Angel Rock

by Darren Williams

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve just had a phone call.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not good news. It was Erskine. They’ve been trying to get hold of you. Your mother . . . your mother passed away yesterday morning.”

  The words didn’t surprise Gibson—he’d imagined them enough times during the last few years—but he still felt the blow land somewhere deep within him, and almost heard the cold, hollow clang of it.

  “Oh. Thanks for coming down. Thanks for . . . letting me know.”

  “Can I do anything? If you need to ring anyone . . . relatives?”

  “No, no, there’s no one else. Thanks. It’s all right. It’s something I’ve been expecting. Thanks for coming to tell me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pop said. “Come up to the house if you want. Use the phone.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will. Thanks.”

  After Pop had gone Gibson went and stood under the shower for a long time. He tried to remember a prayer, any prayer, from his childhood, but the only words that came to him were from his father’s funeral: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, so he said them over and over while the steam billowed up around him.

  When he finished he went into his room and pulled the .38 from his bag and just stared at it for a long time, finally tucking it under the mattress like a dirty magazine. He went and dressed himself in his cleanest clothes and drove up to the hotel. At the bar he ordered a whisky and a beer and when he’d drunk them he ordered another pair. He sat there and lost track of the time and when his head was buzzing and his nose was numb he left the hotel and headed out to the Steeles’.

  He liked the sound the gravel made under his shoes; the crunch, crunch, crunch. It felt like you were really getting somewhere when your shoes made a sound like that. He lit a cigarette and after another five minutes of crunching he rounded a bend and eased up. A ute was parked on the grass verge, its headlights wide-eyed and glassy. On the grass he saw a roll of barbed wire and some sort of tool for tightening the strands once on the fence. A tethered dog in the bed of the ute began to bark at him as he neared and as it did so a figure appeared from the far side of the utility. Head, then shoulders, then torso, like a man climbing out of a trapdoor. John Steele. Sonny to everyone but his mother.

  The boy took a last look at him when he was a dozen yards away and then he picked up a piece of rag and began to wipe his hands on it. Gibson raised his hand in greeting. He didn’t feel drunk at all any more.

  “Afternoon.”

  “Afternoon.”

  Gibson pointed to the few head of cattle grazing just beyond the fence. They were black and dark brown and their coats were glossy and slick in the rain and they looked in prime condition.

  “They yours, then?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s good country around here, isn’t it.”

  “It’s fair.”

  Gibson nodded.

  “Thought I might try and climb the Rock later. Must be a good view from the top. Must be able to see a good long way.”

  Sonny shrugged. The dog whined and pulled at its chain and panted, the pink mat of its tongue racing in and out between the white spires of its canines, a ridge of serrated teeth sprouting from the red-and-black skin of its gums behind them. Gibson looked at Sonny’s hand and saw that he’d cut it and was stanching the blood with the rag, not wiping his hands as he’d first thought.

  “You all right there?”

  “Yeah. It’s not deep.”

  “The wire get you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gibson nodded. “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Blackie.”

  “Vicious-looking sod. Doesn’t seem to like me too much.”

  “He doesn’t like your perfume. He doesn’t like sissy smells.”

  Gibson almost laughed. As he continued up the road he felt Sonny’s eyes boring into his back.

  “Watch out,” the boy called to him, a hint of waggery in his voice. “Other dog slipped its lead. He’s round here some place. You wouldn’t want to run into him smellin’ like that.”

  Gibson nodded, raised his hand, and kept going for another ten minutes until the farmhouse appeared on his right. He walked up to it and was about to knock on the jamb of the open door when he saw Ezra sitting just inside it. Steele nodded, but when he went to take a seat the farmer growled at him.

  “Don’t sit, you’re not staying.”

  “Ma!” yelled Sonny, who’d appeared at the door behind him. “Cut me hand!”

  Ezra looked up at his son. “You finished that job yet?”

  “No,” said Sonny, his face glum.

  Fay Steele, wringing her hands in the dirty pinafore she wore, appeared from the kitchen.

  “Mother, would you get a bandage? Some antiseptic?”

  “Methylated spirit?”

  Ezra looked at Gibson and smirked.

  “That would smart a little, wouldn’t it, Gibson? But it’d get out the poisons right enough.”

  He turned to his wife. “No, not the metho. Something else. Go with her, son.”

  Sonny glowered at Gibson and then he followed his mother into the darkened rear of the house.

  “Your cattle . . . are they for milk or meat?” Ezra looked up at him as if he was simple. “Only I had a steak the other night. Bought it from the butcher in town. Wondered if it was one of yours.”

  “My father had milkers. I run beef. Any fool can tell the difference.”

  “Ah, well, not the first time someone’s called me that.”

  “What do you want, Gibson? You don’t want to be wasting my time with boneheaded questions.”

  “No. Suppose I don’t. Can I ask you something?”

  “What about?”

  Fay Steele returned with a little brown bottle of Mercurochrome in one hand and Sonny in the other. Ezra, his eyes flashing, dismissed them both with a jab of his chin and then began to push himself up out of his chair. Gibson could tell it wasn’t to embrace him.

  “Did she ever tell you about someone watching her?” he asked, backing away towards the door. Ezra looked up at him, blinking like an owl.

  “When? When did she first tell you?”

  Ezra shook his head dismissively, but then he slid back down into his chair, somewhat paler than before, and rubbed his grey-whiskered chin.

  “She always had an imagination,” he said, without much conviction. “She was always making things up.”

  “Did she know where she came from, Mr. Steele? Did she know she wasn’t yours?”

  Fay Steele came barrelling back into the room. Ezra’s mouth clamped shut. She went and stood by her husband’s shoulder and put her hand on the top of the armchair. There was something in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before—a determination—that was both unexpected and touching. He knew she’d overheard his question.

  “Go now, Mr. Gibson,” she said. “I think we’ve had enough upset.”

  Gibson nodded. “Yes, you’re right,” he said, as he stepped back through the doorway. Sonny appeared in the hallway.

  “What about you, son? Don’t you owe your sister something?”

  Sonny didn’t answer him but lifted the rifle he was holding and aimed it at Gibson’s chest.

  “All right,” Gibson muttered. “I’m leaving.”

  He walked down to the road with the three of them watching behind him. His head began to throb and he knew tears were close to the surface and once they came he wouldn’t be able to stop them. He almost ran back to the hotel and there he drank some more and when he was feeling better he called Hughie over and asked him some questions.

  “White?” asked Hughie, in response to his slurred query. “Or black?”

  Gibson half shook his head, puzzled for a moment before understanding.

  “Ah, white, I s’pose. Shit.”

  Hughie nodded and gave him directions to a house in Laurence. It didn’t take long to drive ther
e, despite the car weaving all over the road, and despite his unreliable vision. The house was in a wide street and there was no one about. Cheap weatherboard houses. He found the number he was after and knocked on the door. A young woman answered and peered out at him through the flyscreen. He wondered how things were done.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he muttered. “A friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “Yes. A lady friend. The publican, at the hotel, said I could . . .”

  “Oh.”

  Gibson thought for a moment that he’d been made the subject of a practical joke and cursed himself for a fool for stumbling into it so blindly. He could see them all laughing in the bar, or maybe they were behind him now, sniggering. He turned. They were not. He turned back. The young woman was holding open the door and motioning him inside. He walked in. An older woman was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, one leg crossed over the other, her hair a masterpiece of peaks and valleys the like of which he hadn’t seen in years. He nodded to her and she nodded back and then she held out her hand for his money as if it had been owing for years.

  “How much?”

  She told him. “And nothin’ silly,” she added, with a dry smile, showing her big yellow teeth. “That’s my go.”

  He handed over the notes and the woman folded them and made a show of tucking them into the front of her bra as if she’d seen it in a movie once. She gestured to the room the girl had gone into and he went ahead. When he opened the door she was in front of the dressing-table mirror brushing her hair. He stood for a moment and watched her. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and then picked up an old-fashioned atomiser from the table and puffed perfume out onto her neck. She did it stiffly, as though the other woman had coached her, before turning very slowly to face him. He took a good look at her and wondered at this strange commerce and why it was that the coloured paper in his pocket should give him access to her bed, her body. She was younger than he’d first thought—plump, blameless—and growing more and more uncomfortable before his gaze. He felt sadder than he could ever remember, a little desperate, very drunk. He knew it wouldn’t help but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “Please,” he said. “Stand there. Take off your clothes.”

  Her slippered feet whispered over the linoleum and then stopped on a fluffy pink mat at the foot of the bed. She took the chewing gum from her mouth, set it on the metal end of the bed frame, undressed, then stood by the bed with her hands over her crotch, suddenly bashful. A vein pulsed in her neck. He knelt before her and put his arms round her naked body and pressed his cheek against her soft belly for a long time, just running his hands up and down her back and trying not to care about anything else.

  25

  The drive back to town passed in silence, but when the truck shuddered to a halt in Gibbs Street and Grace hopped down Tom stayed put and shut the door behind her.

  “I’ll see you,” he said, leaning out the window as the truck moved off again. Grace, alarmed, followed along the footpath.

  “Where are you going now? When will you be back?”

  “Later.”

  “I don’t think you should . . .”

  “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry!”

  Grace stopped and cupped her hands round her mouth. “Just be careful!” she called after him.

  He watched her in the side mirror as they drove off and he saw her kick a rock and then give them one last look before turning away. Billy drove back to where they’d started from and they sat there not saying anything for a few minutes.

  “I really thought I’d find him today. I really thought so.”

  Billy looked over at Tom and then shook his head. “It’s too bad,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Say, you want to see something?”

  “What?”

  “A good place. Where I go when things are no good. You’ll like it.”

  Tom shrugged feebly, but as Billy climbed down from the truck and strode away towards the road he followed. They cleared the Steeles’ fence and headed up along an overgrown track. Before long they slipped in under the cool shade of trees and then rocks began to loom up out of the understorey like remnants of an ancient and ruined structure. They climbed up and up and the rocks grew larger and larger. They stopped before one massive boulder and Billy climbed up on top of it and then pulled Tom up behind him.

  “Where are we?” Tom asked, panting.

  “Look,” said Billy, pointing away through the trees, “there’s the town, and the Rock’s right behind us. There used to be a castle up here, long time ago. All fallen down now.”

  “Bullshit,” said Tom and laughed.

  He turned round and craned his neck. Up behind them he could see the Rock’s massive foundations of lichen-covered boulders. Ferns and staghorns traced the path of a tiny stream.

  “It is a good place,” he said, turning back. “I like it.”

  They sat quietly, looking down at the town and catching their breath. He could see dust rising from the hooves of a ridden horse, blue smoke winding up from chimneys, the tops of eucalypts trimmed with new red leaves. He could see the station house, the church, the tall trees down near the convent, even his house out along the river road. He pictured himself in it, then tried to imagine Grace down there in her room.

  Magpies came and fought running skirmishes through the trees. Occasionally a crow or a currawong would get in the way and the magpies would band together to see it off. Tom watched Billy watch the magpies and wondered about him. There was something about him that suggested he knew things about the world no one else did. He’d never been game to ask Henry a lot of things but Billy seemed a better prospect.

  “Why do you think birds aren’t just all black or all white?”

  “Don’t know. Why don’t their colours all run together in the wet?”

  Billy tried hard not to laugh at his own joke. Tom didn’t. Billy grinned and took out the makings of a cigarette. With his nicotine-stained fingers he pinched tobacco out onto a paper and licked the gummed edge. He noticed Tom watching him.

  “You want one?”

  “Yeah.”

  Billy finished rolling his and then made another. He lit both cigarettes and took a deep pull on his and held the smoke in his lungs for a long time. Ash flew in the breeze as Tom followed suit.

  “What happened to your finger?” he asked, as his head began to spin.

  “Cut it off.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “It was botherin’ me.”

  Tom nodded. Somehow it seemed reasonable. He waved his hand at the town below.

  “You used to live here, didn’t you?”

  “Yep, but not down there, in a house just up behind us a ways.”

  “Near the dam?”

  “Yeah, up behind there. Lived there a few years. Remember the place but don’t remember myself in it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Don’t really know. Got put in the hospital down there near New-castle. Can’t remember much before that, when I were here. Can’t even remember my mother’s face, or my sister’s.”

  “You can’t?”

  “Nope.”

  Tom contemplated Billy’s words and hoped he would never forget Flynn’s face. It seemed impossible, but a lot of things had seemed that way before.

  “Why’d they put you in there?”

  Billy looked at him as though he should know.

  “After my sister . . . you know . . . drowned up there.”

  “In the dam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought that was just a story.”

  “No. Not a story.”

  “You don’t remember that either?”

  “Nope. None of it.”

  Tom said nothing for a few moments, just looked down at Ham and stroked his head. He couldn’t think what to say next.

  “You know what they do in hospitals such as that?” said Billy, breaking the silence.
<
br />   “No, not really . . . what?”

  “They feed you gunpowder and kerosene and then plug your finger into the ’lectric. Blows your head clean off.”

  Tom grinned and Billy laughed.

  “How long were you there for?”

  “Ah, fifteen years or so. Something like that. Don’t remember much about them days neither. All I’ve got to show for ’em are all these scars . . . and my hospital teeth.”

  Billy pulled up the sleeves of his shirt and showed Tom the long scars on his arms and then he slipped his false teeth out, the gums pink as coral, and let them dangle on his bottom lip. He gobbled them back up again after a while and smiled the merest ghost of a smile.

  “How’d you get all those scars? Fighting?”

  “No.”

  “How then?”

  “Battles with meself.”

  “You did them?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tom nodded, though he didn’t quite understand. Billy’s eyes had glazed over.

  “Some of those old fellers in there,” he said, quietly, “. . . mad as larks they were, mad as cut snakes. Never were sane, I reckon. Never were.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You were sane?”

  “Yeah, I think I was, long time ago. What kept me going in there was the Good Book, Jesus Christ himself. The church service on a Sunday.”

  “I haven’t been to church much. Henry doesn’t like it.”

  Billy turned to him, disbelief writ large on his face.

  “But the Lord Jesus . . . he’s God. He shed his blood for you. For me too. A man who sheds his blood for you is a brother always and a man who gives his life for you, well, that’s another thing altogether. That’s what the Lord done.”

  Billy’s words came out at a hundred miles an hour and it took Tom a few moments to respond.

  “Jesus came back to life after he died?”

  “Yeah, he did. And he raised other people from the dead as well.”

  “How could he do that?”

  Billy shook his head. “I don’t know, but Father Carney told me he seen it done, with his own very eyes.”

  “You can’t believe everything you see with your eyes. I’ve seen my brother. I saw him standing on the river, and he couldn’t have been there because he’s . . . because he’s dead.”