by Garry Disher
Running
A fresh start somewhere new—that’s how Grandfather Tolley, irreproachably polite, avoided the unwelcome question. His questioners would nod thoughtfully in Tolley’s Four Square Store, and put two and two together: the taciturn man with his city clothes, the motherless small boy—obviously he’s running from something. Grandfather Tolley didn’t tell them that he was placing a specific memory behind him, an image of his young wife flailing in the red-frothed shallows, bewilderment on her face, then fear and shock, then her eyes dulling, dulling. She ran out on him; She died having the kid—both neatly accounted for his gloominess, his presence in the town. Not that the circumstances mattered; something bad had happened, and he’d run from it, simple as that. And so the shark-snatch story remained a family secret. Anna’s other grandfather had also run away from heartbreak. Family and strangers conspired against Grandfather Ison during the Great War, leaving him propertyless and obsessed with property. He left to make his mark, inched his buckboard through the saltbush and mallee scrubland near Pinnaroo, broke an axle, and wept. After the rolling guns and mud of the Sunken Road Trench at Pozières, and the chattering of his five sisters, he’d never heard such dense silence. After the neat geography of the trenchlines and his wife’s and his children’s chubby curves, he’d never been in such a tangled, stringy, monochrome place. Nothing would yield to the match or the axe. A voice told him that he should provide. Another told him that others had done him wrong. Louder, more insistent, was the voice that told him he was not up to it. What made Anna run? A permanent dissatisfaction, to begin with. As soon as she was capable of toddling on bandy legs she wanted to venture beyond the hedge at Isonville, drawn not so much by the promise of the world as by her father’s unaccountable absence every day. She saw him disappear in the Stock & Station car after breakfast, and it was a rare and precious evening if he were there to read to her at bedtime. She hooked her fingers to the thick, white, plaited wires of the garden gate and screamed inconsolably at his departing dust. But someone always carted her struggling into the house and her toys, and the memory faded—until the next morning, when her father betrayed and abandoned her yet again. Once it was Dr Pirie who brought her back, rumbling over the corrugations on the sunken road in his mud-splashed black Humber. Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna spotted her from the overseer’s cottage and telephoned the big house, grimly satisfied, for although they didn’t have a proper home they did have ginghamed twin daughters who never roamed. Dr Pirie encountered Anna on the road for a second time, the mail contractor once, and twice strangers delivered her to the Pandowie police station in Redruth Square. She never did find where her father had gone. Later Anna developed a private running, to places in her head, away from her squared and regulated back yard. Or she’d give herself up to the animistic fig and apricot trees and be unaware of the stonewall perimeter fence or what lay beyond it, so fully absorbed was she by a ladybird, a chip of flint or a broken-backed sparrow’s nest. Buoyed by their first good harvest on the six-forty acres, Anna’s parents sent her to boarding school in the city. She was twelve years old. She shared desks with twelve-year-old city kids, farm kids like herself, and hard and knowing kids from the remote station country, boarders since the age of five. Anna reasoned that the object of the school was to break her spirit. The staff obliged her to be a young lady, the other boarders a teary wretch. The world was a bigger place than Anna had supposed it to be. It was full of swifter runners, more fluid minds and longer ancestries than she could claim. On Sunday morning, when the two hundred boarders filed through the leafy streets from the boarding house to the Cathedral, Anna hung back, edged away, found a taxi rank. Pandowie, she said, and the driver blinked: Oh yeah? Who’s paying? My father. Yeah? Who’s he when he’s at home? We have a property, Anna replied, and saw deference and calculation form in the man’s eyes. Three hours later she was home, spinning giddily in the push and pull of everyone’s dismay, guilt, outrage and admiration. The taxi man accepted a cheque. Anna was home. She caught the Bitter Wash schoolbus at the end of the potholed drive now, and a wildfire of whispers spread from her notorious centre. Later, when the kids from school began to die in the foreign war, boys she had teased and kissed and ignored and endured, Anna was poised to slip away. Then Lockie died. She fled; her mind retreated. She came to a place where the black layers of self folded upon each other until she had only an intermittent and fragmentary awareness of others. It was like a rehearsal for dying. Voices reached her through the fog: Face up to it; don’t run from it. She wasn’t running—she was fading to nothing like condensation on a window. Six weeks were lost to her, a catatonia induced by a loss she thought she’d never bear. But she had a return ticket, time gave her a return ticket, and she was Anna again. She did not refer to this time as running away, or even as getting over a loss, but simply as moving on. Later, when Michael was killed, she would not have been able to run away even if she’d wanted to. She had a family to consider this time. Just the other day Sam said, picking his way through the words: There was a time early on when I thought you were long gone. He shrugged: I even wanted to run off myself. But you and Becky have made life worth living, you know that? Anna opened and closed her mouth, her defences gone to nothing, and realised that it would once have been a burden, hearing him say that. She wrapped him in her arms and they swayed clumsily together. She often finds herself examining that term: running away. Three sets of neighbours have sold out or walked off their properties and gone to live in Queensland, most of the district’s school leavers head straight for Adelaide every year, and last week a young mother drove to the Showalter Hill lookout, ran exhaust gases into the interior of her car with a length of hose, and gently killed herself and her baby daughter. Running away? Anna has considered the separate heartaches of her grandfathers and herself, and examined the times when she had gone looking for love to replace love that had grown pinched, bad or non-existent, and is of the opinion that there is no such thing as running away. Or rather, she can hear someone like Meg correcting her: Running away? A value judgement. Anna will leave for the city when Sam dies, and be told by some of the locals that she’s another one running out on the district, but her line will be: Why endure the unendurable? From time to time she will disconcert her loved ones with this notion. For Anna it will be enough if just one or two of them take her advice and move on to something better.
Christmas
On Christmas Day, the Tolleys, the Isons and Mrs Mac groaned around the table in Beulah’s half of the big house. It was a day of blind eyes, blind to Mrs Mac’s singing, Eleanor Ison’s one cigarette of the year. Anna and Hugo liked to watch their mother puff and giggle through a couple of sherries, well-being rising pink from her breasts to her throat, highlighting her cheeks. Then the old ones died and Kitch edged Anna’s family out into the cold. Now there was only Grandfather Tolley, and he drove out to the six-forty acres or they carted a cooked turkey to his house behind the shop. Anna’s mother didn’t abandon her Christmas Day cigarette and sherries, but the flush at her throat lost its innocence, apt to grow hard red with hurt and anger: My own father, my own brother. How could they do that to me? The Tolleys were on the guest list for Christmas drinks at Showalter Park because Wesley Showalter and Anna’s mother had grown up together. They came to the main gate. Holly. They drove in. Christmases at Showalter Park had once intimidated her father. Until he owned the six-forty acres, he’d been forced, on Christmas mornings, to endure the drunken back-slaps of Wesley Showalter, who boxed him around the compass on three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, arranging the sale and shipment of the Park’s hoggets, ewes and rams. But the six-forty acres made him almost an equal, on those white-cloth, long-tabled Showalter Park lawns on Christmas mornings. He even bred from a couple of bottom-of-the-range Showalter Park rams. Anna was not prepared for her first Christmas Day with Lockie. She sat mute, wide-eyed, stirred to the core, as love and discord raged about her head. Lockie had a chain-smoking, corner-of-the-mouth father, a heav
y, slippered mother who shouted dear at her above the racket, and a Queensland heeler stretched out on the dark pantry floor. He had a tribe of little snatching brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts who lashed out to cuff whining earholes and skinny bare legs. And he had Chester Flood, who had no love or family of his own, only district gossip and an orphan’s bunk bed at the convent in Truro Street. Anna nodded at Chester, who sat as patient and unblinking as a hunting bird, family life whirling around him and brown beer bottles accumulating on the kitchen table. She gazed at him covertly. He was here, he was clearly Lockie’s friend. It was as though she were seeing him for the first time, as though the stigmatised kid at school had been someone else all that time. In the first year of her marriage to Sam Jaeger, Anna installed a new kitchen range and her mother’s recipes in the transportable home at the lip of the gully and offered to do the Christmas cooking. But she hadn’t counted on Mrs Jaeger: You’d better let me do the turkey, dear. I think I’d better do the pudding this year. Dad likes a skin on his custard. Do I detect rum in this, dear? Anna was offended. She refused to see it as Sam urged her to see it, a blessed release from labouring for hours over a hot stove on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. She saw it for what it really was, an exercise in power and control. Anna could never please Sam’s mother, even if she were to clap hands for Jesus twice an hour. So why did she continue trying to please the woman? Every Christmas Day, exactly at noon, Anna and Sam loaded presents, ham and a potato salad into a cane basket and stumbled down the stony hill behind their skipping children. Into the scorching kitchen. Mrs Jaeger would peel back the linen teatowel and sniff at the potato salad: I’m not sure if there’s room on the table for all this. They chewed stolidly through the hours. Even Michael and Rebecca grew quieter, quieter. The music of Christmas in those stern years was a knife clatter on the best china, liquid jaws, the toe of Becky’s sandal kick kick kick against the stout, impregnable leg of the Jaegers’ dining-room table. Anna saw the years fall away from her father’s face when he inherited Grandfather Tolley’s shop, quit the six-forty acres and returned to the town. Tolley’s Four Square Store beat warmly between the Tourist Office and the fish and chip shop in the main street, a place for Daily Specials and catching-up over morning coffee. It became customary for him to stay open late on Christmas Eve with a promise of presents and Santa Claus for the little ones. And so Anna was hurt and bewildered when Sam offered to plump himself up in a red coat, britches and a cottonwool beard and canter up the main street at dusk on someone’s old pony. It seemed insensitive of him, so soon after Michael’s death. She read it as a slap in the face, as a reminder that she was forever guilty. Why isn’t he thinking of our son, she wondered, why isn’t he still stunned with grief, why isn’t he like me? It’s okay, it’s okay, Maxine said, comforting her, leading her away from those clamouring sweet faces and indulgent mums and dads. When Rebecca acquired a house and a lover, she invited Anna and Sam for Christmas lunch. Sam arrived in a state of great agitation, unable to meet Meg’s eye, shaking her hand gruffly before setting off at once to examine the house, oil a hinge, change a tap washer, rap his knuckles against the plastered walls. Meg shrugged at his busy back and grinned at Anna, a warm, faintly sad and mocking grin: Classic displacement behaviour, she said. There won’t be Christmas drinks at Showalter Park this year. The locals have had their fingers burnt, and many of them want only to break the test tubes, thaw the embryos, run a plough over the landing strip and dig up the parquetry floors. Until Sam feels more comfortable, he will find excuses not to spend every Christmas with the girls. There will be a ewe down, a windmill broken, the threat of dust and fire, and so Anna will make the six-hour round trip alone, grateful that he isn’t with her, yet wishing that he felt he could be. When he is gone from her Anna will prepare cold Christmas lunches; not hot, and people will nod, very sensible, but she will be just as happy to spend the day alone. She will send cards to Maxine on the Gold Coast and Chester Flood in Victor Harbor, and ring them before nightfall on Christmas Day if the lines are not tied up. There will be a stretch of time in which Anna views her teenage granddaughter with distaste at Christmas time—her bad skin, her sulky gracelessness, her tossing presents to one side as if to complain that her grandmother and her two mothers owe her something, but it won’t last.
Trains
It began with a rolling mutter in the rails, faint at first but rising rapidly, as if an electrical storm had mustered behind the Razorback and begun to pour along the valley floor toward the town. The children stood rooted to the buckled station platform, stupefied and afraid. Iron ground hard against iron; Anna’s ears rang with it. Soon even the light was ploughed under. She felt a spasm in Hugo’s tiny hand, then nothing, only a tingling sense-memory in her empty fingers. She looked around for him wildly, began to run. She found him in the baggage room, trembling in a head-concealing squat beneath the solid redwood counter top. Outside, the engine rumbled past the ticket office, the waiting room, the signal box, before flattening into a string of red carriages, glass-rattling and benign, with drop-jawed, frayed-collared faces elbow-propped here and there upon the varnished windowsills, staring out, registering nothing. Don’t cry, Anna said, I’m here, it’s all right. She heard her mother’s conking heels behind her. I’ve found him, Mum. Let’s wait here, shall we? her mother said. They listened as couplings took up the slack beyond the gloomy walls, a fussy shunting in the two-line yard punctuated with timorous pauses and incompetence. When the train drew away they returned to the light. Maxine’s father was there, his black uniform cap gleaming plastically above his dead white forehead. He helped them down the steps with a hand to their elbows and a little pointless laugh: Mind how you go, Mrs T. Opposite them, marooned on a shunting line beneath the wheat silos, a single carriage waited. The children and their mother stepped carefully over the asphalted rail ties. Anna looked left and right for runaways and soundless beasts. Up into the carriage. They were not the first. Other mothers waited with new babies and fretful small children. Aunt Lorna looked up, mute, exhausted, quickly grievous, the twins clutching her knees. Whooping cough, she said, as if Anna’s family had it easy in the world, in the big house across the creek from her on Isonville. The nursing sister twitched back a curtain. Who’s first today? she demanded, grim and brisk, stuck in this backwater for the day. When it was their turn, the children’s mother explained that Hugo could not get his breath at night. Try a eucalyptus inhalation, the sister suggested. Then she paused: Mrs Tolley, this is the Baby Train. Hugo’s rather too big now. It’s not fair on the other mothers. Sometimes, far away across the lucerne flats, Anna watched the goods trains crawling north into the dry wastes. Once she lost count at seventy-nine carriages and her father explained that the Electricity Trust had erected a town overnight upon a seam of desert coal. Hugo built a winding track around blue-metal boulders collected from the driveway and over icecream-stick bridges. He funnelled pebbles into the tiny open ore carriages and on the days when the asthma clawed at his throat he might viciously stage a derailment and trample progress into the dirt. In Anna’s final year at the high school, a handful of teachers took the seniors by train to Sydney, then up the eastern seaboard to the tropics. It was winter; the train’s heating often failed in the night hours and Anna and Lockie slept shoulder to shoulder under a Black Watch blanket. But she could not sleep. There was a niggling, an irritation, a sensation close to appetite and provocation. She rolled with it, the endless growl and shimmer of the massed iron beneath her groin. She parted her legs a little; her eyes rolled back; her lips peeled slowly open. It rose floodingly in her and she gasped. She reached for Lockie’s fingers and showed him how and where she wanted them. There was no light, only a moongleam at the edges of the flapping window blinds, but sufficient to show Anna a glint of envy and acute attention in the kids sitting opposite her, awakened by something, alerted to something. She sometimes thought of that night—a night in the education of her senses—whenever she rode by train through the tunnels un
der London, the metal ceilings and curved-glass walls tightening around her, the hand straps clinking like sounds from a bad dream above her, the human odours and viciousness aroused by timetables, IRA bomb threats and eyeball-to-eyeball intimacy with sour strangers far beneath the city. No one ever talked. A man with an unlit cigarette between his lips had it snatched out and ground into the floor by a man who screamed and pointed at a no smoking sign. That was enough for Anna. Coming halfway around the world had cured her of her grief. She went home, got married, had a son and then a daughter. The son was captivated by trains and ducks. Trains rumbled through his books and toy cupboard; a slow duck circled in the air currents above his bed; a train frieze ran from door hinge to door latch at chest height around his room. Whenever Michael saw a real train he reached out his arms to it. His real prize was his Uncle Hugo’s old train set, delivered to him on his fifth birthday packed in the original boxes. Anna looked back down the years but failed to remember the icecream-stick platform, the water tower, the signal box and tiny station clock. The Pandowie line is closed now, replaced by the Adelaide to Broken Hill bus, which stops once a day outside the Four Square Store in the main street. One day dealers will tear it up for the value of the scrap iron and sell the sleepers to landscape gardeners, but meanwhile the 150th Jubilee Committee has restored it temporarily to relive the days of steam. During the months of spring, the original engine and two items of rolling stock run between the town and Last Hope Pass, where the pink-smudge ranges roll on forever across the desert. With any luck, Sam says, we’ll still be running her in the year 2000. Sam and other dignitaries dressed themselves in period costume for the inaugural journey and the mayor made a speech. Anna has written a five-hundred word history of the train and its pioneering times, printed up by Carl Hartwig at the Chronicle as a folded-twice free pamphlet for the tourists. She will ride the train once a year until the service is cancelled. It will be fun: open windows, the smell of the wildflowers on the claypans flats, cinders in the eye. She will never again take a bus anywhere. She’ll rarely fly. Even with bullet trains and whisper-quiet cushioning, the old appeal will be there.
