Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  Susan stepped forward. ‘This is Bo Rennie, Annabelle. Bo’s representing the Jangga people. Dr Annabelle Küen, Bo.’

  The ringer stepped forward and lifted his hat. ‘How do you do,’ he said. His manner formal and dignified, his voice little above a murmur.

  She said, ‘Bo Rennie. That’s a name I know.’

  The whirling world of the past forty-eight hours had suddenly come to a stop and she found herself standing in the stillness of the fragrant sandalwood scrub shaking this man’s hand. He observed her, waiting to know who she was. ‘Dad and Mum had Haddon Hill,’ she said, and she let go his hand.

  ‘Then you must be William Beck’s younger daughter that went down south.’

  Annabelle turned to Susan. ‘The Rennies had Verbena Creek Station. Our homesteads were twenty miles apart. We had a common boundary along Gunn Creek.’

  ‘That’s right. Gunn Creek,’ he echoed her, his dark eyes steady on hers, the past secure with him.

  She felt herself blushing. ‘So you’re Bo Rennie.’

  ‘Well they christened me Iain Ban Rennie, after my grandfather,’ he said playfully. ‘But then Grandma called me Bo and it stuck.’ His amused gaze confided a deeper understanding to her, however, a shared knowledge of the other’s past that set them apart from David Orlando and Susan Bassett, who stood by watching and unknowing.

  Susan said, with a shade of fatigue or impatience in her voice, ‘Well, it sure is a small world out here once you get west of the ranges. I soon discovered that for myself, David. There aren’t many people out this way and you either know all of them or you don’t know any of them.’

  Annabelle said, ‘We were born on adjoining stations and I heard of Bo, of course, but we never met. I was eleven when I went away to boarding school, and from school I went on to the uni.’ She turned to him. ‘Then I went overseas.’

  Bo Rennie said evenly, ‘We met all right, Annabellebeck.’

  She heard with astonishment the syllables of her name elided together on his murmuring voice, as if he rechristened her, or divined a secret intimacy in her name and laid a claim upon it.

  ‘Never! Where then?’ she challenged him.

  He said easily, ‘The swimming hole by the redcliff.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Grandma Rennie defied your old granddad. He wouldn’t have our mob on Haddon Hill, but she always told us the Suttor was our own country and she took us kids over to the swimming hole and defied him. Elizabeth never tell you about that? It was before you was old enough to remember. But I remember and I know Elizabeth remembers too. Grandma Rennie and your mother used to share a picnic back in them days. You and your sister Elizabeth and me and my sisters. We tumbled naked in the water together.’

  Could his claim be true, she wondered. She knew the place and could see them there together, picnicking with their families, shining waterbabies in the pool below the redcliff where the mad explorer Ludwig Leichhardt paused in his wanderings more than a century and a half ago to sit cross-legged in the shade of the sweet flowering tea-trees and eat roast goose with Grandma Rennie’s Jangga forebears. Herself and Bo Rennie.

  ‘We met,’ he said and he took his tobacco from his shirt pocket and stood easily, his heels turned out, making a cigarette. As he progressed the cigarette he glanced up at her from under the brim of his hat a couple of times, as if to check on the progress of her thought. In the silence the steady thumping of music from the closed-up Ford truck. He licked the paper down and put his tobacco away and he said without surprise, ‘I knew you was gonna come back one day.’

  She laughed shortly. ‘Well I didn’t.’ Did she imagine it, or did he offer an understanding that he had waited for her?

  He nodded, knowing something, and lit the cigarette with a match. He tossed the lighted match into the grass.

  David Orlando looked at the match, a curl of blue smoke rising from the silver grass. He stepped forward and put his foot on it. He looked at them all and said with a rising inflection of interested surprise, ‘So your grandfather owned a cattle station, Bo? That was unusual wasn’t it.’ He faltered, looking for encouragement to Susan and Annabelle. ‘I mean . . .’

  ‘My grandfather wasn’t a blackfeller, David,’ Bo Rennie said. ‘His old feller come over from Scotland.’ He turned, his hand going out in an indicating gesture, lining up a heading through the scrub to the northwest, explaining this detail of his story to David Orlando. ‘My Grandma now, she was born on the Suttor. Grandma Rennie was a traditional Jangga woman. One of the last give birth to up there in that stone country. She was took over to Ranna Station on the Broken River when she was a kid and she grew up there with them white Bigges girls as one of their family. That’s where my granddad, Iain Rennie, met her and they was married soon after. When he was killed off his horse, Iain left Verbena Station to Grandma.’ He looked up at David Orlando. ‘That’s how a Jangga woman come to have a cattle property out this way. It was unusual, David. You are quite right. But she was a unusual woman. She had them store people in Mount Coolon deal with her and us kids just the same way they dealt with the other station owners and their kids. We was on the tennis team the same as everyone. There was never no distinctions made while Grandma was alive.’

  Annabelle said, ‘Grandma Rennie was a legend in the district.’

  ‘Is that so?’ David Orlando said.

  Bo Rennie looked at her. ‘That’s right.’

  They waited for him to go on with his story, but he said no more, standing smoking his cigarette and looking at the ground, toeing the silvery tussock grass with his boot, as if he retreated into a reverie of those past days and would disclose no more to them . . . The thumping of the bass in the music from the truck parked a way off under the stand of sandalwood, the cry of a scrub bird from the ridge, the lowering winter sun in their faces, searching their eyes, the first chill of evening in the air. The silence between them. As if the need of storytelling had withdrawn and it was time for the little group to leave the clearing in the scrub.

  Bo Rennie lifted his eyes, the brightness of the sun, searched the perimeter of the clearing for a confirmation of the sign. ‘We’d best be slipping along,’ he murmured, his sense of the moment confirmed. He turned to Susan Bassett. ‘You and me have a talk in the morning, if that suits you?’

  Susan said with a touch of weariness, ‘Sure, Bo. Any time. Whenever. There’s no hurry.’

  David Orlando saw them settled at the mine accommodation centre and left them, promising to have someone meet them at the Isaac Tank in the morning. The accommodation centre occupied a rectangular clearing in the scrub. A symmetrical arrangement of aluminium demountables with a central compound in which there were parked vehicles and numerous containers. Surrounding the entire complex a four-metre chainmesh security fence. The compound and mess hall lit to a daylight brightness by arc lights on towers. It looked to Annabelle like pictures she had seen of concentration camps. She expected guards. They were each allocated a bare single room in the subcontractors’ barracks.

  In her room Annabelle pulled the curtain over the little window and undressed. She had a shower and thought about putting on a dress but instead put on the green overalls again. She was hungry. Her hair was still wet and the evening was cold so she wore the hat. She left her room and crossed the wide passage separating the two wings of the demountable. She knocked on Susan’s door. When there was no answer she tried the handle. Susan was lying on the bed still dressed in her overalls, one leg hanging over the side, her boots on, her hat on the floor, her free hand clutching a bunch of papers to her chest. She was wearing her glasses, which had slipped down her nose. Her mouth was open and she was snoring. She looked like an old woman. Annabelle stood looking at her a while then retreated and gently closed the door. She went out of the barracks and crossed the compound. The night air was frosty. Bo Rennie was ahead of her. He turned and waited for her to come up to him.

  He said good evening and held the door for her. She thanked him and stepped past
him into the mess hall where the men were at their evening meal. He followed her, letting the door swing to behind them against the night and the cold air. As Annabelle went by their tables some of the men paused in their eating to watch her go by, but most did not. She held her grey felt hat in her hand, slapping the flat brim lightly against her leg as she walked, her tinted hair gleaming under the fluoros. She was glad she had not put on a dress. There were no other women.

  At the counter Annabelle put the hat on and lifted two white dinner plates from the pile. She turned, handing one of the plates back to Bo. He took the plate from her hand without a word and they stood together looking over the cooked food that lay sweating in the steel tureens under the hot lights. A man was in the kitchen with his back to them. He was scrubbing out pots and singing along with the radio, You don’t know what you’re doin, a-leavin me here alone, and I don’t feel like livin just knowin you’ll be gone, you’re gonna be sorry.

  They got their dinners and carried their plates back between the rows of tables. They sat by the door away from the men. The mess hall was emptying now. On the table were bottles of Heinz tomato sauce, HP, Lea & Perrins and Keen’s hot English mustard, bunched together alongside glass salt-and-pepper shakers and a spring-loaded napkin holder. Bo set his plate on the plastic table cover. He put his hat down on its crown beside his plate and pulled out a chair. He sat and reached for the bottle of HP, shaking the dark sauce into the brown onion gravy covering his steaks, mixing it in with his fork. Men in groups of twos and threes, and some alone, went by them without looking. Each time the door opened a gust of chill night air came across the table.

  A young man of around twenty came in. He was followed by a girl of maybe seventeen years. The young man was over six feet tall, his arms held out and seemingly too short for the bulk of his torso, which undulated like a waterbed under a vast purple T-shirt. The young man’s black hair and beard were close-cropped, the expression in his eyes remote, detached and preoccupied, as if he dreamed of another life.

  Bo gestured with his knife towards the counter. ‘Where’ve you been? You’re gonna miss out on a feed!’

  The young man and girl ignored him. The girl smiled at Annabelle, shy and curious, examining her with interest. A plastic site ID tag was clipped to her black sleeveless T-shirt and she was wearing a white hardhat set back on her head, her black hair bursting out from under its peak. The men who were still at their dinner looked up and watched the girl go by, admiring her. Annabelle saw how the men’s eyes clung to the girl’s bare arms and shoulders—seeking the grainy detail of her golden skin, her honeyed, her café au lait skin, her skin like a young fawn . . .

  Beside Annabelle, Bo ate in silence. She said, ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes she is,’ he agreed, matter-of-fact. He did not look up from his meal to observe the girl’s progress through the hall of men.

  The young man and the girl brought their meals to the table and sat across from Bo and Annabelle. They both had fish and chips. The young man carried an extra plate loaded with chips. Before he sat he pulled three bread rolls from his trouser pockets and set them delicately on a paper napkin beside his plate.

  When they were seated Bo said, ‘This is Annabelle Beck. She’s no stranger to this country. Annabelle was born on the Suttor. She met your dad when she was a kid. Annabelle, this is Arner and Trace Gnapun. Their dad and me mustered the scrubs together when we was boys.’

  Annabelle reached across the table and shook the girl’s hand. The young man did not offer his hand and barely acknowledged her presence. His broad forehead glistened with sweat. He ate without looking up, his eyes modestly cast down. He was enormous. She thought him grave and beautiful, like a dark prince in the grand and solitary expectation of his isolation, awaiting the death of the king when he will come at last into the inheritance of his kingdom.

  Bo paused in his eating and looked across at the young man as if he would speak to him, but he said nothing and went on with his meal.

  Annabelle would like to have drawn Bo into conversation about Verbena and his knowledge of her own people, but she sensed a reserve in him and held back.

  They had nearly finished when Susan came in.

  As she went by their table she said in an aggrieved voice, ‘Christ, one of you buggers might have woken me. They’re closing this place up.’

  When she came back with her meal, Annabelle said, ‘Sorry Sue. You looked so out to it, I thought I’d better let you sleep.’

  Susan said, ‘Don’t take any notice of me. How are you Bo? Got yourself a decent feed there?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said with restrained appreciation. ‘The tucker’s good here.’

  Susan turned to Arner and Trace. ‘You fellers on the payroll, or you just doing the trip?’

  Arner remained so unmoved by her question, so impassive and absorbed in his meal, that he might genuinely have been unaware of her. Trace laughed and looked at Bo.

  Bo said, ‘They’re down in the contract as field officers.’

  Susan said, ‘Dougald’s idea, I suppose.’

  Bo wiped the gravy from his plate with a slice of bread and ate it. He reached for his mug of black tea and washed the bread down. He sucked his teeth and reached for his hat and put it on. ‘I’ll see you fellers in the morning.’ He pushed back his chair and got up. ‘Goodnight.’

  Arner and Trace both got up and followed him out.

  Annabelle watched them go.

  Susan said, ‘So you two know each other?’

  ‘Bo says we met, but I don’t remember ever meeting him. I’ve heard a bit about him though. He and Dougald Gnapun were apparently wild men in the district when they were young. Dad would have known them. Bo’s dad and his grandma were famous. If famous is the right word.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ Susan said. She yawned and put her hand over her mouth.

  ‘It can wait,’ Annabelle said.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve run out of steam. I’ll be right tomorrow.’

  Annabelle said, ‘I might turn in.’ She was surprised to find herself looking forward to the bare little room in the barracks.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll give you a call in the morning.’

  Annabelle woke from a delicious dream. She was cold. It felt like the middle of the night. Something had disturbed her. She had been dreaming that she was young and was making love to Steven. Only in the dream Steven was not Steven but another man. It was wonderful and she was annoyed to have woken up. She got up, drawing a blanket off the narrow bed and putting it around her shoulders. She opened the door and looked out into the broad passageway between the wings of the demountable. She smelled the smoke of a cigarette in the cold morning air. Bo Rennie was standing at the far end of the passage, his silhouette against the pink morning sky, the brim of his hat and the stand-up collar of his coat. He was smoking and gazing out beyond the perimeter chainmesh to where the tips of the grey scrubtrees were set alight by the dawn. Frost glistening on the roof of the parked Pajero and on the contractors’ vehicles and shipping containers parked in the compound. Annabelle went back into the room and closed the door.

  After she’d showered and was dressing Susan knocked, calling from beyond the door, ‘It’s me.’ She came in and stood watching Annabelle button her blouse. ‘You look great,’ she said. She was holding a clipboard, a camera and a small hand-held GPS. She put the clipboard and the other things on the bed. ‘David rang just now and asked me if I’d go to a meeting this morning with the mine management. You can hang around here and wait for me if you like, though god knows how long I’ll be. Or if you want to you can go on out to the Isaac Tank with Bo and the kids. I spoke to Bo and he said he’d go straight out there. He’ll take the Pajero. I’ll get a lift out with David later.’

  Annabelle said she would go out with Bo and the kids.

  She and Susan stood looking at each other.

  Susan said, ‘You’re enjoying yourself.’ She laughed and gave Annabelle a quick hug. ‘Take your mobile. That way we’ll
be able to link up. You know how to use the GPS?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  Susan showed her how to record a find on the global positioning system. She picked up the clipboard off the bed. ‘Record the coordinates of each find on these sheets. If something looks interesting enough, take a photo of it. Put the number of the photo and the reel beside the number of the find, then we’ll know what the photograph refers to later when we’re writing up the report.’

  Outside, Arner drove up in the white Ford truck and parked behind the Pajero, the diesel motor of his truck ticking over, its headlights on dim. The faces of the two young people behind the windscreen impassive in the dawnlight, waiting. As if they had been prophesied in the occult stone signs of the old people, the voice music of 2PAC thumping instructions for living to them from their CD player, Kick the shit and make the white man bleed. God bless the dead . . .

  Bo stood behind the Pajero at the open loading door rolling a smoke, his back to the young man and the girl. He cupped his hands around the match and lit the cigarette. Annabelle was up front in the passenger seat. She was bent over studying a map on her knees by the interior light. Beyond her, through the windscreen, the crowns of the lofty cabbage palms planted by the company to beautify the accommodation compound were lit by the rising sun. Bo closed the loading door and came around the side of the Pajero. He climbed into the driving seat beside Annabelle and started the motor. He looked across at her, ‘You all set?’

  ‘Yep.’ She rolled the map and turned and put it on the seat behind them. They drove out of the compound, the sun’s bright semaphore winking at them through the net of scrubtrees. The young man and the girl coming on in the truck fifty metres back, the fairy dust of sleep and dreams gilding the morning air behind their wheels. Annabelle was experiencing the enjoyable guilt of avoiding her reality, setting out on this youthful adventure with Bo Rennie, Melbourne and Steven and the university unreachable.