Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  ‘Recorded a top of fifty-three degrees last year.’

  Why would anyone choose to live in such extreme conditions? I assumed she must have been hoping to strike it rich one day so she could escape the place but I was wrong.

  ‘I love the isolation out here, wouldn’t live anywhere else,’ she’d said bluntly.

  A litany of accidents and injuries had walked through the door, all reinforcing the harsh, unforgiving nature of that small bleak town. A man had called for a check-up following a fall down a mine shaft, a woman with ulcers on her legs needed urgent treatment and a sheep shearer presented with repetitive strain injury, nursing a dog that had clearly come off second best in a fight with a wild pig.

  The nurse practitioner told me she had once attended an accident in a nearby paddock, a helicopter crash in which the pilot had died. The co-pilot was badly burnt and had multiple fractures on both legs. She’d asked him, on a scale of one to ten, how bad the pain was. ‘About six,’ was what he said. The nurse had smiled at my shocked expression. ‘People out here are pretty resilient,’ she’d said.

  *

  A stroll through town after brunch showed Broken Hill wasn’t always so broken. The disused train station in the centre of town proudly declared that Broken Hill once had the first fully air-conditioned diesel-powered train in the British Empire. The Silver City Comet went into operation between Broken Hill and Parkes in the late 1930s, with iced water on tap in twelve air-conditioned carriages. Four powerful diesel engines pulled the carriages at a respectable 130 kilometres an hour. That’s when Broken Hill was at the centre of the mining boom.

  Some people came to Broken Hill in the early days to get rich and they ended up settling there. Others stayed as long as it took to make some money down the mines and then they were off. How long would I stay?

  The walk back took us past ‘pavements’ of beaten earth and it felt oddly personal, walking on a nature strip that someone had carefully cultivated. Some owners had watered and seeded the baked red soil to encourage grass to grow and some had planted the strip with lavender bushes and eucalyptus trees, anything that might withstand the frequent droughts and fearsome summer heat. Others had left the pavement as a patch of red dirt, worn down by cars, feet, prams and bicycles that failed to quell the ever-present clutch of straggling weeds.

  We passed houses where roses bloomed in profusion; fragrant petals juxtaposed against the looming backdrop of the dark slagheap in the centre of town. Streets with practical and distinctly unromantic names like Iodide, Bromide, Chloride, Uranium, Oxide and Kaolin overflowed with old-fashioned roses that flourished. I reached over a fence and pulled a full bloom towards me. If I closed my eyes I could have been in England.

  Almost.

  A hot wind filled with fine dust forced me to lower my head, clamp a sunhat onto my head and narrow my eyes as we struggled up a slight rise in the road. Heat swirled into my lungs and a fine sheen of moisture appeared on my skin, drying as quickly as it appeared in the thirty-five-degree heat.

  We passed a small local supermarket that looked like it was struggling to survive, shelves stocked with chips, chocolate, soft drinks, lollies, and a meagre fruit and vegetable section. I picked up a shrink-wrapped packet of corn on the cob and turned it over to check the use-by date. It was long overdue. Someone had simply crossed the date out with a thick black pen.

  Most roads were wide, flamboyantly so, with room for eight or ten cars to drive side by side.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, my hat jammed firmly on my head. ‘Is it so you can shoot through on the way to somewhere else?’ It was a feeble attempt at humour and the joke wasn’t funny. CC attempted a laugh all the same.

  ‘They were designed that way to allow a bullock team to turn around,’ he patiently explained. ‘Early miners would turn up with the materials they needed to build a house loaded onto the back of a dray. That’s why so many houses were built of corrugated iron,’ he added. ‘When the ore ran out they could dismantle the house, put the sheets on the back of the dray and move on.’

  It looked like some of them had left their houses behind. They reminded me of the terrapins we had at school, or the fibro shacks that sprang up in England after the war, that were only meant to last five years and were still standing forty years later. We passed one house made entirely of salvaged materials. The only thing of value appeared to be a huge satellite dish in the garden.

  ‘Probably worth more than the house,’ said CC, in his own attempt at humour.

  There didn’t appear to be a rich or poor neighbourhood in Broken Hill, just pockets of poverty and wealth, often side by side. Houses built from salvaged timber, iron, fibro sheeting, weatherboard and old stone, thrown up quickly with the minimum of fuss, stood beside more substantial, graceful properties, brick-built by settlers in prosperous times and hidden behind tall, swaying trees.

  Next door to one of the graceful mansions was a crumbling house of corrugated iron, with a fence of twisted, broken chicken wire. I looked closer and noticed that the windows were made of odd bits of stained glass. A shaft of sunlight glinting on those windows would have thrown shimmering rainbows into the house. I was reminded that making do can sometimes throw up unexpected bursts of beauty.

  Towards the end of Zebina Street was a shack made of tin and corrugated iron, bound together with mud and stones that must have been collected from the desert scrub at the end of the street. The sheets of corrugated iron were laid at odd angles, the walls were crumbling, the boundary fence was broken and the garden was a wasteland. A handwritten sign hung optimistically on the front gate: ‘For Sale’.

  It was tempting to call the mobile number scratched underneath to find out what the house was worth – there was a time, not so long ago, when you could buy a house in Broken Hill on a credit card – but I didn’t want to get the owner’s hopes up. He or she couldn’t have had many calls.

  CC’s house was one of the last in the street, a simple brick bungalow with manicured lawns shaded by mature trees. A few more houses, a slight rise and the road petered out until there was no distinction between the end of civilisation and the start of a vast empty wilderness that pressed in close and let no one (well, me) forget that Broken Hill was surrounded by desert.

  ‘Do you fancy a swim?’

  It was late afternoon and the sun had lost some of its heat so we cycled two blocks to the municipal pool, a place of such dazzling emptiness it would have had David Hockney reaching for his paintbrush.

  Sunlight sharpened the blocks of solid colour: navy and blue tiles, red flags, purple shadecloth, yellow lifebuoys. It cost two dollars to get in and we had a lane to ourselves. In fact, we had the whole Olympic-sized pool to ourselves. What’s more, it was heated.

  CC dived in to chase down the first of forty laps and I eased myself down the steps, luxuriating in the cool, clear water. I took long, lazy strokes, brushing aside an occasional fluffy white feather that had drifted down from the white cockatoos that were sitting on the branches of nearby gum trees.

  After a while I left CC powering up and down the pool and I got out, towelling off at the side.

  ‘Not many people here,’ I said to a nearby attendant.

  ‘No, gets busy in school holidays though.’ He nodded towards CC. ‘He swims most days. In winter I’ve seen him swim with frost on top of his head.’

  That didn’t surprise me.

  *

  ‘Are you sure you’re not married?’

  I couldn’t get over how neat and tidy the house was. There were signs of a woman’s touch everywhere, in the flourishing indoor pot plants, the ironed tablecloths that covered the kitchen and dining room tables, and a vase of freshly picked roses sitting on the sideboard.

  ‘I’ve got a housekeeper,’ CC explained. ‘Heather looks after the house when I’m not here; she does all the washing and ironing as well.’

  ‘Heather?’ I sa
id, trying to keep my voice neutral. Was that a stab of jealousy I felt? How curious. Since when did I want to look after someone else’s house? And I hated washing and ironing.

  CC looked pleased. ‘Jealous, Frosty?’

  ‘Ha. As if.’

  But I was jealous. And that was a good sign. There was something oddly comforting about being in Broken Hill with CC. His place wasn’t remotely the kind of house I would have chosen to live in, and it wasn’t decorated to my taste either (I’m hard to please, I know, but pink velour curtains and matching pink velour cushions have never done it for me). Still, I felt comfortable. At the last count I’d lived in thirty-two different places, decorating each one with minimalist white or wild colour and the longest I’d lived anywhere was four years. It was hard to explain why I would feel at home with CC, in a house he’d lived in for the past thirty-six years. Was I allowed to be that relaxed, that happy? Was it really that easy?

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘I could eat something.’

  I searched the cupboards for biscuits to go with cheese and found three packets: one expired in 2005, one in 2003 and the winner by a mouldy mile expired in 1999. I fared no better with nuts and an old jar of marmalade, not that it mattered much; the block of cheese in the fridge was seven months out of date.

  CC seemed to exist on a diet of yoghurt, protein powder, steak and peas. Why would such a conservative carnivore be attracted to someone like me? I supposed for the same reason I was attracted to him.

  Yin and yang.

  North and South.

  Jack Sprat . . . and his wife.

  *

  ‘Let’s go out, we can watch the sunset at Mundi Mundi and get takeaway on the way back.’

  I didn’t admit I’d been to Mundi Mundi already; CC was eager to show me the sights and I didn’t want to disappoint him. We folded two deckchairs into the back of the car and took a packet of peanuts, a bottle of wine and a rare bottle of beer for CC.

  The Silverton Road took us across the Barrier Highway – Adelaide 500 kilometres one way, Cobar 450 kilometres the other – and into a landscape of desolate plains and low hills.

  ‘You’ll recognise this next bit of road. It’s where they filmed the big chase scene in Mad Max.’

  CC had told me, with some pride I might add, that the first Mad Max film was shot on location on the outskirts of Broken Hill in the late 1970s. Location scouts must have been thrilled to find somewhere that so clearly said ‘end of the world’ with such finality, but I can’t say there was anything familiar about the seemingly empty scrub that passed in a blur on either side of the road.

  ‘Here it is,’ said CC.

  Apart from a slight rise and bend the next bit of road looked exactly like the last bit. I was oddly touched that he thought I might recognise it, even more so when he revealed he had flown an aircraft in the film and had had to land on a stretch of road further on (which looked a lot like the stretch of road further back).

  We parked at the lookout (a rocky outcrop I did remember) that afforded a view of distant plains stretching across a big fat slab of landscape and I tried in vain to see the curvature of the earth’s surface.

  The air was gritty with dust, the landscape strewn with rocks, and we unloaded the deckchairs in a determined wind that slapped against the car.

  ‘At least the wind will keep the flies off,’ said CC, optimistically, settling the deckchairs onto the rocky ground next to the car.

  It didn’t. We had to part our lips like bombproof letterboxes at Heathrow Airport to cautiously sip our drinks, slipping peanuts between the thin slits, mindful of flies that were trying to slip in as well.

  I once read that the average person will swallow three flies in a lifetime. I dismissed the report. I’d never heard of anyone swallowing a fly, except maybe the odd motorbike rider. Now I understood how statisticians must have arrived at that figure – the residents of Broken Hill had skewed the average. There were flies so desperate to find a drop of moisture they were willing to crawl up our nostrils. I wondered how many flies CC had swallowed in his lifetime and decided now was not the time to ask.

  Dusty plains stretched into the distance and I felt a pang of longing for Sydney Harbour; views of sparkling beauty I’d taken for granted on a daily basis. Images of green fields and dry stone walls in the English villages of Castle Combe, Chipping Norton and Moreton-in-Marsh superimposed themselves across the parched desert. I thought about English country houses and well-stocked kitchen gardens. I remembered the rugged beauty of Cornish fishing villages with tall cliffs, blue seas and cobblestone streets, the majestic beauty of elegant chateaux in the Loire Valley surrounded by formal gardens, the swaying fields of sunflowers, serried ranks of vineyards . . .

  Stop it.

  I would never see the beauty in this desolate flat landscape if I kept comparing it to somewhere else.

  We sat in our deckchairs, sipping wine, slipping in peanuts and watching the sun dip lower in the sky. As we relaxed together in companionable silence, like the couples I remembered from my first trip to Broken Hill, I began to understand how such isolation and peace might be attractive.

  Five minutes before the sun finally sank below the horizon another car pulled up and four chattering teenage girls clambered out. They threw down blankets and pressed together on the ground a few metres in front of us, arms linked as they lined up to watch the sunset, giggling softly to each other. After a brief pause one of them filled the silence with a question.

  ‘So, Brad Pitt or George Clooney? Who would you shag?’

  CC and I sat quietly in our deckchairs, sipping wine and slipping in peanuts. We were invisible to the giggling girls, a middle-aged couple well past our use-by dates.

  The sunset when it happened was fleeting and ordinary so we packed up our deckchairs and left what remained of the evening to the carload of giggling girls (Brad Pitt fans, by the way).

  We got back to Broken Hill and, on a whim, put our deckchairs on the grass in the garden to watch the stars of the Milky Way appear above our heads. Forked lightning flashed across the sky and the distant rumble of thunder held the promise of rain.

  I decided I might enjoy a return trip to Broken Hill.

  chapter nineteen

  ‘Sasha couldn’t get enough time off work for Sydney so we’re meeting in Cairns. I’ll have a few days on my own while the conference is on. Could I cadge a bed? If it’s a problem, don’t worry, I can book into a hotel.’

  I scanned the email, text flickering as I scrolled up and down the screen. My heart was racing as I hit reply. ‘No, of course it’s not a problem, come and stay, there’s a spare room,’ I wrote. I hit send before I could change my mind.

  The occasional email had pinged back and forth since A3’s wedding – how are things, what’s the weather like in Australia? Great thanks, how are you? It was all very grown-up and polite, only now he was planning a trip to Sydney. He would be speaking at a conference in Darling Harbour and his wife would be flying over when the conference ended, joining him for a diving holiday on the Great Barrier Reef.

  A3 was coming to Sydney, and he was coming without his wife.

  The request set my emotions spinning. Why was he coming? Why did he want to stay with me? And why on earth did I say yes? I’d done such a good job of persuading him – and to a lesser extent me – that I was over that ridiculous infatuation nonsense that he thought there was nothing wrong in asking to stay. And I stupidly said yes. Oh crap, crap, crap, crap, CRAP.

  CC was back in Broken Hill and he wouldn’t be in Sydney for another few weeks. In the meantime, the man I had pursued for so long, so desperately and doggedly, without any hope of success or sign of interest on his part, had suddenly asked if he could come and stay. I should have said no. I should have lied and told him I’d be away. I could have made up any number of excuses, I could even have ignored the email
altogether.

  But you didn’t.

  No. I didn’t. I invited him to stay.

  A3 had left an imprint on my life like a stain that couldn’t be rubbed off. I’d tried to stop loving him and I wasn’t sure how successful I’d been. Not very, judging by my reaction to his email.

  What chance did CC have when I was still longing for A3? No. Longing was too strong a word; it was more of a vague, niggling, annoying hope that A3 would want to be with me. But why? Why would I want to be with someone who’d rejected me? Was it because I refused to accept reality? Was it easier to live in a fantasy world than face the truth? Or did I still nurture a faint hope that things weren’t working out, that his newly minted marriage might be on the rocks already? And even if he did arrive and suddenly declare that his bright shiny new marriage wasn’t working –

  Stop right there.

  – why would he want to be with me instead? And did I really want to be with him?

  No, you don’t.

  So why was I so churned up about his visit?

  He’s coming for work and he wants a free bed.

  Yes I know, but what if –

  What if nothing. He’s a cheapskate academic and he wants a free bed.

  I know but –

  No buts. He’s married. Get over it.

  Miss Prissy Knickers was right. Of course he wasn’t coming for any reason other than work. I tried to remember how it felt when I was living in England and A3 avoided my calls, ignored my emails and made excuses not to see me. None of it calmed my jittery nerves. Hope rose like a helium balloon above a busy fairground.

  What was behind his email? Was it, at long last, his chance to reveal that he’d spent the past four years fighting a burning desire to be with me? Had he been struggling with a passion so intense it threatened to overwhelm him and prevented him (pretty much ever) picking up the phone and calling me?

  I should have grabbed that gaudy balloon and jabbed it with a sharp pin. I should have squashed that burgeoning sense of hope and told him not to come.