by Garry Disher
Names
Anna Antonia Ison Tolley. She was named Antonia Ison for her mother’s mother, who had set out with nothing but a baby and grit to bring Grandfather Ison back from his darkness in the mallee scrub. Anna? Another family name, dear. Mr Wheelwright rapped his cane on the wall map. Yarcowie, Caltowie, Terowie, Edeowie, Booborowie, Tarcowie and our own Pandowie. What do these names have in common? Exactly. And the owie means? They didn’t know—this short, compact, natty stranger from the teachers’ college had to tell them: It’s a word used by the Ngadjuri people to refer to water, a place of water. Anna perceived dimly that she belonged to ransacking inhabitants who had forgotten history, who had no use for it, since they knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Bit of a pinko is he, your teacher? Uncle Kitch wanted to know. The words ‘Tolley’s Four Square Store’ were painted on the main window of Grandfather Tolley’s shop and raised in plaster above the shopfront verandah cap. The name Tolley was rendered homespun and unassuming by his storekeeper’s apron, his long, taciturn face, his newness in the district, and not even his son’s wildness had been able to untame it. The Isons and the Showalters, on the other hand, had left their mark on the landscape itself: Ison’s Creek, Showalter Hill. Toward the end, Anna and Lockie seemed to scrap all the time. Anna wounded him with names, she couldn’t help it, and, wounded and confused, Lockie looked for ways to wound her: Okay, what’s the difference between the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong and the NLF? Names, names, names. Anna blithely turned the subject around. She was an accomplished sidestepper. Yet Lockie had hit home. He was a country kid who read the daily paper and listened to the news, while she was a sojourner at the university, someone far from home and full of useless passion, someone who could not keep pace with the issues or the names on the refectory table broadsheets. But, if Lockie knew many little things, Anna knew one big thing, and it blazed inside her: The war was wrong. Her husband’s name for her was sweetie, and her parents-in-law called her dear. She found that she’d married into a family that didn’t listen. But they did talk, constant, niggling, contestable, branch-line conversations that left her exhausted. Since they didn’t listen, they didn’t notice that the poor dog answered to two names: Sam called her Bluff, the Mr and Mrs called her Hilda. The Jaegers left Anna gasping for air. That’s why she strayed. The school run, work, shopping, field days, diversions to see Chester Flood, that’s why Anna burned up the miles and drained the fuel in Mr Jaeger’s bulk tanks. Chester stood back in the shadows that day, waiting for her. She whisked Michael and Becky in from the car, down the corridor, onto his bed. Now, close your eyes, my darlings. Where are we? Who’s that man? they wanted to know. Shhh, sweetheart, close your eyes. A quick nap and then we’ll go home. Afterwards, in the car, Anna played riddle-me riddle-me ree with her children until she had filled their heads with names. She said: When we get home to Daddy, who shall we say we saw today? Every name but Chester’s. They were pushovers, her children, they wouldn’t give her away. Anna had them so bamboozled that they might even doubt that Chester and his house existed beyond the traces at the edges of their dreams. As though to suit his name, Michael was steady and uncomplicated. He laughed easily, a gurgle when he was a baby, an infectious chuckle when he was a little boy. Rebecca grew into her name. She approached it as she approached everything, with suspicion, saw that it fitted her, and remained dark, European, unreadable, refined to the farthest degree. Sam’s parents insisted on being called Nana and Pop, names to make an Ison shudder. One day Anna walked down the gully slopes to the stone house to ask for an envelope, but the Jaegers had gone out for the day. Well, Anna was family; she would simply find her way to the nerve centre and help herself. She had never been inside old man Jaeger’s study before. Her father-in-law liked to pounce on every phone call she made, every pair of shoes she bought for the kids, every mile she drove, yet look who he was giving his money to: Voters’ Policy Association, Christian Institute for Individual Freedom, League of Rights, Australian Heritage Society, Christian Rural Action. The Mrs belonged to something called the Lilac League, hearts of iron inside lilac twinsets. Anna has noticed that the children of the district call her Mrs Jaeger these days, not Anna, a clear sign that she’s passed into the middle years of her life. Sam frets whenever he’s reminded that the old names are dying out. He likes to list them a little wildly: Your uncle Kitch is the last Ison, the Showalters have left the district, Hugo is the last Tolley, and Becky’s the last Jaeger. He’s bewildered by Rebecca’s announcement that she and Meg intend to have a baby: Will it have your surname or Meg’s? Both, Rebecca tells him. What about this sperm donor fellow? He’s given up all claims, Rebecca replies. Discontinuity, delegitimisation, no wonder Sam’s head is spinning. The 150th Jubilee Committee will commission a plaster replica of the gravestone on Ison’s Creek, but then discover that neither the full inscription nor the shepherd boy’s surname had ever been recorded. Some committee members will swear that George Catford, discoverer of the Pandowie lode, had carved the stone, until Anna shows them the inquest report, dated 1851. Anna will not be called Nana, Gran or even Grandma by her granddaughter, just Anna. She won’t be remembered as a town bike, a ratbag, a selfish cow, a hard-faced bitch, an old bag, just Anna-who-knew, even if she didn’t necessarily know what name to give to it.
Films
The pictures came to town because Grandfather Tolley suffered. He stared from his shop verandah at the sharkfin Razorback, and suffered. In spring, when the flowering grasses tossed and surged in the wind like whitecaps on the sea, he remembered his wife and he suffered. Your grandmother liked a good film, he said. She’d take herself off to the Henley Beach Odeon and forget herself for hours on end. Anna watched him on the verandah, staring out. She wondered if he was running a film through his head, grainy villains and lovers in improbable stories to drive that cruising shark away. Then one day he began to take himself off to Adelaide every so often, but he wouldn’t say why, not until he turned up with a certificate, a rented projector, and a second-hand screen fine-webbed with cracks and curling at the edges. The posters arrived on the Monday train, the film canisters on the Friday train. A display case on the wall of the Four Square Store announced: ‘Pandowie Pictures, Forthcoming Attractions’, and every week children dreamed beneath the flyspecked glass, provoked by flared nostrils, guns, surrendered white throats. But, within three years, the folding chairs proved to be too hard, the distances too great, the menfolk too weary, television too appealing, and so Grandfather Tolley closed the Pandowie Pictures and set up a lending library behind the racks of canned peaches, a place where Anna would conceal herself from the world. The winding blade of the auger took more than the tip of her father’s finger. For a while during the long year that followed, it also claimed his spirit. He asked: Why did I ever take up this game? In the chilly winds of July and August his aching fingers crept blindly for warmth deep inside the folds of his coat. The evenings around the sitting room fire were dark and long, and he was a reproach to his wife and children, a shuttered figure who stared at the coals for hours at a time through the stubby branches of that throbbing, never-warm hand. The family watched him. Anna’s mother wanted to say: Snap out of it, Pete, and she wanted to reassure him that she didn’t consider it a step down for her to be an Ison on Isonville one minute, a Tolley grubbing for a living the next. One bitter night, when they should have been a comfort to him and he to them, they left him to his discouraging fire and negotiated the mud and the washaways on the sunken road to attend a charity screening, Doris Day and Rock Hudson on a tiny fold-up patch of white in the Ladies’ Auxiliary supper room. There were husbands there but no other children, and Anna saw that her mother felt it keenly, imagining stares and whispers. The family bought a television set. It was a poor, weak, grey-faced thing in their sitting room, for power to the house came from a bank of 32-volt batteries partly charged by a wind generator, and on gusty nights, when the freelight propeller howled and shifted in the inconstant wind, the tiny screen s
welled and shrank, swelled and shrank. The little towns of the northern highlands lost their drive-ins and cinemas one by one until only the Pandowie drive-in struggled from one year to the next. Blushing, steadying Lockie’s fevered head between her hands, Anna said: Please, don’t hang my pants from your aerial. She waited, her heart thudding, steeling herself. Would he laugh? Ignore her? A voice called softly in the darkness; someone in the next car shifted on creaky seat springs. Lockie mattered to her—the others hadn’t—but was it a mistake to let him know that he mattered? She didn’t really know him. She wondered what he had heard about her. They had been seen driving in, his mates had seen him with her, and all bar Chester Flood had given him the thumbs up: In like Flynn there, old son. Lockie was backlit by the screen towering above them; the speaker crackled on the window next to Anna’s ear. She turned Lockie’s head so that it caught the light: Lockie? You won’t, will you, please? There were boys out there who had made a trophy of her, all shiftiness and hunger, but she didn’t want to be his trophy. She wanted to see love suffuse his face. When Grandfather Tolley died, Anna’s parents handed the six-forty acres to Hugo. He blinked. He flexed his wings. He pulled down the rotting shed, straightened crooked fencelines, planted trees, finally scrapped the little Austin truck. A skylight and a glass wall to brighten the living area at the back of the house. A thirty-metre-high VHF/UHF antenna with booster boxes and coaxial cables to pick up the special channel. For weeks he was devoted to a series upon the American Civil War. The book was on his coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray. Anna spotted Sunken Road in the index:
Of the fighting in Maryland, the bloodiest was at the Battle of Antietam on September 16, 1862. At one point Union troops came in behind Confederate sharpshooters stretched out upon the Sunken Road, which was to the north of Sharpsburg, and, in the words of a newspaper man from Washington, fired down on them ‘like sheep in a pen’. Thereafter the Sunken Road became known as Bloody Lane.
Sometimes Anna borrows Breaker Morant from the video library in Hugo’s shop, just to see Rebecca and Michael, who had been extras in one of the crowd scenes, a pair of small, knickerbockered, bonneted figures standing hand in hand as the troopers rode out onto the veldt and a brass band pomped away in the old rotunda outside the Bon Accord in Market Square. Sam had been hired to play a Boer guerrilla, a distant, bearded, black-coated horseman riding along a slope of the Razorback, but the director had left him on the cutting-room floor. Sam claims that Anna is obsessed, but it’s he who is obsessed, recording the deliberations and activities of the 150th Jubilee Committee with his video camera. Now and then Anna’s mother’s old voice rasps on the line: Could you tape the late film on Channel 2 for me, dear? Technology will defeat Anna too, eventually, and she’ll turn to Meg, a woman of hip-swinging flair and confidence, for advice on how to preset the tuning and the timer.
Cars
This funny, jouncy old goggle-eyed truck was called a buckboard. Anna liked the sound of it: buckboard, buckboard. At the bottom someone had printed, in scratchy black strokes with a broad nib: ‘Setting Out, October 1920’. The children wanted to know where Grandfather Ison was going, posed like that with one foot on the running board of his buckboard. He was unrecognisable, every feature leached from his face by sunshine and over-exposure, and the photographer—Grandmother Ison?—had caught her own shadow in the white foreground. Anna traced her forefinger over his supplies, a number of boxy tarpaulin shapes heaped on the tray top together with coils of fencing wire, a crosscut saw and axes. He had hooked a corked jute waterbag beneath a bulbous headlight. Must have been quite a journey, Anna said, and saw her mother’s eyes lose focus and swim down the decades to a time of pain. The children strained to hear her: Something terrible happened. Your grandpa was very bitter after the war, felt he’d been cheated out of his rightful inheritance. He took up a block in the mallee country, sight unseen, and was supposed to send for us but he never did. No town, no post office, no one to inquire on our behalf. The weeks went by. My poor mother: she bundled Kitch and me together and we took a train to Pinnaroo, borrowed a horse and cart, and drove off into the scrub, looking for him. He was deranged when we found him, almost out of food and water. It was awful land and he just lost heart. He felt he’d failed us and was too ashamed to come home. Anna sighed. The leaves of the album were cardpaper the colour of charcoal, and she prowled through the years. Grandpa Tolley, looking tall, thin and high-strung, one hand propped on the bonnet of his wartime gas-burning Austin; the family’s new Zephyr roofracked with cases, beach balls, buckets and spades; Hugo overflowing his pedal car on the side verandah at Isonville. The main street of Pandowie was one big verandah to Hugo, that’s why Anna always clasped his fingers tightly. He yanked, she yanked back, almost wrenching off his arm, just as Mr Showalter blared by in his glistening black, snout-up Bentley, drunk again, missing them by inches. The Showalters were loved because of that car and hated because of it, often in the same breath. When the Redex Trial passed through the district, two cars rolled on an elbow bend in the sunken road, leaving angry paint scars on the cutting wall and an impression in everyone’s ears of glass splintering, metal peeling open. One by one the girls in Anna’s class turned sixteen and one by one they began to ride in the passenger seats of their boyfriends’ utes, falling naturally into an easy, sleepy, casual acquiescence as if they belonged there and had never not been there. Anna loved the smell, compounded of sun-baked vinyl, grease and Lockie himself. She would not be two seconds in his passenger seat before she bared her legs, propped her bare feet on the dashboard and planted her hand on his thigh. They both loved the liberated, elastic, half-zed of her legs. Later, whenever Anna drove a car, she noticed that a man would never settle comfortably in the passenger seat. She drove Lockie’s ute to the Wirrabara Dance and he crossed and recrossed his legs, folded and refolded his arms. She drove the tutor to the Law Revue and he rode as though in alien hands, as stiff as rope. One of the many things that Anna’s father-in-law controlled was the cost and type of car that she and Sam would drive. Mr Jaeger would come to her, waving a list of figures in her face: According to the speedo, you’ve driven three hundred miles since last Tuesday, two-ninety-five the week before that. How come? Where would you be going, to clock up that sort of mileage? Surely not your job at the Chronicle? Young wives, they shop three times a week when once should be enough. Always dropping over to see their mothers. Do you think we’re made of money? I’ve a good mind to padlock the bowser. Anna told him that she had a good mind to padlock the car so he couldn’t spy on her. Showalter Park has gone to the wall now and the receiver is selling off the property’s vehicles. Trucks, utes, vans, station wagons, all in good nick. Unfortunately, however, even despite a fresh paint job, the Showalter Park logo seems to persist, like a bad memory, on many of the driver’s doors around town. Anna has seen her mother delivering groceries in an ex-Showalter Park pick-up, faintly embarrassed and faintly defiant, as if to say that she hadn’t circled in at the kill when the Park went under the hammer, but so what if she had?—the Showalters had brought a lot of the locals to their knees. Anna will drive along the sunken road after it has been newly sealed, its elbows straightened out, and find herself braking unnecessarily sometimes, bad old hazards and memories still haunting her. Was it here that I had a blocked fuel line, just when I needed to accelerate out of danger, or was it here? She will continue to run a car until, at her annual driving test, an examiner shakes his head over her hearing, her eyesight, her response time, her stiff neck. Her granddaughter will drive her around after that, Anna marvelling at the girl’s languid wrist-flick turns, her easy windmilling style. Shopping will be a cooperative effort for Anna and her neighbour. One will reverse the car, the other will guide her: Bit more to your left, straighten up, mind the tap, whooh! ‘Woman, 84, Killed. An 84-year-old Henley Beach woman was knocked over and killed yesterday when her neighbour, 87, was attempting to reverse out of the driveway of her home’. Three lines at the bottom of page three and it co
uld well be Anna.
