Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  She was sitting on the back verandah in her mother’s cane chair later that afternoon struggling through Steven’s letter. She was two-thirds of the way through the bottle of red wine. There were eighteen typed single-spaced pages to the letter. It was like a conference paper on post-rational ethics and was full of such impenetrable phrasing as, You must understand, I was under the influence of voices that are mysterious insofar as they cannot be compared to those resorted to in usual forms of discourse between husband and wife. She knew it meant nothing. That his defensive, haughty reasoning had no bearing on the real world. Steven had never been able to distinguish the real world from the world of his intellect. He wanted her back. It was as simple as that. But not at the expense of his dignity. Or he thought he did. Until he got her back. Then how would he feel? She didn’t care. She no longer felt vindictive towards him. She didn’t want vengeance, she wanted him to leave her alone. Why couldn’t he just go and fuck another honours student?

  The white cat had appeared again and was curled up in the other cane chair beside her, the chair Bo had identified as her father’s chair. She had been trying earlier to convince herself that her feelings for Bo, that indeed the entire impact of her return to North Queensland, was due to a kind of banal rebound factor and that if she were to return to Melbourne and her job at the university she would soon recover from these influences. The thought of going back to Melbourne and making the effort to put her life in order down there once again, however, made her feel ill and defeated. It would be a prison sentence. She had made her escape. Now she wanted to remain at liberty. Her unconsidered response to the question couched in Susan’s meaningful gaze at the office had been right. She wasn’t going back. No matter what happened. She wasn’t ready for the formalities of resigning from her job and selling the house in Carlton and divorcing Steven and such things. But that must all happen, eventually. There could be no going back.

  She leaned and put the half-read letter on the table and picked up her glass and drank the red wine. ‘Where is he, Mr White?’ she said bitterly. The cat meowed softly. Her mobile rang. She reached and snatched it up. ‘Hello!’ She was unable to keep the eagerness from her voice.

  Steven said, ‘Dearest! I could feel you thinking about us! Did you get my letter? We have to talk. We have to be together and talk.’

  She didn’t speak. A vehicle was coming up the sideway.

  Steven said, ‘Don’t hang up! I’m flying to Townsville on Saturday morning. I have to see you. This silliness has to end.’

  Bo drove up the sideway in the Pajero.

  She pressed END CALL and stood up. She fluffed her hair and switched off the mobile’s power and went over to the verandah rail. She was glad she was wearing a dress and make-up. Bo was getting something from the back of the Pajero. He turned and held up a plastic bag. He grinned. ‘Black bream!’ he called, his tone confiding and intimate, as if he was confident she had been expecting him. As if, indeed, they had arranged this meeting and his arrival was not a surprise but a fulfilment of their orderly expectations of each other.

  His manner towards her was as restrained as ever. Not exactly brotherly, but uncomplicated. Something of the ease of an established friendship. He said he liked her dress, but seemed to be saying: Between you and I there is no need to hurry. We have the rest of our lives. Annabelle tried to impose the same decorous restraint on herself. But the effort was futile. She had to keep taking deep breaths to calm herself. When she had set the table on the verandah, she came back into the kitchen and stood watching him filleting the fish at the sink, his back to her. Mr White crouched in the middle of the floor, his paws tucked close under him on the vinyl, as if he were in pain or had been flogged, snatching at the sweet scraps of fish Bo tossed to him, his teeth showing white, his ears laid flat with the intensity of his pleasure. Bo still had his hat on, pushed up. On the benchtop beside him the stub of a cigarette stuck to the edge of a box of matches. The wet steelblade of her mother’s knife flashing in his hands. Iridescent fillets laid neatly edge to edge on the chopping board. The delicate flesh of the fish glistening with evanescent rainbow hues.

  Annabelle stood watching. A feeling of vertigo, almost of panic. The dizzying sense of being detached from herself. Time slipping out of control. A palpitation accelerating in her chest. As if everything would run on and be lost to her. He seemed unaware of her. She watched him a moment longer, waiting for him to turn around, but he didn’t. She went out to her parents’ bedroom and stood looking at the sideway over the half-shutters, one hand to the windowsill steadying herself. The ragged lopped jacarandas along Zamia Street glowing in the late afternoon light. Low beams of sunlight angling in through the windows, laying bars of gold across her mother’s bed. On the far side of the road the one-storey houses lined up sedately behind clipped frontlawns. It was all still there. Undisturbed by the geological perturbations of her emotions. The perfect déjà vu of normality. Steady. Reality had not been eclipsed. Indian myna birds strutting about chattering on the fresh-mowed nature strip. The muted sound of teevees and radios from neighbouring houses. The regular screeching and screeching of the captive cockatoo that she had already ceased to hear for hours at a time. Persisting for years. For decades. Screeching for a whole lifetime. A futile crying to other cockatoos in the wild that did not answer. Screeching until no one could hear it. Until the screeching had become a habit worn into the mind. Screeching silently. That was how it began. The abyss of loneliness . . . There was no one on the street. Not even the old woman in her straw hat and red cardigan walking her Jack Russell, pausing at each jacaranda for the dog to sniff and pee. Annabelle made a small distraught sound and turned from the window and went out into the kitchen.

  Bo paused in his filleting and turned from the sink. He stood looking at her, expectant, the steelblade and the pale fish steady in his fingers, the bright eye of the fish intimate to his hand.

  She saw that he knew her mind at once.

  The space between them tight.

  The white cat watching him, tense, its pink catlip curled.

  Bo stood looking at her, the knifeblade and the fish forgotten in his hands.

  She crossed the space between them and reached and took his hat from his head and placed it on the bench. She kissed him full on the lips, her eyes closed, pressing herself against him, the warmth of his belly through her dress.

  ‘You’ll get all fishy,’ he said, his voice muffled by her lips.

  She reached and took the knife and the fish from his fingers and set them on the benchtop and placed his arms around her.

  They stood embraced together at the sink, eyes closed, becoming young lovers. The white cat looking up at them, disdainful, measuring the distance of the leap to the black bream fillets. A killer on the loose. Hunter gatherer.

  Annabelle whispered her desire to him—in her mind an image of a muscular satyr, his vivid gaze on the nakedness of her limbs, young and glossy in the antique light of her imagination. Bo leaned and took her weight and she murmured against his chest. He carried her into her parents’ bedroom. They made love in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight where it fell in stripes of gold through the open half-shutters, a sheen of sweat patterning the chiaroscuro of their naked limbs, as if they were lovers at the bottom of the sea in a secret sunken vessel of their own. She moaned and opened her eyes, gazing along his straining flank, the grainy detail of his honey-gold skin, his gilded, café au lait . . . She closed her eyes and cried out at the first strong pulse of her orgasm.

  • When Annabelle woke, a dream of strange landscapes vivid to her mind, Bo was sitting up beside her, her body curled against his, a pillow cushioning his back against the dark oak of the bedhead, one arm around her bare shoulders. She looked up at him. He was gazing across the room at the half-shutters, his eyes narrowed, a far-seeing look penetrating some speculation of the future.

  She leaned and kissed his stomach. The salt taste of his skin sharp on her lips. ‘You are my perfect lover,’ she said
softly.

  He looked down at her. ‘And you’re mine, Annabellebeck.’

  A vehicle going by along Zamia Street. The silent cry of the captive cockatoo. Bo said, ‘When I was a young man out there in the scrubs, me and Dougald tailing them beasts from one melon hole to another day after day, never seeing another living soul, I’d ride along dreaming of a girl like you and forget where I was. I always had a half-belief that red-haired girl from Haddon Hill and me was meant to be together some day.’ He took her hand in his, raising it to his lips, and kissed her fingers.

  ‘Only a half-belief?’ she teased him.

  ‘When you turned up with Susan that day out there at Burranbah I knew this was gonna happen.’

  ‘So did I.’

  They laughed.

  He said, ‘Now we can say that.’

  Annabelle lay looking at the evening light against the wall, recalling the evening at Burranbah, her sense of ease in his company then. The sun was gone now. The red and blue of the leaded glass above the half-shutters was beading on the polished cedar of her mother’s chest of drawers behind him, a glint of blue and red in his black hair, disarrayed against the broad dome of his forehead.

  He freed himself from her and reached over the side of the bed for his shirt. He took his packet of Drum from the shirt pocket and lay back with her again. ‘Arner come up from Maryvale,’ he said. ‘He’s camped with my sister’s mob over in South Townsville.’ He teased a measure of tobacco into his palm.

  She sat up. ‘Why?’

  He gestured out the window. ‘I’m taking him out there to Verbena. We’ll go up and see them playgrounds. That boy’s gotta see where his people come from.’

  ‘When are you going?’

  He looked down at her, his eyes alight with amusement. ‘Well, as soon as you’re ready, my love. First light in the morning can’t be too soon for me.’

  She leaned and kissed him. ‘I’m ready now!’

  He laughed at her eagerness. ‘The Pajero’s all packed. We’ll pick up Arner on the way through in the morning.’

  ‘You planned it all!’ she said.

  ‘Planned? I don’t know if you’d call it planning.’

  She took his hand, serious suddenly, deciding to tell him of the vague threat of Steven’s persistence. ‘My husband’s flying up from Melbourne in the morning. He thinks he needs to talk to me.’

  He looked down at her hand holding his hand. ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to him. I’m not going back to him.’

  He freed his hand and lit his cigarette. ‘You don’t think you might need to give him some kind of an explanation?’

  ‘I don’t owe Steven anything.’

  ‘Well, if that’s how you feel.’

  ‘It is how I feel. Does Susan know you’re going out to Verbena?’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s probably guessed. She knows I’ve been aiming for a long time to get Grandma’s old place back into the family whenever the opportunity come up. The time’s never been right till now.’

  ‘And now it is right?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a place for a grown man to be on his own. Nor a woman neither.’

  She said nothing, watching him, waiting for him and guessing at the vision he wished her to acquire: the two of them running Verbena Station as if they were the heirs of Iain and Grandma Rennie. Was that it? Bo Rennie returned with the red-haired Beck girl from Haddon Hill? She did not dare ask. She did not trust her feelings sufficiently to hear such an idea put into words. Could life ever be that simple again? She suspected that the symmetry of such an ideal return could no longer be realised in this world. She was thankful for Bo’s reticence. Thankful he did not speak of the future in specific terms. She could not imagine what her feelings might be on seeing the Suttor country again. The reality of being there. She had never been able to think of the brigalow and sandalwood scrubs without thinking of her father, her memory of Mount Coolon, a prosperous cattle town, the railhead where her father drove her each time she returned to school on the coast where they stood and said their goodbye. Carrying Haddon Hill and those memories with her ever since, a haven in her mind against grownup disasters. A secret that Steven had never invited her to share with him. She wondered how much her eagerness to go back to that country now with Bo was due to her reluctance to face Steven, and how much to her old desire to recover something of her childhood realities there. For like Bo, she had always believed she would return to the Suttor one day. The clarity of that, however, was becoming blurred. The reality of her return was already more complicated than she had imagined it. People said you should never go back.

  Bo said, ‘I believe I can get the old place off them Heffernans.’

  She saw the grand project of recovery shining in the blackness of his eyes, as if he expected a meteor to approach out of the dark reaches of the past and illuminate his way. She said, ‘You’ve thought about it all your life, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s it! Attitudes in the courts have swung around from what they was years ago. They gotta listen to the Murris’ side of things now. There’s a lot of different owners failed on Verbena since Grandma lost it. That place has changed hands seven or eight times in the past twenty years. She’s not worth half of what them Heffernans paid for her. I hear they’ve had no stock on her for years. They’d be glad to hear any kind of offer I reckon.’ He smoked his cigarette, his features lit by the glow of the sunset spreading across the sky.

  She said, ‘How did your grandmother lose Verbena?’

  ‘Verbena was never the same as Ranna or your people’s place. It was different. Iain Rennie and Grandma always made the dark people welcome.’ He nodded. ‘Verbena become a haven in the Mount Coolon district for a lot of lost and bewildered souls. And for a few fugitives too. Anyone in trouble knew they could always get themselves a feed at the Verbena homestead and no questions asked. That went for white people too. There wasn’t no distinction made at home when I was a boy. Everyone mixed in. There’d be twenty or thirty strays camped along the waterhole at any one time. Bits of wurlies and old canvas tents hooked onto whatever they could find, old cars and wattle branches. I seen them turn up on bicycles and camels, motorbikes and sidecars, droving goats and pigs and lopsided brumby horses, dry cows. Anything. They had everything and nothin them people. They’d all be tramplin around down there. Wild men too. Bits of cooking fires smokin all along the creek. It was a travelling circus for us kids. The sergeant of police used to come out from Mount Coolon to check them over from time to time. Whenever they heard that V8 Plymouth of his coming down the track they’d scatter into the brigalow and lay low just in case he decided they was a troublemaker. Sergeant Collins never liked to go home without making one or two arrests.’

  Annabelle said, ‘I remember that Plymouth. It was powder blue.’

  ‘Yes it was and always polished up like new. If you was in the cell for a night it was your job to clean the sergeant’s motor car before they let you go in the morning.’ He relit his cigarette. ‘Grandma and Iain hated to be parted from each other even for a day. That’s how that big tamarind tree comes to be growing where it is on the high bank of the creek.’ He lifted his arm, gesturing out the window towards the west and the last fire of the sunset. ‘Iain had to go down to Brisbane one time and Grandma couldn’t go with him for some reason. She asked him to bring her back a tamarind tree. And that’s it. She planted it herself on the bank of the creek above the big hole. That tree has flourished there ever since. The canopy was bigger around than two houses last time I seen it. Eighty or ninety foot high. It’s the only thing that has flourished out there since Grandma was kicked off the place.’

  ‘It was my matriculation year when Grandma Rennie left,’ Annabelle said. ‘It must have been nineteen-seventy-three.’

  ‘That was the year. Seventy-three.’

  ‘When I got home for Christmas after the exams everyone was talking about how your dad and Grandma Rennie had suddenly left V
erbena and new people had come onto the place. My dad always said your grandmother would never have sold Verbena. There were all kinds of rumours about what had really happened.’

  ‘Well your dad was right. You gotta go back to when Iain was killed off his horse back in thirty-six. Grandma and her sister May inherited the place in equal shares. It was not to be sold by one without the consent of the other, and then only to go to some other member of the family or their direct descendant. That was the way Iain had written his will. The same day Iain was killed off his horse, Grandma told us, May packed a bag and walked into Mount Coolon. She set herself up with a white man by the name of Jack Horrie and she never come back to Verbena. Not even for a visit. Grandma give May her share of the cheque every quarter. And May and Jack Horrie and his mates pissed it up against the back fence of that fibro-cement place of theirs over by the reservoir in Mount Coolon. I don’t think Jack ever done anybody no harm, but he was a useless poor bugger. He didn’t care where the money come from so long as he had a drink of OP rum.