This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  Dad says, getting up off the ground: ‘Gordon’s just choofed, in a sudden hurry to be home.’

  ‘Oh.’ I might as well have hit Mum with a brick. Speechless: not a common state for her. I think the last time I saw her face like this was when Dad told her the lad coming up from Nyngan was Presbyterian, and for which Mum gave him immediate dispensation after the opening Pleased to meet you, Mrs Cooper. She drops a string bag full of cumquats on the footpath now; obviously she was going to make him his favourite marmalade to take, visited Mrs Cronin’s tree especially on her way back from St Brigid’s, and I won’t be getting dispensation for a while.

  The three of them stand there gawking at me, cumquats rolling into the gutter and disappearing down the stormwater drain. Dad’s big brown eyes are round with disappointment, eyes that have seen more of the world than I will ever know.

  I send myself to my room. If you want me, you can find me in the catalogue under D for dill. And you can all start saying it now: Gordon Brock, my one that got away.

  GORDON

  ‘Going far today?’ the bloke at this Penrith servo asks me. He’s screwing the cap back on my fuel tin, too slowly, wanting to chat.

  ‘Nyngan,’ I answer him, not wanting to chat.

  ‘Nyngan? Where’s that then?’ He looks behind him at the mountains that divide Sydney from the rest of the country.

  ‘Between Dubbo and Bourke,’ I answer him, about three hundred and fifty miles away from this stretch of nowhere, if you’d let me keep on.

  ‘That’s a fair way.’ He sleeves the sweat off his forehead and looks at the bike again, looking doubtful she’ll make it. But she will. It’s only a bit of rust on her. She’s still a Ricky Triumph that goes seventy flat out, and at the moment the only woman making any sense to me. ‘How long will that take you?’ he asks.

  ‘Should get there tomorrow. Evening.’ Probably. Probably would be more sensible to have got the train, but I’ve been looking forward to this ride for weeks. Or I was. A cow complains, bored and lonely, from behind the workshop and, yeah, that’s about the strength of it.

  ‘Where you stopping tonight?’ this servo bloke is asking me now.

  He’s getting annoying. Or making me more annoyed than I already am. But then I suppose I’d be wanting company too if I was stuck manning a servo in Penrith on a Sunday. I tell him: ‘Bathurst, probably.’

  ‘Camping out?’ he asks, looking at my swag on the rack. Rack that Bernie should be sitting on, holding on to me, only the tackle box between us.

  ‘Probably.’ I have my hand in my pocket to pay him now but I’m not quick enough before he asks: ‘Going out there for work?’

  ‘Yeah.’ To make some money to buy Bernadette Cooper a ring. I’ve calculated how many sheep it will cost me to get her the one I’ve just put a deposit on at Prouds. It’s a Bingara diamond. It’s got a speck of graphite right in the centre, like a pinhole view into the universe. Alternatively, I could turn around now and be back in Coogee in time to clout whoever is taking her to this club social. If that was the way I did things. And I don’t. It’s Bernie I’m angry at anyway. She knows how close I am to asking her; she must do. She’s giving me the shove, isn’t she. Either that or she’s a flip, doesn’t know what she wants, and either way, I should leave it alone. I only feel as I do because she looks like Merle Oberon. The only straight lines on her belong to her nose and her teeth, and you don’t need science to explain the effect of that. I’m only stuck on the look of her. And that’s worse bull than her going to a surf club social.

  I’ve been stuck on her like phenolic adhesive since the day I first saw her. The tight waist of her suit. She’d just got her first pay from Chalmers, only sixteen and she’d bought her parents a bottle of champagne, and they invited Mrs Zoc and me round to share it. Here’s to our Bernie, Mr Cooper raised his glass, and then he said to me out the side of his mouth: Don’t let on to her it tastes like –

  ‘Warm today, eh sport?’

  ‘Yeah.’ And it’ll be a lot warmer in Nyngan. I will make up my mind what to do while I’m there. Four years I’ve waited to ask her; another couple of months won’t kill me, will it.

  I don’t stop again till Blackheath, at the top of the mountains, and I haven’t been sensible on the way up. It’s only half-past two. Good that it’s Sunday and the wallopers must still be at dinner. I consider begging a traveller’s beer at the pub on the highway, but turn off to Govetts Leap instead, to the lookout over the Grose Valley. It’s the best view; the best place to see that these mountains are not mountains at all but a series of escarpments. A massive plateau cut through with gorges.

  This view always settles something in me, making me feel small, but in a good way. This giant block of ocean floor forced up from the bottom of another world makes me and whatever’s bothering me seem like just grains of nothing on a scale of time that’s unimaginable. I close my eyes, smell the eucalyptus oil coming up off the forest below, let the noise of the cicadas get above the engine buzz in me. I stretch out the cramp in my knuckles from gripping the handlebars and I’m not thinking about anything.

  Till I hear a woman laugh.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she waves through the banksia scrub, dragging her man out from a trail behind her. She’s missed doing up the second button on her dress, and the hem of her petticoat’s hanging down. Honeymooners. Surprised to find they’re not the only people on earth. I don’t think I even manage to smile at them. It should be me and Bernie up here.

  I want to turn around again, be with her now, and ask her, right now. Bugger waiting till I can afford the ring. Tell her: Marry me, now. Promise her: I’m not going to keep you in a box in the suburbs afterwards. Tell her: Come on the survey with me, I’ll show you the world. But I can’t do that. I’d look like a halfwit now. Tearing off the way I did. Man with the shits – if it was a form of energy, I’d have saved myself a few bob in fuel.

  I go back up to the pub to cool down with a beer, and when the first taste hits my head, I realise I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, so I order a pie. One that tastes like wet gravel as I realise that I am a bloody halfwit altogether: come on the survey? As if Bernie would want to begin her married life living in a tent while I map out bauxite deposits across the long paddocks of the Northern Tablelands. Show her the world: the one from Gunnedah to Inverell. As if they’d let a girl come out on the survey at all. And as if I’ll be anywhere but living in a tent while this war is on: it’s suddenly important for the government to know what we’ve got, and New South Wales is a big place. War or not, I could be waltzing Matilda for years.

  Back on the Great Western Highway, Victoria Pass is good for clearing my mind with the concentration it takes to negotiate it: a gradient that should probably be illegal if it wasn’t so grouse flying down it. Then after that, the road through the hills towards Lithgow is easy, and it’s a pretty ride. This is what I came for, and I do enjoy it. I enjoy it so much I keep on going past Bathurst. The road is smooth and new, on this Mitchell Highway. It was a dusty stock road the last time I was here, and now it’s been surfaced all the way to Narromine. Amazing. Civilisation has always stopped at Bathurst, according to those east of the ranges that decide where public money will be spent, but this Mitchell Highway, it looks freshly painted on. Not a pothole in it, though that’s probably because it hasn’t rained since it was laid.

  There is, however, a kangaroo standing in the middle of it, about a hundred yards ahead. Roos, they make sheep look smart. There’s no reason for it to stop in the middle of the road like that. It’s just stopped there because it has, and it will take off again because it does. You can’t read a roo. Last year I was kicked in the chest by a male, a grey just like this one apparently not noticing the motorbike coming towards it right now. I was coming out of the sheds at Mullengudgery, knackered after the rams, and there it was, as if it had been waiting precisely to quilt me, for no reason. Unless it liked the sound of Dad’s laughter. That was pretty good really. A rare enough thing,
Dad’s laugh, but I don’t think I’d get one from him if I chose to start an argument with a roo here. It’s heading on for dusk, when they get up and about from spending all day just as pointlessly sleeping, so I’d better slow down, find a place to stop, get off the road. The roo continues to ignore me as I veer round it, and it’s tiredness that hits me now, with a sudden shot of thankfulness for every drop Dad’s sweated to get me here. All these years. Even with the scholarships, it’s taken everything he had to give, and I’m half a whisker from handing it back to him framed. It can’t end here in a collision with a roo.

  Not five minutes on, a gully appears off to the right, a stretch of willows and green weeds between the gold of the hills saying there’s a creek down there, coming off the Macquarie, and probably the spot to camp. It is. It’s a beautiful spot, and it would be yabbies for tea tonight if, in my hurry to get away this morning and show the world how angry I was, I hadn’t forgotten to bring anything to catch yabbies with. No meat. Except the bedourie oven full of spaghetti and mince Mrs Zoc made me take, a small lorryload, but that won’t do. You need a piece of meat that can be tied to the end of some string. But then I remember I do have some meat, of a sort, shoved in the bottom of my swag: the tin of sausages I’ve kept meaning to toss out because they are not food. I work quickly, setting three stick-and-string traps on the edge of the water and getting the fire going.

  And then I wait. The sky turns piccaninny pink, not a cloud in it. Blue dragonflies are darting over the surface of the water, too quick for yabbies. I look behind me over the hills. With the sunset, they’re glowing now as if they really are made of gold, and that would be beautiful too if this colour wasn’t caused by this country not having had a drop of spring rain. The grass is paper dry. Who’d be a farmer? Not me. My father would have shot me himself if I’d ever got an inclination that way. Good then that a fascination with rocks has taken me a long way elsewhere. Dad wouldn’t let on he was proud of that under torture – not too proud for anything, he picked peas one whole long summer to pay for my senior school blazer, only work he could get at the time – but he is proud, of me. I can’t wait to see him.

  Dad won’t know what it means for me to have impressed the Surveyor General with that paper on haematite, proposing that there might be a lot more high-grade iron ore than the estimated two hundred and sixty megatons we think we have in the ground, that if in fact this ground of ours did once spend a considerable amount of eternity under a muddy puddle we might have an entire continent of haematite, enough to sell to the whole world – a mineral jackpot. Dad won’t care that Professor Richardson thinks it’s the most exciting undergraduate paper he’s come across for years, that even if it’s a bit wild of accepted wisdom, it’s imagination that drives science, and that will secure me the Geology prize. A given, Professor Richardson said. That’s good, Dad’ll nod, and then he’ll add a smile to the nod: proud.

  It would be good if Bernie was impressed, even just a bit. She finds my fascination with rocks either funny or boring. She either laughs or says ‘hm’ a lot. I don’t blame her. How many famous geologists can you name? How many would know that Mitchell, whose highway I’ve got here on, was a surveyor, and Govett too? Most people, if they have heard of Govett at all, think he was a bushranger who leapt off the waterfall at Blackheath after being cornered by troopers. The reason why most people think this is because it’s written in the Junior Australian History Reader which we all learned by rote in first form. Even the Department of Education thinks surveyors are too boring. This continent rides on the sheep’s back, not a bulldozer, and that is an actual fact. I can still hear Mr Farris, the Science master, asking me, for the last time: Are you sure you don’t want to apply for the School of Medicine, Brock? Not for the first time I wonder if I should have. I’d be just as boring, but I’d be a doctor, wishing I’d gone into geology. Would she be more keen on me then?

  What’s she doing now? Down at the Aquarium, having a dance, roller-skating? Laughing, at some other bloke. She can’t really have gone to this surf club social. Can she? No. Hang on, isn’t it the start of the water polo at the Aquarium tonight? She wouldn’t go to that: the girls who go around with the water polo – Ah, I see. She has lied, hasn’t she. She just doesn’t want me, that’s what she’s doing. Putting me off. Too bloody boring, and I can’t change a thing about that.

  Before I can get too far along this dismal line again, I catch sight of one of the yabby sticks twitching. I’ve got one on the string, a big one, about five inches long, and he thinks tinned sausage is pretty good stuff. I grab him fast behind the claws and throw him straight in the billy. And when I taste him, muddy and sweet, it tastes like home. I eat half the spaghetti then and have another yabby for pudding and I’m nearly asleep as darkness falls and I crawl into my swag, already dreaming of her. She’s wiping her chin, beside me close to the fire, saying: These yabbies would be good in a cheese sauce, don’t you reckon, Rock? Hm, I do reckon. I want to listen to her talk forever; she’s never got a wireless voice on, always just herself. Natural. She smiles, and that seems more like home than anything.

  I’ve been walking for miles, days or weeks. Or years my legs are that sore. But I’ve found a sapphire, a huge fist-sized sapphire, and we’re both holding it, between us. Her thick dark hair touches my neck and she’s kissing me. Finally. The fact that she is kissing me is a lot more exciting than the sapphire. But she pulls away, holds it up to the light, like a hunk of frozen sea, and she asks me: What’s this type of rock again, Rock? I tell her, It’s a type of corundum. She laughs: Conundrum! That’s right. I want to pull her back, to kiss her again, but instead, I say: No, corundum – the crystalline form of aluminium oxide.

  I try to force myself to wake up, so I can’t spoil it further with an explanation of corundum’s atomic structural similarities to haematite. A whipbird is calling it dawn, so I should wake up anyway. But she’s kissing my neck now, and now she’s kissing my face. I don’t want to wake up ever. But I become aware of an odd smell, which doesn’t smell like her White Lilac scent, not at all.

  I open one eye, and see it’s a dog.

  A red kelpie bitch standing over me. Wagging her tail. Her slobber on my left ear.

  She’s pretty keen for something. I open both eyes, get up on my elbows, and she jumps away, over to the bike, pushing her snout against the pannier with last night’s leftovers in it, pawing at the buckle of the strap. She’s a working dog, fallen on hard times, or maybe lost. She’s also pregnant. Sorry Mrs Zoc, I’m going to have to sacrifice the spaghetti. This poor girl is so hungry she just about licks a hole through the bottom of the bedourie when I give it to her. As I’m packing up I wonder if I could get her into town somehow, into Orange, if she’d sit on top of the swag on the rack, she obviously belongs to someone, but when I look to see where she is, she’s taken off. I whistle for her a couple of times, but she doesn’t come back. Nothing here but me and a fine streaky mist hanging over the creek. If it wasn’t for the evidence, I’d wonder if that happened at all.

  The evidence of the drought extends almost all the way to Orange, where some decent rain has fallen, I can see on the hills ahead. I wouldn’t have the nerve for farming, I know just looking at the land, someone half an hour up the road getting good rain while you got none. A small heap of freshly shot ewes stacked on the brown grass against a fence here outside Lucknow is a temporary memorial to the sentiment. The grazier’ll have a good year next year, he’d be hoping, and there’ll be guaranteed prices for even the mangiest fleece, for army uniforms across an empire, and he’ll be shouting the bar. That’s what they live on, hope over logic, the smallholders at least, with nothing to fall back on but the mercy of the bank, that has nothing to fall back on but the sale of the clip, and round it goes. Dad reckons the big droughts come in roughly fifteen to twenty year cycles and we’re due another now, but he would say that: he lost his hope altogether in 1919, apart from me.

  I cross the tracks into Orange, its main street lined
with roses and shop windows full of wealth, Mount Canobolas rising up behind, rich with volcanic soil, and it’s always odd to think that Dad passed up an offer of a settlement holding here. A decision he stands by. This town is all church spires and orchards and pansified squattocracy – not his country. Too easy. I go for breakfast at the Hotel Canobolas, the place as brand new as the bitumen outside, and the couple of old rough heads already at the bar tell you of the season, swaggies tramping through with the stone fruit harvest and whatever piece work they can get, drinking their pay as they go, heading south and away from the heat.

  I’m heading northwest, lucky me, with a full engagement card, nine weeks on twenty-five shillings a hundred head, and probably for the last time. That’s sort of sad to consider, sad as the reason wages are so good this year, until I consider the hundred and thirty pounds minimum I’m banking on, half of which I hope will go to Prouds. When she sees that ring, when she sees how much I think of her, surely … Yes. She’ll have to say yes. I bolt my plate of sausage and egg the quicker to be into it.

  Into the heat. As the sun rises higher the air gets hotter and drier and the engine becomes a small furnace between my knees. The hills disappear into the plains, past Wellington, past Dubbo, and as the bitumen disappears into the dirt there’s only one thing on my mind: only ninety miles to go and it’s not yet three o’clock – I’ll be home for tea. The road is as straight as the land is flat here. But it does contain a few cracks you could lose a dog in after Trangie, so I slow down a bit. Enjoy the scenery, of my country.

  There’s been decent rain here too, I can see from the extent of the grasses, the saltbush and the bluebush. There’s wildflowers along the verges as well, lots of them, these little purple ones with yellow centres. I don’t know what they’re called, but they are the happiest things to come across, purple against the red lateritic soil. The rusted roof of the Nevertire Hotel says only fifty miles to go, but I don’t stop in to say hello. A way off a big mob is being driven across the highway. The dust they’re kicking up looks like smoke in the heat haze, a wall of smoke against sky that’s so blue it almost hurts. A pair of emus watch me buzz pass, curious. I wave to them.