This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  I’ve come here to tell Tim the truth, that’s all, since I can’t give him anything else of any worth. ‘It’s not medicine.’

  ‘No bull,’ he says. He knew that. ‘What you getting them rocks for then?’

  ‘For a weapon, against the Japs. It’s a secret. Not even the miners know why we’re mining it and they’re under contract to keep quiet.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Tim’s interested now. ‘What sort of weapon?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s a lot of scientists in America trying to work it out.’

  He shakes his head, at all of us. ‘That rock have Akurra in him. You won’t know what he’ll do. That why you were in such a hurry to get out of here before?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘That’s a different story.’

  ‘Well, go on then.’ He wants to hear it.

  Tell him the truth. ‘I was chasing a girl. Didn’t catch her. I hit a bull on the Sturt Highway instead.’

  ‘No bull!’ When he stops laughing he says: ‘How’d the ute come out of it?’

  ‘She didn’t make it.’

  When he stops laughing again, he says: ‘What you come here today for then, ay? You want me to drive you up to Leigh?’ He looks over at the jeep I’ve come up in, the government vehicle that I’m driving very responsibly.

  I say: ‘No. No reason. Just to say hello.’

  ‘No bull.’

  ‘No. No bull. I want to ask you something, though.’

  ‘Go on.’

  It’s a question I already know the answer to, but I want to hear it from Tim. ‘What do you think of all the mining and that? What does it mean to you?’

  ‘Whitefella business,’ he shrugs, as if we could put the rocks back in the ground now anyway. ‘You wouldn’t understand what I reckon.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘Them rocks, that land. It’s our mother. What would you think if your mother got cut up and sent away?’

  I tell him: ‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a mother.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ he says. He looks at me for a few seconds, with something like sympathy or pity, I can’t tell. Then he smiles. ‘Don’t worry, Dozy. I’ve got five of them. Mum and four aunties, always giving me shit. They’d all be happy if you got rid of the Japs, but.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘My little brother, Frank, he’s over in New Guinea getting shot at. He’s got to come home so they can get him with the frypan.’

  I can’t say anything to that. That’s the worst bullshit I’ve ever heard.

  He says, ‘You come by here and say hello whenever you are round this way, ay?’

  ‘Yeah, I will,’ I tell him. And I will do that. I want to come back and go bush with Tim Gottlieb. One day. When the war is over.

  The war ends on the nineteenth of October for me, with a memo come up with one of the truckies. Brock, cease operations – effective immediately. Secure the sites as appropriate. Gibbons.

  Pack up, go home, see you later. Is our uranium the shit that’s going to end it for the Japs? Who would know? We don’t even know what happens to it once it gets to Adelaide, what hands it passes through. But I do know I’ve never been less angry or bothered about any of it. The war is ending for the Japs soon, however it comes. They’ll be running out of iron ore now, as well as fuel, with the British taking back the Burma Road. It’s not going to take much to knock them over. Death rays. I’m only curious about them now. What exactly are the Yanks going to do with them? End the war. Tomorrow would be good. Beyond that I don’t care. So long as they get what’s coming to them. On their mongrel knees begging for mercy would be good.

  Errol rubs his hands together, walking up from fixing the grate over Little Gem. He says: ‘Doze, my mate, my scholar, my gentleman, by geez I need a root.’

  I say: ‘I could probably do with one too.’

  ‘What? You coming with me?’

  ‘No thanks. Just checking to see if you’re listening.’ I tell him: ‘I’m going home.’

  I’m going to buy a vehicle and then I’m going home to Nyngan to put the property up for sale with the stock and station, tidy up my affairs. Then I’m going bush. I’ll have a spell back out here with Tim and then I don’t know what. Maybe I’ll go into the Centre, go and look at a lot of haematite. See what it reckons. See what happens.

  BERNIE

  There’s a poster up on the Aquarium noticeboard saying, AMERICAN SERVICEMEN’S BALL, for this coming Saturday. Someone’s written Thanks for coming underneath it, a polite way of expressing the general the sentiment of the day: now buzz off. Hurry it up so we can roll up the barbed wire for another time and go back to being allowed to eat our own pork. Let’s return to a gentler day when Saturday nights were reserved for biff between boaties and surfies. I won’t be going to the ball, either way.

  I pop into Cobber’s, the tackle shop, for a box of worms, then head back up the bluff, round to Forget-Me-Not Bay, as I call it these days, to avoid thinking his name. Going to catch my tea. Not altogether recreational fishing: I’m going broke. Unfortunately second novels don’t write themselves. Too Much To Lose has sold almost ten thousand copies, but the five percent royalty is so tiny I can’t live off it. I need a job, or inspiration. Abe says give it time, and he’s good for a loan if I need one – he’d blooping well want to be since I’ve provided him with a nice little earner.

  Throw my line in and wonder if I should just go and get skunked for inspiration, like a proper writer. Loosen up the imagination. Hm. That poor Bernie Cooper, only wrote one book and then became an alco. Or I could have a steamy love affair with a tortured artist. Nerida did, sort of: she slept with her English professor and he minced up her heart so badly she’s been trying to write about that for the last five years. We’ve already decided that if all else fails we’ll just be penniless spinsters together. That wouldn’t be so bad: Nerida is lovely. Funny and clever and she doesn’t care at all that I’m not as educated as she is – that I thought the Angry Penguins might have been a new line of grim paperbacks, rather than a modern poetry magazine, from Melbourne. She thought that was hilarious; showed me a couple of issues and we flapped around the Ginger Jar connipting for hours over the nonsense in them. I could write about that, couldn’t I? The good things that come from fainting at dinner parties. New friends. New ideas. None of which are settling into –

  ‘Bernadetta! Bernadetta!’ Mrs Zoc calls down from the top of the boat ramps.

  Oh, here we go.

  ‘I get a letter from the solicitor!’ she shouts, takes it out of her apron pocket, waving it in the air.

  I pull up my line and walk up to her.

  ‘Mr Duncan writes to me,’ she’s so happy. Stuart Duncan, Mrs Lockhart’s solicitor and the man who rescued my Arcadia from the wolves, he’s been dealing with Mrs Zoc’s application for naturalisation, which had been rejected, the Department of Complete Rubbish said, because the suspicions against her and her sons’ unlawful activities had not been disproved. Not proved either, but there’s no accounting for institutional stupidity, is there. Only lawyers win there.

  I ask her: ‘Well? What does it say?’

  ‘He says he has sent the application back to the Department. We will prove we are Australian this time. He has a letter from Mrs Lockhart, and from the assistant superintendent of the camp at Hay, for my good character, and all of the receipts of all of the taxes we pay back to 1925. They put us in prison but we still pay our taxes!’ She puts her hands on her hips, proud of it. ‘We will win this time.’

  She does a little compass dance on the grass. Thoroughly certifiable. Should she need more proof she’s Australian?

  I tell her: ‘You will win.’ Or die trying.

  ‘But that is not all.’ She keeps dancing her compass dance. ‘Armando has telephoned me …’ A pause till she’s turned the full circle, and then with a clap: ‘He is getting married!’

  She holds my hands and shouts: ‘Aha!’ Manny is getting married. The surf is crashing o
n Wedding Cake behind me, with that little ache that will never go away. But it’s all right. Hundreds of people get married every day. I squeeze Mrs Zoc’s hands in return. ‘That’s marvellous news.’

  She says: ‘Pick up your fishing things, you have dinner with me tonight, bella.’ I gather my gear and all the way back down to Arcadia she fills me in with the details of Manny’s triumph, finally getting permission from his Palermo girl’s father, with the proviso that they settle in Coleambally now, where the girl, Gabriella, has some relatives on her mother’s side. ‘I understand this condition,’ says Mrs Zoc, so overjoyed: ‘Who with all their right marbles would live in Townsville with the cyclones and that bad wet air? It’s not good for the health. And Coleambally, it is five hundred miles closer. Manny complains, But Mama, I already build her the house in Shirbourne, and I say, So? You build the girl another house.’ She wants grandchildren. She’s going to get them.

  I’m wondering if they’ve yet got permission from the Department of Cruelty for Gabriella to come out from Sicily at all, when Mrs Zoc says: ‘You will be next to be married, Bernadetta.’

  I say: ‘Shush.’

  Shut my ears before she can get going with one of her theories about Gordon. Her present favourites are that I should remain in a state of suspended apprehension because it can take a man four times as long to heal as a woman, and I should be patient because everything will be resolved shortly now that Mount Vesuvius has erupted outside Napoli. I’m not listening to whatever she’s going on about now we round the crest of Arcadia. I can see someone sitting on the brick fence out the front. A man. A uniformed one.

  It’s Colin, with a bunch of flowers.

  Standing up, saying: ‘Hey Bernie, I’ve come back for what’s owing.’

  For a moment I can’t think what he’s referring to, partly because of the burst of happiness I’m feeling at seeing he’s home, and partly because he looks not much at all like my old boatie boy: he looks wonderful. Never thought I’d put the words Colin Quinn and wonderful together but here they are. He’s grown into himself somehow.

  I say: ‘Hello Colin.’

  Mrs Zoc mutters to me: ‘Don’t you dare.’ Leaving me to despatch him.

  I’m not sure if I want to.

  He says: ‘I’m home permanently, back at the Marrickville workshops.’

  A man who’s not going to go anywhere now. That’s an attraction in itself.

  He’s defensive at my silence. ‘I got promoted, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you at all, Colin Quinn. You’re a picture. You’re magnificent.’

  I let him kiss me, here by the front fence, in full daylight. I give him what I promised him. But I don’t put my rod or my tackle box down. He notices, and stops, and I tell him: ‘I’m sorry, Colin, I’m not up for it, and I never will be. Go and find a girl who loves you. You deserve someone to love you.’

  ‘You kill me, Bernie, you always have,’ he says, and I can’t bear the look on his face a second longer. I’ve known him since we were six, mandarin pips down the back of my blouse. He’s survived Nazis in Greece, he’s a decorated escapee, just come back from New Guinea, and I kill him.

  I run into the house and shut the door on him, on all of it.

  I shut myself in my room. My room that I painted the palest oyster-shell pink because it’s my favourite of the colours that swirl in my jasper B.

  Jasper B that worked its way under my pillow again sometime between wanting the merry-go-round to stop and starting on the skirting boards, because I thought it might help him heal, and me too, from all the hurts inflicted by cold hard circumstance. Because I can’t let him go.

  I’ve tried and I’ve tried. And I can’t. I can’t have Gordon, though. Not even Mrs Lockhart has been able to find him with all her connections, prime ministerial and countrywide. But I can have the next best thing: no one. And it’s all right. I’m twenty-five years old. I don’t need a man. I need a job.

  GORDON

  ‘They reckon ten million gone,’ Jim Fletcher tells the head of his beer on the bar of the Court House.

  ‘As many as that?’ I say. You can mention the death of ten million sheep, but not one of your mates.

  ‘That’s only here, across New South Wales,’ he says, letting out a big sigh.

  ‘That’s a lot of sheep,’ I nod. A lot of sheep giving the topsoil a spell off cloven hooves, too. There’s a lot of pasture gone. It’s hard to imagine the grasses and the scrub coming back even if it started raining tomorrow.

  ‘It’ll have to break next year or it’ll be the end of this town.’ Jim shakes his head, as if he’s down on his luck. He’s got a new hat, and his boots look new too. Tough times suit him: when labour is scarce, contractors always do well. Contractors always do well anyway. Maggots, Dad would say under his hat in a bad mood. I look into the head of my beer as if I might find him there. I suppose I do.

  I say: ‘What pushed Dad to it? And don’t give me any bullshit this time.’

  That shocks Jim out of his hard luck. He puts down his glass. ‘I never gave you any bullshit, Gunner. Never. I thought he was in Brewarrina – we all did – because that’s what he said.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘Jesus, kid.’

  I’m upsetting Jim and he can be flaming well upset.

  He says: ‘Gunningbar Creek.’

  So Dad didn’t get much further than the back fence.

  ‘No one thought anything of it till afterwards.’ Jim is still wearing the guilt of it. I can see that plainly on his face. ‘We were all round here, the wireless was going, and that Menzies is saying he regrets we’re at war, and next minute your father’s gone off. We thought he’d show up when you come home that November. He didn’t. I don’t know, Gunner. I suppose he didn’t want to know about it, for a second time.’

  Fair enough. It’s what I’ve supposed myself. I just wanted to hear it.

  Jim turns it on me: ‘Where the bloody hell have you been yourself? You’ve had the women worried, thinking the worst for you. Bolting off the way you did, leaving my mare out there to wander.’

  Thinking I might have followed Dad. I might have, for a minute or two. I didn’t, though, because I’m not Dad.

  I say: ‘I’ve been around.’ And then laugh at how that sounds. Exactly like Dad. So I tell him: ‘I’ve been doing government work, but I can’t talk about it.’

  Jim’s not interested in it anyway. He’s never been interested much in the world outside his patch on the Paddock. He tells me: ‘Jenny Fitzgerald give up waiting for you to show up – she’s got herself married, a few months back now.’

  I laugh again. ‘Lucky escape for Jen – and lucky she wasn’t waiting for me.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it, Gunner. Anyway, she’s gone now, down to Hay it was.’

  ‘Where all the good women go,’ I tell no one in particular.

  But Jim says: ‘What do you mean by that?’

  After all this time, I’m surprisingly still sore about the woman issue as I tell him: ‘The girl I bolted out of here for when I went to work for that oil company. Bernadette Cooper. She married a bloke from Hay way too.’

  ‘Rough country for a city girl,’ Jim says, as if Nyngan isn’t. ‘Who’d she marry?’

  ‘Bloke I went to school with. Mitchell Lockhart.’

  Jim pushes his hat back off his forehead with a start. ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty sure. Why?’

  ‘That’s who Jenny Fitzgerald married.’

  I don’t tear off like a halfwit this time. It’s been nearly a year since I did that. It’s been almost five years since I’ve seen her. If she’s not met someone else by now, she’s a famous author, she’s someone else. Doing her own thing. With a life that doesn’t include me. There’s so much gone on, for the both of us. I’m not sure if I want to see her myself anyway. Bullshit. I only have to think of those words of hers, from her novel.
Her voice. Her face. The shape of her fingertips. I’m as stuck on her as I was when I was seventeen. I’ve loved Bernie Cooper for a long time. Nearly a decade. I’m going carefully about it now.

  I’m driving up to Mrs Wells at Kyra for a cup of tea first, to apologise for my behaviour last time I came home. I have to apologise to Mrs Zoc as well. I’m ashamed of myself for not ringing her back. I don’t know why I didn’t. Too caught up with having the shits and not wanting to know, and then I just forgot about it. Forgot she’d be worried about me, more than she already was. I might have to build up a bit of courage for that apology.

  Not for this one, though. Mrs Well comes out onto her verandah to see who’s this turned up in a filthy second-hand army-surplus jeep down her drive. When she sees it’s me she jumps and waves her hankie. ‘Gordie!’

  I could just stay here for the rest of my life and be treated like a five year old.

  She says: ‘Look at you. Darling heart. Aren’t you a sight! Where on earth have you been?’

  ‘Working,’ I say: ‘And not much shearing. I’m sorry about–’

  ‘Don’t bother with sorrys, Gordie. I know where you’ve been, even if I don’t know the first thing. I saw it in your eyes. But look at you now! Oh you’re marvellous, aren’t you.’

  In two seconds I’m being stuffed full of her fruitcake. It’s good being five. Always room for another grandkid with Mrs Wells. There’s twice as many photos of them all over the top of the piano as there was the last time I sat here.

  She says: ‘What brings you back today?’

  ‘I’m going to sell Still Waiting,’ I tell her, though I’m already having second thoughts. ‘It’s about time, don’t you think?’ And that’s as close as I’ll go to upsetting her about Dad.

  ‘No!’ She just about jumps off her seat with the upset. ‘Don’t do that.’ I think she’s wanting me to hold on to it for the same sentimental reasons already working on me, but then she says: ‘Just wait till this drought breaks, see if you don’t get a better price.’