motion with one beefy arm. When Ursula opened the window, she stuck her head right in, as if to deliver a kiss.

  ‘You got here then. Brought the weather with you too. Follow me, OK? Up there. Watch them trucks though. Don’t park Sam in.’ Clambering onto a quad bike, she spurted off through the mud, up another rut-filled track. Ursula turned to look for Max’s ute but he’d disappeared.

  By the time they reached Rose Cottage, everything felt hallucinatory, still lives carved from exhaustion. A bright pink house, a tropical palm tree, plastic flamingos by the front door. Freda trailed her up the path, saying something about pig shooters and white ants and leaking ceilings and how she hadn’t had time to clean.

  ‘Sheets are fresh, but, and if you want to head up to the big house for a bite, I can whip the Hoover around.’

  To her shame, Ursula remembered shutting the door in the woman’s face. Falling into bed fully clothed.

  When she got up, she found her sheets were full of mud. Going in search of coffee and a washing machine, she found herself in a tiny lounge room stuffed with giant leather sofas. Beer cans in wobbling stacks, full ashtrays on the floor. Boot marks on everything, even the TV screen. A sauce bottle loomed at her from the coffee table, three times its normal size. That feeling of unreality again, the gaunt elongations of her desert dream. A man bearded, bald and feathered, with the bent back legs of an emu, tracking her silently from ridge to ridge.

  Taking one look at the kitchen, she headed straight for the bathroom. The sink was full of pig shooter stubble, something white smeared across the mirror. She kept her sandals on in the shower. The whole place was probably ripe with athlete’s foot.

  Too late, with the water running, she realised there was no toilet in there. But she must have gone last night. She had a vague memory of stepping from a screen door into darkness, walking in bare feet across plastic grass covered in mud. As she’d turned on the light in a little outhouse, a rain of tiny white frogs fell from the ceiling, more frogs exploding in a hopping wave from the bowl as she flushed.

  She stayed in the shower for far longer than the five minutes prescribed by the drought notice taped above the taps. Whatever was making her linger here in this pink water giving off its septic stink was the same thing that had made her scuttle inside last night without even asking that woman about Ray. Vanity, partly. If he was here, working or visiting, she hadn’t wanted his first sight of her after all this time to be an old lady balding under rain. Fear mostly. Fear that they’d never heard of him, that he’d never been here, that she’d got it all wrong. That if he was here, by luck or chance, he might walk around a corner and fail to recognise her, or that she wouldn’t recognise him. Grey hair not blond, teeth missing, head balding, one leg shorter than the other. A weak little chin. Shorter than he had been, time in going forwards somehow bending him backwards, toward earth, like her. Those footprints she’d followed all night, splayed, birdlike, disappearing among hollow rocks and f
ailed water. The silent, stalking bent-legged prophet of her dream.

  Something floated up through the fog of her exhaustion. An old saying. One of Mam’s. One of those little, shamrock-infested needlepoint things she had tacked up all over Twenty Bends. Irish of course. Mam’s sayings always were. Blessings, prayers, curses, hard to tell the difference sometimes. This had been part of some tediously scrolling, Gothic-lettered thing, rambling on about lakes and pillars, by Someone McSomething or Other. It used to sit above the fireplace, where Mam insisted no knitting could be done, unless all the sheep were asleep, and how could you tell? Spilled salt thrown over the shoulder and no cats in the house, in case they turned their backs.

  She tried to remember this particular saying, because it somehow seemed important, in her fatigue. But it kept receding into dream tatters and bathroom steam. Hills, valleys, roads rising, roads falling, in lilting cross-stitch. There were a lot of roads. A lot of walking went on. Dreams were cast and spread, and God was always lurking, opening hearts and turning ankles, seizing people in the great bleeding hollow of his hands.

  Something about a ghost. There was always a ghost.

  The drain was blocked with dust. The water was backing up, forming a red brown swill round her calves. She got out feeling dirtier than when she’d got in. Sullied by the sheer state of the place.

  After she’d dressed, dabbed on some makeup and enticed Winston from behind the lounge with half a muesli bar, there was no putting it off. Gathering her hat and sunglasses, she caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. The powder had been a mistake. In this light, she looked Elizabethan. Ghostly. That was it. On the wall by the fireplace, at Twenty Bends. To appease a ghost you must do what he wants.

  As a kid, it had frightened her, the cosy, firelit tenderness of the embroidery, against the idea. Some ruthless smoke-coloured ghost, arriving down the chimney, making impossible demands.

  Outside, the heat hit her like a wall. Between her cottage and what Freda had called the big house, a ramshackle thing tacked together by a flyscreened verandah, a vast expanse of dust. Yesterday’s rain might have been a dream.

  Walking across it, she expected at any moment to hear a footstep behind her, a man calling her name. But there was just the squeak of her sandals, dogs barking somewhere, the sound bouncing back at her from a row of yellowing needle pines, austere with drought. That brave little patch of grass outside the house littered today with a dirty casserole dish, a single galosh, a dog bone, red with gore.

  ‘Hello?’ Cupping her hands round her face to peer in at the flyscreen door, she saw a blue heeler eyeing her from the shadows of the verandah, its freckled belly heavy with teats. The pad of her finger itched against the wire door. That dog of Dad’s had been pregnant too. That’s why she’d tried to feed it. Because of the sad little bulge below its ribs.

  It reminded her to get a grip. That she used to be a country girl too. Tying Winston to the outside tap, she went inside, edging past the bluey, which growled but seemed too exhausted to move. Emerging from the gloom of the verandah into a dilapidated yellow kitchen, she blinked in the sudden glare.

  ‘Gidday. Sleep all right?’ Freda was squatting beside a wood stove, bum wobbling as she poked the fire with a stick. ‘Bloody thing. Why we can’t just get electric like everyone else, I don’t know. But no, everything has to stay exactly the same as when Sam’s dad was around.’ Clanging the door shut, she heaved herself upright, wiping her hands on her shorts.

  ‘You’ve missed breakfast, love. We start early round here. Can do you an egg though. Or cornflakes, if those termites left me any. Toast? Coffee or tea?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer to any of these questions, just kept bustling round the kitchen, breaking eggs into a frypan, clicking the kettle on with one rubber-covered elbow while reaching for a catering sized tin of International Roast.

  ‘Coffee, thank you. And toast. If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Jam or Vegie? I’ve got some marmalade somewhere.’

  Pushing two slices of bread down into the toaster, Freda wrenched open the door to what Ursula had assumed was another room but was in fact a room-sized fridge. Still talking, Freda burrowed deep inside, her voice muffled by the legs of lamb hanging from meat hooks above her head.

  ‘Only jam, sorry. It’s home-made though.’

  ‘Jam is fine.’

  Feeling stunned by the sun and all the sudden activity, Ursula cleared a space at the table between a child’s colouring book, a spanner, a drift of toast crusts, a half-drunk glass of Milo and a headless Barbie doll. Listened to Freda’s muffled chatter about Sam and neighbours and bushfires while the kettle sizzled dry. Trying to think how to start, what to say. After yesterday’s rudeness, she had amends to make.

  ‘You’ve got kids, Freda? How many?’

  ‘Eh? What?’

  Ursula yelled louder, telegram-style, her voice sounding rusty and unused as Freda’s front gate. ‘Children? How many? What kind?’

  ‘What kind?’ Freda’s face appeared between the lamb legs, puzzled and pink.

  ‘Sorry. I meant, boys or girls?’

  ‘Oh. Three. Of each. Two at boarding, eldest at uni, then the girls.’ She pointed to a photograph on the sideboard of three blonde girls in descending sizes. ‘All the spit of Sam, except for Marcus. He’s the oldest. He’s a ginger, like me.’ She went quiet, diving back into the fridge, rattling through jars on a shelf. ‘After the boys, we just kept trying and then we had Ronnie and then two at once. Never rains. Well, it doesn’t usually. Not out here.’ She poked her head out again. ‘Max said you had car trouble. You want Sam to take a look?’

  ‘No. It’s fine. It’s rented. I’ll just call someone.’

  A snort. ‘You won’t get anyone, not out here. Anyway, roads’ll be closed. All that rain.’

  The toast popped up, burnt black.

  ‘Yes, it was pretty bad. Freda? Do you think I could I get that coffee now? I can do it myself.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, love. Don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’ Hurrying out of the fridge without the jam but carrying another carton of eggs, she spotted the toast, swore, put two new slices in, cracked the eggs Ursula didn’t want into a frypan, started spooning coffee into a mug. ‘Milk? Sugar?’ Ursula shook her head but Freda was staring out the kitchen window, spooning sugar idly while she looked at the dust out there.

  ‘Gone already. All that water. See?’ She made a zipping noise with her lips. ‘Barely touched the sides. You know, our twins have only seen rain twice, counting yesterday. It poured for two weeks straight when they were one. Land couldn’t take it, after all the drought. Sam nearly bought a boat.’ She spun around. ‘Shit. What’s today?’

  ‘What? Oh. Tuesday, I think.’ Without dinner or breakfast, Ursula couldn’t be sure. The last thing she’d eaten was that muesli bar, on the road, years ago.

  ‘Forgot the sausages. If it’s Tuesday, it’s sausages. Written in ruddy stone.’ Running back into the fridge, Freda re-emerged with a straining plastic bag full of pink meat. Stood, meat juice dripping on the floor, worry creasing her plain face.

  ‘You’re not one of them vegans, are ya? Last bloke we had here, that’s what he was. All he’d eat was the bran we feed the horse. Sam reckoned we should just put him out to graze.’

  Ursula was wondering whether to pretend she was a vegan when the smoke alarm went off.

  ‘Shit. Excuse the French.’ Freda grabbed a broom, jabbed the ceiling alarm with the handle, then scraped a lace of burnt egg onto a plate. Putting her fingers to her mouth, she let out an ear-splitting whistle. The blue heeler slunk in, giving Ursula the evil eye.

  ‘There go, Lol. Your lucky day.’

  While the dog chased egg scraps round the floor and while Freda stuffed pig intestines with bright pink pork, talking as she did so, in long looping stories, about Sam’s grandmother and her secret sausage recipe, not so secret, and how she had to follow it, to the letter, breadcrumbs, lard, thyme, pig’s bl
ood, from the pigs Sam shot, or Sam would always know, Ursula drank her coffee, watched Freda moulding, mixing, tying and squeezing. While she should have been wondering how to start, how to ask about Ray, she found herself thinking instead that a woman of such heft and roundness as Freda should never wear a top like that. Not with all those pleats and ruches and gathers, the little sleeves strangling the top of her shoulders, her arms pink and swollen as the sausage links.

  Lulled by the capable milking motions of those square red hands, she was busy redressing Freda, sketching her in something floaty and solid-coloured, a mid-length dress perhaps, when she realised Freda was staring at her, a sausage link dangling from her hand.

  ‘Well. Did ya? Or not?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘See any pigs. On the way in.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’d know it if you had. Nasty buggers. Sam caught a big pregnant sow a month ago. Brought it home, for a bit of meat, and now the littlie thinks it’s a pet. Rides the bloody thing. Of course Marcus, my eldest, he always thought we should breed them, like a sideline or something. He did ag, at uni, so he could take over, when Sam retires.’

  She went quiet, her face serious again. Ursula wondered what it would be like to have a face like that. So sheer, her feelings so transparent, like sun or rain on glass.

  ‘Bit of a handful, our Marcus,’ Freda sighed, tying a knot in her link. ‘Touch and go there for a while. He’s settled down now though, thank God. Got married. Got a good job, in the city.’ The toast popped up again, was ignored. Didn’t matter. With the smell of the raw pork, Ursula wasn’t hungry any more.

  ‘I told Sam, my girls aren’t going anywhere near a sheep. School here first, if we ever find another governess, then when Marcie’s ready for the boarding, they can all go up together. They’re booked into that big Catholic near Orange, and then uni, probably just for the oldest, because Marcie’s into hair and beauty, and with the littlie, it’s all horses and bikes, but my Ronnie, she’s sharp as tack.’ She paused, staring at Ursula. ‘You’re not a writer, are ya? That last bloke, the vegan. He was.’