Blue Dog

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘It was me who tamed him,’ said Mick, from above him. ‘And you don’t give me pocket money.’

  ‘I give you something when you need it,’ said Granpa.

  ‘Anyway, Willy’s almost all right these days,’ said Mick. ‘It doesn’t matter too much if he gets out.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve had much madder horses than that, mad as a meat axe,’ said Granpa. ‘I wish you’d been here when we had horses instead of motorbikes. The blackfellas were the best jackaroos. Those were the days. Taylor Pete wasn’t half bad on a horse when he was a kid. He won at Roebourne every time. They had to shut the tote when he was on.’

  In all their cricket games, Blue had played his part. He was entirely obsessed with having the ball, so woe betide you if you dropped a catch. If the ball was struck a great distance, there was no chance of keeping up with Blue as he hurtled after it, and then it was a hopeless job trying to get it off him. It didn’t matter how much you tried to prise his jaws open. It didn’t work even if you pinched his nose to stop his breathing. You could shout ‘Drop!’ or ‘Give!’ and Blue would just pull back, wag his tail, and make strange grunting noises that were like half a growl. The worst thing was that if you finally got the ball off him, it was covered with the most slimy slobber imaginable, and would have to be rolled in the dust under your foot to get it all off.

  ‘It’s time you trained that dog,’ said Granpa one day. ‘An untrained red cloud is a damned liability. That dog can’t even sit.’

  ‘But how do you train dogs, Granpa?’

  ‘Never had to,’ Granpa replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The blackfellas always trained our heelers.’

  At first Mick tried teaching by example. He sat up and begged, he presented his paw, he lay down, he rolled over, and even tried to sit like a dog. Nothing worked, and Blue just observed him with puzzled curiosity, as did anyone else who witnessed it. It looked as though Blue was training Mick, because he would bark, and the boy would lie down.

  One day Taylor Pete came across Mick trying to teach Blue. Mick was repeating ‘Sit! Sit!’ in a commanding tone of voice, and pressing down on Blue’s hindquarters. Blue was giving way a little, and immediately springing back up again. That dog was surprisingly strong.

  ‘You’ve got no idea, have you, Micko?’ said Pete.

  ‘I’ve tried and tried and tried,’ said Mick, ‘but I’ve got nowhere.’

  ‘Food,’ said Pete. ‘They’ll do anything for food. It’s the only thing you need to know. I’ll bring you some scraps tomorrow.’

  In the morning Taylor Pete gave Mick a bag of small dark cubes. ‘What are these?’ asked Mick.

  ‘Dried roo. Diced.’ Pete popped one into his mouth, and said, ‘You should try some. They’re nice. You can suck ’em for hours. Not that Blue will.’

  Mick did try one, reluctantly, because he did not want to seem a sissy in front of Taylor Pete. It was rock hard, but it had a rich dark taste, and so Mick left it in the corner of his mouth to soften up, and it did last for hours.

  They did not last with Blue. They were gulped straight down, and Mick got through an awful lot of diced dried roo meat before he was done with training that dog, but by the end of it Blue could even jump through the window of a ute on command, and get halfway up a gum tree before falling off. The only thing that Blue could not be trained out of was letting rip with stinkers, and the dried meat only made that worse. He got used to being sent out when he was windy, and would sit outside the door whining to be let back in, and raking at it with his forepaw. It would be fair to say that his prowess in the stench department was fast becoming a local legend.

  Mick was happy, and the sadness of his father’s death and his mother’s absence was something that mainly afflicted him late at night, if he woke up and had trouble returning to sleep.

  Granpa had very big worries, however, and he was trying not to let them show. It was not that Blue had now become an excellent retriever, and it was no longer possible to pull off thirty runs while Mick looked for the ball in Willy’s paddock.

  Granpa was anxious because there was a persistent rumour that the iron company wanted to put a railway track through the station. What worried Granpa even more was that a few weeks ago Mick’s mother had discharged herself from hospital and disappeared somewhere in Sydney. He did not have the heart to tell the boy.

  EDUCATION

  GRANPA TOLD MICK that from now on he was going to have a tutor to make sure he did all the work for his correspondence courses. Granpa was concerned that the boy’s education had become very random and patchy indeed. He had neither the time nor the inclination to teach the boy himself, and was beginning to feel that he was letting him down. He couldn’t expect Mick to make a future for himself with nothing but a headful of his grandfather’s anecdotes.

  ‘Your new tutor is seventy years old, and she looks like a goanna, and she whacks you with a belt if you’re a slacker,’ said Granpa. ‘She’s only got one tooth, in the middle of her mouth, and she’s got lizard breath, and she hasn’t washed her armpits or changed her knickers for forty years. That’s the only kind of teacher to have. She’s called Mrs Marble, ’cause that’s how hard her heart is. And it doesn’t pump blood, it pumps bladder juice.’

  Accordingly, on the day that she was due to arrive, Mick and Blue went to Cossack on the Francis-Barnett, just to put off the evil hour when he would have to meet her. It was a blistering hot morning, and Mick had his dad’s wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes, and a large handkerchief tied around his lower face so that he would not have to breathe in all the dust. He looked very like a bandit from an old cowboy film.

  Cossack was a sad ruin, not least because people had been pillaging the old buildings for timbers that they could use in their own. Many of these timbers had originally come from ships, and had naval markings on them, as you often found in the timbers of cottages in the Old Country. In Mick’s time, there were a few little Aboriginal boys fishing off the old harbour wall; a selection of dead people in the old cemetery outside of town, many with exotic names; one family of Greek fishermen who were always out at sea; and one person living in a ruin.

  Mick met Sergeant Sam the first time he went to Cossack, finding him relaxed in a deckchair on the veranda of a derelict house, with a rough roof over him that had been knotted together out of vegetation and strips of plank.

  Sergeant Sam was an old soldier, a tall thin whitefella with a large hooked nose, whose clothes were pretty filthy, and who wore shoes whose soles flapped as he walked. He had come back from the war in Vietnam, and decided that he truly did not want to live among humans any more. He had a long white scar on his back, and burns on his legs.

  Sam had said, ‘G’day, mate,’ to the boy and the dog, and Mick had replied, ‘G’day.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to look around,’ said Mick. ‘Granpa said it was interesting.’

  ‘It used to be interesting. Now it’s a big barrel of bugger all, worse than Bunbury. That’s why I like it.’

  ‘Do you … do you live here?’ asked Mick.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘I don’t like or not like. Don’t you want to know?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘It’s because I’m a bloody hermit. That’s a nice mutt you’ve got there. Red cloud kelpie. That’s what I always had.’

  ‘This is Blue,’ said Mick.

  ‘Hello, Blue,’ said Sam, holding out his hand, and Blue raised his paw for a shake. ‘Bonzer polite dog,’ said Sam.

  ‘I taught him that,’ said Mick.

  ‘Well, you’re a fine boy then, aren’t you, mate?’

  Mick came back to see Sergeant Sam regularly, bringing him things he might need, such as toothpaste and string, and paraffin for his Primus stove. The little Aborigine boys sometimes gave him a fish, and all in all the Cossack hermit led a nice simple life with no w
orries except running out of water, and he wasn’t such a hermit after all, because of the occasional presence of the Greek fishermen living there too, in the old Courthouse. Before that there had been another hermit, but he had left when Sam had arrived, on the grounds that the place was getting too crowded.

  Sergeant Sam told Mick all about how the town had risen and fallen, beginning with a ship called the Mystery, which, in 1863, had failed to find a landing place at Port Hedland or De Grey. On its sister ship, the Tien Tsin, there had been a cargo of cattle in desperate need of water and fodder. Here in Cossack they had found the Harding River nearby, and plenty of places where wells yielded water, and so that was how Cossack accidentally came to be.

  Sergeant Sam showed Mick where the horse-drawn tram used to run, and the railway to Roebourne, whose cars were pulled by teams of oxen. He showed him where the huge fleet of pearling luggers used to anchor in the cyclone season, and he took him to wasteland near the cemetery, which used to be a town of hundreds of Japanese pearlers, and Malays, and Afghans, and Chinese, complete with gambling joints, opium dens, stabbing and brawling, and rowdy houses of ill repute. ‘Just imagine it,’ said Sam, ‘and look at it now. There was a riot when a boatload of Jap women turned up, once. Now it’s just dry grass and baked earth, and not a Jap woman for miles.’

  ‘Granpa always says that everything passes away, and something else comes in its place,’ Mick told him.

  ‘Your granpa’s right,’ replied Sam, ‘but the only thing that came instead was me.’

  Sam told Mick about Emma Withnell, the first woman to arrive, who raised eleven children, and then there was Caroline Platt, who was always in trouble with the law for getting into fights, wrecking things, and even beating up the schoolmistress. And then there was Susan Thompson. ‘A true blue scarlet woman,’ said Sam, and Mick wondered what on earth he meant.

  Then there came the Gold Rush, and then leprosy arrived, which infected the blackfellas, and they had to build a lazaret for the poor victims on the other side of the river, and all that was left of it now was a few lumps of concrete.

  Sam showed Mick the remains of the turtle-soup factory, and the Aboriginal petroglyphs down at Settler’s Bay, whose age nobody knew. ‘Everything grows up, and then passes away,’ said Sam. ‘Take my advice, son. Think of every day as a new bash at life.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’

  Sam looked confounded and abashed, and replied, ‘Too late for me, mate. And don’t do as I do, do as I say.’

  All in all, Sergeant Sam was as friendly a hermit as one could ask for, and a boy and a dog could waste a whole day very happily in his company. Quite inadvertently, Mick learned a great deal from him about how to winkle the history out of archaeological remains.

  Another important influence was Mrs Marble.

  When Blue and Mick got home just before dark, covered in the usual and universal red dust, they found that Granpa had been pulling a fast one. Mrs Marble was really Miss Marble. She could not have been a day over twenty, and every man on the station had already fallen in love with her, apart from Granpa, who had learned to value the peace and quiet that comes from being unattached. In the days to come he was to enjoy the spectacle of all the station hands turning up, hiding behind corners, or idling nearby while attempting to look busy. One day Taylor Pete even cut himself on purpose, so that Miss Marble could tend to the wound.

  Miss Marble had curly blonde hair, an upturned nose and eyes of periwinkle blue. Her voice had a laugh in it, and she smelled pleasantly of lavender. ‘Call me Betty,’ she said to Mick, but Mick was so entranced that he couldn’t call her anything at all. His mouth flapped up and down like a spare sock on a washing line.

  Unfortunately Miss Marble had arrived on the same plane as the bush doctor, and Mick had to endure the pain and humiliation of receiving a vaccination in the backside, even though he had begged to have it in the arm. Betty Marble left the room when Mick was told to take down his trousers, and for this Mick remained grateful for the rest of his life.

  That night Betty lay in her room, her mind awhirl with her new adventure, and prevented from sleeping in any case by the racket of all the nocturnal creatures outside. In the room next door, Mick lay awake, thinking how strange and wonderful it was to have a woman sleeping in the room next door. His mother seemed a distant dream to him now, something beautiful that shimmered in the imagination, but could not be touched.

  In his room, Granpa lay awake, worrying, because the bush doctor had examined him, and had not been entirely happy with the state of his heart. Granpa had become so used to being indestructible that he could hardly manage to think of himself as anything else. That night he decided that he was not going to be careful. He was the kind of man who would always go at it full tilt, regardless. If he was going to go, it would be from lifting a ute out of a ditch, or falling off Blind Willy at Roebourne Races.

  In his quarters, Stemple also lay sleepless. From the moment that he had set eyes on Betty at the landing strip, he had fallen head over heels.

  OF UNDERWEAR, EDUCATION AND MUSIC

  TWO DAYS AFTER Betty’s arrival, there came Mick’s first proper school day, and he had made himself very smart, even slicking his hair into place with water. He had spent a quarter of an hour sorting his pencils, rubbers and exercise books into neat and workmanlike order on the table. Clearly he was already in love with Betty, as was everyone else except for Granpa and Blue. The dog had already worked out that she was a bad influence.

  While he waited, he looked out over the yard, transfixed, because he had never before seen a young woman’s underwear hanging on a clothes line. It was a strange feeling, knowing where those clothes had been. And there was something unbelievably feminine about them. Not far down the line were his own underpants, which used to be white, but were now a dull shade of cream, with a big ragged hole through the seat. Next to them was Granpa’s baggy, ripped, oil-stained contribution to the underwear collection. He felt ashamed to see them in such proximity to Betty’s pristine lacy delicates.

  Then Blue turned up in the yard, and he noticed the new items hanging from the line. Before Mick knew it, he was watching Blue leaping up and down, as if he were a living canine pogo stick, trying to grab a brassiere, and by the time that he had run out into the yard, Blue had already got himself triumphantly entangled in its elasticated straps, and was moving in circles, wondering what to do with himself.

  Mick fetched Betty, and fortunately she was a good sport and saw the funny side of it, and ran indoors to get her Kodak. Then Mick untangled Blue, and Betty walked off with her brassiere to wash it all over again while Taylor Pete raised the height of the line. That first day, lessons began late.

  Mick was sitting by the radio set, adjusting the tuning, when Betty walked in with books under her arm. What Mick did not know or suspect was that she had been quite nervous about her first day as a teacher, and had got up early to plan what she was going to do. Now she exuded an air of absolute confidence and professionalism that belied what she truly felt inside, which was a combination of embarrassment about the underwear incident and the nervousness of a novice.

  Betty and Mick sat by the radio set and put on their headphones. There was a crackling noise, and then a voice came through, saying, ‘Now have we got Tom and Sally from Summerhill and Mick and Betty from Karratha? Good. How’s it going? Today we’re doing geometry, or more correctly, trigonometry, and we’re going to start with the equilateral triangle. Incidentally, boys and girls, my dad was an engineer, and he used to say, “If you want something strong, make it out of triangles,” so listen in, all you budding engineers, this might be useful …’

  Mick and Betty sat side by side happily doing what the School of the Air told them to do. Not half an hour had gone by when Betty suddenly stood up, pinching her nostrils together and flapping her left hand in the air, exclaiming, ‘Mick! That’s horrible! Go out and get to the dunny straight away.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, Miss.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me! Does that smell like a lady’s?’

  ‘Does it smell like a boy’s, Miss?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. You know what boys are made of.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t, Miss. Don’t worry, Miss, you get used to it.’

  ‘Used to it? Not in a month of Sundays! Go on, get out and get rid of it, and don’t come back till you have!’

  ‘It wasn’t me, Miss. It was Blue. He’s under the table.’

  Betty bent down and looked into Blue’s amber eyes. The dog thumped his tail on the floor, but it did him no good.

  ‘Out!’ she cried.

  ‘But, Miss, it’s his house too. He can’t help it if he’s got rank guts, Miss.’

  Betty put her hands on her hips and said, ‘It’s either him or me.’

  Blue wandered out into the heat with a strong sense of grievance in his heart. He personally had no objection to his spectacular pongs, and did not see why anyone else should. Surely it was a matter for congratulation? Somewhat bitterly and dejectedly he set off up the track out of the homestead, because his nose told him that there was a bitch somewhere in the middle distance who might be inclined to be friendly. He began to feel happier, and settled into a comfortable trot. How wonderful it was to be a dog in the wilderness, with no worries because of all the tame humans. No worries except for the female ones, anyway. There was some taming to do there, that was for sure.