by Kim Kelly
‘Well, hurry up then,’ I tell him, nodding across the trail. ‘Go.’
And he looks across the trail too, into the bush. Helplessly. ‘Where?’
‘You are joking.’ But he’s not. Ever the devil-may-care radical, aren’t you, until we stray too far from the cricket green. What was I thinking, asking him to leave Brisbane with me in the first place? I wasn’t thinking at all. I was mad; I am not now. ‘Just bloody go – anywhere.’
He rubs his beard, as near to embarrassed as he ever gets, as well he should be: he even has a lavatory in the main house at the Swamp, first thing he did when he inherited the place as a token of his grandfather’s pity, and an eternal font of amusement for Susan: it’s the only palatial part of the old relic. He says: ‘But there might be snakes.’
There might. Undoubtedly there are. I saw a beautiful diamond python sunning itself further up the bank when we got here. There is also a nasty load of spitfire caterpillars in the gum leaves above him right now. But I won’t argue with him further by pointing out that there is more chance of one of them falling down the back of his collar, or a bull ant crawling up his trousers, than a snake showing any interest in him, or that it is in the very nature of snakes to make every endeavour to avoid him absolutely. He’s still terrified of them, obviously – barely ever set foot in a cane field at least partially, if not entirely, because of this phobia. I give in quickly: ‘All right, I’ll come with you.’
I signal to the old man that we’re going for a walk in the woods, and we soon find a suitably dense boronia for Cos to go behind. I crush a handful of its leaves as I wait for him, breathe in the scent – of camphor, ledifolia then – and with it comes that note of rosemary and something … Everything is redolent with her scent, it seems. All the forest breathes out her scent, and I am as impatient as she is to be away now too – deeper into this forest, beyond willows and poppies, where the flora will be pristinely rugged, clinging to the walls of the gorge, to the mean soil. I take in another breath full of the earthy perfume, and with it comes renewed determination: when we stop for lunch, I’m going to have another go, I’m going to convince her to go for a walk with me. If I’m alone with her, I’ll be forced to –
‘What the flaming deuces is that?’ Cos bowls backs into me, midstream, pointing uphill a way to what appears to be an outcrop of granite. But it’s not a rock; it’s a cairn of stones, with a cross set in the top of it. A gravesite.
‘Poor bugger,’ I say to this lonely soul. A miner, perhaps, out of luck and out of time; I’ve seen these kinds of graves before: along the Kuranda railway, in the rainforest of the far north; and one as far again south, in the wind-torn mallee scrub outside Castlemaine, by a decaying bark hut. Sad little memorials to the gold rushes, there’d be hundreds of them across the country; thousands possibly. I tell Cos: ‘It’s just someone’s grave.’
‘I’ll probably die on this road too, Wilber.’ Cos is in a hurry to button up. ‘And you’ll bloody well carry me down off it. You’ll bloody well carry me all the way home.’
‘I will, Cos. I promise you.’ And I’ll share a toast with your mother, too, for all the suffering that ended here.
I’m already halfway back to the horses; the buggy is coming onto the Track and Berylda glances over the carriage rail, the briefest hurry-up of a glance; Buckley lifting his hat to me: ‘We’ll find yous at the river crossing.’
I nod in reply, but I’m still looking at Berylda, at the back of her hat; wanting her to glance at me again, even as I’m taking the reins back over Jack’s head.
‘Ben – whoa.’ Cos is shuffling up behind me, still tucking in his shirt. ‘Steady on, old matey.’
‘Steady on?’ I reach for Rebel’s reins now too, the quicker to be going; left to Cos, we’d be here half an hour. I tell him: ‘Get back in the saddle – now. Or you can stay here with old matey over there.’ I nod back at the grave.
He heaves himself up, and then he says: ‘I mean steady on with that girl. Don’t be so quick to jump to for her.’
‘Why not?’ I don’t hide my annoyance with him at this. ‘Have you decided you don’t like her either?’
‘It’s not a matter of like,’ he says. ‘I don’t know that she’s the chasing kind. Hold your horses on her, that’s all. She’s a strange one, not normal, and you’re –’
‘Not normal? Unlike you?’ I have a vague recollection of him having said something similar as we stumbled back to the pub last night; what did he call her? I can’t remember at this minute. I tell him now: ‘You think she’s not normal because she’s not shown the slightest bit of interest in you.’
‘Aw.’ He smacks his hand to his heart as though I’ve shot him, then he warns me again: ‘I only say you should be careful, Ben. Don’t go too off your kadoova on her. She’s just a girl.’
‘Just a girl?’ As if I chase skirt the way he does; as though I ever would. He’s cranked me up properly now; I say: ‘Just a girl – like Susan?’
I kick my horse off towards the trail, not waiting for a reply, and I’m so cranked at that, as I pass the buggy, I forget to look at her at all. What does Cos know about women, really? What do I know? Nothing.
His horse follows mine and after a minute or two he’s in my ear again, still thudding around in the saddle, as he says: ‘I love Susan.’ His breath catching on every word.
I look over at him: sweating, hopeless mess, as blithered as I am when all is said and done, and I say: ‘I know you do.’
‘Poor Susie.’ He laughs. But he means it. He couldn’t tell you why he is unfaithful to her, any more than he could tell you why he drinks, or paints, or generally confides more in Kevin the taxidermied curator than anyone else on earth. I don’t know why I do anything I do either. You can only blame your father and your family so much, can’t you.
Our horses settle into stride together, and Cos settles back into amiable whingeing: ‘Moses in a roasting pan, it’s getting hot, isn’t it.’
And I have to agree: it is suddenly hot now. As the sun climbs so does this heat: exponentially, it seems. I fish around in my satchel for my hat. The cicadas are going for it as the road begins to climb too, winding round the side of yet another hill. I look down to the Macquarie below, a blue ribbon now, almost as blue as the sky. From this distance, perhaps three hundred feet up, the fine new-growth needles of the river oaks appear as a copper haze along both sides. And when I look up again we are surrounded by hills, precipitous now and closely set. Endless hills, and they are climbing ever higher too. Climbing into the sky. Two wedge-tail eagles gyre halfway to heaven above us, hunting together, as the male and the female often do – enjoying the view. This is breathtaking country. So magnificent, I could almost forget why I’m here altogether.
Bloody sheila.
Thanks for that intrusion, Pater.
Don’t listen to him, Ben.
No, Mama, I don’t. But I wonder what the bastard’s doing now. Does he miss her? At all? Or is he too preoccupied with his embarrassment that I’m not abroad with the QMI, chasing Dutch farmers through the African bush? What for? Diamonds and gold for Empire? Glory? Honour? Queensland beef prices will be at the bottom of it, whatever his motivations are.
Coward, he called me like a shot in the back as I walked away from him. What would he know about courage?
‘Not exactly a popular route, is it?’ Cos adds beside me, mindlessly bored already.
And I laugh; God, but he can make me laugh, make me glad he is my friend. I ask him: ‘Aren’t you at all inspired by the scenery?’
‘Not really, no.’ A stupid question, of course. The only river he paints is the Brisbane, as fat and lazy as him, and his landscapes are most often of human geographies: of pin-headed bush cockies tipping cyanide tins into waterholes; black trackers leashed to constables pursuing Kanakas through the cane; the never-ending undulations of Susan’s breasts. His hanging offences, as he
calls them; his commentary on the sins of all our fathers – as disreputable and out of rhythm as everything else about him. And as concealed: none of them ever leave the studio.
But he offers now: ‘I’ll make some drawings of the girl for you, though. She is very pretty, I’ll give her that.’
‘Will you just?’ I smile. This is an apology, of sorts, I suppose, and I accept it: a sketch of her from him would be good, too. ‘I’ll be sure to snatch it from you before you give her a curly moustache, then.’
He ignores that; too much whingeing yet to do: ‘How far do you reckon now?’ he asks me, looking painfully into nowhere – and blindly. Across the ravine a landslide gashes the side of a slope like a fresh wound cut into ochre flesh. Ahead, a bridge made of rubble straddles one point of nowhere to the next: who would not wonder at the nerve of the men who built it there? That’s courage.
I look down at the edge of the road here, the sandstone inexorably crumbling towards the Macquarie below, and I can’t resist: ‘Oh, about a four hundred foot drop.’
He sees something now, staring into the abyss: ‘Jesus!’
I gee up Jack to let him go for it, stretch him out, and he brings Rebel with him. The quicker to get to the river crossing too, to her – to try to talk to her again. Courage. That’s all that’s needed here, and I have it.
‘Ben! You mad arse! BEN! ’
I crack Jack on some more and yahoo like Wild Bill, higher and further into the hills, and I’m flying over that bridge: ‘Yee-ha!’
Berylda
‘Hello! Hellooo, Greta Jones!’
My sister was made to lean out of the side of moving vehicles, shouting her name into soulless, stone-faced valleys – as much as I was made to close my eyes for fear of falling headlong into them.
‘Just about there,’ Buckley turns and chuckles – at me – enjoying himself almost as much as Greta is.
I stare hard into the floor of the buggy to try to still this vertigo, reach for Gret’s sketchbook there between our boots, to find a focus. But Gret smacks my hand away: ‘I said don’t peek!’
She’s making me a surprise of the picture she began at the willows and doesn’t want me to see it until she’s finished. I could say don’t worry, I’m sure I won’t see a thing, really, but I can’t speak. I am too fixed once more with listening to the slip of every stone that falls from the edge of the Track into this bottomless valley in our wake.
‘You can look now, scaredy Ryl – we’re going downhill. See?’
I’d rather not, but I glance up again, right into her beaming face, her happiness, telling me: ‘I wish I could be in this shiny, shiny air every day.’
I wish I could tell her, Soon you will, whenever you like. I reach into my pocket for my watch yet again, as if its tiny hands will tell me precisely when. They only tell me it’s not quite twelve o’clock. Lunchtime. My empty stomach groans around the hour.
‘Here we are, misses,’ Buckley says, and I look out at the bush. We are indeed inside it again, rather than above it, and I feel my shoulders relax a little in gratitude. I don’t know how Buckley knows that we could be anywhere, though, through all the sameness of the trees, the forest as thick as thatch, but my stomach groans again, in its own gratitude: I’m so very hungry now I could eat that whole tin of jam – and its label. Sally picks up her step, head high at a jaunty trot; she’s hungry too.
But, ‘Oh!’ the sound leaps from me now as the Turon comes into view and I am on the edge of my seat again as memory floods me. This place, this scene – it’s as if we were here only one summer ago, not five. ‘Gret – look.’ I grasp her arm and point ahead across the river to one tree that stands apart and taller than all the others. ‘That tree over there – do you remember it?’
It’s a huge gum tree, perhaps taller and broader than any I have ever seen, and certainly more striking: a tangle of white limbs streaked with umber, the colour of dried blood. I remember this tree so well, standing guard over the crossing. It must have been here for a hundred years or more: what journeys it must have seen. How wonderful, how substantial it is, as if it somehow marks this way with proof that we were really here.
‘Yes!’ Gret remembers too. ‘That’s where we came down from that very steep part of the Track, so fast, we thought we’d hit it – remember the splash we made when the wheels hit the water?’
I do, suddenly. Yes, I do. Our blouses gaily bespattered. I could almost cry for the fun we had. My skin shivers with that warm, prickling sensation, filling me now from some depth I never knew was there. The oddest sensation yet passes over me. I never cry, for anything, and yet now what is this? This tingling … everywhere. More an aberration of my hunger than anything else, I’m sure. I’m a little dizzy from it. And tired from my sleepless night. So tired.
Sal pulls up suddenly, snorting and stamping, jolting it away, jolting me back into myself. That’s it for her, she’s had enough, too. She’s more than earned her rest. ‘Whoaaa, my girl, that’s the way,’ Buckley coaxes her further along on to the bank, though, into the shade of a stand of those straggly, shaggy trees I don’t know the name of: they look like some sort of dying pine undecided as to whether they might keel over into the water or shimmer away completely in the heat. That sort of tree, like so many trees – the wattle, the waratah, the whatever bush in general – that cause me to wonder, if there is a grand design to this world, why did its maker save the weariest looking ones for this corner of the earth?
Apart from that great umber-streaked gum over there. It’s a wild and gargantuan apparition of a thing. Papa told us a story about it as we picnicked that day, one of his fabulous, spellbinding stories, right here. I can see him twiddling the ends of his moustache comically, rocking on his riding heels. Well, let me tell you a little something for nothing, my lovely ladies … that was the way he always began such tales. Greta had asked what sort of tree it was, why it looked so different from all the other trees, and he’d said it was because it wasn’t a tree at all, but the bewitched spirit of a murdered trooper – someone he’d once known personally, of course, as Papa knew everyone from Newcastle to Narraburra – and whenever gold thieves passed this way, the limbs of the tree would reach out across the water to pluck them up and cast their spoils into the river, back into the water, from whence the treasure came. God, oh God, but I loved my father so. I think perhaps love might have stopped for me that day; that last day in his arms, in this place, looking across the river at this very tree: Don’t you believe me, Ryldy Ryl? Funny little mathemasceptician you are.
‘Hm. Where are our faithful and handsome chaperones?’ Gret is looking about as she hops from the buggy, the contents of her paintbox clattering as her feet meet the ground, and her tone changing as quickly to worry. ‘I can’t see Jack or Rebel, either. They should be here, shouldn’t they? There’s no other way for them to have gone. Where could they be?’ The sudden panic on my sister’s face is the sum of all her loss, our loss, the crime of it: that she should be brought to fear so automatically at a meeting delayed.
As I am, too. Of course our visitors have plunged from a rocky height and disappeared forever into this endless ocean of trees. Even as I say: ‘I’m sure they’re not far, Gret …’
‘Not far at all,’ Buckley’s brick-dust rasp is sure behind us. ‘They’ve gone for a swim, misses, downriver a bit, caught sight of ’em from the road. They’ll have heard us comin’.’
A canter of hooves over pebbles informs us that in fact they have and they did, and that Buckley can apparently see straight through walls of forest.
‘Hey there!’ Mr Wilberry waves from the saddle, from the lead, his hair damp and his shirt buttons half-undone. Walter Scott could not have imagined him at all. One would have to be completely blind to avoid seeing him. I cannot force my eyes away, not this time. My God, the manliness of him. Impressive. Excessively. As he pulls up before us, Jack’s shoulders ripple with a pleasure all
his own too. I imagine he knows he has a man astride him, for once.
‘I must apologise.’ Mr Wilberry is in this instance superbly unapologetic. ‘The water was too much to resist and we stayed far too long in it. Was your journey good?’ he is asking me.
Me.
‘Yes,’ I reply, the journey already forgotten. I am too swept away by wonder, by curiosity, and too suddenly. Even from this height he does not look down upon me; he invites me up to him. How is this possible?
‘Beautiful country.’ He radiates with some beauty deeper than I know; that something I so dearly want: to be, in the world, as he is, with such gentle, rightful liberty. ‘I must thank you for inviting us.’ He is humble once more; hesitant. ‘It’s … hm – invigorating. To be out. And about.’
‘Hm.’ He is a fine human being, uncrumpling a battered hat from his haversack, a Huckleberry slouch of coarse straw. ‘And you must be hungry too,’ I suppose.
‘I’ll try not to choke to death this time, shall I?’ A bass note that seems to prickle up through the soles of my feet. He is the sun under battered Huckleberry straw. He is buttoning up those last two buttons of his shirt, tiny buttons, such a large hand; my heart demands: Don’t do that. And I suspect I am now hungry in ways I have never known before. This is not an invention of my exhaustion, is it? No.
Greta sniggles surreptitiously behind me, behind her hand, a ha-ha dare, before she assures him: ‘I’ll cut the tomatoes this time, Mr Wilberry, don’t you worry. I won’t let my sister near them.’
My face flashes with a dreadful heat as I find my will and reason to turn away now, to fetch the picnic from the buggy, and as I do I see Mr Thompson, waterlogged and weary as the bush, his Panama sat on his head like a wilted lettuce leaf. He is not the effusively obnoxious bon vivant of last night; without his dinner attire and a steady stream of wine, he is thoughtful, and quiet, and he is watching me. Watching over his friend. Measuring me with a cold and sober stare. As well he should.