I couldn’t really think of a greater insult.
‘But then again, what do I know?’ said Pete, draining the contents of his glass in a way that made my blood boil.
■
Shortly after breakfast, we pulled into a crossing loop to allow a westbound freight through. I tried to pass the time by reading, but I kept repeating the same sentence out loud and I eventually realised it’d be best if I just put the book down. I had always assumed that once my work was in print, I’d be free from self-doubt and that I’d be able to conduct myself with the authority and the silent assurance of someone secretly in the know. What I’d never considered was that the self-doubt might increase.
I was late again after we were summoned to the dining carriage for lunch, so I sat at the same empty booth near the entrance. The menus had already been placed on the table. There was no sign of Pete at any of the other booths. I took another photograph through the window. There were now wider expanses of red earth between the tufts of saltbush.
‘It’s the writer!’ exclaimed Pete, lingering at the carriage door. ‘You can’t seem to get rid of me, can you?’
He thrust his walking stick at me. His backside made a hollow thud when it hit the cushion. Yellow gunk was pasted to his eyelids.
‘Are you sick of it yet?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Good attitude.’
The stewardess arrived as I was passing the walking stick back across the table.
‘I think you already know what I’m drinking,’ said Pete. ‘In fact, put a bottle on my account, please.’
The stewardess rolled her eyes at me and smiled. I ordered a glass of water.
‘Aren’t writers supposed to have a thirst?’ asked Pete.
‘I guess I’m not a real one then,’ I said.
The stewardess took our lunch orders and moved on to the next booth. I tried to see whether she smiled at them in the same way she’d been smiling at me.
‘What’ve you got there?’ asked Pete, gesturing at the black case on the table.
‘It’s just a camera. I’ve been taking a few photos to show my dad when I get home.’
‘What of?’
‘Everything, really. I figure it might help to jog a few memories for him. Not that he always needs help.’
Pete stared at the case and exposed the deep furrows on his cheeks. ‘About what I said earlier,’ he said. ‘I get a bit excited sometimes and say things I don’t entirely mean. Truth be told, I’m just happy to have someone with young blood sitting opposite me, being forced to listen while I ramble on.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Forget about it.’
‘I will if you will,’ he said, probing me with his gunky eyes.
Despite everything, I still had the same feeling that out here in the desert, where not even the birds wanted to brave it, I was free to say anything that crossed my mind without fear of the consequences.
‘Ever heard of Cook?’ asked Pete.
‘No.’
‘We’ll be stopping there straight after lunch. The town’s got a population of four.’ He dabbed at the contusions on his temple with a chequered handkerchief. ‘Years ago the Kooris used to meet us when we got off the train. They’d sell us boomerangs, rhythm sticks, bullroarers. Anything we liked, really. It was all very civil.’
‘How many times have you caught the Indian Pacific, Pete?’
‘I’ve lost count. I try to make it over to Adelaide for Anzac Day every three or four years. This year there’s a bit of a reunion of my old squadron. I don’t overly enjoy the flight, so I usually have to make do with the train.’
‘Does your family live in Perth?’
‘There’s not really any family in the picture. Not in the way you mean.’ He took out the olive-green handkerchief and coughed into it. ‘I live in an estate with five other vets out in Joondalup. It’s nice and quiet. We all tend to look out for each other. Six gold cards and no wives. If they ever made a show about us, I dare say that’s what they’d call it.’
‘What’s a gold card?’
Pete removed his wallet from his trouser pocket. He folded back the leather tongues and handed me a gold-coloured card. The card had a serial number and the words ‘Totally & Permanently Incapacitated’ printed on it.
‘Thanks,’ I said softly, handing it back to him.
‘Take a walk up and down the aisle later on,’ he said. ‘I bet if you asked you’d find half a dozen gold cards on this carriage alone.’ He coughed into the handkerchief again.
‘Is it enough to get by?’
‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘They take good care of us, and so they should.’ Pete examined me with his deep-set eyes. His irises seemed somehow more transparent than at breakfast. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I guess it’s good for a writer to be easy to read. You have to understand: the call came, we answered it and, in our own ways, we all paid a price. How can anyone put a sum on that?’
The stewardess returned with my glass of water and Pete’s bottle of cabernet sauvignon.
‘He’s starting to sink his teeth in,’ said Pete, shakily pouring himself a glass.
‘I find that a bit hard to believe,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Let me know if he gets too morbid for you.’
‘You’re already too late,’ I said.
I liked the way she laughed. I was starting to feel good about my chances of getting her into a still bed.
‘Did you consider not answering the call?’ I asked when she was well out of earshot.
‘It wasn’t really an option. Or it wasn’t an option I felt I had any right to take. You’re forgetting, most men back then felt the same way.’
‘My dad didn’t. He ended up in prison.’
‘Why wasn’t he a conscientious objector?’ asked Pete.
‘I guess, in the end, he thought that course of action was insufficient. He and some of his friends burnt the letters notifying them of their conscription.’
Pete nodded several times. ‘Your father was one of the smart ones.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew him.’
‘No, you have to trust me. We had no idea what we were doing over there. We did some terrible things.’
At school I’d read about a necklace decorated with human tongues.
‘I’m man enough to admit it now,’ said Pete. ‘At first I was just excited to have a tobacco allowance and to listen to the rumble of the old Caribous.’ He caught me studying the contusions on his lower lip. ‘I should’ve had an inkling at some point. It was only when they were flying us over the delta of Saigon that I first had the thought: I’ve made a terrible mistake. My brain has made a terrible, terrible mistake. Of course, by then it was too late. A chain of events had already been set in motion.’
Pete drained his glass in one hit and poured another. He tilted the bottle in my direction, but I shook my head. We both stared out the window. I figured we must have crossed the state border by now, which meant it was the first time in my life that I’d been outside Western Australia.
The stewardess eventually arrived with our lunch. As she laid the plates on the tablecloth, she glanced at Pete, but he didn’t even acknowledge her. I expected her expression to soften into a smile when she looked my way. It didn’t.
Pete took two bites of his toasted sandwich and pushed his plate into the middle of the table. ‘You’re welcome to finish mine, if you’re still hungry.’
‘I think I’ll be fine,’ I said. The thought of sharing his saliva made my own meal hard to stomach.
‘Did you work after you came home?’ I asked.
‘Of course I did,’ said Pete. His mouth was still full of puréed bread. ‘The last thing I wanted was to have time on my hands. I worked as a service technician in Albany for twelve years. I dipped my toe into the mining sector up in Goldsworthy. I was a field manager for Telstra for the best part of a decade, all across the wheat belt.’
He took another long drink. Abandoned freight carriages we
re starting to appear along the rail siding.
‘One evening I pulled into the garage and I just knew. After thirty-two years of faithful marriage, it was over. I walked into the kitchen and told my wife she could have everything: the house, our friends, the money, the kids. I couldn’t do it anymore. I took the campervan we’d bought for when I retired and drove off into the night. I guess the campervan was my one luxury in the end.
‘It’s a funny thing. As I was driving that night, I accepted that I was alone and that was the end of it. In a way it made me free. There wasn’t any animosity towards anyone. Every mistake that ever happened to me was my own doing. I think in time my wife probably accepted it, or understood it somehow. I couldn’t really say. There was no point keeping things going on those terms. There never is.’
‘Have you seen her since?’ I asked.
‘I’ve never really felt the urge. As it happens, she got in contact with me just before last Christmas. I’m not sure how she found me. I knew it had to be serious news, so I let her say her piece. I owed her that much. It turned out my firstborn, Alastair, had gone ahead and hung himself. His wife found him, poor woman. Poor soul.’ Pete coughed into his olive-green handkerchief again.
‘The thing she seemed the most upset about, my wife, was that Alastair hadn’t left a note. I don’t know why it made her any sadder than his actual passing. A note wouldn’t have changed anything. She said she kept thinking about all the things she could have done differently. To me, that’s not a constructive way to think. Mind you, I didn’t say that. I didn’t really say anything.’
He exhaled and looked me in the eye. ‘You might think this is cruel on my part, but when she started crying, I hung up. There wasn’t anything else I could do. I knew it ended the minute I left, or maybe even a long time before all of that.’
‘I’m sorry, Pete.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry. I can’t even be sure that I’m sorry. I know I’m supposed to be sorry, but to me it’s just a word that people have been trained to say. I did what I had to do at the time and, in a way, I already knew the consequences would catch up with me sooner or later.’
There was a rush of static over the intercom. ‘We’re now arriving in the town of Cook to drop off a mailbag and replenish the train’s water supplies,’ announced the driver. ‘We’ll be stopped for approximately forty-five minutes. When you’re walking in the main street of town, please make sure you watch out for the traffic.’ The Queen Adelaide Restaurant filled with muted laughter. ‘He always cracks that joke,’ said Pete gloomily.
As the train slowed to a halt, I caught sight of a rusted fridge on the platform. An inscription on the fridge read: OUR HOSPITAL NEEDS YOUR HELP. GET SICK! I quickly got my camera out of its case and pointed it at the fridge.
‘Before you stretch your legs,’ said Pete, ‘why don’t you take a picture of your harshest critic?’
I panned the camera around to him and tried to fit his long face into the frame. The shot was horribly out of focus, and I wondered whether it was best that way.
BURNT HILL FARM
The sun slides towards the dark mountains like an egg down a hot frying pan, as Don likes to observe to his wife Maggie and their friends Ian and Lesley Sinclair. He can feel the sweat starting to dry on his skin and turn cold. He’s been trying to chop as much wood as he can so the new owners will have plenty to get them started. It was nice of Maggie to let him make an offer on the farm, but she knew they’d come up short. It’s madness that anyone had to put a price on it all. What’s the clean air worth? What’s the history of tens of thousands of goldminers worth? What are the kangaroos at dusk worth? Nothing that any six-figure sum can cover, that’s for sure.
It’s been years since the boys kicked the footy while they watched the sunset. The kids never understood the importance of the ritual. But they will someday. Christ, they’ve all grown up quickly. Not that anyone doesn’t. That’s the thing about time. Everyone is always saying how it moves so fast, but maybe fast is just the normal way that it moves. Fast isn’t even really fast, if you stop to think about it. The main thing that slows down is the damn tongue. When was it that he started confusing people’s names? And why does it make his kids so irritated?
At least the garden bed is finally getting some peace. The problem is that the previous owners planted it smack bang in the middle of the paddock, not knowing it was going to become a footy oval at Easter every year. Apologising for the damage has never been much fun. Still, in the twenty-one years they’ve been renting the farmhouse, they’ve never lost any of their bond and they’ve always been welcome back the next Easter with the garden bed looking immaculate.
And now there is no next Easter. Not at Burnt Hill Farm, anyway. He can’t imagine Easter without drifting out to the woodshed late in the afternoon and letting rip. No therapy like it. He tried to show the kids how to do it when they were younger, but they were scared of the spiders. It’s probably because they’ve been over-mothered, which, he can admit from experience, is better than being neglected.
Chopping wood for the fire is something he looks forward to all year round. Easter only really ends once the smell of the fire has disappeared from the clothes he wore at the farm. Sometimes he avoids washing his jumpers for weeks so he can enjoy the smell just a little longer. But you can cling to things all you like. He sees that now. In the end everything slips away, just like that beautiful sun sliding towards the dark mountains.
IAN, 1989
That first year the adults found themselves staying up long after they’d put the little buggers to bed, sitting in the kitchen with the big pot-bellied stove, drinking tea, berating the Liberal Party, listening to Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan on the cassette player that Ian had bought Lesley for their ten-year anniversary. Lesley was becoming even more stunning with age. Ian still couldn’t believe his luck. Maggie was a gem, too. Don could be a serious bastard sometimes, but it probably wasn’t easy always worrying about whether the bookshop was going to stay afloat.
Ian considered Don and Maggie his best friends. They’d all met at university and attended the Moratorium marches together. There was even a bit of street theatre involved. Now, when their friends were divorcing left, right and centre, the four of them had managed to stick it out. None of them were big drinkers. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. What mattered most, in the end, was trust, and they all had it. There was warmth in that kitchen at night; the kind an unlucky person might go their whole life without knowing.
The mornings were a thing of beauty, too. Nice and nippy. Ian loved the cock-a-doodle-doo of the roosters right outside their window, and the rosellas that hung around the back porch late in the afternoon. Sometimes at dusk he saw kangaroos in the neighbour’s paddock, bounding towards the forest. Kangaroos were beautiful movers. Lesson plans and essay-marking barely crossed his mind. Hell, he could even put up with the lingering stench of Don’s shit in the toilet all morning.
What Ian loved most, though, was watching the kids play in the mullock mounds behind the farmhouse, where the miners had pillaged the hillside during the gold rush. He could see the possibilities of the terrain through their eyes. The three of them were so at ease with each other. It was as if Kat and William were the siblings Tom never got to have. Ian had always seen himself having four or five kids, a bit of a Brady Bunch, but what did it matter if they’d had to stop at one? People had it a lot worse. That much was clear to him with four days and twenty acres of bliss at his convenience.
KAT, 1990
The Easter Farmhouse was heaps colder than the houses in the city. You could see yourself breathing. They didn’t have TV in the country at all. But they had real kangaroos, like Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It was kind of fun playing with the boys, even though they could be so annoying sometimes. William picked his nose and swallowed it. Every time you picked your nose, you picked away a bit of your brain. Maybe that was why he was so stupid. Tom was scared of Spinney the windmill, but Da
d said Spinney’s job was to help get water out from the ground, so he was really everyone’s friend.
Writing songs about the Easter bunny was so much fun. Every year Kat got to write a new one with Dad so they could sing it to everyone at the barbecue on Sunday. They’d come up with the words together and Kat would make up the dance moves by herself. All the adults clapped at the end and said how clever the song was and how pretty the dancing looked. She was a really good dancer because she did ballet lessons every Thursday after school. She was going to be a ballerina when she was older and maybe an actress and a singer too.
Mum always teased afterwards that Dad’s singing hurt her ears, but he wasn’t really that bad. He never broke any windows like in the cartoons. He was good at lots of other things, too, like being the boss of a whole bookshop and chopping wood in the shed with the spiders and putting newspaper in the fire so it made everyone warm at dinner. One time he killed a whole family of snakes that were trying to come into the Easter Farmhouse and eat everyone.
Dad was better than Mum because he didn’t care when Kat had her Humpty Dumpty egg for breakfast instead of Weet-Bix. Mum said children vomited if they had too much chocolate for breakfast. But she wasn’t as scary as Tom’s mum. When Kat needed to wee in the middle of the night and she was scared of the mice in the kitchen, she always woke Dad up to carry her to the toilet because otherwise the mice might chew off all her toes, thinking they were peanuts. It had already happened to a friend of hers.
LESLEY, 1991
It was always Maggie who summoned the kids to the back porch by saying, ‘You’ll never guess who I just saw hopping in the forest.’ She put on the kind of fake enthusiastic voice that Lesley imagined her using when she was bathing clients. They hid the eggs together first thing on Sunday morning. Buying Cadbury Mini Eggs from Kmart was as close to consumerism as Ian and Lesley ever permitted themselves to slip. Unlike Don and Maggie, they didn’t fall for Father’s Day or Mother’s Day or any other day that was invented for retail purposes.
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