‘I was in the lottery but my number never came up,’ said Hooke.
‘Would you have gone if it had?’
Hooke barely understood the question. Of course he would have gone. That was the deal offered, just as it was when Careful Bob went to North Africa to fight the Eyeties and then to Ambon against the Nips. Only later he might have seen things differently.
‘I was a tad too old for that game of marbles,’ said Merrington, giving his polypipe a flick on the rails to clear it of muck. ‘So I wasn’t given the privilege to serve.’
An almost sneer accompanied the words, again leaving Hooke wondering what Merrington meant. That Hooke should have enlisted anyway? That he was, on the contrary, wrong to have even taken his chances?
A phone call came. Merrington’s wife, Dominique, relayed information from under an umbrella at the side garden gate. The semitrailer Hooke promised was delayed past dark.
Merrington said, ‘Well!’ and shot an intense glare at the agent.
Hooke said, ‘Easy does it,’ and reminded him that nine calves were not a full semi load, and the driver was doing the rounds of the district, so might he just be patient like everyone else? Thus reprimanded Merrington became almost timid and asked Hooke down to the house.
With double whiskies replenished twice over they awaited the semi. It arrived past seven in the sodden winter dark. Half sloshed by then they loaded the stock by headlights, the driver using an electric prod and scampering terrified calves up the race in the rain. Merrington took the prod and tried it, liking the feel. ‘This is more humane than people make out,’ he said, jolting a poor animal more than was warranted. Then with a reckless leer he reached around behind his back and gave himself a wallop of volts in the left rear buttock.
‘Whoa baby! Order me one in the morning!’ he yelled.
‘Done.’
They took more drinks afterwards to re-warm their saturated bones. Dominique Merrington attentively plied them with potage velouté aux champignons and home-baked baps as they sat at the kitchen table, telling Hooke he must bring his wife next time. Hooke then rang Liz to explain his lateness and heard the arch humour in her voice, the note of interested surprise over who was getting him plastered. ‘Ted came to the school on Careers’ Day,’ she said, ‘with a stack of slides, and talked to Year Twelve about import–export. They thought he was funny.’
‘As in?’ said Hooke guardedly.
‘Ha-ha. They all want to make their fortunes now selling junk to China.’
‘You’ve met my Lizzie, then,’ said Hooke when he came off the phone.
Merrington shot Hooke an empty glance, grinding his bottom jaw sideways as if about to spit.
‘Have I?’
‘She’s a teacher.’
‘Oh, delightful. The little English one with plaits?’
‘Yes, she’s a Pom,’ acknowledged Hooke.
‘We liked her, didn’t we, Dom?’
Merrington’s wife turned from the stove ready to agree with him, but then catching herself and laughing and putting a finger to her chin, and saying, ‘No-ooh,’ that she hadn’t actually met Liz yet.
The two men moved into the expansive living room with dogs on the rugs and a fire of red gum in the grate. Hooke talked about his children – his own twin daughters by his first marriage and Lizzie’s two boys, Matt and Johnny, by hers. The twins lived with their mother, Barbara, in Sydney, in their second last year at St Catherine’s, and visited their home town irregularly. It broke Hooke’s heart missing them through their growing years, and now when they came it was only for a few days at a time because there was too much else going on for them in the ’smoke.
‘How old are the girls?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘I understand that age,’ said Merrington in a tone that implied, mysteriously, that Hooke didn’t. ‘They should come and visit some time.’
‘Visit?’
‘Look around.’
Merrington gestured about the room, indicating the rooms branching from rooms, to the boot room, the billiard room, the boiler room, to the north and south wings, the attic staircase, the attic rooms, the architectural legend of the Knox House by Leslie Wilkinson on the fabled Isabel. Dozens of paintings hung in the semi-gloom from the ceiling down to the backs of sideboards and couches, ornate frames, historical scenes of sailing ships and artic inlets, willow-lined creeks and standing cattle, blocky abstract squares, carnival clowns and botanical illustrations all mixed in together. The whole thing would mean little to the girls but the offer felt friendly.
‘This one’s called Springtime,’ said Merrington.
Above the fireplace a painting of female figures gave an impression of half-circles overlapping. Merrington stood beside it with a look of shy cunning, inviting a response. There were small floating leaves like mini-bikinis covering the obvious bits. Hooke peered close and recognised the signature.
‘I’ll be blowed,’ he said.
‘Yes, you’ve found me out, Al, I don’t just deal in rubbish, I dabble with the brush.’
He seemed genuinely humbled by the admission, by the revelation of a side of himself that he might possibly disdain revealing, the little ringleted boy with an artistic blush.
Dominique took Merrington’s arm and looked at him admiringly. She was French, angular and graceful, and as tall as he was. ‘We met in a galleree,’ she said, ‘by good chance. I had no idea who he was, rough-and-ready he wandered in from the demolition site next door. After that, well . . .’
She shrugged. He leered.
Hooke liked her. She was wife number three. New life, new wife, new spread, new friendships – it was a pattern in country purchases, newly emerging, a counter to drought-shrinkage.
‘I never know what to make of art,’ said Hooke, looking around at the pictures, all by known names, he supposed, and worth plenty. ‘But I like Norman Lindsay,’ he said, recognising a nude with plenty of chest.
He was unable to square the wispiness of the one over the fireplace with the bluff man who’d produced it. ‘Around Liz and the twins it’s a different story, they’d have lots to say.’
‘They could sit for me.’
‘Sit?’
Merrington made a scribbling motion with his hand on an invisible easel. ‘Twins pay double,’ he said, in a bargaining tone.
Hooke said, ‘For doing nothing?’
‘He’s a lightning croquis,’ said Dominique. ‘A fast worker.’
She meant sketcher. The double meaning escaped her. Merrington caught Hooke’s eye.
‘There would be no funny stuff,’ he pouted, ‘I can assure you of that’ – making Hooke feel he’d had an unworthy thought, when really he was just giving the man his due, reflecting warmly, through a haze of whisky and wine, how there were more ways of skinning a cat than were dreamed up in his little corner.
‘Think of it this way,’ said Merrington. ‘Get the beast right and you never have to feed it or shift it around or call the vet when it gets the staggers.’
‘Agreed,’ said Hooke.
‘Doddery means dollars in the art game.’
‘Ha, ha, I’m with you,’ said Hooke.
He stood, yawned, stretched, patted the dogs and said he’d better be going. The thought of Lizzie and the life they had was a magnet in the night – her warm toes pulling him over to her side of the bed when he came in, and the way they slept in each other’s arms until the early rooster crowed and they woke holding hands as trustingly as children.
‘It’s still early,’ taunted Merrington. ‘She’s got you by the short and curlies.’
‘Maybe so.’ Hooke grinned.
‘Dear me, Edooward,’ chided Dominique, joining the farewells at the door, ‘I imagine Alung doesn’t have the luxury of sleeping in like you do, dormir comme u
n loir.’
Feeling blindly towards his car, Hooke heard Merrington’s voice answering her back. It seemed the new wife was being paid out for verbal slips. But why shouldn’t a man sleep late if he could? Give Hooke the chance, he told himself, he’d sleep past noon every break he got. Merrington, thought Hooke, was lucky in not having to show up at daylight at yet another set of frosty yards, running through the same whiskery old palaver every day of his life for the sake of the national debt and carrying staff members effectively on the sorry list.
Although not every day really. For there were times mid-month or early in the week previous to cattle sales’ Fridays when Alan Hooke’s phone fell silent for up to an hour and the winter sunshine poured across the oiled boards of the agency. Then Hooke went around wiping dust from old photographs and chasing blowflies with a ruler. Then he gave the indispensable Jenny Garlick the morning off to visit her mother in the elderlies’ wing of the district hospital; and sent Henry Tuck on hourly rates delivering hardware around town from the back of the old Bedford while Colts sidled off at noon to the Five Alls and didn’t come back.
Then Hooke was ready for visitors to his alcove under the stairs, the green-stained electric kettle ready on the boil, instant coffee spooned from a jar and a packet of Chocolate Wheatens ripped open and available to anyone who wanted to grab. And intermittently in they came and grabbed – old graziers on their stick-assisted rounds, former loyal clients of Hooke & Hooke, bygone strong men of the Isabel diminished in their bones and down from their outlying acres and wind-rattled pioneer homesteads for good. For the betterment of their old age, and the pleasure of their wives, they’d bought brick-veneer bungalows in town with decent plumbing and cement driveways painted green. Randolph Knox, the odd man out in this sequence, had restored his stone cottage with a walled rose garden, justly famed.
‘Up at the Fives,’ thumbed Hooke when Randolph came in looking for Colts like an old tortoise wrinkly-necked escaped from his shell.
Hooke knew what was coming when the oldsters nudged him in the ribs and told him another one about Careful Bob, and the one time Careful Bob had got the better of them, the cunning old rat of Tobruk. Except Hooke knew it wasn’t just the one time because his father had taken the long view always.
The best example of this was the Bullock Run. It started with those thousand acres bought from the Homegrove Knoxes in the late 1940s. Along the rim of the Dividing Range were more parcels of land Bob had bought for barely the cost of a packet of fags in the ’50s and ’60s at mortgagees’ auctions, deceased estate clearances and the like. Once a scattered mosaic intersected by logging tracks, by the ’70s the paddocks passed to Hooke amalgamated whole. Now with the millennium looming they were a treasure.
The Bullock Run, four thousand acres of mountain fastness, responded to years of aerial supering and low stocking rates, whereas on Hooke’s home block, his rocky three hundred acres just out of town (the house within sightline of St Aidan’s belltower) Hooke ran fine wool merinos until they nibbled the ground almost bare, a choice little flock biding time and building up numbers among the wild turnip and saffron thistle. Hooke guarded their increase from marauding town dogs with a policy of once warned, never reminded. The sheep would remain a mere sideline until wool improved and Hollywood Boy III paid his way handsomely serving ewes. Meantime on the Bullock Run a herd of Black Angus covered the twins’ maintenance and education expenses and left change for a red MGB – or some such whim of nature – that Hooke planned wheeling in for Liz’s fortieth birthday surprise.
Then there was the time, the old men cackled, competing for Hooke’s attention, when Alan was too young to remember, so they said, when Careful Bob had driven warily around the corner near the Catholic church (back postwar when the roads in town were still rough dirt) and the passenger door flipped open and infant Alan rolled out on the gravel.
‘You wouldn’t remember. You sat there like a little king directing the traffic, covered in dust.’
‘Did I just.’ Hooke smiled.
‘Yeah, till Bob in the Saloon Bar of the Five Alls bought you a raspberry syrup and looked around wonderin’ where you was.’
So he had the old men. But since that evening with Ted Merrington, Hooke came back to a thought – opening the door to the street and advancing his indefinable understanding towards that peppery man. It was what he wanted, and why this should be so Hooke wondered. There had been no sighting of Merrington since the night of the big headache when Hooke had driven home seeing double all the way. At the end of that week the monthly statements had gone out as usual, including Merrington’s with a few necessary adjustments.
One day it snowed down to the thousand-metre contour line. Colts stayed home with pleurisy and Hooke went round and mixed him a whisky and lemon. In a distant gap of steely-grey clouds Hooke saw the Bullock Run dappled through the state forest. He imagined the black cattle with snow striping their spines and lacing their sturdy haunches. Get me up there, he vowed.
Suddenly there was Merrington, haggard and huddled in houndstooth sportscoat and Jaeger scarf, crossing windswept, deserted, inhumanly bitter-cold Gograndli Street and meeting Hooke face to face.
‘Hello, bud,’ he wheezed through his teeth.
‘Ted, good to see you.’
Merrington’s tongue, white as limewash, rattled as he shaped his words. Hooke had the feeling he’d forgotten his name, though not his function, as he grabbed him by the jumper and drew him close.
‘Where’s my cattle prod?’
‘Wasn’t that a joke?’ said Hooke, grinning because Merrington had that effect on him, and he was glad.
‘That says a lot.’
‘Ted, I’ll get you one.’
Merrington bit again: ‘The statement you sent me was a fine piece of work. My wonderful price for calves wasn’t so great after you cut it to ribbons with your costs and deductions and whatever else you chose to whittle it down with.’
‘Just trying to help you, Ted.’
There’d been a load of hardwood planks, Hooke reminded his client, six twenty-kilo bags of Lucky Dog and a galvanised steel wheelbarrow with a pneumatic tyre, top of the range, for which Merrington had overlooked paying since auction day and which Hooke, after the three-month allowance for terms ran out, had taken care of, as Careful Bob used to say, till now.
‘Sharp,’ said Merrington, without the trace of a grin.
‘I don’t like being touched, Ted.’
Best to make that clear to a man who was hard as they came. Whose sons, it was said, did his bidding or else.
Merrington rocked back on his heels and gave a small uncertain laugh. There came again that almost apologetic appeal in the collapsed body language – the retreat into meekness Hooke remembered after reprimanding him in the yards.
It needed to be said, but made the friendly side of Alan Hooke feel sick and sorry. ‘Come over to the shop for a cuppa?’
‘The legendary old men’s club.’
‘Is that what they call it?’
‘Oh, crafty. As if there’s something you don’t know. It was the first thing I heard when I came onto the Isabel. That you weren’t anybody till you’d got pissed with Colts and been tested by Hooke.’
‘Tested?’
‘My flaming oath.’
A car went past, separating them, and when Hooke stepped back onto the road he saw Merrington making his way uphill towards the post office, waving farewell as if nothing uneasy had passed between them, as if soon enough – although not today – he would drop in for that hot drink and friendly yarn.
A fact Hooke knew about people who headed up the hill as if to the post office was that up there, just over the rise, Kinloch United Sandison & Ball pitched for business, no matter how small it was. Could be that Merrington was already taking trade to Kinloch the Farmer’s Friend, as the franchiser, new to town, called h
imself, fitting out the staff in akubras and issuing monogrammed cotton shirts and moleskin trousers to both sexes.
Liz said there must be only one farmer using that lot because of where they put the apostrophe. Hooke liked her loyalty, but noticed his cashflow wobble a bit through the year.
Hooke walked down through the backroom storage shelves and went to the dim windows facing out into the lane. There he coiled cobwebs with his finger and gazed up into the hills at the far end of town. He knew every twist of track and crooked boundary line disputed and argued over since Careful Bob first piggybacked him through the kangaroo grass and showed him the place. A shaft of sunlight passed along the range and the snow showers melted from the far-distant slopes almost as he watched. In the good years of the decade now ending, when snow happened there was constantly the smell of spring in the air, rich and clean, well-watered. Not far off was the excitement of a good flush of feed translating itself into people’s wellbeing, interest-only loans, extensions of credit. The depressive cycles of drought were peaked in manic forgetfulness.
There were no cattle prods in stock but Hooke ordered one by express post. As soon as it arrived he threw it on the passenger seat of the Fairlane and drove the fifty minutes to Merrington’s Burnside. Walled ivy and attic window crenellations gave the place a lonely touch, as if it could never be brought to life and never had been. Flagstones on the long rose walk echoed in the morning stillness. Nobody was home. Even the dogs were gone. A small flush of green in the driveway wheeltracks showed there’d been nobody home for possibly a week.
When Hooke drove around the back of the house to check the sheds a bunch of cows galloped along the fenceline towards him, just that little bit hungry and wanting a bale of hay. There was hay in the shed though, and Hooke wondered where Merrington had bought it, who he’d bought it from. Seventeen cows meant that Merrington had bought an extra five from somewhere, and paid good money, too, because they weren’t cheap anywhere. They hadn’t come through Hooke & Hooke, and that thought justified Hooke’s taking liberties to find out more.
When Colts Ran Page 24