Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  Of course he’d written about it. He wrote about everything. His life and everyone he met had no function other than to be transformed into story. In went his childhood on the farm in western New South Wales; his taciturn father and long-suffering mother; in went, too, the hippies with their grandiose illusions about what they were doing on the land; in went the grievous years in the embrace of those oxymoronic sadists, the Christian Brothers, a time during which his misery achieved such heights he’d come to believe himself being tested by Jesus Himself, that He had chosen him, Guy, to take on His role in this time, that the pain was merely training for greater tests ahead.

  No attempt to hide any of it.

  The Brother charted the dissolution of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and, through him, his young wife; the two of them in their tiny slab-sided house amid the wheat fields of the Mallee in western Victoria. Along the way it illustrated how neatly the boys brought up by the Brothers fitted the fighting force required to defend Australia against the Japanese, but equally how poorly they’d been modelled for coming back into civilian life; noting the curious way that in the face of repression and unalloyed violence some children turn on themselves, making themselves the problem, while others will take it as a sign that they are marked out as chosen. Guy’s characters were damaged people placed in a damaged landscape; both described with painful clarity; the paucity of the world beyond the walls of the little worker’s cottage emphasising the claustrophobia within it; the words they said to each other as sparse as the treeless fields. The reviewers hailed him as ‘a new voice’.

  Those first two books came easily. It was only later that he realised what gifts they’d been and why other writers complained so bitterly about the work. In those years the torment had been elsewhere and the writing had been the special place, the one where all other feelings were subordinate to the process, where for hours at a time he could escape. Away from his desk he’d suffered from a sense of dislocation, a loathing for everyone and their noisome striving after the false gods of the appearances. It might be that he had escaped the Brothers, but the language of the church remained his own, he was rooted in its structures, not simply because he had been brought up to it but also because of the beauty of its cadences, its ecclesiastical sonorities.

  Helen changed everything. Bathed in her love, emboldened by his own passion, he’d been free, at least for a time, from the overwhelming need to repel or destroy anyone who came near. For a few days during that London winter he even felt something so extraordinary, so unparalleled, inconsistent and transient, as simple happiness. Walking through St James’s Park, passing under the bare branches of the tall limes, he thought himself, for the first time he could recall, both happy and simultaneously aware of it. Until then there had only been the idea of happiness, most often seen through a veil of sorrow; happiness, by definition, could only exist as a kind of retrospective pleasure, as a nostalgic reimagining of what had occurred. This, he had believed, was the correct way to look at it: people who were happy in the moment were shallow, lacking in seriousness and the capacity for deeper feeling. Truth and beauty could only be mediated through pain. Yet there he was, this woman on his arm, the sloping light cutting through the trees, and it was so simple, so banal and yet more real than anything he’d ever imagined.

  Aldous had been in almost constant contact since the public meeting. Guy had made the mistake of confessing the doubts which had come to plague him. Now Bain was calling every other day, urging him to commit.

  ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he said. ‘Town Hall meetings are the hardest thing you can do, especially in your home town. And you did well. Down here in Canberra it’s different, you’ll see, there’s a level of separation between decisions and individual consequence.’

  ‘Isn’t that what everyone complains about?’ he said.

  ‘Undoubtedly. But nothing would get done if it was all personal, would it? It’s why we have different levels of government, and a Senate. Well, not in Queensland of course, but that’s an aberration. Queensland’s always an aberration. You can’t let emotion rule how you act. We all have doubts, Guy, it’s the nature of the beast. But rest assured, we need your sort on the team. We want you on board.’

  To reinforce this he arranged a brief ‘hello’ with the Opposition Leader at a house in Brisbane. Picked him up from the New Farm apartment and delivered him in his com-car to this great spreading Queenslander stepped onto a hill in Hamilton. Security men waiting on the street to meet them, entering Bain’s credentials on an iPad. No mention of whose house it was. Some friend of the Party’s. An assistant appeared to guide them into a glass-sided lift that raised them to a beautifully restored, painting-rich lobby, and from there to the much landscaped backyard with its swimming pool, its cut sandstone blocks and exquisite hardwood lattices, succulents in tall square pots. Views towards the port and the new high-rise apartments along the river. Lonergan over by the rail in a pale blue polo shirt and shortish shorts, pacing, talking on a mobile, waving them to sit beneath the wide white sail, another one of these small men of extraordinary force, begging the question of correlations between ambition and height; never mind Caesar’s concerns about thin men, if it’s ambition you’re hoping to avoid you’d be more advised to surround yourself with tall blokes. Lonergan, all wiry intensity, even at a distance a burning ego in boat shoes. A former lawyer of course, as they all seemed to be.

  They sat on strikingly uncomfortable wooden chairs, long cold drinks gathering dew on the timber. Not a woman in sight, although officially there was a wife, somewhere. What Lamprey imagined, predictably – it was the pool that provoked it, but also the man’s tough-guy demeanour, the hair on his arms and legs and in the V-neck of his shirt – were night-time scenes of drunken revelry, a sixties porn party.

  Lonergan coming straight to the point, ‘Aldous, here, speaks highly of you,’ he said.

  ‘Aldous is too kind,’ Guy replied.

  ‘Kindness be damned,’ Lonergan said. ‘What we’re after is results and Aldous thinks you can deliver. The Senate’s the thing. We need to stop these micro-parties messing with our agenda. We have the policies – reform the public’s hungry for. But if I can’t get the Senate I’ll be just as fucked as the last lot. I need candidates who can own the debate. That’s why he’s got me talking to you.’

  All his life Guy had been writing about status and power in one or another of their manifestations, be it between men and women, adults and children or the behaviour of politicians. Here, now, directly across the table from him, for the first time, was the real thing. He couldn’t have been more surprised. He wanted to be cynical and superior, to take notes and avoid being seduced, but his defences were no match for the strength of the man. Mayska had been a piece of work, radiating self-confidence, accustomed to command, but his power, undeniable and fearsome though it was, somehow remained vested in what he had surrounded himself by, in his accumulated wealth. Here, in Lonergan, was, at last, the pure essence of the thing, an individual who wasn’t interested in anything as petty as who might like or dislike him, only in his personal agenda and how others might serve its aims. A man gathering it all towards him, raw, coarse, deeply attractive. He’d never encountered such singularity; it was exhilarating and, simultaneously, chilling. The way the man’s attention swung onto him with such ferocity, pinning him to the hardwood chair, focusing for a moment before turning to the next thing.

  On television and radio his force was diminished. Lonergan had a tendency to pause after a question, as if he was giving the answer due thought, or perhaps, more unkindly, winding through the recently stored talking points for the appropriate sound bite. He had a weakness for agricultural metaphors: pruning to increase growth, the cut worm forgives the plough; or, a favourite: one year of seeding, seven years of grief, as if the country was a garden and he, already, its keeper. In person there was none of this. He was quicker, more relaxed, humorous, well informed.

  ‘Aldous tells me you t
hink we should be doing more about climate change,’ he said.

  Lamprey glancing at Bain.

  ‘No point in throwing daggers at him,’ Lonergan said with a flicker of a smile. ‘It’s my job to know what people think. It’s his job to tell me.’

  Guy tried to brush it off. ‘My remarks were taken out of context. Aldous and I were talking with a mutual friend … I suggested he was ignoring the dangers we face.’

  ‘And yet our mutual friend is, as I understand it, working hard on just this problem. Not because he’s an altruist. Out of his own interest.’ Sitting back in his chair, legs spread. ‘The other side like to present us as denialists,’ he said. ‘They call us ignorant. But they’re the ones who’ve got the wrong end of the stick. This whole thing isn’t about climate. It’s about energy. About who has it and who hasn’t. I’m a realist. At the same time it’s more about politics than science. What the other side seem unable to recognise is that, right this minute, we are engaged in a race. It’s a race between being destroyed by the unexpected consequences of our technologies and our capacity to invent new ones that’ll let us create and distribute energy world-wide without killing us all. One will come out of the other. If we win. But the driving force has to be the market. The market is what has got us this far. Not top-down regulation. You can’t regulate us out of where we are. We have to stay the course. Push through.’ Speaking in short sentences but without pause. No requirement to think about it, all that already done. The real Lonergan revealed.

  ‘What if the market doesn’t deliver?’ Guy asked.

  ‘We’re fucked then, aren’t we?’ Lonergan said, laughing dismally. ‘But seriously, do you think you can put the genie back in the bottle? That you can stop people reaching out for energy now they’ve seen what it can do? All those billions in Africa and India? In fucking China? Really? Just because you put up a moral argument? No fucking way. Try it and we’ll have global war like nothing we’ve ever seen. Have a look at the environment after that …

  ‘Listen, we might have war anyway, but if we let the market run its course we’ll at least have a chance.’

  Guy having little or no sense of the truth of what Lonergan was saying, only that, sitting there, sweltering in his best suit, no arguments rose against it. The man’s certainty, his drive, the quickness of his brain was all-encompassing, seductive.

  ‘I wouldn’t have taken this as your field of interest, Guy,’ Lonergan said.

  ‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘I’m a writer. But I’ve been working in the Arts sector for a couple of decades.’

  ‘That’s good. And are you happy about what we’re doing there?’

  Guy gave a self-deprecating smile, allowed himself what he thought was a smidgin of dissent: ‘I’d have to say I’m going to find further cuts to their budget hard to defend.’

  Lonergan took a sip from his drink. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we won’t be giving you Arts, will we?’

  Guy nonplussed, stumbling for a comeback.

  Lonergan laughed, delighted. ‘Listen, Guy,’ he said. ‘How you sell your ideas is up to you, as long as they tie in with policy. As long as you don’t embarrass me or the Party in the process. But don’t worry we’ll school you, starting immediately. We’ll send you off on a training course. Put you through the ringer. Ask you every type of question you’re ever going to encounter. Beat the life out of you. You’ll have all the help you could need.’

  Looking to his left, out at the river. ‘Is there anything else?’ he said. Standing, offering his hand. The meeting over. Ten minutes. ‘Good to have you on board.’

  Helen was not amused, even when he made light of his failings in the face of power. Shaking her head in disgust.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can get involved with these people,’ she said. ‘Apart from any other considerations you’re not cut out for this, Guy, you’re too sensitive. That’s why you write. They’ll eat you alive. They won’t even bother to spit out the bones.’

  They were at breakfast, or, rather, she was at breakfast. He’d already been up for several hours. He was talking to Bain on the phone when she emerged from her rooms, her bald head bare, a shawl draped around her shoulders. Carrying her own griefs and concerns. Gliding into the kitchen to consume some herbal concoction.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Aldous.’

  ‘The oleaginous one?’ she said. ‘Is he still at you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there coffee?’

  ‘I’ll make a fresh pot.’

  ‘I thought you’d told him no.’

  ‘Maybe I need to do this,’ he said. ‘Maybe it will be good for me, get me out of this rut.’

  He unscrewed the percolator and tapped the used grounds into the bin under the sink. Which was when she said the thing about being eaten alive. As if she could see directly through him, past his self-deprecation to the ambition that had been quickened within. Putting him in his place. A view from a more spiritual plane. One to which her disease gave her special access.

  He washed the stainless steel under the tap, flushing out the ashtray smell of old coffee.

  ‘Unexpected consequences my arse,’ she said. ‘These guys have known what they were doing for decades and have kept doing it, lying to our faces. If you can’t see that there’s no point in arguing with you. I don’t have the energy. It’s your choice.’

  Spooning fresh grounds into the little cup. Waiting for it. Whatever it was going to be.

  ‘But understand this: I won’t be involved. I will not be your political consort. I don’t even know if that’s the right word; is it men who are consorts? Whatever. I don’t want to associate with these men and their self-serving philosophies. It is all men isn’t it? You can make your decisions about your life but not mine. Is that clear?’

  ‘The coffee’s on,’ he said, turning to go. There being only so much self-contained ethereal sermonising a man can take before lunch.

  ‘You’re not worried about your past?’ she said to his back, bringing him around. ‘What they might dig up?’

  ‘I’ve never hidden who I am.’

  ‘Still.’ That calm stare of hers. ‘It’s one thing to do that as a writer, when you’re in control of the material. It’s another thing when a journalist stirs around in it trying to find scandal.’

  ‘This isn’t America.’

  ‘It’s getting more like it every day,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the least of my worries.’

  They’d moved in together, into a one-bedroom basement flat, the ground floor of a terrace in Shepherd’s Bush. She went to work in the mornings, leaving him there, alone, trying to find his way into the new manuscript.

  All through the editing process of Magazine Husbands he’d been desperate to start the new work, but now that he had the time and space the ideas refused to animate, the characters remained trite, the sentences fell dead on the page. Frustrated that something which had been so simple was now so hard he took to waiting for her return, pacing the small flat, looking out through rain-spotted windows at the drab back garden. Desperate for release. When she did arrive, he found fault. Her constant cleaning and tidying was symptomatic of a bourgeois sensibility; her chatter about her days, evidence of a scattered mind; her deliberations over clothes, a demonstration of shallowness. He made the mistake of reading to her whatever it was he’d bashed out so torturously during the day. She, in turn, was foolish enough to make comments about it, as if, because she’d studied English Literature, or was some junior assistant editor at a publishing house, she had the right or ability or qualifications to comment sensibly on what he’d produced.

  The only thing he wanted from her was total immersion in the physical, he in her body, she in his. He could hardly wait for her to be in the door before he began to undress her. The difficulty was that his former patterns had begun to reassert themselves. When the immediate passion was spent it was replaced by that familiar sense of disgust; at himself, at her
, at the act. He’d allowed himself to believe that she had banished whatever forces had previously given rise to this pathology, but in the small dark flat, the more he became accustomed to her, cognisant of her cycles, the intimate physicality of another, the less he could bear to be in the same room, never mind bed, once they were done. He made an excuse to get up, to get a cigarette, say he had to write something, go elsewhere. Her parts, so stimulating to him when he was aroused, now repulsed him; their wetness, their scent, their cloying femininity. He shut himself in the bathroom and washed himself in the sink, covering the sound with the noise of the flushing toilet.