‘I’ve just been telling Skel about our connections down here, some family history. I wasn’t the first in line of the wondrous Thompsons to settle in this district. That honour goes to Skel’s great-uncle Evan—or rather his parents. Skel wouldn’t remember him. He was very young when they met, and anyway Evan was an elusive character.’
‘If I listen to you talking about Uncle Evan, will I feel that the world is a better place, exciting even—that life’s full of interest and that I’m a better person?’
‘Are you serious? Of course not, although he was a survivor at one level. Anyway, I was telling Skel about him, and that one day—this was when he was grown up—his parents came home when they weren’t expected and he was caught in their bedroom, red-faced, and holding a small cup of sugar. This is true.’
Greta clasped her hands around the cup of tea, frowning. ‘I don’t understand. Was there something the matter with him?’
‘No, not really, but he was in some ways like a child, a very large one, and strong. His mother and father wanted him to stay at home because they needed him to work on the farm. There was a shortage of labour.’
‘What has that to do with sugar?’
‘His mother never got over the Depression. She hoarded and stored. There was a large bag of sugar kept in the bedroom, so he wouldn’t dip his fingers in it, help himself whenever he felt like it. Everything was in bulk.’
‘So they treated him like a child?’
‘Well, as a child and a workhorse. He left school in Grade Four. He was the youngest child in the family by far—what they used to call a change-of-life baby. They needed him to milk the cows. He was fifty when they died, within a week of each other. Then he took over the farm. There was no money in it, but it could keep one person alive. With a few sheep, the cows, and bees. Then one day a young woman turned up, wanting somewhere to stay. That was at the time when people wandered around looking for meaning, somewhere to live that wasn’t the city. They wanted sunshine and vegetables, free marijuana and someone to love. But there was also wind and rain and the nights were cold, the sky overcast for days on end. Then they didn’t know what to do, or where to go, but they trusted, so she banged on Evan’s door just as it was getting dark. She had a large carryall with her things stuffed into it. Someone told her about him, living by himself, and that he was kind. That probably meant harmless. He was making some soup out of boiled fish and turnips, so he gave her some and told her she could stay in the shed, which had a bed in it and a sink. The dunny was out the back but there were no septics. Like it is here, now. Her name was Yvette and she stayed six months, doing things around the place, hitching a lift into town when she felt like a break. I met her a few times—she wasn’t much older than me. Her hair was long and straggly, and you couldn’t help noticing her body. She was pretty and slight—it was the way she moved: she sort of pranced, her stride longer than a step, so you looked at her. Underneath her clothes she wore very little; you couldn’t see the outline of her undies even though her pants were tight, and buttons were undone, so you looked at her skin, the swell of her breasts. She knew you were looking at her—it was what she wanted—and my uncle Evan would sit there watching, wringing his hands, thinking of something to say to entertain her. He told her stories about whales, and octopuses, how to collect honey, or build a fence. The value of raw turnips. They kept him healthy and strong.
‘In one way she was a tease, but she also acted in ways that made you think she was unaware, almost like a child. She would come up to Evan and sit on his lap, put her arms around his neck, as if he wasn’t a man. Talk about boundaries! She was bit strange. She told him he was an original, not a copy of anyone, that she envied him and his simple lifestyle, his freedom to do what he wanted. He showed her how to kill a sheep, with its neck held back and blood spurting onto the ground. Then onto the gambrel, the block and tackle, and suspend it from the branch of a tree in the yard, the dogs yapping for the bits that would come their way. Cut and stand back for the spill of the guts onto the dirt, cut and punch for the removal of the skin. Hang it overnight and hope the flies don’t get it, but if they do, scrape away the maggots. Yvette loved every minute of it. Evan stopped dropping his eyes away from her when he spoke. He didn’t have the words to say anything about feelings, love, relationships. He had to keep it impersonal, so he spoke about the world around him, showed her things, and when he ran out of things he knew, he made up stories.’
‘How do you know all this? I can’t imagine your uncle confided in you, in such detail. Or are you making it up?’
‘No, I’m not making it up—and you’re right, he wouldn’t have dreamed of talking about any of this. In those days I’d visit him quite often on my way to town, or on my way back. He had an outside fire pit, and we’d spend a lot of time around that fire—now, it seems like hours on end, whole afternoons—drinking tea, talking about all sorts of unimportant things. And Yvette was there, part of that time. I don’t remember her saying very much.’
‘Okay. So what were the stories he made up?’
‘Oh, about everything, but mostly to do with what’s around here, natural things. About flowers and the Aboriginals, the ocean, how to train a horse, the value of boiled food, where rain came from—the spouts of whales— what the stars signified. She would smile at him and nod encouragement. He looked after her and then one morning she was gone. No words. No note. There was a circus in town—this is true—I think she wanted to be a juggler. When she left, the stuffing was knocked out of him, you could see. When I called around to visit, there would be nobody home. The ute would be parked in the shed. The doors of his little house, his shack, would be open and the chooks strutting around inside. I would chase them out and shut the door and sit on the steps and wait for him. I knew he would be home before dark. I think it frightened him. If I asked him what he’d been doing, he’d say, “Nothing. Walking. Looking at things.” He would never talk about Yvette, except to say that she’d stayed for a while, and then she’d gone. Sometimes when I was driving past I would see him out in the paddock with his dogs and the small flock of sheep. I didn’t know what he was doing.’
‘Is he still alive, your uncle?’
‘No. But he lived until he was nearly ninety. As far as I know, there were no other visitors allowed to stay. You’d see him around, walking along a road miles from anywhere, sometimes down at the coast. He was always moving as if he had to be somewhere, soon. He didn’t amble.’
‘I can understand that. If there is no purpose, you have to create one. What happened to his farm?’
‘Some developer bought it. At the moment it’s planted in blue gums. The next step, I suppose, will be five-acre lots, or less. Get away from it all, come to suburbia in the bush.’
‘Do you think we’re safe, here at the coast? No more subdivisions?’
‘Probably.’
‘I think I’ll get another dog. It’s been a while. You remember Kipper, the Jack Russell I inherited from Oliver? A snakebite.’
‘It’ll happen again. It will chase snakes and die.’
She rose and stretched, and his eyes followed the outline of her body.
She turned to him with a smile. ‘Do you think there may be some family resemblances here, with you and Evan and his awkwardness with women?’
‘What?’
‘Something to think about?’ she asked. ‘I must be off; my shed could do with some attention.’
‘You should stay and have something to eat, wild fish and wild vegetables. Whaddaya say?’
She paused, looking at him, her face expressionless. ‘That’s very kind. Fish, I love. Could eat it until the bulls come home.’
‘Cows,’ said Tinny. ‘You catch a lot yourself?’
‘Enough to keep me going, and sometimes extra—for smoking, pickling.’
‘Ah, so you’re into value-adding?’
‘When I get the chance.’
‘Me too. The ever-resourceful herring.’
‘People,
’ said Greta. ‘Isn’t it people who are resourceful?’
‘I s’pose so.’
Greta sat there while Tinny and his boys set about preparing the meal. She realised that it was a familiar routine for them. Tinny turned to Skel, who was sitting at the table, his eyes following the conversation. ‘O silent one, I think we could add to this,’ he said, pointing to the salad bowl. ‘More lettuce?’
Skel rose immediately, picked up a colander and walked outside. Tinny turned to his other son. ‘Rock, if you’ve finished washing those sweet little potatoes, you could put them on to boil. Okay?’
Tinny commenced muttering, half-singing, ‘I’m a weak one, oh yeah, but a willing one, oh yeah …’
Rock looked at Greta. ‘This is what he does,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing he likes listening to himself.’
Tinny started shuffling around the kitchen bench. ‘Baby, just you wait and see, I’ll be there, oh yeah, I’ll be there …’
Skel came back in with a bowl full of lettuce and handed it to Tinny. ‘You do it, Skel,’ his father said. ‘You finish off the salad—I’ll cook the fish.’
Greta smiled at them, happy to be in their company. She liked the energy, the friendly byplay, and she knew the ‘Real Wild Child’ Tinny was riffing off. She also knew Suzi Quatro’s ‘The Wild One’, and she wondered about herself. Was it true that all her life she wanted to be someone? Who was she trying to be in this strange corner of the world? Was she really a wild one, or did she belong elsewhere, in a city like Hamburg or Berlin? Should she live like her sisters, who had so shocked her when she discovered the husband of one of them was having an affair with the other sister, and both of them now had a child by him?
Tinny was asking her something. ‘Inside or out? Where do you prefer to eat?’
‘What are the mosquitoes like around your place?’
‘Never see ’em,’ he said.
The boys looked at each other. ‘That’s because—’
‘Out we go,’ said Tinny, grabbing plates and knives and forks as he went. ‘Rock, potatoes. Skel, salad. I’ll bring out the fish. Greta, can you grab the condiments?’
‘Condiments,’ said Rock.
It was perfectly still and the mosquitoes began troubling her bare feet as soon as she sat down. ‘I’ll get some Scram,’ said Rock. ‘They don’t go near him because his skin’s like leather. You couldn’t bang a nail in it.’
Skel passed the potatoes, then the butter and pepper and salt. ‘These come from our garden,’ he said.
‘I’m very impressed,’ said Greta. ‘All this produced by yourselves.’
Skel nodded. ‘Most of it.’ Then he passed the salad.
‘You gonna stay in these here parts?’ said Tinny.
‘That’s the plan—at the moment,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any desire to go back to Europe, Germany, but the north, up north, that’s something different. I keep thinking about it.’
‘Oh? Like everybody else down south, come winter?’ ‘Yes—and no. I don’t really enjoy the winter, but I like it up there when it’s really hot, when the heat shimmers. Then I feel alive.’
‘Kills a lot of people,’ said Tinny. ‘It’s too much for them. Some of ’em go a bit mad. Troppo. Others just die, slowly, from the inside.’
‘You have spent time there?’
‘Yep. Five years in the mines. Driving a truck. Boring as shit. But like everyone knows, they pay you a shitload to be bored. So I did it. That’s before I settled down here, with my wife and family. Now it’s only family, isn’t it, boys?’
They both nodded. ‘Yeah, Tinny,’ said Rock. ‘Greta doesn’t want to know your hard-luck stories.’
‘Greta, eh?’
‘That’s her name,’ his son replied.
‘Oh? Not like Prudence Peaches.’
Rock did not answer. Skel wanted to ask Greta if she would like some more potatoes, or salad. Rock said, ‘Would you like the condiments, Greta?’
Tinny looked at him, then sprang to his feet, standing straight. ‘Shall I cook some more fish?’ he said.
Later, when the boys were inside doing the dishes, he asked Greta how it was that she was living in Australia. She explained that she’d come to Sydney University from Hamburg as a postgraduate student, and she’d completed a PhD in Australian Studies. ‘I was what you call a mature-age student,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I felt I had something to prove, but that, I suppose is another story … My thesis was about the land, arid land, how it was used traditionally and how we might learn from that for how we use it today. The focus was on the Pilbara.’
‘So, the environment and the Aboriginal people. Real popular topics in Australia.’
‘I know, it’s a struggle—but not only here.’
She sat in silence; she’d been here before, this question and answer, but with someone else. Then she realised it was Oliver, the first time she’d met him.
‘Sounds like a strange topic for a German,’ said Tinny.
‘Everybody says that,’ she replied. ‘I suppose it’s true. My interest started with the literature, Australian novels, or even before then. I got more and more taken with the descriptions of landscape—the openness, the isolation, the intensity of the desert. Very different from the Black Forest! I read people like Patrick White and Randolph Stow, who described vast, threatening environments, and people who were at the edge of society—often the edge of themselves, if that makes any sense. Then they went in, to the centre of the land and, maybe, themselves. I wanted to experience that. And in a small way, I did …’
She hesitated, uncertain about what else she wanted to say. Then she smiled at him. ‘Be warned, once I start on this, I don’t stop! But I will.’
‘And then you came down here?’
‘Yes. I didn’t walk like an explorer. I drove overland, in stages, coast to coast in the end. Then to Perth, via the Pilbara. Oliver was kind enough to offer me a place where I could write—a sort of refuge, I suppose. And I’m still here, which surprises me in some ways.’
He heard the catch in her voice, saw her lips quiver. For a while there was silence.
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘there was the fire. Our house, Oliver’s house, was burned down. And although it didn’t kill him, not at first—he wasn’t too badly hurt—you could see it knocked something out of him. He struggled, became hollow. To himself—and me. Then—I think his immunity was very low—he caught some virus, then he got pneumonia, refused to go near a doctor, and died not long after going into hospital. I don’t think he wanted to live. I don’t think he found what he was looking for here, whatever that was. I wasn’t there at the end. It was very difficult, hearing about his death …’
They sat there, looking into the night sky. Greta pulled on her jacket; it was starting to get cold. She didn’t tell Tinny how guilty she felt, about leaving to go back up north when Oliver was clearly not well. She felt she would probably never get over his death. It felt like a punishment for possessing a wayward heart, a punishment that was thoroughly justified. She made no mention of Marvyn.
Sixteen
They had gathered sticks dry and white as old bones to build their fire. A wind had sprung up from the east, bitterly cold. ‘It is a wind,’ she said, ‘that cuts into you. Through the flesh and into the bone. Ein bitterkalter Wind.’
Marvyn pulled his beanie lower and hugged himself. ‘We’ll need a pile of wood. This stuff burns too quickly.’ In the dry riverbed there was some protection. They placed stones around the fire, then balanced the wire grill over the top. They had some potatoes to boil that weren’t too warby and Marvyn’s uncle had given them some kangaroo hunks which he called steaks. Light was fading quickly from the land and sky. She said, ‘Here everything goes on forever.’
‘Not the light,’ he replied.
Greta pushed the coals in from the edge and fed the fire. ‘You feel a need for something to make sense of it all. There are no streets, no houses, no music, no people. You and me and this fire, and the
n—there must be something else. In the city there is always something else, and so you forget.’
‘That’s where gods and spirits come in,’ he said.
‘For some people. For others it’s just more. Always more.’
They cooked their food and sat, staring into the flames. There was a long silence. ‘The smoke from the fire,’ she said, ‘smells like perfume. Do you think it’s sandalwood we’re burning?’
Marvyn did not respond. ‘Soon you will go back again, to that world where you say you forget.’
‘It’s a difficult choice,’ she replied. ‘I left in a hurry. Oliver was not good. I should get back.’
‘You belong there.’
‘Sometimes I do. Not only there. Here, too.’ She wanted to say, especially with you, but it was too hard for both of them. ‘You will come down, too? Go back to school, to study, like you said?’
‘That’s the plan. Not yet. My gran, she needs me. She’s sick with the diabetes. No one else to help her. Not now.’
He meant after his brother’s death. Family and death and dying. Corey had plans. He reckoned he knew how to make a bomb, and Greta believed him. He said he’d go out with a bang and the whitefellas would start to take notice. The Wadjelas, they’d sit up and take notice when he blew the fuckers to kingdom come. It would be the beginning of a war. For too long they’d shut up, rotting away in their camps. Nothing but a problem to themselves and everybody else. It was too late to change: the balance had tipped and now it was a long slide to a bottom, beyond anything you could imagine. Some of the whites in town said Corey was nothing, a black cunt. ‘I thought you liked black cunt,’ he’d replied. ‘I’m your bro, man—didn’t you know?’ And they punched the shit out of him. Corey had visions that he jumped at. He saw things. In the end, Marvyn cradled him in his arms, crying like a baby.
‘He would have done it, you know. He reckoned he’d start with the cop shop in town, then move to the big city, parliament. No one would know it was him. A fucken stupid boong. Impossible. For once, he would be invisible.’
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