Judy loved rolling the word Blindale around her tongue with Tony Watson, sharing what they shared. When she was eight Judy had broken the bond between Mum Watson, Pop Watson and Tony by clicking with Tony the day Major Marks brought her over to Blindale from Silver Springs. Tony had been raised at Blindale pretty much as the Watsons’ own son. They’d had him for three or four years before Judy lobbed in, a good idea, they thought, getting him a girl to play with. Then they were sorry, or Mum was, because Judy was from that day Tony’s sidekick, his little chirping mate who bossed him around and coaxed him to peel a thick-skinned Blindale orange in a continuous strand and toss it over his shoulder, making a perfect J for Judy in the dirt.
A possum climbed a trunk, crept out on a branch and stared down at her as she flashed her torch. A crash in the undergrowth was revealed as a cow, big-horned and staring at her. She turned the torch off and lay on her back, sore and uncomfortable. She gave up on that and climbed into the back seat of the car and locked the doors. There she slept doubled up. Nobody could possibly be as cowardly as Judy, nobody ever struggled as hard to overcome fear. That was her feeling about herself. Facing Mum Watson without Tony was a challenge, but it was not a challenge as stiff as being terrified lying on the ground waiting to be trampled by a cow. So she slept in the car, scrunched up like a spider and covered by a thin blanket that kept slipping off.
When Judy woke next there was fog over the river, dense and still, and dewdrops on the car windows where she shone the torch. The fog made her feel protected, safe. It was three in the morning. Her mother talked about nuclear radiation getting into food and water supplies, lingering in the bones, mutating generations to come if it did not completely wipe them from the face of the earth. She wanted Judy to think about that. And Judy did. Of course she did. But at this hour of the morning, in the insulating fog, even the wicked slept, Judy trusted, with night noises muffled and a feeling of the whole of nature quietly hissing away like the cleaving of water at the bow of Rattler.
When she woke again it was to a bitterly cold grey morning, the fire still bravely smoking, and she lay shivering and dozing until condensation burned off the car windows and sunlight struck her face. The sun came up over the top of the fog like a peeled orange trailing strands of white pith. Then it was hot, and Judy walked through the slippery, sucking mud of the riverbank and washed herself in the river, smacking aside algae and brown muck with the flat of her hand as she stood knee deep. The truck came back along the river road, and Judy knew if she lied to Mum Watson about where she spent the night that Mum Watson would already have found out by the bush telegraph that knew if an ant crossed the road or a galah lost a feather.
Mum Watson was back from church. Every fourth Sunday she went to the monthly service preached in rotation by ministers in the weatherboard crossroads church sitting high on termite stumps. It had a mark on the wall higher than the pews from where the last flood reached. There were six worshippers that morning and the minister, seven when the carrier, Schmidt, a Lutheran, came in.
Mum was poking around the yard feeding the hens when Judy drove up between the rows of orange trees. She was dressed in lumpy white stockings, a striped dress with puffed sleeves and a chained jewel, an opal, attached by a safety pin to her collar. The sun beat down on a bare patch at the top of her head.
‘The others are inside,’ Mum said by way of a greeting. ‘Tony’s talking. Pop’s listening. It’s all he can ever do now.’ Her lip trembled. ‘Tony’s like a little bird warbling. Tell me you’re back teaching.’
‘Not exactly teaching,’ said Judy. Mum looked her over.
‘You can’t go in like that.’
‘I can’t,’ agreed Judy. She headed straight over and poured herself a mug of cold water from the coolroom tap. Her gift was letting Mum down.
The heart of Blindale was that tap. Judy thought of it as a fountain; Blindale was an oasis, a copper tap with a galvanised pipe running back inside through the wall of the coolroom to a refrigerated metal water tank. Any time of the day you could just walk up to that tap, unhook the enamel mug hanging from a wire and drink as much icy-cold water as you wanted while standing outside in the baking-hot open air.
Mum had already heard, from the carrier Schmidt, that a girl in underwear was seen standing in the river. Mud from the river had squeezed up between Judy’s toes and dried on the tops of her sandals. There was dust in every crease of her shirt and jeans. Mum handed her a towel, a bar of soap and a nail brush. Judy lathered and rinsed in a cascade of water under the tankstand. The soapy smell of concrete and earth drains took her back.
‘Jeez, look what the cat dragged in,’ said Tony as the screen door scraped. Judy’s combed hair dripped flat from her shower. She wore a clean white t-shirt and short shorts.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said.
‘Better late than never,’ said Tony. ‘Eh, what, Mum and Pop?’
He did not get up from the table as politeness would dictate with someone normal. Pop wove a couple of steps over in a real effort, hugging her till she could not breathe. He used to have things to say. They were worth listening to too. Judy touched his cheek with the back of her hand and felt a tear prickle. At that Tony scraped back his chair, bowed swiftly, and sat down again. He never kissed Judy or showed any physical affection. If she tried hugging him he stepped away like a wrestler waiting the next move, arms held out from his sides. But he gave her his quick smile before palming an unlit cigarette up from the table. They would talk later. My God, how they would.
At twenty-four Tony’s round face was framed by a blond Beatle haircut. He wore a blue Oxford shirt, moleskin trousers and cherry-red riding boots. Last year the Watsons had celebrated their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Tony was the MC. They had been married before Marconi radio masts ever cobwebbed paddocks on the edges of country towns, before the Macquarie Radio Network ever took its name from a governor, or was it an inland river. The Watsons were dinosaurs in that respect. They had come back from their honeymoon driving a sulky, Tony told the crowd. It was painful to speak of Chicka. Tony was Chicka’s foster-replacement, ghost brother. Gingering things up, he called on the cousins and nephews, nieces, grand-nephews and grand-nieces for a few words. They made halting, inaccurate speeches that dragged on until people started talking over them. ‘Does anyone play a musical instrument?’ Tony begged. Who should step forward, lean as a whip, but Warwick Mickless, Judy’s teenage boyfriend, carrying a Western guitar, his dented Stetson fanning out all round him like a claypan.
Judy had not been there. A few days before the party her appendix burst and she was operated on within hours and would have died, quite possibly, if she had been at Blindale with peritonitis. Tony wrote to her describing the day. He used a lettercard, a perforated fold of light cardboard sold at post offices all over the country, pre-stamped and conceivably designed with Tony Watson in mind for getting things off his chest in the minutes available between engagements. The lettercard was less than the price of a standard stamp as long as no extra pages were included. In one or two hundred words, adding fifty more optionally cramped on the back, Tony said plenty week by week, never failing Judy.
‘Tony’s getting to be famous,’ said Mum, running her hand through his pale, silky hair. ‘Aren’t you, dear?’
‘Whatever you say, old darlin’,’ said Tony. ‘There’s less and less kindness these days. People just don’t think of each other.’
Pop made a spitting, gasping sound. ‘He’s laughing,’ said Mum. ‘He laughs when we tune in. Laughs before Tony ever says a word. You bring joy to his soul, my boy.’
‘Glad you appreciate it. I’m giving up double rates to be here for you lot,’ said Tony, lighting a Marlboro Menthol and blowing smoke out over the butter, cream and jam. He shouted his earnings into Pop’s ear while holding his fag aloft and flicking the ash away from the table with an elevated thumb, at the same time reaching down at floor level to stroke the cat winding its tail around the leg of his chair.
When Tony first came there, a nine-year-old boy rescued from Goulburn Christian Brothers by the Watsons grieving for Chicka, it was the cat, and the same tortoiseshell cat it was too, that was there to greet him. The same recipe of cake, a sponge with passionfruit icing, and the same knotty tea-cosy, Wedgwood butter dish, carved emu egg on the living room shelf. The same Gundabooka Mountain waddy-donger, a hard length of mulga wood, tied to the hallway wall with fuse wire. It was the white man’s Far West symbol of understanding the black man to the limit he liked. A faint, whisperingly mysterious electrical sort of sound had grown louder. It was Pop wheeling up to the garden gate on his Velocette motorcycle looking for O’Malley. Before he ever came there Tony’s surname was O’Malley, a little strop of a boy, biffed and bruised in a dormitory scrimmage. Father unknown. Mother deceased. First love Judy Compton.
The Salvos were always the ones, and as a matter of fact, later when they were both at high school in Bourke, Judy was to wear the ribboned bonnet and severe buttoned collar of a Salvos’ tambourine girl, a curl of dark hair against her rosy cheek that Warwick Mickless said made him horny as a jack rabbit. Tony the trombonist on similar Bourke occasions had stockinged his legs into Salvo stovepipes, brilliantined his hair, tilted his cap back from a spotty forehead and blown hymn numbers till his lips numbed. Drunks outside the Royal Hotel emptied their pockets as Major Marks rattled the collection box.
As far as Tony could or would ever remember, Judy Compton was the last person he allowed to make rules relating to his domestic life, and whenever she bounced back into his orbit she had his permission to start making them all over again. ‘When I was married …’ he liked to say years later. Or: ‘At my wedding …’ It gave people something to think about, a reference, if only they knew, to how two kids dressed up and played weddings at one of them’s command in the diesel-stained yard at Blindale. He pulled her along in a billycart, the bridal car, and told stories at night, doing all the voices. Mum and Pop Watson stood in the hallway listening. Pop giggled. They’d lost one. Now there were two. Pop elbowed Mum in the ribs, she frowned.
That was many years ago. She still frowned, never being pleased with Judy enough. When Judy told her she’d started sailing she laughed.
‘You? Pull the other one, girlie.’
‘There are some women,’ said Tony, when they were outside taking their time walking to the bottom of the orchard, ‘whose mothering don’t extend to girls. Mum Watson’s one of them.’
‘I was only ever temporary here,’ said Judy. ‘Not like you. What I loved wasn’t what you loved either.’
‘Except we both loved Blindale.’
‘It’s what hooked me,’ agreed Judy. Her mother, Beth, had also been in the category of unmothering mothers at the time. Exactly in what way that was all right now still needed sorting out. Tony squatted in the shade, on his haunches, on the edge of the orchard overlooking the river and blinding dry floodplain on the other side. There was a distant clump of trees and a tin roof reflecting light, the Schmidt homestead that was cut off when the river rose. ‘Do the Schmidts still live like pigs and slaughter goats in the bath?’ Judy asked.
‘I’ve heard they do,’ said Tony.
‘Mum Watson made a point of it to me every time I didn’t wash my face. If I didn’t I’d grow up ignorant like the Schmidts. Old Eric Schmidt goes to church with her. They’re thick as thieves. It makes me laugh.’
‘Ease up, doll.’
The midday roast with Pop’s brew on the table in green glass bottles, wired marble stoppers holding the fizz in, left them all happy. ‘I’m stuffed,’ said Judy when the lemon upside down pudding with canned Nestlés cream was demolished. Mum and Pop napped and Judy and Tony cleared the table. He washed, she dried. Back they went afterwards outside, roving the compound. In Judy’s opinion there was a feeling of hardness, of disillusion creeping up and flooding into Blindale. She could not explain it but tried. When you were still deciding who you were it was destructive if someone did not believe in what you couldn’t put into words yourself.
‘It’s not them, it’s you,’ said Tony. ‘The oldies have got something pretty good with each other; plenty don’t have it.’
‘I’d be terrified of breathing or doing anything if I was Pop, in case I had another stroke.’
‘Yeah, and you’re getting on,’ said Tony. It made her quake, it was true. How much time was left in a world geared for self-destruction in a nuclear holocaust? Tony had a future mapped out, oblivious to geo-politics and the way the world rattled its swords. With playing live telephone conversations on air made legal, he made an art of it. He intended getting out of radio in the bush, getting a job on a Sydney station. It wasn’t all about him either. One day he would help the Watsons into retirement care as thanks for saving him from being a nobody.
‘Pop was up the ladder picking navels when it happened,’ Tony said. ‘It’s not called a stroke for nothing. A stroke or a bolt from the blue.’
There was the sound of topknot pigeons flying low overhead, small tinkling bells of hope. The old couple did not have much time left to play with. They did not sit round and moan about it though, said Tony.
‘For you,’ he added, getting on with his idea of Judy, ‘it wasn’t ever the river or Blindale homestead so much, or Mum, or Pop, but the flood the river had that year. I got the surname welded on; you were only here three months, remember.’
‘It seemed so much longer.’
‘Six weeks of that time we couldn’t move.’
‘Ants on a saucer,’ said Judy. ‘Every time I come back I hope there’s been a downpour in Queensland so I’ll see it again. I’d never seen the sea, or hardly ever. That flood was like the sea. There were no edges to the horizon. Warwick Mickless had never seen the sea either.’
‘Now that you bring up that name,’ said Tony, ‘have you seen him or had any word of him?’
She hadn’t. No.
‘He came to the studios one day,’ said Tony. ‘It was a few months after the party. It must have been pretty darn flattering, my asking him to play in front of the kinfolk. Jeez but what does he think, a singalong makes him a star? He’d been to some outfit that makes tapes of hopefuls playing guitars and yodelling cowboy numbers. He asked me to play one on air. It was a ludicrous amalgam of doggerel and strummed chords.’
‘I hope you didn’t say that.’
‘I said there’s no easy way to be any good.’
‘I’m scared that’s true myself.’
‘Now he’s flying helicopters.’
After her three months at Blindale Judy had gone home to Silver Springs and a more resolved situation with her parents. She was somehow inside herself, still rattled by being minded though, and never gave up wondering how they had brought themselves to have her parked if they loved her as much as they said they did.
When she reached high school age arrangements were made for her to board in Bourke, as the Springs was too far away for daily travel. At Major and Captain Mrs Marks’ establishment it had been the girls’ dorm for Judy, the boys’ for Tony. Their friendship, they found, was just as strong as it ever was and a third, Warwick Mickless, made their duo stronger. It was where they met him on a day of remembered importance, when Warwick was introduced to Tony’s class and seated next to Tony after a fair bit of whispering between teachers at the door of the room. Tony was fifteen, Warwick sixteen, a drover’s son who could not read or write, or hardly. He had rarely been to school. He was like a man
among them and already a star on the rodeo circuit. Tony was asked to help bring him up to scratch before his next drove. Promoted from two classes below, Judy was placed on the other side of them, the cleverest girl in the school, winner of spelling bees and general knowledge quizzes, beating older kids. Warwick was so darned sweet.
‘I loVe you JuUd your a diSh and a doLL.’
She kept that note and always had it somewhere.
Being seen with Warwick back then was to be seen with the one who counted. His long, doggy face had burn scars from being rolled into the ashes of a campfire as a baby. At the Brewarrina buckjumps he was a sensation, leaning down from a galloping pony after the brumbies threw their riders, snatching the ropes from the dirt. Then, with the reins looped over his arm, he leaned back and rolled a smoke and waited for the next rider sparking from the chute. Tony, thanks to Warwick’s old man giving the nod to the auctioneer, was handed the mic to read the adverts between events. Birth of a lifetime career, fodder of character shape, drug of necessity it never went too far to say. Patter.
Tony was cheered for his patter and scorned on the side, as befitting one with the power of words. There was a trick Tony had, where Warwick’s pony’s galloping gait and swivel turns gave tempo to a line of Tony’s talk. It was country and western rock-and-roll, making Tony known around the rodeo circuits and district shows before he was seventeen.
You could not pry the three of them apart for a year. On Friday nights they went to Randalls’ flicks for the double bill, Joe Kidd, Judge Roy Bean, Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli. Every chance he had Warwick worked his hand down Judy’s blouse. She nuzzled into him like a possum in a hollow. After the flicks they went over the dialogue.
‘Look at your belly, Judge. You can’t even close your coat across it.’
A Sea-Chase Page 4