A Long Way From Home

by Peter Carey

  But finally, what the hell.

  I let Titch hire an ‘office manager’ who had been a teller at the National Bank. One week later he decided the new man was useless but he still felt free to leave him in the office and go speedboat racing on Port Phillip Bay. Allegedly this was ‘business related’ being filled with Redex contenders like Jack Murray and Jack Davey.

  Why should I complain?

  Bobs Tyres had thirty-second spots on 3UZ, the same station as Deasy’s Radio Quiz Show. ‘Titch Bobs has something up his sleeve’ and there is nothing like a catchy slogan to make you popular at a barbecue it seems. He practised magic tricks at night and it wasn’t as if he actually looked like his father, but these performances made him excited and he got a sort of glint in his eyes and showed a clean straight line of teeth.

  I was on the showroom floor one Saturday morning, in no rush to take the order I would clearly get, when Edith telephoned with what she called ‘a mergency’.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘Up to you,’ she said. ‘They’re carrying stuff out to a van.’

  The prospect was annoyed and, as I later learned, went straight up to Ballarat and bought a Ford with cash. But I was home in a minute, finding Ronnie in the driveway in his sister’s place. How brave he was, coming with me to confront the burglary. And what a wild and woolly lot the burglars were, a pair of Balts quite obviously. The man’s face cut with ugly scars, his body twisted to one side. His wife was small and fierce as a fighting fish.

  ‘This is private property,’ I said, and much else I can’t recall but naturally I was agitated, and the more I heard their cock ’n bull, the more upset I was and it was my lovely dear Ronnie who dragged me off the front verandah and back inside where Edith was too busy with her telephone to make tea for the Balts.

  ‘It’s Janice,’ she hissed, meaning Janice Cox, the new best friend.

  Back on the verandah the black child had unexpectedly appeared. What did I say to that?

  ‘I am Neil,’ he said, and held out his hand as he had done previously.

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Balts said they had come for his father’s books. I made conversation as if I were a normal woman. I poured them tea and was embarrassed to see my milk curdling. They pretended not to notice but they did. Ronnie asked Neil had he ever seen a two-tone Cadillac and Neil said no, and so they went away, and returned with the glossy American catalogue originally supplied by Dunstan.

  As Ronnie had a rough and rowdy side to him and as he had never seen a black boy in his life I was pleased to see how attentive he was to his guest.

  That was when I must have thought it. I mean, feeling kindness ease my pain, seeing them on the dusty hallway floor, backs against the wall, caressing those glossy Cadillacs: the notion that we could have Neil to stay for a weekend.

  I certainly did not rush into it as Titch later said. I certainly did not ask the Balts’ opinion but anyone could see those boys were born to be each other’s friend. I was not conniving or meddlesome. The opposite. I tested Ronnie’s feelings first, then Edith’s. At that stage she was perfectly amenable. The complaints began after the first weekend.

  She then said I was embarassing. ‘The way you grin and fawn on him. Can you quit it, Mum?’

  Who had heard of such a thing? A girl being jealous of a boy, but she resented any kindness I showed, big or small. She was outraged that I dared pat his little head, and that I drove all the way to Melbourne to pick him up and then drove him home afterwards. ‘Your pet monkey,’ she said, and I slapped her and she would not talk to me for days, and it was not until her father came home that she rejoined the human race, sitting in his lap and tickling him. She was lucky to have a father at all, I told her. This also was a cause of great offence, but I must say I did look forward to those weekends when Adelina lent us Neil Bachhuber, as I thought of him. It was a relief for her, of course, with her husband not really being her husband, and she working six days a week and selling bric-a-brac on Sundays.

  I never, honestly, thought about the boy’s skin colour. Of course it was a shock the first time I met him, but I was more disturbed by his stand-in father who was black and sissy, and smelling pretty, with hands so very soft and dry.

  In the autumn I was quite often in Melbourne with the two boys and then I could not help but feel the world’s opinion, in the back of a taxi, say, with the driver’s eyes on me, thinking his dirty thoughts, imagining what I had been up to. How many times was I asked where I came from, what age the boys were, and where they went to school?

  Ronnie was boisterous and bouncy and Neil was careful and exact but they were continually amused by each other. What a shame it was that Willie never had a chance to see them looking through his gold-stamped foreign language books. None of this was in my mind when I took that photograph. It was not a very good one anyway, like a million photographs taken with Box Brownies, two boys in swimming togs, a grey paling fence behind them, their arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting in the sun. Yes one was black and one was white but no-one remarked on it when I picked up the Kodak envelope from the chemist shop. Of course, it is well known, they look through everything when the pictures are delivered. In any case, what bad thing could they think? I had been ‘up to something’. But what? What possibly?

  I placed the photograph in an envelope and addressed it to Neil’s father. He had a right. I was claiming nothing from him. I was not related to the son. Please tell me what is so strange about offering solace to a lonely man?

  18

  I had waited for it, the wet season, through every blistering morning and the heated rocks of afternoon, and still I was not prepared, not for its density, immensity, the roar upon the roof, the obliteration of all distance, the air sucked from my lungs, as if it meant to kill me. This rain was the temperature of blood. It polished the tree trunks until they shone. A billabong appeared from nowhere, right by the camp. It brought the trombone cries of frogs, splashing, laughter. My cross-cultural scholars ducked and dived and brushed their teeth with broken twigs and arrived clean and shining at their desks. The Crossing Bridge was said to be in danger. The landscape out my bedroom window was a necklace of islands in swirling cack-coloured water. I thought of Tom Tailor and his ark.

  It was at this unlikely time that families began to leave the camp to go about their ceremonies and other Law business in their countries. Oliver Emu did not have to go anywhere. This was his country and he would soon face his initiation and I saw his silent apprehension and excitement as the days passed. Then, suddenly, his desk was empty, and I heard he had run away to the missionaries who took him in to protect him from these ‘barbaric practices’. Just like one of those girls, said his grandfather, they did the same to escape their old man husbands. All bugger-up, Doctor Battery said mournfully. The boy would get a hiding when he found him.

  It was dry in the classroom but sometimes, in my dreams, I heard the water working inside the limestone walls. It had been water, of course, that made my schoolroom cave, not by erosion but the action of carbonic acid, water combining with carbon dioxide. Off he goes. I thought, all this slow evacuating was not simply finished because Captain Cook had come. Caves were being created still. The Kimberley was riddled with them. In one of these, I thought, the Punka Wallah had his secret ark and all its treasure. It was from caves like mine that the great Clever Man (AKA Pigeon or Jandamarra, or the black Ned Kelly) had conducted his lethal raids upon the Kimberley police.

  Jandamarra had known ‘finger talk’ by which language he spoke silently to his followers while they stalked the white police. I also had learned ‘finger talk’ and ‘stick talk’ and I encouraged my kids to make stick talk paintings while water rose in the billabong and creeks rushed down what had once been dry and rocky gullies. The pupils, boys and girls, could all imitate the tracks of animals and reptiles and I had them dip their fingertips in ink and print with them, always removing the paper before they
mucked it up. When each child had a ‘best’ painting I transferred it to the limestone personally.

  ‘Like a public toilet,’ said Carter, when he saw these paintings on the classroom walls, the gorgeous blue and white like a willow pattern, the Saga of Captain Cook which I had transcribed, line by line, a pillar from the earth to heaven, also the maps of ancestral chases stretching horizontal across the clean white space that had once shown the bulldozed lines of the whitefellah highway. ‘I can’t wait to see old Gavin’s face,’ said the manager. ‘He’ll shit his pants.’

  He was as vile as usual, but there was something else illuminating the golden beaky countenance, a naughty boy’s delight in mischief. He still judged me weak as water, a boong-lover, a half-caste if not quite a poofter, but he was impressed that I had not yet gone mad or spat the dummy. So he watched me, waiting, like I was a good story that had not reached its climax. He could not believe I had held his interest for so long.

  Of course I would be gone by the time Gavin finally returned, but I too would have liked to see the inspector’s compromised and weather-worn expression when he finally understood that a human place of education might be sweeter than a church. The dusty cave school had disappeared and in its place was – what? Like what? An ancient chapel made by Bosnian Christians hiding from the Turks?

  As the rain continued Doctor Battery remained my instructor. It was, as he never ceased to tell me, not too late for me to be a proper blackfellah. I was his son and he would take me to see secret boards when our mob had granted their approval and in the meantime we squatted amongst the empty bottles in his humpy and he taught me, for instance, that the flying foxes are the Dreaming companions of the rainbow snakes. ‘When the snakes smell that flying fox he know it time. He is a young fellow, that old snake. He frisky Billy. He plenty busy now, sticking his head up out of the water.’

  Inside the humpy there was no escaping the stink of Autumn Brown Sherry and musky flying fox, and I could see the Rainbow Serpent in my mind’s eye, his mouth sprung open, shooting out lightning and saliva.

  ‘Tadpoles swimming in his spit,’ said Doctor Battery, communicating ancient Law or teasing me or both at once.

  The spit was rain, he said. Now the lightning people were wake up proper. ‘See, Uncle Redex. The lightning women flash their lightning more and more. Lookem now. Steam up into clouds. Grubs and frogs them bosses of the rain. They sing to the rainbow more, more. Down it comes, the rain. The waters dark and muddy,’ he said and I was a silly bugger he added, and I better keep away from those whirlpools in case I got dragged in and drowned. It was mournful down in the camp with so many gone.

  Carter came to my residence to stack the fridge with his extra beer. I asked him, very casually (as this was the best style with him), why the people had holidays at this time of year when it was hard for them to travel around the floods to their distant countries. Surely the wet season was a better time for the kids to be inside at school. Dry season would be a better holiday.

  ‘Don’t be a nong,’ he said. ‘We don’t run this business for their convenience.’

  I was a nong, I thought. This was all for the bloody pastoral companies. Now there was so little station work they could have their precious holidays. This must have been a small saving for the station who had suffered the expense of feeding the people tea, sugar, beef, and weevil flour. But when the wet arrived my blood relations returned their station clothes to Annie in the store. She wrote each man and woman a chit and saved it in a Brockhoff biscuit tin so they could claim them on return. If the eagle had not taken me, this might have been my life, I thought, frightened of the naked truth of their revealed anatomies, tall, thin and fat, young fruit, male and female, wrinkled, with shocking unarguable facts and characters as distinct as the human face.

  As the majority of camp residents departed the stockmen returned. Takman, as they say. The last to arrive had been three hundred miles from camp when the deluge began, and they had a slow wet ride back through rain, their shirts and pants soaked, the horses floundering in the bogs. Days were added to their journey by their diversions around the heads of newly flooded creeks. Their salt beef went sour. At day’s end they squatted round their hissing campfire, holding their hats over the frying pan to keep their damper dry.

  Mrs Carter and the kids were far away down south on the dry hot plains of Corangamite where they would not see a black face from one year to the next. So when Carter invited the white stockmen for a Christmas booze-up my fridge would soon be emptied and there would be no moderating influence from the missus.

  I had no choice but to attend, knowing pretty much how things would go. I would arrive early, when everyone was sober. At this stage, I would be thought acceptable, sometimes interesting, even admirable, but my job was regarded as a waste of time and it would not take long before someone felt compelled to tell me, no offence. It would be noted that I did not drink. It would be necessary for me to point out I was not a temperance wowser. ‘Did you never even taste it?’ they would want to know.

  It would be unfair for me to generalise about the races on Quamby Downs but there would always be, in any gathering of white men at this station, a certain number with pathological or psychotic tendencies, and it was these, it seemed, who set the tone. Perhaps this would have been different had I the spine to oppose them openly. It is perhaps a weak excuse to say that I could always rely on Carter to expose my secret thoughts which he did most effectively at the Christmas booze-up by taking an inspection party out to the caves. Thus, I suppose, he forced me to speak up. I should have been pleased by the shock caused by the writing on the wall, but I was unprepared for their crude hostility to the Saga of Captain Cook.

  My exit was accompanied by a silence so threatening that when I returned to the residence, I locked the door.

  Soon there would be a call for the beer in my fridge and I would have no choice but to unlock. Therefore I remained at the kitchen table, and tried to read the silly opera book. When there was gunfire from the Big House verandah I did not take it personally, but when a rock landed on my parked car, I jumped. Then there came a mighty bang above my head. A brick, I thought, but it could have been anything. Then came a knocking on my door, so faint and scratchy that all the hair stood on my arms. I extinguished my bright kerosene lamp and picked up my torch. The bolt would not come quietly so I slammed it open and flung wide the door which banged against the wall. It was Susie Shuttle in my torch beam. In her clean school clothes in the middle of the night. I thought, she has been into the school, she has dressed in her best clothes. How hooded was her brow.

  ‘They need a doctor,’ she said.

  My torch found a young couple with a baby whose left eye was closed and oozing pus. One side of its face was hot and swollen with infection.

  Susie did not know that I had already used my stash of petrol taking her family hunting. She had no idea I was scared to venture out in this weather and I feared being washed away and drowned.

  ‘This baby is going to die,’ she announced.

  I introduced my silent visitors to my table where I had to order them to sit. Having directed Susie to make them tea, I carried an empty petrol flagon through the puddles, knowing, of course, that a flagon of petrol would get us nowhere but hoping that, in the midst of all the happy celebration, it would make the purpose of my mission clear. Things were said about me. No need to repeat what they were. I waited while Carter defeated a young jackaroo in a knuckles contest which had already made the young fellow’s hand a bruised and nasty blue.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ he told me when he had his victory, but he gave me the key to the padlock that secured the petrol pump.

  I then acted as if I would really drive to the distant hospital.

  I bundled the parents and their baby in the back and Susie in the front and I removed the sheet of corrugated iron which had substituted for the missing windscreen. As water poured onto my knees, as the engine fired, the rain began again and I did not think of
anything but navigating to the station workshop.

  I had spent many hours there with old Battery and of course he had found it very useful for me to learn the ways of the workshop generator. So now I brought the monster into roaring life, providing power for lights and then the petrol pump. I thought, Mrs Bobbsey would be amazed by my competence. I applied the key to the lock. It did not fit. I thought, I am saved. I don’t have to drown myself. But then I heard the baby’s broken breath and became the servant of a different fear, that I would kill it with ineptitude.

  Susie Shuttle was right beside me as we entered the Big House and it was she who led the charge to Carter, who paused with his beer bottle still inches from his pouting lips.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, and I was surprised that it was Susie he addressed.

  ‘You gave us the wrong key, boss.’

  ‘Maybe the problem is the hole,’ said Carter, speaking in a manner that I attributed to drink.

  ‘We need the correct key,’ I said.

  Carter rubbed himself obscenely. ‘My point of view exactly.’

  There had been a great deal of hooting and barracking until then but now there was a silence. I expected to get beaten and was, in the midst of everything, surprised I did not care.

  ‘Quit it,’ Susie said. ‘We need the bloody key. The baby is going to die.’

  Carter made a grab for her knee, but she stepped back.

  ‘Barry,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s your missus, Barry?’

  It was impossible she would speak to him like this, not just raise her voice, but use this familiar first name which I had never heard before. She was my sturdy clever pupil, just sixteen years old, but her eyes were on fire and she was not afraid and I understood that Carter, somehow, was going to listen to her.