by Tim Winton
In the yard beside that shoddy little joint, I got out and rigged up the spotlight on the roof of the cab.
‘You know what to do?’ I asked.
He got out.
‘You just stand up here and move the light slowly. Sort of search the paddock, you know. If you see anything, just knock quietly on the roof and I’ll stop.’
‘Yeah. I did it when I was a kid.’
‘Can you shoot?’
‘I s’pose you mean can I hit anything.’
‘It can be helpful.’ I switched the light on. The motor idled.
Jaccob shrugged in the reflected light.
‘Well, I’ll shoot from the cab.’
I got down and he jumped up onto the tray. From inside the cab I could hear his elbows on the roof. I put the ute in gear. Jesus, I thought; here we are looking for something we don’t know anything about. I knew something was out there, something that didn’t belong, and I wanted to kill it and nail its pelt to a tree so all the hidden eyes could see it. I wanted things to feel right again.
We jolted up the rocky pastured slopes. The beam of the spotlight reached out like an arm to make a hot white oval that moved from stump to fence to rock, to climb the trunks of trees and send shadows spilling across the ground. It was cold. We ground along soft firebreaks and lit up meadows of spiders’ eyes, and the sound of the motor in low gear grew stranger as the night went on. Out in the dark there was no definition, no assurance, nothing familiar, no sign, beyond that floating oval disk, that we hadn’t stumbled off the edge of the world entirely. I couldn’t be sure the world was anything but that oval disk. My eyes followed it. I drove automatically and the ute thumped and rattled tools as the wheel bucked in my hands.
Now and then, a roo floated by like a ghost, or a fox hid arrogant behind the blaze of its eyes as it retreated deeper into the bush. The night was eyes, and I wondered if I’d recognize the right eyes when I saw them.
We lurched and jerked and tossed on the hard and slew and swayed in the soft. We lay weals upon the night, the way we always do in this country, making enough noise you’d think we were warning every secret and fearful thing to beware and flee.
As we came to the top of the property where a hoard of boulders rose from the side of the hill, each stone a sleeping beast in the light, there was a sudden thump on the roof from Jaccob and I flinched and stomped on the brake, ready to see some white shadow turning its flank to me, when all I saw was Jaccob as he rolled down over the windscreen to land with a crump on the hood. The motor idled. I stared. Jaccob lay before me with the light tilted full in his face, and I began to laugh.
‘What the fuck?’
Laughter had a good hold of me and I put my head on the wheel, jerking silently, until my leg gave out on the clutch and the motor stalled and Jaccob was rolled off the hood and I could hear myself half-choking in the still of night.
Jaccob got in beside me, rubbing his elbow.
‘I wanted a break, not a fracture.’
I got a hold on myself, sighed, and sat back.
‘It’s bloody cold out there,’ he said.
He mashed his fists to get some blood into them.
‘What the hell are we looking for, anyway?’
‘Eyes,’ I said. ‘You know what cats’ eyes look like?’
‘I know what a cat’s eyes look like.’
‘Well, that’s what we’re looking for.’
‘Cats don’t kill dogs and goats.’ He said it out of anger. It was clear he wasn’t so sure.
‘You don’t know anything about cats.’
Jaccob’s teeth showed in his shadowy face. ‘Oh, I know enough, old man.’ It seemed to cost him something to not go wild. I realized I didn’t know a damn thing about him.
‘I’ll spell you on the light,’ I said.
Ida looked at Ronnie and Ronnie looked back. In the end they smiled again. They were enjoying themselves. They turned glasses in their hands.
‘We’re very different,’ Ida said. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’
Ronnie grinned and put on an expression of mock-outrage. ‘I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was wondering how you kept your age so well. Geez, you’ve done alright.’
‘You don’t even know how old I am,’ Ida said with a laugh. ‘Why is it that women flatter each other and men ignore us? Well, I’m sure they wouldn’t mean it, either. Anyway, you’re a fibber. You were thinking how different we are.’
Ronnie took a drink.
‘S’pose you’re right.’
‘I’m from the farm and you’re from the city. We may’s well be from different planets.’
‘You really reckon?’
Ida got up and went to the window, though all she could see was herself reflected. It was warm inside. This was her place, this was what she knew, and it wasn’t so bad.
‘You think we’re getting a bit tipsy?’
Ronnie drained her glass. ‘I’d say there’d be some truth in that.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you a joke, and it’ll explain the way we’re different. Oh, maybe it’s more about Maurice than me. You eat pork?’
‘Yeah, I shouldn’t, I guess.’
‘Oh, fiddlesticks, of course you should. See?’
‘No.’
‘Good. That settles that then.’
‘We are getting a bit wrecked here.’
‘Wrecked. Now that’s a young person’s word. See, you’re young and I’m old.’
‘But you’re not!’
‘I am too, but that doesn’t mean I’m not stronger than you. I could box your ears, girl.’
‘Tell me the joke.’
‘Then I’ll box your ears.’
‘Oops, sorry about the carpet.’
‘Here, one for me, too.’
‘Now the joke.’
‘Oh yeah, the joke.’
Ida got herself back into the sofa and hyperventilated a little while Ronnie snorted into her glass. Their shoes were off and their eyes narrowed from resisting laughter.
‘Right, the joke. Now there’s this bloke, see, and he’s driving along a country road and he goes past a piggery and sees all the normal signs of piggeries – which probably means he was looking with his nose – and then he sees this big porker leaning up against the fence with a cigarette in his mouth, looking kind of handsome and thoughtful, and then as the driver slows down, he has to take a second look, because, lo and behold, not only is the pig dragging on a Marlb’ro, but he’s got a bloody wooden leg. Excuse me. Anyway, anyway, a wooden leg. This pig’s got a wooden leg.
‘Well, the passerby, he’s pretty amazed by all this, so he stops the car and goes up to the farmhouse and gets hold of the farmer and says does he realize that there’s a pig in his yard with, with, with a prosthetic piece —’
Ida took a drink and disciplined herself a moment before going on. To Ronnie, it was a wonderful dream.
‘Anyway, the farmer says “Yairs, yairs, that’s a beautiful pig that, a most flamin’ amazin’ pig. A pig like ya never met before. I could tell a few stories about that pig down there. That pig is my greatest companion, my loyal friend, and I owe that pig more than a man can repay.”
‘The visitor’s fairly dumbfounded and he asks him, you know, to elaborate.
‘“Oh,” says the farmer, “one time my kids were asleep in the house and the wife was away shopping and I was down at the boundary putting in a few strainers and the house starts burnin’ down. Course, I knew nothin’ about it, but the pig was knockin’ off the rosebushes in the front garden and he sniffs out a fire and quick as a wink he tears inside, drags the kids out of bed, gives them mouth-to-mouth on the front lawn and then gets the garden hose and singlehandedly puts out the fire before I’ve even woken up to the problem. I owe that pig my children, the fruit of me loyens.
‘“But that’s only one story. There’s a dozen others. That pig carried me home one day from the back paddock when I broke me leg. Just carried me back and put me down beside the phone. Tha
t pig helped me shear five hundred head o’ sheep last year. That pig worked me out of debt. That pig sorted out marriage troubles ’tween me an’ the wife. It opens the car door for her when she gets home from town. That’s a sensitive pig; clever, compassionate – geez, it’s damn-near human!”
‘The passerby is really touched by this, you see. And he comes back to the pig’s wooden leg. “I s’pose,” he says, “the wooden leg is a souvenir from one of those adventures then, sort of a wound in the battle of friendship?”
‘“Oh, no,” says the farmer, “nothing like that.”
‘“Oh,” says the passerby, “then how do you explain the wooden leg?”
‘“Well,” says the farmer, “a pig like that, it’d be a shame to eat it all at once.”’
Ronnie sat a moment and felt herself fill with sick, shocked laughter. And then Ida exploded into shrieks and giggles and they both fell to the floor, writhing.
‘That’s it,’ Ida said, with her head under the coffee table, ‘that’s the difference between us and you. We’re farmers.’
‘You ever been resuscitated by a pig?’
‘Only by the smell of one, dear.’
‘We can’t be that different,’ Ronnie said, still lying on the floral carpet.
‘Well, maybe not that much for us. We’re girls.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘Right now? No. See, I’ve remembered this other joke.’
‘No, no,’ Ronnie pleaded, ‘I’ll die laughing.’
‘Well, then you’ll owe me a favour, dear. Can we drink lying down, you think?’
Up on the back with the cold handle of the lamp in my fingers and the wind in my eyes and cutting through my clothes, the night and the darkness seemed closer and I felt less protected by the car. I braced against the back window of the cab and rested on the roof, pushing the light back and forth, sighting along the beam until I felt like I was in it, that it was my eye, that the light was me.
Stumps, fallen trunks with upsearching grey arms, the broken teeth of Jaccob’s fences, the dam with its startled covey of wild duck, the fruit trees like a stood-down regiment of old soldiers – everything melted in and out of vision in a dreamy, dislocated way where things were created out of darkness, yielded themselves up to the oval disk and ceased to be a moment later. I found myself sinking into a matrix of tiny lights, fine black holes, and there was no telling space from matter.
A blur settled into view. Big white blur. It brought stillness – there was no vibration.
Jaccob shook my leg. He stood on the ground and was tugging on my trouser-leg.
‘What’s up? What’s the matter with you?’
He snorted.
‘Don’t tell me you were asleep.’
I looked down at him and then up at his house.
‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘let’s get some coffee.’
‘I drink tea.’
I ran an icy hand over my face.
‘Think you better try coffee.’
The spotlight made an eye out of one of the house windows. I switched it off. As I got down I felt the blood move in my legs; my knees felt like someone had knocked two-inch nails through them.
I stood there looking at the old Minchinbury house, and though it might’ve been the cold, I knew I’d never quaked like I was quaking now. There it was, the place I hated with its bullnosed verandah and long scroll-silled timber windows, the limestone blocks rendered and painted white at the front. Even rebuilt, it was the same thing I remembered. A big, beautiful, pointless, idle place. Walking up those timber steps, I made myself breathe and I did not obey the messages my legs sent me; I did not fall down.
I’d never been inside before. It was a mess. That comforted me, in a way. Furniture was haphazard and covered in dirty crockery and clothes. Smudged glasses and an overflow of ash stood on the hearth. So this was how the rich lived.
In the kitchen Jaccob put the kettle on a gas ring and looked fidgety.
‘Got the feeling we’re not going to find anything, you know.’
He was right, I knew, but I said nothing.
‘Whatever we’re looking for won’t be stupid enough to blunder into our light. If it’s not been seen before, it won’t show itself now, tonight. How do you think it got so big?’
I felt myself getting angry. He was right, but this thing was meant for me, and I was going to get it myself, I knew it.
‘Why don’t we get a professional hunter down here,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing.’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
Jaccob was silent a moment. The kettle growled.
‘We don’t even know what it is,’ he said.
‘I’ve told you what it is.’
Jaccob shook his head. He was smiling as though I was a crazy bastard, and my skin prickled hot and I felt my mouth run away from me.
‘And another thing. Take some advice from an old man. Don’t get involved in that girl. There’s no use in it. She’s a loser.’
He had me against the kitchen wall before I could draw breath. Where he grabbed my jacket I felt his knuckles against my ribs.
‘I reckon you should mind your business,’ he said through his teeth.
‘We’re neighbours,’ I said, fighting for air.
He let go of me and stood back.
‘Jesus Christ, now I can see how feuds get going down this way.’ He looked a little shaken himself.
‘No,’ I murmured. ‘You don’t know the first thing about it.’ I went cold as well, saying that. My heart was hard with fright.
‘Veteran feuder, are you, Stubbs?’
I could still see poor Wally on the table, tearing at his pulpy eyes, and the cat squealing off in flames. I’d started it all, this whole nightmare.
He looked straight at me where I was, still against the wall, and very slowly he broke into a thin smile.
‘Reckon I’m not the warrior type, son,’ I said.
He took the kettle off the gas ring after a moment and made coffee. With that bloodless grin on his face, he gave me a mug, and I realized that I liked him. Not because he could be tough and push an old man around, but because suddenly it was clear that he had things twisting darkly in him too. It wasn’t what was out there that frightened him most, it was something more secret. He didn’t look right in this house, as though he hadn’t gotten it beat into place yet. I thought maybe, if one day we could swap stories, he might understand mine and me his. I was right, but a lot happened before I was to find out.
We went out again in the ute and saw nothing. After his place we gave up. When we pulled up outside my house, every light was burning and Slim Dusty played flat-out on the radio, pouring into the yard.
The women were in the kitchen, pissed as sticks.
I started shouting.
Jaccob picked up the girl like she was a kid and took her out.
I heard his car start, even over my own bellowing.
Ida sat with her eyes closed to me. I felt utterly without hope.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re —’
My voice gave out. I didn’t have the strength or the words to keep yelling. I followed Ida to the loungeroom. I looked at her. I held my fists like they were animals.
She rolled onto the sofa, lit a cigarette, which I hadn’t seen her do for fifteen years, and said:
‘Go to hell, Maurice.’
The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.
A boy sits in his father’s lap out on the back verandah as the sun makes its way down among the trees. He smells tobacco and neatsfoot oil on his father and he listens to the creak in his chest. The carcass on the fence is stiff now. The boy strains, listening for the sound of a horse. The man from the paper is coming. Inside his mother is singing. She thinks they are going to
be rich. But the sun rests in the jarrahs and no one comes.
This is not my memory. It comes to me now and then and I see it clear and sharp as though I am there, but it’s before my time, things don’t look right. These people ride horses. Their clothes aren’t familiar, and yet when I dream it everything feels in its proper place, and sometimes I think this is one of my father’s memories. I have no way of telling. It’s terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn’t possibly be able to. It’s like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the glacier of time and space and story.
AFTER JACCOB went up to bed, Ronnie went out onto the verandah. It was cold and she hoped it would clear her head, but it just made her teeth ache. She stood at the rail and looked out into the darkness. They weren’t kidding themselves – something was out there. She wished the memory of those people from Bakers Bridge hadn’t come to mind, but it was all that talk about cats. She knew there was no point in telling Jaccob or the others what she’d really seen that night over at Bakers Bridge; they’d think she was one of the weirdos, they’d think she was sick and depraved for even being there, and sometimes she wondered if it wasn’t true. But she hadn’t known about it. It was all such a lark to Nick – that bastard. She liked old Mrs Stubbs, and she didn’t want to frighten her off. The old girl had guts and she was pretty smart in her own way. Geez, hadn’t they hit the piss tonight. Ronnie’d talked like a maniac and Ida was spilling secrets all over the place, about the days when her and Stubbs used to screw in a hollow log down in the paddock so his old man wouldn’t hear them, about how they used to steal honey from the wild bees at the edge of the forest, and the days they used to row downriver out of the valley and haul an unsuspecting sheep off the bank at some distant neighbour’s place and row it back up here laughing like larrikin kids, so they could butcher it and barbecue it for themselves. They went through all the beer in the house – even that vile homebrew – and then they’d knocked off the sherry. It was sad that Ida had never had the son she wanted. The daughters sounded awful. Ida showed her photos of them: greying, sensible mothers in running shoes and corduroys and styleless haircuts. They looked like they ran church youth groups; their smiles hadn’t the least trace of fun in them. They looked like slaves to commonsense and she felt sorry they were all Ida had.
