She launches into her questions, ‘Have you ever . . .?’ but her eyes flick down to the name printed on the card: ROBERT L. PETTERGREE. She breaks off and looks up at the man, who has an ordinary, tired sort of face and is swaying a little on his feet.
‘Mr Robert Pettergree? You are Mr Robert L. Pettergree formerly of the Better Farming Train?’
The man’s eyes roll a little from side to side. ‘That’s right,’ he says, not meeting her gaze.
Sister Crock purses her lips for a minute and thinks. It’s not unheard of. There was a circular about impostors from the Director General of Recruiting. Unfit men sometimes paid a mate to do the medical for them so they could get the post-war pension. But this case isn’t about money. From what she knows of Robert Pettergree he’d be repulsed by the idea of scamming money from the government. And it isn’t about age. She accepted Hec Bowd, who has a good ten years on Robert Pettergree. Sister Crock reasons, correctly, that he must have a physical condition that prevents him from standing before her naked. She goes on to imagine, incorrectly, an intimate affliction – a botched circumcision or the like, rather than the more mundane truth of a pigeon chest. And although she thinks briefly of Jean alone in some awful farmhouse surrounded by sandy waste (she has been influenced here by Mr Ohno’s letters – of course she read them all) she respects Robert for his stand and she likes the idea of being in on it. Part of her would like to watch Les Noy’s face as she reveals him as a fake, but a bigger part of her is flattered to be part of something so male, so larrikin, so daring.
Sister Crock winks at Les Noy.
‘Stand against the measure please, heels touching.’ She slides the stick into position. ‘Funny, isn’t it, Mr Pettergree? You seem to have lost some height in the Mallee.’
— 29 —
THE MALLEE SUNSET
Some men don’t take the seven days to fix up their private affairs. Some go straight away, hitching a ride on the recruiting train to the next major town and then changing for the city. These are the men Mr Plattfuss calls publicly, ‘economic recruits’, and privately, ‘five-bob-a-day murderers’. Their enlistment orders direct them to come in working clothes and bring their own cutlery. Most wear the only clothes they own and are lucky to carry a rusty penknife in their pocket.
Robert wears his good blue suit. His wedding suit. He left without telling me and I wouldn’t have known but Sister Crock noticed him waiting around with the other men as they packed up, and she sent Mr Plattfuss out in the Clectrac with a message. I was so shocked by the news I shut the door in his face. He took off straight away so as not to miss the train, which meant I had to run across the paddock to Ivers and get Elsie to drive me to the station. Once I was settled in the front seat and my heart had stopped pounding I knew I wasn’t going to plead. There was no point in dragging him back to face the failure. He’d found some new ideas to deceive himself with and they didn’t include me. But I wanted to see him. I wanted to hold him and smell his skin, feel his stubble and the flushed heat of his face against my cheek. I wanted to imprint him on me, to make a last physical memory to draw upon in my grieving.
Elsie drove like an invalid, gripping the wheel as if she was trying to squeeze the life out of it. As we rounded Mt Wycheproof I could already see the engine rolling slowly south, a soft glove of steam trailing behind it.
‘Sorry, too late, love,’ Elsie said, but she kept driving and didn’t stop until the car was stalled over the tracks. We watched the train roll further and further away from us. Some of the men waved from the windows – one lost his hat to the wind. For a few seconds all of our gazes intersected as we watched the hat surf the breeze. It looped and danced and then fell suddenly sideways, landing on its crown in a breath of pink soil.
I didn’t see Robert. But he wouldn’t have been waving. He wouldn’t have been looking out of the windows. We watched as the train lost its shape and dipped over the horizon. I wept a little then, but a truck drove up fast behind us with its horn blaring and Elsie had to put her foot down.
We went to the butcher’s. Elsie didn’t want to waste a trip into town. Then she dropped me home. She patted my shoulder as I reached for the door handle. ‘I’ll send Bill over to help with the heavy things.’
‘Pardon?’
‘For moving. With your husband gone you’ll be moving. I’ll send Bill over.’
Will padded around the side of the house to greet the car. He’d just woken up and his long snout broke into a toothy yawn.
‘I’m not moving, Elsie. He chose to leave, it doesn’t mean I have to.’ I hadn’t thought this through at all but speaking it made it clear. I would stay.
Elsie shrugged and brushed an imaginary spot from the sleeve of her dress. ‘Whatever you say. This is no place for a woman on her own, but whatever you say.’
I patted Will then I ate an orange and slept for a while. When I woke I thought I could hear someone playing the piano – the repeated tinkly jumble, just like Abe walking up and down the keyboard with his three tabby legs and one white leg, but it was only the wind rolling an empty beer bottle backward and forwards against the step.
Then I went for a walk across the paddocks. I walked in the wheat and remembered what Robert had told me about the break. How each morning close to harvest time the men would walk out into the paddocks, break a wheat stem and listen for a particular sound – a clean dryness – that meant the wheat was ready to harvest. I thought of all of the men of the Mallee alone in the early morning listening to the sound of a stem snapping – the sharp dry sound of it amplified across the paddocks, joining up from farm to farm, coming together distinctly so the townsfolk in their beds would be woken by it. And that everyone would know, instantly, that the pattern of our days was about to change from growing to harvest.
The wheat that is left in our paddocks is poor. There are patches of rust and thin patches where the seed has failed to strike. I am not sure what will happen when it is just left like this, how long it will live, how quickly the other plants will move in to replace it.
I make only two decisions. The first is to ask Ollie Bowd to stay. I can teach her to sew on her old Singer and she can help me with the farm. Perhaps together we can grow a different crop – something that belongs here. And I will go to Tatura and visit Mr Ohno – fraternise a little with the enemy. I would like to bring him here and show him the farm. Show him that I didn’t die in the sandy waste and that perhaps there is something here for me after all.
I take off my shoes and stockings and walk back to the house. The sun is setting but the soil is still warm beneath my feet. In the Mallee there is nothing in between the sun and the soil. It is just like the picture on the boxes of raisins and oranges – strong tentacles of light radiating out in a perfect circle.
The sun sinks lower. A last golden slab of light glances my arm and sweeps warmly down to my feet. Then the air chills quickly. I open the kitchen door and go inside.
FULLY BOOKED
Carrie Tiffany on Reading
Awards and Recognition
READ ON
The Books That Changed Me
The Book Group: Reading Guide and Questions for Discussion
Discover more at
picador.com/40
Carrie Tiffany on Reading
I learnt to read in the desert. I was twenty years old and working as a park ranger in central Australia. I lived in a silver caravan stumped up with old house bricks. During the day I emptied the rubbish bins, or went on patrol, or took tourists on guided walks, or shot feral cats. At night I read books.
Books were scarce in the desert. The national park I worked on was serviced by a tourist resort that sold fly spray and wafer-thin boomerangs made in China. It did not sell books. The nearest books were in a library four hundred kilometres away. I rang the library and joined up as a remote reader. Books would be sent out to me every month on one of the tourist buses. I couldn’t access the catalogue so a librarian would choose the books on my behalf. My librari
an was called Merv. I wrote him a note with a summary of my tastes. But I was twenty – it was the summary of a taste for something I had never eaten.
The books arrived one afternoon on a Greyhound bus with a dozen Swedes, some Germans and Japanese. I was still in my ranger uniform and it went badly. The tourists thought I had come to meet them, not to collect a box of books, so I had to explain. They nodded and smiled. They wanted to see the books. I held each one in front of me for a few seconds while they squinted at the covers and mouthed the titles. They looked disappointed. It was the wrong detail in the holiday stories tourists tell about rangers. I should have been collecting medical supplies, or an important part to repair the two-way radio. I took the books back to my caravan and turned on the air-conditioner. Turtles of the Top End, Practical First Aid, Leyland Brothers Trekabout and Thea Astley’s The Well Dressed Explorer.
I read so as not to feel alone, and to escape the heat. There were months of 40-degree days. The air felt too hot to ingest – like it was pulsing off metal. I sniffed and panted. The blood vessels in my nostrils hardened and sprung leaks. My pockets were full of rusty tissues. When I washed the blood stains from my shirts and hung them on the line, they snap-dried in seconds.
I rationed The Well Dressed Explorer. Fifteen pages in bed at night, three with breakfast. When I came back to my caravan after a day’s work I felt a surge of relief that The Explorer was still there, high and dry on its scatter of toast crumbs. I sent Merv a note asking for more stories like Astley’s. The next Greyhound bus brought Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead and Patrick White.
I didn’t read in front of the other rangers, and I certainly didn’t talk about reading. We talked about the day we were in, and the days immediately before and after. The roster was ten days on, four days off, so we talked about where we were in the roster and if we would go to town on our days off. As I came to the end of a ten-day roster I would use a pocket calculator to see if I had enough pages to cover my days off. I could not imagine a day when I did not read.
There were real stories in the desert. Stories as engaging as anything I was reading, but somehow their very realness prevented me from entering them. An Anangu woman I worked with told me the story of her life in a liquid mixture of English and Pitjatjantjara. The woman wasn’t exactly from the country of this national park, but some other country a few hours’ drive away. She had come here as a teenager and was taken in by a white man working as a mechanic at one of the roadhouses. She kept the man’s house and had two children. The mechanic was a short-termer – a man from down south who’d come to the territory to make money and escape for a while. When he left he took the children but not their mother.
The Anangu woman didn’t know where they had gone, or how she might follow them. She had never been more than a few hours from the mission she was born on. She couldn’t read, or dial the numbers on a telephone. She went to the courthouse (next to the library) in the town four hundred kilometres away to ask the judge to return her children, but crippled with fear and shyness, she was unable to say their names. She moved back into the Aboriginal community and eventually married again. She lived on the fringe of the two worlds – working with the whites as a ranger during the day, living in the community at night.
Once we went on patrol together and she showed me some of her country. I felt intensely uncomfortable. I was being shown only by default. I was being shown the country that was meant for her children. Sometimes when I went to meet the Greyhound bus she came with me. I collected my books and she searched the faces of the tourists – hoping to collect her children.
I read so I didn’t have to see what was in front of me. This was nothing new. As a teenager I used reading as a weapon against my mother. I chose books on the basis that she couldn’t pronounce the name of the author. The Russians got a good go – Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn. And I liked thickness. Great dense loaves of books that made my mother’s Georgette Heyers and Mills and Boons look like white-bread slices. We were a television house, not a book house. The great writers of my family’s heyday were TV comics such as Dave Allen and the Two Ronnies. My father’s only books were car-servicing manuals and a couple of leather-bound Dickens he had bought in a junk shop just before we left England. My father figured he’d make a serious profit by selling the second-hand Dickens in Australia. Three months later, when our shipping container arrived, my father was already an Australian. I unwrapped the books from our winter sheets and placed them on a shelf in my bedroom, where they gave off an unmistakable smell of England – of gravy.
I read to protect myself against the dark. During the day I told the tourists about the rich nocturnal life of the desert. I described pythons chaining across the cooling sands, bilbies emerging from their burrows to feed in the starlight, owls coasting on thermals between the dunes. But the nights inside my caravan were tame. The stale air rotated backwards and forwards through the air-conditioner. The only sound was the turning of pages, the rearranging of limbs and pillows, and an occasional break for tea. I did not like the gap of time between reading and sleep. The re-embodying act of closing the book and turning off the light was jarring and left me feeling suspended and uncomfortable.
I read of one landscape and lived in another.
On my twenty-first birthday Merv sent me a card saying he was taking me to England. George Eliot, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, the Brontës. My country. I read of moors, fens, dells and heaths. Sometimes there were strange echoes between what I read and what I was doing. I read Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native in a bird hide with blood on my hands. We were researching the wedge-tail eagles that flew up and down the highways feeding on road-kill, and in the process often becoming road-kill themselves. A lump of horsemeat was staked out near a road and the rangers took turns recording observations in a tiny hide dug into the ground and covered with sticks and spinifex. Each ranger took a four-hour shift writing down how many eagles arrived and how long they fed for. When the horse meat ran out a new fetid and maggoty lump had to be dragged out from under a tarpaulin some distance away.
The eagles were fast and vicious. Their feathers stuck together in greasy clumps. They had sharp beaks and huge drumstick legs. Once a group had gathered they fed and fought each other. I wrote my observations every twenty minutes or so, but the rest of the time I made a pillow from the red sand and rolled onto my back to read.
I read about Diggory Venn, Thomas Hardy’s reddleman in The Return of the Native who digs up red clay to make dye for sheep’s wool. The clay seeps into his skin, leaving a permanent red stain. Venn is a native of Edgon Heath, a desolate flatland in Hardy’s Wessex. When I rolled over to check the eagles through the viewing slit in the bird hide my eyes took a few seconds to re-adjust, to push back the image of Diggory Venn the reddleman. I returned The Return of the Native to Merv at the library with blood smears on many of the pages from where I had touched the horsemeat. I didn’t feel especially guilty and it was beyond me to explain.
I read so I didn’t have to think about where I was, or why I was there, or what I would do next.
I read to meet people, and to avoid meeting people. When I stood in front of a group of tourists to talk to them about the desert I imagined them as characters in books that I had read. I saw them on the page with their back-stories, the plot points that had led them to be standing at that place on that day. I wondered how people could be written.
I read to be seduced. Merv went on a librarians’ study tour of Paris. He sent me Hugo, Dumas and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I fell badly for Flaubert. I read Madame Bovary three times. It was hard to put back on the bus. I noticed the nametag of the girl serving behind the counter at the roadhouse – Emma. She wore blue eyeshadow and Australian-flag earrings, but I still looked at her anew.
In the nineteenth century Flaubert’s book about Emma Bovary coined a medical condition; an excessive dreaminess in women was termed Bovarysme. I suspected I was the only ranger in the Australian desert suffering from Bovar
ysme.
The French books had advertisements in the back for other titles. I liked the sound of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I wrote a request to Merv and he obliged. I was late for the bus and my books had been left on the side of the road. Not the one book by the writer Proust that I had expected, but seven – a great bale of books tilting in the afternoon sun.
Sometimes a story from the day attached itself to the book I was reading at night, and I felt the book and the story were in conversation through me – that I spent the day switching eerily between the two. I was reading Capricornia by Xavier Herbert and working to build a walking track with my friend, the Anangu woman. My friend talked about her daughter. Her daughter was grown up now, somewhere down south, and my friend wondered if she had her own children and what they would be like. Capricornia ends when the body of a pregnant Aboriginal girl is discovered in an empty water tank. The girl had hidden in the tank out of fear her child would be taken away. As my friend talked of her daughter I could see the desiccated body of the girl in the tank – the desperate marks her fingernails had made as she scratched at the rusty corrugated iron. It was too hot to be building a walking track. My friend’s story, with the images from the book attached, was too much for me. I said I wasn’t feeling well. I said we should knock off early.
Reading in the desert is not the same as reading in the classroom or at a university. My knowledge of the world, of history and politics and geography, was poor. Everything to me was at the same time both fictional and real.
After a few years I left my job as a park ranger in the desert and went back to England to visit my relatives. I was in London during December and had a few days to kill before Christmas. I was reading the Latins then – humid books by García Márquez and Allende and Paz, but I was thinking about Thomas Hardy. I went to the ticket office at the tube station and asked how I would get to Wessex. One British Rail employee consulted another and then another. A young Indian woman finally broke it to me gently. The Wessex made famous by the English writer Thomas Hardy was not a real place. It was a place only in books. It was not possible to go there.
Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Page 17