by Stephen Orr
Wakefield Press
Stephen Orr is the author of six previous novels. He contributes essays and features to several magazines, journals and newspapers. His short fiction has been published widely over the last ten years, and a selection is gathered here for the first time. Stephen Orr lives in Adelaide.
Wakefield Press
16 Rose Street
Mile End
South Australia 5031
www.wakefieldpress.com.au
First published 2017
This edition published 2017
Copyright © Stephen Orr, 2017
All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE
Edited by Emily Hart, Wakefield Press
Ebook conversion by Clinton Ellicott, Wakefield Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Orr, Stephen, 1967– , author.
Title: Datsunland / Stephen Orr.
ISBN: 978 1 74305 490 1 (ebook: epub).
Subjects: Short stories, Australian.
Wakefield Press thanks Coriole Vineyards for their continued support.
Contents
Dr Singh’s Despair
The Shot-put
The One-Eyed Merchant
A Descriptive List of the Birds Native to Shearwater, Australia
The Keeping of Miss Mary
Guarding the Pageant
Akdal Ghost
The Barmera Drive-in
The Confirmation
The Adult World Opera
The Syphilis Museum
The Shack
The Photographer’s Son
Datsunland
Acknowledgements
Dr Singh’s Despair
From: Dr Sevanand Singh, Anandpur Sahib Rd, Nangal 140124, Punjab
To: SA Health Commission, Citi Centre Building, 11 Hindmarsh Square, Adelaide South of Australia
Dear Sir or Madam
Let me make it clear—I have no intention of repaying the $7328. My reasons for returning to India are set out in my last two letters. Still, I have more to add. My address has changed so there is no point sending more correspondence. I no longer live beside the Nangal Fertiliser and Heavy Water Factory but have found a small home in the country. Here I can recover and lick my wounds (if that is how it is said). I can talk to pandits and thank God I realised my mistake before it was too late—before I brought my wife and son to Australia, to your outback, to Coober Pedy. You say I only worked three days—true. You say you paid my airfares—true. Also, I thank you for paying for my motel in Adelaide. But you did not pay for my taxi, accommodation or meals in CP. In fact, nothing was paid for or arranged as promised. And now I will tell you more of the story of my not repaying.
Dr Sevanand Singh stared out of the football-shaped window. The landscape had changed from brown to red to off-Fanta. As the small jet descended, sheds, petrol stations and even shrubs gained definition. There was a road, and a small white car, and you could see sand ridges that stretched towards the horizon. As he waited, he thought without thinking. About why God had made so much nothing. What was the point of creating a void? No dams or powerhouses, no towns or shops, or apartment buildings. No forests. No petrol tankers. No animals. No ants. No bacteria. Had God abandoned this place? Was He displeased with it or was it an experiment of some kind? Or was He just resting, and yet to cover the sand with trees, rivers and animals, or pine trees, or anything?
No, he thought. This is it. God has finished. Maybe there’s an order, a system, a hierarchy of animals and plants that can’t be seen from ten thousand feet.
He looked at the brochure in his lap and remembered. Flicked through the photos of polished opal and thought, So what? Remembered his wife saying, ‘These are the eyes of Buddha, or a cat, or snake.’
‘But snakes’ eyes are black,’ he’d said.
‘No, turquoise, with runs of red and silver.’
Yes, perhaps it is God’s work, he guessed. Hiding beauty in the most inaccessible places. Challenging pale-skinned, bow-legged men to find it. He could even hear God’s voice: Come and get it, boys. But you’ll need to dig through sand, clay and rocks. What, you want to look into my eyes? Not likely!
As Sevanand studied his brochure he saw images of life in the outback. Hawker Gate—one small opening in an eight-thousand-mile-long fence—an attempt to keep dingoes out of God’s nothingness, and a sign threatening six months’ imprisonment for not shutting the gate. A man in overalls peeling the skin off a dead kangaroo. Alice Springs, its homes lined up like overcooked cupcakes. Quonset huts full of tractor parts and fence posts, a deserted railway siding called ‘Nevertire’, and the Tibooburra Post Office with its promise of a radio trunk line to all states. A hundred and one pictures of nothingness, in the place he’d chosen to live. To bring his family, to make their future. Australia—a picture of two men asleep in a swag as a lamb licked chop grease from their lips.
They were descending, and he could feel the engines slowing. As they banked he saw thousands of peach-white pockmarks on the landscape. Each had its own slag-pile and there were small iron huts, trucks with drilling rigs and even a few people wandering between the shafts. Faint tracks connecting the mines like a dot-to-dot. Reminding him of his mother’s lace tablecloth, laid out across their particleboard table whenever a rich uncle came to visit.
They landed, and taxied, and the jet stopped in front of a cream-brick terminal with the words ‘COOB R P DY’ in cracked plastic. He thanked the cabin assistant, gathered his briefcase and climbed out. Stepped onto the tarmac and stopped to get his breath. Sweat on his forehead. Shirt and pants sticking to his body. ‘Hot?’ he said to another man, who had fat red cheeks and three or four days’ stubble.
‘Warm.’ Pulling his underwear out of his arse.
Sevanand could feel the heat through his rubber soles. He put down his briefcase, took off his jacket and draped it across his arm. An Aboriginal man wearing shorts and steel-capped boots removed bags from the luggage compartment and threw them onto a trolley. He stopped to finish a cigarette, step on it and say, ‘You’re a funny sort of black fella.’
Sevanand was unsure. ‘I’m the new doctor.’
‘Good for you. We just lost one. Pommy fella. He lasted a few weeks … or was it that long?’
‘A few weeks?’
‘Yeah.’ The man ran his tongue over his yellow teeth, spat and motioned for him to come closer. ‘See, problem was, he couldn’t see the funny side of things.’
‘No?’
‘Next thing you know, a bloke goes crazy. That’s what started happening to him.’
‘How’s that?’
He tapped his nose. ‘That’d be telling tales.’
Sevanand raised his head and tried to straighten his sore neck. The short, balding black man fought with a heavy case. ‘You got a sense of humour, Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll need it. You like beer?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘All the time, mate. And what about sex?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You know, fuckin’. Plenty of it here. TV reception’s shithouse.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Listen, mate, you don’t need to be married. We’re pretty open-minded up here.’ And he laughed.
‘I must get along.’
‘Go on then. If you stay, we’ll make you an honorary black fella.’
As Sevanand walked towards the terminal he heard the man say, ‘Fuckin’ coon.’ He went into a hot shed choked with fumes, the smell of anti
septic and the cries of a pudding-faced baby. On one side, the shed opened to the desert, the other, tarmac. There were a few plastic seats, a ticket desk, a Coke machine and a brochure stand with one brochure: Ian and Judy’s Shell House, with a picture of Uluru and the Opera House made from cowries. Flies made a meal of dog biscuits, shit scrolls and urine in the pet bay before mingling with the tourists. Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ played on an ancient PA as a television flickered on the wall with grainy images of men in fake beards panning for gold as they explained the history of mining in Australia (although they never mentioned Coober Pedy).
He sat on a loose seat, took a freshly ironed handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He remembered the brochures the Health Commission had sent him: Barossa Valley vineyards, fishing off white beaches on the Eyre Peninsula and marvelling at the Naracoorte Caves.
Yes, some of this please, he’d written back. He was tired of living in the most densely populated place on the planet. A swarm of humans that just kept coming, filling his waiting room, his days, his nights, his dreams with broken bodies, malaria, typhoid and TB, floating through the small, hot room he worked in for sixteen hours a day.
Yes, some of this please.
But then came the next letter. We have shortages in remote locations. Very considerable financial incentives are involved.
Yes, some of that too.
So, sign here, Dr Singh, and we’ll pay your airfare, accommodation—the whole lot.
Almost.
He approached the ticket desk. A pimply girl picked the orange laminate until a biscuit-sized piece snapped off. The ticket clerk looked at her.
‘Oops.’ Grinning.
He looked at her loose, tie-dyed top with tassels. Pants—purple, silk, ballooning, tied off at the knees. Leather slippers. Unwashed dreadlocks—as if she, and the boyfriend, busy arguing over tickets, had just come off of the Shiva Ashram.
Cardboard people, he thought. Phonies! Hardly Indian.
Finally, he approached a tall, crisp meringue-looking woman behind the counter. ‘My name is Dr Sevanand Singh.’ He waited, assuming she’d know who he was.
‘Dr Singh?’
‘Yes, I’ve just been appointed by your Health Commission. I was told someone would pick me up.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone.’
They looked around the terminal, which by now was almost empty.
‘Anyone for Dr Singh?’ she called, but there was no reply.
‘Was a car sent?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t told.’
‘This is most upsetting. If someone says they’ll do something …’
‘That’s the government,’ she explained. ‘I wouldn’t expect too much. They don’t know anything exists outside of Adelaide.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Is there someone we can call?’
‘A taxi?’
He waited. ‘Yes … that please.’
Despite the fact that I had been forgotten I arranged my own lift, at my own expense. I waited for ninety minutes in the shed before I was asked to move outside (the airport was closing for the day). There was very little shade. You probably think I complain, but no. A thermometer in my bag read 54 degrees. Sir, I am a doctor. Six years of education earned as a scholarship from the Rupnagar Council. Two years as a junior doctor. So, in India I am respected. Cars are sent for me and rooms prepared in hotels. But CP? No wonder the man before me shifted to the Gold Coast, or (someone said) returned to Leeds.
He’d never known a straight road. Nangal drivers were catfish, navigating their asphalt rivers: the Satluj River Road, the road to the dam and Hydel Channel. The highway south, which led all the way to New Delhi, with never more than a hundred straight metres. Roads wrapped around hills, along valleys, fighting their way through towns, forests and tea plantations.
But this was different. A bamboo stake, a metre-rule, a million miles of English iron floating a foot (or so) above the sand. A road from and to nowhere. Grey tar and white paint rolling on and on towards a horizon that kept tumbling towards infinity, as far, as remote, as unthinkable as his lost Punjab.
The taxi driver was studying him in the rearvision mirror. ‘I couldn’t have been no quicker, mate,’ he said, winding down his window. ‘When she called I had the carby in pieces.’
‘Carby?’
‘Car-bu-rettor. Petrol, Air!’
‘Well, how far is it?’
‘Another fifteen clicks.’ He narrowed his eyes to size up the small Indian. ‘What, you pissed off, fella?’
‘Not with you. But they were meant to pick me up.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone from the hospital.’
Silence. He studied the landscape. The small shrubs and groundcovers, something green growing in the cracks in the road, a few pine trees struggling beside a rest stop. He was acclimatising to the outback, to the small things. It was a geography of oxygen, dust, the wind exciting the sand like so many sine waves. He wondered how much Punjab could be squeezed into a single line of longitude beyond his tinted window.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘The hospital.’
More silence. Rubber rolling across road. The growl of five-and-a-half cylinders. Cold, stale air. Johnny Cash.
The driver was still looking at him. ‘Where you from?’
‘Nangal. The Punjab.’
‘India?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bet this is a bit of a shock, eh?’
He didn’t know what to say. Shock? ‘Perhaps I will get used to it?’
But the driver just grinned back at him.
Sevanand asked, ‘Have you lived here long?’
‘Long enough.’ He cleared his throat and spat out the window. Most of it came back. ‘So, you seen plenty of dead bodies?’
‘Many.’
‘They sorta … spook you out?’
Sevanand stopped to picture a dead body: an old man with sunken cheeks and prominent eyebrows. ‘It’s nothing, until the colour goes out of them.’
‘What then … like a leg o’ lamb?’ Half-grinned, half-grimaced.
‘The skin is surprisingly tough to cut … like leather.’
‘Christ, that’ll be us one day, eh?’
Sevanand imagined his own lifeless body sitting up in bed in a motel room, his tongue protruding from his mouth, his left hand clutching his Coober Pedy brochures. Or spread across the highway, his stomach cavity exposed, his intestines sizzling on the hot tar. He looked across the desert, then at his hands. ‘The Lord said, As a man casts off worn out garments and takes on new ones.’
He looked up at the driver, who smiled and asked, ‘You a Bible basher?’
‘Hindu. The Sankhya Yoga.’
‘Ah …’
‘The Bhagavad Gita.’
‘Fuck!’ He pumped the accelerator as the car lost power. They drifted to a stop.
‘This would be the carburettor?’
‘This would be, mate.’
They popped the bonnet and got out to look. The driver, Trevor (he could see his name badge), showed him the small metal part sitting loose in its cradle. ‘That’s what you get for rushing a job,’ he said, glaring at him.
‘I didn’t realise.’
Trevor kicked the front bumper. ‘Fuck!’
‘Perhaps, if it wasn’t ready you shouldn’t have used it.’
Trevor’s face turned redder as his hair follicles formed their own pockmarked landscape. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have fuckin’ called me.’
‘I don’t appreciate your tone.’
‘I don’t appreciate your …’
Attitude, colour, smugness, smell, race? He could just guess what Trevor was thinking.
Trevor took a deep breath. Stared at his passenger. Shot forward and attempted to wave down an old Dodge truck.
‘Can I help?’ Sevanand asked, but his voice was drowned by the truck’s engine, and a loud stereo. He fanned fine dust, coughed, wipe
d his eyes and spat the outback from his mouth.
Trevor approached the driver and said, ‘I need a lift.’
‘Get in,’ the man replied.
Trevor looked back at Sevanand. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Can I come?’
He indicated the truck’s load of scaffold and replied, ‘Just a few minutes … maybe an hour.’
‘What should I do?’
But he was already in the cab, waving, and the old truck was pulling onto the road.
Sir, in CP people do as they want. There is no such thing as punctuality, an appointment, deadlines, promises—the simplest bits of courtesy. No, the driver did not return that night so I tried to sleep in the taxi. It was very cold and I put on four or five layers of clothing. There were lights, and tooting, but no one stopped. I understood the outback was a place where people helped each other. Not the case. As trucks passed they rocked the vehicle. So, at two or three in the morning I decided it was safer to sleep on the grass beside the road. I gathered my bags and found a hollow in the ground.
Sevanand stood surrounded by a soup of stars, high cloud and the distant light of what he assumed was Coober Pedy. He turned on the spot, searching the desert, and after two complete orbits looked down to find himself buried up to his ankles in sand. He pulled himself free, sat down, took off his shoes and emptied them. Found himself placing them neatly together, taking out his wallet and arranging it beside them, removing his watch and placing it in his left shoe and finally, opening out his handkerchief and using it to cover his effects. ‘Lord Krishna,’ he called, but there was no echo, sound, companionship. Just a dampening, a deadening—of noise, movement and thought.
‘Coober Pedy!’
A car sliced through the night.
‘Thank you very much,’ he whispered. ‘Mate.’
Then, his wife appeared before him. She was smiling, and laughing, and said, You’ll always remember your first night in the outback.
He wasn’t laughing. And last.
Come on, think of why you’re doing this.
Why?
For us.
And he could hear the voices of his children in the distance.
We can’t continue in this flat, she said. There’s a whole new life itn the West. We’d be mad stay here.
He could see the desert full of people: Buddhist monks, drink sellers, lepers, children, a taxi navigating the crush of bodies and police chasing a gang of child thieves. Millions of bodies crowding his world of nothing. The din of conversation, singing, prayer, ads for Pepsi blaring from a speaker, floating in the cold air and settling on the warm, hi-vis sand. There were five, ten, maybe fifteen million people, but no one person. Just numbers, like ibis crowding an estuary, or pigs waiting in a slaughterhouse yard.