The Drover's Wife & Other Stories

by Murray Bail

  Probably most then wanted to hurry past but this was not possible in the dark.

  The woman sat up and began pulling hairs out from her nose with tweezers.

  The partitions at intervals creaking. Their own breathing another powerful sound. They wanted to find the end before she switched off the lamp. The man climbed into bed. A scene which seemed to recede an inch at a time.

  He sat up remembering something. Slippers. He took them out of the bed and placed them on the floor.

  The horizontal movement altered to that of dropping, one by one, to the floor. A pause to dust themselves, adjust a tie. The odd remark or two seemed appropriate here and there. Some had coats of special waterproof material. Each and every one stepping out closing the door.

  Home Ownership

  The insidious Habit of Thrift was proclaimed by the churches and the home-purchase pamphlets: ‘13,690 homes have been provided, another 605 are under construction.’ That was the year ending 30 June 1934. All you needed was a deposit of £35. The houses were built on ironbark stilts, Brisbane being such a humid city. It’s the stilts and the galvanised iron which give Brisbane its temporary air as if the whole lot could be quickly dismantled or swept away.

  The street began like all the rest littered with sharp-smelling sawdust and bent nails not yet rusty or trodden into the ground. The sewerage came later. All white, the row of wooden houses exuded a kind of transparent hope, definitely, like new glass. The ground all around was bare.

  That was—what? Goodness, forty years back.

  Like everything else, the street has changed.

  Number 17 has the front porch converted into a sleep-out with louvred windows. Next door there, ‘EMOH RUO’, has the yellow carport leaning against the side.

  Plenty of others have tacked on, if not another bedroom, something. There are metal blinds galore, house names in inlaid mulga, portholes, lantern-lights near the doorbell, various weathervanes and ornamental flyscreens.

  After the war the street went through a slack phase; nothing much moved (changed). A nomadic period followed, rented accommodation, the appearance of solitary strangers.

  And now—must be due to the exorbitant cost of new housing—young couples have returned, and there’s been a spate of further extensions, ‘improvements’, shouting children at dusk, power saws biting into the night. Only one house, Parker’s there over the road, has remained as it was, motionless on its stilts, while the street and time passed it by. Parker couldn’t be better named! Since he moved in the week after he married he hasn’t budged.

  As a young man he rode a bike to work, the future before him. In those days he had yellow hair and an open blank expression. With their new house in the background Joyce would run out and wave, after first wiping her hands on her thighs: funny characteristic habit of hers. Then she’d remain for several minutes leaning over the gate, looking up and down. Other times, early in their marriage, she could be seen digging in the garden with a heart-shaped trowel.

  Joyce cut back the wild grass and muck; carted away the builder’s rubbish; and one weekend had Parker out there pouring concrete borders. Here she planted several cactus plants which threw geometric shadows at dusk. It was an attempt to impose order on the harsh elements, as if their lives would become ordered accordingly. This is common in Queensland. People dress very neatly.

  Yet Joyce certainly wasn’t the person one normally associates with cactus. The house wore brightly coloured curtains. On certain afternoons the windows reflected the trees and passing clouds just like her sunglasses, while the door in between kept opening and closing. With the step painted verandah-red, the house had a look…very conscious of itself. Joyce had this other funny habit, noticeable even from a distance. After saying something, usually to a man, she’d roll her lips back as if she’d committed an error or was applying lipstick. A nervous habit. She was short, firm-breasted. She had large eyes. Oh, she was something! Joyce always liked to laugh. At the same time she was serious she could be hard on Parker some days—waiting for him the minute he stepped in. He, the pedalling Methodist, without a tie but with the top button done up. He had a simple wooden expression. It implied stubbornness. Where did they meet? A ludicrous doomed pair. Couldn’t everyone see that?

  Brisbane hummed with a kind of humid emptiness. It drove people with a perfectly sound mind to drink. The slow-moving days were punctuated at metronomic intervals by door-to-door salesmen. The ring on Parker’s bell was the signal, though often as not the house would be wide open.

  The house breathed through the door.

  ‘I say, anybody home? You-who!’

  And then came the murmur of Joyce’s time-consuming idle questions; at intervals her sudden high laugh.

  There was nothing else to do in Brisbane.

  Raising one trousered leg on the stop, arms and jaws all working in unison, the reps altered the geometry of the foreground. Most of them were hardworking with mortgages of their own, and it was noticeable how after a while most of them took to avoiding Joyce’s door. She never bought a thing.

  There was one particular regular who peddled American pens and propelling pencils, all colours, in rows like picket fences. His narrow sample-case was lined with them.

  This man had a hungry tanned neck, wiry wrists—loose gold watch—and wore brown suit-trousers. He had lizard eyes. The eyes of a lizard: sliding off while selling halfheartedly, more interested in her over the road bending in the garden. He let out a loud conspiratorial laugh without foundation, and Joyce glanced up. You could see what he was up to. Few weeks later, sure enough, he was in there, leg up on the step, his suitcase of pens not even opened. Shielding her eyes, Joyce had a way of squinting: her hand apexed over eyes duplicated the shape of the peaked roof sheltering the windows.

  Every second Thursday he called. Regular as clockwork.

  He liked to say, ‘I’ll toddle off now to Mrs Cactus,’ and wink. He called her Mrs Cactus.

  A familiarity did grow between them. He was a traveller of sorts. He had endless stories. She took to sitting casually, ostentatiously, on his suitcase, exposing the red step of the open door. Clasping one knee as they did in those days, she leaned back and laughed. Some afternoons she wore pale-blue shorts.

  He told lies about himself, lies a woman recognises and yet laughs. They were for her.

  She liked to laugh.

  With Parker she didn’t have much of a chance.

  Some Friday afternoons he began appearing without calling on other houses; and every other Thursday Joyce would be there wandering casually around near the gate, expectant. Coatless in summer, leaning against the house, that shirt of his merged with the white weatherboard. All that was visible then was his tanned head. She’d come out with what looked like lime cordial or tea. For several hours he’d stay. Parker usually worked overtime on Fridays. And the house with its picket fence maintained a dental smile, no sign of decay. There was nothing much wrong with what they were doing—sitting on the steps—yet the women who’d liked Joyce before seemed to think so. They shied away and pulled faces at the slightest pretext. Perhaps they were right; because Joyce took no notice. And no longer did he bother even bringing his sample-case. It turned out later he had lost his job.

  Strange how 1939, fateful year for the world, was on a smaller scale a fateful year for the Parkers.

  Underneath these Brisbane houses people store their tools and ladders, fruit for preserves, bits of timber and junk in shadows bordered by the stilts. To camouflage the mess, white lattice covers the front and sides, perforating the shadows. It’s dark and cool underneath.

  At about four one afternoon he emerged from there, and returned casually to his place on the steps. A little later Joyce followed and went inside. He turned to say something, but she had shut the door. The exact day is easily remembered. Hitler’s armies had poured into Poland, a Friday.

  Emptied, made plain, devastated by the war, the street like many others in Brisbane took an age to recover. The str
eet seemed wider, but of course it wasn’t.

  Parker’s house was still there; it seemed to have tilted slightly. This was another optical illusion. The undergrowth and the turbulent dead sticks which had been allowed to go wild after Joyce’s death formed shoulders across the foreground, obliterating the stilts and lattice, one shoulder higher than the other. It came as a shock: it had overwhelmed Joyce’s cactus, darkened the face of the house. Nothing had been done to lift the fallen front gutter, and the first time it rained, in 1945, it shed three separate streams of water.

  Joyce had been pregnant, as everybody knew. Poor girl. She was found in the bathroom, sometime early 1940. Circumstances remain vague. But complications occurred more in those days. Parker, of course, had always wanted children, actually talking about five. He was a fool.

  Joyce was twenty-eight.

  The front door had opened and closed a few times, then it remained shut. There was no light. Parker preferred the back, the kitchen, at night.

  His punctuality became a joke. He hardly spoke. With its hooded eyes, jowls, resting on its dry shoulders, the house stubbornly gazed. It was always there. Lily-white in Joyce’s day, its complexion beginning to deteriorate, the former pinkish glow at the end of the day assuming a kind of ashen grey. Unattended, the paint-skin began falling away, in Parker’s case revealing raw patches; it can be the problem with weatherboards. The red step, that characteristic spot alive in the centre, chafed and faded. No longer was it the focal point. Nothing was. At five o’clock a slate-coloured shadow grew below the windows and spread, and over the years darkened considerably.

  Parker stopped going to church. He over-reacted, it was said.

  Dandruff spotted his shoulders. He had filled out considerably: wide dark shoulders. His hair thinned and turned a kind of rust-brown. Short, back and sides. When he came out and stumbled along unshaven, unkempt, it was with his kitbag to buy groceries. Some of his front teeth had gone.

  It was said he had gone soft in the head.

  The eyebrows darkened as weeds grew and withered in the gutter, drooping over the twin miniature roofs shading the front windows. These jutted either with stubbornness or a kind of blindness. The windows beneath retreated into the shadows, never cleaned. The frown which developed was caused there by the line of wooden slats above the windows, and the angle of the fallen main gutter. Slowly the picket fence lost its smile. It had always been inane, irritating, anyway. Palings turned grey and here and there loosened by humidity and time angled and fell away: dark spaces, gaping holes, were displayed. Sometime in the fifties Parker had to wear glasses. Parker had an unusually lined and weathered face for his age. As time passes, it takes an effort to maintain appearances.

  Grey weeds appeared, most noticeably out of the chimney.

  The nose seemed to lengthen. They do with age. It grew dark, a blue-grey, and in the morning dripped for several hours.

  Parker didn’t seem to care.

  Parker seemed merely to continue, passing through the house and time. It was a life.

  Perhaps inevitably, the plumbing gave trouble. Quite an operation digging around the foundations; quite a stench, too, of soaked earth and ruptured pipes. It had to be done.

  Parker had hardly missed a day’s work in his life.

  There was the Vietnam war in the late sixties.

  Certainly, the roof showed signs of age. Apart from the gutters which suddenly overflowed without control or warning, a few of the corrugated sheets and the ridge-cap lifted in the slightest breeze, and rust, first freckles, then beer-coloured streaks became dark scabs: another darkening process. The roof was eggshell thin. And of course early on parts of the lattice had gaping holes, evidently rotten below the shoulders, like one of Parker’s Swedish singlets.

  He withdrew farther into the house, so it seemed, retreating behind shadows and that shemozzle in the foreground, and small boys sometimes crept up and rang the bell or threw stones on the roof. It naturally attracted attention, increasingly so, as the other houses became renovated. A sign in green biro, ‘NO HAWKERS’, appeared on the gate, although door-to-door salesmen, if you don’t count the Mormons, haven’t appeared in years and, even if they had, it’s doubtful they would have called.

  The various horizontal lines had filled with dirt and moved apart, no longer parallel but wandered and concentrated around the shut mouth and dull windows and, what with additional cracks and unexpected shadows, formed a network of wrinkles, a stubborn complexity. A kind of weariness grew as the house brooded, which was not obvious before. More and more it drooped. After all, he couldn’t care less. It was futility. It happened gradually until one day it became clear and stayed that way. The steps, now grey, blurred into a jutting chin.

  So he passed the years, inside.

  Suddenly registering one morning, like the rare appearance of Parker along the footpath, was the bulge on the right-hand side, quite a rupture, a weakness there. And it’s still there today. That can be a problem with the old weatherboards.

  Parker put his bike away. Under the house. Not long after, he retired. That was only a few years ago.

  He kept his thoughts to himself.

  Dark birds as small as flies buzzed around the mouth. A blocked chimney became a recurring minor trouble and, beginning around March, the bathroom became incontinent, quite unreliable. Other gutters slipped at the side.

  It settled on its shoulders, its eyes almost closed.

  A vibration, a tic, developed and accelerated even in the still conditions of Brisbane. It was that loose downpipe, the skinny elbow on the right.

  And now this, or at last: unknown to Parker, or to anyone else in the street, white ants had been at the insides, destroying and multiplying, attacking beneath the surfaces. Evidently it had been going on for some time. The collapse when it came was sudden and complete. It has come as a shock. For a long time, almost since the war, it seemed no one had really been living there and now there’s only a house.

  Huebler

  Some people will go out of their way to avoid help, and I suspect Douglas Huebler falls into this class. The various ‘feelers’ put out to him have so far met with a stubborn silence. It seems Huebler is determined to go ahead, rushing into it, alone.

  His announcement was made with appropriate fanfare on the floor of a Paris art gallery back in October, 1972.*

  It was his intention, he declared, to ‘photographically document…the existence of everyone alive.’

  Pause. Let it sink in.

  He was doing this ‘to produce the most authentic representation of the human species that may be assembled’.

  ‘Editions of the work will be periodically issued in a variety of topical modes: “100,000 people”, “people personally known to the artist”, “look-alikes”, “overlaps”, etc.’ Until he had photographed everybody.

  A strange ambitious task, by any standards; and I wish him luck. He’s going to need it. Sceptics have already pointed out that to photograph ‘everyone alive’ could wear out a dozen men, let alone one. But Huebler is adamant. He is an artist (striving after the impossible), and only in his early forties.

  Personally, I find his list of the twenty-three people he intends to begin with very interesting (he wants At least one person who is incapable of sin, At least one who may outlive art, to mention but two). It so happens I know the whereabouts, have met in the course of my life, his twenty-three people, or ‘types’. I offer them to Huebler, helping him, one artist to another, whether he likes it or not. If Huebler wants more information, such as addresses, he knows where to contact me.

  1. At least one person who always has the last word.

  A word first about his status, marital and so forth. Leslie Aldridge, MBE, runs a large but obscure department in Whitehall. He is a bachelor, or as a Times obituary will put it, if he succeeds in his ambition, a ‘life-long bachelor’. He is tall, sober, well-off and immaculate; but not as urbane as one might expect. His clubs include the Reform. There he can be found mo
st evenings chewing the steak-and-kidney pie.

  History, its ramifications, has been Aldridge’s passion, even more than most Englishmen, if that is at all possible. At the Foreign Office he is known for his memory of dates, especially to do with the monarchy and the European wars. Concern for details implies obstinacy—and Aldridge can be prickly, noticeably with subordinates. Lately at the office he has seemed preoccupied. His mind is wandering along somewhere else.

  Aldridge approaching his sixtieth year has been struck by the fact of his own mortality. Apart from his name in old telephone directories—stored in the basement of the British Museum, admittedly—he is soon to disappear, without trace, as though he had never existed. The thought frightens him. His objective now is nothing less than to avoid anonymity.

  At least his method is scholarly. Aldridge invents words. It consumes his thoughts, all his spare time. In a meeting he’ll suddenly scribble on the back of an envelope. To have a word accepted into the language: it would be proof left behind of his existence.

  It is said that ‘astronaut’ was first used by the writer Nabokov. Such an ordinary neologism would not satisfy Aldridge. He aims to have the last word—a rare honour—which has been, for many years, Zymurgy (practice or art of fermentation, as in wine-making, brewing, etc.).

  Aldridge’s words are:

  Zynopic, adj. 1973. Pertaining to that type of blindness suffered by believers in astrology.

  Zythm, n. 1974. The interval of breathing during sleep.

  Zyvatiate, v. 1973. To sway or revolve with feet fixed to one spot while under the influence of alcohol.

  His problem now is to get one of these into print. The publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary show a polite but sceptical interest. They always request sources. Leslie Aldridge is now writing letters and articles to magazines and newspapers, ‘planting’ the words. So far, until now, his words have been ignored.