Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  Margaret never short of an opinion. Of the dam she says, ‘It’s progress, isn’t it? That’s the truth of it. You can’t fight it.’

  ‘So you’re not with the hippies on this one Margaret?’ he says, for the laugh of it, because they go back, he’s known her for as long as he’s been in practice, his father would have been present at Martin’s birth, almost certainly pulled him out from between her legs fifty years ago. The mystery of it. Martin runs a lighting business down in the city. Doesn’t, you’d have to note, stretch to a ceiling fitting for the kitchen, or for that matter to private health cover for his mother.

  ‘You wouldn’t know how some of them survive, would you? Haven’t the brains they were born with. I saw one girl the other day on the steps of the IGA,’ the supermarket, which she pronounces the same as the mountain, the Eiger. ‘Feeding her daughter – a wee thing, no more than three year old – raw spaghetti. I’m telling you, I saw it with my own eyes. If that’s the future I don’t want a part of it.’

  He’s here about her hip, she’s had a fall and now needs a replacement, can’t manage the ute anymore. He examines her in the bedroom. Most of the old Queenslanders in these parts are built of solid timber, the walls constructed out of single-skin, vertically fixed, VJ board milled on the Range, the sparse framing on display. At some point Margaret’s home has been lined – in a misguided gesture towards what must then have been modernity – with unpainted masonite, walls and ceiling, so it’s brown on brown and sagging, the air trapped in the rooms for decades, an internal bathroom with a toilet and a claw-foot bath stained with rust from the furious hot-water heater perched above it. There are other doors he’s never seen behind. There will be a parlour, and another bedroom or two, where Martin and his sisters were raised. Not a bookshelf in sight.

  Her bed is a double and newer than everything else, its 1970s plush headboard, built-in radio and veneered side tables standing in sharp contrast with the walls and the wardrobe, the latter a looming presence in the corner of the room. The bed’s been made. He wonders how that happened, if she did it, on her crutch, one-handed, so as not to be embarrassed by the doctor. She lies down with much difficulty but no complaint and he gently pushes aside the voluminous old woman’s underwear to reveal the bruising from her fall, now fading to a jaundiced yellow, the skin, where it’s never seen the sun, soft and supple. The muscle starting to fall away.

  In the absence of help from Martin or the girls it’s a case of waiting her turn.

  ‘I saw your new man in the hospital,’ she says.

  He waits. She means Nick.

  ‘Handsome, eh? Cold hands.’

  ‘That’ll do now,’ he says.

  ‘Is this one going to stay around?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s a wife and kids in Canberra. Separated.’ He helps her to stand again.

  ‘And what about you? By yourself down there?’

  ‘I’ve got the dogs,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve all got the dogs,’ she replies.

  He takes the Stapleton Road back into town for the simple pleasure of circling the catchment. It’s longer and becomes single bitumen for a time, dipping steeply and rising again, passing through a nice stand of white-trunked eucalypts. It’s been a while since he’s been this way. Out on the ridge some mining magnate has built a vast pile. During construction they cut half the hill away, but now the building’s finished it’s tucked into the land, less formidable than it might have been, if you don’t count the painted timber rail fences stitching the paddocks around it, or the helicopter pad near the house, the imposing electric gates on the road, just to let everyone know.

  Out into paddocks again there’s a long view to the west across the river valley, the hills beyond rendered flat by the heat of the afternoon. Sometimes, late in the day, they can step into the distance in different shades of blue, beckoning. Today they’re indistinct; no more than scenery. More houses have been built along this way, less grandiose these: one-acre blocks subdivided before the law tightened up, now home to website designers, artists, feng shui practitioners, young families. On a whim he goes up to the lookout above the old quarry, from where, when it’s clear, you can see forever. Today the flatness fallen over everything. It’s an excuse to have sip of something. To stop in the cabin of the truck and feel his pulse racing for reasons that are by no means clear, to tip a portion of the half of brandy into him while looking out towards the indeterminate sea and feel the alcohol enliven not just him but the whole extraordinary vista. Taking a piss through the fence onto the cobbler’s peg and desmodium the Council have left to grow on the other side. Back, what, twenty-five years it would have to be – that anyone might live this long – he came up here one night with Lindl, sneaking away, and kissed her in the glow from Brisbane in the south. Who knows where Marcus was. No doubt about his connection to the world then. Now it’s all at a remove. Sonia between him and everything else. Or perhaps that’s the alcohol. He fires up the truck and slips a CD into the machine. Crowded House thundering out of the dusty speakers, his musical taste, like so much else, locked in another era. Singing along with it as he winds down the steep track to the road.

  Perhaps the pulse was to do with visiting Helen Lamprey, recovering from surgery to remove a tumour from her bowel, the diagnosis for which, it is hard to forget, came from the previous locum to Nick because he, Miles, was late on another morning and she’d taken the appointment she could get and Abbas had sent her off for all sorts of tests which Miles had thought were a load of nonsense, and told him so, cross with him for even seeing Helen. Then, of course, the tests were positive and it was all on.

  They live in a house that could not be more different from the Ewarts, on the north-east, the better side of town, views to the sea, architect designed. Built long before anyone else lived out that way. When the locals thought they were mad. The living room’s long and wide, with lots of glass on the coast side, books and paintings on the others, shelves and shelves of books despite Lamprey having his own studio.

  There are low rectangular Italian couches with, at their centre, Helen, a small woman, made smaller by the surgery and the chemotherapy, which is not going well, by herself today it seems, even in these dire circumstances, Lamprey off on one of his projects down in Canberra. The fine bones in her fine face revealed.

  He’s surprised her husband isn’t with her.

  ‘Oh, I’m okay,’ she says, ‘really I am. I have lots of help.’

  She wants him to sit with her, to have a drink.

  ‘I can’t drink,’ she says, ‘but I’ve got some lovely white in the fridge. It would give me pleasure to watch you.’

  She’s always been the perfect hostess, brisk, efficient, but now her movements are slow and studied, as if even raising her arm is too much and, after accepting her offer (has she smelled the brandy on him? Is she alert to this weakness?) he must open the bottle and pour for himself, bring her a wine glass with cold water in it (‘so I don’t feel left out’), wrap the blanket around her shoulders although it’s not cold in the house. When he was younger he’d lusted after her. That’s not the right word. He’d lusted after several women, and known some, too, even in a small town like Winderran, but Helen had exerted a more significant force. Not simply because she remained aloof. If there’d been any woman for whom he might have settled, but she was already taken and anyway she’d been one of his patients. He’d been obliged to admire her from afar. Later, after Alan was killed, he’d had to watch her disintegrate.

  ‘Guy’s too busy at the moment,’ she says. ‘Dabbling in politics now. It seems he’s being tapped.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘Oh, Bain, I suppose. And the Leader of the Opposition.’

  ‘Lonergan?’ He can’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

  ‘Nothing too grand for our Guy.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The Senate, I believe.’

  ‘But, the Liberals?’

  ‘Don’t sound so shocked.’
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  ‘How’s he going to write if he’s a Senator?’

  ‘He hasn’t written anything for a long time. Other than opinion pieces. Can’t, won’t.’ She pauses. ‘My fault, I think.’

  He waits to see if an explanation for this last will come. The sun has started its tilt towards the west, somewhere behind the house, and the slanting light enhances the view towards the sea, throwing the shadow of the Range across the lowlands, darkening the remnants that linger in its creases.

  ‘Your politics are showing,’ she says. ‘I’m not keen on Bain and Lonergan but they’re not quite the dark side.’ She laughs briefly. ‘Although, now you mention it, my husband quite possibly went over to that years ago, before I met him. It would explain the gift of those early books, wouldn’t it?’ Holding the glass against her chest with both hands, her fingers entwined around its fragile curve. ‘We met in London, me, a girl from down there.’ Nodding towards the coast. ‘I’d escaped. I mean really. I had a position with Pan Macmillan. How remarkable is that? As an editor. Do you remember Picador? I was with them. Great writers. Have I told you this before?’

  ‘Only the bald facts.’

  ‘That’s where I met Guy. A skinny young man, very passionate about things. When he asked I went home with him. He had such ambition. He wanted to recreate the world, reimagine it. I mean, that’s what all writers want isn’t it? It’s what they set out to do. But with Guy it was something more. It wasn’t enough just to lift himself, he had to take the entire country with him. Like a kind of Atlas figure, raising the whole continent. Now look at the company he keeps.’

  Helen still has remarkable presence, despite the illness, or perhaps because of it. Lamprey must be a fool not to be sitting where he is. But then it’s easy to think that when it isn’t you. Besides, he’s an imposter, the one who didn’t pick up on the early symptoms. He feels a sudden overwhelming desire to confess, which he supposes means he wants forgiveness. Not hers to give.

  He lifts his glass and empties it, leaving the condensation gathered in a small pool on the table, its meniscus picking up the late silver light.

  ‘Have some more,’ she says. ‘Please. I think you can manage, can’t you? How do you survive without Sonia?’

  ‘It’s you doing the talking today, Helen,’ he says.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? But do fill your glass again.’

  He goes to the fridge. Places the glass on a benchtop made of some polished black stone. Everything about Helen has always been exquisite. Expensive. The song he was singing in the truck now lodged in his brain as soundtrack. Whenever I fall …

  ‘It was me who brought him back here. Otherwise I think he’d be living somewhere else. Provence, maybe.’ Laying on the sarcasm. ‘He had an affair. I wasn’t going to hang around for that sort of thing, so I flew back here. He followed and by then, of course, it turned out I was pregnant. With Alan. So we stayed.’

  That would have been in the late seventies, their arrival not the sort of event that went unnoticed in Winderran. The hippies had a wholefood shop in the main street (The Store) with barrels of brown rice and oats, chickpeas and flour, local provenance vegetables, a poor stunted crop that, at least in the early days. Helen worked there. The beautiful wife of the famous writer who’d come to live in a fancy house out on the hill. As much a reason as any other to shop there. It had been some months before he realised she was also responsible for the books on the back shelf. Amongst the copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Spiritual Midwifery were literary novels, and not just Lamprey’s.

  It is difficult to recall the strength of emotion which certain women provoked in him during those years. A disabling intensity. It’s not that his sexuality has disappeared, it’s still there, latent, but the force of it has dropped away, like a shroud or a veil, so that the world is revealed in an utterly different light. He is not sure if he is the better for it. Certainly it is easier. Women are just people now, like other, more attractively shaped men, with different, and sometimes curious, takes on life. They do not command him by their simple existence. He can see that even if Helen had not been the Beautiful Ice Queen, if she had succumbed (had she ever even noticed his desire? She was always smiling, always friendly, but to everyone, you couldn’t take it personally) nothing would have come of it except sex – some passionate exchanges in the front seats of cars, people’s bedrooms – because the person he’d been fascinated by had not been this woman (with, presumably, some leaning towards the politics of the Right, otherwise how could she have survived all these years with Lamprey and his steady march towards the reactionary) but some other ideal.

  After Alan she had come to him several times. He had prescribed various different drugs to help her sleep. She had stopped working at The Store. She hadn’t been seen much about town. From all accounts the focus of her life became Sarah, her daughter, now living in Western Australia, something in IT.

  ‘It can’t have been all bad for him, to be here, can it?’ she says. ‘I mean there were some good books written in this house. And now, to be considering politics. The thing is he likes to be liked, you know. All writers do. And he’s had a bad run with his acolytes.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘His young men. He likes to mentor young talent. The trouble is they have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds them, a way of proving they’ve outgrown him. They write bad reviews. It hurts him more than he admits. Recently it’s got worse. I have the sense he has become unmoored.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Oh. From his work, I guess. From me. No. More than that. From everything. He always had such a sense of things. That’s what made him good.’ She pauses, seems to consider saying something more but then rejects the notion. ‘It’s so kind of you to sit with me like this,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you must have places you’re supposed to be.’

  ‘I’m getting less good at being in the places I’m supposed to,’ he says.

  ‘Life can be so unfair, can’t it?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asks, thinking she’s still talking about Guy, that maybe she’ll articulate the withheld thought; not realising she’s turned her attention to him.

  ‘I’m just rambling,’ she says. ‘But for many years I played the good wife. Guy was so big, there wasn’t really any room for anyone else and to be honest I was happy with that, the local girl made good. That’s something we have in common isn’t it, Miles? Not so many of us locals around. I had my children, he had his books. But the years went by and things changed and I decided to become a bit bigger. Or at least a bit more me. And what happens? I get ill. It must be like that for you, too, I guess, with Sonia? You find something valuable and then it gets taken away before you even begin to appreciate it. You don’t mind me saying that? These days I discover I’m becoming terribly blunt.’ She puts on an English working-class accent. ‘I say things as I shouldn’t. I always liked you, Miles. It’s an intimate sort of relationship this one, isn’t it? You know all my secrets. My pregnancies, illnesses, diseases, losses, unhappiness. I was very pleased when you got with Sonia. She was such a strong woman, a real person, not these bits of fluff you used to go around with. It’s strange being from a place and watching it change so much, so many strangers deciding to call it home.’

  Everyone left. That’s what his generation had done. They turned eighteen and got up and went off to university or to work somewhere else. It was only the timid who remained. Of which he was one, he supposed. After university and his internship Winderran hadn’t seemed like such a bad place. His father already suffering with his heart. He was timid, always had been. Never mind the women of which there were less than the small town likes to think. Most of the time they chose him. He’d been needed in the practice. This is something he can say, that he is already older than his father was when he died, which, according to the cliché, means every year is a bonus, except he doesn’t think that; really, it’s just more life, indistinguishable.

  He met Sonia at a conference in Sydney, she wa
s a lawyer for a firm that specialised in compensation cases, a career woman, the same age as him, no children. They slipped away. The Manly ferry on a bright day, the Harbour all around. They made each other laugh. She was moving to Brisbane. They ended up living half in her flat, half on his farm. She loved having cows and dogs. He had never known a woman change so much in such a short time. When they met she was, not slim, but well apportioned. Over the next decade she became positively Wagnerian, as if her position in the company and her relationship with him allowed her to grow in physical stature as well as in personality. A force unto herself. He didn’t mind. The sex had remained tremendous. A woman of appetites. Then she got cancer. Being a doctor no help at all. Within months it had all fallen away. Reduced. Fifteen years from go to woe.

  The shadow of the hinterland has spread all the way to the sea. Only a container ship halfway out to the horizon – heading south for the Port of Brisbane – still in sunlight, glinting. They are in their own pool of twilight in the wide room, the glass table now liquid black. It seems tears are running down his cheeks. He can feel them wet around his mouth, on his chin. His glass empty again.

  ‘Guy and I barely live together,’ Helen says. ‘He’s away a lot, and when he’s here he sleeps in his own room. I think he finds me a bit abhorrent. The sick wife. Like my cancer to me. He’d like to simply excise me but can’t find the way to do it neatly, without embarrassment.’

  She doesn’t seem to have noticed his tears, for which he is glad. Twice in one day.

  ‘I think it would be convenient for him if I was just to slip away, but I don’t think I’m going to. Not yet anyway. Do you?’

  He doesn’t answer. There is no good reason for destroying hope.

  She talks across the silence. ‘If you’d asked me a couple of months ago I would have said it was a close thing. But now, I’m not so sure. Do you want some more wine? There’s sure to be some left, it’ll only go to waste.’

  He does want more. His mind has been measuring the contents of the bottle in the fridge door. But he knows he needs to go, and that he cannot afford to be caught, again, driving like this. Even the local doctor cannot push these rules too far. He needs to go back to his own lair. To his dogs.