Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Flocks of unseen birds pass through Bassett

  According to the Australian Bird Book in his father’s bookcase, the few inconspicuous olive-green honey-eaters and elusive grey-brown fly-catchers that he sees retreating into the tree-tops at the rear of strangers’ backyards and into the peninsulas of bush that still survive among the last scattered streets on the edge of Bassett are only a few of the more venturesome of a whole nation of native birds that lives out of sight among the coastal scrub and swamps and inland plains and savannahs and heathlands and rain forests and alpine valleys of Australia. Hardly anyone that Clement knows in Bassett, and certainly not his own father who has wandered for hundreds of miles across Australia nor his mother who grew up on the northern plains of Victoria nor his teachers who seem to know so much about places he has never seen nor the priests who when they close their eyes in prayer see at once a whole landscape that few ordinary people ever reach, knows the names of more than a few of all those birds or can tell him how far a boy might have to travel beyond Bassett to see them in their true homes. Only Mr Wallace the grocer, in the hours after his shop is closed and when Clement never sees him, goes on murmuring the names of strange species because there are still some that he has yet to capture for his aviary before he can walk in through the wire gate and not worry any more about the birds in all the miles of country outside because he can see them all as they are supposed to live among the swamps and heaths and jungles that he has prepared for them. In the front of the bird book is a map of Australia divided into zones. Over the place where Bassett would be if it were important enough to be marked, a dense flight of tiny arrows shows that a great belt of open forest country occupies northern Victoria. In all the pages describing individual species of birds there are dozens of wrens and fly-catchers and honey-eaters and diurnal birds of prey and water-birds and parrots and cockatoos common alone or in pairs or in small or large flocks in open forests. Hundreds of complex patterns of plumage, green and blue and slate-grey and orange and crimson and rufous and buff and lemon-yellow and chestnut and turquoise, persist all round the outlying suburbs of Bassett and perhaps even pass along secret pathways in the tree-tops of its parks and gardens and wastelands on their way from one part of their territory to another. While Clement is confined for season after season among crowds of people, none of whom has yet been able to show him into that bright system of hidden roads that they surely must have discovered in all the years they have spent in Bassett, the small or large flocks move freely all over their zone of open forests. Each spring and summer the males of every species flaunt their gorgeous colours from prominent perches all over the country that coincides with Bassett but has seldom been seen by anyone in that city. Cup- or saucer- or dome- or platform-shaped nests of twigs or bark or other coarse fibres lined with dried grass or moss or cobwebs and camouflaged with lichens or mistletoe or dead twigs, with one or two or from three to six eggs pure white or pale creamy-brown or reddish-white sprinkled with rich red and a few underlying markings of lilac-grey more pronounced at the larger end, hang in every tree and low shrub of the forests that no one can point out to him but which are somehow superimposed on the already intricate red and grey and orange patterns of Bassett. Some pairs stay together faithfully for life and remember at last a grove or a thicket that only they know of in the forests that no people know of as the place where they first mated and then no longer wanted to mate with any other, while other kinds that form new pairs each year go searching through the country that belongs to them, although the people who claim to own it have never heard of them, for the sunlit clearing where a sudden flash of unexpected vermilion or discordant yellow decides which of all the mates that they might have chosen will be theirs for a season of north winds and afterwards only someone that they remember dimly among other mazes of leaves and branches when other mates plunge beaks deep into the feathers of their necks and then go with them to look for nesting-places. At the end of a week when Clement has spent every night reading the bird book and wondering about the flecked and striated and variegated populations that pass to and fro along green tunnels beneath the surface of Bassett, Augustine invites the boy to the racecourse to watch Sternie in a trial gallop against two other horses. They reach the track long before breakfast, but the summer sun is already high in the sky. Augustine sees a woman leaning against a long dazzling car. He whispers to Clement that the boy will have to meet Mrs Moy the jockey’s wife and tells him to think of something sensible to say to her but not to mention Sternie or racing. The boy stares hard at Mrs Moy but sees no trace of Chinese colouring in her skin. She is easily the most beautiful woman he has seen. Out on the track Harold Moy warms up Sternie for his trial. Clement is sorry to see the jockeys wearing only plain shirts instead of racing colours. When he shakes hands with Mrs Moy he sees in the glossy black circles of her sun-glasses the white-railed arcs of racecourses where a solitary horse looms up and dwindles again, far from its rivals in some mysterious race. When she turns her head to watch her husband doing battle against the small field of strange riders and their horses, Clement glimpses in the smoky glass, where only a few months or years before a gaudy array of wind-creased jackets veered upwards on a long crazy course that reached far back into the depths of the black glass pressing against her expressionless face until one mass of colours more splendid than all the others flared up for a moment like a rare flame and overflowed the round dark mirrors and she decided that her next mate must be Harold Moy who thrust his arms and twitched his legs like a madman absurdly far ahead of the field and wore like fluttering plumage his colours of molten jewel, burnished crossed sashes and sleeves, iridescent armbands and cap, strange shifting vistas of a tiny racecourse set among symmetrical groves of trees far different from any in Bassett. Mrs Moy goes on staring into the sunlight, and Clement wonders what kind of racecourse, what sequence of horses and assortment of colours she sees as she looks out from the other side of her private sky towards the landscape that he scarcely recognises in the light of the usual sun. After a long silence he forces himself to ask her politely whether she lives somewhere near the racecourse and not far from the edge of Bassett. She says – yes, that’s right Clement – you could almost see our house from here if it wasn’t for those trees over there. She points to the stand of timber at the far side of the track. Without stopping to think, Clement asks – do you ever see many parrots or kingfishers in the bush around your house? Mrs Moy looks deliberately down at him so that he sees only bush unmarked by any sign of a racecourse in the dark screen between her eyes and his. She says – that’s a funny question to ask – no we’re too busy to stop and look for birds I suppose but I’m sure there are plenty around if you only knew where to look.

  The Gold Cup race continues

  While Clement waits for his mother to leave him alone in the house for long enough to guide the field a little further on its long circuitous journey, he turns the pages of the bundle of exercise books that he brought home for the last time from school a few weeks earlier, just before the start of the Christmas holidays that promised so many idle afternoons that he planned to spend one day in January looking through the rows and rows of his own handwriting and gloating over the remoteness of the hours when he struggled to keep the sweat on his hands from staining the pages and traced faintly from time to time with his pencil on the marbled cover of his book a journey as arduous as the struggle of the afternoon to reach the hour when he could escape from the dusty room and gulp down water at the taps. On almost every page he sees some project – a set of sums, a passage of transcription, a composition on At the Baths or A Thunderstorm or An Adventure With a Snake, a page of geography about the Eskimos or of history about the Crossing of the Red Sea or a test of ten words from the spelling list – that began when he wrote with slow unfaltering strokes the letters J. M. J. (for the names of the Holy Family) at the top of the page and then watched anxiously as the first letters of the first words appeared from beneath his pencil because he wanted no mark o
f his rubber and no altered stroke of his pencil to mar his page. As he kept on with what he and the teacher called his work, he looked forward to the time when the whole of the smooth double page would be filled with words or figures or neat pencil drawings not of his choosing but ordained by his teacher, who knew that when it reached from edge to edge of the white sheets it would show a boy as much as he was permitted to know of the intricate systems of learning that adults so often saw in books that were too difficult for children. But looking through the discarded exercise books, Clement sees how the uniform slant of his letters gradually lapsed on so many pages into a jumble of tottering summits and distorted slopes and how the light and shade in his pencil strokes soon became an unvarying dark-grey and the projects themselves, which were originally meant to spread themselves across two pages and to remain for long afterwards as evidence of his perseverance and industriousness, petered out long before the end of the second page in a sentence that was never finished or a sketch that was left with its mysterious shapes unlabelled. He remembers the rewards that his teacher once promised and the punishments she threatened to urge him and his forty or fifty classmates to finish every word of their work and to pay close attention to neatness and wonders whether these are all now utterly meaningless because, sooner than any of them had expected, the bell rang outside and the grade shuffled out into the hot afternoon and next day there was some new piece of work to begin and in no time at all it was the Christmas holidays, or whether the uneasiness he feels whenever he glances through the unfinished pages means that his punishment is still to come. In one of the books he finds a bare white space which, if his teacher had found it, might have cost him an hour of pastels or free reading because he knew as well as anyone in the grade that every space had to be filled, but which now, so soon after the days when he had to keep it hidden in his desk, he can stare at openly for as long as he pleases. Under a few sentences from the story in his reader, The Race – The winning post was now not far off. The prince threw his last apple, hoping and hoping that once more Atalanta would stop. She saw the gleaming fruit roll across the sand and felt that she must have it. For just one second she bent and caught it up. That was the prince’s chance. Darting past her, he reached the winning post just, are some words that he wrote in the early days of the holidays telling the story of a race a few months earlier than the Gold Cup race. He cups his hands over his mouth and his left ear, and prepares to describe softly to himself in the phrases of a racing commentator the race whose story is written as only a list of horses’ names with a series of numerals beside each name to show the position of that horse at the half-mile post, then at the turn into the straight, and finally at the finish, and illustrated by a sketch of a sprawling racecourse of an irregular oval shape that fills all the remaining space between the stories of a prince, who had to succeed in an almost impossible race before he could marry Atalanta, and of the horse Tamarisk Row whose owners never gave up hoping for a great win and the end of the second page. He tells how the field, with the best gallopers striding comfortably and well within themselves, travels around the long gradual curve at the far side of the course where a boy might have felt the point of his pencil flowing smoothly across the paper and heard the voice of Miss Callaghan as she went on with what she called her urgent private work at her desk saying – there’ll be something special for anyone whose writing can stand the test of a magnifying glass, and still the little-known horse Tamarisk Row waits patiently near the rear for the moment when his rider asks him for an effort. His whispering voice grows a little harsher as the leaders begin the slow turn towards the top of the straight across the faint lines from which a boy may once have mopped a few tiny puddles of sweat because he heard his teacher saying as she looked hurriedly towards the front desks – pity help anyone who can’t show me two pages of beautiful work at bell time and that means no marks from grubby sticky fingers, and the horse that he relies on to enact something heroic in a space that has so far been marked only by timid journeys and predictable home-comings seems likely to be thwarted in its run by the wall of horses ahead of it. And he allows the air rushing from his throat to obscure his words as the noise of the crowd might drown the words of the course broadcaster while the field struggles up the long straight across the space that was still unfilled when Miss Callaghan said – I’ve changed my mind – because it’s such a hot afternoon I’m going to let everyone go home on time but mark my words I’ll be taking up all those books tomorrow and woe betide any person whose writing isn’t their best or anyone with spaces or gaps in their pages, and he realises that Tamarisk Row will finish on the heels of the winner after a desperate but unlucky finishing run that perhaps only his owners will see and appreciate. The boy’s mother comes to tell him to be good while she is away in Bassett just as he notices that the names of horses, the numerals, and the sketch of the racecourse have been made so carelessly that there are still many gaps between them and the edges of the pages, so that even though no teacher may ever point to the spaces and ask him accusingly what does he mean by them, he should still find room there for more names and numbers telling of great races to finish the task that he began so seriously and fearfully on a hot afternoon in a room where he will probably never sit again and perhaps to see spread out across the page the sort of pattern that his teacher believed possible and that once seemed to promise such satisfaction. Even before he hears the bus pull away he is writing in a space near the edge of the page the names of the runners in the Gold Cup and arranging the sixteen marbles in the positions that they reached soon after the start. He kneels beside them and, with his eyes tightly closed, pushes each runner forward. After each push he waits, listening for the click of glass against glass that tells him a runner has been checked by another in front of it. If he hears no click he hugs himself with excitement to think that a horse whose name he can only guess at is making a long run through the field and perhaps passing a whole bunch in one sudden burst. When the last runner has been pushed he gropes for the absurdly wide runners and moves them closer to the rails. Then he opens his eyes and gloats over the many changes in the field. He enters the runners’ positions in the exercise book, closes his eyes again, and pushes them all forward once more. He intends to bring them as far as the turn into the straight and then to enjoy the sketches and figures describing their positions for perhaps a week or even longer until he is left alone for the whole afternoon that he needs to lie beside the field as they make their last runs in the straight, to keep his eyes closed until he can no longer bear not to see which horse has run last after all, then to close them again and wonder about the second-last horse and then all the others in turn. When the field finally reaches the turn he describes the race again in the words of the course broadcaster – as they start the run around the big sweeping turn about three furlongs from home and the field begins to bunch up all but this leader Lost Streamlet who’s slipped away a couple of lengths clear from Veils of Foliage and Hare in the Hills still continuing that long run right around the field from near last they’re followed by Springtime in the Rockies waiting for the last run Hills of Idaho there too and Proud Stallion who looks beaten Passage of North Winds close enough if he’s good enough and Infant of Prague under the whip making no impression then Captured Riflebird and Den of Foxes with a big job in front of them then a gap to Monastery Garden followed by Mysteries of the Rosary dropping out about to be passed by Silverstone and Tamarisk Row together a long way back and then Transylvanian who couldn’t get up from there and last of all Silver Rowan about twenty lengths from the leader. When the positions are safely entered in his book, he sits waiting for the sound of the bus outside and enjoying what he will dwell on in secret every day until the race is finally decided – that moment when the supporters of almost every horse can still believe that their fancy will still justify their hopes even if it has to finish with a run that even they will marvel at for long afterwards. He holds his breath for the sake of Lost Streamlet whose rider has dared to m
ake his run so far from home and fears at every stride the arrival close behind him of a whole bunch of determined challengers but who may yet cling to his narrow advantage all the way up the straight. He clenches his fists for Hare in the Hills who was among the tail-enders early and has steadily improved his position ever since, but wide on the track, so that he may have used up already too much of his precious stamina. He gets to his feet and walks all around the room in his anxiety for Tamarisk Row who has only two horses behind him and must now wait until the field has entered the straight before he makes his run because there is no way through the pack ahead of him. From different points around the room he tries to estimate the distance between Tamarisk Row and the leaders, and realises that no matter how strongly the horse finishes he will not catch the eye of the course broadcaster until near the post, so that many even of his supporters might have given up hope and looked instead at the leaders before they first hear his name Tamarisk Row roared at them like a battle cry above the confused noise of the crowd and perhaps only a handful of faithful friends will know that almost unbearable elation that gradually rises as a forgotten horse passes one after another on his long weaving run through the field and still the crowd has not noticed him bearing down on the leaders.