A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  The men of fixed purpose, the Monks, sat together in their own enclaves in the dining room, as did the Escapees. The Escapees were recklessly loud. Always they asked Kate if she would like a drink with them. Even if she had wanted to, she wondered could she drink what she really wanted. You were required, it seemed to her, to bludgeon yourself with the heavy beer from the taps. If she ordered a gin and tonic, it might betray and define her. She might drink, she told them, some Friday.

  —That’s no bloody good, love. Most of us go back home Poet’s night.

  She thought of the fat marbled steak she had eaten and the beer she would come to drink in time, and was gratified.

  At the funeral Mrs. Kozinski’s pursed mouth fell away into hysteria, yelling across the grave.

  —What sort of mother? What sort of mother? If you had been a wife! Dining with your father? Of course, you dined with your father! If you had been a wife and a mother, I would have my grandchildren!

  If she could clog in her blood the memory of Mrs. Kozinski’s frightful plaint! She would smother it up in the wrong kind of carbohydrate. Fearing nothing except that Mrs. Kozinski’s voice might not be blotted out in torrents of country food.

  The Escapees went to the bar confused, the Monks went upstairs to watch a quiz or current affairs or the instigating murder of some cop show, and thence to their thrifty beds. She could feel from the bar the emanations of the Escapees’ surmises: was she on or a teaser or a dyke? Whereas watching margarine commercials, the Monks wondered was she really a nice girl or a troublemaker? Kate hoped that these two poles of speculation held her in stupefying balance, like Buridan’s ass, stuck halfway between two equidistant bundles of hay.

  In a month or so, Kate was sure, neither the Monks nor the Escapees would bother entertaining such questions at all. The electricity would slacken. And if it did not, she would catch another train, looking for one apt town amongst all the others, as they dwindled away in population the nearer you got to the core of the country.

  Cardinal Archbishop Fogarty was at the graveside, and Kate heard people say of Mrs. Kozinski, Imagine, behaving like that in front of the cardinal!

  As if it made any difference. Cardinal Fogarty’s eminential purple added a fragment of heroism to Mrs. Kozinski’s scream.

  Uncle Frank was too demented and Monsignor Pietecki handled the actual obsequies. And the crone yelled without restraint,

  —You did not respect my motherhood, you did not give allegiance to my son. And so God came down on you like an axe.

  We will see, she cried within herself, having spooned custard in to smother her heart. I will do a better job on myself than God could.

  In the television room upstairs, when she looked in and beheld a curled-lipped commentator grilling a shadow minister in a manner which had the entire attention of the Monks, she noticed a bookshelf, an aging encyclopedia in it. It was perhaps a leftover from the days when Myambagh’s wool and wheat earned a lot from places far removed. Or maybe Jack Murchison had bought it on an impulse at a sheep station auction.

  She grabbed one volume. Back in her room, the door bolted, she sat on the bed and read studiously, since even a ghost needs news and diversion.

  Volume 13—Jirásek to Lighthouses. In the casual hope of finding something new about Slavs, she turned to the opening page and read Jirásek. She found he was a Czech. 1851–1930.

  —Jirásek was born at the Hronov, Bohemia, on August 23rd, 1851 and served as a high school teacher throughout his working life. His historical novels were the most famous of his era and invoked Czechoslovakian nationalism. He showed a strong interest in the Hussite period …

  Joss, she discovered, was a pidgin English word derived from Chinese seaports and applied to idols and deities. Jota was a traditional Spanish dance from Aragon and exploited 3/4 rhythm. Slobodan Jovanović was a Serbian national lawyer, politician and historian who died in Windsor, Canada in 1962. James Joyce—well, she knew of James Joyce. She had failed to understand Finnegans Wake at university. She skipped Judaism, with mental apologies and a few inner tears in Bernard Astor’s direction; she skipped the Book of Judges, Julian of Norwich, Jungle warfare. She read a little of Jurassic, and the section of Jurisprudence’s two basic concerns.

  And then she came to the Ks, and at their head Kangaroo, the national totem. On the same page as Kandinski. People shot these animals. There were probably men in the bar downstairs who could tell her how you prepared yourself to execute them. Yet their placid herbivore stare, well captured in the photograph beside the entry, should have given them immunity. Macropodidae—Greek for big-footed. Of the order Marsupialia. The nearest living relatives: wombats and phalangers, who are also Australian. The gray kangaroo, Macropus canguru, had—by the time this particular encyclopedia was compiled—been clocked at twenty-eight miles an hour over the surface.

  The sooty kangaroo stood about six feet, but an extinct form stood twelve. Five toes—one however missing except in Hypsiprymnodon. The second and third toes slender. They did not contribute to the species’ gift for locomotion but were used instead to comb the fur. The tail served as a balance and a rudder during movement at speed.

  The kangaroo in the photograph was leaning back a little, hind paws slightly in the air, so that his tail looked like a support of great solidity.

  The dark brown eyes are rather large, said Volume 13. The ears are capable of being turned toward sound. Female red kangaroos have two uteri and three vaginas. Almost as soon as one infant is born from one uterus, another can be conceived in the second. Once conceived, it remains in suspended animation in the womb for five months, while its older sibling occupies its mother’s pouch and feeds from one of its four teats.

  Something like the shadow of rapture overcame Kate as she read of the infant’s journey after birth, ploughing across the fur between the womb and the pouch of the four teats. Using its four limbs in a motion similar to the Australian crawl. It chooses the beginning of winter to make this journey, this transmaternal exodus. Red and gluey and one inch long, it makes its first and its slowest dash from one shelter to another. On its journey, Kate presumes, it learns the nature of the world and the value of established routes. Coming to haven, it takes one of the teats in its mouth. The teat expands and holds it in place. The infant stays there, in dark security, attached to the earth’s bounty which enters its mother and washes down to this warm cavity. After months, it will leave the teat for a time and begin to make excursions from the pouch, until at six months it renounces the sac for good.

  The gray kangaroo, born of its red mother and also known as the sooty, the boomer or the forester, lives in the grassy plains of open eucalyptus, serving the function for Australia which antelope and deer perform for other continents. Turning the earth with its gentle mouth.

  Kangaroos travel in clans or troops, protected by a patriarchal kangaroo who will ultimately have to meet the challenge of young, ambitious males. While he can he defeats them by boxing with his forepaws, by punching and slashing with his large, savagely clawed hindfeet. Under siege, he enjoys the does.

  The gray kangaroos—though so vigorous—are easily frightened however, Volume 13 told Kate, and in fleeing are capable of injuring themselves. They will tend to flee in a group rather than resist, but sometimes they stand and punch and strike out. There are some documented instances where they have crushed or disemboweled dogs, and there exist some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reports of their disemboweling humans who attacked them. For a considerable time, their boxing talents were exploited by sideshow operators, who would pit them against human opponents. When boxing they throw their weight onto their tail and use only the heels of their hind legs for support.

  —Don’t worry, she announced to the kangaroo entry in Volume 13. Don’t worry.

  In one sense she had no time or sympathy for the creature in the photograph, labeled Macropus canguru, who with its left forefoot to its mouth stared at her from the page. It had blundered into the wrong univer
se, where the promise of the safe pouch was not honored on the open plain.

  She had passed perhaps an hour and a half with the encyclopedia, and now someone knocked at her door. As she expected, it was Jack Murchison with his comfortable half-grin. They could have known each other for months.

  —Quiet night. Thought you might like to have a look at the taps.

  —Are there many men down there?

  —The usual suspects. Locals. Harmless old bastards.

  Yet toward the bottom of the stairs he turned again.

  —Everyone of them bloody famous for something in this town, though.

  The saloon bar, small and designed for business and exchanges of confidence, was empty at this hour. From beyond the glass doors you could feel the determined quietude of the town. She could see more or less through the wall how the grain trucks slept in the sidings in a skein of light mist. Exactly, she told herself. Exactly. In other places, politicians might be making firm speeches about grain exports, but here in the Myambagh yard grain took its long sleep in the bellies of the wheat containers.

  Jack opened the counter in the saloon and let her through to the business side of things. They could now walk through a door and emerge behind the long counter of the main bar.

  She was aware that she had entered a place of holiness and taboo like other places of this nature: the weighing room at racecourses, the middle box of a confessional. Behind the bar! It felt to her as if it offered a brand of immunity. She wished they’d wait here, in the empty saloon awhile, while she absorbed the air of sanctuary. Jack thought that her delay was just a sort of confusion about the nature of his kind of proletarian pub, the geography of a place like this. His smile was forgiving. But it said too, I always suspected you belonged in bloody Marriotts and Hiltons.

  Through with not enough delay, into the public bar. Sparsely populated, the way Jack had promised. She noticed by the further wall the pool table asleep under its green cloth. Its triangle hung up over that three-notch snooker device called the spider. The light out above the table itself. The last men gathered up to the bar for the final drink of an irretrievable day. Even then she had the feeling which became stronger the longer she stayed at the Railway, that they thought they were pleasing themselves but in fact were at a kind of work, fulfilling a function, occupying spaces which had to be occupied to ensure that things lasted and that constellations stayed in place.

  She saw a man still in his white overalls—a local tradesman. Sheltering, she could tell, behind the simple exchanges of Jack Murchison’s pub. He thought this was home—it was obvious. He didn’t want the complicated market which waited for him in his marriage home, behind the walls of his plain house in a sleeping street. It stood out. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes …

  In the corner by the back door, on a tall stool, a very large man. His upper body pyramidal as he sat. Yet it could be in part a muscular fatness—you couldn’t be sure it was flabbiness through and through.

  His corner. God knows how you tell that. But his corner. Utterly without aggression, he gave off the smell of ownership. Jack said they were all famous for something. This man knew he was famous. He bore it sweetly apparently, since the face he turned toward Kate looked large and generous and without suspicion. Famous for more than his great bulk, this man.

  Separated by a yard or so from the pyramid was a thin man still wearing his hat. He flashed a ferrety smile at Jack as Jack led the new woman through. He was a whippet. Kate could tell infallibly, with the judgment which came to you only on this side of the bar, that his function was that of a man who had opinions and who’d been everywhere. Not everywhere in the sense of Melbourne or San Francisco or Edinburgh or Tokyo. Everywhere in the sense of Wilcannia, Dungog, Warricknabeal, Manduramah. And of course, Myambagh, where he was now stuck.

  Kate found these categories delicious. She had not been able to spot them before her catastrophe. Now there was some nutrition for her in them.

  The man who’d been everywhere had a boy at his left side, a very tall boy with a Celtic smudge of a face. Those faces you saw now mainly and only in bush towns. A distillation of Connemara or the Highlands. Such a face had been sent into the bush in the nineteenth century, not always voluntarily, and had remained there in its original form, a survival, an ancient visage. You wouldn’t see a better face on fishermen in the outer Hebrides.

  There were also two immeasurably old and yet not quite aged men, one on the corner of the bar, one where its shorter arm met the wall. This second one sat under a plaque which said, Placed here by Murchison’s Railway Hotel Social Club in memory of Bert (Stumpy) Hogan, 1923–1989. Stumpy’s Corner.

  These two old men wore hats, just as the appointed thin man, the smartalec about places, did. The one at the bar corner—the Cornerman—had what Kate thought of as a quick face, the way a friendly dog who wants to be involved in human games has a quick face, sifting conversations for the word which will let him in, invite him to stand on his hind legs.

  By contrast, it was clearly the appointed task of the man under Stumpy Hogan’s memorial plaque—the Plaqueman—to know that though he had perhaps six and a half decades’ vivid experience to exploit if called on, he would fail to be asked. He would die with all that eager material still in his veins.

  For the pyramid of a man by the back door and the whippet in the stained hat were the two who controlled the traffic of discourse here. Catalyzed by Jack Murchison, they would do it in a leisurely but utterly authoritative way.

  The Plaqueman understood this exquisitely, and in a more refined version of the universe would have passed it on to the Cornerman whose ears twitched so much like a willing hound’s. But that was the rule too. You didn’t pass it on. You had too much bloody pride.

  So part of the special tension of the bar was that the two old men could have been so easily won. A crumb would have done it. The making of a minute space in a conversation. That could not happen though. For the New South Wales Liquor Licensing Board had given Jack his license for liquor, not a license to let eagerness be satisfied or diffused. The kindly-looking pyramid of a man would have lightly done it for the two older ones if it hadn’t been for the operation of such rules of the universe.

  Kate was astounded and reassured to know that since the first fermenting and distilling gods there’d always been such arrangements as these. A man was given his license and control of the liquors on which the deities had breathed, and all these acolytes arose from nowhere, at a summons they couldn’t even hear, and came in to fulfill fragments of the liturgy, altering their dreams as they went by passing the brown fluid through their brains.

  Jack, she thought, was a very lucky man. Without trying and because it was appointed, he had acquired regulars. They all interested her, including the two old men you weren’t meant to talk to.

  As Jack introduced her to the till, she could feel the whippet’s eyes on her. He was the one who would make the prescribed jokes, the ones which weren’t even funny.

  —Got a new apprentice there, Jack? Bloody sight prettier than the last one.

  —This button is for a middy, Jack showed her, standing before the cash register. This is for a schooner. You press this one for a nip of spirits—vodka, rum, whiskey. In a perfect bloody world, of course, you’d charge what each nip was worth, because everyone knows whiskey, vodka, gin and rum are all different prices. But the Railway Hotel is an imperfect bloody world, and you can’t get staff anymore who’ll keep different prices in their heads. The age of literacy is bloody dead and gone out here. Now peanuts and every other sort of rubbish we’ve got for sale, that’s all the same price too. See the peanuts button? That’s what you hit.

  He cleared the cash register so she could do a few trial runs. All conversation had stopped, she was aware. Everyone was intent on Jack’s instruction and trying to read its effect on her, above all waiting for some hilarious error.

  —Now the taps, said Jack. Old and New and Foster’s. Bulk of the trade. Guts of the b
usiness. Watch my wrist.

  He took out a schooner glass from a tray of unused glasses and flourished it before her as if he might be about to make it disappear.

  —All in the wrist. The big aim in life is the two-pour schooner. No beer lost through the drip tray, nice head, beautiful.

  And so he demonstrated, exactly by description. One long pour, flicking the beer tap handle with a genuine elegance. Panache. It filled her with a kind of pleasure, one appropriate to the plain planet where she now lived. This wrist stuff was exquisite.

  A second, shorter, sharper pour, and there was the completed column of beer, carrying the right head. You had to be careful, she knew, about heads of beer. What was normal and permitted in other nations was grounds for assault or the ruination of a pub’s repute in Australia. The right head was a birthright. It applauded the drinker’s existence and manhood.

  She studied what Jack did, keeping in her mind the wrist motion. Flick, flick.

  —Beautiful, said Jack, putting the perfect flute of beer on the bar. The fat man clapped. He was permitted. The eager old man laughed at the clapping. That was permitted and ignored.

  Introductions now, in prodigal order. The large pyramidal man by the back wall was Jelly. Jelly’s brown eyes, she noticed, were by nature genial, despite the seemingly cruel nickname.

  But then Jack said, Nothing to do with the size of the bastard.

  And Jelly laughed, hugging the joke to himself.

  —He’s a bloody dynamiter. Jelly for gelignite. This is Kate, Jelly.

  —Okay, love. Welcome.

  Jack had turned to the whippet by now.

  —This is Guthega. Don’t pour him a drink unless you’ve already got the bloody money in the till …

  —That’s all right with you, you avaricious bastard, the whippet cried. There used to be a bloody miserable publican like you in Canowindra. Ran him out of bloody town. Will you introduce my poor bloody son or what?

  The whippet had gestured toward the boy with the Celtic blur of a face.