Drylands

by Thea Astley

  Despite the hammering on the door and the cries of outrage, she managed to keep the irate gent at bay for the entire movement, after which she removed the door-stop and opened up to his pulsing face, the blander smirk of the local sergeant and a crowd of paused and grinning shoppers. ‘There,’ she had said. ‘Now, wasn’t that lovely? Such a change for you all.’

  She was charged and fined for creating a public nuisance and the blare of rock continued to yammer and shake the food aisles packed with goodies that had passed their use-by date.

  She didn’t give a hoot for the stories that budded in the telling and clambered about her mythic persona like scrub creeper. As a gesture she drank alone one night a week in the ladies’ lounge at the Lizard, ignoring the scowls of male customers. She was making a statement. She was kindly, honest and her own woman.

  She had heard about Benny Shoforth’s imminent eviction and had marched in on him a fortnight before, offering help, suggesting he move to the old barn at the rear of her property. But Benny had become as independent as she.

  ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve planned out what I’m going to do.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  He hesitated, fumbling with his cup, staring away from her across the verandah of her house to the flat plains in the west, the gidgee clumps lonely as himself.

  ‘Listen, Benny,’ she insisted, leaning forward in her chair and making him meet her eyes, ‘whatever you’ve decided is fine by me. It won’t go beyond, okay?’

  ‘I’ve found a place.’

  ‘Found?’

  ‘Sort of. Out in the Isla Gorge.’

  ‘What sort of place, Benny?’

  He started to grin. ‘First class, missus.’

  ‘First-class what?’

  ‘Well, there’s this cave, bit of a rockpool, way off the beaten track. I could camp out there for a bit till I think out what I want to do.’

  Paddy put her own cup down and found tears starting.

  ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Come and stay on my place for a while.’

  ‘Can’t do that, Paddy.’ He didn’t often use her first name. ‘Like I said. Can’t do that.’

  She was blocked by his gentle smiling face. ‘Then can I help you move? Can I run you out there? You can’t take that lounge suite on your bike.’

  He laughed, as she’d meant him to. ‘Matter of fact,’ he told her, ‘I didn’t want to leave that behind. It’s all I’ve got to remind me of the family.’

  ‘Heirloom stuff,’ Paddy suggested, joking (that worn pile, those jabbing springs!), cutting the edge off the words with her hand just touching his arm. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take a run out this week.’

  It was more than fifty kilometres to the granite hills and ravines that formed the park, a lonely road where the bitumen ended suddenly and became a tributary gravel stretch that soon became a track, then a line of wheel ruts made by lone bikers and the occasional park ranger. Rock humps loomed over them as the truck cut between spurs of the hill-line.

  ‘Not far now,’ he had said. ‘About another half-mile.’

  They pulled up on a sandy stretch above a creek that was more a chain of secret waterholes. Leaves dangled their still and pointed knives amid a shrilling of cicadas that only magnified that stillness until it swamped them sitting there in the truck. Overhead a wedgetailed eagle circled the gorge in a giant arc of air. Sky geometry. Nothing else moved.

  Paddy climbed down and walked across to a dark unmoving circle of water. She shivered slightly in the hot midday. ‘I don’t like the feel,’ she said. ‘There’s something wrong.’

  Benny stood watching. He grunted then bent down and scooped a handful of creek-water and drank. It was sweet. Part black, part white, he understood that settler fright. Scrub. Scrub-scare! It was alien, spiky, unwelcoming. To them, anyway.

  Reaching out he broke off a twig from a grey wattle. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try this. Wood smells like violets. Nothing wrong with that.’

  She held the twig to her nose and trapped the elusive scent. Then she smiled. ‘Okay. I’m being stupid. Let’s see what you’ve picked out for a camp-site.’

  She followed him along the bank of the watercourse where it swung sharply in towards the cliffs, lurching into a thickness of tree that hid them from the track. A few metres back from the creek, boulders had dropped and formed a shallow cave whose sandy floor stretched down towards one of the waterholes.

  ‘Here,’ Benny said. ‘This is it.’

  ‘Here?’ She stared unbelieving at the depression in the cliff face.

  ‘Yes, here. It suits me fine. Came out a month ago and camped for a week.’ He kicked the sand about on the cave floor and she saw ash traces of his fire.

  ‘It’s too far,’ she said hopelessly. ‘What if you’re sick, Benny? It’s miles from the nearest town. You’ve only got that damn crazy bike. You can’t do this.’

  He didn’t want to argue. He was too old for fighting the system, too old to care about anything except the terminus. ‘Just help me,’ he said.

  They went back to the truck and Paddy opened a thermos and poured out mugs of tea. Gobsmacked. What was there to say?

  Early in the morning of the last day, Benny’s last day in his home of ten years, Paddy Locke parked her truck in front of his verandah. His possessions were crammed in two cardboard boxes he had obtained from the supermarket in Red Plains. His clothes. His six books. Cooking utensils and tucker. His camp stretcher was neatly folded with bedding roped onto it.

  ‘That’s it?’

  Benny grinned. ‘Not quite.’ He led her inside and nodded at the three-piecer his mother had owned and the small table and chairs. ‘There’s the heavy stuff.’

  She looked at him and back at the lounge suite and back at him and suddenly began to laugh. The thought of that housemaker’s cliché squatting sedate in a cave in the middle of the scrub was a stunning irony.

  ‘I like it!’ she said. ‘I like it!’ and began laughing again till her laughter petered out in the puzzled hurt on Benny’s face.

  The three-seater weighed a ton. They dragged it out of his sitting-room and onto the verandah and then Paddy said she had to stop for a rest. They sat on it and stared at the paddocks across the road already marked out with surveyor’s pegs.

  ‘What time do you expect the terminators?’

  Even at the pain-point of this moment Benny had to grin. It could be any time that day, he told her. But really he’d like to be gone before anyone came. He wanted to undercut the council’s victory by his absence, not let them be spectators at his final humiliation. His whole body vibrated and rang with departures.

  After a few moments they started work on the big settee again, managing to bump it down the steps and up to the tailboard of the truck. They stood panting and examined the situation.

  ‘Jesus, Benny,’ Paddy cried, ‘we’ll never do it.’

  ‘I gotta do it,’ he said. ‘Gotta! Grab the far end.’

  He was quickened by age-old affronts as he wedged himself under the top end of the settee and began raising himself, slowly, agonisingly, until he could edge the front legs over the truck rim. He could hear his heart drumming against the thin walls of his body as he eased himself out and went back to help Paddy shove the settee further onto the tray. One on each side they hoisted and thrust and the settee slid in a couple of feet and he said to her, ‘You get back now and I’ll do the rest,’ and she said, ‘Nonsense, Benny, I’m cursed by youth,’ and for three minutes of muscle-rack tearing at their elderly backs they shoved until the lumpy thing was three-quarters on and they could pause.

  ‘The rest’s a breeze,’ old Benny Shoforth said.

  He went back to the house and trundled the single chairs out one at a time and between them they got them on top of the truck, packed in with the boxes, the bedding, the table. Then she followed him inside to check on anything forgotten. The sun stared at them both through the windows while the house sang a small wistful song of emptiness.

&n
bsp; It took them half the morning to move the furniture from truck to cave.

  They lugged the settee up the track by swinging one end forward, then the other, a kind of diagonal peg-legged walking, a process they could keep up for only a few minutes at a time.

  Halfway there, Paddy Locke downed tools suddenly and produced the thermos and they sat on the lounge in the middle of scrub and sipped tea from plastic mugs. Benny could see how crazy they must look, two old codgers taking their work break on worn Genoa velvet with the sound of cicadas rubbing at the sky, scrubbing the air like sandpaper. The wedgetail soared back, swinging over the country where they sat enclosed, then rose on a thermal, taking in the world.

  ‘That’s how I’d like to be,’ Benny said. ‘Really like to be. Up there away from all this.’

  ‘All this what?’

  ‘All this trouble. The house. All of that.’

  He looked down at his near-empty mug and tipped the last drops of tea onto the track. He’d taken pride in never being a troublemaker. He’d accepted and accepted with the passivity that was a natural part of the way of things since boyhood. It didn’t make him feel any less a man. His dignity had remained intact. But now as he scuffed his worn shoes in the dirt and grass and looked at his few possessions scattered at intervals beneath the trees, he was aware of an alien chafe, that ancient anger against the way things were and the powerlessness of poverty and colour.

  ‘There’s still one box in the back of the truck,’ Paddy said.

  ‘That’s yours.’

  ‘No. It’s yours. Let’s finish getting old velvet up to the cave and then we can go back and fetch the small stuff.’

  When things were finally arranged, the cave took on the quality of a macabre joke. Benny organised a cooking place just beneath the overhang of granite and stacked his skillet and bush kettle on a rough shelf made from a fence paling. At the back of the cave he set up his bunk and stacked his six books alongside like relics from a different world. He propped his bicycle up against one rocky wall.

  ‘This is crazy,’ Paddy said. ‘ You know you’re always welcome.’

  ‘I know.’ Benny nodded. He spotted tears in the woman’s eyes and didn’t want any fuss.

  ‘You’ve forgotten that last box!’ she reminded him.

  Benny walked back to the truck and brought it over to Paddy who was sitting on the settee staring down across the strip of sand towards the small waterhole.

  ‘Just a few things you might need,’ she said, watching as he pulled back the cardboard flaps. There were tins of beans, soup, powdered milk, jars of honey and sugar, a couple of packets of tea.

  ‘Can’t take this,’ he protested. ‘Not all this.’

  ‘It’s not much,’ she said. ‘House-warming present. Here’s happy days, Benny!’

  ‘Yair.’ He looked at her and away. ‘Happy days.’

  And then they both tried to chuckle, neither of them sure at what.

  ‘I’ll be checking on you,’ she mock warned. ‘I’ll be out to see how you’re going.’ He looked so small, so frail. His face was creased in lines of fatigue.

  She slapped one of the cushions as she rose. ‘Autumn tonings indeed!’

  She kept her word. Within the fortnight she drove out again to see how Benny was getting on. He was sitting over a small campfire by the waterhole, a billy bubbling ready for him to drop the tea leaves in. He looked thinner, said less. No, he insisted, he was happy. He was managing fine. She unloaded some bread she had baked especially and a small sack of potatoes and pumpkin.

  ‘It’s too much,’ he protested. ‘You can’t keep doing this.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ve a bit put by.’ She was hating what they had done to him.

  The council man sent along to take possession of Benny’s property had been curious and pestered with questions. They were like some irritating rash. ‘Where’s he gone?’ he demanded. ‘Must have gone some place.’

  She had pleaded ignorance. Two council functionaries returned a week later. Why should they care? Their persistence hardened her resolve. Benny Shoforth had been seen riding his bicycle into Red Plains to pick up his pension cheque and the few things he needed. Howie Briceland had buttonholed him outside the supermarket and probed but Benny stayed calm, unresponsive to questioning. Every time he looked at Briceland these days he wanted to accuse, ‘You’re my half-brother. We’ve got the same dad.’ He wanted to shatter that confidence, that master-race assurance.

  But he didn’t. He looked at Briceland’s smoothly shaven face with its ginger sprout of eyebrows above the reddened blue gaze and saw the bone structure that twinned his own. ‘I’m coping,’ he said. And wouldn’t say more.

  One day a month or so after Benny had moved to the gorge, Briceland became a spy, eaten up to discover. Mrs Locke had just purchased extra kerosene and a small primus. No questions fazed her. She was too glib. He knew she knew.

  Leaving his assistant in charge of the store, he slipped out the back to his car and followed her truck, now a mile-distant speck almost obscured by dust-murk, until he saw it swing off the main road and head out on the branch towards the gorge. Whistling, he drove past the turn-off and into Red Plains where he had a celebratory beer. ‘Snap!’ he said aloud to no one at all.

  Hunting gave purpose.

  On the next pension day he drove into Red Plains and gossiped with the shire clerk in front of the council chambers until he caught sight of Benny Shoforth pedalling his crazy bicycle along the shopping strip. Abruptly he stubbed out his cigarette, croaked matey farewells, and unable to understand this bubbling joy within drove out of town to the gorge road. It didn’t take him long to find Benny’s camp-site.

  ‘Jesus!’ Howie Briceland said to a bunch of his drinking mates that night at the Lizard. ‘You wouldn’t believe it! A fucking three-piece lounge suite stuck up in a cave above the creek. Imagine!’

  They all imagined and responded with the quacks of laughter Howie Briceland expected.

  ‘Well, it’s not on! He can’t stay. My God, it’s national park. Let one in and we’ll have a mob of ferals stuck all over the place with their tin humpies and plantations of pot!’

  ‘He’s a bit of a boong, isn’t he?’ one of the men commented. ‘Hard to tell, though. Still, he could live off the land better than most.’

  Howie Briceland bit his lip. He wasn’t too sure about letting this side issue dominate. There’d been stories about his old man he’d overheard when he was a kid. Taking that line, he suspected, would open sore places. Establishment ground would tremble beneath him.

  ‘No, mate. That’s not what’s important.’ He groped round for buzz words. ‘It’s the ecology we’ve got to think about. And tourism. Carnarvon Gorge packs in thousands of visitors a year. I think we should start getting our own place moving. Bring the district alive.’

  There were half-hearted beery assents. Howie was not popular. He was feared. He had money, a native arrogance, and was on fawning terms with a number of politicians. But envy – and he knew this – was always nibbling at the perimeters of success and even as he shouted the next round he could sense a dislike of patronage along with the taking. The eager glass-grasping hands made him smile sourly.

  He let the matter drop, deciding there was more available help in Red Plains. A clearance! A purge! He’d never liked Benny Shoforth, never understood that quiet reserve, the tempered replies to overtures in store or pub. He liked to know what a feller was thinking. The loud bugger, his old man had lectured him (uselessly), is the exposed bugger.

  The itch persisted.

  He drove out to the gorge late one afternoon and confronted Benny Shoforth who was dangling a peaceful line in the pool. ‘You’ve got to move,’ he told him. He told him that the park hadn’t been gazetted for campers. He told him he was creating health and fire risks.

  ‘No,’ Benny said.

  ‘You deaf, mate? I said you got to go!’

  ‘No,’ Benny said.

  The story got around. Drinking
buddies nudged each other when they saw Howie Briceland coming.

  Briceland loathed being the town joke. What he said went! He was being made to look a fool.

  Impatiently he waited a few days before he finally succumbed and rang the Department of Parks and Wildlife Services. ‘Wildlife!’ he muttered as he waited on the telephone’s end. They kept playing some godawful classical stuff while he hung there like a trapped fly. He persuaded one of the rangers to go out and inspect. ‘Tell him he’s got to move!’ he ordered.

  The ranger reported back by the end of the week. Mr Shoforth, he told nail-biting Howie Briceland, refused to leave.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Briceland snarled before hanging up.

  Another week.

  He enlisted the aid of the Red Plains police sergeant. He explained the situation in exaggerated detail. He hinted at political intervention for a city transfer.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ the sergeant assured him. ‘No worries.’

  The sergeant, followed by the ranger in his truck, drove out to the gorge and threatened Benny with arrest. ‘This stuff!’ the sergeant said contemptuously, waving a hand at the lounge suite and bed. ‘This stuff has got to go, see. You’re creating a fire hazard out here.’

  ‘No,’ Benny said.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ the sergeant said, ‘but that’s the way it is. We’re taking you and the rest of your things back into town. No argument.’

  Benny stood quietly watching as the ranger and sergeant humped his belongings along the track and heaved them onto the ranger’s truck. They were panting and angry by the time they finished and the sergeant, glaring at Benny, ordered him into the patrol car.

  It was when they tried to turn out of the track that they found their way blocked by Paddy Locke’s utility angled across the ruts. Forewarned by a sly something in Briceland’s eye the last time they had spoken, she had driven out early for her fortnightly check on Benny.