by Alex Miller
He set up the little table under the window with the typewriter at its centre and a straight-backed kitchen chair and a ream of foolscap paper and at nine o’clock that night he began to write. He was exhausted, hallucinating, desperate to enter his own reality. He could not take another moment of dealing with his life and the mysterious needs of his troubled wife. He slid into the safety of his own world at once and without effort, breathing gratefully the free air of it, the image of himself and Frankie waiting for him. He might have been writing with his eyes closed. Thinking it onto the page. It was his cure. His medicine. His drug. It was long overdue. He was oblivious to his surroundings. The writing burst upon him. He didn’t struggle with it but let it take him and it rolled out ahead of him; he knew it, it was written in his heart. He didn’t resist.
The two of us sitting on our night horses watching the dawn, the sweet smell of the Mitchell grass drifting across the savannah, the cattle rousing from their night camp. Me and Frankie, the pair of us, the jingle of our horses’ bits. The relief riders coming out and greeting us softly. And we rode in and gave up the night horses. Frankie went to the blacks’ camp and I squatted by the cook’s fly and ate my damper and beans and the gristly piece of salt beef and I drank down the scalding black tea and I made a cigarette and smoked it. Frankie and I met up again on our morning horses and rode out to check the isolated billabongs along the anabranches of the river, and those mysterious gilgais way out on the plain, looking out for signs that they had been visited by cleanskin bulls—the wild mickies, as we called them. Those loner beasts hating us getting close to them in the open, and they turned to face us and Frankie rode in on the head of the beast and wheeled away and I slipped in behind and grabbed the young bull by the tail and wheeled away, dumping him in a cloud of dust. Which was what we were there for and we had our system for dealing with them. Just now we were enjoying having nobody there to second-guess our performance. Getting away from the camp and heading off on our own out onto the dry flood plain. That’s what we liked to do. The cool morning silence of the whispering Mitchell grass. Nothing between us and the infinity of that vacant horizon line. Frankie and me squatting next to our horses by a small depression in the plain, a gilgai of his Old People, known to him in his bones. Our mounts with their heads down, loose-reined, bits clinking, sucking their fill of the same water we were drinking ourselves. The low morning sun glare off the shivering plain so intense we had pulled the brims of our hats down. Squinting out there towards that emptiness, the dizzying line between the land and the perfect emptiness of the white sky—an absence inclining us to muse on our own paltry existence. Specks we were, out there; ants to the lords of creation. And we were compelled to look. If we did not look, we felt the tug of that vacant horizon in our minds, and sooner or later we turned and looked towards its consuming vacancy, shocked again by the emptiness, the secret it withheld from us. Early morning yet and that line still a precise demarcation between the earth on which we rode and the heavens that stood above us. By mid-morning the horizon would be lost to a dancing pulse of heat haze. We were done with drinking water and we shoved our quart pots back into their leather pouches and buckled them and we rolled smokes and lit them. The smell of our tobacco the perfume of luxury to us, a comfort nothing else could provide. Beside the gilgai a hard-grown mimosa bush, a precious cluster of sweet-smelling blossoms on the single spindly branch of it that was not dead, the rest fit only for kindling. Besides the trampled Mitchell grass the old mimosa was all that grew there on the rim of that gilgai. No other shrub or tree, but a vast intimidating nothingness to a white man like me, pressing its emptiness against my mind. Frankie and me and our horses but a small detail of composition beside that hard-grown mimosa hanging on to its remnant life out there, alone in the wildness of the place, shedding its sweetness to the wind, standing on the edge of the small depression where a man or a beast might find a drink. I asked Frankie how it was such gilgais came to be out there on the plain. He looked at the standing water and said nothing for some time. Then he said, ‘Well, they are just here, old mate.’ And he looked at me and grinned. I knew he would not tell me more. I did not ask him for more. I knew better than to do so. I was sure he harboured in himself a deeper and richer knowledge of the place but was forbidden by the law to speak of the sacred origins of such features, for all such things were sacred and had their stories, each part holding all the other parts in place. That much I knew. A web of belief of the country and its ways I would never share and had no wish to trespass on. The story belonging to Frankie. It was never to belong to me. My story something else, its pieces broken and dispersed, rootless. I knew enough of Frankie’s country to know I knew nothing much of it. My respect for the richness of it lodged in my love of my friend. There was no deeper exchange to be had in it, only the distance of my willing ignorance against the calm intimacy of his knowing. In our friendship we had that between us. Even before Frankie and I rode back into camp the old men would have known if he had betrayed his place, and would have punished him for it according to their law. He rightly feared the old men and respected the law that bound him to them and to his country. Just how those old men would have known such a thing is beyond me. But I had seen it. Their knowing of things that were unspoken. The grim elder, the holder of the knowledge, a wrinkled and bearded old man who had never given my presence among them a second glance, his eyes deep set and twinkling in his black face sheened with sweat. A man resembling the trees and rocks themselves of his own country. A man entirely contemptuous of my momentary existence among his people. For him I was no more than a pale flickering at the edge of his vision. This same old man had predicted with eerie accuracy the impending arrival of a mob of cattle from the west two weeks before we saw the first sign of their dust way off across the plain one chill morning as the sun was coming up. When they drew close later that day a dozen silent blackfellas stood off from the great piker bullocks they were driving. The old knowledge man was the only one of Frankie’s mob to venture to speak with the newcomers in their own language. He knew their language and knew where they came from and how long they had been travelling without anyone ever telling him these things. Those wild men sat their horses and stared emptily through us and would not come alongside us on their still mounts, their long hair and beards gleaming in the sun, their horses unshod, iron-hooved beasts with eyes like the eyes of their riders, seeing distance. Two white men with them, brothers, whose speech I could not follow, their tones so deeply bound in with the language of the blackfellas they travelled with. Frankie said they were wild men and could not be trusted. They were seeking permission from the old man to come in to water their mob and move on through the country. Those wild black riders did not smile or respond to our friendly hand signals but stood off on their horses, silent, watchful and aloof. An old man among them stepped his horse up to meet our old man and they both got down and squatted on the ground and talked, a curl of smoke rising between them. It was a deep protocol beyond even Frankie’s understanding. I watched it unfold, mesmerised. That meeting out there between those two old men troubling and inspiring me. For I knew myself to be looking on at a dimension of existence I had never dreamed of. I was an invisible stranger for those old men and counted for nothing with them. When they were done and rose and climbed onto their horses and turned away from each other, the wild men eased their roany mob of old pikers along with no shouting or yelling but with just one sharp whip-crack parting the stillness of the air. They did not look back at us. We might not have been. We watched them until they and their dust merged into the mirage of distance and they became a dance along the skyline, intermittent and flickering, then gone. And they might never have been, except for the churn of mud in the long waterhole where their beasts had milled and drunk their fill—those slow, heavy old beasts, walking to the slaughterhouse; a silent mob with no cows bellowing for their calves, no frantic calves searching for their mothers, just defeated old pikers from the scrublands of the far west. Frankie t
old me later they were making for the railhead at Kajabbi, a spur line north of Cloncurry, where there were yards for loading beef cattle in those days before the road trains cut out the rail. They had been on the drove from the west for months. I did not ask him how they knew to navigate their way through this country that was strange to them and hundreds of miles from their homes. It was the kind of question only a fool would ask. But the fool in me wondered all the same how they did it, finding their way from waterhole to waterhole in that vastness where there were no mountain peaks or outstanding landmarks to navigate by, but only the infallible map of the stars at night. And what guide were the stars if you were seeking water for a thousand head of cattle? I could not even begin to guess the answer to such a question of life and death. Seeing those two old men squatting on the ground, their patient mounts standing loose-reined behind them, I experienced an acute sense of having no place in their country or in the meaning of their lives, and if Frankie had not been my friend and beside me I might have decided to leave and have done with that country right then…
Robert inscribed the truth of it in simple unadorned prose. His way of telling it an echo of the calm truth Frankie and he had known together in the vastness of that country, the silence and the stillness of the endless Leichhardt scrubs, a land where they themselves became the substance of their own dreams, the mirage of their steady advance across the plain dancing on the vacant skyline, the yellow cloud of fine dust rising above the shuffling herd. It was where the story lay, waiting within him for the telling. The poetry of it. If Frankie were ever to read it, it must be for him the way things had been for both of them. The abrasion of his life, the knowledge of injustice in the conditions of his days and in the days of his mob, the corrosive cruelty of their lot as outcasts in their own country, their terrible loss of dignity and freedom in the face of the white man’s indecent overlordship. Robert heard the sad condition of injustice as the steady background hum of his story. The subdued anger and the quiet decency of the black stockmen in the face of their humiliation.
35
Robert loathed having to emerge from the zone of his writing and re-enter the world of the flat and Lena and their daily needs. The two worlds did not know one another and had no desire to know one another. And when the world outside his storytelling insisted and broke in on him he was irritated and angry and had no patience to attend to it but thrust it aside and went on with his work. He ceased to listen. He didn’t hear her when she called him. And at last she no longer called but stayed in bed and shut the door. There was no room in him to care. He didn’t care. So he didn’t see her downward drift over the weeks and months and had no sense of its seriousness. Or if he did have some sense of it, he was unable to respond. He cared only for his writing. It was for him a trance of days that became weeks and months. He was drunk with it. Drugged. Nothing could distract him. He was an addict. And when he was not writing he was nervous, agitated, anxious to get back to it.
Each morning he woke early and got out of bed, showered, dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, made tea and lit his first cigarette. Then he sat down at the typewriter and wrote, following the richly layered prompts of his memory and imagination. And at six-thirty each evening he got up from the desk and walked to the university and cleaned the offices in the Woolley Building. While he was vacuuming the floors and emptying the wastepaper baskets and manoeuvring the polisher along the hallways, the story of Frankie and himself was tense in his mind. If someone spoke to him, he was listening to his own story and failed to hear them. He was blissfully in thrall to the seductive illusion of creating his meaning through writing. Deferring reality. Deferring his duties and his worldly worries. His responsibilities neglected. He didn’t question his purpose in writing. He didn’t pause to measure the value of what he was doing or reflect on the harm or the good that might come from it. He was seduced and did not resist.
Robert’s lifelong faith in writing as the source of his salvation was established in him during those weeks and months. The dimension without time won him. He was more alone with people around him then than he was while he was writing. He carried afterwards no memory of what Lena had been doing during that period. When he thought about it there was nothing there. He had no sense of her during that time.
So the crisis, when it came, was for him sudden. He was innocent of its approach. It was so sudden he left a sentence unfinished and never returned to it. As usual, when he got home from his cleaning job that evening he went straight to his table by the window and began to write out the scenes that had been entertaining him while he was at work. Her cry, which he realised had been repeated, eventually claimed his attention and he stopped typing and listened. He didn’t hear it as a human cry but as the feeble sounds of an injured animal. When it came again it sent a chill through him. The instant he stood up he realised, with a shock of the obvious, that it was Lena making that desperate sound.
He went over and cautiously opened the bedroom door. The light was on, the same naked bulb hanging from the centre of the low ceiling that hung there the day they moved in and which Lena had objected to and said he must get a shade for. She had said it was squalid. He remembered her using the word with distaste; it flickered in his mind now as he stood at the door looking in at her lying in their disordered bed, the sheets unwashed, the room dense with their smell. His own familiar staleness and the indefinable quality of Lena’s lonely struggles throughout the days of his neglect. The heat of summer was long past. She was clutching the blanket around her chin in just the way she had clutched the covers after her abortion. With a shock of guilt he saw her as a lonely, frightened, lost young woman, a woman aged before her time. Her hair wet with sweat. The hairs sticking darkly to her forehead and the pillow, her cheeks hollow, her skin yellow and tight across the bones of her face. She stared at him, her mouth open, her eyes huge, filled with fear and panic. Without a word she pulled the covers down and lifted her nightdress. Her stomach was bloated and tight, her belly button like a small mouth, twisted out of shape by the pressure.
He said, ‘Jesus Christ! Look at you! I’ll get a doctor.’
When the doctor arrived he curtly asked Robert to leave the bedroom. It was after midnight. Robert stood outside the bedroom door trying to hear what was being said, but the doctor was speaking softly and Robert could only catch the odd word. The doctor was in there with her for at least a quarter of an hour. Robert was filled with intense feelings of guilt and remorse and fear. With him she’d lost everything familiar to her: her friends, her job and her colleagues, even her piano and her love of music. That was how he saw it. He blamed himself.
The bedroom door opened. Robert stepped away as the doctor came out.
The doctor closed the door behind him and only then turned to face Robert. He was a tall man, in his mid-forties, clean-shaven, fit-looking, lightly tanned, dressed in a linen suit and tie, his bag in his hand. His manner was cold and disapproving, his tone severe, even contemptuous. ‘Listen to me, young man,’ he said, keeping his voice low, speaking slowly and with deliberation. ‘If you don’t get a proper job and smarten up and lead a decent life your wife may not get over this.’ He waited. Robert said nothing. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’
Robert felt humiliated standing there in front of this man. The doctor’s attitude confirmed his self-doubt. He was incapable of defending himself.
‘Your wife has told me the whole story,’ the doctor said. ‘She tells me you have a university degree. I want you to give me your assurance that you will get a job, and that you will look after her and begin to lead an orderly and normal life.’ He waited.
Robert understood that for the doctor his neglect of Lena and his obsession with his writing were some kind of unspeakable perversion. He said, ‘All right. I hear you. I’ll get a proper job as soon as I can.’
The doctor stared at him for a long time, a look of dislike in his brown eyes. The malevolence of his gaze. He used a term then to describe Lena’s condition,
which Robert forgot at once. Robert stood before him, angry, ashamed and confused, miserably aware of the doctor’s contempt.
The doctor shook his head, as if their situation defied belief. ‘My God! People like you…’ He left it at that.
Robert let him out and watched him going down the stairs. He wanted to yell after him, ‘Fuck you! You wouldn’t have a fucking clue!’ What did this man know of them?
The foyer door crashed closed behind him, sending its booming reverberation through the sleeping building. It was after one in the morning. Robert closed the door and went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. He took Lena’s hand. Her skin was clammy, her fingers limp.
She looked up at him. ‘I’m dying, aren’t I? What did he tell you?’ She started to cry, small helpless gulping sobs rising up from her chest. Her breathing was congested and he had a dread that she might have an asthma attack.
He said firmly, ‘No, you’re not dying! Okay? Stop panicking!’ He squeezed her hand. ‘He said I had to get a proper job. And I will.’ He felt anything but confident of this, but he said it firmly and with conviction. ‘You mustn’t panic. It doesn’t help.’ He tidied the strands of hair that were lying across her face and he bent down and kissed her forehead. ‘It’s going to be okay. We’ll live differently. I’ve been selfish. I’m sorry.’
She said, ‘No, it’s not you. It’s this place. It’s like a prison.’