He was more amused than ashamed of his dream—or thoughts, if they were. He got up to re-tether his horse. She whinnied to see him, and he stroked her muzzle. Theirs was an honest relationship.
On one such occasion he dreamed of someone, he could not at first be certain, this snapshot dream was something of a double exposure, till finally he saw he was sitting beside Helen of the Harelip. They were seated on the brink of a rock pool, its water so clear and motionless they dared not breathe for fear they might ruffle its surface into some ugly and disturbing pattern. Whether the emotions they shared were joyful, it was difficult if not impossible to tell, only that they were united by an understanding as remote from sexuality as the crystal water in the rock basin below.
During his ride it occurred to him that he did not dream of Marcia; he only thought about her, and then coldly, briefly, on the longer, burning stretches of road.
When he had been away a week, Eddie returned to ‘Bogong’. Peggy Tyrrell ran down to the bridge, her bobbled shawl spread like a crow’s wings in flight, her thin black arms flailing at the evening. ‘Mrs Lushington just about threw a fit, Mrs Edmonds says. She’s been lookun for yer. She’s been onter Tumbarumba—Toomut—half the Monarer. Better make yerself good with ’er, love, or you’re a gonner.’
And Prowse came out on the veranda. ‘Nearly got me the sack, you bugger. I told you Marce had taken a fancy.’
‘What about the Golsons?’
Prowse looked down at the meniscus of a slanted whiskey. ‘They drove off,’ he sighed, ‘in the bloody Minerva. There was nobody to make a fourth at bridge.’
After the prodigal had bathed, the manager came into his room. ‘We did miss yer,’ Prowse said. ‘We wondered what ’ud happened to yer—down on the Murray.’ Eddie felt the finger, apparently checking on vertebrae. ‘Could ’uv got murdered or somethun …’
Mrs Tyrrell came in, but retreated on noticing nakedness. ‘Come on, you men,’ she shouted. ‘There’s a shoulder of mutton and baked pumpkun for tea.’
Before obeying her summons, Prowse advised, ‘I tell you, Ed, make it up with Marcia, and make it quick.’
Eddie decided to wait, which was what Marcia herself must have decided.
Denny and Eddie had been moving the wethers from Bald Hill down to the woolshed for crutching the following day. The men’s faces were pale with dust, each a different kind of clown.
‘Ever done any crutchun, Ed?’ Denny sniggered. ‘Break yer bloody back—snippun the dags off a sheep’s arse. Just you wait. You’ll be sore enough termorrer evenun.’
‘Have to get Peggy to rub my back.’
‘Wouldn’ like Peggy. Too bony.’ He hesitated thoughtfully. ‘Missus is bony. But Dot wouldn’t rub, I reckon, even if you asked ’er to.’
Dot’s husband sounded more resigned than sad.
‘You never know if you haven’t asked. You never know of any body what they’ll come at till you’ve tried it on.’
‘You reckon?’
Eddie had developed an affection for his simple mate, which he believed was reciprocated. They were brought closer by the evening light, and on Eddie’s side, the melancholy knowledge that the chasms created by language and class must always keep them apart.
When they had yarded the silly wethers (what was worse, in the presence of sheep Eddie always ended by convincing himself of the silliness of his own existence and human behaviour in general) his mate suggested with furtive pride—Denny did in fact glance over his shoulder, ‘Why dontcher stop off at our place, Ed, an’ drink a beer?’
‘I mightn’t be welcome. Your missus’ll be getting the tea. Or changing a nappy. Or washing one.’
‘Dot’s all right. She don’t wash too many nappies. She ’angs the same one out ter dry. Dot’s not as bad as they make out.’
So Eddie couldn’t let Denny down, the couple of clowns slouching in their saddles as the newcomer had seen the natives on his approach to ‘Bogong’ that first day, only that the native skin was now toned down from bacon to beige.
Despite acclimatisation and acceptance, he experienced a faint tremor of discovery approaching the Aliens’ huggermugger shack, Cortes, as it were, playing on both sides of the fence. But Denny did not notice, which made his mate, whether Cortes or First Clown, the more regretful of his isolation.
Dot came out. She was looking smaller, sharper than on the occasion of their first meeting, during her pregnancy. Tearful then for a moral lapse, she had grown fierce in defence of its fruit. Like the rickety shack she had acquired with marriage, her legitimised child was a property.
Denny quailed somewhat, but found courage to ask, ‘ ’Ow is she?’
‘ ’Ad the colic all evenin’. She’s sleepin’ now.’
The mother might never have seen Eddie before. Dot Allen had probably dismissed him to the limbo of foreigners and amateurs.
‘Thought you was gunner be late,’ she told her husband, ‘when I’ve almost got yer tea ready.’
‘Well, I’m not late, am I? An’ tea’s not ready.’ His burst of logic was unassailable. ‘You know Eddie, Dot. I’ve asked ’im back to drink a beer with us.’
‘Not with me, you haven’t. Haven’t the time for swillin’ beer.’ The shack shuddered as she swept inside.
Denny brought a bottle that had been hanging by its neck at the end of a rope inside the iron water-tank. He ventured into the kitchen and returned with a couple of chipped and stained enamel mugs.
‘No time!’ Dot shouted from within.
The beer was warmer than one would have hoped, and its head rising, slopped over into wasted pools.
Dot called, ‘Hope you men aren’t gunner get drunk an’ wake ’er up.’
‘Not enough ter get drunk on.’
‘I’ve known you do pretty well on a little.’
Encapsulated in evening light, the two friends sat looking out across the plain. From the shack drifted the eternal smells of boiling mutton and burnt cabbage.
‘Don’t wanter wake the baby,’ the mother shouted between bursts of hardware.
The baby had begun, indeed, to cry.
Dot came out. She was carrying a plate, on it a used paper doily she must have scrounged from a great house, and on the doily, some fingers of yellow cheese of varying thickness and length.
‘They say,’ she said, ‘if you eat somethin’ fatty …’
She returned inside. The baby was by now in tongue to split the shack’s buckled boards.
‘There!’ the mother shouted. ‘You’ve waked ’er! I knew you would. Bringin’ back mates. You don’t ’ave no consideration, Denny.’ She choked on that.
Denny was smiling, lips a glutinous mauve, the sunset glinting on spectacles mended with string as grimy-greasy as the wool on a sheep’s back.
‘Wot’s wrong with my choo-choo?’ he called back. ‘My little choo-choo!’
He went inside, and returned with the screaming, congested infant.
Denny sat on the edge of the veranda dandling a tantrum. ‘Choo choo choo!’ At one point his love dribbled down from the violet lips in a slender thread of saliva, while the baby thrashed around, revealing that her nappy was out to dry.
She was a sharp-featured child, as sharp as her mother, but the little scalp already showed a drift of golden down.
Dot had emerged preparing some fresh outburst, only to find the baby laughing up, parrying the last traces of saliva, her tender, gummy smile related at the other end of time to Peggy Tyrrell’s toughened grin.
Dot stood looking down on Denny, on the black, cockerel’s feathers plastered by sweat to a balding skull. ‘He’s good with the baby,’ she conceded. ‘Denny’s good,’ she murmured.
Her person might have trailed after her voice, withdrawing into everyday life from a moment of revelation which was almost inadmissible, if there hadn’t been an intrustion, an active violation of grace.
Eddie was the first to notice the approach of Dick Norton the rabbiter, mounted on his skeletal nag, the rabble
of his mongrel pack at heel.
Dot was not long after in spotting her dad. ‘You keep off!’ she shrieked. ‘We only want peace in this place. Fuck off, dirty old man!’
Though into high summer, the rabbiter was dressed in a cardy the colour of split peas and a cap with ear-flaps in fake fur.
‘I’m yer father, ain’t I?’
‘Yeah, Dadda, we know!’
‘I’d of thought everyone knew about everythink. You’re no saint yerself, Dot.’
‘We try, don’t we?’ Dot screeched. ‘Anyways, from time to time. An’ we’ve got Mr Twyborn ’ere—on wot was a social visit till you showed up.’
Purple in the face, the baby had been handed back by Denny to the mother.
He had risen, very dignified, his head trembling, with its wisps of damp black cockerel’s feathers. ‘Yes,’ he golloped, ‘you fuck orf—fuckun old Dick!’ the spittle flying in all directions.
He whipped inside the shack, returned with a gun, and fired a couple of shots at what was by now practically darkness.
There arose a yelping of dogs, the whinge of a spurred horse. ‘ ’Oo’d want a social visit with a bunch of bastards like youse?’
The baby shrieked worse than ever. Again Denny let off the gun.
There were sounds of retreat. If it hadn’t been for the baby’s screams, silence would have descended on a landscape reduced to formlessness except where the last embers smouldered on a distant ridge.
‘There! There!’ the mother coaxed in a burnt-out voice.
‘Choo choo choo?’ Denny giggled, still exhilarated by his masterful initiative.
Dot sighed. ‘What will Mr Twyborn think?’
She didn’t stop to consider for long. The Aliens were going inside to their overdue meal of boiled mutton and cabbage, or breast.
As Eddie Twyborn untethered his horse and rode away, he wondered whether he wasn’t leaving the best of all possible worlds.
Peggy Tyrrell was waiting for Eddie. ‘You’ve upset ’im,’ she said.
‘Upset who?’
‘Prowse,’ she said. ‘I never seen ’im so upset. Couldn’ eat ’is tea. Went to bed. Thought you must ’uv been throwed again. Or went for a swim and drownded.’
‘It’s not all that late. I stopped off for a beer with Denny.’
‘But you was expected. Mr Prowse is the manager, and responsible for those under ’im.’
Mrs Tyrrell sounded unusually prim. She was on Prowse’s side all right, perhaps with some axe of her own to grind, or perhaps it was only self-righteousness raising its head.
He ate his stuffed mutton flap and would have gone to bed while she scraped the dishes if he hadn’t heard a sighing, a groaning, a jingling of the bedstead, from the manager’s darkened room.
He paused in the doorway before entering his own. ‘What’s wrong, Don? Not sick, are you?’
There was a prolonged silence meant to impress. ‘There’s nothing wrong—Eddie. We were only wonderin’ about you—those who have yer interests at heart.’ A pause, a cough, then the sharp hissing. ‘Cripes, I got a pain in me guts!’
‘What about a tot of bi-carb if I bring it?’
‘Thanks, Ed, it can’t be indigestion. Didn’t eat me tea. Didn’t feel up to stuffed flaps.’ Again a groan, and a jingling of the bed. ‘I never talk about it, but Dad’s old man died of cancer, Eddie.’
Eddie said, ‘See you in the morning, Don.’
‘Don’t think I’m fishing for sympathy,’ the manager called after him. ‘But I can’t say we weren’t worrying about yer.’
As he undressed he could hear a listening. He could almost hear sandy eyelashes thrashing the silences, then after he had put out his lamp, Prowse rising through a jingle before going out to pee off the veranda. He could hear him listening, barefoot on the brown lino, after returning.
When sleep fell on Eddie Twyborn, a penful of wethers milling round him, Marcia was possibly there. Yes. Though in what capacity he could not remember when he awoke to a pale sky and dwindling stars the morning of the crutching.
In the next room the manager must have been lying on his back, while in the kitchen Mother Tyrrell was raking the stove and calling on Our Lady to rid her of her aches.
It was a long day at the shed. At noon Jim the Father brought in a mob of ewes when yesterday’s wethers were barely accounted for.
‘ ’Ow’s yer back doin’, Ed?’ Denny Allen called to his mate.
The manager came and went, more often absent than present, though when there, he would muck in with the men in short ostentatious bursts, impressively muscular in a singlet. ‘Better to get it over—even if it buggers us,’ he advised his team.
Prowse chose the cleaner sheep, Eddie noticed, himself drawn, it appeared, to the daggier ones. It was an aspect of his own condition he had always known about, but it amused him to recognise it afresh while snipping at the dags of shit, laying bare the urine-sodden wrinkles with their spoil of seething maggots, round a sheep’s arse.
At one stage he found he had picked a ewe who must have detached herself from her own mob and joined the wethers. Before becoming fully aware of the difference in sex of the sheep he was handling, he had cut off the tip of the vulva. Nobody noticed his clumsiness or distress. As the day lengthened and the men grew tired, the blood flowed copiously from under the most professional hand. Lacerated beasts were sometimes dismissed with kicks and curses.
At least the sound of snipping soothed, and the smell of tar rising from wounded, blown crotches. Some of the sheep raised their muzzles, baring their teeth in ecstasy or agony at the treatment they were receiving.
From squirming on the greasy slats, they regained a precarious balance as Eddie Twyborn straightened a fastidious masochist’s back. He must have been grinning like a skull. His blisters had burst and become raw patches from manipulating the hand-shears.
Denny laughed. ‘ ’Ow you doin’, Ed feller?’
During one of his appearances Prowse laid a hot, appraising hand on the novice’s back. ‘Eddie ’ud make a professional shearer if he only knew it.’
Towards mid-afternoon the manager decided he did not want the wethers returned to Bald Hill. He told off Eddie to drive them to a rested paddock at some distance, while Jim and Denny, and he in theory, finished crutching the ewes.
‘Can’t write home and say I’m a slave-driver,’ he told the jackeroo, who was by then too dazed to think of an answer.
It was some relief to be off on his own, his back broken, his blistered hands listless on the reins. Released from their recent ordeal, the wethers trotted meekly enough, their heads working as though by strings concealed in their papier mâché armour. In her automatic movements, the mare too, seemed relieved, jingling the metal on her bridle, lowering her head to snort at the dust, prodding stragglers with her muzzle.
An animal acquiescence had descended on all those involved in the migration through the coppery glare of late afternoon, in which, on the other hand, trees were shedding a less passive drizzle of silver light.
They reached the distant paddock, its fence in such poor repair he saw himself returning in a few days to that other back-breaking operation of digging post-holes, tamping down the stones round renewed posts, and straining vindictive wire. In his present exhaustion he accepted the state of affairs with a degree of cynical resignation, slammed and chained the netted gate, and headed for home.
His horse had carried him perhaps a mile when he was overcome by drowsiness. He dismounted, and after tethering the mare to one of her front fetlocks, lay down beneath a tree, on the pricking grass, amongst the lengthening shadows. He did not sleep, but fell into that state between waking and sleeping in which he usually came closest to being his actual self.
This evening he started remembering or re-living an occasion, it was a Sunday afternoon, when he had felt the urge to see his fortuitous mistress. Never in his life had he felt so aggressive, so masculine, or so impelled by the desire to fuck this coarsely feminine woman. He d
eliberately thought of it as fucking, and spoke the word on his way up the hill between the cottage and the homestead. As he walked he was looking down at his coarse, labourer’s boots which he was in the habit of treating with rendered-down mutton fat. The boots matched his intention, just as no other word would have fitted the acts he performed with Marcia, nothing of love, in spite of her protestations. Except on another, more accidental occasion when they had ridden together through the paddocks, sidestepping the imperfect expressions of perfection.
Each incident had taken place so long ago, if not in time, in experience, Eddie Twyborn could only watch them in detachment as he lay dozing or re-living beneath his tree, the face of Greg Lushington, that amiable absentee, re-forming amongst the branches. However intangible, Greg’s presence made his own behaviour the coarser, the more shocking.
The house when he reached it on this Sunday afternoon had about it an air of desertion. A cat raised its head from where it was lying in a patch of winter sunlight. A wiry strand of climbing rose was rubbing deeper the scar it had worn on a corner of painted brickwork.
As he wandered round, considering his plan of attack, chains rattled against kennels, mingling with abortive barks and faint moans of affection for one who had ceased to be a total stranger. He entered by the kitchen door. The servants were gone, either to town or their own quarters. The only life in the living rooms was a stirring of almost extinct coals (on tables, copies of the London Tatler and library books from Sydney which amounted to Marcia’s intellectual life.)
He looked inside her bedroom more cautiously, for fear of disturbing a migraine or a monthly.
Silence and the absence of its owner played on the frustration growing in him.
He flung himself on the bed, of the same oyster- or scallop-tones as those of Marcia his mistress (incredible word). There was Marcia’s familiar scent, not so much a synthetic perfume as that of her body. He lay punching at the down pillows, prising out of crumpled satin handfuls of opulent flesh, until present impotence and an undertow of memory forced him off the bed to rummage through the clothes hanging in the wardrobes.
The Twyborn Affair Page 29