Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  The casual obscenity somehow made more crude by Lamprey’s refined voice, its use at an event like this slightly shocking, although who knew what was correct anymore? Funerals, it seemed, had become untethered from ritual, the attendees adrift on a sea of ideas stretching from the traditional mourning of a death to the curious mish-mash celebrations of a life so favoured by the secular or multi-faith brigades. Such musings not helped in this case by the choice of music: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones playing ‘Time Waits for NoOne (and it won’t wait for you)’.

  ‘Things would be busy at the practice?’ Lamprey said.

  ‘Just a bit.’

  The place in chaos. He’d had to cut short his trip to Canberra to try to sort it out.

  ‘Helen and I were hoping you might join us for a meal tomorrow evening.’

  ‘I’m a bit swamped at work,’ Nick said.

  ‘Nothing special, we have a few friends coming over, you don’t have to stay late, but at least that way you’ll get a decent feed.’

  ‘I’d be delighted then.’

  ‘Good, very good,’ Lamprey said. ‘I wanted you to come, if only as a way of thanking you for what you did the other night … I understand the young man’s on the mend?’

  ‘I assume so,’ Nick said, ‘I’ve not heard specifics.’

  The crowd filling the rows of plastic chairs. Even at a time like this Nick with an eye for the women. Irredeemable. But then some of them, a man couldn’t fail to notice, had seen the occasion as an excuse to dress up, to show some skin.

  ‘But I really don’t think I need more thanks. I’ve rarely been thanked more profusely for anything in my life.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, I happened to bump into Aldous Bain when I was down in Canberra. Then, when I got back, there was a case of wine on my doorstep with a note from someone at Mayska Coal & Gas.’

  ‘I hope it’s something good.’

  ‘Embarrassingly so.’

  ‘Well you deserve it.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so, even if it’s not true. I’ll bring a bottle with me tomorrow. Better than anything I’m likely to buy.’

  ‘I look forward to it. Peter has an excellent cellar. So, tell me, how was Aldous?’

  Nick not sure how to answer, Bain and his cronies being hardly his favourite people, an opinion their brief meeting had done little to alter. Noting Lamprey’s familiarity with Mayska and his cellar. ‘He didn’t recognise me at first,’ he said.

  ‘Aldous is normally pretty good at that sort of thing,’ Lamprey said. ‘The politician’s gift. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was here today, his constituency, pillar of the community and all that.’

  On the night he’d arrived Nick had gone around to the restaurant late to say hello to Abie, taking a seat at the bar and ordering a drink, not a little surprised at the place’s popularity. He’d always believed in his ex-wife’s capability as a chef but here it was now, writ large, her bistro, Eatery, still full to the gills with noisy prosperous Canberrians, waiters in long aprons weaving their way between tables, some sort of party going on in the back room.

  Someone alerted Abie to his presence. She came out from the kitchen still wearing her apron and sat with him, drinking from a tall glass with a splash of wine at its base, talking about their lives and the children and what he might do with them over the next few days, as if the two of them were civilised people, old friends working out schedules, which in many ways is what they were, the vitriol of their last few meetings – when Greloed, and what Abie saw as his inability to keep his dick in his pants, had been the subject of her not insignificant scorn – papered over for the occasion.

  They’d moved on to the topic of her elderly parents when they were interrupted by Aldous Bain who, it seemed, had emerged from the back room to speak to Abie about some detail of the meal, the same tall pomaded creature he’d met in Winderran at the house concert. He glanced at Nick as if trying to place him and failing. Nick, in turn, felt disinclined to help but then, fuelled by a simmering resentment for the position he’d been put in at Spring Creek Camp, held out his hand and introduced himself.

  ‘Ah yes, of course. Different contexts. How delightful to see you again Doctor. What brings you to Canberra?’

  ‘Nick’s my husband,’ Abie said.

  ‘Hah. A small world, eh?’

  When he’d finished with Abie he turned to Nick again. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve been hoping to catch up with you … have you got a moment? Could we go outside? I’d like a cigarette.’

  ‘I’m talking to Abie.’

  ‘Well, another time, then.’

  But Abie insisted she had to return to the kitchen, so Nick followed Bain out into the Manuka night, to stand beneath the trees while he lit a cigarette, drawing heavily on it, as if he’d been waiting some time for this moment. He asked Nick if there was any news about Cooper, but without, Nick thought, real interest in the answer.

  ‘I just wanted to say thank you for what you did, that’s all,’ Bain said. ‘We very much appreciated your discretion.’

  The man had, for all his loathsomeness, a certain force, as if, not physically powerful himself, he was yet accustomed to command respect, or, failing that, obedience.

  ‘I did want to ask, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nick said.

  ‘I was wondering if you had mentioned the incident to anyone.’

  ‘I’ve not. Only because I’ve been so busy, it’s slipped my mind.’ No advantage he could see in letting Bain know how much the incident had disturbed him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, no reason. It’s just, we would be grateful if you didn’t mention it to anyone. These things have a way of getting out of control.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the family matters of people like Peter Mayska.’

  ‘Were you able to apprehend the perpetrators?’ Nick asked. That weird bureaucratic language again, emerging from nowhere, as if Bain provoked it.

  ‘We did,’ Bain said. ‘And they’ve been dealt with, not so much the boys themselves as those in charge.’

  A certain satisfaction rising at the thought of the thug being brought down.

  Their meeting had a curious coda. As they re-entered the restaurant the place fell silent, as if to mark their arrival. The cause of the interruption was, however, not them but the emergence from the back room of Stanley Lonergan, Leader of the Opposition, flanked by his entourage, all well wined and dined, the room appearing to part before them as they made their way through the tables. Nick had never seen him before in person. He was older than he appeared on television, shorter, too, a nuggety bloke, walking with his arms away from his sides like a boxer. Hard not to be awed by him, even for someone like Nick.

  ‘Were you and Miles close?’ Nick said, tilting his head towards Lamprey while scanning the faces in the marquee.

  ‘Not really, but we’ve known each other a long time. Mind you, Miles knew everyone, it went with the territory.’ Lamprey’s long thin legs spread out before him, taking up space. ‘I get asked to do this sort of thing all the time. Often enough I can get out of it, but no chance with this one, I’m afraid.’ He pointed to Nick’s notes. ‘If you want my advice, the best thing to do with that is to read them one more time then toss them away. Almost certainly you know what you’re going to say by now anyway. If you get the order wrong who cares? No-one else will notice. Pick a person in the crowd and talk to them. You’ll find it easier.’

  One of the other town doctors taking the seat on the other side of Nick, leaning across to shake both their hands.

  At the same moment Joy stood up to the lectern and tapped the microphone. ‘Welcome everyone,’ she said, ‘on this sad occasion.’

  Four or five speakers before him. Telling stories about the deceased that made people laugh. Every joke another nail in Nick’s confidence. He could barely listen to what they were saying, sitting there with the sweat running in fine streams
down the skin inside his shirt, no use telling himself it was just a question of speaking a few words at a funeral.

  There’d been a time, it seemed, when Miles had been known as the Love God; this from having been found down the back garden at parties with one or another of the town’s wives. You know who you are, the speaker said, and everyone laughed; all of them, Miles, the man telling the story, presumably the women themselves, impossibly old for such a tale to stick, although perhaps not, perhaps this was one of the lessons he, Nick, needed to learn: that none of it goes away.

  Lamprey strolling to the microphone when it was his turn, taking it out of its stand and holding it like a motivational speaker; no notes; tips of the fingers of his free hand tucked into the pocket of his jeans which, it must be said, hung loose at the back. ‘Miles Douglas Prentice, MD,’ he said, and paused, looking out over the audience. ‘You’d have to excuse a man for being a Love God, wouldn’t you? Who amongst us, in our heart of hearts, wouldn’t want to be one of those?’ Letting the laughter settle. ‘But jokes aside, today is not just a sad day for Winderran. It’s an important day. We should note it well. It marks a great loss to our town, not in the shape of a doctor, even though this was a particularly good one …’

  Nick reluctantly admiring Lamprey’s poise and timing, thinking, nonetheless, that he’d rarely heard such a load of old cobblers; Miles, whatever else he was, hadn’t been a good doctor. Perhaps once upon a time, but these last few months Nick had been picking up the pieces behind him – the badly read tests, the missed calls, the late mornings. It was possible, of course, that this was what funerals were for, papering over the cracks in someone’s life, saying good things about them because they’re dead and no longer pose a threat.

  ‘No,’ Lamprey continued, ‘with Miles’s passing we’ve lost an unofficial register of the health of this town, a walking codex of our community’s history.’

  Giving an account of the three generations of the doctors-Prentice. ‘Miles took up the baton sometime in the seventies. These men, grandfather, father, son, overlapped in the practice. What this means is that there’s hardly a man or a woman born in these parts in the last hundred years who wasn’t brought into the earth by one of them. Hardly anyone who has not, or whose loved ones have not, received their care.

  ‘Miles didn’t marry a local girl (which is not to say he didn’t try on a few for size) …’ More laughter.

  Nick folded his speech one more time and stuffed it in his back pocket. Struck by the phrasing, brought into the earth. The solidness of it. The certainty of it. He’d not been aware of the history, should have figured it out from the photos hanging in the surgery.

  Several years earlier he’d done a course at the hospital in Canberra. Everyone was obliged to do it during their internship; a modern innovation intended to increase their empathy for patients, bravely setting out to teach them how to start to feel all the stuff they’d been so effectively taught not to during their training – either by design or necessity – the anger, guilt, sorrow, which were the currency of any day in a hospital.

  The first lesson was titled What You See Is Never What You Get. The trainer suggesting they tattoo it onto the inside of their forearms. By the end of the course, several months of lunchtimes later, he’d come to agree with the sentiment, never mind that it was too hard to practise on a daily basis. The message had been directed towards patients anyway, not fellow doctors. Miles had been older and an alcoholic. What were the chances of seeing behind that screen? And yet there he’d been, every day, day after day, perhaps someone not so unlike himself, after all.

  When it was Nick’s turn he stood behind the lectern, looking out across the mass of faces, taking Lamprey’s advice and searching for one to speak to. His eyes finding the nurse, Eugenie, standing at the back of the marquee in a frock and a wide white hat. It shouldn’t have been a surprise – some part of him had been searching for her the whole time – but the proposition of speaking directly to her robbed him of whatever it was he’d worked up the courage to say.

  ‘I’ve had the privilege,’ he managed, ‘to work with Miles these past few months. Now I have the odious privilege of stepping into his shoes.’ Should he risk a joke? On no account. ‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, rising to the occasion, ‘that even if I worked here for the next twenty years, for the rest of my life, that the whole town would come out to honour me.’

  Everyone invited to partake of refreshments prepared by the Ladies Auxiliary, laid out on trestle tables in a tin shed next door to the marquee. The music starting up again, whether by design or chance with ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, with its lilting rhythm and haunting harmonica, it’s curious chorus: Warehouse eyes and Arabian drums. Nick was hoping to escape unnoticed but was waylaid by the appearance of Helen at Lamprey’s side, adorned with a kind of turban as cover for her naked scalp, gently placing porcelain fingers into Nick’s proffered palm by way of greeting, the curious garb somehow aligning her to Dylan’s music, as if it had been for her he’d sat up all night writing the song. Should I leave them by your gate? She had, he saw, been crying. It caught him by surprise, a further reminder of Miles, the man. Wondering if she had been one of those wives.

  ‘That was well done, Guy,’ she said, looping her arm through Lamprey’s, her slightness exaggerated by her husband’s bulk, not that he was big, just that she was almost wraith-like, quite possibly not long for the world.

  Lamprey putting his own hand over hers, for some reason generating in Nick a deep pang of envy; the longing for a relationship in which both partners support each other, are made larger by being together.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Nick, wiping her eyes. ‘This is all a bit personal for me. Miles was, as I’m sure you know by now, my doctor. He spoke very highly of you.’

  ‘He did?’ Nick embarrassed at the obvious note of surprise in his voice. Casually searching amongst the crowd for Eugenie. He’d gone to the trouble during these last few weeks of finding out who she was, but no more; just a little backgrounding. Married. Reason enough to leave her alone.

  He located her in a small group of women, plastic wine glasses and finger food in their hands. All in their finery, as if it was a race day carnival. She met his eyes for an instant (had she been looking out for him?) before turning away. Enough to stop him approaching. Instead he stood awkwardly beside a tent pole, and was thus collared by an older man with a stooped back, whose health he made the mistake of asking after, a retired veterinarian who launched into the history of arthritis in several generations of his family, a man who should have known better.

  When he saw Eugenie rounding up two young girls he broke into the man’s monologue.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Sorry, pager’s ringing.’

  Taking a shortcut across the oval, through the parked cars, catching her as she reached her dusty soft-roader, calling out ‘Hello,’ in a tone he hoped expressed the normality, the innocence, of a casual meeting.

  ‘Doctor Lasker,’ she said.

  ‘It’s Eugenie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, tucking her sunglasses up onto the brim of her hat. Blushing.

  Really very lovely.

  ‘Nick. Please, call me Nick. I just wanted to say hello. I’ve been away. I had to go down to Canberra.’ Starting to tell her this as a way, perhaps, of explaining why he hadn’t pursued her, then realising what he was doing and cutting himself off mid-sentence so as to avoid having to include the bit about seeing children, ex-wife, and all the rest, but thus rendering what he’d said almost senseless, a clumsy non sequitur which he sought in turn to cover by observing she had managed to find a space inside the marquee.

  ‘I thought you spoke rather well,’ she said.

  ‘You’re very kind. And a liar. I’m not a public speaker. That I came on after Guy Lamprey made it even worse.’

  ‘Well, I’d have to disagree there. But then I’m biased.’

  Smiling internally at that, a little surprised that she should be
so forthright as to say how she felt about him. The force of her amongst the reflected glare of the parked cars, in the flesh, confirming the feelings he’d had during the days after their meeting. Guessing, now, that she must have felt something similar, if only by the way she stayed to listen to his ramblings despite the presence of her daughters, tugging on her arms. Cursing himself for not having thought of something to say before he chased her across the showgrounds. Standing gormless before this little family.

  ‘So, you’re going to take over the practice?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve not decided. I’ll stay for a few months anyway. See how it goes. There’s a lot to keep up with.’

  ‘I’m sure there is. Miles was very popular.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘A little. He wasn’t very …’ she searched for a word, settling on available.

  For himself he might have chosen sober, but then it was probably best not to speak ill of the dead. ‘I didn’t know his history,’ he said. ‘He kept to himself. I meant what I said, though, about not expecting to take his place.’

  ‘You’re not likely to in a country town like this,’ she laughed. ‘There’s history wherever you look. I should know, my husband was born here.’ Communicating her status. Warning him off.

  ‘I should let you go,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d say hello.’

  ‘You said that,’ the elder daughter said, looking up at him.

  ‘Sandrine!’ Eugenie said, squeezing the girl’s hand hard.

  She could not have been more than twelve, and was dressed as if for a ball, in elbow-length white gloves and a long flowing dress, her hair elaborately braided.

  ‘Do you get out much?’ Eugenie said.

  Toeing the ground. ‘Not really, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Gosh but that must sound rude. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that sometimes, on a Friday night, we go to the Alterbar for pizza, listen to music. You could join us.’