The Hands

by Stephen Orr

  Trevor just looked at him.

  So they climbed into Fay’s EH and he settled in behind the wheel, watching and waiting for his dad. ‘I can’t see.’

  Murray went around to the boot and found a rug for him to sit on. When they were ready, he said, ‘Start her up.’

  He turned the key and the motor crunched and growled.

  ‘The clutch!’ Murray said.

  ‘I can’t reach it.’

  Murray shook his head and pulled the rug out from under his son’s arse. ‘There, how’s that?’

  ‘Now I can’t see out.’

  Trevor, curled in his dark corner, could still see his dad’s face. Angry, of course, but he knew it was all show, and bluff, and even gladness that he was still too small to reach the clutch. He wiped a single tear with his sleeve.

  ‘We’ll give it six months,’ his father was saying, ‘or maybe we’ll try on the tractor.’

  He remembered wanting to talk to his father, to touch him, to hold him; on the hard, meaty part of his arm, perhaps. He wondered why they only talked about castration, and practical issues like clutches and molasses.

  The hands were young, and always would be, and he would be reaching out for his dad, willing him to lead him across the paddock that stretched to their private horizon. Harry, too, who, he suspected, was thinking much the same thing.

  The crew’s hut had taken a battering over the years. The walls had been made from lengths of pine, but these had dried and peeled in the sixty years since Bill Wilkie had put them up. Tired of the muster team’s complaints (up until then they’d slept on the porch), he’d spent three weeks (with a little help from Morris) building it. It had an iron roof, which had rusted, but stayed in place over the sixty winters and summers it had sat, mostly empty, between musters.

  The box sat at the bottom of the hill at the end of a dolomite path that snaked down, between more native pine trees, from Fay’s garden. It was away from the business of the house, so both the Wilkies and the team could maintain their own routines, keep their own hours and have somewhere to go when the disagreements became arguments.

  Harry was sweeping it out. Someone had left both doors open and sand had blown in and gathered around the walls. The gaps between the floorboards were so big that all he had to do was sweep and the sand would fall through. Chris had joined him, and he’d sent him back to fetch the shed broom. As Murray often explained, the most important thing was to keep Chris busy. He only made problems when he had time to think.

  He used a shovel to scoop the piles of sand and throw them out the front door. ‘Mum said I shoulda kept the doors shut,’ he said to Chris. ‘I can’t see how it’s my fault.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Every time something happens. Harry, why did you leave it there?’ He studied Chris’s actions, his big arms, his slow strokes, the way he had to think about every movement.

  ‘Chris?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How did it happen, when you got hurt in the muster that time?’

  Chris didn’t walk to talk about it. How he was standing behind a steer, prodding its rump with a length of hose, when it kicked him in the face. How he fell to the ground clutching his broken jaw with its four shattered teeth and a mess of blood covering his hands. How Morris and Murray had shouted at him, called him stupid boy and simple fool before wrapping his face in someone’s shirt, driving him back to the house and, in the middle of a muster, when they could least afford to, driving him all the way to Port Augusta hospital.

  ‘I’ve showed you my scar, haven’t I?’ Chris asked, lifting his chin and showing him the faint line.

  ‘I didn’t know it was from that. I bet they were pissed off.’

  Chris looked up. ‘Murray, mostly,’ he said, remembering sitting beside his shit-smeared, over-ripe uncle as they drove. He could still see his red eyes, clenched jaw and bit lip. And Fay, sitting in the front, looking back at them. ‘Hold on, Christopher, it’s only a few minutes.’ The corrugations threw the car in the air; the suspension gave up trying. Chris muffled his groans so Murray might stop staring at him.

  ‘What’s worse,’ Chris continued, ‘was when they took me to Adelaide, he had to come too.’

  ‘In the middle of a muster?’

  ‘He was so angry.’ Chris guessed that Murray had never really forgiven him—for the broken jaw, and a hundred other things. He still saw it in his eyes: the look he had when an animal needed to be culled.

  ‘He’s never liked me.’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘He never talks to me nice, and no matter how many times I’ve tried …’

  ‘It’s just him,’ Harry said. ‘Old men are all grumpy.’

  Harry guessed there was probably something in what Chris was saying. He knew the look, the tone, the distance. ‘You’ve just gotta ignore him,’ he said. ‘You shoulda learnt that by now.’

  They took the brooms and went back up, past the old drop toilet, and stopped at the bottle tree. They replaced the fallen bottles and jars and Harry went to his dad’s shed to fetch his whip.

  Then he spent an hour trying to teach his cousin (for the hundredth time) how to crack the whip so he’d break a bottle.

  7

  The land was crusted, drying before it was used, or presented as some sort of offering to the humans and small animals who attempted to live on it. Trevor drove, his hands held tightly ten-to-two on the steering wheel. He tried to imagine this land as a map: its blue-line-major-roads, black-hatch-highways, small-dot-towns and red-spot-cities; tried to imagine how it had been scrawled upon, bi- and dissected, measured and claimed in the name of civilisation.

  Carelyn was sitting beside him, staring across the highway.

  ‘Where do you want to stop?’ he asked, but she told him to keep driving towards Port Augusta.

  Harry was sitting in the back listening to headphones, singing and saying, ‘Mein Vater hat ein grosses Auto.’

  Trevor looked at him in the rear-vision mirror. ‘Eh?’ Although he knew what it meant, knew each of the dozen or so phrases he kept repeating when he was bored.

  Harry met his eyes and took off his headphones.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mein Vater …?’

  ‘Mein Vater hat ein grosses Auto.’

  ‘My father has a big car?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Is that all you know?’

  ‘Ich habe keine Schwester, aber, ich habe einen älteren Bruder.’

  Trevor studied the long, grey strip in front of them. He followed it half-way to the horizon before it was consumed by haze. By then it was blood red, pulsing and shifting across the desert. He could tell it was alive, held in place by nothing more than a million distance markers. There was saltbush and bluebush and dead shrubs that looked the same as the living ones; a rest-stop with a single bin, but nothing else, as if this too was some forgotten skeleton.

  He reached over and turned up the radio. ‘There were smaller numbers of vealer steers with most selling to feeder activity.’

  Carelyn looked at him. ‘Christ, do we gotta listen to that?’

  Harry stared at the road up ahead. ‘Was it das?’ he asked, but they were already over the dead roo.

  Trevor turned down the radio and looked at his wife. ‘It’s how we make our living,’ he said.

  She didn’t reply; just found a magazine in the glove-box, opened it and pretended to read.

  ‘We’ve never been careful enough with prices,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But he just ignored her, turning up the radio again. ‘Yearling steers sold mainly from 190 to 256 cents …’

  ‘Timing,’ he explained. ‘Market fluctuations; we should be looking at the long-term. Still, perhaps I don’t give a shit.’

  ‘What?’ She looked at him.

  ‘We’re never gonna become millionaires, are we?’ He ground his hands into the wheel. ‘Although it’d be nice to get out of debt.’

&n
bsp; ‘We will.’ She put the magazine down as a sign of solidarity.

  ‘Perhaps we could find a buyer.’

  ‘Who’s gonna buy us out?’

  ‘Someone … one of these capital companies.’

  But they both knew there was no point having this discussion again; at least as long as Murray was alive.

  ‘So … in the meantime?’ he asked.

  ‘You worry too much.’

  ‘Someone has to.’

  She pulled a baby-face. ‘Snookums.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ He switched off the cattle report.

  ‘Sell the place, then.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s that easy.’

  He could remember how, one time, it had been much easier. How he’d visit her at work, two or three times a month, waiting beside the vitamin pills and energy drinks as she served. Then, with the smell of menthol and eucalyptus strong in his nose, approach her. He’d use Bundeena (and his prospects) as a selling point. Saying things like, ‘I won’t be able to come in much over the muster,’ and, ‘Dad said I should invite you out … and you could stay a few days.’

  The land and the animals gave him solidity, power, the look and smell of at least potential wealth. And he’d been happy to propagate this image. ‘We prob’ly got three hundred heifers to move, maybe more. Dad’s hiring a big team this year. Two cooks,’ as he grinned, searching her eyes for approval.

  Back in the car, Harry pulled off his headphones and said, ‘You promised.’

  ‘On the way back,’ Trevor replied.

  ‘No … Aiden won’t want to stop.’

  Trevor indicated and pulled over. They stopped in a clearing. There was an old transportable on stumps. It’d been left to sink into the desert. Its windows had been smashed and wall panels kicked in. But it was still a strange miracle, stranded beside the highway, its thousands of nailed-on hub caps, rims, bumper bars and door panels glistening in the sun. It was a shell of spare parts, a hot iron organism roasting in the sun, protected by a skin of nailed-on licence plates.

  Harry got out, produced his phone and started taking photos. ‘It’s cool,’ he said to his dad, sitting on the bonnet watching him.

  The roof was shingled with more car doors and a ring of old tyres hung from the eaves. They knocked against each other in the little bit of wind. Whole exhaust systems had been attached to door and window frames, intertwining like bougainvillea as they snaked their way up drainpipes.

  Trevor had never stopped at the car-house before. For years, as they’d passed it, he’d always made some comment, but left it at that. Once, there’d been a car parked out front, but that had long gone. He’d seen the house grow over the decades; marvelled at how its colour always changed depending on what new parts had been added.

  Harry went into the house and Trevor followed him. ‘Where do you suppose they went?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe they were taken by aliens.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘It’s not like they were trying to blend in.’

  The horn sounded.

  ‘Come on,’ Trevor said.

  They continued for another hour, mostly silently; asphalt, rubber, steel and aluminium, petrol, plastic and glass; a hundred little bits and pieces, turning, lifting, opening and closing, growling, rubbing, expanding and contracting. At one point, Carelyn looked back at her son.

  ‘Weren’t you gonna vacuum the car?’

  He took off his headphones.

  ‘Weren’t you gonna vacuum the car?’

  ‘I’ll do it when I get home.’

  ‘But I asked you last week.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’ He retreated into a shadow.

  ‘Not much point,’ Trevor said.

  They returned to the road. Two, three minutes, but Carelyn couldn’t let it go. ‘It’s funny the things you forget,’ she said, turning around.

  ‘Sorry?’ he asked, removing his headphones.

  ‘It’s funny the things you forget.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Trevor shook his head. ‘Is this really achieving anything?’

  She looked at him, and he knew she was accusing him too.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked him weeks ago.’

  ‘Does it really matter?’

  They arrived in Port Augusta mid-afternoon, slowing into suburb, drifting along the four lanes of chicken-shop-highway that marked the transition from country to town. There were servos and blocks of shops selling home-brew kits and bags of kitty litter. Small, semi-detached homes, their red bricks baking in the methylated sun of early summer; and bus stops, leaning where their concrete had lifted. The few people they saw were very old, or very young, shuffling along in wafer-thin thongs.

  They drove through the gates of the college, parked and found Aiden alone, again, caught up in music, sitting in the memorial garden. He managed a hug for his mum and a handshake and slapped shoulder for his dad, but when he saw his little brother he just put him in a neck-hold and ran his knuckles from ear-to-ear. ‘Three weeks, and you’ve grown, you little shit.’

  ‘As if you could tell,’ Harry replied, but he could see that his brother, too, had changed. More pimples around his lips and razorback nose.

  They sat on two wooden benches, and Trevor asked, ‘So, you all packed?’

  Aiden indicated his case, sitting in the shade of an adjacent doorway. ‘You said three.’

  ‘Sorry, your brother slowed us down.’

  Carelyn was studying her son’s clothes. ‘I didn’t think you had to wear this in summer,’ she said, straightening his tie.

  Aiden wrestled her hands, and fixed it himself. ‘That comes from his Holiness, Pope Prickmeister the Seventh.’

  Harry smiled. He loved to look at his brother’s tie, his school shirt (with its amateur-ironer scorch marks), a Mercy coat-of-arms above the pocket; he loved his khaki pants and his leather belt and he especially loved his socks, pulled up just beneath his knees, folded down to reveal green and blue stripes; and his leather shoes, although he hadn’t polished them since the last exeat.

  He could see himself as a proper gentleman, playing chess and cricket, spending his evenings in the left-open library. Could imagine his own small room, but he wasn’t so sure about the sharing arrangements for Years Eight and Nine; the showers (and he’d seen them) that were only separated by translucent curtains of cows-over-the-moon.

  Still, the smell of disinfectant in the halls of residence and incense in the chapel were more than enough compensation. Even the routines, the bells, the prayers, seemed to promise a world of things beyond the bulldust and cowshit of Bundeena; a different meal every night; dessert: a bowl of fruit that even now seemed tempting.

  An old piano sat in the sun on a mover’s trolley in the middle of the garden. Someone had written SCRAP on the side. As the Wilkies watched a boy wandered over, lifted the lid and tried a few keys. The piano sounded clunky, but in tune. After a few scales he squared up to the keyboard and started playing.

  Harry watched and listened. As he did, he felt he wanted to be this boy; wanted his uniform, his musical fingers, his piano lessons. He felt (as he heard each of the careful notes) that this, perhaps, was a more satisfactory life. Surely these sounds, meshing like windmill gears, indicated a more logical and promising future than the vagaries of learning by radio, of living a million miles from anywhere, of relying on a few wandering cattle to provide a living.

  ‘Little show-off,’ Aiden said.

  ‘He’s very good,’ Harry replied.

  ‘Looks like a little brat,’ Trevor said.

  Harry looked at his father, although he said nothing. Then, he returned his gaze to the boy.

  ‘So, how did it all go?’ Trevor asked Aiden.

  ‘The maths exam was … well, for a start, he hadn’t taught us half of it.’

  Carelyn tchted. ‘Is it that …?’

  ‘Mr Marsh. Everyone was complaining, even Tom, who’s top of the class.’

&n
bsp; ‘We’ll have to go and see him,’ Carelyn said.

  ‘Let’s just wait,’ Trevor replied. ‘Exams are generally never as bad as …’ He trailed off, remembering. He’d sat in this garden thirty years before. It hadn’t been such a different place. A generation had passed with nothing more than a little paint, a new statue of Mary and agapanthus where the rosemary once struggled. Murray, and his mum, had been here, too, quizzing him, and he’d given them the bad news: failed exams, and forgotten assignments.

  ‘Maybe there’s no point starting Year Twelve,’ Aiden suggested, looking at his parents.

  ‘Why not?’ Trevor asked, not entirely surprised.

  ‘Not if I’m gonna fail things.’

  ‘Why are you going to fail?’ Carelyn asked.

  ‘Maybe not fail, but get through with Cs.’

  She crossed her arms. ‘You’re not a C student.’

  ‘It’s getting harder.’

  ‘So? You work harder. Year Twelve is a minimum for anyone now.’

  ‘But what’s the point if—’

  ‘You. Will. Continue.’ She decided against the lecture. How he (Yes, you, look at me when I’m talking to you) was, for seven years, the best student in his School of the Air class; how he used to finish his maths worksheets in minutes and spend half-an-hour waiting for the others; always scored an A on tests and had a spelling age five years above his actual age.

  ‘It’s only another year,’ Harry said to his brother.

  Aiden gave him his shut up, Shit-for-brains look. ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘You’re meant to set a good example.’

  A tall man wearing jeans and a white business shirt approached them. ‘Mr Wilkie, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Trevor.’ They shook hands.

  The man hitched his pants and surveyed the group. ‘Mrs Wilkie?’

  ‘Carelyn.’ A sort of finger-to-finger handshake.

  And looking at Harry. ‘Little brother, I assume?’

  ‘Harrison Wilkie.’

  The man introduced himself as Mr Owen-Smith, Jeff, your lad’s tech teacher. Explaining, much to Aiden’s disappointment, ‘He’s done brilliantly this semester.’

  ‘Really?’ Carelyn asked, turning to her son. ‘That’s funny, because he was just telling us how poorly he thinks he’s going.’