About four he was ready to go into the town. It was only ten minutes’ walk away. He had to buy meat and bread, butter and milk. The milk wasn’t for himself. He also had to make arrangements for accommodation. He planned to move in tomorrow evening after he had put a day in on the job. He wanted to be certain there was going to be a job and that he was going to stick to it. No point in being premature.
He called to Buster. She didn’t come. He walked down to where she sat with Desmond. He seemed engrossed in his pastime, moving his lips but saying nothing, his eyes intent on the water. He had handed over one of his fishing lines to Buster.
‘Come on,’ Macauley said.
‘Where to?’
‘Town.’
He sensed the reluctance in her; the careful questioning.
‘What for?’
‘Never mind what for,’ he said impatiently. ‘Come on if you’re coming.’
‘You coming back?’
‘Of course. Hurry up.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here with Desmond and catch fish.’
Macauley searched her, not sure that she was serious. She was, he saw, and he felt faintly piqued. He didn’t think she’d let him out of her sight.
‘Don’t you take your swag, will you?’ she told him frowning. It was both a statement and a question, and immediately he realised that she had more to go on than an intuitive trust in him. She knew he wouldn’t have told her to come with him in the first place if he planned any treachery. He would have been trying to get her to remain behind. And she knew that so long as his swag stayed behind she had a grip on his coat-tails.
But Macauley wasn’t sure about letting her stay.
‘You’d better come,’ he said.
‘No, I want to stay here.’
‘She’ll be all right with me,’ Desmond said during a lull in his introspection. ‘She’s enjoying herself. You won’t be long and so on, will you?’
‘Can I?’ Buster pleaded.
Macauley thought it over for five minutes before he consented.
When he got into the town he had a nag of doubt. He wasn’t sure whether he had done the right thing in leaving Buster behind. He tried a couple of boarding houses; both were full, but a man gave him the address of a woman, a widow, who took in boarders now and again. Macauley went to see her, but she told him she hadn’t been well, her brother was having domestic trouble; her sister married at the age of sixty, she had a son killed in the war, she couldn’t get the best out of her beans at all, the weather was changeable and she didn’t feel up to coping. Quite aware that he was lining himself up as a target for another ear-basher, Macauley talked her into letting him have a double room, and said he would be back the following evening. He couldn’t help but notice the gleam in her eyes when he left: a token that he was an event dropping into the dullness of her life.
He hurried to pick up his provisions and get back to the camp. He had a couple of shops in mind. The trouble hit him completely unexpectedly. He didn’t walk into it. It surged into him. The first indication he got of it as he passed the pub was a sudden outburst of shouting, a swell of voices; the next instant a jumble of men scrambled through the open door and barged into him, knocking him to the footpath. He stumbled out of the way of their trampling feet and kicking legs. There were three of them, all snorts and grunts and flailing arms, and two were on to one.
Macauley grabbed the bigger man by the coat and pulled him away, twisting him round and clutched his biceps, playing the role of soothing peacemaker. The man swore drunkenly and furiously, struggled to free himself and lashed out with his boots at Macauley’s shins.
The next instant Macauley found himself grabbed from behind, and his right arm jerked and twisted up his back. He jerked his head round. There were three, four, policemen, grim, and down to business, two of them wielding truncheons. Macauley protested astonished, but the only response he got was an extra sadistic upward thrust on his arm.
At the station Macauley rapped out to the sergeant, ‘What the hell’s all this? You’ve got nothing on me. I wasn’t in it. I was trying to break it up. Ask them. Ask him.’ He turned to the one he had manhandled. ‘Tell him.’
‘Ah, get stuffed!’ The man grimaced with a drunken loll of the head. Macauley drew his fist back, glaring savagely, but he didn’t throw the punch. He turned back to the sergeant. ‘Listen, sarge, there must have been a dozen witnesses to say I wasn’t in that blue. Have a go at my breath. I haven’t had a lemonade even. I wasn’t in the pub.’
‘Lock ’em up,’ the sergeant said.
‘Listen,’ Macauley persisted. ‘Listen, I’ve got a kid …’
‘You listen to me,’ the sergeant said gruffly. ‘You’re in here on a charge of drunkenness. If you don’t shut up it’ll be worse than that. Lock ’em up.’
Fuming though he was at the injustice, and bridling as he was with anxiety, Macaulay realised the futility of arguing further. He was as sober as the sergeant himself, and if he had an eye in his head the sergeant must see it. But they had pinched him and they wouldn’t back down now; they wouldn’t acknowledge a mistake. But they’d keep. That three-striper would keep. So would the young sharp-faced snipe with the candle-grease skin who had twisted his arm. There was a time in the future for them.
All four men were thrown into the one cell. Macauley stood with his hands on the bars. The others grouched and mumbled and found resting places for themselves. One of the two who had attacked the third was making overtures to him, asking what had happened, and what was it all about: and the third man said he was damned if he knew; it just seemed to start over nothing.
This third man lurched over to Macaulay after a while. ‘You’re a mug, mate,’ he said.
‘Who are you telling?’ Macauley snarled.
‘No offence, no offence, cobber.’
‘Get away from me.’
‘Fights,’ said the man with a sore-boned sigh. ‘They’re good things to keep out of. I always keep outta fights. You oughta take a tip — ’
‘Get to bloody hell, I told you.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He turned on his heel. ‘Thanks all the same, mate.’
In a little while they were all asleep, snoring and blowing, but not Macauley. He got away from the bars. He started to walk about. He started to wind his hands together. His eyes never lost their stony glitter. They were the eyes of an eagle.
There was no way of knowing time in the darkness. The darkness was a block and it stood still.
Four hours – they’d come in four hours. If they thought he was sober then – sober: what a bloody laugh – they’d let him bail himself out.
The rage he felt against them subsided under the press of the anxiety that was ravaging him, coming up stronger and more provocative of hideous images. One of her shoes by the stream; a wisp of her dress sticking up through the earth of a shallow grave; a roaring fire and that crazy old hatter stoking and feeding it.
Macauley grabbed the bars and shook the gate. Shook it and shook it, but no one came.
There was a sickness of fear in his belly. His breath came in a savage panting. He felt the tension in him would snap his bones. He wished for the power of God to push the walls down like paper and trample out of there.
How did he know what he was like underneath? Underneath all that blab, all that yarn-spinning that could get a simple child in? How did he know he wasn’t acting? How did he know it wasn’t a front of simpleness and harmlessness to hide an animal, younger, stronger, cunning and dangerous?
But he didn’t have to be that. He only had to be what he was. That was enough.
A door opened and light sliced the darkness. They let Macauley out, and when they let him out he was like a tiger. They made him mark time in a desperate ritual of squaring his account and handing back his personal effects. Then they told him he was lucky. He ran from the police station. Down the road, and on, away from the huddle of lights; desperate for speed, frightened with conjecture. And
he came within sight of the camp in an agony of dread. There was only one fire burning, and he didn’t stop running till he was on the fringe of its glow; and he stopped short, staring.
‘Shush!’ cautioned the hunched man rising and appealing for silence with his lifted hands. ‘Be quiet. She’s just gone off.’
Macauley darted round to the other side of the fire, looked down, then dropped to his haunches, searching the small form under the wagga, scrutinising the face with the eyeshade on it pulled down to the nose. Slowly, he rose to his feet.
‘She’s all right?’
‘Well, you’re a nice one, I must say,’ rebuked Desmond. ‘Leaving the poor child all this time and so on. Got on the booze, I suppose!’
‘Booze me tit!’ Macauley snapped, angry now in his relief.
Desmond looked at him from under his craggy brows. He seemed to be deformed without his eyeshade.
‘It’s none of my business, I know that, but there’s no woman should keep you away that long. She could have died of the shock and so on.’
‘Ah, stop going on like an old nannygoat. You and your woman. I had no woman. I was jugged. And if you’ll cut out the cold-shouldering for a minute I’ll tell you how it happened.’
‘She caught two fish, too,’ Desmond barked. ‘And she kept one for you.’
‘Well, do you want to hear or not?’
Desmond conceded and sat down. Macauley felt suddenly weary with the weariness of exhaustion. The throbbing was still in his chest, and he could still feel the fading pound of blood in his temples. His voice was hoarse. He paused often for breath, though he didn’t take long to tell the story. Now that it was all over he was overwhelmed with a sense of foolishness; an angry despair for his weakness, lack of control, and distorted judgement. He couldn’t objectify the man in the lock-up and the man sitting here as one and the same. This was the reality and that other was the nightmare; yet a little while ago that other had been the reality and this the nightmare.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter a damn, anyway, what you believe. I don’t blame you for being a bit sour. You must have had a time with her.’
Desmond squatted and threw a few sticks on the fire. He had a saucepan on the coals lidded with an enamel plate and over that another plate face down. Water bubbled, and steam curled from round the edges.
‘You must have been very worried,’ Desmond said. ‘And you do me wrong, and so on, to say I’m soured by the experience of comforting a grief-stricken child. I’m not used to such things, I’ll admit, but I managed. I told her stories till stories were no more good. She thought you’d run out on her, tricked her. She wanted to go after you. I had to restrain her with force, and so on. Her strength astonished me. I almost lost my nerve the way she went on, but I managed.’ He seemed modestly proud of himself. ‘I sang her songs, I gave her my eyeshade; I lied like the Devil himself about you, and so on. Finally I got her to sleep.’
Macauley looked at this old man with the firelight fluttering on his shaggy face, the hooped shoulders shrinking with time, the hands worn and polished like the stones on the gibber deserts; he saw the kink in his brain, the spark in his spirit, and the good in his heart, and he felt a pang of compassion.
He put his hand on the frail shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Desmond,’ he said.
Desmond seemed to be instantly activated by the warmth of the approbation both physically and lingually. He fussed round the fire, and said enthusiastically, ‘You must be starved. I’ve got some nice steamed fish here.’ He lifted the plate off its mate and Macaulay saw reposing in the cavity four succulent fillets. ‘You won’t say no to that, I can see by the look on your face and so on. There’s bread and fat in the tuckerbag behind you. Help yourself. I’ll go down and get a billy of water for the tea.’
Macauley ate with relish. Then he sat back enjoying a cigarette. Desmond suddenly said to him, ‘Do you know where you’re going?’
‘Going?’
‘I don’t mean going away tomorrow, or the day after, and so on. I mean do you know where your life’s going?’
Macauley looked puzzled for a moment. He shrugged. ‘Who does? Do you?’
‘I have a fair idea. But I don’t think you follow me. I’ll put it this way: Why do you move about? Carry on the life you do?’
‘Here and there and all over the place like a fly, you mean?’ Macauley sighed, gazing into the fire. ‘Some people can move slow and get on all right, I don’t know, I never could. All my life something’s been biting me – urging me on.’
‘Yes, but where to, that’s my point.’
‘How do I know?’ Macauley said. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Listen!’ Desmond exclaimed. ‘Hear that river? There’s water coming from somewhere and going somewhere and so on. It flows on a set course for thousands of miles. It’s not only getting away from something, it’s getting to something. It’s getting away from the mountains and it’s getting away to the ocean. Well, I’ll tell you something. That’s the way a man’s life ought to be and so on.’
‘Why?’ Macauley asked.
‘Well, otherwise there’s no purpose. A man is right to get away from evil, from trouble, and the things that are bad for him. But he can spend all his life running away from them. He should stop and think and so on. Then he should pick something that will better him, that is good for him, and try to achieve it. Then he’s running towards something. See what I mean?’
Macauley nodded his understanding. ‘But who’s talking?’ he said.
‘What I just said,’ Desmond replied, ‘I never thought of till just a few months ago. It took me all those years and so on to find out. And it’s too late for me to start doing anything about it now.’
He cocked his head and directed his one red eye at Macauley. ‘But it’s not too late for you.’
‘I like things as they are.’
‘Well,’ Desmond said, ‘you know best. If you’re satisfied you’re getting to something that’s all right.’
‘I’m satisfied,’ Macauley said, but he vaguely wondered. What was it drove a man to this kind of life and kept him at it? Some said it was a nomadic instinct. Some said it was a sense of inborn irresponsibility. Some said it was the same thing that made a fighter want to keep coming back after he was washed up. Whatever it was, it was there inside a man and could not be denied because it could not be explained.
‘Wouldn’t you be better off with some mode of conveyance like mine and so on?’ Desmond suggested.
Macauley threw back his head. ‘Ha, me a push-bike swaggie? Turn it up.’
‘There is no reason, my friend, to be snobbish about it. People have laughed and sneered at me, too, but they wouldn’t know why if you asked them. I can do sixty miles a day on that bike, and I don’t have to worry about anybody. I’m independent. And what’s more I can carry all the belongings I want. I don’t have to jettison and so on. Why, there’s a whole house on that bike.’
‘Soon you’ll have to get off and walk,’ Macauley chuckled.
‘Anyway it doesn’t have to be a bike,’ Desmond said. ‘What’s wrong with a horse and sulky, and so on?’
‘A horse and sulky?’ Macauley echoed, more to himself.
‘Yes. Cost you nothing to run it except shoes for the horse. It would carry all your gear and more. Save you boot leather and a lot of stress and strain and so on. Just the thing for you and your shiralee.’
‘What?’
‘Her,’ Desmond nodded.
Macauley knew whom and what he meant, but he was surprised that the old man, too, had seen Buster as a burden to him: a swag to be taken, and often carried, wherever he went. Odd as he was there was nothing the matter with his insight.
‘That’s what I’d do if I were you and so on.’
Macauley shook his head. He stood up. He knelt down beside Buster and gathered her into his arms. She only mumbled. He said goodnight to Desmond and turned away towards his camp.
�
��I’ll cop it when she wakes,’ he said. But there was a pleasantness in his voice.
Macauley settled down to the job and the boarding with Mrs Weiss. She was a record that never ran down. He learnt about everybody in the family album and all their associations. There was the little dog she used to have that ran messages and killed and brought snakes to her for grilling on a backyard fire; there was the bantam hen called Rickety Kate, because it had a broken leg that she mended and which caused it to get about with the appearance of using an invisible walking-stick; then there was the pet magpie that could talk as well as some people she knew; and there were a thousand other things she had drawn unto herself to fill up the emptiness of her lonely widowhood.
He had little trouble with Buster. She came on the job with him, and amused herself with stones and pieces of timber, nails, bricks, sand, and cement. In between playing she ran quiz shows with all the men. They made her billy boy, second class. This meant that all she had to do was keep an eye on the billycan and tell them when it was boiling. When she got her first-class ticket she would be allowed to make the fire and light it, but that wouldn’t be for some little while yet. They all thought she was a bright kid.
Sometimes, at least once a day, she would seek variety in her routine by going for a short walk down to the end of the street in either direction or in both. The house being built was on the only vacant allotment left in a street full of houses. It stood roughly about the middle of the block. When Buster went for these walks she always told Macauley first. He had no objection. He was pleased with her behaviour all round. No matter what he might do he knew there was unquestionably no chance of her running away from him. Still, he always cautioned her not to be long, and to stay on the footpath.
It was during the fourth week with the job coming to a finish that Buster went for one of these sightseeing strolls and didn’t come back. Macauley forgot about her for half an hour. Then when he looked around he remarked casually on the length of her absence. When another thirty minutes had elapsed he walked on to the footpath and looked up and down the street.
The Shiralee Page 18