Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  Steven Lang is the author of two novels, An Accidental Terrorist, which won Premiers’ Literary Awards in both Queensland and New South Wales, and 88 Lines about 44 Women, which was shortlisted for both the Christina Stead and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards for Fiction. Steven co-directs Outspoken, an extended writers’ festival taking the form of occasional conversations with major Australian and international writers. He lives in Maleny, in South East Queensland. www.stevenlang.com.au

  Bookclub notes for Hinterland are available at www.uqp.com.au

  For Chris

  one

  Miles

  At first light he hears the sound of a heifer in trouble. Never mind the empties in the kitchen or the one lying next to the lounge, he’s up and out in the cold and the dirt of the yards getting the beast in the crush so he can put his hand inside her and find the calf, working his whole arm deep in her womb where is jammed this extraordinary impossible bundle of legs that’ll kill her if he can’t get it to turn, she roaring all the while, he talking to her in a long, slow stream of profanity, an affectionate soliloquy of half-remembered obscenities, he is, after all, a doctor not a vet, but the truth is he loves his cows more these days, his cows and his dogs (they, lying in the dirt, heads across their forepaws, watching doubtfully from the corners of their eyes) more than any other thing; a man who hasn’t been with a woman since Sonia died two years ago and is unlikely to be with anyone else any time soon, with his arm all the way inside a cow in the early morning, groping for new life.

  By the time it’s settled, the calf out, fawn fur curled, sticky with fluid, feeding well, butting its pink nose up against its mother’s udder like nothing ever happened – the sort of thing that can bring tears to a man’s eyes – it’s already late and he needs to wash and brew coffee, a bit of toast to settle the stomach, putting the bottles in the recycling out the back with hands he can’t help but notice shake, wondering if he can keep himself from it until evening, worried not by the wine but the spirits, his apparent inability now to stop once he’s started, lying on the couch into the small hours keeping himself just exactly where he needs to be with ever less carefully measured doses of brandy until it’s all gone and the television has descended into even more profound meaninglessness than when he started and he hies himself off to bed, the dogs ignoring him, the dogs out for the night by then, disdaining to follow him further down.

  Showered, dressed in shorts and shirt (crisply ironed by Melanie, who comes in once a week to clean) white socks held up by garters, the vertical lines in the knitted-weave straight, his brogues with enough polish on them to last another day, his remaining hair brushed tight back against his skull, he takes the Hilux up the dirt to the main road and onto the Range feeling like something close to half a man. A new house being built on what used to be Carlisle’s, which twenty-five years ago was a functioning dairy – you couldn’t say thriving because none of them had, the dairies had only ever survived – bought now by in-comers from the city, the developers or hippies or tree-changers or retirees, buying them up for hobby farms or to build fancy houses, planting trees on land the old Scots worked so hard to clear, planting so many trees that now you can barely even see the shape of the place anymore. Not that he’s complaining. It’s just the irony of it, the unimaginable effort of cutting forest the size of which we’ll never see again in our lives, big trees, trees that took them days to fell with axes and cross-cut saws, hauling away the timber they wanted with bullock teams, sliding it down the hills to the coast, burning the rest and rooting out the stumps with mattocks, day after bleeding day until there wasn’t a tree in sight, until it was all rolling paddocks with fat cattle grazing, milked twice a day, by hand, only to have their effort spurned a hundred years on, to have it all replanted by these people who’ve arrived with their wholemeal roasted marinated Mediterranean focaccias and espresso coffees and pristine four-wheel drives, their ideas of an environment which doesn’t include people, which doesn’t even include birth and death or only in the abstract, well, that’s until it comes to them via the thousand different ways that ill-health visits the human form. Which wasn’t what he was thinking about at all. It was the calf in the early morning that’s brought this up; the fact of its life (and the life of its mother) given by him, and yet his clear intention to have it killed sometime later, to eat, without remorse or regret; the need to provide grass for its feed between these two events, grass grown on his own land, which had once belonged to another Scot who sold it for a pittance to his father; three hundred acres, not enough in this kind of geography – where the Range breaks away into ridges and gullies – to support anybody really, land that was most likely better served being covered in trees in the first place. It is both the requirement and the difficulty of straddling these different notions which is troubling his mind, the impossibility of their coexistence.

  Only three cars next to the surgery when he pulls up which is good, as long as there’s no disasters over at the hospital. Nick, the new locum, should have been able to deal with what’s come in, but when he opens the door he can see on Joy’s face that all’s not entirely well, there might be only three cars but half a dozen people look up from their Women’s Weekly and National Geographics to note his arrival. He nods to them, smiling good morning, as if to say he’s been off on other important doctor-business elsewhere. He picks up two files from his tray and takes them into his room, putting down his bag and looking around the confines, the high bed with the clean sheet laid over it, the little yellow two-step stool for getting up, the cluttered desk with all its pharmaceutical nonsense in jars and packets, the damn computer already switched on and ready, humming at him miserably from beneath the desk. The familiarity of the place exerting its own influence, calming his mind, as if all the years spent in here, the great stream of affliction which has passed before him, asking for his attention, has a force of its own which calls him out of self-destructive pathways of thought. But not his hands. When he goes to type in the password, single-fingered, the others curled back so as not to bump the wrong keys, they are still shaking. He can feel the sweat rise on his skin from the effort.

  Joy standing in the doorway. Coffee in hand.

  ‘Trouble with a beast,’ he says.

  She lets it pass. Joy being of indeterminate age. Two grown-up sons, one in the military, the other a fitter and turner in Sydney, married with children of his own. Photographs of them on her phone and desk, as screen saver. Prone to showing them. She is a woman of unparalleled efficiency from whom it would be difficult to hide anything should you even want to try, chosen years ago by Sonia, when Sonia was alive and choosing such things for reasons not all of which were to do with effectiveness as a practice manager. She is something of a tyrant with the patients, vetting them according to an arcane system of her own devising, but he does not complain; he could not operate without her.

  She gives a run-down of the morning’s events, the two call-outs to the hospital which Nick has taken care of, the backlog of patients in the waiting room, his home visits which she has, she says, scheduled for the afternoon.

  ‘This is for you,’ she says, putting the coffee on his blotter. ‘Are you ready? Or shall I give you a minute?’

  ‘A moment,’ he says, opening the first file. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’ When she’s gone he gets up and closes the door, gets out a half of brandy from the bottom drawer and pours a shot into the coffee. Enough to steady the hand.

  The first patient, Harry Barkham, takes the offered chair with a mumbled comment about the lateness of the hour. He’s sixty-five, a former smoker, moved to Winderran ten years ago from one of the big cities after having reached dizzy heights in oil then getting a scare with his heart. Built a mansion overlooking the mountains with the proceeds in whi
ch he perches, now, watching over his stocks and shares or whatever it is that ex-oil men do when they’re not driving their Mercedes four-wheel drives. He’s not accustomed to waiting for anyone, and yet is humbled, as are we all, by our doctor, he who has the keys to our happiness. Or some few of them.

  ‘A difficult birth earlier today,’ Miles says, without offering further clarification. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I have this persistent cough,’ he says, and the consultation has begun, the listening to symptoms, the discussion of history, habits, diet. Harry being fit for his age, only carrying a few kilos around his waist. He bicycles with a group of men. Miles sees them from time to time outside one of the cafés in the early morning, bikes leaning against the wall, men his own age unembarrassed by multi-coloured lycra, laughing loud, letting the world know of the ease they’ve bought with each other through shared exertion.

  He lifts the man’s shirt to reveal a pale-skinned back with its unique constellation of moles, places the stethoscope on the various points and asks him to take a breath, listening, wondering, obtusely, if Deirdre, Harry’s wife, still runs her hands over this skin. You’d think, as a doctor, that you’d know these things, but it’s often not clear what people do.

  ‘You’ve seen the camp?’ Harry says. He wants to chat, he wants his money’s worth, or, having been made to wait he’s going to make sure that others will be similarly inconvenienced. Miles doesn’t mind, it’s part of the service.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Out along the Elmhurst Road? A bunch of hippies have set up against the dam. Aboriginal flags. Hand-painted banners. Tents, buses, water trailers, the whole disaster. Settling in for the duration. Not that it will do them any good, State’s committed. They’re not going to let rag-tags like that interfere.’

  ‘You’re in favour then?’ Miles says. A superfluous question. The man was in mineral extraction, familiar, no doubt, with the accoutrements of dissent.

  ‘It’ll be the making of the place, I tell you. Think of the opportunities for tourism.’

  Harry has the deep voice of a man who’s lived in the tropics, enriched today by catarrh and the need to stop and cough; there’s a definite infection but it doesn’t appear to have gone to the chest, the sort of thing a course of antibiotics was designed to address. Harry comes in two or three times a year with various ailments, bits needing to be checked – prostate, knees, hips, a great scar on his chest and belly where they went in to do the bypass but no problem since then. Harry assumes that he, Miles, is also in favour of the dam, which he’s not, he doesn’t have a position. He doesn’t have time for positions but if he did it would be against it, if only because Joy’s brother, Marcus, has a farm right in the way of it which he and his wife, Lindl, have spent the last three decades or so planting up, revegetating the banks of the creek.

  Harry’s problem, Harry’s disease, peculiar to towns like Winderran, has its roots in boredom. He retired too soon. Came up here, spent the first couple of years building his pile, organising the landscaping (he has forty-three varieties of camellia in his ‘grounds’, which he opens to the public once a year) but once that was done had little else to occupy him. Now he plays bridge three times a week, sits on the committee of the Winderran Heritage Society where he holds forth with what he hopes is the same authority he held in boardrooms across the nation when making decisions that involved hundreds of millions of dollars, but which, ten years later, in a small country town, render him a pedant, a specialist on the musicals of Gilbert & Sullivan, his voice drowning out the others in the room, a spokesperson for a conservative point of view that, whatever his opinion on the damn dam, Miles has never subscribed to. A sometime friend of Guy Lamprey, whose wife, as it happens, Miles will be visiting later that afternoon.

  Harry out the door with a script and instructions to alleviate the symptoms with old-fashioned remedies like steam inhalation, he invites in the next patient, and the next. Each with their own problems, many of which are within his scope to deal with, but others that are harder, needing referrals to specialists. These patients, as often as not, arriving with the dreaded screeds of paper bearing internet addresses as headers or footers. At one point he might have been able to dismiss them as hypochondriacs, holding to the pretence that he was the one with the expertise, but those days are past. Knowledge expands in every direction and there is no hope of keeping up. His own authority increasingly in question. It behoves him to take notice of what they bring to him, to sift through the nonsense, the snake-oil, cure-all, self-promoting healer sites to find those that offer new perspectives. Every day, too, the government and the pharmaceuticals deliver great swathes of paper with their lists of wonder drugs and regulations, their research data, their KPIs and side effects, their evidence-based outcomes. He is no longer anything like the doctor he once was, the doctor his father was – a good thing that – but is now a kind of cipher, an overloaded spigot whose function is to act as the local outlet for incalculable streams of information, supposedly tailored to each person who enters his room except that the weight of the unknown backing up behind him becomes ever larger, more pressing – talk about dams – and it’s no use to reassure himself that nobody can know everything because on the other side are the armies of lawyers (of whom Sonia was one, so it’s no use pretending he doesn’t understand) keen to capitalise on his mistakes and apportion blame for his failure to pick early-stage cancer from a back ache, to notice an irregularity in ionised calcium as a sign of this or that.

  At lunch he drops down to the hotel for a bar meal and a beer, to rest, briefly, in the noise of sport and horse racing, in their deep simplicity. The problem being that the bits of the job he loves most, the interaction with people, have got lost. There are ever more screens between him and his patients, a raft of technology on which he is barely floating, whose bindings threaten to come loose beneath him with every new wave. The young bloke, Nick, has a handle on it. Never out of range of his laptop or smartphone.

  In the afternoon he takes the Hilux out past Elmhurst, skirting the edge of this wide valley that the government, given the chance, will flood; noting the camp that so annoyed Harry, where people of all ages, not just hippies, have indeed set up in opposition. Colourful banners tied along the fence line, two people under a beach umbrella at a table by the gate.

  He might be tempted to concur with Harry and his friends and support the notion of development for development’s sake, he has, after all, seen the living standards in the town improve with the arrival of new wealth and the associated demand for better services, better food, more sensitive design. He’s been invited often enough to join them for boozy meals in attractive surroundings, but more recently, since Sonia, he’s stopped accepting. Opulence and fine wine aside he finds himself taken with a terrible loneliness around them. A loneliness even deeper than his own. These people always have something to say, but their banter skitters over the surface of things, it is the perfect embodiment of small talk, a constant and often nasty reiteration of the nothingness they’ve learned to master so as to get on in their world, to serve their own interests, but which has, over a lifetime, emptied them of humanity.

  Margaret Ewart has the upper end of the valley, the near edge of her property dipping down into the area affected by the dam, but most folding away to the north and west. Last remaining daughter of Bill and Ida Tainsch, her husband, Jack, her brothers, sisters, cousins, all long dead. She lives by herself in the kind of rural squalor that was commonplace fifty years ago but is now, for the most part, long gone: a kitchen with worn linoleum on the floor, the webbing showing through beneath the plastic and steel chairs around the formica table; the old Rayburn on one wall going in any weather; the meat safe home to her limited selection of dishes; a geriatric fridge in the corner given to miserable sighs before the compressor cuts in and out; the walls dark from age and lack of paint, the only adornment a free stockfeed calendar with a picture of rape in flower, the yellow turned blue with age; light thrown
by a bare bulb hanging on a doubtful lead. A radio burbles the local ABC in the corner. Vicious dogs chained up on a veranda, guarding her privacy. She comes to the door despite her hip, resting on a borrowed hospital crutch, wearing a skirt and blouse, a cardigan in need of darning at the sleeve ends. Her face a geological study, lizard-like weatherworn skin on neck and shoulders. She serves him a cup of International Roast and a slice of the cake she’s baked for her son who’s been up from Brisbane on the weekend to see she’s okay, no doubt eyeing off his investment, the millions that must be tied up in the place, never mind the unpainted weatherboard house on its sagging bearers or the tumbledown sheds filled with the bits of machinery Jack gathered over the decades. Martin will be wanting to get Margaret out of there and into a home to realise the profit while he can. The problem being she’s not for moving; despite her age, eighty something and in general disrepair, she still has all her smarts, still wants to drive a little white Toyota flatbed in and out of town, picking up her bags of dog and chook food, her staples of white bread and tea and canned ham, going to meetings of the hospital auxiliary carrying plates of cornflake biscuits. Living for who knows what reason. Although that could be said about most of us.

  He sits across the table from her and hears the latest on Martin and his wife, the daughters off in other parts of the world, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There’s a machine working somewhere off in the distance, something large, he can hear its clanking, the occasional demonic beeping of its reverse warning siren.

  ‘That’s Mal,’ she says. ‘Putting in a crossing on the creek. We’ve got concrete trucks and the lot down there, hardening the lane.’

  Mal Izzert, the neighbour, has one of the few remaining dairies on the Range.

  ‘He’s still improving then … even with the dam?’

  ‘You never know with Mal. Could be he’s just upping the price they’ll have to pay to get rid of him.’