A Woman of the Inner Sea

by Thomas Keneally

  —Yes, it’s bloody Chifley.

  Kate did not ask anything more. She noticed gardens awash behind their picket fences. Drowned rhododendrons. The crowns of the streets, which had been clear of water this morning, were now covered. Yet the basic geometry remained. Myambagh’s diamond of levees and embankments clearly held.

  —I sold them to that bugger in Wagga, said Gus. He wasn’t the right sort of person. I kept hearing stories about treatment from people. It started with a vet I know. He called me and said the bastard was starving them, you know, to make them tractable. Get them up to the coat of arms, either side, and they’d be listless, wouldn’t hop away too quick. Bigger camera opportunity.

  —Then I heard he was using the old electric prod, and he was keeping them in a garage too, separate from the animals in the open.

  —Electric prod?

  While she’d been having the dreams of night-bounding, Chifley had been pent up in a garage and bullied round with voltage.

  —In the twentieth century, said Gus. But hang on, it gets worse. One weekend I drove down and had a snoop. It was all true. The stuff about starving them. You could tell they were in bad condition.

  —Then I heard something in a pub that really made my blood boil. There’s an old Australian welterweight champion lives in Wagga, short of cash. The owner was planning a big match with Chifley and this boy. Absolutely illegal. RSPCA would spit chips. But he was doing it. A hungry bastard. He was going to have big gamblers in—some of the Chinese, some of the Greeks, fellers from Sydney. Give them a swish dinner, and then the main event … Would have put a ginger-up drug in Chifley’s tucker, to make him stand and trade blows …

  Gus wagged his head and spiky hair continually while driving. The unimaginable, Dickensian motives of the park owner!

  —Just verifies what I always bloody knew. No animal ought to be in captivity. It corrupts everything. The vets get corrupted. You know, like doctors in some bloody concentration camp …

  Kate herself felt at once an affront to rival Gus’s. Boxing matches were a blasphemy against Chifley’s compact, bounding brain, and the electric prod a violation of his limpid eyes.

  So Gus had borrowed his friend’s truck again, and gone down there and got them out last night. From the perimeter fence he watched the security guard. A lazy bugger, the guard disappeared into his shack in the end to watch some football match telecast from Europe late at night, and that was the last seen of him.

  To make his entry, Gus had cut an opening large as a door in the park fence, and on leaving it with the beasts had repaired it with wire. Gus, the earnest citizen, the man of good civil manners. I take your beasts, but you’re entitled to your fence.

  Gus coughed resonantly. The water had penetrated the points of his chest as well.

  —This is a bloody ridiculous situation for a grown man to be in.

  They passed the statue of the World War I soldier who kept his face set against the downpour, and his boots would be the last of any civic monument to go under. His companion piece, the humbler and lower statue of a merino sheep, looked hunched and ready for submersion.

  —The road’s closed now, east and west, said Gus. And Menzies and Chifley … They’re a bloody inconvenient size to travel with.

  Kate pointed through the windscreen: the art deco façade of the Palais. She found it hard to imagine an age in which Myambagh would have had time for such pretension. In front of it sat well-equipped four-wheel drives and police vehicles. Winches were attached and special lights, and you got a sudden hope that there was no emergency from which they could not haul people, no tragedy on which they could not shed a beam.

  Gus parked some way from these opulently rigged trucks. As Kate closed the door behind her, she felt a strange phantom electricity, the negative impression of the pleasure of that efficient, bounding, marsupial breath beside which her own breath and Gus’s were cramped, permitting nothing better than doggedness.

  The first refugee from flooded low ground she found inside the door, right in the lobby of what once had been Myambagh’s ritzy cinema, was Burnside the investigator, retainer and enforcer. He was altered in some way: he was wearing emergency clothing, donated stuff. Burnside in the weeds of charity.

  Burnside grabbed her wrist. He seemed full of a heaving hysteric strength, and was trying for one or other of his practiced, gimcrack dignities, something to knock her flat with.

  —Listen, I had a hell of a time, Mrs. Kozinski. Had to give up my rent-a-car in the middle of a crossing. Nearly got washed away as I waded out. My clothes are wrecked with stinking floodwater. What do you think of that?

  —It isn’t my fault, she said.

  —Lost the papers of course. They’re floating somewhere across the bloody plains. The bloody ink is running on them. So what do you think, eh?

  She had his vanities at her disposal.

  —I think you’ve got something really interesting to tell people about. When you get back home.

  —I could have missed a child’s birthday party, he accused her.

  But she knew from Paul Kozinski that he acknowledged no children, had only ex-wives.

  Past Burnside, she could see the highly lit section of the hall, down there by way of the aisle, past the remaining cinema seats, in the open space below the stage. Tables and telephones as she’d imagined, and Jelly, white-and-blue in the face with tiredness and plain duty, listening to townsmen and officials discuss something urgent. Jelly looked watchful amongst them in a special way, exactly like a man with a secret strategy which wasn’t in their book of remedies.

  —There he is, she told Gus, directing him onward into the lit floor-space of the Palais. But Gus was wary of the official look of some of the men. He dropped himself, in his wet clothes, in a seat three rows back. Burnside, who was helplessly stalking Kate and Gus, plumped down in his wet clothes three seats further back again. He called to Kate.

  —You can’t tell me you couldn’t have signed those bloody things last night, Mrs. Kozinski! You can’t tell me that!

  Gus was confused by this side argument.

  —What’s this feller talking about? he wanted to know. But his attention fixed itself again on Jelly.

  Kate said, Mr. Burnside, I’m sorry for your troubles. But I am entitled to take as long as I like with important documents. You’re getting hysterical.

  She loved saying that. To the Burnside of the construction industry, the one who made others hysterical by dangling them from the fourteenth floor by one ankle.

  What a delight to see the way his professional air had been eroded. Without that betraying flick of the head, she simply walked away from him, this man without his own clothes, his own car, without the signatures for which he would be paid commission by the Kozinskis who rightly judged her but who themselves needed weighing and sifting, who needed the sharp end of their screams turned back on themselves.

  At this stage Jelly saw her and broke away from the group and advanced up the aisle amongst the aged plush of the cinema seats. Arriving, he saw Gus’s wet black hair, and the leathery Schulberger face cautiously raised to him. She believed it frightened him for a moment: all the mad people, himself counted in, in the one space.

  He pretended they were all there for a routine report.

  —They say there’ll be some flooding in the low parts of town. But we won’t have to move people out by helicopter unless the levees break.

  Then he lowered his voice.

  —See that fat fart Parkinson from Emergency Services? And old McHugh? They’ve got all the bloody first-class equipment to do it. But they aren’t bloody up to it!

  It was as if he was stating these ideas for the first time, as if an amnesia related to all his earlier dry-weather canvassings of the matter in the bar of Murchison’s Railway.

  —You ought to hear them. They say if the levees went, by the time you got permission from the Police Department and from the Minister of bloody Transport for the explosives experts to come in, the water
would’ve subsided anyhow.

  He shook his head. McHugh and Parkinson had between them, by taking this expected line against dynamite, confirmed their impotence in front of Jelly and left him stuck finally with the task. Even Gus, for all his curious problems, was shaking his head, unable to believe this, the old men’s flatulence and lack of grit.

  In his yellow overalls, Jelly began to shiver. He wanted others to take the cup from him. He wanted pillars of the community to be pillars of the community.

  —You can’t put your faith in levees. Nature abhors the bloody things.

  —Jelly, Jelly, said Gus, trying to temper Jelly’s enthusiasm for the one big question. He led Jelly aside by the elbow. In his cinema seat, the irrelevant Burnside had begun to sleep, his knees thrust out, his legs crooked, his head abandoned on his shoulder.

  When Gus finished, Jelly began whispering very calmly. Judging by Jelly’s magisterial air, all this was easily solved.

  He had solemnity, and he turned to Kate, wearing an air of familiar command as if they had been companions from before the flood, not this one, but the one which instigated the messy, clamorous, arrogant business of history.

  —Take Gus across to Jack’s, he said. There’s room for his stock there.

  Stock. As if Gus had a truckload of cattle.

  So now Kate traversed Myambagh the other way, accompanying bewildered Gus and the beasts, the stolen faunal elements of the Coat of Arms of Australia’s Commonwealth.

  —The owner’ll be ropable of course, said Gus. He’ll be after me for theft and loss of earnings …

  They drove straight into the backyard of the Railway by way of the half-flooded side street, swinging into the pub yard as nineteenth-century pastoralists did on their bays or black mares, or else as now the carbon dioxide cylinder truck from Wagga regularly did.

  —Look there, Kate directed.

  All so familiar and eternal this yard was, like the landscape of a childhood. So she behaved like a proprietor. She jumped from the truck and opened an uneven door into what had once been stables. Gus summoned all his grace and backed the truck in so exactly. The lack of any need for communication between them marked him as a desperately applied being, the way she too was desperately applied.

  In one movement she closed the stable door, and the dismounted Gus opened the back door of the truck. A unison, directed by the one brain.

  Gus breathed with greater ease now. The stealth had gone from his green eyes. He had a kind of hope. He hauled out planks and set them to provide walkways to the ground for Chifley and Menzies. After an interval for reflection, both animals seemed about to avail themselves.

  The first to appear was the great flightless bird, Menzies. He looked austere. He exhibited a primeval stiff-kneed suspicion, intensified by the experience of entertainment-park discipline. He moved to his left, fixed Kate with an eye, and moved to the right. Then he doubled a leg into his body backward, so that it all but disappeared. Only one leg supported him, yet he implied that now at last he was content and resting.

  Chifley could have dismounted with one bound. He knew he had enough flight there, packed down in his lungs. But as if his life in Wagga entitled him to it, he was lazy. He tried to creep down the board on his tail and the heels of his great hind paws, and when it looked as if he might overbalance—purely out of the easy option he’d taken, not because of any problem to do with center of gravity—he made it to the floor of the old stables in one unhandy flop.

  His descent of course enchanted Kate and utterly took up her attention. Again she verified the heft of his tail and hindquarters, and by contrast the supplicant, thin forepaws folded in some mimicry of prayer above his resounding gut and his brawny chest.

  Behind him, from the back of the truck, came a stench of mud and of that dirty water which, Burnside had earlier complained, ruined clothes.

  —Dry, Gus addressed the beasts. You’re dry now. No more bloody complaints.

  Though dealing with soundless animals, he apparently saw them as full-throated, complaining ones.

  She was aware of her tiredness, and her night brain descended on her, with its nuances of easy movement and gracious air.

  —I’ll sleep in the truck.

  —But it’s water-fouled.

  He insisted he would be warm. There was a ledge with blankets.

  —Really, said Gus.

  She had seen enough. She even wanted to get away from the shaggy-coated concrete Chifley, who seemed to have brought no fear or twitches with him out of his captive state, and go off to her sleep to contemplate the beast’s abstract locomotion. She got Gus some bread and black tea—it was all he wanted, he said, and so she left at last and crossed the yard, where it was raining again, and moved in under the iron roof of the back verandah which raged with rain. She felt leaden yet had a sense of anticipation. One of the Escapees emerged from the Men’s. He was drunk—he had been celebrating the goodwill he had shown in building Myambagh’s levees.

  —Jesus love. We’re going to be plastering and painting this fucking town forever.

  —Good, said Kate.

  Seventeen

  IT WAS FROM THE DREAMS before dawn, crisper than manna, that Jack Murchison woke her. Even on inundation days, gentle apology was his way with women.

  He said, They need us at the levee, love.

  She washed her ruined hands and drank some water. Downstairs she found a raincoated, gumbooted and aggrieved Connie waiting in the front seat of Jack’s truck. They exchanged hellos. Connie’s seemed specially crafted for this dim, undeclared sunrise.

  Kate wondered if Gus and the beasts still slept from their adventures, or if Gus was already up, feeding them their protein pellets, giving them extra to make up for the barbarity of the owner of the tableau vivant.

  They crowded into the front seat of Jack’s truck, their wet-weather clothing creaking and crinkling. As they drove off, Connie began to talk as if Kate’s arrival in the front seat had been a mere pause in a quarrel which had broken out hours before in utter dark.

  —I know we’re going to be a target yet again. Just because we’re on the highest ground. Jack has to make a big man of himself. And they impose on that. They impose on your good nature.

  Jack’s lips squeaked by way of appeal and reconciliation. Again, his duty to prevent Connie from taking to her carotid with sharp objects governed the noises he made with his mouth.

  —No, love, look. You know we can put in a claim for anything we give people in a state of emergency. Food, drink, shelter, everything.

  —Yes. But you go crazy, and you build up a bill you know the state won’t pay for. So you halve your claim, and they whittle that down by a third, and we end up with seventeen cents in the dollar.

  Connie did not want Jack to put undue emphasis on this flood amidst all the other floods, fires, famines and human slaughters.

  They parked behind the cemetery, and as the three of them walked to the levee at the eastern end of Myambagh, Jack seemed to make an earnest effort to adjust his demeanor to Connie’s view of this one flood amongst many.

  Trucks brought new sandbags from the depot where they had been filled, and people stacked them into the wall. Everyone was tired and talking berserkly, and a man who was clearly an army veteran of some kind came down the line saying, If you want them to hold, you’ve got to stack them army-wise, one lengthways, the next crossways. But people could not hold that much artifice in their head. They piled the sandbags up any way they could. Beyond the levee walls topped with bags lay the universal grayness of sky and flood, a sheet of breast-high undimpled foul water, on which little waves moved now and then across the drowned pasture! Myambagh was utterly beset.

  As a team, one at each end, Kate and Connie carried sandbags to the levee. Kate noticed far away, along the ramparts of the highway, a string of aged and young and pregnant tottering with bowed heads toward helicopters from which men and women with cameras dismounted. Dropping a bag in unison with Connie, Kate pulled the hood o
f her jacket low over her brow. It was obvious though why cameras should be sent to behold this phenomenon, from the air first of all and then from the ground. To show Myambagh’s pocket of color in the midst of the gray-water nullity. To show the wonderful unity of spirit of country people.

  Soon the cameras were at the levee, perhaps three hundred yards along from Kate, at what they must have considered the water’s chief point of attack. Kate, head down, lifted the sandbags with Connie as a light rain fell.

  Someone cried out and everyone stood still and looked up. Connie and Kate looked up, holding a sandbag between them by its four corners. Amongst the tops of eucalypts a mile away, a new wave could be seen. It was slow and lazy. To a Palm Beach surfer like the former Kate Kozinski it would have been beneath contempt, a wave for a slack, still day. It traveled fast however. It came sucking up to the lip of the parapet and broke for a moment over it, splashing everyone’s already glistening gumboots.

  Some people began to reinforce the levee with driven-in angle iron spikes and rolls of fencing wire from the stock and station agents. They were all for a second the Australian Corps, those five brilliant divisions, rebuffing Ludendorff’s assault in the Easter of 1918. They were connected in heroism to the putteed Digger whose memorial stood above the flood in Lachlan Street.

  Kate had time to see that Jack worked with as much brotherly energy as any other man, though he uttered no particular opinions on the army method of laying sandbags, and at one stage he held his hand up bloodied and he laughed. He had taken a routine wound from the wire and the steel, and if nothing worse happened to him then he was no less fortunate than the others. And even if the town were not saved, they were working lovingly together in a dizziness of exhaustion, in a communal frenzy of love.

  An ambulance had pulled up and Connie led Jack to it to have his wound dressed. A nurse who was a farmer’s wife washed the damage and poured a stinging brown disinfectant on it and surrounded it with bandages. Her hood still pulled down to her nose Kate heard Connie and Jack asking the nurse how she had got into Myambagh, since she lived on a farm out to the west of the town, in the universe of water. She heard the woman say, I came in over the railway bridge.