When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  ‘I’m totally and completely slave to Norm.’

  Fred took his chances: ‘So where does Claude fit in?’

  ‘Norm offered me to Claude after hours. Lent me, gave me, threw me in his way. Now Claude wants me to stay with him. I have to decide.’

  Fred looked at her. There was a sting of pleasure in the rhythm of her complaint. She couldn’t mean what she said, the way it sounded – threw? lent? gave? – a starlet of the amateur stage wearing out the stairs to the Public Health Officer’s rooms as the gon was a notifiable infection? Could that be her, like last year’s girl slamming him around in a KO sequence of punches to the aorta before moving on to the next bloke?

  ‘I’m an illustrator, a naturalist-illustrator,’ said Erica. ‘Claude’s got a book, a documentary film and a TV series coming up – educational, with the ABC. He draws, outline of animal postures, and they’re good, alive, you should see his mating kangaroos.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘But more is needed and he can’t do it all. I’m not sure I love nature as much as I’m meant to. As much as he needs me to. Or even if I love drawing for that matter.’

  ‘I’ll bet you’re good.’

  ‘I’m slow. Claude’s always moving on to the next thing, all go, he’s driven. I’m not sure I can keep up. All night in the darkroom’s par for the course for Claude. As for Norm, lab work, field trips, writing it up, analysing on two or three fronts with the Barrier Reef thrown in, that’s just lifeblood for Norm. He’s the youngest PhD they have. If he leaves the museum it will be for a university chair. He’s the next Alec Chisholm or Ronald Strahan, the next Jock Marshall or whoever. Everyone says so. Everyone loves him. Then there’s little me. I’m just very, very ordinary.’

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ said Fred.

  She said nothing, then said, ‘Thank you.’

  Firelight softened and mingled the shapes of figures around the rocks. Erica sat on her rock with a stringbag as a cushion, wearing a sleeveless bush shirt, khaki shorts, her knees together, her elbows on her knees, her strong chin cupped in her hands and her eyes inadvertently shining.

  ‘I drink with them on Thursdays at the Gladstone Hotel,’ said Fred. ‘Fast rounds. It’s always schooners. Claude’s told me everything I didn’t know about anything I don’t, but I’ve forgotten it already,’ he trailed off.

  ‘Like what for example?’ said Erica, as if this might be about her, or someone else, a rival he was told not to mention. He wished it was. Claude had the dilemma of a Shakespearean king – he had the queen; but other men wanted to murder him.

  ‘Sugar gliders,’ Fred said, caught in a situation where – but this was Fred – he was fundamental to the drama but irrelevant to the climax.

  ‘Sugar gliders, I love them. Petaurus, rope-dancers, lovely things.’

  ‘Rope-dancers,’ Fred saw the word, and Consuelo jiving with Pepe like a lovely snake.

  ‘Girls don’t get asked on Thursdays – have you noticed? The boys come round to the flat later, drunk, throwing pebbles at the windows, begging to be let in.’

  ‘Do they get let in?’

  ‘It’s against the rules.’

  That was the Hen House, then, on Burton Street – nurses, students, typists under the hammer of a baritone landlady with a five o’clock shadow and bulging, blue-veined biceps. It was a legend among blokes after a few chugalugs wondering where to go next. Fred saw the curtains twitch, the hand withdrawn. He saw himself, in some future scene, bellowing from the gutter:

  Those girls of Italy, take heed of them; They say our French lack language to deny, If they demand; beware of being captives Before you serve.

  Unhappily in love was Fred’s testament of personal authenticity – Act II, Scene I of what he was fitfully memorising for the next schools’ tour, if the roster clerks at Central allowed his leave without pay.

  ‘Monday nights they’re back from the bush,’ said Erica, ‘tired, starving. We all go out together. It’s greasy spoon night – William Street. They can be scathing about everything outside their work, but they’re not like workers, desperate workers, my lot: what they do doesn’t kill them. They love it over everything else.’

  People were drifting off to their sleeping possies.

  ‘Goodnight, Mister Fred.’ She stood and dusted her knees.

  A while later he saw her standing patiently by Claude Bonney till he finished a sentence. Then they were all spread out along the cliff-line in their unknowable alignments of sleeping bags and food sacks distributed for guarding against bush rats. Fred found a sandy slit just in from under the stars with a billion tons of rock over his head.

  At twenty-five, older than the brilliant Normie, closer in age to the brilliantly unpredictable Claude, both country-born boys like him but who’d got on brilliantly, Fred worked at a dead-end job stowing parcels vans on mail trains and sorting freight and waiting to hear if he’d ever be let back in to uni. Anything with wheels they rode up and down the platform before packing it in – bikes, pedal cars, pogo sticks. It was ineffably wasteful, the life of the working man: they drank stolen beer, ate purloined oysters, smoked pilfered cigarettes while sitting on their heels throughout the eight-hour day arguing philosophy and politics with trembly refugees, former professors from the Captive Nations and head cases known only by their nicknames, which, if used, drove them to murderous rages.

  Station assistant left time for learning lines and scribbling in a Spirax notebook while riding a rattling goods van out towards Macdonaldtown, sometimes for hours in a kind of dream as the trains were assembled for their night runs into the vast country. One day his old headmaster, Mr Hewan, had seen him, and let his eyes glaze over out of consideration for a Cranbrook boy fallen low. Another time Buckler ran for the Illawarra express and Fred hid behind a pillar. High above the station concourse a fat neon monk, brown-robed and chubby-cheeked, dropped iridescent grapes into a wineglass advertising McWilliams Sherry. Something deficient in the visual effect seemed perfect: the way if a grape dropped down the mind twisted the image and it shot out of the glass and went flying up into the grape cluster again.

  The pitiful scrapings of Fred’s working day – his bludger’s picnic – did not mean he was one with Buckler on the socialism racket, the equality dream being Buckler’s idea of poison to men’s relations. When a union rep came round, with pre-war memories, Fred heard stories of unmarked cars from the other side, of men in suits with waddy-dongers who descended from the North Shore into Surry Hills in the 1930s with all the pompous cruelty of unwritten law and lèse-majesté. Fred knew, from reading Buckler’s articles, that Buckler had been one of them, a would-be leader of the pack, who in his peevish retirement was sidelined from everything the century had hammered into him, and his inheritors, for better or worse, owned the day. Curiously they included Fred, his consolation prize.

  When Rusty came down from the country she shouted Fred tea in the Station Dining Room and she seemed to know better than he did what was ahead of him, that it was great: but then of course she loved him and believed in him. In terms of being believed in, Fred looked for a love equal to that. At twenty-five – quarter of a century old! – he felt as old as he would ever get. It seemed old enough to have done what he hadn’t done, as yet, which depressed him. Fred grubbed his way into his sleeping bag and adjusted his hip in a hollow of hard sand, placed his hands under his cheek and peered out at the stars.

  Just for tonight Fred invested Erica Molinari with loving perfection, getting for her what Rusty never had, seeing them sitting up late at a kitchen table swapping stories, married with children (a boy and a girl). Like children themselves hardly able to keep their eyes open they stumbled off, shedding their pyjamas into a hot pile on the bedroom floor. But Claude Bonney kept intruding. The phone rang and it was Claude. He saw Claude attached to high windows by suction caps and shining a dazzling white light
into the room. Awake, abruptly, it must have been around two a.m. and slugged by sleep he saw it – a light that rode in the sky, dazzling Fred as it faded and he fell back into his hip-hole again. Somebody with a spotlight. Up in the sky. How very strange.

  TWELVE

  MORNING AROUND THE COOKING FIRE, Fred stirred his lumpy grains and chewed his dried apricots softened by overnight soaking in spring water. An early mist drained off through the treetops. Erica looked numb, shivering beside the fire wearing a man’s moth-eaten pullover. ‘I could have done with another hour,’ she grumbled.

  ‘Had a rough night?’ Fred wanted to say, but didn’t. Without any rights in a matter he could still feel stung, and it showed.

  ‘Dig in,’ he announced in general, swivelling around on his heel, holding out an aluminium dish.

  This offer for anyone to share his seeds rang a bit hollow. Erica took some and flicked a dollop onto Claude’s plate. They sat hip to hip, a little bit dazed, both of them. Just to confirm the dissolute impression she turned to Claude as if Fred wasn’t standing beside them and gave Claude the unmistakably dazzling smile of a woman awakening into love. Claude gave her cheek a slow brush with the back of his hand. What a shithead, what a seducer. Oh, don’t you know Claude Bonney that you are fated to reckon with others when there’s winning to be done?

  Fred thought of the light he’d seen in the middle of the night – mysterious, hovering, dazzling – and then gone back into a thick muck of sleep. Resentment claimed that brilliance: a surge of longing for Erica, insatiable as a moth’s ache. Just off the fire a cast-iron pan held bacon, scrambled eggs, baked beans. A two-gallon billy held strong black tea with floating sticks. Others swooped but Fred ignored plenty on the grounds of pride. His stocky, greedy frame had needs distinct from his mind’s elevation, however, and when there was still some left he turned his back on Claude in particular and shovelled it in.

  ‘Fred? Freddo?’

  Odd man out has feelings, so wait, was the message neoned across Fred’s stocky shoulders. Then, having pulsed his sour grapes back up into their bunch, he turned around.

  Erica picked the floating sticks from a mug of tea and handed it to him. ‘I’m sorry if I bitched a bit last night,’ she said. ‘You were terribly sweet. How did you sleep?’

  ‘Like a pig.’

  ‘Did you see the light? At two in the morning the whole sky lit up. Everyone’s talking about it.’

  ‘It woke me but I have a habit of thinking things like that are just in my head.’

  ‘Oh, they sometimes aren’t,’ she said, ‘surely not everything is,’ leaving Fred to wonder if he really wanted to be confused by her, just in order to hope. Her physical proximity gave an answer – skin of dull gold, a perfect stillness in the way she stood with her knees a little awry and her pearly toenails grubby from campsite dirt and showing through the straps of her leather sandals.

  ‘You could get bitten by a snake in those,’ he said.

  The subject of the Sydney Rockclimbers was UFOs, but Normie and Claude debated propensities of light, atmospheric lensing effects, temperature inversions dimming and enlarging distant pinpricks of light – headlights on the Dividing Range, refracted landing lights of small planes below the horizon, or, listen to this, a small plane piloted by a maniac they knew, Gilbert Dalrymple, with a gravel airstrip on his family’s hardscrabble farm. They’d gone to school with him – a skinny, freckled ratbag grown into a handsome, copper-haired Robert Redford look-alike in a bomber jacket with a turned-up fur-trim collar.

  ‘But what about aliens?’ said one of the other party. ‘UFOs.’

  Normie gave a high laugh, his trademark of intellectual contempt. ‘UFOs,’ he said. ‘U bloody fucking F fucking Os – I’ve never heard so much crap in three letters. Put it the other way around,’ he challenged the Sydney Rockclimbers, hazarding aliens scouting the earth for landing sites because humankind was sending out all sorts of crisis alarm signals: ‘Scrap UFOs. Make it OFUs – O, object, F, flying, U, unidentified – would you be so convinced what it was? No, you wouldn’t. And you’d have it perfectly described as a natural phenomenon. An OFU. “Must be a natural effect”.’

  ‘But what?’ came the peevish reply from the girl in the Rockclimbers’ party.

  ‘Do your science,’ said Normie. ‘It’s what it’s for.’

  The camp site was like Pitt Street. Somebody shouted there were horsemen coming. Everyone peered back down. There they were, riders head to tail in the vertiginous valley of the Isabel, ascending a fire trail in sheriff’s posse formation, sparks flying from hoofs. ‘They’ll be that hairy wool tie brigade, the Knoxes,’ said Claude. ‘They never come up here, but they’ll want us to know it’s private land and warn us off trespassing.’

  ‘If it’s Tim Knox I’ll talk him round, no problem,’ said Normie. ‘Don’t mention it, though,’ he added, going around to each of the small group of core mates (Fred included) – meaning don’t mention it was private land to the cameraman, Bob Flitch, and his offsider, the sound recordist, who were already feeling conned over putting their lives at risk, being asked to dangle from ropes while operating camera and mike. It wasn’t in their contract (verbal, with Claude), but then neither was staying in their swags past breakfast with hangovers, said Claude, while the rest of them kicked their heels waiting.

  When Claude went to them, two grubs on the dirt, and banged a spoon on a saucepan, Flitch barked without getting up that they could have stayed at the pub in the Junction and still got to the Walls in time. ‘He’s been spewing,’ Claude said when he came back to the others. ‘There are half-digested onion rings on the bursaria thorns.’ It was Claude’s first venture into documentaries. He was feeling the strain. His eye for detail was hungry, but dyspeptic.

  Two soldiers arrived for the climb, a senior Australian officer, Chook Hovell, and a former commando adventurer, Gideon Pugh. The commando was the one who’d put an ice-axe through the skull of his best friend during a delirium episode in Antarctica. This information was impressive, otherwise two soldiers were the same as everyone else – no braver, no less afeared of gravity waiting on a whim of crumbling rock. Yet the knowledge they were soldiers kept them apart and a whiff of competition drifted on the breeze. Chook Hovell (of Hovell Mills, the flour-milling dynasty) had risen through the promotion ranks since winning the MC as a captain in Korea, doing it hard in barracks and jungle command posts when he could have lived the country life like his cousins, the polo players and Royal Easter Show grandees, the Pullingsvale Frizells. He was now a brigadier.

  They’d made a separate camp in the night, now they came up to the overhang, ready for the day. Their arrival motivated Flitch into getting his camera out and starting work with a will. No longer a young man, he’d been a photographer with the 2/1st Battalion in Crete, escaping to Egypt in an open boat and navigating with a map of the Med torn from Pix magazine. The story was deemed unlikely by Claude, but Hovell vouched for this gloomy dog of a man who looked like death and could not find work in the film and television business despite having shot footage with Charles and Elsa Chauvel and taken flattering stills of Chips Rafferty, who was not a handsome man. In the code of Claude Bonney all were equal on the slopes, but what Fred liked was the underlying elitism and the way it couldn’t be suppressed. As in acting you could be the best but still had to wait for the role to allow you. In that there was no call on democracy, architecture was the same – hold to the structural vision, ignore the rest – and just on this point Fred agreed with Buckler. The hand of authority surpassed consensus.

  Looking up at the Isabel Walls in the changed light of morning, Fred had trouble working out where it was he’d scooted vertically as a boy. He’d been surer last night, on arrival. Now he began to have doubts over whether this was even the same place. An amble around the cliff-line would tell him, but before he could start there were groupings to be sorted. The Hovell Foun
dation was paying Claude’s film and photographic costs and Erica’s wages if she decided to join him. Hovell, who was well past forty, had never climbed. He was peerlessly willing, nonetheless. The commando Pugh was one of Claude’s toughs from the Carstensz Pyramid – an ice climber, a former Royal Marine who’d mixed it on the heights with ex-Nazis.

  ‘Meet Fred Donovan,’ said Claude, doing the introductions. Fred gave Hovell the sardonically friendly salute he sometimes gave Buckler, and something about the way Fred slung him the fingers made Hovell look at him twice.

  ‘You must be the architect,’ he said, giving Fred the satisfaction of having been talked about, and having been talked about in the shape of the most idealised conception of himself, beloved of both Rusty and Buckler – ‘architect’ – of which ambition in his life so far he had fallen short, a role that might nonetheless leave behind at curtain-fall something more enduring than just the shimmer of an effect.

  Chook Hovell and his commando had an air of having seen things, done things, that necessarily made them sad, proud and ashamed. (Fred, of all people, could guess: he was a reader of seared emotions.) They were recently back from Malaya and Indochina, now doing higher duties at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and needed the dry crackle of the Australian bush in their ears, Hovell said, and the whiff of Australian dust in their nostrils to know what they stood for. They held back, checking and re-checking their ironmongery of karabiners and pitons. The commando, Pugh, was a short, square man, of the sort that was said never to get on well on rock, with legs like barrels. It showed how you could be wrong. Chook was almost freakishly tall and thin. He was well over six feet with a narrow protuberance of chest bones that crowded up towards his throat and made him look suspended in the act of swallowing, even while talking. His face was narrow, his nose beaked and his jaw was angular, off-centre, and he had a strange need, every few minutes while eating, to lay down his spoon, take hold of his jaw with both hands and crack it back into line. His eyes were something else altogether: they offered trust.