The road west humped across ancient floodplains, making for slow going on corrugations through sand drifts. Up ahead a purple cloud hung in the empty sky. Most strange: it wandered north and south as Veronica tightened a handkerchief over her mouth and raised an umbrella against the naked heat. They crept forward, the motorbike steering crabwise in the dust. Sand trickled into Colts’s boots and the front forks flummoxed in ruts. At some point the cloud made a decision, packed itself into an anvil shape, turned thick blue, swelled. Up ahead a wall of rain descended with a perfect sheen and roaring, and they couldn’t run or retreat as it approached with its arms out.
Their cheeks turned white, their noses red, as rain gulped down their collars, wet their ankles, irritated their noses. They stood with the bike helplessly humble, submitting to a drenching for ten minutes. When the cloudburst stopped it left a departing drumming in the ears.
Everything was soaked, including the matches Veronica searched for in a box held under her chin until she found a few dry heads and took a Players from a tin of dry twenties.
Colts tugged at the handlebars while she puffed and he calculated filching one for himself from her stash. The sun came out but the bike was stuck. Sheeting leftover water created foaming rapids of grit. Near by the hump where they stopped it ran into cracks in the ground and disappeared with a hurried chuckle.
Veronica draped blankets over the handlebars. Colts, after sitting sidesaddle, fist under chin and brooding, tried walking but stilts of mud on his Niblicks toppled him. He used a pocket knife, paring slices of muck from the soles. With the boots hung around his neck, he rolled up his trouser legs and picked his way along the claggy track barefootedly.
‘Where are you off to?’ said Veronica – a funny old question, as there was nowhere to go except the far horizon.
‘I’m looking for something,’ said Colts, mud squeezing up between his toes, the firm consistency extruding narrow, sausage-like rolls.
‘Not someone?’ she said. Buckler was a presence between them: deflated to one, overblown to the other. She thought she smelt goats and made an association with the forthrightness of Buckler’s sweat.
Colts couldn’t tell her it was really those horses he was still looking for. At first they were blobs of mirage, then long-leggedly they broke off and he could almost see their blinkers. They fell back again into what looked like a four-wheeled mustering cart, a cook’s turnout. But, shading his eyes to be sure, the sight fell back even farther into the wavering broken horizon and Colts was almost blinded. Thus a vision became real and he found himself bringing it to earth. Could be his whole life would be dedicated to a job of search and answer in the outdoor light.
There was a stand of mallee nearby, its shade like strips of metal where bark lay curled and black. There Veronica pugged around as Colts grew small. She gathered dead twigs and made a fire, using a dry page from her sketchpad to get it going. Feeding the flames with damp, dappled leaves until one took, she sneaked a look over her shoulder and noticed the motorbike had more of a lean, but didn’t worry too much about that until a kind of sucking collapse came, and the bike slewed into the table drain. Though she wrestled to hold it steady and called for Colts, the angle increased and the motor sank in mud, ribbed cylinder vanes the gills of a suffocated fish.
Colts heard her but thought she was singing hymns, which she often did satirically: ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me . . .’ They always put her in good humour; there was nothing more definite when it came to promise than the worn old earth.
Veronica returned to her fire to dry her boots. As a young wife she had taken this very road west with Buckler to homesteads where she sat on sunset-blazed verandahs and sketched and painted while he politicked.
During those honeymoon years, in the dingo-howling dark of bush camps, Buckler had limbed from his stretcher and stripped off his singlet and undershorts. Dunc her darling dented soldier, he’d stood in the dim tent nakedly brushing off sandgrains and imaginary fleas, catching a lone mosquito in his fist and doing a meticulous dry wash, no hurry at all, careless of her watching as he gazed down his pale trunk and sun-reddened extremities and wrinkled penis with an expression of detachment. Yes, she would have to say she still loved his indifferent, corporeal, tangible being, his form and representation of male embodiment. Given the chance she would keep him around the way she saved bottles and jars holding form. Then look for the slit of light from his eyes looking her way, and hold him off in order to have him whole.
Buckler had continued over the New South Wales border and into South Australia for his rendezvous with Birdy Pringle that time, when the decision was made to better their lives by taking on the two orphans, Faye and Kingsley. It had been the Bucklers or Birdy by the toss of a coin, which Buckler made sure was double-headed. It was all so strangely wonderful to look back on, it brought her to tears.
Now in that bare width of country Veronica blinked, aware of Colts standing nearby and behind him a mob of goats. They pattered in the mud with a startled whisper and when she turned, touching her lips and smiling, they gazed back at her. Every dappled colour of the yellow earth and of the blue cloud-scattered sky was in their coats, streaked browns and blue-greys, black-shellacked hides and washing-day whites as they propped, snobbishly eyeing her, all of maybe half a hundred balanced between curiosity and flight. Goats’ heads lifted, their tufty beards angled, their haughty eyes gazing.
‘Kingsley Colts,’ she breathed, ‘what have you brought me?’
‘Brought? I followed them.’
‘They’ve made a goatherd of you, then.’
‘Like fun they have, they’re hers.’ Colts indicated a blob of haze. ‘You won’t believe it, she’s coming over to help with the bike.’
‘She?’
It seemed amazing in the circumstances, unless you knew amazement really, how it came in everyday moments. Two women owning the deserted country stripped of men and left in charge of the half-hatched.
A structure on four wheels lurched closer. It might have been the original of Buckler’s horse-drawn caravan taken back to its primal sketch of converted dray with curved iron roof on tree-branch struts, only lacking two children, a boy and a girl, large-eyed with small hopeful faces peering over the side-boards.
‘Who is she?’ said Veronica as the contraption lurched in. A tray shelf held sacks and drums, and what looked like an old garden seat, plump with pillows, in the driver position.
‘Some old dame,’ said Colts. ‘Struth. I’ll tell you what, hold your honker.’
The woman wore a heavy unbuttoned overcoat steaming from the recent downpour, her sagging breasts in a yellow, mudstained dress. On her head was a straw hat, a piece of sodden vanity. Two fat-pinched bloodshot eyes, a spread blue nose, stained teeth bared in a grin.
‘Where’s the mon?’ was her almost incomprehensible greeting.
Veronica was about to say there wasn’t a man, but bowed towards Colts.
The woman began clambering down even as the horses heaved to a stop.
‘Let me introduce myself,’ said Veronica, foolishly formal.
The other only grinned.
Colts backed off, sensing it was him involved in the matter of introductions.
The old dame advanced in the mud, weaving the flaps of her coat and driving him as far as Veronica’s smouldering fire.
‘A shrewd little ken all, ken little?’
He laughed exaggeratedly, the way he did when an unfair accusation was made, which always had truth in it.
She extended a mottled pink hairless arm, thick as a joint of pumped mutton.
Colts stood fast; she meant to give him a game of knuckles. ‘All right, missus,’ he said, ‘don’t lose your wool’ – and held his breath against the ammonia goat pong. As he pressed his fist against hers, shaping up, she splayed her fingers to baulk him, and he suddenly drew back.
> ‘My strike,’ she said, spittle frying on her lips, and rained blows that caused the fine bones along the back of Colts’s hand to burn and swell.
For an old lump she was quick, rocking on small feet, well balanced. He wouldn’t like to be the goat she held against the killing knife, backed to a fence, blood and hairs on her coat.
Veronica intervened impotently, ‘Stop this, really, I say there, what’s in it?’
‘A guid game never goes astray,’ said the woman. ‘The lady poets of Greece focht aye the foremost in their birthday suits.’
‘Is that the Scots’ accent I detect there, Mrs . . . ?’ said Veronica a little bit gaily.
‘Lizzie Walker, I have no mon’s name.’
Spoken as if we’re supposed to know her, thought Veronica, as Colts looked on from under his hat, nursing his carpal bones, surliness changing to a leer. To be famous in this country you only had to live there.
Somehow the three of them and the two horses dragged the motorbike from the mud. Veronica caught the giggles, Colts frowning at her. A man must be stern. They unbolted the sidecar and using ropes raised the bike in pieces to the back tray of the wagon and set off walking, the horses hauling in the dusk. It was not altogether understood, but slowly an impression was gained, that Lizzie Walker regarded the bike as salvage, a rightful prize.
Turning south following the goats they found elevated sandy ground just on dusk. Goats circled, firing pellets of black dung as the woman hopped around finding a nanny to milk. Colts collected sticks for a cooking fire. It was buck stew and not bad either.
Lizzie Walker raised a square bottle to the firelight after pouring a splash into her guests’ mugs. She stirred the pot and spoke of her life. There had been men, but they couldn’t hold her.
‘The one was dim as a post from taking blows to the head. The other had fingertips like pebbles from pushing needles through leather. The drover, Bulleen, whose wee cat this was –’
‘Cart?’
‘Fezackerly. He was guid tae me but loved his stock more. A butcher mon had a way of twisting an animal’s neck until it fell to the ground. Knew his way round bones and drank till his liver went phut. There was the bootmaker, he carried the clap. Curry, I gave a well-known jockey, mon burped like a frog, stank of bad teeth and was puir in the stomach unless he rode. Luton – should I mention names? Luton’s hams were like a grasshopper’s drumsticks from operatin’ the pedal radio on guvvermint outposts and chasin’ gins. See what’s ahead of ye, laddie, if ye’d be a mon. See what ye’re bound for, what ye’ll be?’
Lizzie Walker was travelling hurt through a band of poor soil called Australia. It lent itself to that.
They reached the rail line at last, where a carriage served as the schoolhouse. The teacher’s residence was a second carriage on termite-proof blocks under the bare sun. A few tin huts with canvas awnings ached with loneliness, slapping in the oven-wind, clinging to the edges of the iron tracks with desperate closeness. A boy and a girl, twisted with shyness, watched.
Lizzie Walker tramped along the railbed scavenging bottles thrown from trains and gathering papers blown from the railway camp. Her goats gambolled under an overhead water tank where there was a nibble of green pick.
‘Puir railway children. They learn to put miles between them.’
Awaiting the train, Veronica had last words with the goat woman while Colts sat on the siding with the bags they’d sorted from their lot. It was a simple transaction without stated reason. Veronica stood upwind from her as they haggled it out. Then she rejoined Colts.
‘How much did you get?’ he asked, acting as if every oil-stained lump of metal Buckler ever kissed was tagged for his unique inheritance. ‘You just let it go,’ he accused her.
All Colts had was a blanket roll and a billycan like a swagman born to the track. Veronica hadn’t much more. The boy’s boots on laces hung around his neck, bumped against his ribs as he paced the siding, keeping clear of Veronica, looking for a smudge of engine smoke to the east that would take them farther west. He’d had enough of her and found a plank of shade, squatted and closed his eyes.
THREE
DUNC BUCKLER HAD TWO MAPS, one with place names and the other cross-coded with numbers. ‘Use the first for bum fodder if we get sprung,’ he instructed Jack Slim, his corporal.
‘Shouldn’t we just swallow it?’ said Slim.
‘First Jap we see, you start, Corp. Masticate into spit balls. Force ’em down. That’s an order.’
They drove to places Buckler knew and the officer took tea with owners while Slim poked around sheds and listed machinery. Meantime Private Abe, their factotum, cadged them a boiling fowl or half a sheep, sometimes a wild duck on a scummy reach of station tank. Rabbits were plentiful with their small bones and stringy flesh, and just for variety’s sake a haunch of dark-meated kangaroo might be spared from the dogs.
Buckler kicked tyres, made assessments of national value and recited the law of requisition to be applied in circumstances unpredictable but hasty if the Jap took the north. Such grandiose sheep stations they were – soil blown stripped, property names sand-blasted from galvanised iron sheets wired between posts on red sand tracks set back from rutted roads: Wonder Downs, Lily of the Valley, Hope View. A collection of tin sheds, the kitchens a bed of ashes.
In a high-stalking Chevrolet wagon crossing Australia slantwise, Buckler and his duo emerged from grey saltbush country into red sand mulga country, into broken golden downs of spinifex with purple ranges on the skyline.
They camped in dry creekbeds burning red gum logs, from which spiders and foxes, lizards, red-bellied black snakes, native cats and ground-nesting swallows emerged on the run. The road through the ranges revealed station after isolated station, the homesteads looking whole from a distance being built of stone, empty-eyed when the Blitz lurched closer, abandoned as the region returned to desert. An inventory was accumulated worthy of the industrial revolution: boilers, mine batteries, pumping engines, electric and motorised contraptions of many sorts. Stranded tide-wrack from a generation of defeated hopes, Buckler’s own included?
He wouldn’t say that.
It felt almost halfway across the continent to Jack Slim and somewhere short of no-place to Abe, who relished the going in his lip-smacking foreigner’s way. Buckler believed the big Commonwealth offered such reffos the biblical factor, a parable of existence’s last stab to the philosophical brain.
‘We haven’t even started yet,’ promised Buckler, wiping his mouth with a kind of turbulent delight while his pair of six-bob-a-day tourists gaped. When the new moon dangling the evening star came up, his Byron rang:
The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two . . .
And promptly Slim gave the next few lines, chapter and verse:
Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon Broke out of bounds o’er th’ ethereal blue, Splitting some planet with its playful tail, As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.
Buckler couldn’t keep anything from Slim. Veronica, damn her knowledge, and Colts kicked out of school were on Buckler’s trail – the news in a letter dust-lined in his kit, forwarded from Brigade HQ and carried by the mailman until their paths crossed, he’d talked of it drunkenly while thrashing arguments with Slim. Women and children in the camp. History’s tares and tatters.
Across the artesian basin, when they came to a steaming bore drain, Buckler declared a bogey, the bush bath and shave. They splashed in cattle troughs with bars of soap and face washers, Slim playing a boy’s game – blocking the overflow and diverting it through the sand. Buckler left him for hours while he modelled canals, rivers and dams, singing and lost to himself on all fours with his balls dangling from his army shorts like a dog’s.
‘I’ve owned up to another
kid,’ supposed Buckler, who liked Jack Slim though couldn’t get the measure of him exactly. Agreeable, jokey, smart-hitting the way they turned them out from Sydney University, which was to say with the shininess brought up, buffed with civilisation and then smudged a little in the colonial style. He worried that Slim was a card-carrying commo, but made allowances for youth and education – Slim telling about being kicked from school early, a time of hardship on the wallaby track before he studied at night and won a teaching scholarship. They were open with each other based on affectionate sincerity. On grounds of pinko conscience Slim believed it was all right to defend Australian soil, but as for expeditionary forces of the kind Buckler craved, forget them.
Up the back of the Blitz buggy they carted pots and pans, surveyors’ pegs and crates of infernal tinned meat. They had bags of dried peas and a sack of Eyre Peninsula wheat, which Buckler sprouted with the exactitude of an agricultural ace. A winch and short-handled spades and a fury of digging got them out when they bogged in sand. There was always the stink of fuel drums, which Buckler twitched over draining, saving what they had, refilling the drums from station stores and leaving a voucher in promise. Under a blacksmith’s shed he bolted a blade on the front with an arrangement of hinges, converting the truck into a push-puller able to clear the country of sticks, as he liked to say, boasting they might navigate the contraption on the diagonal, the full width of the continent if they pleased.
To which Slim said, ‘It’s never been done, except by Afghans on camels and by long-distance blackies carrying message sticks.’
‘Don’t try me.’
Slim strung an aerial between trees and they contacted HQ, reporting in code to their brigadier.
‘That code name, Scorched Earth, dunno why, it fills me with hope,’ said Buckler.
‘You seem to mean that,’ observed Slim, whose hobby on the track was working Buckler out. Their orders were to make an inventory of tools, motors, fuel in sealed drums and whatever they thought, when it came to it, useful if the army was forced to retreat on short rations through the arid zone, picking what it could from the skeleton of the land it called its own.
When Colts Ran Page 4