The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  Mick’s skateboard lay on the verandah steps, just like last time, like a dream he was being forced to re-enter. Taste of metal in his mouth, a crawling on his scalp. Everything in slow motion. Something looming. Something he was trying and failing to outrun.

  Drawing up, he saw the boot-shaped hole in the front door, and he’d known it would be there, somehow, and he was out of the door before the ute came to a stop.

  ‘Hello? Lil?’

  The living room was dark, the curtains drawn. The room hard to navigate, the air fraught and he ran toward the bedroom, never fast enough. Something puffed underfoot. Flour, mixed with smashed crockery and broken glass. He tried to say her name again but his mouth wouldn’t make the shape. Part of him was noting the capsized sideboard, the kitchen window smashed again, the TV upended, the screen cracked as he tried to make his body work, swimming it toward the bedroom. Leaning near the door, Mick’s new cricket bat, a present from Ray for going back to school. Great gouges out of the willow and the handle cleaved in two.

  Thinking of the neighbour, the husband, the scar on Mick’s arm, he stopped at the doorway, afraid to turn on the light. Dark in there too except for the slice of uneasy dawn coming through the pink curtain. The glass in that window was also broken, he noted, as if from far away. A pair of boots sat in the middle of the floor. Gary’s boots, from the sleep-out. Had she been mooning over them? Had he come back to claim them? Had he worn them as he rampaged through the house? Then Ray’s eyes adjusted, and he saw the big stain on the bed and he touched it and his hand was wet and he wanted to be sick.

  When he switched the light on it was pitiless. The bed was soaked. The bloodstain wide, brown, deep, something fibrous in the centre. Fabric from the bedspread, he told himself. Boot prints everywhere, and paw prints too, red, white, ticking and avid, circling the bed, across the pillow on the floor. Stalking him sideways, arriving from a dream.

  As he picked up Lily’s jeans, soaked with blood, he heard a shot, kicking dull against the sky.

  Fear and anger sent him full pelt toward the verandah, where he stopped, swivelling frantically. Nothing, nothing. Just dawn light gleaming like dusk across the dam.

  He scrabbled through the ute tray, looking for his own gun. Found the old pillowslip he used to wrap it in. Empty. He hadn’t thought about the gun all the time he was away. Just assumed it was there.

  He started throwing stuff around, Freda’s garbage bags spilling tiny woolly pink and yellow things as he tried to find his strongbox, the bullets. Yellow mittens, a white bootee, curls of fencing wire. The arm of something, bright blue, impossibly small. The box wasn’t there, just the old padlock from it, and then he remembered, he’d left it in the sleep-out, under the old camp bed. Forgot to take it with him in his early morning rush, all those weeks ago. A second shot rang out and he spun around. Birds flushed up from the trees along the creek. Down there, near the boundary fence. A flash of blue.

  He started running, vaulting the fence, stumbling across the rough paddocks, too slow and clumsy in his big boots, in that poor sly light. Another shot, much closer, stifled by something, earth he hoped. He dived behind the water tank.

  Peering round, he saw nothing but those bird shapes against the sky. He was reaching behind him, scrabbling for a rock, a stick, finding only a bit of poly pipe left over from when he’d done the irrigation, a lifetime ago, when his hand met something cold and wet. The shock set him back on his haunches and then the kelpie was licking him all over, before bounding off toward the creek.

  Ray gathered himself, measuring the shape and weight of the pipe in his hand. Might look like a gun in this silvery light. Then, with one swift action, he stood up, stepped out, high on his toes, like a dog. Like Old Alf had taught him, long ago. Try and look bigger than you are.

  He was ready to hit, shout, run, feint sideways, but there was only Mick in his blue school shirt, Ray’s rifle held one handed above his head. Something loose and wrong about his other arm. Whirling, swearing and shouting, the boy was kicking out at the dog, which was leaping up and play bowing, thinking it was all a game.

  ‘Mick! Stop. Put it down.’

  The barrel swung unsteadily toward him but Ray was ready, stepping sideways, and the bullet pinged harmlessly against the tank. The kickback sent Mick sprawling, the gun flung clear. Ray picked it up and cracked the barrel before going over, heart beating hard.

  ‘What’s wrong? Where’s your mum?’

  ‘Wasn’t me.’ Mick’s face was puce with the effort of holding back tears. ‘Wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t even here. I shoulda been, I know, but I went to Davo’s and then it was too late to ride back and the bike was playing up, and when I got back this morning, I couldn’t get in. Something was up against the door. I think it was Mum. I tried to break it down. I hurt my arm. But I broke the window and then there was blood everywhere. And the bed …’ Behind them, birds wheeled and wheeled, casting black shapes across the sky. And Ray knew it would always come to this. Dogs, guns. A light like dusk.

  ‘Where is she? Is she okay?’

  Mick nodded, then shook his head, going round and round. ‘Ambos took her. They wrecked the gate, Ray. Just drove straight over the top of it. They told me to come but I couldn’t. There was the dog.’ He looked pleadingly up at Ray. ‘Ray? Think I broke my arm.’ He burst into tears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They found it finally, on the edge of the rough acres designated for the new hospital. For half an hour they’d jolted through paddocks clotted with ruts and demountables, circling that red brick box on a hill. So small and squat and eaveless, he’d thought it was a toilet, haloed by bogongs and a fluorescent pall.

  Mick didn’t move when he stopped the car. Just sat staring past the smashed insects on the windscreen, as if they were still travelling. As if there was still somewhere to go. Grief was passing over him in roils and tempests, and he’d flattened himself beneath it. Found a small pocket where he could breathe.

  ‘Just forget her, mate.’ He’d been about to say Cheryl hadn’t meant it, but the lie died on his tongue. ‘She’s a silly bitch.’ He undid Mick’s seatbelt for him. ‘Come on. Let’s get some sleep.’

  Three rooms, three plywood doors. Some joker had put a boot through theirs, in anger, grief or despair. The bare lightbulb revealed two beds, a plastic kettle, two cracked mugs. The place stank of damp carpet, old air freshener, stale drains. The odour of charity, scant and dour. Inside the drawer of the old oak highboy in the corner, donated by some do-gooder probably, someone like Cheryl, some woman of upright morals and flint-cold heart, a little card told him how the Rotary cared for those in distress. The other drawers were empty. No blankets, no towels.

  Mick was asleep almost before he hit the bed. Ray, unwilling to commit himself to another day ended, to another night where nothing and everything might draw to a close, sat outside on a garden bench dedicated to some dead person. He drank warm beer from the ute tray, watching lights in town wink out, one by one. Somewhere, a cow bellowed. In the lumpy, torn-up darkness, the plod and rasp of grazing sheep.

  When his phone went, he expected Cheryl, but it was Freda. Offering shock, fear, condolence. God-flavoured hope.

  When she stopped asking how he was and what she could do and when he still hadn’t said anything and he was about to ring off, she pleaded, ‘Ray. Wait. Just one more thing.’ He sighed.

  ‘I know it’s bad timing but I thought you’d want to know. I found Charlie, through that church friend of mine.’ Charlie. A name, a person from another life. In a pub, about a hundred k from here. ‘He’s pretty bad, Ray. He’s drinking again and he’s off the pills. Maybe if you gave him a ring. He listens to you. Or I could give him your number, he’s probably lost it …’

  ‘No. Don’t. And don’t ring again. I’ll ring you, sometime, soon.’ In some afterwards he couldn’t imagine. When she started crying, he turned off the phone, then switched off the blue glare of the insect light. Sat in darkness, cradling a cigarette. If he
closed his eyes, he could almost pretend he was safe in the little orbit of his camp fire, his outline simple against the sky.

  It was freezing out here but at least it was properly dark. In the hospital it was always endless, lidless, fluorescent day. It had only been forty-eight hours but he felt he had been walking those corridors for a lifetime, following pastel lines running at chest height on moth-coloured walls. Pink for emergency, blue for palliative, yellow for something he couldn’t remember. Green for exit, he knew that way by heart.

  Every hour he’d walked from Lily’s room to the kitchenette for coffee then back past the nurse’s station and the hard chair waiting room, passing a room indistinguishable from all the others except for the old lady in the second bed who kept pulling her nightie up over a bald, bandaged skull. He’d tried not to look at the bags of flesh hanging on her rib cage, the little head brown and shiny, fighting for air. The last time he’d gone past, maybe an hour ago, a nurse had been wrestling with her and Ray had winced at the sight of those big beefy forearms bearing down on that little bag of bones. A relief to push through the swing door to the little courtyard provided for visitors, planted improbably with ferns and palms.

  He’d cowered out there as long as he could, adding butts to the little alp he’d created under the No Smoking sign. And all the while, the door creaked back and forth on its invisible current. Waiting to breathe him back in.

  The room seemed to contain more and more women every time he returned. Cheryl. A nun from the local convent, who’d arrived unheralded, homing on grief with bat-like instinct, in the middle of some night. The sister of Lily’s he couldn’t remember the name of, looking in her sturdy shoes and grey cardigan more like a nun than the nun herself. Nurses, of course, short, blonde, wide, plump and freckled, handling that little body he knew so well, but already it seemed to belong to everyone but him. Her neck lolled under their fingers as they propped, wiped, smoothed, jabbed and bustled, murmuring greeting-card bullshit about passing on, finding peace. A better place.

  Once, briefly, sidling in, hovering uncertainly, pressing his hand once, hard, before sidling out again, a woman as thin and pale as the woman in the bed. The friend from the clinic Lily had coffee with sometimes. Lily herself, of course. But he couldn’t look that way. Like those first few weeks at the farm, he could only manage her in glimpses. A hand. An eyebrow. A white blank around which others scurried, throwing shadows, muttering prayers.

  A vigil, Cheryl was calling it, plucking the word from some hospital pamphlet and bestowing it like a Vaseline halo as she rocked herself to the nun’s rosary incantations, the tap of the nun-like sister’s foot. Performing grief. Constructing it. They’d been doing it for hours, the women. With ritual and small repetition, casting the room adrift. Pushing him and the boy further and further, to a chair by the door, a mattress in the corner, put there by a nurse, so people could sleep in shifts.

  No one slept. Rituals like this required an audience. Even Mick, slumped on the mattress with his earphones in and his death metal turned to high, had picked up on it, this silent conversation they were excluded from but somehow scaffold to. A busy chatter of eye lines, knitting needles, strategic cups of tea. It made Ray jumpy, this secret language, the way it flourished in clammy undergrowth. Made him angry, in the small blue reaches of the night. The nub of things always sideways and elsewhere, in the space between strangers and the shadows they cast.

  Sitting there, lapped by waves of rage and sickness, anchored only by the same things that were uncoupling him—Lily’s eyelids, a vein in her forehead, too thin and close to air—he tried to steady himself on the calm horizon of the older sister. She wasn’t praying. Armed with thermos, pen and newspaper, she was doing the crossword. Sitting so prim and upright, she looked like she was about to rodeo.

  She reminded him of Ursula of course. Like her, Ursula would have been scornful of this humid confederacy, the way it fixed everyone in some general mid-distance of sorrow. Ursula would have refused to submit.

  The thought had made him push back his chair yet again, startling the women, who frowned, fingers to lips, enforcing this mute religion of which they had become the priests. Resume his eddy of pacing, wading greenish air, past the kitchen and the nurses’ station and the topless lady in the second bed, now being fed breakfast or was it dinner, some brown pap from a plastic bowl. The courtyard sucked him in once more until it breathed him out again. And when he returned, a feeling, faint but unmistakeable, that everything that had ceased in his absence was gently sighing, rearranging itself. Waiting only for the sound of his boots to seamlessly resume.

  At some point, in the middle of this night, or maybe earlier, who could tell, in that soupy air recycled by the click of needles and beads, some darker thing had risen up. Beneath the bright scent of the cream they kept smoothing on Lily’s face, as if even now rejuvenation might be possible, the stink of something shameful. No amount of air freshener or roses could disguise it, the lush, soiled scent of her dying. As if through the alchemy of her illness and his knowledge of her body, he could smell the rot at the heart of each infected cell.

  For the last hour in there, he’d fixed himself on a smiley face some nurse had drawn on the whiteboard above the bed. Below it, Lily’s face, collapsing toward zero. The imprint of her head on the pillow as they lifted her to rearrange her, yet again. How heavy even that little bird skull seemed on her neck. And all the while, the women’s penance billowed on and on. Every prayer, each smoothing of the sheet, pushing him further and further, until he found himself standing by the door once again.

  ‘Jesus. Just go if you’re going. And take him with you. This is all his fault.’

  Christ, he was cold. Long slow grief had washed through here, eating holes in the bedspread, wearing the lino to a gleam. He clicked his fingers at the kelpie, to coax it up for warmth. Rotary could go fuck itself, place was a stalag. But the kelpie stayed on high alert by the door. As if it knew this place was just a way station to somewhere worse.

  Too cold to sleep, he got up again. A shower might warm him up. No cubicle, the tiled room awash with water and yellow fluorescence and then he remembered. No towel.

  Drying himself with his clothes, he put them back on, then got into bed. A deep chill from the rubber-covered mattress, his teeth clicking, and he lay wishing for hard ground, a pure clean desert cold. Getting up again, he emptied his rucksack, put on all his T-shirts, two flannies, a jumper. At the bottom of the bag, Lily’s pink poncho. She’d been wearing it the day she’d come in. He stood fingering it in the dark. Too small for him of course. Too small for Mick. The neck gaping from where he’d stretched it over Mick’s head and the plaster cast on his arm, that night when he took him out for some food. Was that only yesterday, driving out from the hospital looking for pies or pizza, slaloming around endless roundabouts? Ray speedy from no food and too many cups of coffee, Mick silent, staring out at the road ahead.

  In the stadium light of the servo, the only place open at three am, Ray had joked feebly about the way the pink of the poncho clashed with the red stubble of Mick’s hair. Mick didn’t laugh. Didn’t move. They’d stood in silence, watching two plastic hamburgers go round and round in the microwave. By then, the only thing holding Mick up was his music and the bit of food Ray managed to shovel into him twice a day.

  The boy started up suddenly in bed, arms flapping, then sighed deep, settled back down. In the faint light growing from the window, a little tic in his cheek, feeble and fluttering, like a rooster after the chop.

  For Ray, sleep just wouldn’t come. When he pulled the curtains shut against the greying light, the dark was impenetrable again. He felt thin as the fog of his breath, taking up no space in this hyphen of a room. Reaching down for the poncho, the dog, alive even in sleep to the memory of a brutal puppyhood at the hands of a man like Sam, snapped out, caught his finger. Should get up and wash the bite but he was too cold.

  Lily’s poncho was so small, it barely covered his shoulders, but
it was a comfort. It smelled of her. Sweat, sickness, apricot oil. The bottom was all stretched and loopy, from Mick’s shoulders, and there was a big hole in the back, from where they’d had to cut it off. He turned it over and over in the dark, telling each broken connection and nubbly carelessness, each slapdash square. On the front, a stiff patch. Blood, or chicken grease, from that last picnic they’d had, down by the creek, the day she’d told him about the baby and she’d got the all-clear. On the fringe, a crawling stain of creek water, brown topography of what he’d dared to call home. The pink of this poncho, thrown on a bush. On the bank, her jeans and yellow teapot shirt. The brown of her skin, a silky terrain.

  He got up to have another shower, feeling hot and ashamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There was only one photograph of himself with his father. Even then, his father wasn’t in it, Urs having cut out Dad, the dead pig, the tree it hung from, the rifle, leaving Ray stranded by himself in the little silver frame. A ghostly hand on his shoulder. His own face a shocked white blur. The one bright thing the blue of his shirt. Dad’s shirt, Ray’s own having been soaked with blood when they gutted the boar.

  The day he left home, he’d stood for a long time in Urs’s bedroom, looking at that photo on her dressing table. Trying to decide whether to take it with him, whether to write a note on the back and leave it on her bed. Trying to imprint on his fourteen-year-old mind the image of his thirteen-year-old self. The light in the photo different, against the other times he’d seen it, against his memory of the day itself. The gold haze of a winter afternoon gone droughty and unearthly from the relentless sun pouring through his sister’s bedroom window, and it had seemed to him as if his image had been worn out too soon by the bright regard of her relentless yearning, even before all the looking and longing she would do in the days to come.