Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  The Gold Cup race begins

  Clement’s mother tells him that she may be away in Bassett for most of the afternoon. She warns him to behave himself and not to answer any knocks at the door. When he hears the bus turn the corner into McCracken’s Road, Clement feels the same kind of excitement that he once felt when he was alone in the house with Kelvin Barrett. He pours out the sixteen chosen marbles onto the mat and arranges them in a neat line. He lowers a length of timber into place behind the line of marbles and fixes his eyes on the wall at the far end of the room. Carefully, and without once lowering his eyes towards the marbles, he slides the timber back from the line then moves it forward again with enough force to send the sixteen rolling forward along the mat. Because he knows from experience that the marbles will have sprayed out a little, he feels for them gingerly with his hands, still keeping his eyes averted, and moves the outlying ones across towards the main group so that all sixteen form a loosely bunched mass with several already clearly ahead just as a field of horses appears at the end of the first furlong of a long race. Still without looking at the marbles, he touches them one by one and discovers with a thrill of pleasure that three of them are loosely spaced ahead of the main bunch while two others are clearly tailed off. Then he turns his back on the marbles and hugs his bare knees and grips his cock and balls to curb his excitement as he remembers how the dawn was chilly but the day promised to be the hottest of that summer when the owner-trainer of Tamarisk Row led his horse through the damp grass to where the tall-sided truck stood on the circular gravel drive, how the man’s wife stood beneath the lavish green awnings of creepers that made a dark tunnel of the long veranda around the house holding in her faintly freckled arms their silken colours loosely folded so that creases and ridges and pleats and knobs and indentations of fiery orange and soothing pale pink and astringent green concealed the true pattern of the jacket and seemed to comprise a design too intricate to be described by any words in a racebook, how the man travelled with his wife beside him for more than a hundred miles to the racecourse while the drone of the truck’s motor sounded like the ominous beginning of a piece of music, and how as the time for the race drew near, the man and his wife, their best friend and their jockey looked from one to another of the rival groups huddled together and realised that all those others, like themselves, believed that their day had arrived. The boy on the flattened pile of the rug, where a golden or reddish pattern is now almost obscured by stains and dust and the passage of feet across it, savours for the last time the pleasure of knowing that soon a race will be run which at each furlong of its journey will seem to promise to a different contender a narrow victory but which will finally prove that for months or years past fifteen groups of people have gone on confidently devising schemes that would never succeed while one group was planning for a day that when it finally came would seem to those people to have been inevitable. He crawls around to the far side of the rug and lowers himself onto the lino so that when he opens his eyes he will see the field of horses across the bare space of the desert-coloured rug. He peers between his eyelashes and sees the field as if a cloud of dust had settled over the racecourse, but he knows the sets of colours so well that he recognises almost at once the flamboyant fuchsia-toned reds and blues of Proud Stallion showing out boldly three lengths ahead of the field. At once Clement shuts his eyes again and turns away from the rug to comprehend what he has just seen. Defiantly, recklessly, the rider gives Proud Stallion his head, and even at this early stage of the race there are people in the crowd who begin to wonder whether there will be after all not a final desperate struggle between a pack of evenly matched rivals but a strange homecoming before an almost silent crowd as Proud Stallion continues his astonishing run that allows no supporters of other horses even the least hope that their champion might overtake the leader. But then he guesses at the positions of the others in the field behind the leader and the unspent strength that their riders may be holding in check and shares with the supporters of Proud Stallion their fear of every other runner in the great bunch poised behind their horse and, whenever something makes a sudden movement forward, their sudden alarm and presentiment of defeat and even their resignation because it was too much to hope that their horse could lead all the way. He lies down again facing the field, and with his eyelashes just meeting turns his head slowly to the right, looking past Proud Stallion and across the space of three clear lengths behind that horse until he sees with a pleasant shock (which would have been just as great no matter which horse he had seen) colours in which the faded gold of long vistas predominates – the insignia of Hills of Idaho. Again he turns away, but not before he has glimpsed just behind the second horse a bunch in which many horses might be travelling with that easy loping stride that means they are only waiting to make a powerful run towards the lead. For a few minutes he enjoys the revelation that this one name among sixteen, Hills of Idaho, which people have spoken aloud so often with no special sonority may in future whenever it is spoken ring out like a battle-cry reminding the hearers of the long story of how a little band of men never stopped believing that their day would come. Clement now looks towards the rear of the field where he knows there are several horses already being restrained well behind the main bunch. Sooner than he had expected, the shape of a horse comes into view and he cannot wait to know which one is so far back so early in the race. He stares at the pale aloof colours of Transylvanian and wonders whether the sharp-faced secretive stable followers still do not flinch or show the least concern as they see the fifteen rivals that their horse must pass already so far ahead and still toss their heads carelessly and scoff at the distance that most people already believe is too great for Transylvanian to make up, whether they will keep up that intimidating pose for long after they have begun to realise that they were not the most cunning of all that crowd after all their boastful posturing, and when if ever they will admit quite simply that their schemes have failed. He looks further to his left towards a horse whose rider holds it almost as far behind as the conspicuous Transylvanian and cries out with joy as he sees the ill-matched colours of harsh desert and helpless skin enclosed by the tantalising green of a country that no one has yet visited of Tamarisk Row. He rolls forward onto the bare gritty surface of the rug. He hunches his body so low that he feels with his thighs how his cock has swollen with the hope of something too pleasurable for words. He presses his fists tightly against his chest, trying to restrain the horse that he has always known, whether he was alone in the weeds of his backyard and trying, with nothing to guide him but a glimpse of a light so delicate that it could irradiate even the blazing summer sunlight over Bassett, to creep closer to the narrow but perfectly transparent window through which he expected to see, more clearly than he ever saw the shapes of racehorses in lumps of gravel or the histories of their owners among the shadows cast by tall marshmallows, long afternoons where another boy, if only he knew it, saw the gravel and weeds so clearly on certain afternoons that he never wondered whether there were others on other afternoons so little distance away who saw their gravel and weeds more or less clearly, or staring in the noon twilight inside his house at a picture in a magazine of a village in the impenetrable hills of Romania towards sunset on a day that no one but himself now wondered about or a town on the incredible prairies of America at the beginning of a summer that no one but himself still persisted in searching for its unique essence and then peeping around the agitated golden membrane of the lounge-room blind in the hope of seeing the place that a person would recognise only if he had stared for years at the Carpathians or Nebraska or inland Australia and discovered what it was that was still missing from those lands because it was far away from each of them and yet on the way back from Bassett to all of them, would come from far behind and startle the thousands who had been looking anywhere but in his direction for the winner and oblige them to ask one another for long afterwards where he had come from and how it was that they had overlooked him for so long and never notic
ed his unwavering journey through the very thick of all those that had for long seemed certain to reach the coveted place before him. He thinks of the days when the husband and wife, the owners of Tamarisk Row, would promise each other some new pleasure – each undressing the other by daylight in their kitchen or lounge-room or watching while the other stood up in the bath and pissed, or tying the other up and tickling or torturing him or her between the legs and under the arms with feathers or hair brooms or chips of ice from the ice chest, or painting the other between the legs with crayons or water paints or indelible pencils – that they would not enjoy until after the day when their little-known horse became famous and they knew that even though they were Catholics and had come to that country as strangers from somewhere else that they could remember little about, still the triumph of their horse before thousands of watching strangers and the rewards that it brought them meant that they need never wonder again what the people for miles around did in secret that made them smile so knowingly among their deceptively bare paddocks that their grandfathers had discovered for them and taught them what to do with. Before he has time to consider how the distant position of their horse in the early part of the race still reminds the owner and his wife of those other occasions when the same horse, or a few years earlier the unlucky Journey’s End, would weave its way through crowded fields only to fail by cruelly narrow margins, Clement hears the bus from Bassett stopping at the corner of McCracken’s Road. He picks up a pencil and writes down the order of the field and, as nearly as he can judge, the distances between the horses. As he writes he chants under his breath the words that the racing commentator cries out to the silent crowd at the course and the people beside wireless sets in towns where many of the crowd have never been and that sum up what a man would believe of the field who could see no more than a bunch of horses far out on an arena of dead grass with already a few dropping back so far that they seem unlikely to take any part in the finish – Proud Stallion striding out boldly three or four lengths clear of in second place Hills of Idaho settling down well on the inside of a bunch of horses with Infant of Prague, Mysteries of the Rosary and wider out to Veils of Foliage looking for a good position they’re followed by Passage of North Winds going smoothly Lost Streamlet there too and then a gap to Monastery Garden followed by Den of Foxes a fair gap again to Silverstone but going nice and easily further back to Captured Riflebird and Hare in the Hills in a strung-out field dropping out towards the rear is Springtime in the Rockies and then comes Silver Rowan and further back still to Tamarisk Row and tailed off even this far from home is Transylvanian.

  Clement thinks of the Protestants’ city and his own

  One Sunday morning Augustine takes Clement past St Boniface’s and on through the main streets of Bassett towards St Thomas More’s Cathedral to hear the eleven o’clock high Mass. In the very centre of the city they cross Trafalgar Square where a massive stone archway flanked with lions and unicorns and griffins reminds the people of Bassett that the men who did all the important work in the old days were Englishmen with manes like lions’ and claws like griffins’. Augustine has now almost succeeded in teaching his son that the city with its porticoes and balustrades and columns and statues is not something to be proud of because, although the Catholic men of Ireland got to Australia as soon as they could, it was already too late and they found the same Protestant police and magistrates and landlords and wealthy shopkeepers who used to imprison and fine and rob them back in Ireland already in control of even the isolated inland places like Bassett. So Clement does not worry when he notices that the stone animals around the archway are disfigured with dirt, and only seldom wonders whether there is someone in Bassett who carries in his mind a map of all the tunnels and caves and cul-de-sacs and short cuts and arcades and passageways among the Protestants’ city and appreciates its complexities as they deserve and as God might if He took an interest in non-Catholic places, or whether there are obscure angles and surprising convergences of far-reaching routes and secret intersections of almost-forgotten tunnels that no one now alive understands and enjoys and gloats over and each week or month a few more dusty alley-ways or mossy ledges behind parapets are forgotten by the last person who once knew even vaguely of them and form the beginnings of a mysterious district that ought to be explored all over again because now even a Catholic could find something stirring in its abandoned hollows or perhaps claim some neglected enclosure as his own. Augustine explains that the Irish who landed in Australia came too late to see the country as it had been for thousands of years when only scattered tribes of Aborigines wandered through it scarcely disturbing the parrots and dingoes in remote gullies where they did as they pleased, and too late to make Australia a Catholic country, so that now the lands of Australia would always be covered by roads and farms and suburbs of cities in patterns that bigoted Protestants and Masons had laid out. Now Australian Catholics can only gaze at the designs that have been impressed on their country in the hope that somewhere among the rows of squares and meshes of irregular shapes they might see corners that the Protestants had overlooked and which could still remind them of great mysteries just out of sight behind ordinary-looking things, or dream of plains far inland that are probably too harsh anyway but where perhaps a few Catholic families could live in a little community whose roads led only to properties within the settlement and nowhere else beyond it.

  Barry Launder discovers Tamarisk Row

  The Killeatons’ backyard is narrow but deep. On one side of it is the picket fence of the Presbyterian church-hall yard. On the opposite side is the tumbledown fence that the Killeatons share with the Glasscocks. The back fence is a length of rusty ragged wire-netting. The yard beyond it belongs to people named Podger whose house faces McCracken’s Road. Clement never sees anyone in the back part of the Podgers’ yard, which is littered with rusted iron, car tyres, and broken machinery. Sometimes at night Clement hears shouting from the direction of the Podgers’ house, but his father tells him it is only the big Podger boys coming home drunk and arguing back to their father. One afternoon Clement extends one of his outlying roads towards the Podgers’ fence. As he moves slowly on his hands and knees beside the fence, he notices among the rubbish in the Podgers’ yard a heap of broken china, some of it striped with a colour that might have been originally a striking orange-red. He pokes a stick through the wire, trying to scrape some of the china towards him, and disturbs a big boy Podger, about eighteen years old, who has been scratching around out of sight behind some old seats. The boy says – what are you after Snow? Clement says meekly – I thought if nobody wanted those old broken cups and saucers any more I could take a few little pieces for a game I was playing. The boy says – nick over the fence quick and snitch it if that’s all you want. Clement makes sure that his mother is not watching, then scrambles over the sagging wire fence. He picks up only some of the china, leaving plenty in case the Podgers might still value it. He would like to ask what the stuff looked like before it was broken but he suspects that the Podger boy has already noticed something odd about him and is waiting for a chance to make fun of him. Just before Clement climbs back, the Podger boy says – I don’t suppose you’re the shitty bastard that pinched me magneto. Clement says – I’ve never been inside your yard before and I don’t even know what a magneto is. The boy says – I had a fuckin magneto here somewhere and now it’s gone. He tries to lift a pile of scrap metal with his toe. Clement stands timidly behind him, feeling that he ought to help. When the Podger boy sees him still standing there, he says – piss off now or I’ll kick you where your mother never kissed you – and Christ help you if I find out it’s someone from your place been fartin around our backyard. Clement goes back to his own yard. He spends the next few weeks rearranging the whole pattern of his farming country. He decides that he was wrong to think that as his backyard extended further out of sight of the front gate it became more secluded and remote and safe from disturbance. He realises that the further back a road might lead
towards the quietest, least-visited reaches of a territory that a people have decided is theirs alone to explore, the nearer it might approach to the edges of a territory that is so familiar to another people that they have not yet noticed the strange country just outside its borders, although one of them might stumble on it at any time. He supposes that the reason why he has always been strangely affected by the sight of plains and flat grasslands viewed from a distance is that the most mysterious parts of those lands lie in the very midst of them, seemingly unconcealed and there for all to see but in fact made so minute by the hazy bewildering flatness all around them that for years they might remain unnoticed by travellers, and so determines to make the central districts of his yard the site of his most prized farms and park-like grazing lands. The property named Tamarisk Row cannot be moved from beneath the tamarisks, but he does shift it from the space between the trees and the church-hall yard around to the inland side so that it is protected on one side by the thick trunks and on the other by the level expanse of land between its boundaries and the flat heart of the backyard. When he has done all this he begins a scheme of scaling down the roads and fences and farms and towns and horses and people to a small fraction of their former size so that all of them will be concealed by the vastness and monotony of the backyard as if by the flatness and imprecise distances of a great plain and a person walking past them or even over them might see no more of the patterns of roads and farmlands than if he had glimpsed such things from a low hill many miles off. He has not quite finished this project when he hears beyond Podgers’ fence a boy calling out – come and look – I can see Clem Killer down here – this must be little Killer’s place. He looks up and sees Barry Launder, the leader of the gang that rules his grade at school, jumping down with his older brother from Podgers’ fence and then walking across the yard to meet him. Clement is so shocked to see Launder, the boy who should have been kept out of his yard at all costs, strolling across the most secret part of it and to think that he entered the yard with one bound from the direction from which no other trespasser has ever come that he cannot invent answers to Launder’s questions but answers timidly and truthfully. When Launder asks him what he was playing in the yard by himself, he admits that he was building little farms. Launder demands to see the farms. Clement takes him to one that has not yet been made smaller. Launder understands at once that the rows of tiny chips of wood are fences. He crushes half a mile of fencing with his feet, not so much to annoy Clement as to discover in all seriousness whether the fence will support his weight. He says – these fences aren’t much are they? Clement himself kicks over a few hundred yards of posts and says – as a matter of fact I was going to pull all these fences out and make much better ones because they were the sort I made when I was only a little kid. Launder says – I think we’ll have a good look around this yard. He and his brother stroll over to some of the poultry sheds. On the way they pass more farms. Although he seems not to notice them, Barry Launder manages to knock down almost every fence and to wipe out nearly every road that he walks across. Clement says politely – you’d better not open the doors of the chook sheds. Launder says – do you want to try and stop me? Mrs Killeaton calls out from behind the lilac bush – I’ll stop you you brazen little brat. She hurries towards them, looking fierce. The Launder boys stand their ground. She says – you two whoever you are get away from that fowl shed and get back where you came from or I’ll tan the hides off you. Very slowly the two boys turn towards the Podgers’ fence. Barry Launder gives Clement a look full of meaning. Mrs Killeaton says – before they go Clement have they broken any of your toy farms – because if they have I’ll make them get down there in the dirt and fix them all up again. Clement only wants his mother and the Launders to forget all about the farms. He says – it doesn’t matter if they tripped over a few fences – I was pulling them down myself anyway. The Launders take a long while to reach the Podgers’ fence and climb back over it. Clement’s mother keeps him inside for the rest of the afternoon. She says – what nasty little bits of goods they were, and asks him who the boys were. Clement tells her their names and a little about them. He decides that after this the only farms and roads that he can safely build will be tiny lumps and faint roads so absurdly small that even he, their designer, will have to believe that he sees them from across an enormous distance, and even wonders whether he should make his backyard the country of a people like the Aborigines or even some earlier race of people who made no marks at all on the grasslands or in the forests so that he can follow their journeys without plucking out a single weed or altering the lie of the least patch of dust.