The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

“Fred has a railcar up near Miser’s Creek. We could go there, Papa.”

  “Very well. Yes. Do as you see fit. Yes. Go there. Two days.”

  As they drove into the barn, he jumped down from the cart and twisted his ankle but still ran all the way, stumbling over the unmarked mound of his wife’s grave and into Telegraph House.

  “What do we do?” said Comity. Her first choice would have been to cry, but if ever a situation needed rising above, this was it.

  Fred’s gaze was fixed on the stationery store, for he had convinced himself this was the night Quartz Hogg meant to let loose the Kadimakara.

  “Can we find your railcar in the dark?”

  “Byallmean,” said Fred unenthusiastically.

  “Or we could sleep under the stars?” said Comity.

  “Three dog night,” said Fred, picking up the Stationmaster’s forgotten jacket and slipping his arms into it. Comity had no idea what “three dog night” meant, but it conjured pictures of teeth and slaver and glittering dingo eyes. Perhaps they should simply creep back into the house and sit out the party in Comity’s bedroom.

  “Burn it dead,” said Fred suddenly with a decisive jerk of his head. “Yeah verily. You got kerosene?”

  Comity had a horror of fire. Living in a thatched house in a country seared to kindling by the sun, she often lay in bed planning her escape if ever she woke to find Telegraph House ablaze. Now Fred was bent on setting light to a wooden stationery store in the middle of the compound, to kill the monster inside. She asked herself what her mother would think, but that was ridiculous. If Mary Pinny had still been alive there would be no monster: no monster, no Quartz O’Malley Hogg, no panic, no choices to make.

  Her father expected them to be gone, so Comity and Fred drove the trap into the barn and hid there. The lights were on in Telegraph House and the party underway. Hogg was thumping the piano keys so hard that the china teacups on the dresser were tinkling. Someone had laid hands on a penny whistle but not the knack of playing it. Amos was playing comb-and-paper. Hart was rattling a pair of spoons.

  Twice Comity heard Hogg shout for her to come and join in: he must think she was still in the house, sulking in her room. Instead, she and Fred were busy unhooking the spirit lantern that hung by the forge. On every side, the dry straw bales piled against the walls ticked like clocks. A rat moved about overhead. The night was loud with insects. Outside, the cattle mooed, and chewed the cud: they were restive, unsettled by the music, perhaps, or the presence (unusual at night) of Aboriginals standing among the gum trees, watching. Watching for what?

  When Fred lit the lamp with his flint lighter, a dozen lizards on the barn wall flinched. A rising moon was keeping a watchful eye on the two skulking children.

  “No,” Comity said. “We cannot burn it. We will only make it angry and then it will kill everybody.”

  But Fred had risen above the dust-cloud of doubt into a realm of pure, clean fear. When the piano fell silent, his sharp ears could pick out a soft gurgling noise within the store. The monster’s hungry belly rumbling, for sure. Here was a monster built of barrel hoops, window screens, pots, pans and kettles, whose fiery dreams leaked smoke through the roof of Jesus’ gunyah. And it was up to Fred to kill it.

  Holding the lantern inside one flap of the Stationmaster’s jacket, he crept out of the barn and across the yard. If the door was unlocked, he would throw in the lamp and allow it to smash at the monster’s feet. Poor evicted Jesus would surely do the rest, fanning the flames from his throne in the sky. Jesus was good with lamps, after all: The Light of the World picture proved that.

  Fred reached for the door of the store, fully expecting it to be locked. He had just gripped the handle when it moved of its own accord within his hand and the door swung towards him. What Fred saw was not the Kadimakara.

  It was Hogg.

  That was why the piano had fallen silent: Hogg had stepped out of the house and gone to the store to fetch something. The two stared at each other.

  “Now there’s a garment I recognize,” said Hogg. His fat, pink fingers stroked the lapels of Pinny’s borrowed jacket. Then his hands closed into a fist and he pulled Fred sharply towards him, all but lifting him off the ground. The lantern fell to the ground. “I see you are true to your breed, jacky. Thieving is your stock-in-trade.”

  Kicking the store door shut, and dragging Fred with him, he fairly trotted back towards the party. A sharp high noise of triumph came from him, like the squeal of a piglet. “Look here! Come see!” Men and Aboriginal women spilled out of Telegraph House.

  Comity, frozen with indecision, stood in the shadow of the barn and watched the horror unfold. At every moment she expected her father to emerge onto the verandah like everyone else, but he did not. Inside the house the furniture had been pushed back against the wall to make room for dancing. By accident, or on purpose, it had blocked the door of the machine room, and imprisoned Herbert Pinny in his office. He could be heard now, objecting: “Mr. Hogg, a word if you please! Open this door at once!”

  The partygoers were all people Comity knew, and yet they were…altered. Did Quartz O’Malley Hogg have magic powers? Was his walking cane truly a sorceror’s wand? Because suddenly Amos was…not Amos, and Hart was not Hart. Mr. Sankey could not stand upright without overbalancing and tottering sideways. Cage’s seven sisters would not have recognized the rubber-legged, grinning fool trying and failing to put on his spectacles.

  Comity stayed hidden. What to do? Watch. Bide her time. Wait for the right moment to step forward out of the shadows and call a halt.

  But the moment never came.

  “Caught him trying to break into the store,” said Hogg. He seemed to think it hugely funny. “With a stolen lantern and wearing the Stationmaster’s jacket, no less! We seem to be harbouring a thief in our midst.”

  And instantly the skinny boy they all knew by name, had all seen toiling in the garden and labouring at the forge bellows, was a thief, a criminal. The rubbery grins on their faces smeared into scowls.

  A righteous gleam lit the eyes of Smith the smith. “Going to be sorry now, boy,” he said and wrenched the jacket off Fred, as though skinning a rabbit. He bound Fred’s hands behind his back with the thinner of his two belts.

  Hogg expressed no rage. It seemed the greatest joke in the world that Fred should have turned up at the party uninvited. “Tell me, boy. Where is my charming young fiancée this evening? Speak up! You her pet dingo and not know her whereabouts? What use is a dog that cannot sniff out its owner?”

  The men tittered and snorted…though Hogg’s fancy sentences wound round their brains like ivy; they could not fully catch his drift.

  “You know what, my excellent comrades? I have a mind to go dingo hunting. A piece of sport I have not seen since my days in the Army. You get a pest problem, you got to cull. You got to cull, or before you know it you are overrun. So who’s for a little sport?”

  There was a general enthusiasm; few could have said for what. Smith, though, being a man after Hogg’s own heart, understood him completely. So, too, did the Aboriginal women, for they melted away: slipped out of the lamplight and vanished like woodsmoke, taking with them the figures among the trees.

  “What are we doing?” asked Amos blearily, stumbling over an open can of whitewash left standing on the verandah.

  “We are going hunting,” said Smith with a smirk. “Hunting dingo.”

  “Remember to hang the carcass on the cat tree after,” mumbled Sankey, who was slumping sleepily sideways in Comity’s chair. “Keeps more vermin from coming.”

  A hoot of laughter burst from Hogg that was worthy of Loud Lulu. “Shall I do that, dingo? Shall I hang your carcass on the cat tree after, to scare off the rest of your kind? I believe I shall!” And pushing his face up close to Fred’s, he painted a large white X on the boy’s chest.

  He painted another X on Fred’s back.

  “No camouflage tonight, jacky. Got to give a chap an even chance, eh? Got to be sporting. Yo
u in sporting mood tonight, jacky? You got the legs on you for a good run?”

  Some of the partygoers began to frown, others to snigger.

  “Mr. Hogg! Open this door at once! What is going on? I demand an explanation!”

  Quartz Hogg ignored the Stationmaster as he had done for weeks. To him, Herbert Pinny was a harmless rodent squeaking in the wainscot. “Saddle the horses, Mr. Hart,” he said.

  Hart took several steps backwards along the verandah. “I just have to fetch a…some…thing. Give me a while. I’ve had a drop too much…” Then he turned and bolted for the barn.

  Comity was too slow to dodge out of sight. Hart saw her, plain as plain. But in his muddled, befuddled state, the oddness of her standing there, in the shadow of the barn, at three in the morning, seemed not to strike him. “Too far,” he told her. “This has gone too far.” Then he broke into a galumphing run and climbed the ladder to his room in the roof.

  Amos did Hogg’s bidding instead of Hart. He headed for the barn to saddle horses, but spotting Starbuck and the trap standing conveniently to hand, he blinked a few times in surprise then called back towards the house. “Buggy’s ready and waiting!”

  Without the jacket and with hands tied behind his back, Fred’s skinny shoulders seemed narrower than ever; he was a matchstick figure – like the ones drawn on the pitch-and-toss stones scattered in the yard. Hogg got into the pony-trap with Smith, jovially inviting the others to saddle up and follow on behind.

  But a blurry confusion thick as syrup had overtaken the stockmen and the wiremen. Herbert Pinny’s voice nagged them from the machine room. “Let me out! Unbar this door! I demand you open…”

  “What are we doing?” Cage asked of Amos, and Amos shrugged and yawned and looked embarrassed.

  As Smith hauled his huge bulk into the trap, Fred seized his chance. He took off and ran, heading for the paddock. Comity, who had slipped back inside the barn, watched him go through a knothole in the planks. Hogg gave a chortling laugh and took up his shotgun from the floor of the pony cart. He made great play of taking aim on the luminous white cross that danced among the trees. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  Click. The gun was empty, the bullets safe in Fred’s dillybag. By the time he had pulled out his army pistol, the painted cross on Fred’s back was out of sight.

  His happiness barely dented, Hogg took up the reins. Starbuck was startled into movement. Hogg drew out, from beneath the seat, a tin of cartridges and set Smith the task of loading. “The hunt is on, gentlemen. Follow my lead!” And away they went in the glare of the moon, the cart listing under the great weight of Smith.

  But instead of following, the other men turned back into the house: dazed and hazed, perhaps they were looking for the party. Earlier there had been a party, that much they knew. Now all of a sudden there was nothing but a smell of spilled whitewash, and the Stationmaster’s voice demanding to be let out of the machine room.

  Instead of unjamming the door, instead of receiving an official reprimand and losing their jobs, they stayed sprawled along the verandah, nursing their drinks, desperately hoping the whole evening was a bad dream, a drunken imagining, nothing more. Perhaps if they drank still more, the memory of it might disappear altogether.

  Despite Pinny’s shouted demands to know what had been going on, no one shouted back with an explanation. No one told him what had just happened. So Pinny comforted himself that at least Comity was on her way to safety, with Fred for company. Trapped in the back room of Telegraph House, he had no way of knowing that Fred was just then running for his life across the pastureland, dodging between startled cattle.

  Comity tried to lift a saddle onto Cage’s horse, but the saddle weighed too much, and the horse kept moving away from her, unwilling to work again until morning. Hart’s gelding kept its bristly lips tightly pursed against the bit. Only Amos’s mare, biggest of the three, allowed Comity to put a bridle on her.

  “Help me. Help me, Mr. Hart! We have to help Fred!” she called up at the loft, but no feet appeared over the edge of the loft hatch.

  She had to stand on a straw bale to climb onto the horse’s back, and then it insisted on visiting the manger for a bite of breakfast before deigning to stumble out into the moonlight. Comity ducked her head to avoid a hideous cobweb. Only then did she see that Hart had come to the loft hatch to watch her. The look on his face was unreadable – shame, apology and disgust, all stitched up inside a green headache.

  “Why did you let him, Mr. Hart? Why did you not stop him?”

  He shrugged. “’S’only a jacky,” he said in a slurred whine, and she shut her heart against him, utterly, forever.

  After she was gone, Hart headed back to the party, to try and ease the pain.

  The trap tracks were easy to see in the moonlight, easy to follow. She would rather have followed Fred, but his bare feet left no trace discernible to any but the cleverest eye. That is why Hogg would never catch him. Never catch him. Fred would simply melt away into the night…

  …hands tied behind his back, in a world squirming with snakes.

  The horse showed no interest in trotting; without a saddle to cling to, Comity would probably have fallen off if it had. So they plodded along while, ahead of her, somewhere far out of sight, Quartz Hogg bowled along in the pony-trap probably doing that horrible whistling where he sucked instead of blew and did not bother with a tune. If that is the worst noise he makes (thought Comity, striking a mental deal with Jesus) the whistling is fine. Just as long as there are no more gunshots.

  There again, without the gunshots, she would probably never have found them at all.

  The sound came from over to her left and behind her; she must have missed seeing where the wheel-tracks had turned off the trail to wind between the great swirls of spinifex. Comity told herself it was the sound of a widow-maker shedding a bough. But when a second crack followed, and a third, she could not fool herself any longer.

  Night was turning grey with anxiety. Morning was bullying it aside. Fred needed the darkness to hide him. Comity peered around, hoping to glimpse her friend, at the same time wishing him as invisible as Tuckonies.

  She found that her days of roaming about with Fred had taught her more than she’d realized: she actually knew where she was. Fred was moving in a circle, heading back now towards Miser’s Creek and his railcar gunyah.

  Had been. Had been heading for the railcar, until Hogg spotted him.

  Quick-licking dawn uncovered the pony and trap. It had come to a halt on a sandy mound that raised it a little above the surrounding landscape. Smith was still seated, but Hogg had stood up, rifle to his shoulder, watching, patiently watching for any sign of movement. He knew his dingo had gone to ground – he had sighted the boy momentarily. He knew to be patient: the growing daylight would show him his prey.

  He was concentrating so hard, watching for the smallest movement, that he was not aware of Comity at all until her horse’s hoofs clacked together. He swung round, rifle and all, and Comity saw the round, black muzzle’s end. She fully expected the hammer to fall, the flash, the stock to kick… Quartz Hogg looked at her along the barrel and smiled his babyish smile.

  “Look, Smith. My fancy little fiancée wants to be in at the kill!” The syllables rolled and grated in his mouth like stones.

  The thudding in Comity’s ears grew louder. She thought it was her heartbeat until it took on material shape, bounding out of the half-light: a kangaroo. The Big Red thump-thump-thumped along with effortless grace, each bound spanning a prodigious space, then plucking up twin tufts of dust as the roo stamped its mark on the wilderness. This place is mine, it seemed to say. Its route towards Miser’s Creek took it between the girl on the horse and the pony-trap.

  Hogg’s crystal buttons glinted as he turned. A single shot felled the kangaroo, which tumbled out of elegant flight into a jumble of joints, foot bones and ginger tail, with a loud grunt and a gusty sigh.

  Smith had turned to watch the kangaroo die: both hu
nters’ heads were facing away from Fred, who saw his chance. Crouched down behind a termite mound, he rose unsteadily to his feet now, no hands to help him and dizzy from sudden movement. A tingling raged through his cramped legs, but he ran, even so, hoping the diversion might give him the time he needed.

  But Comity, in seeing him, must have sat up straighter, refocused her eyes, allowed her face to brighten, because Hogg turned to look where she was looking. Calmly he broke open his rifle, expelled the used cartridge, reloaded. He took aim on the running figure, on the white, painted cross almost luminous in the half-light of dawn.

  Unlike the big red roo, Fred went down without a sound.

  Starbuck, doubly startled, jinked forward in her traces and jerked the trap. Quartz Hogg sat down sharply. Comity slid off her horse and started to run the furlong to the buggy. She could not breathe: a roaring noise was emptying her lungs of air. As she ran, she stopped and picked up stones and began to throw them. She threw them with all her might, over and over again, rearming herself as she ran on. The stones began to hit the wheels, the tailgate, the upholstery. Smith, who had turned to watch Fred die, gave a startled grunt as a stone hit him in the neck. Another hit Starbuck, who towed the trap off the summit of the rise, and again the men lost their balance. Comity went on running, went on pelting them with stones. One caught Smith on the ear, one hit Hogg on the back of the head. What she would have done when she reached the trap, even she did not know. But chortling amusement gave way to curses, and having achieved his objective, Quartz Hogg recovered control of the cart and turned in a wide circle to head for home. He drove at Hart’s horse to frighten it away: the long walk home would teach the girl a lesson.

  It was the longest distance she had ever run, or so it felt. Past the dead kangaroo, past the termite mound, past the belt that had finally slipped from Fred’s wrists; past the blood spatter… Her skirts hampered her, her boots weighed like lead, her hair got in front of her eyes and stopped her seeing.

  “Fred?”