‘What for — my cooking?’
Everyone had praised his cooking and he had the feeling he’d excelled.
‘For sure.’
‘So where do I fall down?’ he asked tightly.
‘You don’t get it, do you,’ said Davo, shaking his head and smiling as if at the stubbornness of a well-loved child. ‘One day you’ll cut the tomatoes the wrong way. Or you’ll put onion in the mashed potato. Or you won’t. It doesn’t matter what. Blame the stars.’
‘Bloody old Alastair got me all the way out here, and now he’ll send me all the way back without putting me on somewhere else? It’s crazy economics. It’s about twenty-five hundred k’s return trip. That’s some way to run a business.’
‘He’s not paying,’ shrugged Davo. ‘You’re the one wanting work. You’re just a little strip of paper on an organiser board. Face it. Maybe now he’ll just move you up a notch or two, when he hears you’re okay.’
‘If he hears.’
‘He will. But whether it makes any difference or not, who knows.’
‘I’ve still got my own transport,’ he said conclusively.
‘Spot-on,’ said Davo. ‘You know something.’
Rain was coming in sheep country. Each night for the past few days the horizon had been lit by sunken lightning flashes — with gusts of gritty, cooling air spilling through the space between the huts and the wash-house, marking a change from the terrible heat that had gripped the place when Louella was sacked, and Old Jake and the two Kiwi imports, Christian T and Pam, had left for Boulia. These two hadn’t been natural allies but they were thrown together, and did things in tandem, even their thinking.
Christian T and Pam had not been able to imagine anywhere in the world hotter than Leopardwood Downs: the name Boulia apparently suggested to them a bubble of coolness, when in fact Boulia was way up north, almost as far north as sheep went in this country, one of the hottest towns in a hot State, Queensland. Maybe a contractor had lied to them, and Old Jake, who had shorn around Boulia for many seasons, kept quiet about it because he wanted company on the long drive — although more likely it was his stone deafness that only made him smile when they strutted their ignorance.
‘Is Boulia far from the beach?’ Christian T had wondered. ‘Can you get to Brisbane from Boulia for the weekend?’ they wanted to know. The answer was yes, ‘If you drive two days and two nights without stopping’.
Their replacements came. They were two shearers, Lenny and Flash, and a woman rouseabout, Rosie, a friend of Louella’s. Clean Team Alastair paid for their petrol and lent them his car so that Maurie Holgate would hire his team again next year. ‘When the chips are down,’ said Bertram Junior, ‘it comes to PR.’ They bounced into the camp at the end of breakfast one morning, just as the rest of the team disappeared over to the shed — wheeling up in Alastair’s Fairlane, having driven all night ahead of storms dumping two hundred, two fifty millimetres of rain behind them on floodplains and stormwater drains, on lignum flats and stony ranges, on riverside gullies and desolate overgrazed paddocks and miserable homesteads across an area the size of the United Kingdom. It rained at places where there had been no rain in a year, but nothing fell at Leopardwood Downs. Storms that had cut across from the centre of the continent and shafted down into the southeastern country had left Leopardwood Downs with its shearing prospects intact.
‘You’ve no idea what’s coming,’ said Lenny. ‘We want to shear these buggers and clear out. Otherwise we’re stuck here. How many are left?’
He told them: about four thousand.
Lenny clapped a hand to his forehead: ‘What?’
Flash said, ‘Bullshit.’
Rosie said, ‘What’s that, a full week?’
‘As good as,’ said Lenny as he rinsed his plate in the sink. ‘Fucking Alastair lied to us again: “Zip up, zip back, clear the backlog in a couple of days”. I am going to tear that man’s throat out.’ He turned from the sink with a smile. ‘At least we’ve got ourselves a chef in the kitchen, eh?’
Lenny was a balding Kiwi shearer approaching forty with a permanent tigerish smile and a yellowing fag on his lower lip, a sweat-towel around his neck and a stubby in his hand the moment work was finished. ‘Bertram Junior giving you plenty of tongue, is he, Cookie? It’s his way of trying to make you do better, when fuck me, you’re fucking fine.’
Lenny wore a shearing singlet that said:
My philosophy is quite simple
If I can’t eat it
Or screw it
I’ll piss on it
Flash was a twenty-six year old South Australian shearer who was happy all the time, foul-mouthed, spirited. He had fallen out with Davo and Barb at an earlier shed over something that none of them would mention, but which made them guarded in each other’s company. There had already been one clash in this shed, Barb versus Louella: no one wanted another, especially if rains were coming and there was a chance of being stuck.
‘Hey, mate,’ Flash called to Maurie Holgate as he went past the wash-house one day, ‘Do something about the shaving mirror in there, will you, it’s a bloody disgrace’.
It was the shed life as it was lived. The cook was in it: Lenny, Flash and Rosie found him in it. ‘I’m only a shearer, just a fucking shearer,’ sang Lenny as he finished his breakfast that first day and went up to the shed an hour late, and rang the board.
Rosie was shy. When he asked her what her feelings were about Louella being dumped she said, ‘Thet gel’s hopeless when I’m not around to watch her, thet’s the truth, Cookie’.
Lenny always thanked him for his meals, regularly saying at mealtimes, ‘This little lot exceeds your usual high standard, Cookie’. He was developing a philosophy of appreciation: ‘What’s this shit, Cookie,’ was worth something as irony, while anyone who came back for a second helping, even if they didn’t say a word, could be considered grateful.
‘Unbeatable shit,’ Flash would pronounce, surveying the serving table. ‘Unbeatable eatable shit.’
The hostility between Flash and Davo was so guarded it could seem like politeness. Eyeing a meaty shank, which they both favoured, each would wait for the other to take it first, or would pass it up altogether.
‘Arrgh, leave it for the dogs.’
They could agree on that.
Cut-out night. Last night at Leopardwood Downs.
He located the largest cooking pots he could find, boiled two huge legs of Leopardwood Downs mutton, served them with cabbage and boiled potatoes, and made candied carrots and mashed pumpkin. The weather was cooler, appetites were up from work, the team dug in with their forks and spoons, and there was plenty to eat. The potatoes glistened with melted margarine. There was a dish of mustard. Mint sauce. The carrots lay on their serving dish as if lacquered. For dessert there were two shortcrust pastry pies striped with jelly and custard, one red, one green, and a row of leftover UHT cream cartons (a previously rationed luxury) all chilled down to near-coolness with their tops angle-cut ready for piping out. The technique was to twist the cardboard as if throttling a quail.
It was party-time — although nothing like the wild end-of-shed frenzies he had heard about, that were like apocalyptic roads to destruction from all accounts. He would preside over one of those before he finished this work, he told himself — if he ever got another job. He would clear the tables out of the mess-room and dance with Louella and Rosie till his joints ached, dance with Barb and roar good-natured abuse at Davo, and tell Bertram Junior where to put it, and Bertram Junior would glare his ‘I’ll get you, Cookie’ glare, and there would be no more divisions between people.
‘Still on that Coopers, Cookie?’ taunted Bertram Junior. ‘What’s the secret of that stuff?’
Willie-boy reached across the table and tapped his arm and said he wouldn’t mind a Coopers, if there was any to spare. He said sure, have one. He hadn’t seen Willie-boy drink alcohol in three weeks. Willie-boy knocked it back, and then got a restless look in his eye, and started bargaini
ng with the others for a share of their supplies.
Some time later Willie-boy stood beside him with his arms folded, swinging a stubby between his fingertips, rocking back on his heels, benignly shickered. ‘These are the nights, Cookie,’ he said. ‘It’s a real get-together we’re having. Pity that Lou ain’t here to enjoy it, eh.’
‘Where is she now, do you think?’
‘Fucked if I know, the stupid gel.’
There was a serene intimation in the huts on cut-out night: all things would come good. It was a time to get quietly smashed and let the washing-up worry about itself. After dark Leopardwood Downs shed had a special feeling. The owner and his sister, after a cut-out beer, had driven their seven kilometres back to the homestead, where there was mains power, air conditioning, satellite TV, telephone, books, magazines, reading lamps, paintings.
The shearing team was out on its own.
Going outside for a piss, dragging his boots through the sand, he had the feeling that Leopardwood Downs shed had slipped its moorings and was drifting away on the ocean of land. Its motion registered on the long top of the nearby sandhills, where stars raked, blurred, flickered and blinked out. Silence lapped the place around, with an under-rhythm of crickets, nightbirds, and faint rock music coming from Bertram Junior’s car, on the other side of the huts. There was a reimposition of distance into ways of thinking here. Time divisions hardly mattered. When communication devices were switched off the global village blacked out. It was always like this. There was release waiting, if you were ready for it.
From over the other side of the sandhills he felt himself and the nine-year-old self that had camped out with his father moving towards each other. The boy had a dog panting after him, a patch-eyed fox terrier crazy for lizards and rabbits, who always came when called, even when yapping deep underground. At the memory of the dog he felt a surge of feeling. He must be drunk to be smiling like this. Dirty was the dog’s name — he was always backing out of burrows, shaking off sheets of sand, or getting his nose down between split rocks where snakes hid. They had taken him on holidays to the North Coast, smuggled him back through a tick gate, and he had died in Bourke of a tick bite. The boy had sat crying on the rough, lumpy lounge, his fingers stuffed in his mouth because he hated the idea of being found crying so hopelessly for a dog. His mother put her arm around him, and said, ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk’. It left an image of Dirty drinking from a saucer, wagging his stumpy tail, looking up and meeting the boy’s eye, ready for adventure. Then dragging his hind legs, crashing into the saucer, unable to walk, lying down paralysed and looking at the boy with an expression of desolation.
All that was abandoned, forgotten, or undervalued — wheeled back in the pattern of the night sky. He imagined his father, letting go of anxiety, lighting a cigarette, sitting on the running board of the Chev, just enjoying the boy’s presence while thinking of something else. It was what the boy had done with his dog until the day he died; what he did with his own children; what he tried to find in his marriage; what he tried to find in his life. What was wrong with that? It was everything. Maybe just this letting-be was what his father meant in his prayers. He had wanted it for himself then. He wanted it now. Only it was always so hard to find.
The team was so small here in the wide silent immensity of night. What they had in common might not have been much but they had it in plenty. On they went, singing, warring, working. They had got rid of Louella, but behind their bluntness about her was something else — not consideration but a compensating faith. Willie-boy and Bertram Junior had slingshotted her ahead to the next intersection of roads, the next town, the next shed — as if they knew a secret about her but they weren’t going to talk about it because it was a secret they weren’t even telling themselves. She belonged with them. That was it. And they loved her.
Under the stars, he felt he had arrived where he was going almost before he had started, almost without realising it, meeting his father as just a man, realising that that was all it was between them, the unresolved knowing of other selves that can only be met in self-knowledge. And yet tomorrow he would make the mistake of packing up and pissing off once more, still searching for something, forgetting what had been in the grasp of his understanding this night.
The hissing, sputtering gas lights hardly showed where the huts were as he moved farther out, breathing in the soft air. At a hundred or so metres, the distance to the truck and bedroll, the huts were blotted out of existence. Long ago the boy’s father had offered up his prayer for continuation in the wreckage of the church in Brewarrina. On this night maybe it was answered. What did it matter in what way? His father would have to recognise him half-pissed, living rough, a failure as a family man.
A faint ripple of lightning showed where the huts were now. Stubbies could be heard crushing into the bottle bins at the bottom of the steps. The sound had a special satisfaction — like the grinding of stars.
It was late when he returned from his night stumble. Davo plucked a ukulele and sang songs he’d written. They were about people he’d known and attitudes he had, relating to maltreatment of animals, world population, cars, and shearing sheds. (Remind him to tell you the story some time about the shearers who crucified his dog.) Davo had worked with homeless adolescents and would do so again. One of his songs was about that. Another was in the voice of an unborn child. Around the table, people revealed their pasts. Flash split open a plastic pouch and rolled joints. Things went quieter then. Lenny was once a deer hunter, flying into South Island hills by helicopter and tramping back with a carcase slung over his shoulders — forty-five kilos, no worries. Flash’s son, Flash said, was four, almost five, the same age as Cookie’s youngest. ‘We should get them together in the sheds some time,’ said Flash. ‘I get him in the school holidays and take him with me. Kids love playing round these places, rolling in the wool, making car tracks in the dirt.’
Flash said, ‘I always make it back for his birthday. Wherever I am, I just drop everything and head home. Too bloody right I do.’
Rosie for all her wild living sat there crocheting a pillowcase for her baby: she was pregnant, knocking back Jim Beam, inhaling dope. Her stitching was intricate: ‘Show standard,’ nodded Bertram Junior quietly to him, proud of accomplishments emerging in people who might otherwise come across as raucous, ghetto-blasting, tattooed, dope-smoking devils with sinewy tails between their legs. Bertram Junior recited sporting statistics, challenging anyone to catch him out. His brain was encyclopaedic. When the cook showed his sporting ignorance Bertram Junior was scathing: ‘And I thought you had brains’. Willie-boy had once been a car salesman. ‘Take this one, you look as though you need it.’ That would have been his style. Though it wasn’t any sort of a life, either, he said, preferring the sheds despite their hardships. He looked round the room with dark, moist eyes. ‘Our little family is breaking up. It’s always like this. You get all the shit. The shit gets sorted out. Everything goes along nicely at last and then, bingo, that’s it. No more sheep. Kind of a pity, I think.’
Bertram Junior asked for a taste of Coopers: took a sip, and pursed his lips sourly. ‘How can you drink that stuff?’ Then he praised the meal, adding, though, ‘This ain’t nothing like a boil-up, I am here to tell you’.
Lenny stood at the door looking out at the horizon flickering like an erratic fluorescent light. ‘You have my cheque ready tomorrow as soon as we finish, Bertram Junior,’ he threatened, ‘or I’ll have your guts for garters, because there’s no way I want to be stuck in this shithouse country without work.’
He asked Lenny where his home was.
‘You’re in it, Cookie,’ he spat.
Then it was the last morning at Leopardwood Downs, last day. Shearing finished just before lunch and once they were paid off the team scattered. Lenny called, ‘See you down the road a bit. Your fuckin’ shout — that’s the rule, Cookie: your first shed, so you buy a carton.’ Lenny wagged a threatening finger.
‘Catch you a
t the shearers’ motel,’ winked Flash, leaping into the moving car with Rosie stretched out on the back seat, already fast asleep.
Willie-boy walked around chewing hunks of fluffy pizza bread left over from a quick, early lunch. ‘We won’t get tucker like this in our next shed.’
‘You will if I’m cook,’ he replied.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Willie-boy noncommittally, glancing over at Bertram Junior as if what Bertram Junior knew, he knew — whatever it was, maybe nothing.
Bertram Junior was exacting a cheery revenge on Barbara for the authority she had exercised over a rouseabout in his shed. She had won, no doubt about it, on the matter of Louella. Bertram Junior wouldn’t forget the day. They stood talking against the bonnet of Davo’s truck. The caravan had been hooked up, ready to roll, since the night before: Davo and Barb were splitting off, going home for a quick holiday after a year in New South Wales sheds. ‘Let’s work together again,’ was the vow. Bertram Junior was telling a story to Barb, spinning it out. It was to do with problems he had with his car, how it was a good machine, but it sat low to the ground, and he’d hit a rock coming over from the previous shed, and although Maurie Holgate had been a good bloke and brazed it for him in his welding shed, he was going to have to just poke along on the run through to Bourke, with the cook tailing him in his one-tonner in case of trouble.
‘How are you going there, Cookie?’
‘Almost done,’ he called from the kitchen, where he was sweeping the mess and kitchen area, wondering how it was with each pass of the broom that more burrs jerked up from nowhere.
‘Take your time,’ Bertram Junior assured him. ‘Gee,’ he turned back to Barbara. ‘This rig must cost you and Davo a packet in petrol to run.’
‘Mmm,’ said Barb, examining her nails.
Davo sat on the steps of the huts furiously smoking and tapping the face of his watch because he couldn’t believe the time they were losing. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘This guy is master of a very old game.’ Bertram Junior’s Valiant floated over the track, becoming airborne approaching a ditch and then yawing to the side only when there seemed no possibility of avoiding disaster. Or it mounted the road shoulder and drove along crunching old beer bottles for a while, hitting whipsticks of mulga, and then swooping to the opposite side of the track like a roller coaster trolley. The yellow truck followed.
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