The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  What would her mother have done? thought Comity. What kind of hospitality would she have offered this sociable, big-hearted man? Comity was out of practice with conversation, but there were other ways of being friendly. Her friendship with Fred, for instance, was built on stories. So Comity decided that tonight she would tell a story over dinner.

  Choosing her moment, clearing her throat, she began, “In the Dreamtime, when the world was new, Bobbi Bobbi the Creator came down from the sky to see how everything was going along. As he glided hither and thither, he heard the sound of crying and came upon a crowd of people sobbing. ‘What’s the matter, little ones?’ asked Bobbi Bobbi.”

  “Bobbi Bobbi?” said her father, emerging from his usual trance-like state. “What is Bobbi Bobbi?”

  “He’s a—” And to her horror, Comity realized that she had begun a story about a snake. As well as three plates of beans, she had inadvertently laid on the dinner table, in front of her father, a gigantic invisible snake. “He’s a creator, Papa – like Byamee.”

  “Lord God Almighty created the world,” said Mr. Pinny with an air of bewilderment.

  “Yes. It is just a story Fred told me.”

  Her father frowned, considered, nodded. So Comity went on, treading (as it were) on snake eggs:

  “‘What’s the matter, little ones? I made you to be happy, not sad.’

  “‘But we are so hungry!’ said the people. ‘We have nothing to eat.’

  “‘What do you mean, you have nothing to eat? Did I not hang up bats in the trees and on the cliffs?’”

  “Bats?”

  “Bats, yes, Papa.

  “‘But we cannot catch them!’ cried the people. ‘We climb up. We get close and – rattle-fwoof – off they fly!’ So Bobbi Bobbi thought, and then Bobbi Bobbi unhooked his scales and reached inside his chest and pulled out a rib.”

  “Scales?” said Mr. Pinny.

  It seemed to Comity that an immense tiger snake was heaping its coils around the dining table, flickering its forked tongue over the dish of salt, yawning with disappointment at her lack of storytelling skill. She tried to think ahead through the story, to edit out all mention of snakes – which was hard, given that it involved Bobbi Bobbi winding himself around a mountain. Comity did the worst thing she could. She ploughed on.

  “‘Take my rib,’ said Bobbi Bobbi. ‘Use it to knock down the bats, and cook them in your campfires. This rib-stick will always come back to you, so it will never be lost. But never ever kill more than—’”

  Quartz O’Malley Hogg broke wind – a noise so vulgar that the Rainbow Creator Snake was startled into silence. Hogg pushed his plate of beans, lentils and carrots away from him.

  “Your daughter, Pinny, is plainly studying to keep house for a native. I trust she will not serve us bat for dinner?”

  Herbert Pinny blinked, still startled by Comity breaking out in Story at all.

  “Now, Pinny, old man, about that storehouse in the yard…” Hogg pinched fingerfuls of bread out of the new-baked loaf. “You have no objection if I stow some things in there?”

  Next door, the machine rattled into life, and the room filled up with a swarm of words: CATTLE…RAILHEAD…BANKDRAFT…FODDER… The Stationmaster seized the excuse and was gone in a flash.

  As the machine-room door closed behind him, Mr. Hogg, too, got up from the table. “These beans are blowing me up like a hot-air balloon, Miss Comity. You must change the menu. Allow me to help with the provisioning.” And drawing his pistol, he went out of the door. There was a bang that set the piano wires trembling, and he returned carrying a chicken by its neck. With an exaggerated bow, he presented it to Comity like a bunch of flowers.

  Feathery, still twitching, oozing blood from its staring eyes, the bird died in her lap. Comity looked across at the closed door of the machine room, and something inside her died, along with the chicken.

  Hogg made the stationery store his own, borrowing the key and forgetting ever to put it back. He clattered and banged about in there, and whatever it was he was doing, it engrossed him so much that he was often gone for hours. Somehow, Sunday morning prayers lapsed. Hogg’s belongings left no room for Jesus. It was almost as if he thought he was the most important person around.

  Little by little, Hogg let his duties lapse too. If a game of cards was not finished when his shift began, he stayed to finish the game. If a conversation with Smith turned to sport or war, he sat happily in the forge and told anecdotes about his days in the Army.

  Far from being annoyed, Herbert Pinny was relieved. Solitude was his again and he clutched it round him like a shawl. Bad enough that his evenings were still jangled at dinner.

  Quartz Hogg told the stories at table now – stories that grated on Herbert’s beliefs and plain petrified Comity. He told of the fall of Kabul when the Afghans had promised to let the women and children go, then done unspeakable (well they should have been unspeakable) things, and left the women and children as dead as the cats on the cat tree. Then Hogg would break off and move over to the piano, merry as a kookaburra.

  Comity, too, had stopped enjoying the musical interludes.

  “He bounces me on his knee when he plays,” she told Fred. But somehow saying it did not quite convey the violence of that thumping left foot or how the bouncing (and the toffee-sweet cologne in the man’s hair) made her feel slightly sick. It sounded such a friendly thing to do: He bounces me on his knee.

  Fred did not seem interested. He did not even stop hoeing the garden to answer her. The hoe-blade made a sharp hiss each time it cut into the sandy earth.

  “Can we go to the railcar again?” Comity asked. She had been making a pot holder and a tablecloth for the carriage, and had set aside two chipped cups as well: a thank you for letting her share his secret place. But Fred did not so much as look up. Was he sorry now that he had shown her his gunyah? “Are you awake-dreaming?” she asked, but got no answer.

  Pocketing her hurt feelings, she went back to the house. As she did so, she spotted Hogg standing in the open doorway of the paper store, watching Fred. His big army pistol dangled from one finger.

  Glancing in the mirror as she got indoors, Comity was startled to see that her cheeks were wet. It was annoying. Over the last few days she had often found herself unaccountably leaking at the eyes. In the dunny, in bed, standing at the stove poking the chicken bones into stock, or playing solitaire – anywhere she was unobserved, she would start to cry, all out of the blue. Rain from a cloudless sky. It made reading difficult, and without reading she found it hard to rise above things. The things Hogg talked about at dinner, and the Morse rattle of her heart kept her awake at night, too. She lay on her back, staring into the darkness. Mice moved through the walls of the house.

  Or was it mice? Might it not be Wundas – those invisible mischief-makers who (Fred said) flew about stealing anything not nailed down? The kettle, for instance, and the garden twine had mysteriously gone missing from the kitchen.

  At set of moon there was a rattling and scrabbling at the wall beside her, and she sat bolt upright in bed. “Fred? Is that you?”

  A rattle, as of Morse, was tapped out against the window glass – an O? An F? A Q? “Mama? Is that you? Say it! I cannot understand you!”

  The door of her bedroom slammed open and her father stood there in his nightshirt, wild-haired. “Wake up, Comity. You are dreaming.”

  She clung to him and clung to him, and told him how her mother was tapping at the window and that there were Wundas in the wall. He shushed her, flinched at the mention of his wife, and held her at arm’s length as if she was on fire. And he did not believe one word.

  “You were dreaming, child. It comes of eating meat after so long on beans.”

  And he would not go and look; would not, would not, would not go and look.

  In the morning, the insect screen was gone from her bedroom window. It had been prised off the wooden frame.

  So. Not her mother after all.

  Comity was left
to puzzle why, all of a sudden, Wundas had set their sights on Kinkindele Station and why winged invisible spirits of the Australian Outback wanted a kettle, twine and wire mesh.

  My dear Cousins,

  Here I am writing to you again. We have been joined in our daily round by a Mr. Quartz Hogg who is Father’s new telegrapher. He can play the piano and speak Afgang Aphgan Affgann because he was in Cabool during the war. He made a good start here but is rather lazy. Maybe it is homesickness. The poor man misses the city something fearfull. So if men are needed in Adelaide or somewhere, we are quite reddy to let him go. You may tell this to your important father, Super Intendent Mr. Bligh.

  I hope you are well and clever as usual. We have a summerhouse now with a sideways stove and seats. It used to be a railway waggon till it hit a camel.

  Your affecshunate cousin,

  Comity

  It was in mentioning the railway carriage that Comity remembered the kettle on the stove, and thought how useful it would be, in place of the missing copper one. Now she would have to talk to Fred again, she told herself. She threw back her shoulders and clenched her fists.

  “I would like to go to the railcar again, please,” she said, towering over him. Fred was kneeling down by the quince bushes, picking caterpillars off the fruit.

  “Please go way. No more talk.” Fred wriggled round so that his back was turned on her. “Please.”

  Comity wilted. “A Wunda stole my window screen last night,” she offered, trying to pique his curiosity. But Fred’s hands were shaking with fright, and she could see now that both Smith and Hogg had broken off from a game of mah-jong to watch.

  “Five minutes. Under the house,” said Comity in an undertone, and went back to the house. Settling herself on the verandah with a book, she was relieved to see a maze of prints made by bare feet beneath her bedroom window. Not Wundas, then. Wundas probably did not leave footprints, she supposed. Beneath her, a gentle scuffling hinted that Fred had arrived under the verandah.

  “Not Wundas,” said Fred’s voice, beneath her feet. “Hogg want some things fetch to his gunyah.”

  “What kind of things?”

  But Fred did not know. Every Aboriginal in Kinkindele seemed to know what was afoot…except for Loud Lulu and Fred. Now, when the Aboriginal mob sat in a circle to sing or eat or talk, the circle excluded Fred. It was a wall between him and the campfire. He was an outcast, and he had no idea why. He felt banished. It made the fear much worse.

  “He shoot me if I talk with you,” said Fred, and Comity was so shocked that she dropped her book. “He have big damn gun.”

  “I shall tell Father to dismiss him at once!”

  A long silence followed which cast doubt on Comity’s promise. Would Herbert Pinny really stand up to a man with a gun, who had seen battle in Afghanistan?

  “What do you think Mr. Hogg is doing in the chapel?” she asked. “It makes a fearful noise.”

  “He build a Kadimakara,” said Fred with his customary certainty. “The fellahs bring him things. I think he fix all things together. Build a Kadimakara.”

  “And that is? Tell me again?”

  “Big damn monster. Fell down whoop-bang through the sky. Eat so many people down here he get fat. Not can get back up hole in sky. I show you. Big bone, yes? Bone of dead Kadimakara?”

  She remembered. A single bone, as long as her leg, half embedded in the fossil rocks, up by the Dry Ocean. “For what? What for is he building one?” she breathed, feeling her heart run about her ribcage. “You are a noodle, Fred: how would a monster fit in the stationery store?” She shook her head and went on: “Anyway, I need a kettle. Ours has disappeared, and I thought maybe—”

  A rainbow scattered itself over her book, and she looked up to see Quartz Hogg grinning at her, running his eye this way and that along the verandah, twirling his crystal-knobbed cane.

  “Are you so lacking in company that you must speak to yourself, Miss Comity?”

  She snapped shut the ant-eaten book. “I read the words out aloud sometimes, Mr. Hogg. Just when people speak, you know? Just the parts inside the high-up commas.”

  He tilted the cane so that rainbows fluttered over her face like butterflies. It made her eyes skitter. She stiffened her resolve.

  “Have you come to work your shift? Father will be glad. He gets so tired having to do everything himself.”

  But Hogg’s gaze took in the sky, the view, the mah-jong board balanced on Smith’s anvil, the birds in the trees, and he wrinkled his nose: there were better things on offer than work. “Is your father a hunting man, Miss Comity? Thought he might care for some sport this fine Sunday.”

  “I do not think he likes to kill things, Mr. Hogg.”

  “Now that is a shame. For every other telegrapher I know takes his rest on Sundays. Seems to me your father never leaves the house. Like Count Dracula.”

  “Naturally he comes out!” exclaimed Comity with what she hoped was a light laugh.

  “Not as I hear it from the crew.”

  “Well, please to remember we are in mourning.” It sounded like an excuse.

  The smile never left Hogg’s face. He snatched the book out of her lap in a movement so quick and insolent he might have been a child in school teasing a fellow pupil. Comity’s letter to her cousins fell out; she had not been able to fetch an envelope for it from the stationery store.

  “Excuse me!” she squeaked, as he began to read her letter. Hogg smiled even more broadly as he came to the mention of his own name, and the thinly veiled attempt to have him sacked.

  As coolly as she was able, Comity got up and tugged open the swollen front door, wishing Hogg good day. But as soon as she was inside, she ran to the machine room and hauled on her father’s arm. “Come! Please come! Come and tell Mr. Hogg to do some work. Come out and tell him you are not Count Dracula. You are not. He told Fred not to talk to me, and he cannot keep the chapel to himself and all the envelopes, and he is reading my…”

  Her father’s face reduced Comity to silence. It was so pale. His mouth was held in brackets of sore red eczema. His eyes were pebbly grey and slow to soften at the sight of her.

  Herbert Pinny stood up. Slowly, slowly, he put on his jacket and ventured as far as the verandah.

  Quartz Hogg had not been idle since Comity’s going indoors. He had gathered up the stones from around Mrs. Pinny’s grave and piled them into two mounds at his feet. Twelve strides away, another had been placed to serve as a target.

  “Game of pitch-and-toss, old peach?” he greeted his superior.

  “Mr. Hogg, kindly return to your duties.”

  Hogg beamed. “Leave the door open, and we shall hear any incomings. All work and no play, Mr. Pinny…all work and no play.” Everything in his manner was civil and cheery, polite and comedic. Everything in his meaning was snide and jeering. What was more, he had mustered Amos and Hart, Sankey, Cage and Smith to watch the game.

  Both games.

  Pitch-and-toss, and the taunting of Stationmaster Pinny.

  At a distance, the stockmen, too, stood watching. Even the horses jinked in their paddock and looked across the yard.

  Comity stared at the sacrilegious cairn of marker stones: Fred’s tribute to her mother. “You took those off Ma’s grave!”

  “I did?” Hogg made great show of examining the stone in his hand. “You need fresh. The heathens have been daubing on these ones.” His throw struck the target with a noise like a pistol shot.

  Hart said, “Come along, Mr. Pinny. Your turn.” Gentlest of the three wiremen, even Hart had been wound up like a cuckoo clock by Quartz Hogg and set to chirrup on time.

  Sympathy does not live long among men. The team of hands working on Kinkindele resented the Stationmaster for shutting himself away from his only neighbours and making no effort to be sociable. The heart of Australia is a lonely enough place, without a man snubbing his workmates. Puzzled, offended and bored, they had been easily won over to Hogg’s side.

  “Your turn, Mr
. Pinny,” said Sankey. “Give it your best.”

  “Return to work everyone,” suggested Herbert Pinny, in a voice cracked for want of use.

  “It’s Sunday, Mr. Pinny,” said Cage.

  Crack went the second stone.

  Comity could not think which was worse – for her father to play pitch-and-toss with gravestones or to let Hogg humiliate him. She gave him an encouraging push –“You can beat him, Father!” – and so she too sided with the enemy.

  Herbert Pinny walked out into the middle of the yard, to the spot where his wife had died beneath the washing line. He picked up the stones painted to decorate her grave, and he flung them at the target. His hand shook. His head poked forward from his shoulders like a tortoise’s. Impotent rage pulled his muscles taut. He tried not to look around him, but the trees seemed to jab at his eyeballs. The dust was made of God’s funeral ashes, for surely God was dead or He would have put a stop to this.

  Herbert stood in the Middle of Nowhere and flung stones at stones, when all he wanted to do was to beat them on Quartz O’Malley Hogg’s skull until he had driven the man into the ground like a wash-post.

  Fred, too, had been drawn to the pantomime in the yard. He stood staring at the painted boulders he had gathered from the bed of the creek. His lips moved in mumbled curses.

  “You are in my eyeline, fellah,” called Hogg and, without waiting for Fred to move, drew out his handgun from the back of his trouser band and pointed it at the boy’s head. Fred ran like a rabbit, in stark terror, to the sound of laughter from men who had worked themselves up into that excitable frame of mind called bullying.

  As Hogg threw the last of his stones, the sheet of paper that had lain beneath them blew across the yard and away under the fence – Comity’s letter to her cousins. The one asking for Hogg to be recalled.