Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  The bald man had loaded Eyre’s baggage on to a small two-wheeled cart, drawn by a moth-eaten donkey, and had bidden Eyre to climb up on to the seat. But as they had trundled away from the Asthoroth, Eyre had been unable to take his eyes off the two Aborigines, standing in such a striking pose, attenuated black figures against the pearl-grey water of the harbour, half-wild, mysterious, magic, sexual; like no people that Eyre had ever seen before.

  ‘First time?’ the old man had asked. He had boasted scarcely any teeth at all and his bald head had been as brown and wrinkled as a pickled walnut.

  Eyre had nodded. The cart had bounced and rattled out of the port; and south-eastwards towards the settlement of Adelaide itself. The rough muddy road was lined with scrubby bushes; and off to the right Eyre could see rows of sand-dunes, and hear the waters of the Gulf of St Vincent slurring against the beach.

  ‘Got a place to kip, squire?’ the old man had asked.

  ‘No,’ Eyre had told him. It had begun to drizzle; a thin, fine, rain from the mountains.

  ‘Well then,’ the old man had decided. ‘It’s Mrs Dedham’s for you. Every boy’s mother, Mrs Dedham. Solid cooking, clean sheets, and Bible-reading afore bedtime.’

  They had driven through the low-lying outskirts of Adelaide, the donkey slipping from time to time on the boggy road, and the rain growing steadier and heavier; until the old man took a sugar-sack, which he had ingeniously rolled up into a kind of huge beret, and tugged it on to his head. Eyre had watched the rain drip from the brim of his hat, and shivered.

  They had rolled slowly past sheds, mud-huts with calico roofs and calico-covered windows and even an upturned jolly-boat, with windows cut into its sides, and a tin chimney. But then at last they had reached the wide, muddy streets of the city centre, where there were rows of plain, flat-fronted houses, and shops, and courtyards; all interspersed with groves of gum-trees and acacias; and quite handsomely laid out. Although it was a wet afternoon, Eyre had been impressed by the number of people in the streets, and the scores of bullock-carts and carriages. He had expected the people to be roughly-dressed, but apart from a group of bearded men in tied-up trousers who were probably prospectors, most of the passers-by were smartly turned-out in tail-coats and top-hats. The women looked a little old-fashioned in their bonnets and shawls, but what they lacked in modishness they made up for in the self-assured way they promenaded along the wooden sidewalks, mistresses of a new and confident country.

  Eyre had seen more Aborigines, most of them dressed in bukas, or native capes, but a few of them in European clothes, although one girl had been wearing an English skirt with her head and one arm through the waist, and the other arm protruding from the open placket.

  Mrs Dedham had owned a fine large house at the east end of Rundle Street, built like its neighbours out of limestone, brick, and pisé. She had come bustling out to greet Eyre as if he were her prodigal son; even hugged him against her huge starched bosom; and offered him steak-and-kidney pudding at once. In the kitchen, as he had eaten with determined unhungriness, she had told him how she had come to Australia from Yorkshire with her dear husband Stanley, and how Stanley had started a sheep-farm at Teatree Gully, only to be taken at the peak of his success by ‘shrinking of the mesenteric glands’, an ailment that would later be diagnosed as peritonitis. Mrs Dedham had sold off the farm and bought herself what she like to call ‘a gentleman’s hotel’; three good meals a day, no visiting women, no whistling, and a communal Sunday lunch after church.

  That night, in his unfamiliar bed, with an unfamiliar light shining across the ceiling, Eyre had lain awake and thought of his father. Outside in the street he had heard laughter, and a woman calling, ‘Fancy yourself, then, do you?’ Then more laughter.

  The following day, he had paid Mrs Dedham’s handyman four shillings to drive him out to Hope Valley, to find John Hardesty. It had still been raining as they had followed the narrow rutted track between dripping gums and wet sparkling spinifex grass; until at last they had arrived at the sheep farm, and the rain had begun to ease off.

  The farm’s owner had been a stocky man in a wide leather hat, his face mottled by drink and weather. He had said very little, but taken Eyre to the back of the house, and shown him the wooden-paled enclosure where John Hardesty had been buried, over two years ago.

  Eyre had stood by the grave for five or ten minutes, then returned to the farmhouse. ‘Had he been ill?’ he had asked.

  The farmer had shrugged. ‘You could say that.’

  Eyre had replaced his hat. The farmer had stared at him for a while, and then said, ‘Did away with himself. Hung himself with wire in his own barn. Nobody knows why.’

  ‘I see,’ Eyre had said; and then, ‘Thank you for showing me.’

  He had decided to stay on at Mrs Dedham’s; and so that he could pay her rent of 2s 0½d the week, he had found himself a job in the tea department of M. & S. Marks’ Grocery Stores, on Hindley Street, scooping out fragrant Formosas and Assams, and also brewing up tea in barrels, since some customers still preferred to buy their tea the old-fashioned way, ready infused, for warming up at home. Just after the New Year, however, he had met Christopher Willis at a party given by Marks’ for all of their suppliers; and Christopher had arranged for him to take up a clerical post with the South Australian Company, for 1s 3d more per week. ‘And far more future, old man, than tea.’

  His first sweetheart in Adelaide had been a saucy young Wiltshire girl called Clara, daughter of one of the aides to the Governor and Commissioner, Colonel George Gawler. Clara was green-eyed and chubbily pretty and Eyre had courted her with the frustrated enthusiasm that only a single man living at Mrs Dedham’s could have mustered. He had bought his bicycle solely to impress her, even though it had cost him two weeks’ wages; and he had taken her for a wobbling ride on the handlebars from one end of King William Street to the other, with Clara shrieking and kicking her ankles.

  On his return to Mrs Dedham’s that evening, he had found a note waiting for him, to the effect that Clara’s father had complained that Eyre had made ‘an unforgivable public exhibition of his daughter’s virtue’. Mrs Dedham herself had told him the following morning, over veal pudding, that she considered it best if he sought alternative accommodation.

  ‘I don’t expect my gentlemen to be bishops,’ she said, bulging out her neck, and lacing her fingers tightly together under her bosoms. ‘But I don’t expect them to be hooligans, or peculiars, either.’

  That was how he had found himself staying with Mrs McConnell, on Hindley Street; and from the beginning Mrs McConnell had taken a special shine to him, and pampered him so much that in three weeks he had put on all the weight he had lost on the voyage from Portsmouth. She cooked marvellous pies, with glazed and decorated crusts, and washed his shirts and starched them until they creaked. All he had to do in return was call her ‘Mother’, and accompany her once or twice a month to the Methodist chapel by Adelaide barracks. She did so like to go to chapel in company; and Dogger wouldn’t go for anything. Dogger said that he had carried on quite enough conversations with the Lord in the outback; and that if he went to chapel, the Lord would only say, ‘Christ, Dogger, not you again.’

  ‘You have to understand that a fellow needed God, in the outback,’ Dogger had frequently explained. ‘You didn’t have anybody else, after all. The kowaris didn’t talk to you; the dingoes didn’t talk to you; and the damned skinks and shinglebacks, they’d either puff themselves up or yawn at you something terrible.’

  Eyre had nodded sagely, although it was not until later that he had learned that kowaris were desert rats, which preyed ferociously on insects and lizards and smaller rodents; and that skinks and shinglebacks were both prehistoric-looking species of lizard.

  Mrs McConnell came back with the jug and the basin and the pale green jar of Keatings Salve.

  ‘You’ve not undressed,’ she said.

  Eyre started to unbutton his shirt. ‘I felt too sore,’ he confessed. ‘And a little
too tired, too.’

  ‘The salve will soon make you feel better.’

  She tugged off his clothes in a businesslike way, until he lay naked on the bed. Then she carefully washed out his bites, and sponged the rest of his body, his chest, his back; and laid a cool wet cloth on his forehead. ‘You sometimes remind me of my son Geoffrey,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Eyre acknowledged. She had told him that several times before.

  ‘Geoffrey always used to say that life was like a sugarbasin.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eyre agreed.

  Mrs McConnell washed the dark crucifix of hair on his chest, so that it was stuck to his skin in whorls. Quite matter-of-factly, she held his penis, and rolled back the foreskin, and washed that, too. He looked at her through puffy, half-closed eyes, and he was sure that for a second he saw something in her expression that was more than matronly; but then she smiled, and clapped her hands, and said, ‘You must have a clean nightshirt. I’ll bring you one of Geoffrey’s.’

  He lay on the bed waiting for her. He smelled of camomile and vanilla and tincture of zinc, which seemed to be the principal ingredients of Keating’s Salve. He found himself thinking of Geoffrey. Poor Geoffrey who had said that life was like a sugar-basin, because every taste of it was so sweet. Geoffrey had gone riding, a keen and straightforward young boy of eighteen; so far as Eyre could gather; and been bitten in the ankle by a death-adder, the snake the Aborigines called tityowe. Mrs McConnell had stayed in her back parlour with the drapes drawn for nearly three months, until Dogger had at last come home from Broken Hill, and persuaded her to start living her own life again.

  That night, Eyre dreamed of Yanluga, sobbing, crying for help. He dreamed of Charlotte, too, gliding across the lawns of Waikerie Lodge as if she were on oiled wheels, instead of feet. He dreamed that Mrs McConnell came into his room naked, but with the black body of an Aborigine woman, and that she knelt astride his face and buried him between her thighs.

  He woke up at dawn; when the sky was a thin, cold colour; and he was shivering. He climbed stiff-legged out of bed in his ankle-length nightshirt and went shuffling to the window, and leaned against the frame. Hindley Street was deserted. The only signs of life were the lighted window of Keith’s Fancy Bakery across the street, and a single Aborigine boy sitting close to the bakery steps wrapped up in his buka, a puppy crouching between his bare feet.

  Eyre began to feel that something momentous was about to happen, and that his life had already changed beyond recall. He sat down on the side of the bed, frowning, still shivering, not understanding why he felt this way. And the morning breeze which lifted the dust in the street also rattled the casement like a secret message from one prisoner to another/it’s time to be free.’

  Six

  Mrs McConnell brought him a breakfast of oat cakes, ham, and soft-boiled eggs, with honey from old Mr Jellop’s apiary. She parked her big bottom on the bed and watched him eat; smiling and nodding in encouragement each time he forked a piece of ham into his mouth, or bit into an oat cake.

  ‘You’re going to have to rest for a few days, get your strength back,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs McConnell, I’m a little bruised, but that’s all. I really want to go and get my bicycle back, before some blackfellow steals it, or Lathrop Lindsay finds it and smashes it to bits.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of going out there today?’

  ‘As soon as I’ve finished my breakfast, as a matter of fact. And then I’m going to cycle over and see Christopher.’

  ‘But you’re still invalid! I can’t allow it! Supposing you came over queer?’

  ‘Mrs McConnell, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your nursing. You’ve been more than kind. But I’m really quite well.’

  ‘Well? Do you call that well? Your eye looks like a—like a squashed cycad fruit.’

  At that moment, Dogger appeared in the doorway, his hair sticking wildly up in the air, his face in a condition of chronic disassembly, his striped nightshirt as crumpled as if he had been tossed into a wool-baler.

  ‘Constance,’ he said. ‘Don’t mollycoddle the boy. He’s not your boy. And besides, my brains won’t stand arguing.’

  ‘Just because you’ve drunk yourself silly, don’t go picking at me.’ Mrs McConnell retorted. ‘I’ve had boys, I know what’s best for them. And what’s best for this boy is a day or two in bed.’

  Eyre took hold of her hand. ‘Mrs McConnell, I’ll come to a compromise. If you let me go out this morning, I’ll make a point of coming back to bed this evening early; and you can dress the bites for me, too, if you please.’

  Dogger sniffed, and ran his hand through his hair, making it look even wilder. ‘There you are, you see,’ he remarked, to an invisible referee who was standing next to the wardrobe. ‘The voice of sanity prevails. Thank God for that. Now, where’s my breakfast?’

  Mrs McConnell patted Eyre’s mouth with his napkin, kissed him on the forehead, and stood up. ‘I’ll make it for you now,’ she told Dogger, still smiling at Eyre. ‘The fish, I’ll be bound.’

  Dogger gave a twisted, exaggerated grimace. After an evening of heavy drinking, the only breakfast which he could physically stomach was salted sea-perch, with red pepper; and a large glass of buttermilk. About an hour after that, he would be ready for another jug of homemade beer.

  Eyre walked up to Waikerie Lodge. The morning was bright and dusty. The twin plagues of Adelaide were dust in the summer and mud in the winter; apart from the flies, and the fog, and the occasional outbreak of typhus, or ‘mesenteric fever’. The dust rose up with the wind and whistled softly through the sugar-gums like hurrying ghosts, and everything it touched it turned to white; so that after it had died away the countryside looked as if it had been blanched, and aged, as if by some terrible experience.

  His bicycle was exactly where he had left it, propped up against a bush, untouched except for a splash of parrot guano on the saddle. He walked cautiously up to the back gate of Lindsay’s house, and looked across the lawns, but apart from a few scuff-marks on the grass, there was no trace of last night’s horror. There was no trace of Charlotte, either, although he skirted through the bushes so that he could see up to her bedroom window. The family had probably gone to church. If so, Eyre hoped without cynicism that they would pray for Yanluga. They had certainly done nothing else to assure that their servant’s spirit would rejoin his dreamtime ancestors.

  Captain Henry came out on to the patio, wearing a red string headband and a shabby frock-coat, and leading half-a-dozen of Mr Lindsay’s greyhounds. He was probably doing nothing more than taking them out for a walk, but Eyre decided that retreat was more sensible than suicide, and crept away from the perimeter of Waikerie Lodge, and retrieved his bicycle, and pedalled off to visit Christopher Willis.

  A little way off, though, he stopped, and looked back towards Waikerie Lodge. All he could see through the surrounding trees was the edge of its brown shingled roof, and the white columns that flanked its grandiose porch. It was like an impregnable castle in a Grimm’s fairy tale; ruled over by a king who had set impossible standards for his daughter, the Princess Charlotte. She would probably die an old maid, imprisoned by her father’s ambition, particularly since South Australia’s economy, buoyant at first, had gradually begun to collapse; so that week by week, the likelihood of a visit from an eligible English baronet was becoming increasingly remote.

  Down at the South Australian Company, Eyre had already seen three major merchant banks withdraw their money from Adelaide; and more letters of withdrawal were expected by the end of the year. The returns had not been high enough, or quick enough, and the general feeling in the City of London, which in the early days had been adventurous and optimistic, was that Australia, on the whole, was ‘a damned odd duck’.

  These days, the only English quality that Adelaide saw were the exiled sons of shabby Sussex landowners; or botanical eccentrics whose trunks were crammed with magnifying-glasses, and tweeds. Nobody suitable for a girl like Charlot
te.

  Eyre cycled off towards the racecourse. It was warm now, and the wind had dropped, although high creamy clouds had mounted in the east, and there was a chance of thunder. The mid-morning light had become curiously metallic; as though the landscape had been cured in spirits of silver, and the spokes of Eyre’s bicycle wheels flashed brightly along the pathway towards the racecourse. He usually sang as he cycled. This morning he was silent. A distant church-bell clanged from the centre of the city; and he allowed himself to whisper a verse from the 62nd Psalm, one of his father’s favourites.

  ‘How long will you assail a man, that you may murder him, all of you, like a leaning wall, like a tottering fence? Men of low degree are only vanity, and men of rank are a lie; in the balances they go up; and they are together lighter than breath.’

  Eyre repeated, with relish, ‘a tottering fence’, and tried to swerve so that he ran over a Holy Cross frog that was squatting on the track, but missed it.

  Christopher Willis was packing his horse-panniers to go out fishing when Eyre arrived on his bicycle, and he didn’t look particularly pleased to see him. Nonetheless, he put down his nets, and said, ‘Hullo, Eyre; you look as if you’ve been boxing with kangaroos.’ Then, as Eyre parked his bicycle, he peered at him more attentively, and said, ‘And the kangaroos won, by the look of it. Are you all right?’

  Eyre said, ‘I’m recovering, thank you. My dear Mrs McConnell is taking care of me better than I have any right to expect.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘Your dear Mrs McConnell. I always suspected that she wanted to adopt you. In fact, I rather believe that she thinks you’re Geoffrey—Geoffrey, is it?—returned from the grave.’

  He sniggered. That was the type of joke he always enjoyed. He had the appearance of a very disjointed public schoolboy, and the humour to match. He was big-nosed, with wide-apart eyes, and he always seemed to be growing out of his clothes, even though he was twenty-five. He parted his hair severely in the middle, and sometimes stuck it down with bay rum, or violet essence, especially when he was going to meet a young lady, which he did with unexpected regularity. They were never young ladies of the very best breeding, but they were invariably willing, and giggly, and of course they always wanted him to marry them, at once, which he wouldn’t.