Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  Not specifying who ‘we’ was. Perhaps husband, children and all.

  ‘I’d like that. Get me out of myself a bit.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, herding the girls into their seats, the gloved one turning to look back at him, letting him know she had his measure.

  He’d been at McDonald’s with Josh and Danielle when the call came through. The end of a long day, doing things: the museum, a walk around the lake, a film, then hamburgers. As if buying their happiness with wall-to-wall entertainment. Danielle still of an age where she wanted to make it work. Josh of an age where he didn’t, having brought along some game device from which he was impossible to separate, even to eat the food of his choice. (Abie wouldn’t have taken them to a McDonald’s in a fit. He’d had to make them promise not to tell her.)

  When the hospital rang he all but leapt to answer his mobile.

  ‘I should get this,’ he said.

  Josh shrugged his shoulders.

  It was the Sister.

  ‘Nick,’ she said. ‘Doctor Lasker, I mean. I’m so glad I’ve got you. It’s Doctor Prentice.’

  Tears in her voice. An unusual sound in the presiding nurse, a middle-aged woman of remarkable efficiency, equipped with a lovely dark sense of humour, a trait not to be discounted.

  ‘He’s been in an accident, a road accident.’

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s dead, Doctor Lasker.’

  Nick in a plastic booth in the antiseptic homogenised overly lit brightness of the take-away franchise. Danielle watching. Even Josh with one ear cocked, as if such a message might be communicated to everyone proximate without the need for words. Or perhaps it was just they were the children of a doctor, primed for the calls that would take him away.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘His car went off the edge of the Range. On his way home, we think,’ she said. ‘Rolled a long way down. Someone saw it happen, otherwise nobody would have known. They had to winch it out.’

  An image of a sloping stretch of road at night super-imposing itself on the present surrounds, wet tar reflecting the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, men in hi-viz waterproofs hauling the battered ute up the bank out of the rainforest, all of it imaginary of course, and yet profoundly unsettling; the immediate thought being that Miles had done it deliberately, although why Nick should have thought that, or why Miles would want to have done so, he couldn’t have said. He’d been so pleased at the prospect of having a few days away from him. Last seen sitting behind his desk in chino shorts and long white socks, as if he were going on safari. Brogues on his feet.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  Both children now looking at him. Wanting an explanation. Their father gone for months at a time. Visiting them for just a few days. Hardly there and now announcing he has to go back north again.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘But you must see, it’s an emergency.’

  ‘Does this mean you’re going to stay up there?’ Josh asked, straight to the point, using a tone that suggested Winderran was the ends of the earth. Perhaps it was.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll be needed for a little while anyway.’

  ‘Aren’t there other doctors?’ Danielle asked.

  ‘Well, yes, of course there are. There’s quite a few in town.’

  ‘So why’s it your job?’ His second child no less alert than the first.

  Ticking off the points in his mind. ‘Because Miles is … was … my employer, and there was just the two of us in the practice, and we have the hospital emergency.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come back down again. Soon. And you could come up and stay with me during the holidays.’

  ‘You’ll be working then, too,’ Josh said.

  ‘You can visit with Uncle Matt and Auntie Rosie when I am, and do things with me when I’m not.’

  ‘Right,’ Josh said. He hadn’t stopped looking at his machine, in fact was still pressing buttons even as they spoke. Multi-tasking.

  All day Nick had resisted telling him to put it away. ‘Couldn’t you stop that for a minute?’ he said.

  No comment.

  ‘Josh.’

  ‘I’ll just finish this level.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to their place,’ Danielle said.

  ‘I thought you liked it there. They’ve got a swimming pool. And a boat.’

  ‘Denise is a bitch,’ Danielle said.

  ‘Don’t say that about your cousin.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘It’s not nice.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Josh said, putting the gameboy thingy down to look out the window at the circling cars. A big four-wheel drive having trouble with a reverse park. ‘Denise won’t let Danielle play with any of her things. They’re all spoilt.’

  As if this wasn’t something he’d thought himself, with the house on the canal estate and the big motorboat, the cupboards full of discarded toys and sporting equipment from forgotten enthusiasms. But then he’d thought the same about his own children, too.

  ‘I don’t want you to go away again now,’ Danielle said. ‘This is supposed to be a holiday together.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, sweet-talking his own daughter, ‘I might have to see what I can do. But listen, Honey, Daddy’s got a problem he needs to sort out. It’s kind of serious and I can’t be with you in the way I want to be. Not right now.’

  Danielle folding her arms, adopting a resigned expression. ‘It’s all right Daddy,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re busy. You’ve got people to look after, haven’t you?’

  This being, of course, the doctor’s dilemma and excuse, both. The perfect reason for not being available, that he was too busy, had sick people who required his presence. And yet, if he was even remotely honest, there was still time for other things.

  There were a lot of darks in the Lampreys’ house; black kitchen benches, cupboards and tiles, black bookshelves to show up the many-coloured spines of the thousands of books, a broad ironbark table with dark-wood chairs set on a mixed-species hardwood floor. Places laid for eight; guests gathered near the windows with champagne flutes in hand, talking and laughing a little too noisily, nervous at having been invited to share the great man’s table.

  Lamprey introduced him to the company: the portrait painter Ian Illchild, a bald thick-set individual whose forehead, with its coruscating ripples of flesh, acted as a canvas for his emotions; accompanied by his wife Arlene, mid-sixties Nick would have guessed, but made-up so heavily, like a geisha – bright red lipstick on a stark white base – that it was hard to tell. She, less well known than he, but apparently respected for pieces made from found objects, a woman full of bawdy anecdote and raucous laughter. Balancing them one of Miles’s ex-patients, Harry Barkham, a great block of a man with thick grey hair and schoolmaster’s eyebrows, dressed in loose-fitting beige linen, in possession of both a booming voice and opinions, one of those Winderrians Miles had categorised as suffering from what he liked to call PIPS, Previously Important Person Syndrome; accompanied by Deirdre, his wife, stick-thin and sharply styled, dressed to match the furniture, giving tight-lipped knowing smiles but saying little. Finally a slim blonde of indeterminate age with, it must be remarked – for they were much on display – formidable breasts, introduced as a potter, something slightly loose about her, as if she were coming apart at the seams; invited, no doubt, to make up the party with him. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Here might be the reason for the late invite, for surely it had been an afterthought. Nick not certain he could deliver the level of conversation required but forgetting his reservations after a glass or two from Mayska’s bottle and the late appearance of Helen, emerging from the rear of the house in purple silk, resembling nothing so much as a Buddhist nun, the lack of eyebrows adding to what must have been already a pale and ethereal beauty.

  She asked him – they were seated together at one end of the t
able – to explain why he was in Winderran, of all places, as she put it. A question he would normally have let pass but which, when issued from her bleached lips, provoked a version of his history that included Sydney, Canberra, marriage, children, and now divorce; a catalogue that sought to avoid, in the way that a man will when talking to a beautiful woman, no matter her availability, any mention of the other women who surely stand as the stations of the journey, except that Helen’s way of listening was so direct he was unable to entirely excise them, and, thus, hearing himself, brought his tale to a halt.

  ‘I seem to be doing nothing but talking about myself,’ he said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she replied. ‘I’m asking you. I’m always curious as to what it is brings people here. More often than not it seems, in one way or another, to involve love. I think it’s something about the place. There’s always a story, you see and, at the moment I don’t feel as if I have one. I’ve slipped into a kind of limbo. Just me and my cancer. Too much body,’ she said, laughing. ‘And I particularly don’t want to talk about that today with you, of all people. So, continue. You say you have a brother living down on the coast?’

  Blaming Matt for his presence in this part of the world. Telling Helen about his brother’s excessive lifestyle, which, he said, he wants instinctively to criticise except that all his injunctions fall away in the face of the family’s happiness, the way that he and Rosie always seem to be laughing, always have time to play games with the children, to go out fishing in the motorboat moored in the canal next to the house.

  The meal being served by a woman in her mid-thirties with slightly Italian features, introduced as Nina, a distraction in herself, delivering dishes to the table in a no-nonsense manner; far more interesting than the fey blonde (who made the mistake of thinking he might be interested in the various modalities she was employing to maintain her health, techniques apparently unknown to, or ignored by, modern science); serving them a whole roast fillet of beef, the meat charred on the outside and cut into thick bloody wedges, the centre all but raw, no contingency for those who might like it otherwise. Helen picking at hers in the way of convalescents, taking tiny mouthfuls, pushing the already small portion around the plate.

  Nick dragging his attention away from Nina’s short black skirt, bringing the conversation around to Helen. ‘What will you do now, without Miles, I mean, as your doctor?’

  ‘You know about my case?’

  ‘I’ve looked into it, briefly.’

  ‘Well, I have oncology in Brisbane. I’m down there two days a week. They’re monitoring me.’

  ‘Which is not the same as having a local GP.’

  ‘No, it’s not. But then we weren’t going to talk about my health, were we?’

  ‘It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t worked out how to be a doctor in a small town yet. I’m either too involved or not enough.’

  ‘It has crossed my mind,’ Helen said, pausing for long enough to get him to raise his eyes to meet hers, ‘to see if you would … if you had the time … take on my case.’

  Nick realising how affected he’d become by the wine. So much so that he hadn’t noticed their exchange was by way of a job application. Not an afterthought at all. Interviewing for a position he wasn’t at all sure he wanted. Too late now.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ he said.

  She put her thin hand on his. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not the most attractive undertaking. But I like you. And I can see why Guy has taken an interest. Unusual for him to pick a doctor, but clearly his good taste hasn’t entirely deserted him.’ This last said as if to herself rather than him. As if she was fading, which was possibly the case because the next moment she excused herself, standing up from the table, balancing herself with her hands on the hardwood. Trying to brush it off with a laugh. ‘All this excitement,’ she said.

  He went to come around the table to her. ‘No, no. You stay here, sit, please. I’m all right. Enjoy yourself. I know that Guy will want to talk to you.’ Slipping away, back to from wherever it was she’d come.

  After dessert they changed seats. The women gravitating towards one end of the table as in an English novel of manners. The men at the other, with brandy. Nick refusing the latter despite the insistence of his host. ‘I’ve already had too much wine,’ he said, ‘I have to drive.’

  ‘So, Lamprey, how’s the campaign going?’ Barkham asked, settling into his chair, that large over-expressive face, folds on folds – you wondered how he ever managed to shave – hovering beneath those extraordinary eyebrows, looking to steer the conversation into an area of interest.

  ‘You mean our ongoing shit-fight,’ Lamprey said in a sour tone.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to let that meeting get you down,’ Barkham said. ‘I thought you handled yourself pretty well, all things considered. You didn’t have a chance against a mob like that.’

  ‘Did you hear that woman?’ Lamprey said, ‘Water tanks. I mean, Jesus wept.’ Leaning forward. ‘It’s typical Winderran. What this town does best in all the world is split into opposing tribes. I’ve remarked on it before. Everyone huddled in their little groups just waiting for an issue to emerge so that they can take up positions and throw insults at each other. Everything gets blown out of proportion.’ Sitting back, point made, but then, rallying, rising back up again. ‘Actually, this might interest you. I’ve been doing some research. She got her figures wrong. Mixing up gigalitres and megalitres. Easy to do I suppose. You’d need six million houses, not sixty thousand, to store that amount of water. But who can be bothered with facts, eh?’

  ‘Guy here,’ Barkham said, pleased with himself, as if he’d scored a point by assisting Lamprey to score one, explained for Nick’s benefit, ‘performs an essential service in our culture, pricking the wind from those who would set themselves above us.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Lamprey said, ‘a windy prick am I.’

  A call from the women down the other end to quieten down. ‘You men’re too noisy,’ Arlene said.

  ‘It’s just our powerful bass notes, reverberating,’ Illchild said deeply, ‘you need to lift your game ladies, sing out the higher registers.’

  At which Arlene made a fist of ululating and, having started it, was joined by Barkham’s wife who, against all expectation, giving possibly her only contribution to the evening, took the vibrating wail to grand new heights, transporting the room.

  Lamprey could not have been more delighted, clapping his hands with glee.

  ‘The thing about environmentalists,’ he said, when the noise subsided, ‘is that it’s become like a religion for them.’

  ‘What has?’ Illchild asked, possibly a hint of criticism in his voice.

  ‘You name it. Planting trees, for a start,’ Lamprey said. ‘It doesn’t matter where or what type as long as you’re putting them in the ground. You can see these fucking orange triangles dotting every hillside in the district like little shrines to their earth goddess. At the same time hardly a day goes by when you’re not assaulted by the moronic roar of the machines cutting the buggers down and chipping them up. There are teams of them working around the clock, can’t deal with the demand.’

  Lamprey, it seemed, wrote an occasional column in one of the weekend papers based around propositions like this, as well as the doings of various politicians, a kind of public diary. Nick hadn’t read the column, this week or any other, and wasn’t about to start. What he found interesting, though, was how Illchild and Barkham, both significant figures in their own right, acted like a cheer squad, vying for Lamprey’s approval. He noted, too, a certain tension between them, as if they might not agree with each other on everything, or be content with their place in whatever mysterious hierarchy held sway, albeit being happy enough on this occasion to demonstrate to Nick who was on the inside and who the new chum. None of which was necessary; most of the time he didn’t know who or what they were talking about, hadn’t been to the meeting, didn’t even know the name of the woman who’d got
up Lamprey’s nose.

  ‘I’ve been doing a little research on her,’ Lamprey was saying. ‘She was the union rep at the hospital down the coast for years. Which just about says it all, I’d have thought.’

  ‘Workplace Health and Safety’s got out of hand everywhere,’ Barkham said. ‘They’re a law unto themselves, right across the country. It’s got so you can’t do anything without filling in fifty forms. It’s not a wonder we can’t compete.’

  ‘You’d have come across a bit of that wouldn’t you, Nick?’ Lamprey said, attempting to draw him into the conversation.

  ‘Pretty strict in hospitals, what you can and can’t do,’ he said, non-committedly, hackles rising. He wondered what gave Barkham, or Lamprey especially, with such an ill wife, the qualifications to criticise hospitals. Clearly, at a dinner party general assent was the order of the day, but this was his field. What they hadn’t grasped about him – but then how could they have, he’d barely spoken – was that even if he didn’t know shit about local or national politics, he was Labor to the core. His father in the railyards at Enfield. ‘Not an easy job being a nurse,’ he added, ‘Underpaid, overworked and good at what they do, in my experience.’

  Barkham started to harrumph his way into a contradiction but Illchild got there first, starting to tell a story about Arlene’s recent experience in hospital. Lamprey, however, wasn’t happy for the conversation to veer into the personal. ‘Don’t get me started on that chap who owns the land the dam wall’s going to be on,’ he said. ‘Supposed to be a scientist. Talk about crazy.’ Looking at Nick, as if to find agreement from him, which Nick would have liked to give except he once again had no point of reference. He’d been up since before dawn. Exhaustion was setting in. He was flattered to have been invited into this circle but doubted it was really a fit. Lamprey didn’t need his adulation or approval, he was superfluous to requirement, and yet, at the same time, there was a sense this display was all for his benefit. As if these men needed an audience.

  They’d moved on anyway, discussing something Lamprey had said to his co-host on the book show he did on the television.