The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  By now all the official delays, court adjournments and tax investigations were jumbled together in his mind. The future appeared increasingly hazy and he felt the same fatalistic confusion he knew on that dip in the coast highway near Sugar Cane Road, when night sea-fogs suddenly swept over the cane fields. What should he anticipate around the next murky bend? A riskily unlit hippy cyclist, an invisible hitchhiker, a petrol tanker thundering across the imperceptible lane markings? Would he ever see his way clear?

  Against his own best interests he’d come to dread the weekly visit of the one person who might at least clarify matters for him, his solicitor, Gareth Wyntuhl. As the legal process dragged on, he increasingly resented spending every Thursday afternoon and Friday on the lawyer’s highly expensive devil’s advocacy and narrow legalistic interpretation of the prosecution case. He also resented him for eating into his swimming time. This wasn’t strictly true. He still swam his usual laps, though less calmly with Wyntuhl hovering enigmatically at the pool edge, whistling tunelessly through his teeth and forever looking at his watch. With the lawyer present, he felt bound to don his Speedos – and resented not swimming naked, too.

  Unavoidably these days, after an hour or so in the lawyer’s presence he lapsed into a mild fugue. On a bad day Wyntuhl’s monotone could make his brain shut down completely. At the start of his troubles he’d tried to fight the unusual effect it had on him: the gradual fainting sensation and cloudy vision, leading to a total mental fade-out, a sort of grey noise where only background sounds had any relevance. The tap-tapping of the pool’s filter box, magpies calling on the lawn, brush turkeys scratching in the shrubbery. Now he went with it. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was almost a reverie, and he wondered whether it felt like this to be hypnotised. Maybe Wyntuhl should grow a goatee and get himself a stage act. When he fell deeper into this particular stupor – a sort of painless, aura-free migraine – every thing about Wyntuhl, from his endomorphic physical outline to the veranda table he’d heaped with files (the lawyer’s attempt to claim his attention with a crisp conference ambience), faded into the rural hum and buzz and became as abstract and misty as dreams.

  After the past year of examinations and committal proceedings it wasn’t surprising his mind needed a rest. Tired of raking through the ashes of disgrace, his brain had called a halt. Maybe he was having a mental breakdown. How easy it was to forget the minutiae of the case – the dates, the amounts, the stock transfers and telescoping bank loans, all that paper-shuffling – and sink back into the vibrations of trees, livestock and wildlife, of cattle lowing, water dragons scuttling under the veranda, and palms rattling in the wind. Pulling this blanket of nature around his shoulders, he felt safely hidden, a snug wombat in its hole. Somehow less ignoble, he could even fantasise about the puzzling uniqueness of his position. Instead of a former company director under indictment for alleged ‘corporate misconduct’ and ‘breaches of directors’ duties’, he could be a beleaguered sovereign awaiting news from the front. Maybe a Caribbean president anticipating a peasant uprising from the sugarcane fields below.

  If only the calm didn’t end at the last lap, at the moment his finger-tips tipped the wall behind him and he stood, removed his goggles and allowed the dusk’s pink-grey shadows to settle on his body for a few seconds. But, inevitably, reality returned. He stepped heavily out of the pool, shivering now and streaming water, and stamped bare-arsed across the terrace to the house.

  *

  Lushly green, thanks to their prime position between the coast and the Nightcap Ranges, his thirty-two acres lay along a north-south valley of carved-up dairy farms, formerly dense rainforest known as the Big Scrub. Cleared of its native red cedars a century ago, the rich volcanic soil now nurtured in their place a thriving feral tree, the camphor laurel, imported from China during a nineteenth-century preoccupation with arboreal neatness. Long escaped from its municipal parks and government schoolyards, the camphor laurel now ran as wild and free as the thistle and dandelion throughout the Northern Rivers. And, disgracefully, at scenically unrestrained intervals, over Leon K.’s acres.

  Of course his neighbours, real farmers, many of whose ancestors had razed the original rainforest to plant grass for their cattle, detested the camphor laurel as an alien weed, a timber version of the Asian Hordes. If he might harbour some guilt deep in his heart for his alleged misdemeanours (uncharacteristic errors of judgment through overwork, a misplaced trust in subordinates, unforeseen vagaries in the market were the forms of words Wyntuhl suggested to explain them) he hadn’t a leaf, a twig, of environmental guilt. How could those farmers understand the quiet pleasure those camphor laurels gave him, their gentle tiers sloping and rolling away towards the cane fields and the sea? He found the trees’ leafy density and undulating outlines attractively foreign. At dusk their voluptuous silhouettes filled him with nostalgia for something ordered yet indefinable: contentment, even romance.

  There was a cosy childish component, too, in the trees’ rounded, European appearance. His daughters used to call them ‘broccoli trees’, the camphor laurels reminding them of that unwelcome clumpy vegetable on their dinner plates. For him they recalled the trees in the picture books of his youth; The Magic Faraway Tree was a favourite. Even the word ‘camphor’ brought back aromatic childhood memories: his grandmother’s wardrobes and linen chest in Budapest. His own camphor laurels, meanwhile, were forever striking new shoots, which he made no attempt to cut out. It was another count against him, this city gent’s whimsy, a hobby-farmer’s un-Australian and neglectful misuse of the land.

  His property was L-shaped, with the farmhouse and his sixteen highest acres forming the vertical part of the L. On the horizontal bottom sixteen, beyond the red-clay dam and the orchard, with its rotting and desiccated fruit, his twenty-three beef cattle – a token herd to fatten and sell – grazed behind a multicoloured foreign tangle of blackberry, lantana and bougainvillea, the subject of monthly noxious-weed action warnings from the local council. Lately, a couple of headstrong yearlings had begun squeezing through the electric fence and barbed wire into the neighbouring property. Their dopey discontent – they were happy to be zapped and lacerated every day just to sample the identical grass on the other side – astounded him at first, but no longer. That was the country for you.

  He had never claimed to be any sort of farmer himself. In the first enthusiastic flush of ownership he’d keenly planted a wide sample of regional produce: mangoes, guavas, macadamia and pecan nuts, a few coffee bushes for novelty’s sake, some custard apples, imaginative hybrid citrus like lemonade trees and tangelos, also papayas, bananas, lychees and avocados. He’d imagined satisfying strolls through his orchard after Sunday lunch parties, and healthy family breakfasts of his own exotic fruits: icy glasses of guava and citrus juice; mangoes sliced into clever cubes. But once the troubles began, the Sunday parties quickly fell away, and breakfast somehow never progressed beyond toast and coffee. Soon he was eating, and living, alone, and those few trees still bearing fruit were taken over by fungus and fruit fly, birds and flying foxes.

  Since the sale of the yacht and the ski lodge, the farm was his only nominal asset. The house, a century-old hardwood Queenslander, badly needed renovating, but under such close financial scrutiny he couldn’t carry out the necessary repairs. The authorities were monitoring his accounts. He imagined teams of investigative accountants trawling over his petrol and grocery bills, frowning at the cheques for swimming-pool chlorine and pony feed. But frankly it wasn’t just the financial block preventing him from acting on anything. It was a deep lack of will. Even a phone call to a local tradesman was a daunting prospect, requiring more mental effort than he could muster. Meanwhile, unless a southerly was blowing, the septic tank reeked intrusively, the house’s timbers were peeling and cracking, and the electrical wiring was questionable; increasingly, light bulbs popped after a few days. The tennis-court lights were failing, too; the last bulb was flickering and ready to blow. But to change them would also be expen
sive; he’d have to call an electrician and hire a cherry picker. It hardly seemed worth the effort now that he had no tennis companions, night or day.

  More importantly for his daily wellbeing, the pool – built ninety years after the house, the first, vital change he’d made when he’d bought the property ten years before – already required extensive doctoring. Electrical fade-outs affected its pump, the tiles were loosening and blue-green algae always threatened. He swore he could see algae spores borne on the breeze and grey fungal scales clinging to the trunks of the poolside palms, awaiting their chance to poison his water. This was one problem he knew he must act on. If the structure of his life was crumbling, the pool was the only thing keeping him sane.

  *

  His old city friends shunned him as if he were contagious. And except to complain in terse phone calls about his trespassing cattle and noxious weeds, his farmer neighbours didn’t communicate with him, although most days their vehicles passed him at high speed. The shared lane to his farm was a winding tunnel of blind turns, ferny overgrowth and furry roadkill through, and over, which every other driver drove murderously fast. Whenever he went to town, purposely observing the speed limit, his car was tailgated by furious motorists, and sometimes also by mysterious white vehicles. Several times he’d noticed a white car parked in his lane while someone photographed the house and property from the front gate. When he stepped outside to question the photographer, the man (he couldn’t tell if it was the same man) nonchalantly sauntered to his car and accelerated away. Some authority keeping tabs on him, he supposed. One of the many gung-ho state and federal acronyms fighting corporate crime nowadays, all competing to capture the big-business scalps. Perhaps the prosecution or the tax office, working in cahoots. Maybe a private investigator acting for a major creditor. He’d felt paranoid the first time he spotted this overt surveillance and for several nights was unable to sleep. More fatalistic these days, he expected nothing less – and still slept badly.

  As for the road-ragers, it had jolted him for a moment to think they might be financially wounded shareholders, retirees who’d lost their life savings, small mum-and-dad investors like his own Anya and Apa. Lifelong hard workers and money-savers. Little people, some media hacks had suggested. That thought didn’t bear considering for long. No, he assured himself. They wouldn’t be chasing him. He had a silent telephone number; he wasn’t on the local electoral roll. Probably just impatient tradesmen – testy plumbers or electricians in a hurry to the next job or the pub. Whoever they were, most of these journeys ended with their angry horn blasts and aggressive two-finger salutes.

  Nevertheless – and this was a hard-to-break habit from his swimming training of thirty years ago, an urge to become a regular Australian, a suntanned sporting champion – he hadn’t given up trying to adapt to his surroundings. Early on he’d grown a beard and shelved his conservative city casual-wear of polo shirts and deck shoes for work boots, jeans and heavy hemp shirts bought from a hinterland shop called Don’t Tell Mama. (The labels warned: Do Not Consume.) However, the change of image – the green and khaki hemp, the boots, the greying whiskers – hadn’t prevented a raddled old hippy from accosting him in public.

  This was in the main street during his Saturday-morning shopping. Out of a weedy nook between shopfronts leapt this shoeless scarecrow, ragged and bony as Treasure Island’s Ben Gunn. As if some dervish-releasing button had been activated, he began whirling about on the pavement, dusty dreadlocks spinning, flailing veiny arms and kicking the air. At first Leon K. thought he was having a fit. But when the assailant swung a wild punch at him, shouting, ‘Fuckin’ yuppy wog! Go back home, wanker!’ he had to duck. He reeled back in surprise.

  ‘Take it easy, mate.’

  People peered out from doorways and cafés. ‘C’mon, I’ll do ya!’ The aggressor launched another childish haymaker that swiped his shoulder. Who was this lunatic? Leon K. was twice his size, with enough pent-up tension of his own to knock him back into his cave or swamp. What he did was hold him off, his pulse pounding in his ears, while he wondered what to do next. Punch him to the ground? (Self-defence, plenty of witnesses.) In another second he imagined what a delicious time the Sydney scandal sheets would have of that. (At least half of the witnesses would have camera-phones.)

  Leon K. brushed him aside again as the man’s nonsensical obscenities mugged the gentle weekend air (Shithead-poofter-wog! City-dickhead!)

  ‘Steady, tiger, I’m a local,’ he protested, mildly enough in the circumstances. Inviting the onlookers’ sympathy, he forced out an indulgent laugh.

  Suddenly he craved sympathy, just as he ached to broadcast the fact that this nutcase, the whole community, everyone, had got him wrong. ‘My mother sewed piecework in Surry Hills,’ he wanted to yell. And his father, gallant and exhausted Apam, a civil engineer back in Hungary, a respected kulturmernok, had worked two jobs round the clock in Australia – tyre re-treader in Granville, nightwatchman in Parramatta – driving his son to his daily 5 a.m. swimming training between shifts. ‘He never had time to swim himself. Never even had time to learn how,’ he could tell them. This is what he wanted to share with the onlookers: his family’s noble struggle and how he was absolutely his parents’ son.

  But disapproval flooded the street, and it wasn’t aimed at the punchy scarecrow. ‘Now, Sonny,’ a middle-aged woman murmured. ‘Don’t get yourself het up, darl.’ So this reeking Sonny was that protected species, a local character. Fizzing with adrenaline, Leon K. dodged his wind-milling fists and pushed past him. Sonny was still dancing on his cracked and crusty feet like a manic flyweight. His clothes and bouncing dreadlocks gave off aggressive, pungent odours of smoke and sweat. ‘Big-city wanker! I’ll be dealing with you!’

  Rather than the altercation itself, it was the unfairness of the presumption behind it that shocked him that Saturday morning. How could this feral junky whose stink now impregnated his own clothes think he represented the city and all it stood for? He was an interloper there as well. The city – the city! – that wished not merely to punish him but to knock him out of existence.

  For better or worse, he’d chosen the country. Moreover, he’d tried to experience its essence. The annual district rodeo at the showground had seemed the place to start. But if he’d expected to see Outback Australia on show he’d mistaken the event. It was more American Western. Hollywood Western. Country-and-Western Western. Everyone – men, women and tiny children – in Wrangler jeans and pearl-buttoned shirts, in boots and cowboy hats, those country-singer Stetsons that looked three sizes too big. All of them dressed to the nines in order to see cows and horses discomfiting people in a flamboyantly painful way.

  While the animals took their revenge, he’d shared a bench with some rum-and-Coke-drinking rodeo wives and their squabbling children. The crowd oohed as a steer threw a rider heavily against the barrier and then trampled him. Attempting to distract the steer from the prone cowboy, the rodeo clown also caught a horn in the bum, which lifted him two metres in the air. Watching him thud to earth like a polka-dotted sack of potatoes, the smallest rodeo offspring, a boy of about five, announced grimly, ‘I’m never going to ride those cows.’

  Embarrassed in this company, his mother shrieked, ‘Don’t be a girl, Chad! I’m gonna put a dress on ya!’ Her friends sniggered. Chad’s mother went on, ‘I’m gonna put a bra and panties on ya!’ Raucous laughter from the other rodeo mothers. She was on a roll now: ‘You’ll be sitting down to wee next!’

  This was obviously another side to the country. He seemed doomed to be confused here. Best to keep his head down. He stayed away from potential hot spots like bars and clubs to prevent any more Sonny-type blow-ups. For serenity’s sake he even gave up the city newspapers and read only the local rag. Better its bluff mixture of shire jottings, vandalism round-ups, New Age guff and Beef Queen updates than feline financial gossip and always seeing his name maligned.

  The countryside might have become his choice, but he hadn’t chosen to live t
here alone. While he’d submerged himself in the country and his wife and daughters had remained in the city, he still clung to the belief that he and Kate weren’t separated in the pre-divorce sense of the word. It was just that she chose not to live here – and this was where her husband had to be. She’d cited the difficulty of their daughters’ schooling, plus (he could still see her pacing up and down the kitchen as she delivered this particular body blow) she needed time to ‘adjust’ to the scandal, and so on. And so on, and so on, all the way back down the tortuous bends of the Pacific Highway in the BMW with Jessica and Madeleine to Sydney. So his family remained in the Vaucluse house transferred to Kate’s name. Her acceptably Anglo-and-incognito maiden name, to which she’d reverted with far more readiness than he’d anticipated. Yet another knife in the gut.

  Now he rarely went down to Sydney. In any case, his movements were circumscribed by his bail conditions. His only regular travel these days (he’d had to surrender his passport) was the 100-kilometre round trip twice a week to report to the nearest police station. Standing at the station counter certainly killed some more time; never less than an hour, sometimes two. All he needed to do was sign the bail-appearance form and walk out. Five minutes maximum. But in six months that had never happened, the cops being such specialists at ignoring him, acting busy and strolling about purposefully with their takeaway coffees and Big Macs. Or insisting that the relevant officer was off-duty, or that the bail-appearance forms had gone astray. Even the spottiest, most self-conscious probationary constable stared right through him. Why not? He was that most invisible of felons, the white-collar criminal. The class-loathing was palpable. Give them a local wife-basher or gang-banger any day.

  In the meantime his only contact with the city and the trial was Gareth Wyntuhl. But ‘Wyntuhl of My Discontent’, as he thought of him, was definitely contact enough, bowling up in his hire car every Thursday morning after slumming it on Regional Express’s one-class 8.10 a.m. flight from Sydney. ‘A plane with propellers!’ Wyntuhl never failed to exclaim, amazed at his own crazy courage.