Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  ‘No, can’t help, sorry,’ had been the response.

  This was a surprise. Stations normally supplied meat. He had learned that. The only question was keeping them up to the mark.

  ‘What about a packet of chops and a leg from the homestead?’ he suggested. ‘Just put them in the fridge in the quarters. Something to keep us going till we get sorted out.’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ said the station owner, ‘I stopped killing about a year ago when my arthritis crippled me. I’ve lost all the strength in my hands.’

  ‘Sorry to hear about that. There’s not much I can do about it,’ and he rang Harold in the inland town for guidance.

  Harold cleared his throat, following it with an expressive silence. He didn’t know anything about any arthritis. ‘That fellow is a good client,’ he added eventually, suggesting that he bring mince and sausages in his Esky, to be reimbursed from the mess account, and leave Harold to do something about the first lot of mutton, after which he would kill station sheep himself. ‘I have a mate in town who is a butcher. I’ll get a carcase from him and bring it out to the station for you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to tell the owner to pull his finger out? Doesn’t he have a stationhand who could do the job? Isn’t he obliged to co-operate?’

  ‘Let’s not get too worked up about this,’ said Harold.

  The supply lane past Gograndli homestead took a right-angle turn to the other side of the river, and crossed a log bridge snagged with debris. The truck nosed through a broken-hipped gate, pulling up beside a mudbrick outhouse, a ruin. He surveyed his new workplace with a heavy heart. The laundry wall was rubble. The wash-tubs were open to the sky under a sagging cantilever of rusted corrugated iron. Pink-primed doors of the shearers’ huts faced each other across a narrow laneway. It was the ideal location for a chain gang movie. Between the huts was a view straight out onto the plain, into the heat and mirage of the west. It was as if there was no river, no shade, no comfort anywhere, and the pretensions of Gograndli homestead on the opposite bank were only a taunt, reminding those who lived passing lives that makeshift was all they had.

  There was an old chook-run at the back of the huts with drifts of poultry feathers piled against the wire. Sadie needed no invitation to get started. He tried to hook his finger through her thin, silver-star-studded collar to restrain her, but too late. The smell of poultry and the possibility of a rats’ nest blitzkrieg was enough. Out the window Sadie went, sailing to the ground like a dollop of porridge, then rocketing from sight.

  The shearers made their way to Gograndli in ones and twos of dilapidated vehicles that once had been the pride of town lairs. Sadie ran out to meet them.

  ‘Whosiz dis little fucker?’

  ‘Cookie’s.’

  ‘Whatser name?’

  ‘Sadie.’

  ‘C’m ere, Sadie.’

  A man named Cal scooped the dog up in the fingers of one hand, held her to his face, growling and laughing, the flat face of a Maori carving meeting the sharp lizardy features of an Australian reptile-killer, leaving Sadie’s short buckled legs dangling, making her yap, holding her to the sky and examining her like a butcher assessing a porker — Sadie with teats like a sow; with black, white, and ginger spots; with a greedy, dribbling, dirty slit of mouth — and then rolling her onto the ground with a deep chuckle.

  ‘Fuck off then, ya squirt.’

  Sadie retreated under the huts, barking with razorlike persistence.

  ‘Dem teeth could snap a bone,’ nodded Cal admiringly. ‘I love dem terriers.’ He got down on his hands and knees and stared under the huts in a transfixed, unfocused fashion, not actually looking at the dog, more as if he had forgotten the dog, as if the dog had created in his mind a more interesting idea to follow — a fascinating shadow, enticing Cal’s brain away under the huts.

  When Sadie’s yaps faded Cal shook his head and came back to the present.

  ‘Some goer, Cookie, ay,’ and shambled off to his room.

  Harold wore an All Blacks rugby jumper despite the heat, a pair of charcoal football shorts, and wide rubber thongs. His black curly hair fell over his forehead, and he had an expression of wary friendliness. He was in his mid-thirties, with a controlled, man-of-consequence aura that made him seem older.

  ‘So you have a dog,’ Harold stroked his chin, then hooked one foot back on the bullbars, dangling a thong, and looked at his new cook from a slight sideways angle, just as Bertram Junior had done. Except Harold didn’t seem ready to follow a situation any old way, to see where the fizz led, like his brother. He wasn’t someone to wait and see what developed. He had the look of a fireman who smothered smoke all the time.

  They walked down the laneway between the huts while he whistled up Sadie.

  ‘Here she is,’ he said, introducing her to Harold. ‘Is she a problem?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Not necessarily. I am a dog lover myself from way back. Lots of cooks have dogs because of the loneliness of the kitchen. Hello, Sadie,’ he boomed, legs planted apart like a colossus. ‘You’re a real little salami, heh, heh.’ His eyes switched round in the direction of the man again. ‘It’s just that we have to be careful of the grower here. I am here to tell you, the gent we are dealing with has a problem.’

  ‘Over killers?’

  ‘That’s just one matter,’ Harold nodded his head judiciously. ‘There is another point to consider. Winston Didale was very dissatisfied with the behaviour of some of the people at crutching time. You see, some of the fellows got cut one night in town, and they come back here and played up something terrible. An incident occurred concerning a dog. A couple of very low characters strung a dog up in a bush and beat it with a stick. I will not have them in the team any more. It’s the bane of my life, Cookie, that I can’t be in two places at once. There was a fellow on the team who didn’t like animals being treated this way. He come back from town later, and walked in from the gate so no one could hear. Then he came in and he caught the dog-beaters while they were asleep. As a matter of fact it was his dog they crucified. He used a piece of construction timber. Can you imagine it. He put two men in hospital. Those two men are still looking for the man concerned to get their own back. The grower could hear the ruckus from the big house and it created a negative impression.’

  Sadie hunted in the rubbish tip in a slit of earth behind the kitchen. It was choked from years of dumping, filled with metallic solid waste: a buckled square iron water tank, rolls of rusted barbed wire, sheets of tin, smashed beer bottles. It was a hiding place for lizards and snakes. Sadie disappeared in there for hours, wriggling through dangerous crevices that could slice her in half or pierce her to the heart with rusty spikes. He forgot about her, deliberately didn’t think of her, it was her life and this was his — sinking down into the routine of the work, getting the stores organised, greeting the new arrivals as they drove in at all hours. Then she would be there at the back steps, nose against the gauze of the kitchen door, her plump hindquarters wagging in compensation for the tail that had been docked (and now was just a curl of bristly hairs). Any news for me? Any developments?

  Close to midnight Lenny and Flash arrived, headlights sweeping the compound, car stereo blaring, doors slamming, footsteps on dusty boards, the pair of them coming in to greet him, saying they were glad to have this shed because of his cooking, pumping his hand and accepting a toasted sandwich at this hour, and glancing over their shoulders as two other figures came in after them, dark-haired and luminous-eyed. Rosie and Louella. ‘Ay, Cookie, great to see ya. What’s there to eat? Got en apple?’

  All the way to Gograndli the man had hoped for familiar faces. Now he had them. In the chill night air Louella had commandeered Harold’s pure wool sweater, and leaned against the door jamb like a model. She looked beautiful and lost. She would never know quite what was going on around her, in herself, between others. The men and Rosie stood around telling him where they had been, what they had done since he left them at the Golden Horsesh
oe Motel. This was what he had come back to find, a sense of belonging that was like getting up pace and swinging aboard a ramshackle carousel. Through the weeks of waiting for work he’d imagined confidences, developing understandings, a sense of lives — his and theirs — interconnecting, becoming like one.

  The catching-up didn’t take long. A silence fell in the kitchen and he concentrated on getting the toasted sandwiches right. He made them in his big steel frying pan over the wood stove. Lenny grabbed the sharpening steel and whisked an edge onto his chef’s knives to fill in the time. ‘Blunt as arseholes, as usual, Cookie,’ he derided. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, I really don’t.’

  The sandwiches were ready, dripping with butter, oozing with cheese, tomato, and sliced ham.

  ‘Here we go.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘You’re a beaudy.’

  ‘Thes’s what we’ve got you for, Cookie,’ said Louella.

  With the kitchen empty he took the pressure lamp down from its hook over the sink and walked out to the cook’s room, a separate detached building in the dark, where Sadie slept in a cardboard box on a nest made of dusty jute sacking, occasionally snorting and snapping, chasing poultry in her dreams.

  He set his alarm for quarter to five, stretched out on his saggy bed, and listened to the silence.

  OUTSIDE TIME

  Two-thirty in the morning and he found himself wide awake. It was the second week of shearing at Gograndli Station. He went outside. Everything was changed from the stark, negative impressions of daytime. Bright moonlight shone between buildings. The deadly nightshade in the walkway outside the kitchen door had a silvery stiffness. Cobwebs shone in shadows. Windows were blank. The galvanised roofing of the shearers’ quarters seemed frosted. Fretworked tree shadows in the yards and the holding paddocks were transparent as air. There did not seem to be any trees nearby when the sun was at its height. Now they declared themselves, a spectral forest. Back across the river no light shone from Gograndli homestead. The tension of the waking world was relaxed. Wagtails and magpies stirred, ducks whooshed overhead, emus stalked the saltbush plain with emerald eyes. Dark shapes of night stood separate from each other in a gathering ground-mist. The red gums on the riverbank were stately, the coolabahs on the floodplain shifted informally closer. Now they joined ranks with everything. A spirit breathed.

  He walked around the huts and stood over the old dump with its shattered glass, ruptured water tank, and rusted motor parts, his bootlaces dragging in the dirt, his beltless trousers held up by one hand. Generations of broken beer bottles shone in piles as he pissed on them.

  Over his shoulder were the huts. Inside the huts were a dozen sleepers. He had the feeling that nothing on earth could wake them at this hour. They were felled in rows, two by two, arranged on metal beds, their heads against the back wall and their feet pointing towards the doors. They were all the same now, felled into the stillness between the noisy movements of their lives. The depth of night had dropped them like a scythe, their wakefulness mown by a blade of silvery photons whetted on moonrock.

  At four he woke again. There was a different quality to the light. The moon was low, angled through the louvres on the ruined wash-house wall. Its light no longer called to mind comparisons with day, reversals of familiarity, pale images and recompenses of waking reality. Now a magnetic lowness was in the air. A mood of violent attraction and unaccustomed dread had the man sitting up, throwing back his sleeping bag, sitting on the steps of his room and lacing his boots. Shadows were elongated, prowlike, fixed, clawed, slammed, hooked on the ground. It was the dream hour, a time bewildering to consciousness. He lit the fire in the stove and stared at the flames. Outside a visual gravity tugged the mind lower than ever it went. Suicide hour. Death hour. Hour of departure. From here to the edge of the world wasn’t far. It lay past a steep, eroded cliffline north of the river’s meander, where the wagtails and magpies went silent, and only sheep bleated, lost souls endlessly stressed, asking what next. Out from that edge stars would declare themselves after moonset. Another hour and the sky would lighten, galah- and corella-pink would flush the east, morning sun like a trumpet blast would stream down the plain, etching the shoddy coolabahs and the mournfully decaying red gums in pitiless light.

  But not yet. There was still this cold, brooding stillness of the low-angled moonlight. He passed along the row between the huts with an armload of wood. Inky shadows stood at the shearers’ doors. Their dogs chained to the stumps watched him, and went back to sleep. Sadie was asleep on her sack. He made a mug of tea and sat on the mess-room steps and waited. This was his time.

  ART OF COOKING

  Up at five and dressed by torchlight. Stumbled from the cook’s room into the night air to check the stars, then into the kitchen quietly, hearing the scuttle of mice. Groped around for matches. Banged into the table in the dark. Jumped back from the whoosh of the gas lamp as the kitchen filled with light.

  Took a quick look round: everything cleaned and ready from the night before — sink, tea-towels, implements. Washed hands, and thought if only the kitchen could be quiet like this all day. But didn’t stand there dreaming. Filled the kettle, started waking properly — time already ticking away. Carried the gas lamp through to the mess, balancing it on a corner of the dining table, watching light fall on the shining surface. Angled the lamp and knelt at the fridges, groping past Tooheys cans waiting to roll to the floor, removing a bag of chops, a packet of bacon, a dozen eggs, a couple of tomatoes, a string of sausages, a plate of liver and heart from the previous night’s kill, a leftover tin of corn. Carried the armload back to the kitchen and spread it out.

  Looked like too much breakfast, but thought ahead — about the day’s two smokos, side dishes for dinner, and of plates of spreads and cold leftovers to be stacked in the fridges to divert the team from attacking more important foodstuffs outside meal hours. Thought about rule of economy: control the stores but don’t be miserly; do the balancing act; be a magician; stretch time and money. Thought about the next day, Thursday — orders day. Checked the cereal packets: Corn Flakes, Vita Brits, Rice Bubbles. Hardly touched.

  Didn’t think of anything else.

  The hotplate was smoking ready, so tipped the sausages on, pricked them and rolled them, and laid out strips of bacon. Checked the clock. Twenty-five past five — just under an hour to the breakfast bell. Still pitch dark outside.

  Everything hissing away quietly.

  Carried a jug of hot water out the back, over to the cook’s room for a shave by torchlight. Indulged in the luxury of a warm wash and emerged after five minutes with hair combed, face glowing, dog at his heels. First touch of morning along the horizon — faint light breaking over the saltbush plains. Shriek of corellas overhead, stir of wagtails in the ruin of the old chimney. Crows flapping about in the river red gums. Saw the deadness of the river in the gloom. Had barely had time to glance at it since the shed started.

  Back in the kitchen, and what was this on the table? The chops. Forgot all about them. Too late now to include them, so made rapid mental revision of dinner-time menu and attended to the hotplate. Cut bacon into smaller pieces. Halved the sausages. Heaped up the liver and heart. Turned the tomato, flipped the fritters, set up the warming dish and transferred things over. Spooned Billy Tea into huge teapot. Gas up under kettle. Lit griller for toast and made time-check. Quarter past six. Oil into frying pan, eggs on the side ready, started making toast. Concentrated on the toast. Didn’t burn the toast. Wrapped it in greaseproof when ready, and kept it warm.

  Grabbed the cowbell and headed for the door of the mess. Opposite in the dim laneway were the doorways of the shearers’ rooms. Hour of peace. Someone talking in his sleep. Dogs snuffling under the floorboards. Sadie scraping in the tip. Pity to shatter the quiet — but did so — and then sped around the back to the boiler room and tugged the generator to life. Sprinted back to the kitchen, flicked off the gas light, made a quick clean-up and wipe-down of
the table, washed hands, switched on the radio (‘Teardrops’) and minutes later the first arrival appeared, yawning and clutching his plate.

  ‘Morning, mate. What have we got?’

  ‘Almost everything,’ was the over-the-shoulder reply, as eggs spat in the pan. ‘How many?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  Here they all came now: Arnie, Harold, Cal, Lenny. Watched Lenny’s eyes as he searched for chops and couldn’t find them. He was about to say something when he lifted the lid from the liver and heart.

  ‘Offal. How about that.’ Lenny had a craving for iron. (Hard living took it out of him.)

  He used to throw heart to the dogs until Lenny stopped him.

  Fried eggs for all, and in minutes the original dozen was gone. The men tramped through to the dining table and without words made high protein input for a day on Gograndli wethers.

  ‘Tea?’ someone called.

  On its way.

  He carried the teapot through to the mess-room and poured a cup for himself. Back in the kitchen leant on the bench, sipped tea and surveyed what was left: breakfast items transforming themselves in the mind’s eye into smoko items. But he didn’t meddle with anything yet. Who was still to come? A bunch of passing acquaintances. Mack, a presser, who never ate eggs but liked everything else. Skye, a rouseabout: usually just coffee and toast. Jeff, a classer, definitely a late sleeper, his egg a cert for sandwich fillings. Last would come Louella, the second rousie, yawning and rubbing her dark Maori eyes way past breakfast cut-off time (seven sharp), beguiling the cook with her smile. It was still the same with her. Each time he saw Louella he thought he would never see her again. Harold always said, ‘That’s it’. But next day she’d be back on the board again.