by Sarah Hay
John didn’t seem to know much about Irish other than the fact he was written in as a clause of the station’s purchase agreement. No one was apparently allowed to get rid of him.
Although John reckoned he could kick him off if he wanted to. ‘What’s he going to do, sue?’ John added, laughing. Susannah looked forward to seeing the old man again. He didn’t expect anything from her.
She wiped the lino tabletop, watching her hand move in a circular motion, leaving behind little droplets of water, satisfied by the way the dirty marks were being obliterated. The thought of being here indefinitely left her with a vague pain in the head.
It was as though her mind was overflowing with things that had to be folded away. There was plenty of medication she could take for it in the Flying Doctor medical chest. The heavy grey enamelled chest was kept under the bottom shelf in the pantry. Its key was on the top shelf among all the other keys she was responsible for, keys that opened the stores cupboard and the cool room where the beer was kept. Reading the literature, the chest open, she discovered five closely packed trays, apparently containing eighty-five items. She checked them off against a list and read the manual and worked out how to
Texas reach the Flying Doctor in an emergency. The possibilities for injury and death out on a station three hours from town seemed almost endless. She settled for a packet of paracetamol, taking two tablets with a glass of water. Rinsing her glass at the sink, she gazed out through the louvres and remembered that John had just asked whether she was happy. Why had it taken him so long?
In the afternoon she left the boys lining up Matchbox cars like a miniature traffic jam across the floorboards in the sleep-out while she connected the hoses to rusty sprinklers and moved them around the lawn between the trees. Overhead birds darted and dived from one branch to the next, one after another, screeching. She thought of what Ollie had just said. After they had woken from their nap, she had taken them across to the kitchen for a drink and something to eat. He had stopped on the path and looked up at the sky.
‘How high is the sky, Mummy?’ he asked. ‘Like how many metres long is it?’
It reminded her of how she and a group of girls from boarding school had camped out in the paddock of a farm owned by the parents of one of her friends. They slept in sleeping bags around a mallee-root fire and imagined their lives. Looking up at the stars, the possibilities had seemed endless.
‘When I grow up,’ Ollie said, ‘I’m going to be an astronaut. Mummy, what are you going to be when you grow up?’
It was too hard to keep up with the news of all her friends’ activities, especially when she had nothing to tell. The spray from the sprinkler arced over the leaves and everything glittered.
Little birds with black-banded eyes dipped and trilled. She walked across the lawn to the storeroom after collecting the list of stores from the desk in the house. John had produced it last night. She would need to place another order for the second half of the year: all the groceries except perishables for the next six months. They’d come up by truck from Perth. She checked off what they already had. There were cans of food stacked on shelves that bent under their weight. Beans and corn and beetroot arranged at random, and then more cans in unopened boxes on the floor, along with drums of flour and large containers of tea and coffee and sugar and oil. A line of light shone where the walls met the floor, and the gap made her think of snakes. She looked up again and noticed the layer of dust and what may have been mouse droppings that covered everything: the tins of unrubbed tobacco, Rizzo papers and then, to her right, folded dusty jeans and hats and belt buckles that had lost their shine. There were more books like the ones she’d found in the house: cowboy stories for one dollar. The covers reminded her of the posters that advertised what was on at the drive-in in the town where she grew up. A shadow crossed the doorway. It was John. Perhaps she should talk to him, answer his question.
‘What are you doing?’ she called as she stepped back into the light.
‘I’ve got jobs to do,’ he said over his shoulder.
The children were running through the sprinkler.
Determined to stand
tall on the untamed
frontier
I
Laura learnt to ride on a tight rein, her horse circling an instructor in a small well-kept yard located on the edge of Greater London and on some maps it was probably considered to be in the county of Hertfordshire. The instructor repeated many times how Laura was to hold her hands, and what she was to do with her feet, toes pointed forwards, elbows close to her sides. When Laura accepted a job as a jillaroo soon after arriving in a small town in the far north of Western Australia, she wondered if the station horses would respond to the same commands.
She was driven out to the station sandwiched between the manager, who she had just met, and the new head stockman, a man surprisingly called Texas, and on the back of the same utility were two other men who were going to work as stockmen.
They passed through country that looked like the African landscape she’d seen as a child in a TV program called Daktari, and reached the station homestead after dark, the ute pulling up in front of a fence. A woman was standing beneath the light on the veranda. Laura was relieved to discover that she was not the only female. She hadn’t expected the trip to take so long.
The silences between the men made it longer. Even though the woman at the hostel had known of John and the place he managed, there’d been too much time for ideas to creep into her mind and make her uneasy.
As the light had left the country they were driving through, it had begun to feel more foreign. Occasionally John, the manager, would ask Texas a question and when Texas replied he seemed to be laughing to himself, but even when she listened closely she couldn’t hear anything funny about what he’d just said. John told Texas she was from England. Texas made a small noise in the back of his throat and looked out the window.
‘She can ride,’ added John.
Texas glanced at her and back at the windscreen, a slight nod, and then she saw that he was grinning.
‘Maybe ride one of them buckjumpers eh?’
She smiled warily, unsure whether to laugh or not.
The woman under the light stepped forward to meet them.
Laura looked back at Texas; he was watching her and then he turned and followed the other two men. They seemed to know where to go because they vanished into the darkness. She stared after them. It was the first time she’d met an Australian Aboriginal.
After London, she’d expected every city to be a mix of people
Texas from different places and cultures, but in Perth, surprisingly, it hadn’t been like that, not where she had stayed.
John was holding the door open. He nodded towards the woman. ‘My wife Susannah.’
Their eyes met, Susannah’s resting on hers briefly before they flicked across to her husband.
‘Are the kids in bed?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Susannah croaked and cleared her voice, repeating ‘Yes’, more loudly.
She seemed startled and it made Laura uncomfortable since obviously Susannah wasn’t expecting her. Laura searched her memory for something similar, a reference point, but there wasn’t one. Instead she became aware of the silence that seemed to exist beyond the boundaries of her own experience. Sounds emerged from it, scratchy and insignificant, the far-off engine, the footsteps of the woman across the veranda, her own shuffle that followed. It felt as though she’d dived into the gap between what she’d imagined a station in Australia to be like and the reality, and it was a bottomless drop. Susannah stopped in the doorway in front of Laura, glanced over her shoulder and then back at John who was still standing by the door.
‘Shouldn’t she go with the others?’ she said to him.
John stepped into the kitchen.
‘She can’t go with the blokes. Cook’s out bush. She can have that room that was the governess’s.’
He dragged out a chair for himself and sat down.<
br />
‘Pull up a pew,’ he nodded towards Laura. ‘You want a cup of tea?’
They sat in silence while Susannah poured water into a pot. Her back was blank, unreadable, and the sleeveless top she wore revealed arms that were slight yet muscular. There was a smell of cooked meat in the room and dishes lay neatly stacked on the sink. Although the place was clean, it looked old and shabby, more like a workers’ cottage. Laura tried to catch the woman’s eye when she turned around. Susannah seemed to relent a little, adjusting her features into a small tight smile.
John was talking.
‘I’ll get you to give us a bit of a hand around the place. The other blokes’ll head out to camp tomorrow. They’re behind with the mustering.’
Laura nodded, having no idea what he meant by that.
She took a sip of tea. She should have looked for a job in town or waited until she got to Darwin, worked in a café or a dress shop. But she’d been determined to work on a station in Australia. It started when she read The Thorn Birds years ago. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t remember the story, it was the feeling of anticipation she was left with when she finished it. She glanced at Susannah again but her eyes were elsewhere and her expression inscrutable. Laura hoped they might become friends.
Laura had arrived at the small Kimberley town from Perth five days earlier on a Greyhound bus. Pressing her face to the tinted windows and watching the landscape slide sideways, she felt as though she was trapped in a metal capsule for forty-eight hours. She was impatient to breathe the warm dry air.
Her mind’s eye was able to see her travels as a spidery trajectory across the continent, the shape of which she had long ago memorised. When she thought of how much blue lay between where she was now and the green-shaded island of another hemisphere, she leant back in her seat and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the outback sun was surfacing, an aberration in size and colour, breaking through strips of cloud wrinkling the sky. Tree shadows striped the pale dirt and she became breathless at the thought of her own courage. The bus followed the road as it carved through rock and grass and hills that bled red into the distance. Grass grew in thin yellow spears clinging to the contours of the land and the silver trunks of the boabs glowed like fat-bellied sentinels. The bus drove over a steel-framed bridge and beneath was water that curved into a lake on the side she was sitting. The driver turned off onto a gravel road, away from the lake, to where bungalows sat squarely on large blocks of land; eventually he slowed and stopped outside a flat-roofed, brown-brick building with a sign above it advertising Four X. Her pack was taken out from underneath the bus and placed on the side of the road by the driver.
The dirt was fine like flour and it leaked rusty colour onto her flip-flops and between her toes. The door of the bus swung shut and she was left standing alone. She glanced at her watch. It was seven in the morning. There were people she’d met in Perth who could have told her where the youth hostel was but she hadn’t thought to ask and she hadn’t expected to be the only person getting off at that stop. The place reminded her of a town she’d visited on a tour to the goldfields, a ghost town, but further down the road there were dark shapes of people drifting between the light and into the shade of trees. She walked across to the double doors of the pub and peered through the glass. The bar was closed and the concrete pavement had a sickly smell of spilt beer. She returned to her belongings and dragged them along the dirt to the shade of a tree that had leaves like green butterflies. She heard a vehicle in the distance.
It sounded like a four-by-four as it changed through the gears.
Then it faded. It was so quiet she could hear leaves flick to the ground. They were brittle, hard-edged leaves. She broke one in half and threw it away. Sharp-beaked birds fluttered in the branches above. A grey bird with black speckles around its neck, a dove perhaps, dropped into the dirt like a helicopter landing and scattered dust and debris. It cooed and she realised it was the bird responsible for the persistent call she had heard in the distance whenever the bus had stopped for food. The driver said it was a peaceful dove. Whoever named it must have been comfortable in this strange outback land. Not crushed by the weight of its sky.
Laura’s attention returned to the fluorescent light of the station kitchen and the man and woman on the other side of the table. She finished her tea and eventually Susannah offered to take her to her room. Laura followed her through the door and waited while Susannah collected some linen. Laura discovered her room was across the lawn, away from the other buildings. When Susannah turned on the light, Laura saw that she had her own bathroom. They made the bed and, just when Laura thought everything was going to be all right, Susannah
Texas straightened, standing tall by the door, and said, ‘Where did John find you?’
Laura replied at the youth hostel, but she knew the question was somehow more complicated than that. After Susannah left, Laura discovered that the shower produced only cold water.
A few days later Laura was still wary of Susannah. That morning the woman had been angry with her children for wandering across to Laura’s quarters. Laura had liked talking to the boys since they reminded her of her niece who would be about the same age as them. Now Laura sat on the cool edge of the veranda, listening to the cicadas that seemed to sizzle in the dry grass. The hills beyond the fence appeared unattached to the earth and she could hear the children in another part of the house. She stood up and decided it was more comfortable in her own place. John could find her there. She walked about twenty metres past the stores shed to the other end of the yard and stepped into the area that was like a veranda enclosed by flywire where along one wall was a single bed. Lying there, it was possible to feel the slightest tremor of a breeze passing through the wire. She wondered if there might be something else to do today, rather than accompany John as he drove seemingly endlessly through the bush and the grass, apparently checking the troughs and the machines that pumped water. She had caught glimpses of wide-eyed cattle and he talked about improving the herd, conversation and silences broken by the intermittent appearance of a gate. She supposed he liked having someone to open them.
She re-read the letter she’d collected at the GPO in Perth.
Perhaps her family had already left for France. Her mother told her they had sold their caravan and bought a new one that had a microwave. They hadn’t decided yet but they might stay at the caravan park below the chateau on the hill in the Loire before they drove on to the Camargue and to their favourite place by the sea. Your father has a new hobby, she wrote, he is painting copies of the photos from our family trips in watercolours.
She enclosed a postcard-size picture of some wetlands and a watery sky above it. When Laura had arrived in Perth it had been raining in England. It was easy to imagine the wet streets, the cars and the buses passing through puddles, a train surfacing from a tunnel, streaming with water, whining to a halt at its station. From there she could remember what it was like to enter their semidetached house in north London, the heavy door and the narrow passageway, the coat rack swollen with padded jackets and beanies and scarves, and then announcing through the thick warm air to her mother that she was home.
But it was harder now that she knew the house in Mill Hill lay empty. There would be a letter waiting at the post office in Darwin. It was another place on the map but there was so much in between. Perhaps her parents would be wondering why she hadn’t written and they’d also know she hadn’t written to her sister. She looked at the little watercolour painting again. It would be impossible for her father to paint in watercolours the landscape she could see through her bedroom window. He wouldn’t have the right palette to use, just as she couldn’t find the right words to describe it. She got up from the single bed
Texas to return the letter to the inside pocket of her backpack in the bedroom. It was where she also kept her passport, her return plane ticket and a round-Australia bus pass. The bedroom was a small, square room with an overhead fan and just enough room for a double
bed and a wardrobe. The floorboards were a parched grey and marked with splotches of paint from when someone had painted the walls, and the window looked out past the lawn to a fat boab tree and to faraway hills. Without the letter from her parents it was possible to imagine that she didn’t belong anywhere.
II
There was no one on the veranda, so Laura moved hesitantly towards the kitchen door. She didn’t know why she did that. She wasn’t normally shy but the station people made her feel slightly awkward as though, perhaps, she was in need of them and not the other way round. They were in the kitchen talking.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You said you wanted someone to talk to.’
‘Oh . . . so that’s why she’s here.’
Laura was peering tentatively through the flywire. Susannah’s knuckles disappeared into the dough she was kneading on the bench. She looked up.
‘I was just looking for John,’ said Laura.
Susannah inclined her head towards the table. John was sitting there with some papers spread out before him.
‘Laura, there’s a mob of weaners that should be arriving this afternoon,’ he said, shuffling through the paperwork. ‘I need you to make sure they’re run into the yard with the trough or just get the driver to do it.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You can manage that?’
Laura stood there for a moment wondering what to do next, thinking it would be nice to be offered a cup of tea, too embarrassed to move away.
She called through the flywire: ‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do before then?’
There was a pause before Susannah answered: ‘You can water the lawn. Thanks.’
‘What about that stuff by the door?’ added John. ‘I keep tripping over it. Why don’t you get her to take it over to him?’
‘It’s fine. I’ll do it later.’
‘What is it?’ asked Laura. ‘I can do it.’
Susannah came to the door and opened it.