by Kate Lyons
He panted up the incline at a punishing pace. Two more weeks of treatment and a hospital visit every other day. Three days until Cheryl was back from her Gold Coast holiday, having topped up her terracotta tan. The only reason he was still here, he told himself. Lily’s lack of a car.
At the top, the air was fresher, the pain in his chest slowly ebbing away. Not a cloud in the sky now. Hard, hard and endless blue. Three black cockies flew across in an arrow shape, their mewing desolate and mournful, on their way to somewhere else.
No messages on his phone when he connected. Nothing from Urs, and it had been over a month. Three more days.
Putting his phone back in the pocket of his overalls, his hand met something dry and soft. He looked at the hair, still black and glossy, before letting it drop and blow away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She didn’t get up the next day. Taped a note to the door, saying she had a cold. And she was cold, despite the heat and the mothy rattle of the airconditioner. She watched a scourge of light from the venetians travel across the floor, window to door. Like her skin, the light worn thin by the day’s great expanse.
Now and again her mobile beeped from the depths of her bag. Six messages so far, all from Harry. All about Tilda, with exclamation marks. No details but she could imagine. She’d stopped taking her pills. She’d caught a train, to the coast or the country or to some blighted outer suburb where buses rarely ran and where taxis refused to go. She’d been caught shoplifting. A man had attacked her while she was sleeping on a bench. She’d burnt down her room and the house and garage with it, along with the box of family photos, Harry’s guitar, Harry’s African art statues, all Mam’s old clothes.
The last message just said Urgent. She kicked the bag under the bed and the bleeping died away.
At dusk, a knock on the door. Freda, asking how was she feeling and did she want Panadol or dinner on a tray. Ursula lay doggo until the bulky permed shape behind the glass moved away. After that, she got up, closed the blind entirely, sank back into oatmeal-coloured gloom. Lay labouring against it, heart beating slight and fast, like some tiny wingless bird.
Night came but no sleep. Too many hours and they were hers alone to make and shoulder, despite their sly weight and muffled purpose. A heavy swathe of useless and unnavigable time. It had always been like this, she realised, ever since Ray.
Before dawn, a storm, dry and violent. Lightning sheeted at the window, roof tin took sudden flight. She listened to it clatter on fake lawn or fake palm tree, the bonnet of her car. She lay there, willing destruction entire. When it didn’t come, she got up, went to the outhouse, moving slowly in brilliant electricity. Smell of ozone, sewerage. Things leaking, bursting, giving way.
At first light, she found a frog on her pillow. Tiny, albino, it lay curled like a baby’s hand.
She was woken later by another knock at the door. A tall shape behind the front door glass. Not Freda. Not Ray.
‘Hi. How you feeling?’ She stood looking at his feet. Boots today. ‘Sam’s going to take a look at your car, but he had to head out to the neighbour’s first. There’s a fire. Don’t worry. It’s a long way away.’ She wasn’t worried. Didn’t feel anything at all.
Max jangled his keys, shifting boot to boot. ‘Listen, no one’s around much today. I thought, if you’re feeling better, you might like to get out, go and see something. The river and the old homestead. We could camp out there. If you’d like.’
They drove in hot silence, along no discernible path, across hurtful stones, cracking mud, drying already to dust. Little mailboxes lined this track, the Gilberts, the Shaughnessys, the O’Riordans. All gone, according to Max. Now and again her mobile beeped piteously from her bag.
‘You might want to get that. Before we lose reception.’
‘It’s just Harry.’
‘Oh. OK.’
More bumping and skidding, more silence and dust.
Half an hour later he asked, ‘Who’s Harry?’
‘No one. Someone I live with.’
She went quiet and Max didn’t ask and she didn’t say, just sank gratefully into more hot, grainy silence. A solitary hum in the car as Max got out to open a gate, got back in, got out to close it again. At some point, off the main track, they passed a tiny town, with a wooden pub, the world’s smallest RSL. An old dog lay sprawled beside a water tank. Looked like it might have been there her whole life. Something wet dripped on her shoulder. Winston, panting in her ear from the back seat. She’d forgotten all about him. She wondered where he’d been, who’d been feeding him. He looked better. Glossier, brighter-eyed. Leaner even.
‘His head looks better. His sore.’
Just disinfectant apparently, a dab of some ointment from Max’s overall pocket. She wished for some mysterious salve for herself, something to heal the puckering hole in her heart.
Silence again, for another hour, the ute bouncing along invisible ruts in tall silver grass. A stalky murmur, like some dry old sea. On the map, which she consulted with not much interest, she saw they were heading toward the famous river, the historic homestead, marked by a big circle on Freda’s map. Nothing there, of course. Half a fence, some old machinery, a row of white-anted piers. Far below, the river itself, deep, brown, thick, shrunken between high steep banks.
While she sat in the car, Max got out to poke around, kicking sheets of iron, banging inside the drum of the steam engine with a stick, as men do. She put on her glasses, reading without interest Freda’s photocopies. Steam paddles, wool yields, wide-toothed shearing combs. In the end, all that endeavour, all those statues and photographs, all that bewhiskered boasting, for this. Old brown iron, dry wind riffling through dry grass, gutted bits of life. Right then, it felt like nothing might ever run green or true again.
‘What’s he like?’ Max asked after he got back into the car, handing her, for some reason, a rusty bolt. She put it on the back seat. Winston gave it an experimental lick.
‘Sorry? Who?’
‘Well, not the dog. This Harry. Bloke you live with.’
Where to start? With his faith in angels? Or his non-belief in microwaves? That little cavalier beard he’d affected lately, the sort middle-aged men grow to cover a weak chin.
‘If you ask him how he is, he tells you. In detail.’
‘Oh. One of those.’
An hour later, and the road ran out entirely, Max aiming the ute at what looked like a solid wall of bush. Where are we going, she was forced to ask, as they jounced through, undergrowth cracking against the windows. A famous creek, Max told her, wrenching the wheel to avoid termite mounds tall as cows. It would be cooler there, he said.
No water though, when they got there, just more red dirt. Up ahead, in a shallow indentation of stunted trees, amid a swamp of tiny pink flowers, a procession of pigs, in descending order, like they had been arranged by a child. A big hairy one, a mother with swinging teats. A brindled baby bringing up the rear.
‘Why is it famous?’
‘One of your explorers camped here once.’ On his way to being dead no doubt.
What from a distance had looked like shaded green grass turned out to be a field of prickles, host to a million ants. While Max dug a hole for the fire, the idea of which seemed insane in the heat, she tried to pick the worst of the burrs from Winston’s fur. When Max asked her to unpack the tents, she did so badly, ungraciously, sweating and swearing, tangling ropes, losing pegs, high-stepping skittishly through long grass, worrying about snakes. Not hot enough, according to Max, who was digging a pit for the fire, his pile of sticks flaring almost before he touched them with the match. Going back to the car for her nail scissors, to trim away Winston’s snarled undercarriage, she saw by the temperature gauge it was forty-three degrees.
They sat in deep hot shade under the mulgas. Not a breath of air. When it got too hot even for that, Max suggested a swim. She followed him up a steep bank of earth. Below it was a dam, tannic and algal, slimy with more of those little pink plants.
All around it, tracks like little emblems and Max deciphered them lovingly. Emu splay, roo arrowhead, the molar shapes of goats. One he didn’t know. Feathery, sly, the heel just a witchy wisp.
While he squatted down, pondering it from all angles, she took her sandals off and tested the water, worrying about what might have swum and died and defecated in there. But he just stripped off and waded in. She followed gingerly, T-shirt ballooning behind her, until she took it off, watching it float away. Even that slimy, tepid water a relief, after the heat.
Later, as he foraged for wood, she sat in the taut shade of a bush. Noticing things, despite herself. The intricate hairs of those little muscled plants. The fine shadow they cast against the red. For a long time, she watched a trail of ants build a world around the drip of sugary tea on her sandal strap. Wondering, in some tiny corner of herself, about the owner of the hairy-winged heel. Wanting to see it. Expecting not to. Telling herself she wanted and expected nothing at all.
Finally, toward sunset, a cooler breeze through the mulgas, little pockets of desert night. They sat on a log eating sausages, and she stopped worrying if the crunch on them was chilli, dirt or ants. When she got out her hip flask and offered it to Max, he shook his head.
‘Nah. I’m good. Don’t do that any more.’
And he said nothing more and she didn’t ask, just drained the whiskey, watching spindled shadows, silver grass, the torn lace of trees. A full moon, yellow and hazy. Perilous-looking stars.
In her tent, at midnight, when she heard something scrape and scuttle against the canvas, she lay rigid, telling herself a snake wouldn’t make a sound like that. When she heard it again, feathery, insistent, closer this time, she called out and from the next tent Max told her it was just a moth.
In the early hours, when that fluttering started up again, right by her ear, she picked up her sleeping bag, blundering out of her tent and into his. They lay together, chastely separated by nylon and zips, hands clasped. Listening to the distant mourning of ewes and lambs, caught in their separate pens.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘I told you, Ray. Nothing that’s going to die.’
A singed smell of cooling earth through the open window. They’d had a bit of rain a few days ago, just enough to put a fuzz of green on the home paddock. Not enough to settle the dust.
‘Everything dies,’ he said, not unreasonably, then regretted it. She went quiet, tugging at her nightgown, trying to free it from the sheet.
‘Come off it. You know what I mean.’
‘There’s only seven.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. So what’s the point?’
He couldn’t see her face. So black and thick these autumn nights. But he knew she was looking at him, one eyebrow quirking up in that way she had. They were still black, her eyebrows, thick and dark against the yellow shriek of her skull.
‘I dunno. Felt sorry for the bloke.’
When he’d seen the notice in the local paper, he’d just thought fertiliser, lumber, maybe some poly pipe for the drip-feed watering in Lily’s vegetable patch. For anything more permanent, for the orchard she kept going on about, they’d need proper irrigation and there was still no sign of that missing paperwork showing who owned the land along the creek. That left the bore, and for that he’d need a drill.
Could rent one though. Maybe even buy one, second-hand. They could afford it, just about. Two months’ fencing work on a neighbouring property, navvying three days a week at the hospital building site, pay from his new job, cooking weekends and Thursday nights at the local Chinese and now they had money in the bank. Even after servicing the loan Gary had taken out to feed dying stock, they’d be ahead. Cash in his pocket, for the first time in months.
To celebrate, he’d bought himself a new shirt, new boots, lunch at the pub. Sitting at the bar, he’d leafed through the local classifieds, looking for hire equipment, maybe a secondhand drill, finding instead a rash of auction notices and farm clearances. Cheap stock, small acreages for sale. More land. His thoughts circled yet again to the neighbour and the creek. Lily was adamant the man was lying, that if they could just find the contract, they could prove the water was theirs. Even if it wasn’t, it might still be possible, in six months’ time, if they were careful, if he kept working, kept saving, if Lily kept getting better and the jobs kept up, to make an offer, for water rights or even for the land itself.
Driving out, heading deeper and deeper into the poor red country west of town, for the first time he’d dared to see a future unfurling, steady, rich and orderly as the rows of fruit trees Lily dreamed about. Farm clearance, the real estate sign promised him, and he turned left. Might get a bargain, he thought, turning up a driveway as wrecked and rutted as their own. Might even have a drill.
When he saw the place, he felt ashamed of himself. Tattered fences, bare paddocks, dry dams. The word foreclosure hung everywhere like thick, red fog. Here and there, a bit of green pick. Worse than nothing, because it offered hope to man and beast. No beasts here anyway except for a couple of horses tied to the verandah post. One was old and ribby. The other, young, nervous, too thin for its height, pranced nervously at the end of its rope. Outside the sheds, their doors swinging, shiny padlocks hanging off, their empty interiors floating with hay and dust, the only things worth selling, lined up in rows. A tractor, a harvester, drums of fuel and bales of feed. Next to a truck piled high with furniture, the family, in faded blues and weathered greys, standing shoulder to shoulder against the crisp-shirted men from the bank.
He got out, scuttled round the back. He was checking out a cage trailer—rusty, unregistered, suspension shot, but could be useful, for hauling supplies or firewood—when the farmer came over, planting his worn-out boots next to Ray’s. They stood in awkward silence, looking at the trailer. Ray offered him a cigarette, but the man waved it away.
‘Four-fifty. Cost me two thousand new. Cash in hand only. Extra hundred and I’ll load it up with those.’ The farmer jerked his head toward some sheep bunched near the fence. Thin, silent and wool-heavy, they had the dull eyes of the recently starved.
‘Yeah. Thanks mate. I don’t run stock.’
The man folded his arms, squinting at him. Ray realised he must look like some sort of hobby farmer in his shiny new boots and his packet-fresh shirt. He bent down to look at the trailer again and a missed pin from his collar stuck into his neck.
‘Good dorpers, those. Worse places to start. Don’t look much at the moment, but they’ll be OK when they get some condition on.’
‘Yeah. Not sure what I’d do with seven sheep.’
‘Eleven. At least. Probably more.’
Jumping the fence, the man waded through the bunch of sheep. Grabbing a ewe, hauling it over the backs of the others, he flipped it easily, the animal hopeless and placid under his hands. Ray saw a firm bulge beneath the sunken flanks.
‘This one, those two, old girl at the back. All in lamb.’ Dad’s voice in his ear. Them lambs’ll go like smoke when they hit the ground.
‘Cash only. Like I said. To me, right here. Fucked if I give those bastards another red cent.’
Together they turned to watch the bank men trying to load the young horse onto a float. The colt was baulking, frantic, white-eyed. The man at the front was hauling too hard, the one behind standing far too close. Halfway up, the horse pig-rooted, scrabbled, lost its footing on the ramp. It came down hard, bashing against the float. Stood trembling, a big gash on its leg, while a young boy watched from the verandah, arms by his sides.
‘Listen, I’ll take the trailer. OK? Four-fifty, you said.’ Ray counted out from his wad of notes. Even his money, straight from the bank this morning, looked too new and crisp. ‘Not sure about the ewes.’
The man spat, just missing Ray’s boots.
‘Suit yourself.’
The farmer stalked off toward the house. A woman waited for him behind the flyscreen. White legs, white apron, her face in shadow. Giving only her body to Ray’s assumptions before he
r husband slammed the door.
When he got home, towing his sagging trailer stuffed with pipes, feed bags, an old sprinkler system and seven half-dead sheep, he found his own front door hanging open. Mick’s skateboard was lying halfway up the steps, as if trying to mount them all by itself.
‘Hello?’
‘Mick, please. Take it off. Right now.’ Lily’s voice was high and echoey, on the edge of panic or laughter, or both.
‘I can’t. Not yet. You’ll look weird.’
‘I do already! I can’t believe I let you do this. Must be mad.’
‘Just wait. Trust me, OK? I done this tons of times. Well, once at least.’
Following a trail of discarded clothes—Mick’s school trousers, Lily’s bra, her yellow dress—he found them in the bathroom. Mick was wearing Ray’s washing-up gloves and Lily’s pink cooking apron and not much else. Lily was crouched in the bath, dressed in her swimmers, great dollops of white stuff all over her near-bald head. Hanks of black hair all over the toilet seat.
‘How much longer? It really stings.’
‘Twenty minutes. Half an hour, tops. You’ll see. It’ll look really cool. Like that singer. That blonde one you like.’
‘Annie Lennox?’
‘Who?’
Lily and Ray exchanged a look in the mirror, until Mick slathered on more of the bleach and Lily clenched her jaw and closed her eyes. Wincing along with her, Ray unplugged his clippers, which were dangling precariously from a power point above the half-full sink.
‘Jesus, how much of this stuff did you use?’ He picked up Mick’s big black bottle of bleach. Not For Domestic Use, in red letters on the side. ‘You could do an Olympic swimming pool with this.’
‘Don’t worry, Davo showed us. You know Davo, from school. His hair went green from swimming training, so he bleached it but then he had to shave it off anyway, because it makes you go faster, but he left the top long, like a mohawk. It looked cool.’