by Thea Astley
I stopped there too in that decaying township for a cup of tea at the one general store. Graveyard music. A dozen cottages, drunk with summer, straggled along the main street, the only street. The tea-break was a mistake. It excited curiosity. A few old men watched me from the pub verandah and one of them (‘Can I help you, mate?’) sauntered over for an explanation of my presence. I abandoned that brown and yellow hillside on the casual wheels of tossed lies that insisted – but breezily – that I was heading east to the coast and north for the cape and accelerated from ancient interested eyes over tan landscape whose gullies and small streams had almost forgotten the pollution that clogged them.
Yes. It’s easier to disappear in a crowd.
But I haven’t chosen crowds.
I shall put all this down. It’s pretty smart these days, so my reading tells me, to avoid the narrative line like the plague. Narrative merely packs you in with the cloggers, the airport glossies, thick tomes designed for the eighteen-, the twenty-four-hour flight to another terminal where you’ll glimpse, as you stagger cabwards dehumanised from the twice-cooked meals and body cramp and changeovers, pre-fliers fingering the book-stall thickies seeking print oblivion.
Chuck your read tomes into the queues. Watch them leap to take a mark.
Hey! Take a Nembutal!
Where I come from, that’s how I could have begun.
And what would you have? A country gawk whose father and his father before him had worked in claypan country just east of Isa, in droughtland that killed off the sheep as fast as they put them there? When I wasn’t at school in the Taws, I was back home helping Father kill the sheep that were dying from lack of feed, lack of water, bogged in the sticky glue of drying waterholes.
My parents sold up, eventually, God knows how, and took the residue of the sale to an outer suburb north of Brisbane where they could keep in touch with sonny-boy who was completing an accountancy course at a technical college.
‘I can’t bear the suburbs,’ Mother said, Father said. After thirty years on twenty thousand acres, how could they? Settling for a green five-acre lot near the Glasshouse Mountains was better than nothing, I suppose, and I watched them take to gardening like obsessives. A creek from which they pumped cut the rear corners of the block and they planted exotics that they had never been able to cultivate out west. Within three years I could lose sight of the old loves fifty feet from the house, as they were to lose sight of me when I went south to Sydney, bristling with high distinctions, to work for a legal firm.
God, I should have been bored!
Merely writing the above I feel the stasis of a yawn begin its upward surge. Caaaaaaaw!
Perhaps it was meanness of spirit, an ungenerosity, envy – whatever – that had started me on an I-spy investigation of privileged boss funds. I could claim it was a fanatical probity drummed in from an early age by Calvinist parents who had not once attempted curly bowling at tax-men, bankers, creditors. I could claim that. Maybe it was a sheer desire to see the balancing of ledgers, the beautiful equation between losses and profits making X equal Y. Yes. Look, it was that – the Calvinist equation. And I longed to see it as if it were the Grail. When my failure to find even the dimmest shape of that glimmering icon unearthed only malfeasance, irritation won. I reported the misplay that denied me the golden gleam.
Ergo…
No. I didn’t personally want the Caymans, the Virgin Isles, Vanuatu, Majorca – those paradises of non-taxable venality. I wanted this land with its shallow Calvinist dish of red dust and claypan.
My parents died a year before this crisis, killed in a joy flight over Moreton Bay. Their five acres and house that had been hidden eventually under plaited leaves was sold up to a refugee from the city and I had been left with a smallish inheritance sitting in a credit union. I could flee, I could be self-supporting for a few years. Was I exaggerating the menace I felt? Certainly my actions in exposing graft and embezzlement had resulted by the end of a month in a series of newspaper articles and charges being laid. (I’m a bit of a gabmouth. I had journalist buddies.) I’m looking ahead at this point. So little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one. It would all blow over for the senior partners. Nothing would have to be repaid. Boss nest-eggs, weekenders, luxury cars and numbered bank accounts in faraway places would be safe. There was only the small surf of scandal to ride out, and even being struck off the legal rolls was a mere hiccup, the post-port belch people like Tyrannosaurus Lex had been emitting during decades of business lunches.
Skip the lunches.
The unforgiven unforgivable one was me. The whistle-blower. Pursuit of that piece of righteousness could go on for the rest of my life. That’s how it works here.
All together, now, sing, in high falsetto, those words of our dear old anthem: Our land is rort by sea!
Changing identity is a tricky business.
A false licence is an Open Sesame to escape routes.
I drove away from my camp-site beside the creek and headed back to the coast, crossing the Tropic and moving north to hole up in a cheap pub in Townsville and take driving lessons.
‘Name?’ asked the pert teenager behind the desk of the driving school.
‘Massig,’ I said. ‘Franzi Massig.’ She bit her pen with alarm. ‘Here. Let me.’ I reached over and filled in the form.
‘That’s a funny name,’ she said.
‘Yes, isn’t it! German.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I came out when I was five. My parents were migrants. My father worked on the Snowy scheme.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘What’s a pretty girl like you doing worrying about things lost in the mists of time?’
That brought a smile. This was hard work.
‘ID?’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m up here on a working holiday and eventually I’ll need to rent a car. I didn’t know I’d need a birth certificate.’
She smiled again. ‘Well, credit cards?’
‘I always pay cash,’ I said, producing cash. Another apple. Another Eden.
‘Oh well,’ she said.
‘Thank you. I am most obliged.’ We swapped smiles.
After that, it was remarkably smooth sailing, especially when I urged my driving teacher who, incidentally, was amazed by my rapidly acquired expertise at the wheel, to call me Frank. He could come to grips with a name like that.
That’s the trouble with everything these days. The effects of technology. You have to be listed on a computer somewhere, somehow, get wired before anyone will concede you exist.
I abandoned the van in a shopping-centre car park somewhere in Bundaberg and rode a bus back up the coast. There was a terrible amount of to-ing and fro-ing as I laid false scents. In Townsville once more I bought another van. I had a new name on my driving licence and registration papers. I opened a new bank account.
Outwardly I acted the part of a breadline Bert. Some sort of low-profile employment was indicated: odd-job man, office cleaner, all-round fixer. I couldn’t make up my mind between these intoxicating choices.
Now that I had a name change, now that I had a little money, despite premonitions of discovery that ruffled my sleep and made me stick to back roads, almost automatically I found myself driving south and west once more to the source of my new identity. This time, however, I would enter, trumpets blazing, in a mess of flags.
Having taken co-ordinates, I thought, smirking with trigonometric sheen, estimated time of arrival would be mid-evening.
There are now two hundred and seventy-five people in this town, the late arrival having drifted into the bar of the Legless Lizard, alive with wizened old gaffers escaped from their homes and a loud group of wild boys drinking round the pool table. The manager is also the barman, and the manager’s wife the bar-girl. The manager (Clem, I discover later) is a dark-moustached gent dressed far too young for his age and could give his bar-girl wife, who is a blonde and string-thi
n, a good twenty years. There is something odd about the set-up. He has a creamy deep-south American accent. She has the forceful rasp of a Gold Coast tearaway.
Between the hubbub of orders I book myself a room for a week, to unbelieving looks from the girl-wife and those drinkers close enough to listen in. After dumping my bag in an upstairs room (‘No one’s staying. Grab yourself a room on the front side. The wife and I have a flat at the back.’) I return to the bar for a nightcap and get sociable.
‘Come far, mate?’ someone asks after a watching while.
‘In from the coast,’ I say.
‘Staying long?’
I consider saying ‘Just passing through’ but something makes me commit myself. ‘Looking for a patch,’ I offer. ‘Just a small piece of dirt with maybe a creek.’ Several voices assure me I’d be lucky and then there are all those dropped queries: Where are you from, mate? What line are you in? And so on. Mate’s elated at the glibness of his lies: a broken marriage, he explains, offering reality, a vague ‘Back-of-Cairns, forced to sell up with the split, looking for something smaller, the money’s dropped out of the tobacco industry.’ We take two beers and a lot of cigarettes to discuss what’s wrong with the tobacco business and then I plead exhaustion and push my way up the uncarpeted stairs to a twelve-by-eight room opening onto the wide verandah.
The next night I damp down that curiosity by saying how much I like the look of the country hereabouts and, sensing the beginnings of approval, I shout the first round. But weather-eyes are still open. Merv (on my right) and Barney (on my left) tell me I can’t go wrong in this neck of the woods. ‘You can’t go wrong, mate,’ they say, affirming words with nods. ‘Been here twenty years,’ Barney says. ‘Wouldn’t be any place else.’
Twenty years? I’m doing sums before dropping my first important lie. ‘And what you say your name was?’ Barney asks.
‘Massig. Frank Massig. My friends call me Franzi.’
‘That’d be German, eh?’ Barney says. ‘There was a young bloke with a name like that when I first come up here shearing. Renting out of town, he was. Bit of a hippie like but not a bad sort of bloke. Buggered off suddenly, him and his missus. Well, he went first and she must of gone soon after.’
‘That was my cousin,’ I explain, gallant and excusing. ‘He went back south. His dad died on the Snowy scheme. He’s still down that way as far as I know. Carl. Used to talk so much about up here when I saw him last. That would be easily five years back though, and we’ve lost touch. Still, I remembered all the things he used to say about the place, so when things went wrong for me up north I had to come and see for myself.’
‘So you’re German, too,’ Merv says, pressing the point. He’s a squat, solid man with a broken nose and killer thumbs. But his mouth’s kind. There’s a good-natured curve.
‘Australian,’ I say, deliberately tightening my lips. ‘My parents migrated in ’50 and I was born here. Mother was an English girl nursing in Europe when she met Dad. He was a bit of a mess. Shot down, you know.’
This is easy: the full flight of the burgeoning untruth. Suddenly I remember telling the driver school secretary I came out at five. Never mind. I’ll stick with this one. I find I can improvise like an old jazz maestro, piling up riffs and breakaway cadenzas. ‘Badly scarred from burns. Look, everyone suffered. No hard feelings, eh?’
Barney lights up, drags in smoke and expels slowly. ‘That’s right, mate. We all suffered. Me and Merv, we were stuck up in New Guinea. Them bloody Japs were worse than any German, I’d say. Anyway, you’re half a Brit. That’s the main thing.’
‘Yeah,’ Merv agrees. ‘That’s the main thing.’ He grins suddenly. ‘I’ll get the next round.’
I breathe in the pub: there’s the unremovable stench of stale beer and smoke. Forty years back, maybe, the tongue and groove walls had been painted white. It’s a yellow memory. At one end of the bar a door to the hallway and office. At the other end of the bar, next to the dartboard and the pool table, a door opens onto a side lane. Across the hallway there’s a ladies’ lounge with no one in it. Staff? There seems to be only the pub owner and his partner, who looks disgruntled and deals shorttemperedly with the younger men who huddle away from the plastic choppers, the hairy ears, the beer guts. The television screeches above everybody.
At the risk of alienating Merv and Barney I am tempted to ask for a pina colada. (Just checking!) I ask. ‘Certainly, sir,’ the pub owner says, unblinking, and in three minutes flat there’s a frothy yellow concoction in a brandy balloon. I don’t believe this.
‘Jesus!’ Barney says. ‘What’s that pansy stuff?’
Do I detect the lingering twist of smile lurking under Clem’s moustache?
Keep a low profile. Agree. Melt in. Be dull, conservative and so orthodox the town forgets you are there. Treat the drink as a bit of a joke. Never do that again.
If I had been an adequate chess player I would never make cultural mis-steps like that. There’s a flippancy I can’t control.
A background. I must flesh out a background that doesn’t waver. Before I again settle into sleep in that upstairs room whose iron-frame bed has a quilt of the kind my grandmother used, I sort lies like a well-loved, well-thumbed pack of cards. I try them out, my face mumbling into the pillow. Ordinariness is all.
I consider the lies already told. Should I flesh them out further? Forget that mythical wife abandoned on the Atherton Tableland and offer data about the real one who abandoned me? (‘Mate, I don’t want to talk about it. Okay? Still hurts.’) Would that be too easy to check out?
Boringly, grindingly reasonable is the aim. Coming as a stranger into a no-count hick town at the back of nowhere and wanting to settle is stretching the disinterest of country folk. But before the north? These tiny communities demand knowledge of before. How about, I ask myself on the lip of sleep, a small convenience store in the hills outside Adelaide? Now, I like that. Could account for the name, the background after the Snowy. Lot of German settlers there. I develop the lie and retire Dad from the Snowy to place his accumulated savings in this smallgoods shop: liverwurst, bratwurst. The wurst is yet to be. I grin into the lumpy pillow. Helped out with my parents until their mixed goods was killed off by the supermarkets. Anyway, I wanted a change, a bit of a rest. But still wanted country, small towns. Used to that. Used to… sleep.
My problem is remembering the lies.
Now four years on and accepted.
(He hoped. He was beginning to think of himself in the third person.
At least they were accustomed to his presence. But he was still a newcomer. Even after four years.)
A bar-room introduction to Jim Randler and I had obtained a lease with an agreement to purchase on that small ten-acre patch by the creek. For the first year I worked as yardman and bar-useful two nights a week at the pub, and watched Clem and Joss cope with drunks and rednecks with the chilling aplomb I had first noticed.
I felt safe. I had almost forgotten the reasons that brought me here and answered readily to my new name. Old Randler on the farm back of me had asked a few searching questions during the preliminaries of rent-lease-purchase. He had known my cousin Carl briefly, he told me, and found him an aloof character with few practical skills who seemed disinclined to accept advice or even help.
‘Now, that little wife he had with him,’ old Randler said, settling down to a cuppa and a pipe on his verandah, ‘she was a different matter. I felt sorry for her. She tried so hard for the few months they were here to make a go of it. Little bits and pieces, you know what women are like.’ I thought of the heap of grimy curtains and bedding I would lug outside and burn, eager to destroy any evidence I might have missed. ‘Then the bugger vanished overnight. She said he’d gone back to Germany to do something for his dad.’
‘That’s right,’ I agreed. I nearly added that that was when we had met but remembered in time that I’d been born out here and hadn’t seen my cousin for years. Mr Randler noted my munched openers and pause.
&
nbsp; ‘Yes?’ A curious grey glance. He looked me in the eye. ‘I think the poor kid was pregnant. Not that she said anything to me, mind you. But she seemed pretty miserable that last week. Said he was coming back for Christmas. And then one morning in the new year she was gone too. Someone saw her take the mail train out to the coast.’
He added, as much for himself as for me, that the place was a bit of a mess. Together we inspected it as if I’d never seen it before and he made offers of help with tanks and plumbing. Where was Mrs Randler? I shied at asking and he volunteered nothing at that first meeting, but I nosed about in town to learn that he’d always been tied to helping his old man. Some of those diehard settlers had feudal views. I refrained from comment.
The place should really have been burnt down but I persevered with patching, in between odd-jobbing for the Legless Lizard. Gradually the shack took on a neater and cleaner appearance. I hacked out spaces for windows and installed a water closet in the dunny shed. As I said before – everything!
For years. Four years.
Things have changed. Are changing.
A week ago I found Clem cuddling a tearful Joss in the kitchen, holding and rocking her like a baby. Next day Joss had gone. I wait for Clem to tell me. He doesn’t. Not really. ‘We’re thinking of moving on,’ he says. ‘Joss has gone ahead to look around.’
And I feel lately that I am being watched.
There’s nothing concrete about this, just the sense of eyes, eyes that crawl across the back of my neck. When I swing around – nothing. Simply Clem washing the glasses, spreading the bar towels, emptying ashtrays. I’ve gone quickly to the street door but there is only the distant figure of someone walking away on the other side of the road, usually a local I know. (Hi, Bert! Cheers, Darkie!) Twice it has been a stranger, back view only, hat brim down, opening up his four-wheel drive and getting in to push out along the main drag and take the inland road. There’s nothing unusual about this. Lately our town has been a source of interest to tourists and fossickers. There have been traces of gemstone on the northern face of the Rock. The town is divided on the matter: the council wants tourism, that cheap bastard industry, but it wants to preserve Drylands’ only attraction, the weird escarpment that, at certain hours of the day, in certain angles of sun and shadow, creates an illusion of the Madonna and child that lasts several minutes. Geez, mate! Cop that, eh!