The Sunken Road

by Garry Disher

  A great many of the shearers and hut-keepers are the offscourings of English prisons, and a more insolent set of scoundrels you could not find. They are much given to spending all their money on drink and bad women, but there are few good men of the labouring classes hereabouts, and, from their long servitude on the Sydney side, they all know a good deal about sheep.

  These days Anna may have a glass of wine in the evening. Possibly two, if she’s in the city and Meg and Rebecca have taken her to a restaurant. It’s always Meg who orders the wine. She’s a frowner, never satisfied with the wine list. Rebecca drinks mineral water. She tasted an alcoholic drink once, and hated it. Anna will find a nightly Scotch more satisfying as she grows rounder and more creaking and puts her feet up at the end of the day. It will be a ‘thing’ about her, known to the family. When those closest to her fly back to the country from abroad they will always be carrying a duty-free bottle of Glenfiddich for Anna, who will want to share it and want to save it.

  Secrets

  Great Aunt Beulah cloaked herself in secrets. They were all she had left. Secrets kept her out of the grave and were her chief weapon—in her feebleness, trembling and reliance on a keeper—against first Grandmother Ison and then Mrs Mac. Come here, dear, she would say, drawing Anna to her like another secret: We don’t want that old bat to hear this, do we, sticking her nose in where it’s not wanted. Anna glanced back over her shoulder. Surely Mrs Mac had heard? Yes—you could tell by her tipped-up nose that she had. Beulah’s clamped claw trembled on Anna’s forearm as if to shake her apart: I had a lover, dear, forbidden to me by my father. Such a fine-looking man, riding up the drive on his horse to see me, grinning to beat the sun. And sing! She lowered her voice: I would sneak out after dark to be with him. He wanted us to run away together. He said: Don’t tell your father. But I did, I don’t know why. Don’t you make the same mistake, dear. The lost six weeks of Anna’s grandfather in 1920 was another incident in the secret history of the family, and Anna’s mother did not reveal it until he was dead. She said: It’s not that he went mad, you know. It was just a breakdown, the sort of thing that could happen to anybody. Imagine the pressures he was under, the disappointments, stuck for weeks on end in that godforsaken place with no one to talk to. It’s no wonder he lost track of time. But you’re not to think that that kind of thing runs in the blood, Anna, and there’s no need to repeat any of this. Anna reared back. As if she would! Anna herself was full of secrets and always would be. She gave up none of them, secrets confided or her own. Lying and evasion are components of secrecy. Whenever Anna got into trouble she’d spin explanations and excuses so elaborate and confounding that her accusers would soon abandon grilling her. Yet she was struck by how easy it was to free others of their secrets. Anna was a listener, always watching, thinking, making connections, and she had only to sit and stare at the eyes to hear all there was to hear. It was not only children, drunks and adulterers who wanted to confide in her. Most people felt the burden of their secrets and gave them up with a sigh the moment Anna pinned them with her clear, unblinking, acquitting eyes. But Lockie found out about the tutor. One night he followed Anna to the house in Unley and kept watch on it until the dawn, shivering grimly behind a dewy windscreen and putting two and two together. Your secret life, he said sourly. Anna retorted: At least I don’t sneak about. He scowled: Anna, listen to yourself. What do you think screwing behind my back is if it’s not sneaking about? She folded her arms: Who are you to talk morals? You’re about to go off and learn how to kill people. He went away to camp, he sailed for the South China Sea. She didn’t see him again. There was only a postcard, an exhilarated postcard that left her feeling oddly abandoned and outpaced. Habits of secrecy and evasion were necessary if Anna and Sam were to contend with Sam’s parents. They learned to conceal what they had spent their paltry allowance on, to conceal their only holiday together, their thoughts, even their children. One day Mrs Jaeger abruptly ceased her endless polishing and stared fully at Anna, her face twisted in fury and impotence: You’re a sly one. I don’t understand people like you. Anna made love to Chester only once, but once was enough. It was a terrible secret. Perhaps even thinking about him to begin with was enough to count as a dangerous hidden fact. She happened to read in a magazine at the doctor’s that in three out of four couples one partner harbours a secret which, if revealed, would destroy the partnership. Anna snorted, startling the others in the waiting room: Don’t reveal it, then. Rebecca was eighteen when she telephoned to say that she was bringing a friend home for the weekend—and oh by the way, the friend was a woman and they were lovers. This last bit was muttered hurriedly and there was a click and then the dial tone as Rebecca broke the connection. Anna thought, irrelevantly: My daughter has no skills for this kind of thing. The revelation itself affected her not at all. Anna didn’t mind, she wanted only for her daughter to be happy, but irritation set in: Does she expect me to tell Sam, or does she want it kept secret from him, or does she want to tell him herself? No, she wants me to tell him. And when I do, he won’t say anything. He won’t know how to deal with it and so he’ll not deal with it. Beyond being faintly embarrassed when Rebecca and her friend are here, he’ll say and do nothing to acknowledge the fact that he knows, or that he cares. It will be as though Rebecca has a secret life, in a parallel time, and he need never be aware of it, if it’s not brought to his attention. And bringing it to his attention will practically entail sitting him down and stating it slowly, loudly, clearly into his face. Why do that? It would only hurt everybody. And what of the grandparents? My mother will be okay about it but the Jaegers won’t. I shall never tell them. I’ll leave that up to Becky. Anna did tell Sam, it was not mentioned again, and things are mostly okay now. Sam has jokey phone conversations with Meg whenever he rings Rebecca, so that’s all right. A few weeks ago there’d been something he wanted to get off his chest. Anna had waited patiently, and one evening, as she was sorting through photographs from the Public Record Office, he said hesitantly: Anna? Yes, my love? He swallowed: I’ve some bad news. Uh huh. In a rush: I borrowed against our place and sank it into that breeding scheme of the Showalters’. We’ll maybe get back two cents on the dollar. The world is teeming with secrets but few of them surprise Anna. She will play ‘Can You Keep a Secret?’ with her granddaughter and enjoy her visits to Pandowie, where she will listen to the stories Hugo and her mother have for her about the people she grew up with. She will hear a secret that will leave her feeling numb with pity and love. Her mother will ask, unexpectedly: Were you involved with Chester Flood at the time Michael was killed? Kind of, yes. Silence for a while, then: It was understood that Wes Showalter and I would get engaged. But I was more interested in Rex. We used to meet in secret, but the war took him to Europe and he was lost over Germany. After that I couldn’t marry Wes. Funny how things turn out.

  Food

  For eggs the households on Isonville relied upon half a dozen black hens. A faint, engrossed scratch and murmur filled the daylight hours, a perpetual background busyness beneath the wiry hedges. At sundown the hens bobbed spastically into the open and crossed the yard to the wire-netting pen and sheltered roosts at the rear of the house. It was Hugo’s task to toss them kitchen scraps at night and Anna’s to collect the eggs in the morning. Two generations ago an Ison had planted apricot, apple, quince and fig trees to screen the big house from the overseer’s cottage. The families rarely ate beef. A ewe or a hogget, butchered once a month, provided chops, liver, brains and leg roasts. They got milk and cream from a couple of Jersey cows. The children often felt a kind of slathering avarice for scalded cream. There were occasions, abundant springtimes, when the milk tasted of the wild-flowering grasses that had begun to choke the paddocks. Anna grew carrots and radishes in a narrow strip of weedy soil beside her father’s tomato vines, sweetcorn and sandy lettuces. One numbing and bitter day in August, when the windborne rain slanted far into the shelter shed and the ground was as hard as iron, Anna gave up her school lunch to Ch
ester Flood. He sat with everybody but he had no lunch box open upon his knees. The nuns had dressed him in patched shorts and a threadbare grey pullover, and Anna couldn’t bear to see the purple cold-bruises on his shanks or hear his helpless teeth. He ate the jam sandwich; she ate a rock bun; neither said a word. Anna wrote about race relations on the frontier for her honours research project. According to Mrs Showalter’s old family memoir, the Protector of Aborigines had toured the district in 1842:

  Consequent upon the presence of great numbers of cattle and sheep hereabouts, the chief food of the Native, namely the kangaroo, the emu and the wallaby, has been unprocurable and so he makes armed attacks upon the hut-keepers, carrying off livestock, occasionally with the loss of life on both sides. I have communicated with representatives of the northern tribes on the subject. They acknowledge having attacked the flocks, claiming shipi paru padlotti (a longing for sheep’s flesh). I advised them to desist, for they risked rendering themselves obnoxious in the sight of the European and liable to persecution and abuse. I am now satisfied that they fully understand the nature of our laws and punishments on the points of theft and murder, and expect no further trouble from them. Indeed, one settler has made tea, flour, sugar and tobacco available in exchange for labouring duties, the Native proving to be most adept at hauling stone, and on occasion, a lubra will deliver a wild turkey and be paid in flour, which she gobbles from her cupped hands.

  Anna’s tutor had never heard of the book: Indulgent family history, privately published—how can you be sure it’s accurate? he demanded. Is there any real analysis? Anna’s job in London entitled her to luncheon vouchers, issued in bundles of five on payday once a week. Her pay was mean, the luncheon vouchers were mean. One voucher, exchanged for a thin, cramped wedge of sandwich or an apple and a finger of stale cake was not enough to take away her hunger. She needed food to fill her up and she needed it to help her forget. When she had been married for five years and the children were toddlers, her twin cousins, the daughters of Kitchener and Lorna, had a double wedding in the garden at Isonville. A vast striped marquee crowded the lawn at the front of the house, the canvas bellying and exhaling as a hot northerly blew in across the lucerne flats. Anna sat with Sam, Hugo and her parents at a trestle table next to the bridal party and picked at cold chicken and potato salad while Hugo sneezed and wiped his scratchy eyes. Anna drank too much and took showy risks on the portable dance floor, her way of fighting down old grievances. She had not seen her uncle and aunt for many years and rarely since the day they’d forced her family out. Kitchener and Lorna had prospered at Isonville, but there were no sons to carry on the Ison line, only sons-in-law from the city, sleek men who would carve the property up when Kitchener and Lorna died. Anna could see her mother thinking these things, see the complicated memories and hopes in her face. Then Uncle Kitch appeared at their elbows: I was thinking about an Ison family reunion, this time next year. What do you think? Eleanor? Care to help me arrange it? The field days every April were pretty daggy, in Anna’s view. She always helped with the catering, more as a way of gathering information for the Chronicle than as a commitment to the district. She didn’t notice Wesley Showalter’s drunkenness this time: she wore her new dress and was daydreaming. Should she go to Chester naked underneath? She beamed across the cups and saucers and plates of scones in the Ladies’ Auxiliary tent, confusing the orders and blushing at the frankness of the scenes playing behind her shining eyes. She did see Wesley Showalter at the funeral, four days later, staring abjectly at the ground. He thought that he was fully culpable, but Anna knew better, Anna shared in the guilt. She should not have been coming home from seeing a lover or enjoying the lingering sensation of him on her skin but concentrating on the shapes coming toward her through the dust on the sunken road. Years later, something happened to cure her of her guilt. To celebrate Rebecca’s acceptance as a student at the Conservatorium, Sam and Anna arranged a meal out at the Bon Accord Hotel. Dinners there were a joke, everyone knew that, but that was part of the appeal. The steaks came drenched in gravy on chunky white plates and Rebecca’s salad was awash in vinegar. That awful man, Rebecca said suddenly, and Anna looked through the smoky alcove to the front bar. Wesley Showalter stood there swaying and shouting, his heavy face red with power and unhealthy blood. He recognised her, went still, then began to elbow jab through the smaller men until he was framed in the alcove and finally booming above them, dipping alarmingly at Rebecca: You’ve grown, girlie. Rebecca shrank away from him. He stood at a rocky attention again: Worst day of my life. Should’ve stayed at home. Anna understood that he meant the day he slammed her car into the rock face. They stared at him. After a while he wandered away. Last week Anna put it to the Jubilee Committee that tribal seeds, berries, grubs, tubers and insects should be included in a proposed display of the district’s foodstuffs. Her suggestion was approved by a vote of seven to six, but only after some forceful lobbying on her part. Today she is making notes about the double suicide on Showalter Hill for her column in the Chronicle. The Red Cross had stepped in with food and mugs of tea after the funeral, but Anna finds that she cannot bring herself to mention their generosity or the funeral itself, not when the suicide is clearly an indication of a deep malaise: The government would do well not to ignore the level of disenchantment of the people who make the nation’s food, and we would do well not to place all of our hopes in the Jubilee festivities. As she learns to cook for one, Anna will find herself eating less and better food. She will learn to make small economies. One of the pleasures of her life will be to buy fruit and vegetables fresh from the market gardens that ring the city, for fruit and vegetables at Tolley’s Four Square had always displayed the wear and tear of storage and transport and were rarely a pleasure upon her tongue.

  Hate

  Beulah is easy to hate, hard to love, Grandmother Ison said. The old cow. Anna gave the appearance of not listening, of absorption in her crayonned chimneys, smoke and hillsides. In the armchairs above her bowed spine her mother said: Don’t let her get to you, Mum. It’s eating away at you. Grandma Ison shifted her careworn, bony frame. It’s a trade-off, isn’t it? Beulah rescued us after your father’s breakdown and now she’s extracting her pound of flesh. Literally. Hateful old cow. Anna looked up. At once her grandmother said: Sharp ears. How would you like to dance the swords with me again, sharp ears? Four years later, when the old generation had died out and everything had gone to the son and nothing to the daughter, Anna’s mother said: I want to remember my father with love but it’s hard not to hate him. She said: I want to love my brother, but tell me how I can. If he would just give us something, release some land to us. Didn’t I count? Don’t I count? An unfamiliar harshness had entered her voice, as if she were edging warily through treacherous new emotions, hate and envy and a sense of deep, deep offence. Hate rose easily in Anna’s heart on her mother’s behalf. She treated Uncle Kitch, Aunt Lorna and her cousins with disdain. If they happened to inquire, in their side-door manner, how the house-hunting was progressing, the hate came back to bite her, sidling in on her flank when she least expected it. She came home from school one day and saw the dog stretched where there was no afternoon sun to warm his bones. Kip, she called. Kippy. He lifted his tail once and let it fall. He was disinclined to stand. Anna’s fingers flew over his fur, encountering blood, while his snapping jaws tracked her hand apologetically. Did Auntie Lorna do this to you? Bloody bitch. Anna’s quick mind aroused hatred. She was hated for experimenting with boys. She met the hateful sneers and curled lips face to face, silent and proud, and understood that envy breeds hatred. So did difference, so did fear, so did public display. Think you’re so smart, said the faces lining Frome Street. Think you’ll be allowed to do this when your slant-eyed friends take us over? Join a circus if you want to make fools of yourselves. There was bewilderment in her father’s letters: Do you really hate us? What did we do, for you to hate us like this? Talk to us, sweetheart, he said. Lockie said: You’re filled with so much hate. Y
ou spout love of mankind but it looks like hate to me, your face all twisted up. Anna put both hands to her cheeks, suddenly aware that he was right, that something like hate was wrenching her mouth into hateful shapes. She counted to ten and said evenly: What do you think you’re doing, learning to kill people, if it’s not hate? Lockie’s finger quivered: Quit it. Just you quit it, twisting words around. Must’ve been mad, thinking we’d ever end up together. Anna married into the Jaegers. Such hatred. It simply poured out of her father-in-law, a leaning-forward, voice-lowered, eyes-narrowed assumption of a common ground between them: You can tell by the nose if there’s a dash of the Jew. Crinkled hair, your black. The complexion—you can tell a lot from the complexion. A dash of the Abo—look for a thickness about the lips, the spread nostrils. Would he be Greek or Italian, that new bloke in the bank? Turkish maybe? Same bloodline. Sam hated Anna for a while when Michael was killed. He blamed her. He was too grieving and too polite to say so, but she knew. Hate need not be showy; hate may burn coldly, forever. At first, Anna didn’t hate Wesley Showalter. She allowed him a certain right to venture out at the wheel of the black Bentley that day, just as she’d allowed herself a secret elation from being with Chester Flood. And there were simply too many other factors involved for Anna to blame Wesley Showalter alone: water in her fuel line, the choking dust, the hungry sheep, the blind corners of the sunken road. But she did eventually learn to hate him. He had been born to rule, and no matter what tragedy or mistake he caused, he would never lose that assumption or the power it gave him. He’d never learn; he’d never truly be sorry. And so she felt hate; her frustration and her impotence bred hate. One day a stockman on a station property behind the Razorback entered the homestead with a hunting rifle and shot dead the manager and his wife. The district said instantly: Probably she wouldn’t sleep with him. Or she wouldn’t leave her husband. The papers printed his likeness: skin pasted to the bone. Half a day later, fear set in under the swift shadow of the Showalter Park Cessna and the beating rotors of the police helicopter as they crisscrossed the dry country behind the Razorback. The killer had been seen crossing the Murray, passing through Gawler, slipping among the quartz reefs on the Razorback itself. The women and children of the outlying stations began to drift into the town, making for Tolleys Four Square, where Anna’s father served free coffee and made them shiver and laugh. Crazy, they said of the killer; he was crazy with jealousy. That’s what love can lead to. But Anna thought it might have been hate. She imagined the cold, unloved, whitewashed walls of the stockman’s quarters, the yawning gulf between the stockman and the world inside the big house. Then someone found the man dead with the rifle between his knees in the property’s Land Rover on the bank of Ison’s Creek. He was coming to kill me, Aunt Lorna shrieked. Stupid woman, shut up, Anna’s father said. The stockman shot himself because he hated what he’d done, said the sages of the district, but Anna doubted that too. He’d got rid of the focus of his hate and left himself with nothing. Carl Hartwig is rubbing his gingery hands together over Anna’s latest observation in the Chronicle: Some of the Showalter Park workers have spent the greater part of their working lives on the stud. Is it any wonder that they felt intensely proud of its origins and heritage, the world-class reputation of its wool clip, its vital role in Australia’s merino industry? Now they are dismayed, as we all are, to see it go so rapidly under after almost one hundred and fifty years of hard work. And not only the workers. Many of us had a stake in the Park’s new technology and have lost our life savings. It’s as though an admired parent has shown us feet of clay. The excesses are hateful: the flights interstate, the frequent trips overseas, the wholesale gutting of the big house to make way for costly renovations, the lavish parties, the extravagant colour brochures, the annual Field Day circus. And how have the Showalters atoned for everything? By running a brokerage firm called Golden Fleece from an Edwardian mansion in the Adelaide Hills, leaving we here in the mid-north to pick up the pieces. The letters are pouring into the Chronicle: Does Mrs Jaeger hate us, writing these things about us? Maybe she hates Australia and should go and live in certain countries to our north where she can indulge her hate. What we want, in this lead-up to our Jubilee festivities, is positive thinking and selfless love of town and district, indeed nation. But I’m only pointing out, Anna begins, but Sam, or someone in the street, is always cutting her off, spitting hate in her face. So much hate. The locals listen to idealogues on talkback radio or on mail-order audio-cassettes, and Sam has invited a soapbox thumper to address a Save Australia rally on issues of moral decline, the right of citizens to bear arms, the immigration crisis. And so Anna admonishes herself: Keep your head down, your mouth shut. She will become a good hater. She will enjoy hating, learning that there is no profit in hating for personal reasons but plenty in hating for the common good. Politicians, posturing fools, people in the public eye.