by Black Inc.
He was all alone. It was hard to be all alone in the city. Someone was always watching you from between the venetians. Whatever you did, you had to assume it was being done in public. This – being all alone on a little back road, not having to keep the right sort of expression on your face, or look as if you knew what you were doing – made a nice change.
Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click, he sang. It was exhilarating, belting it out into the stillness of the morning. Wide is his blow and his hands mo-ove quick. He heard his voice wavering, drifting up and down. Tone-deaf, Miss McDonald had announced to 3B. William Bashford, you’re tone-deaf, and he had felt a clutch of fright, wondering if being tone-deaf was something you got sent to the principal for. Stand at the back, William, and just move your lips.
He’d been an obedient boy. Being obedient was half of being a no-hoper. He had stood up the back and just moved his lips for years.
But he loved to sing. The ringer looks around and dah-di-dah-di-dah, and curses the old something with the blue-bellied joe! A cow lifted its head from the grass and stared.
Things had gone wrong when he saw a house he thought was derelict. He’d stopped, his hand on the cool metal of the gate, tempted to explore. This old place had its roofing iron curling at the seams, the grass was long around the rotting veranda, the house and the faded old red truck beside it all up to their ankles in dry grass. He liked poking around old places, but he’d been caught out before. You’d think a place was abandoned, but suddenly there’d be someone coming down off the veranda, and you’d have to wave in a casual way, and call out morning, how’s it going mate, and they’d come down to the gate and you’d have to have a conversation about who you were and what you were doing there. By the time you’d got through all that, any idea of communing with Nature was well and truly finished.
There were cows in the front yard of this place, tearing at the grass around the water-tank tilting dangerously on its stand. As he watched, an old woman in a long pink nightie ran around the corner of the house waving a stick at a few flustered cows that were lumbering along in front of her. In a surprisingly big voice for such a frail old thing she was shouting Garn! Gaaaaaarn! Git!
He watched, frozen to the gate, as she herded the cows around to the side and into a paddock. Her nightie, drenched and dark with dew along the hem, swung heavily around her bare feet as she strained to close the ramshackle gate. Her wispy white hair stood up in a ruff around her head, with pink scalp showing through.
She did not see Will, but disappeared around the back of the house. The cows gawped at the place where she had been. Will felt he was gawping too, and reminded himself to blink.
Coming back along the road later, the sun was in his eyes and he kept his head down. The dew had dried on the grass and the birds had been replaced by the cicadas that were starting up one by one, each one drilling away a different note. The flies were taking it in turns to get up his nose.
As he came near the house again he made his stride more purposeful and did not look around. The old woman was in her yard again, still in the pink nightie although there was a pink cardigan over it now. She was standing near the powdery old truck, looking up at the face of a young policeman writing in a notebook. Near them, another policeman bent over with a spring-loaded tape measure, measuring something along the ground. As Will watched, the tape snapped back and the policeman grabbed his hand. His mouth made the word FUCK.
Will walked faster and did not glance over towards the house again, his neck stiff with the ungainly look of a tall person trying to be inconspicuous. He stared into the dusty bushes, at the dusty roadside grass, at the dust itself on the roadway. He was tremendously interested in the dust. But even a man as interested in the dust as he was could not fail to hear the old woman, speaking with one of those well-bred penetrating kinds of voices.
‘If I was going to pinch his bloody cattle, d’you think I’d do it in my bloody nightie?’
He had not pinched any bloody cattle, had not been caught trespassing, had got no further than putting his hand on the gate. Had done nothing wrong, in fact. Why did he feel so guilty, scurrying along with bowed head?
The thing he had done wrong was going for a walk in the first place. Going for a walk was not something you did, out in the country. That alone was asking for trouble.
At least there had been no one listening to him sing.
*
He had the Akubra and the elastic-sided boots, but he had not thought to bring a raincoat with him from Sydney. But the clouds were there again, at the end of Hill Street, as they had been on the first day, big dramatic clouds with serious dark-grey folds that looked full of rain.
He imagined himself out on the paddocks – his own paddocks! – in the rain. He would have to huddle under a garbage bag. Word of that would soon get around. That Bashford bloke, saw him out on his place in a bloody garbage bag! It was easy to get off on the wrong foot in a new place.
Looking down Hill Street, he could see the Criterion Hotel and the milk bar. No raincoats there. There was the butcher, and a draper and mercer that looked as if it had been closed for years. Further along were the Stock & Station Est 1919 and the general store. The general store had a window full of faded and flyspecked cornflakes boxes. It did not look a promising prospect for a raincoat. That left the Stock & Station, whatever that was.
A tall skinny bloke like a long drink of water, all chin and nose, was leaning on the war memorial cairn watching him as he walked slowly along to the shop, carefully, as if he expected to have to give evidence. Brown hair, brown eyes, big ears.
Quickly, as if he knew exactly where he was going, Will crossed the road towards the Stock & Station. His walk felt jerky as he crossed the vast expanse of Hill Street under the gaze of the chin-and-nose man. Funny kind of walk. He forced himself not to look to the right and look to the left and look to the right again. Only a no-hoper would think a car could take you by surprise on Hill Street, Boolowa.
Inside the shop he paused, hearing the door bell jangle above his head. He was going to be Norm Sharpe. Front up to the counter and say mate a lot. Easy.
The first problem was finding the counter. After the glare outside, the shop was dark. It would be easy to think those grey overalls were a person. That would get back to Norm. Feller comes in here, says g’day to the bloody overalls.
There had been a teacher at school called Mr Overall. Naturally, the kids had called him Mr Underpants.
It was the kind of thing you tended to remember at the wrong moment. He instructed himself not to laugh. Feller comes in here, laughs at the bloody overalls.
Beyond the overalls there were shoulder shapes. It was hard to be sure of anything in the dimness, his eyes straining to adjust after the scalding light outside, but he thought the shoulder shapes were not a mate either, just a row of checked shirts, with caps on a stand beside them.
He was working out that there must be a counter over on the far wall – there was a gleam of something horizontal cutting across the verticals of the shelving behind – when a voice came from the direction of the gleam.
Help at all, mate?
He thought of laughing and calling out bit dark in here, mate, nearly talked to the bloody overalls! His mouth open for the laugh, he thought better of it. Over the years, he had learned that not everyone thought the same things were funny that he did. New place, new people, no offence intended. Better to play safe.
Ah, yes. Mate.
He dodged around a tower of brown blocks of cow-lick. He could see the man behind the counter now, two blanks of reflected light from glasses turned at him, another long nose, long chin, like the Johnny over the road. Inbreeding. Small gene pool. Probably a lot of long noses and long chins in Boolowa.
After a moment he realised there was a customer at the counter too, a big solid man in a red-checked shirt, standing as still as a pair of overalls.
Sorry, mate, Will said. Didn’t see you there.
He made an ush
ering gesture with his hand, palm up.
Go ahead.
But the man shook his head.
You’re right, mate, he said.
Will turned to the shopkeeper. The glasses sat cock-eyed on his face so you wanted to reach over and straighten them up. Tufts of grey hair erupted out of his nostrils. Eye contact, Will told himself. Make eye contact. But he could not look.
I’m after a raincoat, mate, he said. It sounded a bit on the loud side. Got a raincoat at all? Mate?
Somehow it was not quite the way Norm Sharpe would have said it. The shopkeeper did a peculiar thing with his face that made the glasses twitch back up his nose. After a long blank-glassed stare, in which his hand smoothed over the empty counter, he said:
Nope. No raincoats.
It seemed that this was going to be all. Will nearly turned to go, but the image of himself under the garbage bag was vivid in his mind.
Oh well, he began.
But the shopkeeper cut across him quickly.
Not at the moment.
There was another pause. Will started again.
Oh well.
But the shopkeeper might have been waiting for him to speak.
Sold the last, some time ago now.
His words were like a force of nature. Will was silent. He did not think he would say Oh well again.
The glasses were slipping down the shopkeeper’s nose again.
The man in the red shirt moved now. He turned slowly and methodically and had a good long look at Will Bashford, all the way from the elastic-sided boots to the Akubra. Then he crossed his arms over his big checked chest and gave a short deliberate laugh like a cough.
Not had a drop of rain here for three years.
He turned to the shopkeeper.
That right, Lance?
Lance nodded and stared at Will.
Before he could explain about the big flat-bottomed heavy-looking clouds, and the way they were heaped up against the hills, the shopkeeper cackled and pushed his glasses back up with his thumb. You could see he was enjoying the anticipation. He was going to make a joke.
Not a real lot of demand, for a raincoat, just at the minute.
He and Lance both laughed thoroughly. Will tried to smile but it felt like a snarl. He wished he could think of something else to ask for, so he could leave with dignity, but he did not want a cube of cowlick.
He tried a joke of his own.
Be prepared, that’s what I always say!
It was not what he always said, and it did not sound as if it was. His witticism was received in silence.
Will felt his mouth shaping a stupid meaningless smile.
Oh well, he found it saying again. OK mate. See you later.
He was turning away from the counter when Lance gave him a fright by saying suddenly:
Pump’s pressing charges, you know.
Will was confused, his mind full of anxiety to get outside and check the clouds. Surely he had not imagined them. He felt as if his mouth was hanging open. Pump? Pressing?
The shopkeeper said loudly, as if he thought he was deaf, or slow:
Charges. About the cattle.
He and Lance exchanged a tiny smirk.
When you was out for your walk. This morning.
Lance gave Will a fright, slapping his hand on the counter suddenly.
Been bad blood there for years.
Will turned from one face to the other as if he was lip-reading.
Business about an easement. Reckons he’ll sue this time, but.
They both watched Will. Even if he could still remember what came after sweeping plains, he had a feeling it would not help him now.
Um, he said, and wished he had not. They were both watching him as if he had something more to say.
After a long silence, the shopkeeper said kindly:
So, if you saw, mate, you should say.
Will was feeling congested, as if his pipes would burst from sheer incomprehension.
Yes? He tried.
Don’t want to see her go to jail, do you, an old thing like that?
He twitched the glasses up his nose again.
Mrs Quincy, mate. You give a statement, she’ll be right. Small, in at Willoughby.
He was speaking very slowly. Each word was beautifully clear. No problem at all with the words.
The man in the check shirt broke in impatiently.
The cops, mate. Go to the cops, give a statement.
A statement, Will repeated. The cops.
They were waiting for him now.
He imagined himself going into Willoughby and finding Constable Small. Norm Sharpe had introduced him to Constable Small, outside the Criterion. Gregory Small did not seem like a young man to hurry or cut corners. He had shaken Will’s hand at length, as if testing it, and inspected his face closely.
Bashford? he had asked. Or Brashford?
He would be slow on the big black Remington that the Willoughby police station would be managing with. I was proceeding along Seven Mile Road in an easterly direction at about 7 a.m. on Tuesday the 14th of February. Read out in Gregory Small’s loud flat voice, it would make Will sound more of a no-hoper than ever. At Lot 84 known as Braeside I saw eight cows proceeding through a broken fence.
The exact number of cows would cause a bit of a bottleneck. About eight or approximately eight, Will would want to say. But he did not think Gregory Small would be the sort of man likely to be comfortable with approximations. Cows were either eight cows, or nine cows, or seven cows. You could not have approximately eight cows.
They would sit there at the desk with the Remington between them and Will would feel himself going red in the face and his ears swelling, the way they did when he was embarrassed.
Course, your mate Norm’s on Pump’s side, the man in the check shirt suddenly said. They’re cousins through old Grant Pump.
Plus Norm married the sister-in-law’s girl, the shopkeeper said. They own that, where you was going this morning. For your walk.
There could have been another little smirk exchanged. Click go the shears, boys, click click click.
Will stared at the dusty boards between his boots. He could feel the blood pouring up into his cheeks, his neck, his ears. He seemed to be radiating heat, as if these two could warm their hands at him. And curses the old something with the blue-bellied joe.
There was a little jump on blue-bellied where his voice always cracked. It would have been funny if you had been a person behind a tree, listening.
Well, he said. OK.
They did not ask him exactly what it was that was OK, but watched with interest as he backed away from the counter, got himself turned around, and headed for the doorway. It seemed to have got lost among the shelves of dim things. Dodging a pyramid of something in big tins, he lost his balance and had to put a hand out to save himself, knocking a big box of Ratsak onto the floor. His bottom felt a huge ridiculous target for the two faces watching as he bent over to pick it up. Then he could not find the right shelf for it and had to stuff it in next to a bundle of axe handles and some funny-looking leather appendages.
He felt he would never reach the hard white glare of the doorway. It seemed centuries ago that he had set off in the cool of the dawn, when he had not known that there was no such thing as a private walk in the country.
Hooroo, mate, the shopkeeper called, but he could not bear to turn.
Shooting the Dog
Peter Goldsworthy
Each time the gravel slid off the shovel
it sounded like something
trying to hang on by its nails.
—PHILIP HODGINS, ‘Shooting the Dogs’
He was long in the tooth now, although no one in the district could put an exact figure on the years. His name offered a clue: even this far from the city it had not been possible to call a dog Nigger for at least a decade.
‘You get jailed for it these days,’ Hedley Stokes liked to joke, ritually, to his daughter-in-law Meg, city born and
bred and blamed for all kinds of city nonsense.
Hedley had bought the dog, fully grown and pre-named, years back.
Two droughts back, he sometimes joked – but the worst drought had been the absence of his son Ben at the time, playing football in the city and searching for Meg, or the idea of Meg, and trying to get the farm out of his blood. When Hedley’s left knee finally gave way (cack-footed, he had been no mean player himself in his day) and Ben reluctantly returned to take over the place, the name-change insisted on by Meg – ‘Nugget’ – would not be answered to by the dog. Dogged herself, an English teacher anxious about the influence of language on impressionable minds, she tried one more time – ‘Nipper’ – but even the softening of a single consonant was stubbornly resisted by the black dog.
And even more stubbornly by Hedley and his wife, Edna, who still drove over most days from their retirement unit on the coast. Hedley gave the notion nothing more than an incredulous snort; it was Edna who took the young woman aside and suggested that it might be cruel and confusing for the dog.
Largely retired from farm work, Nigger was allowed to tag along with his son, Blue, as the younger dog went about its shepherding. Blue was an athletic, wide-casting dog – the best in the district, many thought. If Ben was caught up in the crutching or drenching he would sometimes leave a gate or two open, and rely on Blue to bring up the sheep from the bottom paddocks unsupervised. Nigger was more of a loose cannon now. Slower, arthritic in the hips, he would break out about the flocks ever more lazily, much to the younger dog’s frustration. The winter before, while bringing in the Angora goats that Ben had briefly diversified into, then rapidly out of (‘Another get-poor-quick scheme, son?’), Nigger had cast far too narrowly, dividing the herd and stampeding half of it through a fence. Half a day’s work went down the drain, and far too much torn hide and bloodied fleece. The younger dog had taken it upon himself to admonish his sire’s clumsiness, chasing the astonished Nigger back to the ute, and then directing an equal amount of dog invective at an even more astonished Ben for his lack of leadership.
Hedley couldn’t believe his ears when told the story over that Sunday’s roast. ‘Who’s running this farm? You’re the top dog, Bennyboy. You’ve got to lead by example – not leave it to the dogs to sort it out.’