By the time Grace had clambered back up the bank with the billy, Pop, with Tom’s help, had gathered enough wood to start a fire and was just putting a match to the little pyramid of twigs and leaves. When the fire was blazing Grace placed the billy in the centre and they all sat back in the shade of a tree and waited for it to boil. When it had, Pop unwrapped the fruitcake his wife had made and portioned it out and then he made tea to wash it down with.
They set off with their rods not long after, following the river upstream to where it spread out into broad pools. They fished for the rest of the afternoon but caught nothing. Late in the day they trudged back up to their camp and sat and watched the day wind down. Pop relit the fire and Grace put a fresh billy in it, but dozed off while waiting for it to boil. When she woke Pop and Tom had already made one billy of tea, drunk most of it, and had been down for more water to brew another. The smell of tea and smoke was all around her and the fire was just a curled red cat of coals. Later, after they had eaten and the sun had set, they lay in their sleeping bags listening to the night. After a while Pop propped himself up on his elbow and leant over to Tom.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think about how hard this must be for you out here.”
“It’s all right. Really.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Tom waited. Pop seemed to want to say more but was having trouble starting.
“You know,” he said, finally, “I had a good talk with Henry the other day. He’s sorry for what he’s done, all his drinking. He’s not a bad man, Tom, just a hurting one.”
Tom nodded.
“You have to understand how much young Flynn meant to him. To your mum as well. The little feller . . . held them together. Myself and Mrs. Mather, well, we don’t see eye to eye on a few things, but we both love Grace like blazes. If anything happened to her I think we’d be even worse off than your mum and Henry.”
Tom looked over at Grace’s sleeping form and nodded.
“But he was my brother too.”
“Yeah. I know. I know. Look, one day, when your mother’s . . . better, she’ll be there for you. Until then . . . I told Henry what a fine boy he has in you. I told him he should take more care.”
“You did?”
“Yep.”
Tom looked at his fingers for a while before continuing. “I don’t think Henry . . . I don’t think he . . . I don’t think he’s ever wanted to be my father.”
“I don’t think that’s the case, Tom,” said Pop, his voice grave, “but if it is . . . then more fool him.”
Pop lay back in his sleeping bag and closed his eyes.
“Good night, Tom,” he said. “I’m good for sleep. I’ll talk to you some more tomorrow . . . after we catch a few champion fish . . . all right?”
“All right. Good night then.”
“Good night.”
The night was cloudless and bright with a full moon. Tom looked up at it for a little longer and then fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
18
Nestled by the river the little town of Angel Rock still looked to be fast asleep when Gibson left at first light, but also, maybe, about to produce the impossible, about to reveal true beauty, or something close to it. He looked up at the Rock. Just as Pop had said, with the light as it was, he could just about see why they’d named it. He could see how the sail-shaped piece of rock at the rear might be mistaken for a wing, the piece of rock below it for a head—of sorts—but then the sun’s rays dropped further and it changed before his eyes. He could see a face now, but if it belonged to an angel it had to be the most misshapen, rough-headed angel of all time—or maybe it was hiding its face, resting its forehead on its arm. It reminded him of something else, something he’d seen once before, a long time ago, but he couldn’t think what, or where, and as he rolled quietly out of town the light changed again and the impression faded away and the Rock became indeterminable stone once again.
The morning was uneventful but once he was in the ranges the Holden began to overheat and he had to stop a few times to let the engine cool. He went down into a gully the third time it happened and found a beautiful little creek, the banks crowded with ferns and moss-covered rocks. He replenished his bottle of water, drank, then sat there for a few minutes watching the clear water roll over the stones and green weed of the creekbed. He put his hand down into the water’s cool caress, wondered whether Angel Rock, the whole world, wasn’t somehow similar—just a surface to be broken through, the dark machinery of existence—mysterious, dusty, cold-hearted—there for the seeing beneath. His dream of the graveyard came to him and he wondered whether that place, that Gibson, existed too, somewhere. He looked around and up. Nothing but trees and the sky, so quiet, so empty—yet not at all so. Not at all. He shook the water from his hand and walked back up the slope.
When he cleared the range he let the car coast down the roads and the overheating stopped. The afternoon flashed by as he put his foot down, only stopping again close on five o’clock to relieve himself by the side of the road. He hadn’t seen another car or truck for nearly an hour now and the only sounds he could hear were his piss hitting the ground and the slow ticking of the car’s engine as it cooled. Ahead was a small range wooded with dark-leaved eucalypts. A layer of bluish haze hung like smoke over the strip of hills, as if the trees were burning but not being consumed. When he drove down through them he saw an understorey of dull khaki shrubs and earth the colour of cold ash and when he crested the next hill he saw a town down in the valley below. Beyond the town there was land stretching out in great spools of peach and ochre, olive and rust; a mantle of sky glowing ultramarine and electric overhead.
He drove into the flat, two-street town, pulled over into a park and fell asleep across the car’s back seat, exhausted.
He dreamt of Darcy, walking ahead of him, just out of reach, beneath trees, then through the deserted streets of Angel Rock. He followed her, sure that if he could only catch up, her touch would be like nothing he’d ever known. It would lift him like a crisp blue swell, wash over him, take his breath away—maybe keep it—but be worth that, even that.
He woke with a smile on his face, wondering how his mind could resurrect her—someone he’d never met—so precisely. Up through the window he could see myriad stars, bright and clear in the black void of night. He thought he should have felt more alone, but he didn’t. He closed his eyes again, hoping there might be more of the dream to come.
The next thing he knew a skinny little Aboriginal boy was tapping at the glass just above his head. Bleary-eyed, half-asleep, he reached into his pocket and passed the tapper a dollar bill through the gap he’d left at the top of the window. The boy took the note and scampered away, laughing and hooting to his mates. Ten minutes later Gibson heaved himself out of the car and washed as best he could in the small sink of the public convenience he found in the park. He walked over to the hotel when he’d finished and ordered a breakfast of eggs and chops and bacon and listened to the complaints of the publican as he ate it as though he were some kind of travelling confessor. When he went back to the car the boy was standing by it, his two little friends watching from a safe distance.
“Your tyre’s flat, mate,” the boy said, pointing to the offending item. “I was tryin’ to tell ya.” He held out his hand and grinned a toothy grin.
Gibson smiled. “You didn’t let it down by any chance, did you?”
“Nah, mate.”
“Swear to God?”
“Swear. Cross my heart, hope to die.” The boy spat in his palm and held his hand out for Gibson to shake.
“That’s all right,” said Gibson. “I believe you.” He fished another dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to him. “Go on, don’t spend it all at once.”
All three boys watched him as he changed the tyre and then waved as he drove off. He kept going for a few more hours until he came to another little town spread out along the
banks of a brown river. As he drove down the main street a funeral procession came out of a church. Most of the town seemed to have turned out. Gibson stopped by the hotel and waited for the procession to pass.
An old drunk came and leant on the banister of the hotel’s verandah and looked at him. A finer example of pickled manhood he could not have hoped to find. The man came down the steps and stopped by the car’s window.
“A funeral,” said the man. “Won’t be long.”
“Yeah,” sighed Gibson. “I’m plagued by ’em.”
“Plagued, are ya?”
“Yes.”
“Crikey, that’s no good!”
“No. How far is it to Mount Wright?”
“Mount Wright?”
“Yeah.”
“Awww, you’re nearly there, lad,” said the man, winking. “Come and ’ava drink. Do you good. We’re havin’ a bit of a wake.”
Gibson nodded to the procession. “Who died?”
“Old coot . . . name of Spratt . . . thought he’d been dead for years meself, truth be told!”
The old man screwed up his face, cackled madly at his own joke, then stumbled back up the stairs to the cool of the bar. Gibson shook his head, envying him just a little.
The procession cleared from the street and snaked along over a bridge to the river’s opposite bank. He followed at a distance until the hearse and accompanying cars turned off down a lane. He could see a cemetery at its far end. He pictured the souls of old river folk, bobbing, floating in the ether, waiting for the resurrection, eyes opening after an age of sleep, as though no time at all had passed. He planted the accelerator, leaving it all behind in his dusty wake.
He drove out of town for a few miles and only then did he pass a sign and happen to look at it in his mirror as he passed. Mount Wright, it said, in reverse. He shook his head, turned the car round and drove back into town. When he pulled up by the hotel, the drunk saw him and began to laugh like a drain.
“Told-ya you were nearly there!” he spluttered.
“Clown,” muttered Gibson, getting out of the car and going up to him.
“I’m looking for a bloke named Smi— named Horace Flood,” he said.
“Horace Flood?” The man turned and shouted into the bar. “Hey! Any of you bastards know a Horace Flood?”
Out of the gloom came some murmured responses.
“Yeah. Long gone though.”
“Lives up Sapphire way, I heard. Up near the border.”
“That’s the preacher.”
The drunk relayed the words to him as if he was hard of hearing.
“Doesn’t live here any more?”
“Doesn’t live here any more?” the drunk shouted in.
“No. Been gone years.”
“No, mate, gone years, the fellers reckon.”
“Wife and daughter are in the cemetery,” said someone inside.
“Wife and—”
“Yeah, I heard. Here.” He gave the man a ten-dollar bill. “Drinks all round.”
The drunk looked at the note, then held it up to the light.
“Aww, beauty!” he said, finally, sounding like he meant it. “Good-on-yer, mate!”
Gibson drove down to the cemetery and looked around through the stone angels and plastic flowers until he found the graves. He stared down at them for a while, then looked up at the boundary fence of the graveyard and across at the empty fields beyond. There was no one watching from a distance, no one kneeling at other gravesides with prop flowers and false tears. The mourners at the old man’s funeral were still huddled together around his open grave. He’d left a big family behind. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren by the look. One or two glanced over at him, but they had other, more pressing concerns and soon paid him no more heed. He turned his own attention back to the graves.
The mother had died many years before her daughter. Drowned, said her daughter’s headstone. Annie Flood. Drowned. The words set into the stone. What man or woman hadn’t dreamt of going that way, hadn’t imagined sinking down into the depths? Set in stone beside her name like that it seemed to him she could never escape it. It changed everything that had gone before. Everything she had been, thought and seen in her short span. All drowned.
When he looked up from his reverie he found the funeral party departing, their dust rising sluggishly into the air and falling back as they passed. He wiped the sweat off his brow and flicked his wet finger towards the dusty earth, then he turned and left Flood’s family to their rest, hoping the next world was treating them with a touch more kindness.
The country beyond the town consisted of broad plains of drab mulga and vast stretches of nothing. He’d never been so far from all he knew. There were flickering mirages at the end of long straight sections of road as if the sky was merging with the earth in a sleight of smoke and mirrors. Crows danced around carrion in the middle of the road, punching their steely beaks into the meat right up until the last possible moment, as if they thought he might stop and have a go at the rotting flesh himself. At a quarter to two he saw a ragged sign for Sapphire. He turned off the road and stopped. He was up high and could see for dozens of miles in every direction, the blue of the sky consistent from horizon to horizon. To the southwest lay a long, low mesa, but there was nothing else on the plains except a single pillar of spiralling air, made visible by the dust it carried. He watched it weave across the earth, then vanish. If there was a town out there he couldn’t see it. There was no Damascus, no Jerusalem. Desert, yes, but no temptations: no panoramas of naked flesh, no palaces stuffed with gold, no fountains of perfume, no cities to sack. He climbed back into the car and followed the road down into the nothingness for another hour before Sapphire slowly revealed itself to him. In a fold, a ripple, a knurl in the landscape the sun was glinting off something man-made, but it still took another quarter-hour before he reached the source of the reflection. The road came to an abrupt halt. On either side of the last fifty yards of it were a dozen corrugated-iron shanties. Gibson turned off the car and looked about, tired and parched. The land surrounding the settlement was gritty and bright in the sun and dotted with knee-high tussocks of spiny grass. Small yellow flowers, their stems trembling in the warm breeze, pushed out of the red, gibber-studded earth. He eased out of the car and stretched his arms up over his head and then he walked up to the nearest house and knocked on the door. No answer. None from the next or the next or the next. A town of ghosts and a deathly quiet. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
He set about examining each shack more closely. Most were occupied by nothing more than dust and cobwebs. Some seemed more recently inhabited and these he examined for clues as to their owners, but he found no evidence of Flood or Smith in any of them. Finally he came to the last shack on the western side of the street, set a little further away from its neighbour than any of the others. Its door was locked, its windows heavily curtained. He walked round to the rear. A few old tools leant against the back wall but other than that there was nothing. He broke the lock on the back door with an old spade and then he dropped to his knees in the doorway and peered at the fine layer of dust on the floor. Nothing disturbed its uniformity. It had been some months at least, maybe years, since anyone else had entered. He stepped inside and pulled back the curtains to let in some light. There was only the one room; a fireplace, table and kitchen press at one end, a bed at the other. Set over the fireplace on two rusting iron spikes was a mantel shelf fashioned from an old railway sleeper. On the rough wooden surface sat a pipe, a Capstan tobacco tin and a box of matches. The tobacco tin was empty. He picked up the pipe. It was smooth and cool to the touch. He was vaguely disappointed, as if expecting a small coal to still be alight in the bell.
The pipe was the only evidence he found of any vice, or indeed, anything that tempered the dwelling’s feeling of utter cheerlessness. He stepped forward to examine the kitchen press. The plates and bowls stacked in it were either of battered tin or turned wood and the ute
nsils were worn-down relics, decades old. In the kerosene-tin pantry box he found near-empty tins of flour, tea, sugar, and salt. He moved to the bed. It was made up with grey army-surplus blankets. A small table beside it supported more dust and a candle-stub on a tin lid. He sat down on the bed and felt under the pillow with his hand but found nothing. He opened the drawer in the table and pulled out a thick, leather-bound bible and an old shortbread tin with its tartan paintwork all but worn away. He flicked the bible open. High on the inside of the front cover he found the owner’s name printed in thickly inked capitals.
SMITH.
He let out a long breath and then began to leaf through the thin, grubby pages, his hands trembling just a little. Soon he found the first of the underlined passages. There were many more underlined and cross-referenced with other books, chapters, and verses, some with scrawled annotations, exclamations and question marks. Proverbs was thick with weaving lines. As was Job, Lamentations. Smith seemed to be a man who liked his sadness neat.
He put the bible down on the bed and prised open the tin’s lid. Inside was a sheaf of papers, about two inches thick, tied up with brown string. He could see that they were covered in fine, closely spaced handwriting. He untied the string and read the first page, then the second. It was some kind of treatise, but it felt as though he had come into an argument halfway through and the gist of it eluded him. There was an even greater abundance of footnotes and marginalia. There were numerous crossings out and long-winded references to other works, but it was the lengthy, roundabout, barely legible sentences that stymied him. He flicked through the pages, saw a name begin to appear again and again, sometimes underlined in an angry red. Horace Flood. He sampled the prose around the name. Declamations, condemnations, vitriol. A great schism seemed to have developed between the two men. Although he tried he could not seem to get to the crux of the disagreement until he turned a page and found the beginning of the pages—the whole thing had been cut like a deck of cards.
Annie Flood was the subject of the first half of the screed—Annie and no one else. Page after page described Smith’s absolute devotion to her until Gibson began to feel a little ill. Obsession seemed too mild a word for it. He flipped over another page and found a photograph of her pinned to the paper. It was yellow with age and mildew but he could still make out her features well enough. He thought he could see some resemblance to Billy in her features but it was her similarity to Darcy Steele that took his breath right away.
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