by Stephen Orr
‘Why?’ Harry asked.
‘You wouldn’t remember, but the Tea and Sugar was in a big shed and you could look in it. And he took me in, and he’s saying: Well, this is where you’d line up and wait for the butcher to serve you.’
Harry could hear the old man.
‘And this is where we’d sit to watch a movie. Had ’em all: South Pacific …’
He could still see his grandfather picking the loose melamine on the counter of the provision store, saying, ‘See, I started this, and no one ever fixed it.’ As Trevor asked, ‘What was that Western, with Gary Cooper?’ And Murray shook his head. ‘It wasn’t Gary Cooper … let me think …’
He returned the photo to his brother. ‘She thought the sun shone out of your arse.’
Harry didn’t reply.
Meanwhile, back inside, Gaby was packing her few things into her case. ‘It’ll be best,’ she said to Trevor.
‘Rubbish,’ he replied. ‘It had nothing to do with you.’
‘No?’
‘Of course he’s gonna miss Carelyn. He’s only a kid.’
‘We should let it settle … longer.’
‘Why?’
‘Or maybe you could talk to them?’
He studied her face. This was something he hadn’t noticed before. She had theories about grief, the words, even the experience, with the loss of her own parents at a relatively young age. But, somehow, she just didn’t seem to get it. ‘What am I talking with them about?’
‘How they should make …’
He waited—make, make, an effort?
‘How would you feel if that was my daughter and she said that to you?’
She zipped her case and he took it from her. ‘I’ll go get him. Have a talk. Ask him to apologise.’
‘That’d just make it worse.’ She went out through the laundry, opened her boot and waited for him to load the case. ‘How about this? We can take them away for a night somewhere? Before the muster?’
‘Fine. Any ideas?’
‘I’ll ring you tonight.’ She held his face, smoothed his cheek and kissed him.
Fifty metres away, the boys were watching. ‘What did you say to her?’ Aiden asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Is that why she’s leaving?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what you gonna do?’
Harry moved to get down but stopped. He looked at his father, alone, beside the house. The car started and drove off down the hill.
‘Well?’ Aiden asked.
He stared at him.
‘He’s gonna be so pissed off.’
He stopped to think. Looked at the ground, then at his father, then the car, disappearing down the driveway.
‘I’m goin’ in,’ Aiden said, as he jumped from his branch. ‘Coming?’
He turned away from him.
‘Fair enough.’ He walked up to the house, pulling his pyjamas from his arse. Harry watched him go. He doesn’t understand, he thought. Doesn’t see it. He studied the photo again.
Aiden passed his father. ‘He’s up that tree.’ He indicated.
Trevor looked and eventually found the small figure in the branches.
‘He’s in one of his moods.’
‘Well, leave him,’ Trevor replied, but Aiden had already gone in. After a few moments he set off down the hill. When he arrived at the tree he said, ‘You got the shits on?’
No reply. Harry pretended to look into the distance.
‘She was only trying to … be nice.’ He looked up. ‘You gonna talk?’
‘Yes.’ He could see her car approaching Murray, in the ute, and noticed how close they seemed to pass.
‘You gotta think about how she feels,’ Trevor said.
Nothing.
‘Okay.’ He turned and walked away. ‘I don’t think your mother would’ve liked all this.’
Keep her out of it, he wanted to say. He watched his father go, slipping on the pine needles. ‘What is she?’ he called.
Trevor stopped and looked back. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Is she your girlfriend?’
‘I suppose.’
He turned away. Trevor continued.
He felt safe in his little Y. Couldn’t feel the indentation on his leg or the rough bark on his skin. He searched the trunk for spiders, as he’d done, sitting in this same spot, a year or so before. Carelyn, on her knees, holding an empty jar, searching the leaf litter.
What does she want? she’d asked.
Any insects or spiders, he’d replied.
Then what?
Then we gotta gas ’em and pin ’em onto some foam.
As they’d done, together, him neglecting the ether in favour of pinning them alive, watching them struggle for an hour or more: bugs, moths and a butterfly trying to rustle its wings. She’d said, That’s just cruel.
No, it’s not. They’re insects. They haven’t got brains.
They’ve got some sort of feeling.
Nothing … they don’t realise what’s happening to them.
She’d spent an hour on her knees, as he lifted every bit of bark and flicked every spider he found into his own jar.
What have you got, Mum?
A cockroach.
No … that’s a slater.
He was still watching the car. But he could hear his mum in the pine needles. I gotta go back in and get the tea started.
A bit longer.
I got a few.
Please!
Delay, always delay, to keep her closer, longer. He closed his eyes and could still smell her, feel her arms around his body.
Then lights, tearing metal, the sensation of tumbling, cold paint on his skin.
Her breath on the back of his neck. It was his afternoon sleep and he was lying in his hot room. She was there beside him, holding him (it was the only way she could get him to go to sleep). Five, ten, minutes … Then he could feel her slipping from the bed.
Longer …
As she returned to him. A few more minutes, and she was trying again.
Longer …
I’ve got work to do.
But she returned to him.
His next memory was of waking an hour later and feeling the vacant hole in the bed. Feeling it.
Mum?
But he could hear her in the kitchen, talking to Fay.
He wondered how long she’d waited before reclaiming her arms and going out to finish the folding.
He looked at the house—the cold, stone box—and wondered.
They’re all the same, his mother said, studying the bugs in the jar. Maybe you could look somewhere else? In the paddocks?
I could use Aiden’s old collection?
No.
They’ll never know. Still the same bugs, aren’t they?
As she stopped to think and remembered all the jobs waiting at the top of the hill.
I can just rewrite the labels.
As he recalled the time it took for the car to roll and settle in the sand, like it had been there, that way, forever.
She was looking up at him. Perhaps you can use some of his.
He stayed in his tree until lunchtime, until hunger brought him back to the house. As he went in he heard them at the table; as he was taking off his boots they stopped. He moved closer and saw that someone had set his spot. There was a plate with pie and chips and a glass of cordial.
No one looked at him.
‘Pass the sauce,’ Murray said, and Fay passed it to him.
‘Yer lunch is there,’ Trevor said, without looking up.
He turned and went into his room. He was determined to stay hungry, to teach them, to show them that loss and grief shouldn’t be a comfortable thing. Lying on his bed he found the photo in his pocket and placed it under his pillow.
There, that should teach them, he thought, seeing how they hadn’t started talking again.
21
September. Winter had passed with almost no rain. Trees and shrubs had waited for water but gi
ven up, shedding leaves and pollen in disgust. With the end of winter, everyone agreed, it would stay dry for another year. The cracks in the walls would widen, and tempers fray around the edges. Yanga would find shade in the lowest, coolest part of the farm.
Winter hadn’t even supplied cold mornings. Murray had woken, his sheets kicked off, his naked toes not the slightest bit numb. There was no frost and there was hardly any dew on the bit of lawn they tried to keep green. They’d had a few evening fires but these were a nod to winter: the memory of cold, rained-in nights, something to remind them of this equinox avoided. Short days that promised nothing but long nights.
With this dark quarter already complete it was time for the muster: this re-scheduled, argued over, barely planned, sap-sucking chunk of their lives. Trevor was hoping it would be over in a month but knew, with the cattle wandering further in search of feed, it would take longer. He was bracing himself, hoping the house and his family would be able to take care of themselves for the duration. It seemed unlikely. Fay and Chris left dangling like a couple of live wires; Murray everywhere and nowhere, generating stress; Gaby, still trying to find her place in the small gaps and widening cracks; the boys, torn between their bikes and the horror of lessons; Carelyn, gone, unable to hold it all together, to tell everyone why they should be somewhere else doing something they didn’t want to do. That, now, would fall to him.
Although, maybe something good would come of it, he thought. Maybe the absences would lead to a new dynamic. Maybe people would work out they needed to help. To cook, to clean, to put stuff away. Maybe not, he thought, sitting at his computer, reading an email, selecting Print and watching the words become real.
Dear Mr Wilkie,
I was given your name by the Elders stock agent in Port Augusta. I represent the Malboona Rural Equity, Investments and Partnerships Group.
He took the paper, held it by the tips of his fingers and re-read it. ‘Once in a lifetime,’ he whispered to himself.
‘How’s that?’ Fay asked.
He looked up. ‘Just thinkin’, Fay.’
‘Ah.’ She continued stirring port-wine gravy.
Once in a lifetime. She wondered if he’d received some good news. Nothing much happened once in a lifetime—except birth (Chris’s, drawn out, problematic), death (excluding other people’s), decay, a rotten husband, the making and unmaking of a family. She could still see Chris, ten or eleven, walking naked around the house, and Murray looking at her. ‘He shouldn’t be walking around like that.’
‘He’s not hurtin’ anyone.’
‘It’s not right!’
Family, she realised, was the most difficult thing of all. It never reached a point of completion and what was there never seemed satisfactory. But one thing, she realised: there was always a pivot, one person at the centre holding it all together. ‘You lookin’ after yerself?’ she asked.
He looked surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I said.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Yeah?’ She looked like she didn’t believe him. ‘Sometimes it’s worth goin’ to the doctor, even if you don’t think there’s nothin’ wrong.’
‘Why?’
‘A check-up: heart, sugar …’
‘No … fit as an old mallee bull, Aunt.’ He started re-reading the letter.
She guessed it would be a heart attack. Always was. Morris, dropping to his knees, telling them he couldn’t feel his fingers; rolling onto his side, drifting off. Dead before anyone knew what was happening. ‘Just to be sure,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘What, you know something I don’t?’
‘You got a lot of people relying on you now.’
‘Fit as a fiddle.’
She wasn’t so sure. It was his habit of leaving the toilet door open when he pissed; and her good ears, listening for his stream. She knew the plumbing was the first to go. Heard Murray two or three times a night, sliding the pot out from under his stretcher, or going out against the lemon tree; the piss that wouldn’t come. ‘You’re nearly at that age,’ she said.
‘What age?’
‘When you should have your prostate checked.’
‘That’s not till fifty.’ He looked at her strangely. ‘Why do you bring it up?’
‘I thought it was forty.’
‘No.’ He stared at her, unsure.
‘Anyway,’ she said, turning off the gravy, ‘as long as you feel well … in yerself.’
‘I do.’
‘Sometimes it can be a bit much for one person.’
Now, he guessed, she was talking about something else. ‘How’s that?’
‘As long as you keep talking.’
‘Sorry?’
She knew that he knew—about how long he spent in his shed, and how quiet he was when he came in; how he’d started going for long walks in the desert paddocks; made less conversation around the dinner table; wasn’t asking to check Harry’s assignments any more. ‘You gotta laugh sometimes.’
‘I do.’
How he just sat staring at the television as everyone else laughed at Stan and Blakey.
‘Keep talking,’ she said. ‘That’s the main thing.’
‘I’m okay … what, you think …?’
‘Don’t think nothin’ … just sayin’.’
But he knew exactly what she was thinking. He knew it was always the woman who noticed, who’d help, intruding onto dark, unproductive land. ‘You think I’m gonna jump off a cliff?’
Her face was blank. ‘Well, look what happened to Bill.’
‘Bill was sick.’
‘No, he wasn’t.’ She knew the outstation walls had closed in on him until there was no room to move, until the noose (without him touching it) slipped over his neck, until the floor opened up beneath him, until he fell, through no fault of his own. ‘He was just ashamed,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘It was a situation he couldn’t get out of.’
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t so sure—but then his thoughts turned from the outstation to his shed. ‘It was how he looked at things,’ he said.
You can only see things one way, she thought.
‘He should’ve moved on.’
‘It was his son.’
‘Still …’
As he saw Carelyn’s fingers, joints, nails.
‘It was his choice,’ he said.
‘Perhaps. But maybe the Wilkies have got some sort of … gene.’
‘Perhaps,’ he conceded.
He’d learnt that Fay didn’t say much, and she certainly didn’t like to interfere with other people’s business (Murray had spent forty years warning her off). But what she did say was generally right. She would leave it at that for now, he guessed. Let the thought germinate and emerge into the sunlight. Then, in a month, or a year, if nothing had happened, she would return to it. She would work at it. Just a hint, a look.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. He folded the piece of paper and went outside.
Meanwhile, Murray was trying to instil some sort of order. Bill Clarke had arrived early and landed his Robinson near the crew’s quarters. Harry and Aiden had stood watching, shielding their eyes from the dust, marvelling at the globular insect, spastic with enthusiasm. They’d noticed the spotter’s seat and wondered when their turn would come. They’d asked Bill where he’d come from and he’d said, ‘WA … via the moon!’ He’d shaken their hands. ‘I’ll take you up later if Dad says it’s okay.’
Harry had gone with Bill to the smallest of the crew’s trucks, parked along the road, full of panels for the stockyards they’d soon be moving across the desert. Aiden had brought up the ute and helped Bill roll two drums of avgas onto the back. Then he’d driven Shit-for-brains and the boss of bosses down to the helicopter. Bill had opened the tailgate and kicked the drums and they’d rolled and dropped onto the sand beside his machine. They’d lifted them, then pumped most of the first into the bowels of the chopper. When they’d finished, Bill had said, ‘That’s her r
eady to go … what’s next?’
There were three trucks, and back towards the highway, the first of the road trains for the first of the cattle. Murray told each of the drivers where to leave his vehicle—half-road, half-scrub—so they could get their car and ute around. He stood in the middle of the road waving them forward, back, further, further, don’t worry, it’s not soft ground. Inside the cab of the second truck one of the men said, ‘Fuck, not this old prick again,’ and his friend replied, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t see him once the work gets started.’
Murray greeted and escorted each of the men to their quarters. As he did every year he showed them where he’d set up their camp stretchers and they said, No, thanks, and rolled out their swags. Sat on old logs and lit smokes and started asking about the muster.
‘Trevor has a map,’ he told them. ‘He knows where most of the mobs are.’ He said it like Trevor was the most knowledgeable grazier in the country. ‘Calves were down, but then again, everything’s pretty poor, eh? And dry.’
A stockman named Walker said, ‘It’s only gettin’ dryer.’
‘I know,’ he replied, sitting on a rock and finding his own cigarette. As he lit it the whole crew watched his hands shake.
Bill Clarke wasn’t interested in small talk. ‘We’ll need to sit down and plan it. October ten. That’s the latest we can stay.’
‘Five weeks?’
‘Gotta get up north before the wet.’
Murray wasn’t fussed. He didn’t want it dragging on any longer. ‘That should be fine. We’re all ready to go. How long was it last year?’
‘About that. Five weeks. I’s tryin’ to be fair to yers.’
There was a long silence. Another man, Stephen Higgs (although the others called him Susan), flicked his cigarette into the cold fire, stood and walked a few metres. He unzipped and started pissing. ‘You’re right, Murray, that’s dead-looking country.’
Murray wanted to tell him there was a short-drop but he guessed there was no point. ‘This is our sixth year of drought.’
Higgs returned to the circle. ‘Up Queensland it never stops pissin’ down.’
‘Well …’
‘Should be farmin’ up there.’
Murray didn’t understand. ‘We’ve had worse.’
‘Yeah?’
‘In the thirties. Nearly killed my father. Whole place was de-stocked for nine years.’