Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  Ernest quietly listened to the music, head tilted to one side, as the words rang out clearly through the silence. He seemed as still and calm as a deep waterhole in an ancient forest, covered by slow-growing moss and ferns. I was a shallow puddle, wind scuttling across the rain-splashed surface. I kept whipping while Ernest kept listening and the song seemed to last an eternity.

  We ate an exceptionally frothy omelette in near silence, then Ernest put down his knife and fork.

  ‘That was good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ Then he looked at me with calm brown eyes and said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  The wind whipped across the surface of my shallow pond. I wanted to run away and hide. I was used to interviewing other people; that was my job. I was on safe ground searching for stories, getting other people to talk. Ernest waited, in silence. In the face of his quiet sincerity there was no option but to tell the truth.

  ‘It’s been a tough year . . .’

  And suddenly I was crying, great gulping sobs that couldn’t be contained. The truth was utterly miserable. I’d lost what felt like my last chance at love, and it hadn’t even been a real chance. I felt old, used up and unloved. Ernest pushed back his chair and stood up.

  ‘Can I hug you?’

  Unshed tears choked my voice so I just nodded. Ernest walked around the table, put his arms around me and held me tight, in a kind, loving, generous hug that asked for nothing in return. Then the doorbell rang.

  ‘Hi, Aunty Deborah.’

  It was Hanne, Kate’s 22-year-old daughter, holding an armful of spare bedding. I’d rung Kate earlier from the office and told her about Ernest.

  Hanne introduced herself to Ernest.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, ducking his head.

  ‘Where are you from, Ernest?’

  ‘From Byrock, out west.’

  ‘And how long are you planning to stay in Sydney?’

  I couldn’t help smiling. Hanne was sussing him out, sweetly trying to make sure I was OK.

  Ernest nodded his head again and lowered his eyes.

  ‘That’s up to Deb,’ he said.

  I walked Hanne to the front door. ‘He seems nice,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  And it was.

  *

  We spent the rest of the evening talking about the world of Spirit. Ernest had an avowed connection with the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the land, the spirit of animals and the spirits of his many ancestors who walked beside him, in constant communication.

  ‘I was staying with an uncle, an elder, and he kept chooks.’

  ‘Chooks?’

  ‘Chickens. We were sleeping in this caravan and one morning, early, there was a big fuss outside. The door was open and a chicken appeared. It just stood in the doorway.’

  Ernest paused in his slow, measured telling of the story to make sure I was listening.

  ‘My uncle, he sat up in bed. He looked at that chicken and he said, “Well come on then, tell me what the fuss is all about.” So that chicken came into the caravan. It hopped on the bed and it sat on my uncle’s chest. There was a lot of squawking and I reckon that chicken told him what was going on because my uncle, he said, “OK, I’ll be out in a minute, you go and tell them to calm down.” So the chicken went back outside and it all calmed down.’

  Maybe I’m gullible. Maybe a scientist would have asked questions like, do the chooks normally get fed at that time in the morning? All I know is, after listening to Ernest, I was convinced communication between humans and animals was possible.

  Ernest saw messages everywhere, in the trail left by an ant, in the touch of a dog’s nose. ‘The call of a currawong first thing in the morning? That’s my uncle,’ he said.

  I was starting to think he was almost Shakespearean in his adherence to dreams and portents, then he blew it by admitting he read his horoscope every day and believed every word of it. His touching naivety about horoscopes aside, I was impressed by the stories he told of elders who communicated with animals in a way we’d forgotten how to, or perhaps we never knew.

  It was fascinating to spend time with someone who spoke so openly about talking to animals. I relaxed to the point of offering Ernest a beer or a glass of wine but he shook his head.

  ‘Given up the grog,’ he said. ‘Can’t talk to Spirit when you’re on the grog. Have you got another can of coke?’

  I handed him a cold can from the fridge and he popped the top.

  ‘Have you ever been married?’ he suddenly asked, tipping his head back to drink.

  ‘No,’ I said, lips tightly pressed together.

  ‘Why not?’

  Some of my closest friends wouldn’t dare approach me on that touchy subject but Ernest strode right into the mouth of the volcano, and instead of erupting I burst into tears, again.

  ‘I don’t know!’ I wailed. That led to another hug.

  ‘If I get scared tonight can I come and sleep with you?’

  I was suddenly wary and Miss PK was on full alert.

  What did I tell you? If he sets one foot on those stairs he’s in big trouble.

  I had to agree with PK: that wasn’t what I wanted.

  ‘Ernest, you have to stay in your own bedroom.’

  He nodded. ‘OK.’

  What’s to stop him slipping upstairs in the middle of the night?

  The attic room where I slept didn’t have a door – the stairs simply led to an open space under the eaves – but some instinct told me Ernest wouldn’t do that. I sensed a streak of decency in him.

  You don’t know anything about the man!

  Calm down, PK. I believe I can trust him.

  Ernest could have easily overpowered me but as I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come, I didn’t feel remotely nervous.

  ‘Good night,’ he called up the stairs.

  ‘Good night, Ernest. Sleep well.’

  chapter eleven

  ‘I don’t wear clothes in the bush. I don’t want to scare you while I’m here so I’m keeping my clothes on.’

  Ernest was standing in the kitchen, sipping a mug of sweet tea, and he was naked from the waist up. On the bottom half he wore a pair of loose-fitting pyjama bottoms that sat low on his hips, revealing jutting hipbones and a lean torso. I pressed a spoon against the teabag in my cup and watched leaves float to the surface.

  ‘That’s good, Ernest. I’m glad you’ll be keeping your clothes on while you’re here. You’ll notice I’m keeping mine on too.’

  ‘Will it be a problem when you visit me? I’ll be naked then.’

  I ran through a few options in my head. When did I last spend any time alone in a forest with a naked man? Would it bother me? Too right it would. I was unnerved by the proximity of a half-naked man, especially one as attractive as Ernest. I’d had so many disasters in the past I didn’t trust my reactions towards men anymore. Whatever I did or said would be wrong. I settled for something flippant and non-committal.

  ‘Just as long as you don’t expect me to be naked too.’

  Ernest looked disappointed. ‘Maybe once you get to know me better, and you relax, you’ll feel OK about it.’

  I concentrated on fishing tea leaves out of my cup. Oh, yeah right, I thought, like that’s going to happen. You haven’t met Miss Prissy Knickers. And then I wondered if it might happen in the bush. Ernest was a good-looking man and I allowed myself to wonder what his skin would feel like if I were to reach out and touch him. I banished the thought as quickly as it appeared.

  I had come to Australia to do a short-term job that would get me out of England and away from A3. I wanted to enjoy myself but I wasn’t looking to start a new relationship, have casual sex or get involved on any level other than friendship. The conversation in Byrock had been fascinating but I’d crossed the Ru
bicon. Besides, I still felt uneasy about the way Ernest had turned up out of the blue the day before. I wasn’t even sure I would be making a trip out to his camp any time soon. I glanced at the clock, swallowed the last mouthful of tea and rinsed my cup in the sink.

  ‘I hope the little hairies won’t put you off,’ Ernest said from behind me.

  I switched off the tap, unsure if I’d heard correctly.

  ‘Little horrors? Are there children at your camp?’ I asked, wiping my hands on a tea towel and turning back to face him.

  Ernest frowned at the floor, clutching his empty mug. ‘There are no children, it’s just me and the little hairies.’

  I was discombobulated by the talk of nakedness and kept expecting a joke to unfold.

  ‘A little hairy? What’s that when it’s at home?’

  I should have known better. Ernest didn’t have a flippant side.

  ‘It’s a creature about two or three foot tall.’ His voice was careful and deliberate, as always. ‘You don’t see them very often because they move too fast, but they’re out there.’ He frowned again. ‘Don’t let them worry you, though; you’ll be all right.’

  The air was thicker than it had been a moment ago. Was he serious? There was an Aboriginal man in my kitchen and he was talking like a character from Lewis Carroll. It felt like I was staring down the rabbit hole, wondering if I should follow. Ernest was telling me, in all seriousness, that if I were to visit him in the bush, not only would I have to contend with a fully naked, six-foot-six-inch Ernest, I’d also have to watch out for small hairy creatures that moved incredibly quickly. I didn’t bother to ask if they would be naked. I think I knew what the answer would be.

  I looked at the clock again. There was no time to pursue the conversation; I had to get to work.

  My hand hovered over the fruit bowl where I kept a spare set of keys. Could I trust him? I didn’t know much about Ernest but he was a guest in my house, I had allowed him to stay, and I couldn’t now treat him like a prisoner and lock him in. Or out. Besides, he’d done nothing to make me think I couldn’t trust him. He’d made no attempt to climb the stairs during the night and he seemed as open and honest as his name suggested.

  ‘You’ll need these to get back in if you go for a walk,’ I said, handing over the keys. ‘I’ll be back by six thirty – help yourself to any food you can find in the fridge or in the cupboards.’

  I left him standing in the kitchen, a young man with an old-man beard nestled incongruously against his bare torso.

  *

  The day passed quickly and I barely had time to think about Ernest. Everyone in the marketing office was working like crazy, including the lovely Janis Joplin who kept us all supplied with freshly brewed tea. Lovely as she was, there came a time when I had to stand up to her. I was copied in on an exchange of emails, in which Janis offered to write an in-depth feature on medical training for a professional magazine. I was impressed; that was a complex job that would require hours of research and interviews to do it justice.

  Twenty seconds later an email pinged into my inbox. ‘Looks like I put your hand up for some more work,’ she wrote, adding a smiley face at the bottom of the email.

  I could feel my heart thudding. I was the person who always said yes, no matter what was asked of me, in work and in life. But I’d never been under such intense pressure before. I was working weekends and evenings just to get through the workload. I thought about the photo shoots I had to arrange, the four-page advertorial for The Sydney Morning Herald I had to organise and the next issue of the newsletter I was meant to write, never mind the website that hadn’t been updated and the weekly news that hadn’t even been started.

  I was forty-nine years old and I had never stood up for myself in a workplace before. It was one of those ‘now or never’ moments.

  ‘Looks like you put your own hand up,’ I replied, adding a smiley face of my own. That may sound insignificant but it was a major step forward (and it was also the end of the smiley faces).

  I called in to Woolies on the way home and picked up a cauliflower for dinner. A few weeks of walking up Darling Street had left my clothes looser and my thunderous thighs noticeably less flabby. The long slog uphill, inhaling scent from flowers and listening to birds singing overhead, beat going to a gym any day.

  As I turned the key in the lock I wondered if Ernest would still be there. My clichéd view of Aboriginal people, gleaned from tourist images and an English primary school education in the 1960s, was that they went walkabout, roaming the land for months on end.

  I found Ernest sitting perfectly still in an armchair in a corner of the living room. He got up when I came in, moving with a slowness that wouldn’t be stopped until he’d reached his full height, like a whale slowly breaking the surface of the ocean. After an unexpected hug hello, I asked what he’d been doing all day.

  ‘I had a sleep,’ he said in that tentative, even way that wouldn’t be rushed. ‘And a bit of a cry.’

  His answer took me by surprise. ‘Why were you crying?’

  ‘I lost all my money.’

  Ernest crumpled back into the chair and empty space pushed at my stomach.

  ‘What happened, Ernest?’

  ‘I lost it on the pokies.’

  ‘How much did you lose?’

  ‘Everything I had.’

  My heart beat faster. I sat down opposite and fought the instinct to respond with dramatic intensity. Instead I took a breath and slowed the conversation down to match his pace.

  ‘Ernest . . . how much did you have?’

  ‘Three hundred dollars.’

  Relief that he hadn’t lost more vied with shock at discovering all Ernest had in the world was $300. Now he didn’t even have that.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, as gently as possible. I could see he was upset. He stared at the floor, slowly moving his head from side to side.

  ‘It was the bad spirits. They made me do it.’

  I tried to get on the same wavelength as Ernest when I answered. ‘Why didn’t you listen to the good spirits?’

  ‘The bad spirits don’t want me to be on the path of goodness.’

  ‘But why did you listen to them?’

  ‘I didn’t have a choice.’

  His answer shocked me. Surely we all had a choice when it came to good and evil; I’d always believed that. I don’t know if it was Ernest’s quivering lip and lowered shoulders, or the strangeness of what he was saying, but suddenly I knew I’d had a choice when it came to A3. I wasn’t a victim of fate; I could have chosen to believe him when he said he wasn’t interested and I had chosen not to. And now, here in Australia, I could choose to nurture my sadness about the fact that he was married. Or I could choose to let it go and get on with life. Choices. We all had them. It seemed an important point, one I wasn’t willing to let go of.

  ‘Ernest, what if the bad spirit told you to do something terrible, something really bad. Would you do it?’

  ‘They don’t want me to stay on the right path.’

  ‘Ernest, you can choose to listen to the good spirits.’

  ‘The bad spirits want me to fail.’

  ‘What about personal responsibility? What if the bad spirits told you to bash someone? Would you do it?’ I could hear my voice rising. I was selfishly worried for my own safety. What if the bad spirits told him to take a pop at me? Would he be forced to do it? Would the good spirits intervene in time? Ernest shook his head and tears fell on his cheek.

  ‘Where do you figure in all this talk about good spirits and bad spirits, Ernest? What about your own will?’

  ‘They want me to fail,’ he repeated miserably.

  It was pointless to continue the conversation so I let the subject drop and made cauliflower cheese for supper.

  *

  ‘My uncle Dave told me a riddle I don’t underst
and. He said I’d understand it one day.’

  After dinner it had seemed like a good idea to get out of the house, so I took Ernest on a short stroll along the quiet back streets of Balmain; now we were sitting on a park bench overlooking Birchgrove Oval. Ernest was reluctant at first, eventually admitting he’d been moved on by police earlier in the day when a concerned resident ‘reported’ him for sitting on a bench in that very park. Try moving him on now, I thought, suppressing the fury that made me want to ring every doorbell and find out who had been so bigoted.

  It was a clear night, cool near the water with a faint sprinkling of stars above. Here those stars were competing with light pollution from a city of four million people and all that went with it: cars, houses, buses, ferries, museums, supermarkets, office blocks, high-rise apartments, skyscrapers. Out in the desert or at sea they would be diamond sharp. I had an inkling of what Ernest meant when he said his ancestors left him behind when he walked into a town. How could any spirit reach him in the middle of all this distraction?

  ‘What was the riddle?’ I asked.

  ‘Whether you’re a butterfly or whether you’re a snail, when the magpie comes pecking you’ll remember who you are.’ He turned his head. ‘Do you know what he meant?’

  Maybe I did. In spite of his size, Ernest seemed as gentle as a butterfly. He was as slow as a snail too, every movement considered and purposeful, his speech never hurried. His uncle had chosen the metaphors well. I tried to link my answer to the bad spirits, hoping to find a way to help Ernest get over what had happened.

  ‘Maybe what your uncle is telling you is that the bad spirits are like magpies. When they peck at you, even if you’re gentle and slow, you have to learn to defend yourself. You have to remember that you’re a man and find the strength you need to do the right thing. When bad things happen, when the magpie comes pecking, that’s when life is teaching you a lesson.’

  Ernest nodded but he didn’t look convinced. It’s hard to interpret the guidance others give. How often has the universe tried to teach me a lesson? I’m pretty sure well-meaning friends must have tried many times to let me know I was chasing the wrong men, and wasting my life in the process. But did I listen?