The Sunken Road

by Garry Disher

  Writing

  What’s that you’re writing there? Anna lived in the world but she also lived in her head, and if she withdrew too often, books were snatched from her hands, fingers were snapped before her eyes, voices scolded: Daydreamer. What are you thinking? What are you writing? When Anna voyaged, wearing her various costumes, everyone said: Wake up in there. They said: Play with your cousins. They said: It’s bad manners. They wanted her to be engaged—if only they knew that she was engaged. When, in a caprice of love, her mother posted ‘Kip’, by Anna Tolley, 8, Pandowie, to the children’s pages of the Sunday Mail, Anna took her writing underground. What was she writing? She was writing a letter to June, her penfriend in England. June was her cover story. June also became an unwanted obligation. Anna didn’t like June. She didn’t like writing to her. She could picture June’s weak eyes, her mother’s perm, her father washing his Morris in his shirtsleeves and braces. They had little to communicate to one another once Anna had evoked Isonville and June the Holly Hill Estate, Leeds. June’s letters caused Anna to mince around the house: Oh, Mummy, Hugo is ever such a horrid little boy. Kids from Texas were never listed among those seeking pen-pals, only Junes from Leeds. Anna loved two men and she hurt them sorely with her pen—Lockie, who’d described for her how the dawn broke over the South China Sea, and her father, who’d had her in his thoughts as he watched his sheep die on the verges of the sunken road. If the editors of the student rag hadn’t been so offhand with Anna, it might not have happened. Their approach with her was: You can clean the paste-up bench, maybe review the odd film, so Anna submitted a thousand words attacking conscription and the Anzac myth, and they led with it in the next issue. She posted a copy to Lockie and the silence stretched between them. She posted a copy home and heard bewilderment and offence. Anna was saying Look at me, wanting Lockie and her father to see that she was someone special, not someone they could fob off with automatic or absent-minded love. She was saying Look at me, unaware that they would always look at her. Then the boys from home began to die and her pen dried up. She fled the country. She recovered her voice, but it was slow, slow. It was a halting, fragmentary, pen-slashed voice: Dear Mum and Dad, Taken off the plane at Frankfurt—very security conscious—suppose you can’t blame them—opened my camera case gingerly—expecting a bomb?—most unnerving—why me?—travelling with two Kiwis and they weren’t hassled—must have the eyes of a fanatic. When she married Sam Jaeger, her father-in-law, blind to who she was, urged her to write to the papers, to businessmen, to bishops and MPs. He stood in her kitchen and boomed: Dear Chief Commissioner. We, the undersigned, are strongly in favour of a more energetic police action to put down the anti-Springbok rabble once and for all. We won’t be sorry to see a few police batons in action, if that’s what it takes. Totalitarian forces like these seek, through infiltration and subversion, to destroy the values of our Christian way of life and sacrifice our freedom on the altar of atheistic materialism. Sign at the bottom, girlie. Carl Hartwig offered her two days a week at the Chronicle, proofreading, writing up the Strawberry Fete, the Red Cross Flower Show, the dusty April field days, the Copper Festival, hatching, matching, dispatching. Her income helped to tide the family over when there were no odd jobs for Sam in the district. All these years later, Anna is still writing about fetes and weddings for the Chronicle, but Carl Hartwig is also giving her space for feature articles and local history, based on material she’s been collecting for the 150th Jubilee book. It’s going to be an opinionated book, and some of her opinions are finding their way into her weekly column.

  Sir: The residents of Pandowie and district do not agree with Mrs Jaeger as stated in The Chronicle on April 4 that ‘Pandowie is dying’. We are of the opinion that a newspaper report should be interesting and informative, based on fact and worthwhile news, but her article was neither interesting nor informative. The townspeople are not all old, as she suggests, and even though family farms are falling into the hands of the big concerns, and landholders in the area, of which Mrs Jaeger’s husband is one, are getting fewer in number, community groups such as the CWA and school welfare are still able to accommodate 1200 people for lunch during Merino stud field days in April of each year. The Pandowie Red Cross flower show is renowned as one of the best in the mid-north. Pessimistic criticism of this nature is not welcomed by people who are proud of their heritage and working to maintain a town which has survived for 150 years and will thrive for many more to come.

  Anna and Sam have received a letter from the bank in which a faceless suit-and-tie has written: We regret to advise you. How dare they? Sam wants to know. He flicks the letter with the backs of his fingers and blinks away the tears. We bank with them for twenty years and they let us know by letter? They can’t even talk it over with us first? As Anna’s eyesight fades, as she begins to miss grease spots on the benchtops, she will put away her stamps and envelopes in favour of the telephone. Every home will be blessed with gadgets that make writing redundant and she’ll talk to her daughter and her granddaughter on a flickering screen. She will continue to mark appointments on the calendar and fasten messages to the refrigerator door, but she won’t see what her granddaughter sees, handwriting that unravels as Anna approaches the grave.

  Siblings

  Anna was trying to understand: Grandfather Ison and Great Aunt Beulah are brother and sister? She grew restless and meditative on her father’s lap, her brows drawn together, as all human patterning realigned and rearranged itself in her head. She herself was a sister, with a brother. She began to sense that she was not unparalleled and unprecedented in the world, that the people around her were not there simply because she stood at the centre but were caught in webs of their own. She wanted to know more. There was plenty to know. Grandfather Ison had five sisters, in fact. Anna came eventually to understand that Grandpa-and-his-sisters was a story full of trouble and strife, but she wasn’t interested in the quality of the links between them just now, only the type. It would be fun to have a sister. We’ll see, her mother said. Who’s your sister? Anna wanted to know. I haven’t got one; I’ve got a brother, your Uncle Kitchener. Again Anna frowned, absorbing this new tie. She twisted back her head, stared up at the underside of her father’s jaw: Have you got a sister or a brother? He had not. He also was motherless, his mother taken by a shark when he was a baby. Peter! You’ll give the child nightmares! Able to go no farther than Grandfather Tolley in her contemplation of her father’s line, Anna turned back to the Isons. She stared at her little brother. Hugo was stretched cheek-down on the hearthrug, running a tiny, wheel-less metal truck across the toe cap of their father’s leather slipper. She rearranged the players. She imagined that Hugo was her Uncle Kitch, a small boy ready for bed. Her mother, sitting in the club chair on the other side of the flames, became Grandmother Ison. Her father, murmuring into the hair at the back of her neck, became Grandfather Ison, and Anna herself, the child in his lap, became Eleanor Ison, a little girl ready for bed. Anna wanted to know why—since her mother and Uncle Kitch had grown up together in this house—did Uncle Kitch now live in the overseer’s house across the creek? Because I was the first to get married, and when you kids came along we needed the extra space. But Uncle Kitch is married with kids now, so won’t he need extra space too? He certainly will, Anna’s father replied. Anna’s father often said one thing and you heard other things behind it. Four years later, Kitchener inherited Isonville and moved his family into Beulah’s half of the house. His rift with his sister, his hungry presence on the other side of the dividing door, drove Anna and Hugo into taking long bicycle rides through the back country or to their mother’s old school on the sunken road. They felt free and venturesome. Then one day their cousins begged to come along with them. They were twin girls, with thin, straining, overwashed print cotton frocks on their sturdy frames and identical expressions of envy and glum anxiety on their faces. They had no thoughts of their own and understood nothing. Outside the schoolhouse, Anna and Hugo dismounted from their bike
s and watched the sisters wobble toward them through the tossed-aside blue gravel at the road’s edge, flushed and damp, afraid of missing out. A lazy kind of badness crept in Anna’s blood. She infected Hugo with it. They took the twins through the gap in the crumbling wall and seduced them out of their hot dresses and bike-seat wrinkled pants as though they had been rehearsing this for all of their lives. Dazed, overheated, always wanting more, the twins dogged Anna and Hugo through the summer. There was always Maxine in Anna’s life, but she wanted a sister. She learned at first hand that a friend may be treacherous, a friend may reject you. She fell out with Maxine and had no one until Lockie Kelly came along. When she first met his family she came home to tell of it with the light of their careless, raucous, even-handed love still burning in her eyes: He’s got four brothers, two sisters, endless cousins. But, like a slap in the face, her father said: The Pope promises them extra points in the afterlife if they breed up big. Anna flared: So how do you explain Grandpa Ison and all his sisters? Anna’s father couldn’t explain it. He didn’t bother to try. He turned the page and smiled a smile of wisdom and secret intelligence that made Anna burn. At least she didn’t have a falling-out with Hugo over the six-forty acres. She had no right to expect half of that poor, stony country: it was too small; he’d worked hard ever since he left school; she’d seen enough heartache and strife between her mother and Uncle Kitch. Sometimes Anna wonders how things might have been between Michael and Rebecca if Michael had lived. Should she and Sam have had another baby? I begged you, Mum, remember? I was so lonely by myself. Anna tries to remember. Maybe Rebecca would have been happier, less on her guard if she’d had a brother or a sister to love and care for through her young years. Anna will draw closer to Hugo and her mother. They will be all she has left of her own young life. She will return to Pandowie every few months and see that nothing changes, even as everything changes: the unvarying beat of the town and her family there as the old certainties crumble.

  Sport

  When the First Eighteen played at home, cars and utes by the dozen parked snout first around the oval’s perimeter rail like stubby spokes on a huge hub, like beasts crouched at a waterhole. Anna and Hugo stood on the front seat of the Stock & Station Holden, bumping their behinds on the seat-back. Their mother sat next to them, lost in a book propped open on the steering wheel. When the horns sounded the children stiffened, searching among the men streaming onto the field for their father, who wore the purple and gold of the town, the number 12 stitched to his back. But Pandowie lost the toss, obliging them to kick against the wind, and so the children’s father, stationed on the flank at the far end of the field, looked tiny, unused, disappointing. That changed at quarter-time. Suddenly he was right there in front of them, ceaselessly patrolling and dashing, sometimes climbing the sky with a leap-twist, riding the backs of slower men to snatch the ball. The children could scarcely breathe. They clambered out of the car, leaned on the rotting white rail, straining to touch. The men were massive, thunderous. The damp earth rumbled under them and the children heard the vicious punch and slap of bone against bone. They feared for their father. At half-time he trotted to the car to gulp water from an enamel cup. The spell broke. Anna recoiled from him: so much taut, white, mud-splashed, damp-hairy flesh; his cyclonic breathing; the spray of sweat and snot from his hot, elated, angry, heaving face. Another man leaned to ruffle her hair, enveloping her in a stupefying animal fug: Your dad’s a wild man, missy. The children’s mother played tennis in the summer months. Again Anna noticed that dislocating transformation. Her mother, dressed in tennis whites, wasn’t as huge, snorting and destructive as her father in his black shorts and black sprigged boots, but she did seem larger, powered by strong, quivering, naked thighs. Anna reached out her fingers to the tracery of red and blue veins, the dimpled, follicular flesh, but did not touch. Then, fully dressed, they were her parents again, smaller and more accessible. The long skipping rope rose, arced, dropped, snickered on the schoolyard asphalt, rose again, dropped again, in a hypnotising, metronomic beat. Anna and Maxine, face to face outside the ring, began to nod, then rock and sway minutely, finding a sympathetic pulse-beat in their veins. Together they stepped into the blur and began to skip, a tidy, efficient, one-two of their feet, their skirts breathing around their knees, Anna’s plait knocking gently against her spine. Without warning they clapped palms, twirled one hundred and eighty degrees, twirled again, clapped again. Anna felt buoyant and weightless, attached to the earth only by her need to rebound from it. It was known in the family that Hugo was clumsy, a dreamer. He tripped on his laces. He gazed beyond the school grounds as balls trundled past his dreamy legs. But he tried. He might come home and say: Dad, I got eight kicks today, which Anna knew to mean: Dad, I didn’t cry today. At the end of her first year at the university, Anna said no to blazered Americans selling encyclopaedias and caught the train home to Pandowie. She slid easily back into Lockie’s sinewy arms, but was not so certain how old friends would receive her. Her year away, her ticking mind, were a burden here in the wheat and wool country. I’m available if you need me, she told the tennis captain. That was on Monday. On Thursday she drove into Pandowie and checked ‘the board’, a glass-fronted public-notices cabinet bolted to the outside wall of her grandfather’s shop: Last week’s results, next week’s teams, premiership table. She had not been picked. That meant one of two things: there were plenty of better players available, or she was being told that she could not expect to step willy-nilly back across the barrier she had set up when she left the district. Anna waited. Two weeks later, her name was there, Pandowie vs Wirrabara. She drove to a dusty crossroads on a baking plain. The tarry court surfaces jellied under the hot soles of her sandshoes, while panting sheep watched the play from the poor shade of half-a-dozen pepper trees. Across the road was a tiny Methodist church, set behind a stonewall fence in the corner of a crop of unharvested wheat and star thistles. In the four hours that Anna was there that afternoon, three lonely cars shuddered by in roiling clouds of dust, spinning small stones like missiles against wheel arches and into the powdery roadside grassheads, and she knew that nothing had changed. She lost interest. When Rebecca was old enough for Saturday sport and week-night practice, Sam was the one to drive her there and back. He was not a peaceful guardian. If Becky revealed a torn knee or diminishing ardour, his ambition for her grew more pronounced. He pounded the sidelines, snarling: Get in there, Beck. He arrived home, swollen with outrage: Some brat’s mother had a go at Becky today. When Rebecca finally quit in favour of the cello, Sam mooned about, full of unfocussed energy and rage, so Anna steered him toward the bowling club. He seemed to sigh with relief—the wobbling, measured pace of the heavy fat clumsy balls on the grassy links, an opportunity to bitch and yarn with friends and strangers, the anticipation leading to the Association Championships every March. He is the club president this year. He holds great expectations for the Year 2000 Jubilee Tournament and has posted invitations to championship teams and individuals from all over the Commonwealth. Anna stares at the exotic postage stamps on the replies that have begun to arrive at the house, and often catches herself thinking that Michael would have enjoyed fixing them in his albums. Sometimes Maxine, decked out in her whites, urges Anna to join. Anna shakes her head. Her argument is that the local clubs don’t need her, they need kids who will stay on in the district. She writes: Young people are traditionally the driving force behind our sport and social clubs but there is nothing to keep them here, and so we are suffering a tragic loss of youth leadership. The closest that Anna will get to sport in the years to come will consist of listening to Rebecca’s good-natured objections to watching Meg play soccer on run-down ovals in distant suburbs on squally Saturday afternoons. All the devotion and energy of Anna’s ageing neighbours to bowls, organised walks and winter swimming will fail to move Anna, who will walk at her own pace, and die in her own good time.

  Books

  Their father came home dog-tired every evening, often after they had
gone to bed, but he never failed to read them a bedtime story before sitting down to his lamb chops—by now oven-husked, in a sludge of gravy—bread and butter, sugar-steeped black tea and tinned peaches or apple crumble. He’d appear grinning at their door, lower his creaking bones on to the end of one bed or the other, and feel for a small foot beneath the covers: My darling first-born, my precious second-born. Anna and Hugo stirred, scooting upright to the heads of their beds: Read us a story. Okeydoke, and he’d page mutely through their creased, friable, cottony boardbooks, sigh, deeply dispirited, and end up spinning them a story of his own. Anna learned to read early, hungrily and well. Her books were passed on to Hugo, and from him to the Pandowie orphanage, where children like Chester Flood might read them. Anna lowered her concealing wings of hair into her mother’s childhood books—thick-papered English hockey stick and Empire stories—and dreamed her way into the colour plates. She ran about in a gym slip with flying ribboned hair, dodged spears on the frontier, grappled with swarthy spies on the running board of a touring car on a mountain pass in a small, fir-tree Balkan state. She soon left her friends behind, she left the school library behind, and began to sneak into corners with books from her mother’s bedside table. She read like a fast, hungry vacuum, sucking in dizzying, rousing, half-understood characters and notions. All that indirect talk, all that flesh made willing and weak. Her mother found her one day and halfheartedly tried to prise the book from her hands: Sweetheart, I want you to understand, life’s not like that. Not like what? Her mother’s face, pink and hesitant, grew sharp and certain at last: Loose morals. There were other clipped and pointless lessons over the years. When Anna started at the university, there were five hundred eighteen-year-olds enrolled in English 1. She floundered. She understood one thing in the books she was expected to read, her lecturers and tutors another. She felt that she must have been only half alert all those years ago, curled up with a book in a corner, or that she had somehow missed half the lines on the page. When she lay waiting through the slow months for her first child to be born, her blood beat slowly within her. Only mustard pickles and manor-house mystery novels would stir it. The mysteries were delivered by the boxload from the lending library that Grandfather Tolley had set up behind the canned peaches in the Four Square Store. Her mind would wander from time to time. She’d put a book down and ask herself: What if? What if this were Lockie’s child kicking in my belly? If Lockie had not been so cruelly taken from her, that is. She’d lost six weeks of her life when it happened, had lived six weeks of a parallel life. According to a flick-page magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, something similar had happened to Agatha Christie. Anna went very still when she read that. She felt a kind of elation, a connection in time to the heart-ached author. One day Mr Jaeger came to her with jars of relish from the stone house in the gully below and placed half a dozen slim, cheap pamphlets in her lap. Then he stepped back, struck a commanding pose against her patchwork valley view, and pointed, his finger quivering at the books, her womb: Things you should know, now that you are about to bring a young one into the world. The lines in his face were like cracks in concrete. She glanced down, saw Conspiracy and Elders of Zion among the obscured titles. Her father-in-law counted on his fingers: The family, Christianity, private enterprise, noninterference from government, insularity in world affairs. One finger bored at the baby within her: There is a nexus between communism and Jewish internationalists, did you know that? I suppose you were taught by pinkos and Jews at the varsity? The Jews, he continued, counting again, have been responsible for the Russian Revolution, most of the recent wars, organised crime, feminism. Did you know—he delicately lifted a wilting pamphlet from her lap—that Hitler was part-Jew himself? The bastard son of Baron Rothschild? His extermination policy was financed by wealthy Jewish internationalists, for devious ends. Anna manoeuvred her heavy rump to the leading edge of the chair, planted her hands upon the armrests, hauled herself to her feet. The pamphlets spilled to the floor. She kicked them flying, stumbled and swayed: Get out, get out, get out. You... are... poisoning... me. There was a time when books were an unsafe subject around Anna’s daughter. Mother, you are part of the straight hegemony. Have I read this, have I read that, dead white males, living white males. The system has colonised me; I wish to decolonise myself. Anna believed that Rebecca was unhappy. She could not say: You’ll meet someone soon, but it was what she thought. Then Rebecca bought a house. Anna helped her unpack, and the woman there in her daughter’s kitchen that first morning had clearly stayed the night. They broke for coffee. Where to begin? Anna relaxed. Let them break the ice with me. She watched the stranger obliquely. Where Becky was dark and darting, Meg was slow, tall and lazy, a blue butterfly the size of a thumbnail where her flaming hair touched one bare shoulder blade. Finally, Meg blew a wobbly smoke ring toward the ricepaper shade: Have you read, she said, naming a Chicago private eye, and Rebecca and Anna leaned forward, eyes alight. Now the three women swap books and argue that so-and-so’s latest book is not as good as her first, her most recent. One of Anna’s disappointments as her eyes grow weaker will be the limited range of large print titles in her local library. She will spend more time thinking. She will attend the monthly meetings of a reading group from time to time but come away irritated with the know-all women, the sweetness-and-light women, the women who talk only about their children.