A man’s best moments came when he stumbled upon himself accidentally complete. If life had a purpose, was that what it was?
Maybe that’s why a crash, a charred dab in a golden paddock, had seemed the best awaiting Dalrymple, an enlarged full stop. Then there would have been no way to say he was somewhere he wasn’t, someone he wasn’t.
The crash came, but it wasn’t the flying sort. Erica handled the non-flying sort better because it wasn’t a tease of imagination or dirty fuel or metal fatigue, but a manageable life event – whereas Dalrymple thought: better the Bureau of Air Safety investigation, widow in the anteroom, than a lawyer’s office, the marriage counsellor or the certified shrink’s itchy couch, or (in the case of Kingsley Colts) the Napoleon couch in the corner of a sunny sitting room, a plaid blanket over the knees, in a centrally heated, convict-era cottage watching five-day Test matches on satellite TV.
Dalrymple was ageing by the calendar’s reckoning and felt it in his bones – although not too much yet, just a painful knee, a sore shoulder, a stiff neck creaking and catching when he turned his head too far. Ticker in the danger zone, however, and Dalrymple didn’t think about that, nor of his hands trembling when he lifted a coffee cup to supercharge waking. Single malt was always Dalrymple’s comfort, the pure refined version of heartland for someone homesick for unreachable places. Randolph Knox blamed Dalrymple for getting Colts back on the stuff, but to be honest, Dalrymple had riposted, Colts wasn’t choosy round spirits.
Clouds raced over, blue and hectic. It was dry, always dry out the plateau road, but cloudy with a buffeting wind. So many crosswind landings wrestled and won, they said Dalrymple could land backwards on a skewed tailwheel if he chose.
Now scuds of vapour formed over low hills, granite boulders, thistly paddocks and dead trees. There was a whole twenty-four months once when rain was condensed mist droplets. Sandhills blocked the road and Duck Creek got fully six inches, arid zone figures.
That was the year Dalrymple stared at the sky from the end of a crowbar building fences and Erica went to work cleaning the toilet block in the Isabel Junction caravan park. It was when Janelle Pattison went for him with a knife on behalf of the sisterhood, a key moment in Dalrymple’s marriage tale, just as it was for Janelle, but the other way around, for it was when she joined lives with Cud and they’d since been solid.
‘Here we go, buddy-boy.’
Dalrymple parked, walked a few paces, clambered over a padlocked gate and thump landed on the other side in a bare, bare paddock. He’d seen a bloke send his thigh bone into his pelvis doing that. The Duck Creek home track, re-routed years ago, no longer entered the old way to reveal the sweep of the landholding – a matter of pride when Dalrymple and Erica bought from the front gate. That was on the 17th of October, 1981, after spring rain – well known as the mugs’ date for rural real estate on the Isabel, according to Colts’s information, singularly wry – poplars smelling of honey, clover frothing and rye grass imprinting rivers of wind, lambs almost grown out, their mothers matronly. It wouldn’t have mattered, as Duck Creek was a piece of land as close as Dalrymple could come to buying back what his father had wasted. Then he, the son, was the wastrel.
Now Dalrymple sneaked in like a thief, alarming staggy wethers. There were new owners under the hills, the larger runs subdivided except for Cud and Janelle Pattison-Langley’s Wirra-ding, and Claude and Jacquie Bonney’s Duck Creek Wetlands, their boundaries lapping up to what was called the environmental exclusion zone of the projected dam.
Dalrymple shaded his eyes and realised there was more than a kilometre to walk before he even joined with the old track. For this way in he could not see the shearing shed under the old bark-peeling viminalis and the various improved paddocks once revealed from an elevated angle as workable and worth the price; those dreams that were no longer on show, for which Dalrymple and Erica had busted a gut to pay, grading a strip on the ridge above the house and building a hangar with the words Dalrymple Aviation painted on galvo ribs.
The homestead itself never showed itself until the last moment. So Dalrymple didn’t expect it yet. What puzzled him was a plantation of pines wedged across the middle distance and showing a stiff green wall of treetops at the top of a rise he walked along. Could not remember for a minute which paddock he was in – a neighbour’s?
Dalrymple’s navigational sense was better in the air than in walking shoes. The track upon which he trudged sliced east between granite tors casting sheets of speckled exfoliation. In crevices safe from stock a leaseholder had jammed rolls of barbed wire now rusted. They were taken from a demolished fence that Dalrymple had built with his own hands. Which way had it run? He could no longer tell. All boundaries were melted.
And the pines, those pines – he came back to them – who’d planted them?
Of course, now that he thought himself into spatial order and mentally joined the new track to the old, he had – last seen in driving rain with thousands of feathery-topped seedlings unloaded from a tractor-trailer. He turned into an alleyway of trees where the trunks were solid and dirty-horned rams got up on beds of brown needles under a radiata canopy sheltered from wind.
Things were quiet at the Duck Creek crossing where cars and dogs and shrieking children once splashed through. There came Dalrymple throwing a long shadow. So quiet at the crossing these days that a wombat had set up residence, burrowing under a chunk of reinforced concrete loosened in a flood. How that water had torrented! Milk chocolate churned to foam, sky laid down as a river, flattened, wetted the grass for miles around the year Polly was born.
The pump shed Dalrymple built that year still stood, ditto old tin sheets lying in a ditch, which he’d always meant to move. It was a shabbier, more condensed, grittier and more disposable place than he remembered, for it was leached of dreams and therefore with the feeling of mere wasteland stumbled upon.
And yet there was the house, with the question storming as Dalrymple stumbled up to a bedroom window with a flap of torn insect screen scratching in the wind. Who was this being standing so intently still as to feel himself disappear? A man back on the other side, making a choice the way a ghost did, whether to haunt, or to toss all that and come out alive.
Dalrymple had loved entering the gauzed front bedroom and closing the door against houselights, standing with his nose to the window netting and watching freeze-frames of lightning in the dark.
‘Gil?’ her voice called him.
A thunderclap pretended he didn’t hear. He was a youngish man in that phase of his unfolding, in which he was spared knowing himself. The rolling plateau of granite rocks and windblown tussocks gave a sense of being alone on the planet. He liked that, and never wondered why, or what it would lead to.
Out of the darkness came the rumble of hoofs. A strike of white fire and Erica’s mare skidded, lit up where Dalrymple had started scooping a tank before his dozer threw its tracks. In the next loud crack Cosma came at the gallop between trunks of glistening snow gums – seemingly motionless, tail erect, loudly snorting. It meant there was a gate left open or a gate knocked open in the squall. No point in rushing out, nothing to be done, but Dalrymple hoped the mare wouldn’t spike herself on a Telecom star picket he’d meant to remove. Should have the day before, or really the week before when the cable layers finished and Dalrymple took them beers, a carton of Tooheys hefted high on a generous shoulder.
Back in the town of his birth Dalrymple had been a boy standing at the window of an electrical store and looking at the blank screen of a television set before he’d ever seen a TV picture or there’d ever been reception in the area. Fragments of streetlights and passing cars had the excitement of a good flick.
Erica opened the door behind him, admitting a shaft of light.
‘Gil, are you in there? I wish you’d answer me. The kids are frightened and they need you. Don’t be unavailable when you’re needed.’
Why Erica with her beautiful wisdom would need any self-help had raised a tricky question, troublemaking, a bad sign between them.
‘Cosma’s in the home paddock,’ he said.
‘I’m more worried about the kids just now.’
‘She’s your horse, honey-hearts. But there’s that steel post, y’know.’
Her silence told him she knew all about the picket. A lesser woman would have rolled her eyes, but Erica had an implacable way, she made a monument to justice and stood there waiting. Somehow she knew the horse was safe while at the same time Dalrymple was already responsible for its death.
He couldn’t say it having lied, having made a false promise to lapse his commercials and stop risking her breadwinner – but during a storm he was up there with his great wings flung around. Erica once called him the eagle who’d won her, clawed her from the rock of the Isabel Walls where he’d backfired his Auster and drawn her eyes up: expecting dunno what from his need to soar – abundance? What she loved in him first she blamed him for later. That was the mystery of marriage, and it beat them.
‘You can’t just disappear, Gil. It’s teatime.’
There was a dull flash, an echo of weak thunder. The storm had moved too far away to be interesting. Dalrymple led the way back to the kitchen.
‘The kids are okay,’ he said as they went in. ‘It’s you who’s frightened. You don’t like saying what rattles you, that’s the pits. And they pick up on it.’
‘Rattled, scared, you can say that again,’ she allowed.
But brave too – with the fatalism of a soldier, he had to acknowledge. He wasn’t as brave as her himself because not as fearful. She never missed a parent–teacher night and would visit old people in hospital, those she’d met at her humble jobs, or on the road befriended when their cars broke down, stuck by their steaming radiators with reptile calm. She lent money to people in trouble and gave too much, cutting the household back to neck chops and suchlike, and it seemed to please her, that Dalrymple and the kids risked breaking their teeth on bone fragments.
Erica’s father, Silvio, had been a tough old bastard. He took her from school and used her roo shooting as a child at Byrock, where they’d kept a refrigerated trailer. She’d aimed the spot while he took them out – big reds and fully grown greys – a nightly killing for pet food suppliers until the day came when Erica stood up to old Silvio and she rocked from home.
She’d missed so much school and then caught up. They’d sparked, ignited, at Claude’s Duck Creek Wetlands Open Day when Claude and Normie Powell raised money for quadriplegic research and Dalrymple offered loop-the-loops.
Erica still shot for the dogs, drawing a bead in the creek paddock at twilight, going forward with the skinning knife. He’d find her kneeling, splashed with blood, hacking through sinews, because old Silvio had started something that might be described as a battle against whatever it was that limited a woman.
Dalrymple knew her secret and it confounded him. Unlike other people who were good at shutting things off, Erica had no way of stopping what started in her head. Silvio had behaved towards her as he might to a son, and that was all right, lots of girls rose to that expectation in the bush and it made them. But Erica made it an attitude about everything when she was older. She just had to do it. For that reason she had rock climbed with the Bonney crowd. She’d lived with Claude attempting to match his pace, and he was not a bad bloke – just wasn’t up to her, though he always believed he was better.
‘We cannot, will not, are not seeking another cent from the bank,’ she’d said when Dalrymple came to her with the scheme for the interest-only loan that would set them back on their feet. A French bank too, which seemed a cracker of an idea to him – Banque Nationale de Paris. They were the best rates on offer. Bon chance. Everyone on the Isabel had been onto them.
A grave woman, in short. There was medication in the pantry and Erica used it, but she liked the fags and vodka greyhounds best, two or three biggies at the end of the day, and sat for hours when the kids were asleep with a sketchbook in her lap. Bloody tense, that meant, at the work of living. Yet Dalrymple loved that grey-eyed tiredness of hers, with the downturned smile and the prominent vein in her forehead that swelled sometimes, and the bare curve of her neck, which he stroked while holding her, calming her, getting her to trust him again and twisting her hair and coiling it to the top of her head.
‘Nice, nice,’ she’d murmur.
‘I want the chance to make you happy.’
These words Dalrymple used when he first loved her. She gave him that chance. Then they were living it.
In the kitchen Erica took Polly’s braids and made them tight as licorice twists. Polly was seven, then, precursor of wide- foreheaded beauty, holding her feelings glassily open, which meant an element of judgement visible in her mother’s favour. Kim had a pale, five-year-old freckled country-boy face, and he and Dalrymple were like two dented, dusty scones, the pair of them. Already they had a conspiracy of blokes going between them.
The kids ate their baked beans on toast with mounds of steamed spinach on the side, sprinkled with grated cheese. They had white moustaches from drinking milk and Dalrymple tousled their hair with one hand on each submissive, grateful head.
‘Don’t you know you’re safe in the house? It’s your castle,’ he said.
‘The lightbulb went on and off,’ said Polly. ‘It sort of sizzled.’
‘That’s normal,’ said Dalrymple.
‘She said it was going to blast,’ said Kim, looking up defiantly.
‘That would never, ever happen,’ said Dalrymple.
They got it from Erica. She was unable to touch a slack powercord unplugged from a wall without wondering if it still had electricity in it. Old Silvio covered every practicality in her education except her mind. They’d only had Coleman lamps out west, the light of camp fires and Lighthouse candles.
Dalrymple said, ‘I saw a fireball once.’
‘Not now,’ warned Erica.
‘Hey, but it was quite something. It was down on the Isabel Estuary, on the coast. Came through the lounge window and danced round the kitchen, soft as fairy floss. Everyone laughed, but their hair stood on end and their fingertips glowed purple.’
‘Did it blow up?’ said Kim.
‘I just said what it was – harmless.’
After they cleaned their teeth they went to Erica for a story.
Dalrymple stepped to the door and reported a clear sky.
‘The stars are out. Here comes Mr Moon. Hey Kimmy, let’s go to the top of the hill and check that horse.’
‘Can I, Mum?’
‘Fine,’ sighed Erica, releasing an arm from around her son’s waist. He ran to Dalrymple and launched himself at him, and Dalrymple lifted him to his shoulders.
They walked up the hill and the mare came from shadows and followed through the gate.
The boy smelled of damp grass and fresh wind, muddy earth and a whiff of horse from stroking Cosma. The very essence of Dalrymple, he was. No way to see him as a semi-professional League player with a head like a concrete potato, one who slips Dalrymple cash, two or three hunnerd dollar notes at a time, withholding condemnation. Ghosts have power but only in the shape of chronology shredded, never to the letter of outlines fixed.
Later that night Erica told Dalrymple she didn’t like him interrupting their story time. Polly was a g
reat little reader and Kim wouldn’t get hooked if Dalrymple kept tempting him off.
‘It’s important a kid goes free,’ said Dalrymple.
‘Whatever that means,’ said Erica. She rolled over. ‘Hold me,’ she said.
Dalrymple waited until he heard her quiet breathing, then turned his back, looked out the window into the sparkling, rain-washed night. He imagined he was a battle-tank commander. The enemy came from the direction of town. Dalrymple had them bailed up in a gully of rocks. Tracer bullets lit the sky and he picked off small, dark, scurrying figures as they scattered. He did it wing-over and screaming down, the Gatling pouring hot lead like a garden hose.
One day Dalrymple rang home and heard his own voice on the answering machine. Leaving himself a message he knew he’d be first back to savour its curiosity.
That was the day he knew he needed to run. He didn’t like who he heard – ‘You’re goanna die,’ he told himself, so many parts of himself flown, so much held back unfinished.
Dalrymple goes to the rocky hilltop above the house, outlook wide, dusk not far off in the sparkling winter light. He makes a fire of bark and twigs before the time comes and he will have to face retracing his authorised steps to his car. He can see the car parked away and away, winking like a heliograph in the last reflected sunlight, and knows it will be star-dark before he stumbles back. On the main highway fifteen kilometres away cars have their headlights on, so far off that as the minutes pass their lights go piling into each other in a continuous animated pulp of diamonds.
Once before there was something like it, along a pipeline big enough for a monkey’s motorbike to ride through, travelling two thousand kilometres into mountain gullies from a gas field under the inland sky.
When Colts Ran Page 28