by Miller, Alex
On his way round the perimeter of the tank now, keeping well away from the deep mud near the water, Crofts noticed the station owner’s clothes, half-trodden into the slime. His boss had clearly been in a hurry, if not in a panic, to get to the bloated carcass of the pig. The stockman doubted that there was a straightforward explanation. With Rankin there never seemed to be anyway. He was shocked, in a slightly detached way, by the sight of the station owner lying more than half-drowned in the slime beneath the stinking pig; but he was not deeply worried by it. He did not, after all, see himself spending an indefinite future with Rankin. He rescued him and that was that.
•
The following morning Ward Rankin awoke to the sound of his daughter singing an accompaniment to the radio from a distant part of the house. It was a still, already hot day outside. He sensed that he had slept for a long time and could not tell whether it was morning or late afternoon. He lay quietly, not moving, his thin body tense beneath the sheet. His eyes swam in and out of focus as he gazed through the gauze of the enveloping mosquito net. He was listening, not to the voice of his daughter, but to another, further off, more rhythmically insistent sound—the intermittent reverberation of a steel bar being driven repeatedly and with force into the earth. It was the sound of the stockman working at the shoeing area.
three
The stockman’s accommodation on the Rankin station was a small unlined fibro-cement hut situated some way beyond the machinery shed and about twenty metres from the chook pen. Inside this regulation two-man quarters two iron-framed beds stood one either side of the door. On each bed there was a shabby mattress and one or two dark grey woollen blankets. There was just enough room between the beds for a narrow three-drawer chest, above which a single-paned window now stood wide open—to catch any chance movement in the dead air. A few pieces of clothing and a bridle hung from nails driven into the wall-studs here and there, and from the central beam of the ceiling a bare light bulb dangled on the end of a length of flex.
There was nothing in the hut that might have given a clue to the personality of its occupant—except perhaps an elegantly bound copy of Gulliver’s Travels, lying discarded on the dirty floorboards under one of the beds. The floorboards extended out the door to form a tiny verandah which was pleasantly shaded by the glossy foliage of a large black bean tree, planted there more than thirty years ago by the station owner. Here Alistair Rankin was presently sitting with his back to one of the verandah posts. Cross-legged, with his arms folded tightly against his chest, he was rocking himself slowly from side to side and staring into the shadowy interior of the hut. His nervous gaze flicked repeatedly from his sister to the stockman and back to his sister again. The boy’s eyes were narrowed with resentment and his lips moved silently, mouthing bitter promises.
Janet Rankin was lying on her back on the bed to the right of the door. She was flushed and in an expectant mood. She was wearing her usual summer outfit of a pair of thin cotton shorts and a shirt, with nothing underneath them. The shirt was open; it was more comfortable this way, she claimed reasonably, considering its mere presence enough of a compromise. She would have gone without it altogether if her mother had not seemed prepared lately to engage in a serious fight over how she was to dress. The fact that her mother had gone into Springtown this morning to meet her brother, Gil Sturgiss, at the train station and was not around to do any checking up, added considerably to the intensity of Janet Rankin’s mood. Her mother, whose opinions and motives she considered hypocritical and self-interested, was not out of the way nearly often enough for the girl’s liking.
The bare heel of Janet Rankin’s right foot was poised on the raised knee of her left leg. Looped around her right big toe was a redhide thong that was attached to the thick end of a broken stockwhip. She had unplaited a good length of the whip from the thin end and was using the unravelled strands as make-believe reins. Raising her foot suddenly into the air and thrusting herself up and down on the bed, she roared, in a very good imitation of her father throwing a tantrum while managing a skittish horse. ‘Stea-dy! Steady you fucking mongrel!’ She lashed at her foot with the strands of the whip and writhed about on the bunk, tiny beads of sweat glistening on her forehead and her stomach as she moved in and out of the deeper shadows close to the wall. ‘Useless fucking animal! Settle down before I shoot you, you bastard!’ During her performance she kept glancing across at Crofts, checking on his response.
Although he was accustomed to hearing Janet Rankin swearing vigorously whenever her parents were out of earshot, the sudden violence of her words in the enclosed space of the hut made the stockman uncomfortable. He was sitting on the bunk opposite, wearing an old pair of khaki shorts and mending his jeans with a needle and thread. Apart from the deliberate movements of his hands with the needle he remained very still, his breathing shallow. He did not look at her, but instead glanced sideways out the door at her brother. Only after making this nervous check a few times did he finally allow himself to look at the girl.
She stopped moving the moment she saw his attention was on her, and in turn watched him. Her blatant pose invited him to look at her, insisted on it. She let him examine her in this way for several seconds; then, deciding that was enough, she put her hand down and tugged her shorts into place, at the same time bringing her legs together to sit up. She slipped the redhide loop off her toe and stood in front of Crofts in the narrow space between the beds, looking down at him, her breathing unsteady from her exertions.
The stockman carefully resumed sewing his jeans.
‘Well?’ she demanded, her voice sharp with impatience. ‘That’s how he goes isn’t it?’ The stockman forced the needle through the thick wad of denim at a seam before looking up.
‘That was very good, Janet,’ he said lamely, glancing out the door at Alistair again, a nervous smile on his lips.
The minute she saw the expression in his eyes she wanted to laugh at him, so she screwed her face into a grimace instead and dangled the whip in his lap. ‘No it wasn’t!’ she snapped, jiggling the whip ends. ‘D’you still want this?’
He looked down at the dancing strands and grasped them in his hand to still their twitching movement. He hoped she wouldn’t notice his unsteadiness. She held on, aware that the knuckles of his clenched fist were only a few centimetres away from a milky-blue vein that was pulsing quickly on the inside of her thigh. Neither of them moved. She could feel her brother’s gaze fixed on them; she could feel his loathing, his jealousy of Crofts, and it made her all the more determined not to let go of the whip. She eased her feet a little wider apart and grasped the plaited leather shank firmly in both hands, as she leaned back a little. She kept her eyes on the tensed muscles of his upper arm as he resisted her weight. If she had inhabited a perfect world, in which unpleasant consequences for one’s actions did not have to be endured, she would have bent forward and dug her teeth into that rounded muscle with all the strength of her jaws. It made her gums ache thinking about it—it was a pity there were other things on her mind.
She had felt rushed from the beginning of the day, as if there was not a moment to be lost, aware all the time in the back of her mind that her mother was driving home along the road with Gil, getting closer every minute. With their arrival everything would change, for all of them probably, but for herself certainly. She had known for some time that this was not to be like other Christmases. Life would not go back to normal after it was over. When Gil had gone once again—and life could never be normal as long as he was around—she would go herself, early in February, for ever most probably. Janet Rankin perceived this imminent change quite simply as part of the natural course of events in her life.
She did not know exactly what had taken place in the brigalow three weeks ago between her father and the stockman, but she intuited that it was something out of the ordinary, and she had not been surprised at all. The details were of no consequence; it had been for her the first of a series of incidents that had begun to rush them towar
ds this Christmas, to converge on a time when many more things were bound to happen, but when all of them could not possibly happen in a peaceful way.
At thirteen Janet Rankin was experiencing the anxieties of an increasing urgency in the rhythm of her life. Nothing happened smoothly for her any longer—the more important the task she had to get done (and important tasks were multiplying around her at an alarming rate), the less time she had to get it done in. She was adjusting quite well to this faster tempo, but at this moment the approach of the car along the road was beginning to make her feel panicky, for she had something crucial to settle between herself and the stockman before her mother and Gil arrived to complicate the issue.
It was not going well.
She fixed her gaze on the patiently resisting muscles of Crofts’ upper arm—preferring this to the distracting perplexities of his eyes—and pulled harder on the whip. A furious frustration began to mount in her as, despite herself, she recollected how, when he had arrived six months ago, she had felt compelled to come here to the hut. To see. To satisfy herself. Her curiosity had been irresistibly aroused by the way her father had spoken of him when the letter had arrived from the agent in Rockhampton. He had read it to himself twice, slowly, at the breakfast table, before folding it carefully and placing it at last on the cloth in front of him. Looking up at them all, he had smiled as if he had just gained an advantage over them. In telling them then of its contents the hint of self-congratulation in his voice had suggested—to her at any rate—a connection between this English boy and his own peculiar and very private intensities. She was startled. Detecting that note in her father’s voice had sent a small bright shock into her brain—as if a switch had been thrown cutting her off from him.
Looking back on it since, she knew she had grown up in that instant. Just like that, she had found herself alone suddenly with only her own resources to go on. The initial rush of fear into her mind had quickly given way to a deep sense of excitement, of joy even. She had been—and still was, though now in a rather more disorienting way—dazzled by the implications of this momentous event. She had sat there at the breakfast table staring at her father and willing him with all the power of her mind to acknowledge the effect of his words on her, but knowing that he would not, or perhaps could not, for reasons that were beyond them both. The special relationship they had always nursed along had never been a very robust thing: he had trusted her perception of his inner realities (he could not actually share them with her) in a way he did not trust either her brother or her mother. But their rapport had died in that moment. And with that meagre business out of the way, she had stood forward as herself. Her sudden laughter when she had got up to leave the breakfast table had puzzled all of them at the time, and had frightened Alistair.
The minute her mother had released them from classes on the day of Robert Crofts’ arrival, Janet had run here to the men’s quarters and had stood in the doorway staring at the new stockman for a long time. Sensing something going on that was beyond him, Alistair had hung back unhappily, prowling nervously behind her, longing to get away at once out into the high grass as usual. He had dreaded, even then, any thought of letting Crofts in on anything; he wanted to keep things as they were, to keep everything secret, secure and intact between himself and his sister—as they had always been, complete for each other. But Janet had sensed immediately that Crofts’ arrival, unlike the arrival of other stockmen before him, signalled the end of all that. It had been obvious to her. It had been so obvious, in fact, that she had never even thought of mentioning it to Alistair, or anyone else. And besides, there was no one else.
From that moment, Janet had begun to see her father as an ordinary failure, instead of the guardedly sympathetic and mysteriously complex man she had previously considered him to be. She began to be contemptuous of what she now construed as his inability to live up to his expectations of himself. And this diminished view of her father afforded her a measure of her own newly acquired stature. She did not, in this process of review, deny that she was ‘like’ her father, she simply came to believe that, with an endowment so similar to his, she would not fail as he had. Standing at the door of the stockman’s quarters that day, watching Crofts unpack his few belongings, she confidently awaited objective confirmation of the new order of things.
As she stood there gazing at the slightly embarrassed newcomer it all seemed clear to her. What could be simpler? Another little click in her brain to get this thing settled. That was all that was needed. But as she stood there staring silently at him, ignoring his friendly greeting, the expected click did not happen. After a couple of attempts at breaking the ice Crofts gave up on her and continued putting his things away, behaving as if she were not there. He even hummed a tuneless melody to himself and finally lay down on the bunk with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling in a way that people only do when they are entirely alone. In a few minutes he had drifted into a daydream and its images flitted across his relaxed features.
Janet Rankin had observed the stockman’s mind at work that day and at once she had understood him completely. Before he had had time to conceal it, she had glimpsed the source of his solitariness. And she had been offended and confused by Crofts’ impenetrable arrogance, by the way in which he confidently occupied a place sacred to himself, somewhere apart from the rest of humanity. The infuriating part had been recognising in Crofts a conviction that matched her own most deeply cherished belief about herself; like her, he obviously considered his destiny superior to that of others around him.
Indignant beyond words with the daydreaming stockman she had signalled to Alistair. Together they had suddenly screamed at the unsuspecting Crofts: ‘Stupid pommy bastard!’ and had run shrieking to their secret lair far out in the tall grass, flinging themselves down and laughing and wrestling hysterically for more than an hour in an effort to exorcise their fears, until they were both shaking with exhaustion.
The rattling of chains across iron and the sudden furious barking of the dogs announced the arrival of the car at the night-paddock gate. Alistair jumped to his feet and was gone without a word.
Crofts’ arm relaxed and he relinquished the whip, causing her to stumble backwards, her bare legs scraping painfully against the frame of the other bunk. ‘Here they are,’ he said.
‘So bloody what?’ she replied, looking at him with disgust and rubbing the back of her legs. ‘Here you are and so bloody what!’ She turned and took a step towards the door then stopped and suddenly lashed the mattress next to him with furious strokes of the broken whip. ‘Shit!’ she cried, lashing the mattress again and again. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’
‘Take it easy!’ Crofts pleaded, getting up quickly, a nervous smile on his lips. He was wondering if she would take a swipe at him if he dared put his hand on her.
‘Like you?’ she asked with contempt. She had set the rules to the game and he had obeyed every one of them; when she had stopped he had stopped, and when she had gone on he had gone on. He had not taken the initiative once, so it had remained her game. She stared at him coldly. Then she took a deep breath, folded the whip neatly, and dropped it onto his bed. ‘You should have been a woman,’ she said, still attempting to sting him, but in a way she meant it.
As she turned to leave there was a thud of boots on the verandah and Gil Sturgiss strode through the door. He was skinny and almost two metres tall. He wore R.M. Williams leatherneck cowboy boots and a carefully shaped Akubra sombrero. In his left hand he carried an expensive German hunting rifle, which he held out from his body, as if offering it as a token of goodwill. His blue eyes were shining and he smiled a wide and expectant smile.
‘Gidday, Robert,’ Gil Sturgiss said, greeting a certain friend. He extended his right hand for a shake while thrusting the rifle out with the other. ‘Check her out. Take a shot at something. We’ll have a shooting match.’
•
Christmas Day lunch brought them all together on the western verandah. The gallery-like spac
e of this room was even more pronounced today. The fully extended dining table occupied the centre. It was draped with a heavy white linen cloth on which silver and crockery and numerous dishes of food had been carefully arranged. There were green peas and orange carrots and bright red peppers suspended in clear amber domes of chilled savoury aspic, trembling and glittering in the diffused light of the verandah. Above these dishes, dangling from chains of paper decorations, brightly coloured globes of glass rotated slowly on their threads, mirroring the scene in miniature; while beside them, down the length of the table, were gleaming crystal glasses, brimming with cold white wine and for the children sparkling lemonade. Over all, the rich and succulent aroma of roasting meat filled the air. The bustle of preparation had finished and they were all seated, ready to begin. At the head of the table, against the streaming light, sat Ward Rankin. He was freshly shaved and bathed and dressed in a laundered white shirt, tucked neatly into a pair of pale grey tailored slacks of some light synthetic material. They were waiting for a signal from him. Here in this bright cool place, gathered before the family’s old silver and crystal and fine linen—preserved for this from a bygone era—they waited for him. And they forgot the silent waiting wilderness outside.
Ward Rankin’s gaze took in the scene before him. ‘To a happy Christmas,’ he said, raising his glass to them.