Billy, getting drunk himself, roared with laughter: ‘Ha, ha, ha! Piggy Trotters’s mare . . . ho, ho, ho!’
‘That’ll do for yarns,’ said Colleen, but without strength. She turned to her husband, who merely shrugged.
Jeremy said, ‘If you call a yarn about horses dirty, you shouldn’t be living in the bush. The lady’s a horsewoman, too . . .’
‘’Orsewoman, are yo’, Dutch-ess, m’dear?’ cried Billy. ‘Good on yo’!’
There was a chorus of good-on-yous. They had a drink on the strength of it. Now Lydia was holding the bar up somewhat, standing with her back to it, jodhpured legs and elastic sides well apart for better support.
Billy wiped his beard clear of the dark stain of rum and froth of beer, proceeded to tell how he’d got even with Piggy Trotters for a certain meanness done him, by taking a hand in a bit of horse-breeding Piggy was essaying in his striving after the Beatrice Cup: ‘He’s got this mare, Belmont Belle. She’s good. She cost him a whole heap o’ dough. She’s got speed . . . but no stamina. He reckons she’ll get that speed combined with stamina through puttin’ her to a Lily Lagoons ’orse. There was a good ’orse, Magnet, son of that wonder ’orse of Jeremy’s ’ere Elektron. Magnet was a Vaisey sire. Piggy borrees him when his lady mare comes in her time.’ Billy paused, then said to Lydia, ‘Bein’ a laidy, Dutch-ess, you wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout Bromide, would yo’?’
Jeremy explained to her, ‘It’s used as an anaphrodisiac for males.’
Lydia nodded, repeating the medical term with care and a giggle.
‘Wha’ you call it?’ Billy demanded.
‘Get on with the yarn.’
‘Not under the stockwhip, I don’t mate!’
‘All right . . . it’s the polite way to say it puts a male off his oats.’
Billy guffawed: ‘That’s a good ’un. Write it down fo’ me. That’s what I want . . . a lot o’ polite ways o’ tellin’ me yarns, so’s to beat Colleen ’ere.’ Colleen scowled at him.
Billy resumed: ‘Well, Dutch-ess, I got ’o use this Bromide stuff a lot, yo’ see, wit’ all them Jack donks o’ mine, which can be a fo . . . a flamin’ nuisance when they’re ruttin’. Now, me luck’s dead in to get even with Piggy. I’m camped on the Alice when they bring Magnet in and put him in a paddock nearby to rest him ’cause he’s come a long way. He’s got a trought there to drink out o’. I sneaks in and Bromide’s his trought. Next day they puts the mare in with him. She’s all for it. But poor ol’ Magnet . . . he don’t even try. They think he’s still tired. But they leave the mare in with him, ’cause she’s that mad she’s workin’ on him. As soon’s it’s dark I opens the fence and lets in me ol’ Jack donkey, Walloper. He fixes her right away. That’s the nice thing about animals. They ain’t fussy like humans when it comes to doin’ what comes natural.’ Billy cocked an eye at Colleen and got another scowl. Lydia could scarcely contain her giggling.
Billy went on: ‘Course I had me ol’ Jack out o’ there toot sweet, and drained the trought, and run clean water in. Next day Magnet’s feeling better. He’s got over the what-y’-call-it, Alfie-daisy-oc, and does a bit o’ stuff . . . and everybody’s satisfied, includin’ Piggy, and specially yours truly. Naturateivly, in due course, Piggy finds himself the proud owner of a promisin’ little colt with a donkey tail and the Cross o’ Calvary on his back . . . ho, ho, ha, ha, ha, wow!’
The place rocked with laughter. Even the grim faces behind the bar unstiffened a bit. Lydia, in tears, would have buried her face in Jeremy’s breast, but evidently anticipating it, he sidestepped so that she landed on Billy, who embraced her, till he woke up to what he was doing. As Billy pushed her away, Jeremy said to him, ‘Wait till Vaisey hears you’ve been playing around with his girl, too!’
Lydia reeled. Taking advantage of the general hilarity, Jeremy guided her to the door, at the same time signalling to Colleen with his brows. Colleen was out in the passage to meet them. Between them they supported her, all but helpless with laughter as well as the grog, to the room quite elaborately prepared for her next to the Currys’ own quarters. Jeremy went to get her suitcase. When he returned he left it at the door, saying to Colleen, who was helping her undress, that they would be departing at daybreak and would require nothing but a cup of coffee, since he had food with him.
Back in the bar he found the crowd silent and subdued.
‘Where is she?’ demanded Billy Brew.
‘She’s gone to bed. She’s pretty tired from a long day . . . and you leave here alone, you old Jack Donkey.’
There were a couple more rounds of drinks. But the fun had gone out of things. Within an hour Mick closed the bar. Jeremy went to the car and got his swag and found a room in the tin complex, a bare little box with a fly-wire door, a hinged shutter for a window, a bare iron bed, a chair, an old-fashioned wash-stand with enamel jug, basin, and po, standard hotel equipment of the land. He unrolled his swag, took out the clothes neatly wrapped in the middle, stripped to under-drawers, lay down, and was soon asleep.
Jeremy was up at first light, rousing the dogs as he went to shower under the tank that took its chalky tepid water from the big square railways tank, which in turn was supplied from a bore. There was light in the detached kitchen as he came back. He went there to find Colleen with the Primus burning and the kettle on. She replied to his greeting stiffly, and when he asked if she had called the lady, took a key from her apron pocket and handed it to him. He asked, ‘What’d you lock her in for?’
‘Well . . . those drunks . . . and her behaviour.’
Handing the key back, he said shortly, ‘Won’t she still be needing protection from us? It isn’t daylight yet. Besides, you’ll have to take her to the shower.’
Colleen scowled as she passed him. When he glanced at the bulge beneath her pinny as she passed him she scowled again. But when she came back with Lydia she was as pleasant as could be, with every second sentence: Your Ladyship. Evidently she had washed and ironed Her Ladyship’s yellow silk blouse in the night and pressed the black jodhpurs, so fresh did the lady look. They had café royal with toast. Then, farewelled by Colleen and several of her brood, they were off and away, into the copper-red morning.
The copper became brass. The blue lane they followed became a scarlet ribbon through eternal silver-grey, with the slender silver poles of the Overland Telegraph line to count the miles in leaping chains. Lydia babbled like a happy little girl about the fun of the night before. How glad she was to be away from the toadies, she declared. He looked at her a couple of times as if he might tell her that no ordinary woman traveller would have been so indulged, but did not want to spoil her fun.
The country they sped through was of hard red soil scattered with pebbles of purple ironstone and flat as concrete, grown with as many spiky antbeds as stunted trees so that it was a wonder either trees or termites managed to survive. No water, save at intervals a bore, a windmill either turning slowly or hanging inert in dead air, an earthen tank, a line of troughing, with sometimes a flock of bright birds drinking. Never an animal, nor a blade of grass within sight. Jeremy said that, being a stock route, it had long since been eaten to the roots by travelling stock and the roots eaten out by termites, but that a single shower of rain would miraculously bring it back to life again.
After an hour or so of running they stopped for breakfast at a bore. The heat smote them. The flies appeared from nowhere. He got her out a fly-veil under which to eat her sandwiches and drink her tea. ‘What a country,’ she remarked. ‘The silence presses down on you.’
‘Listen, and you’ll hear things,’ he said. ‘Insects, birds . . . hear the telegraph line humming. It’s probably alive with talk about us.’
Breakfast done, he went off into the scrub. She looked up to find him gone, stood rigid, staring. When he came back she said breathlessly, ‘Please don’t leave me like that again.’
‘They don’t put up public lavatories in these places. Don’t you want to go yourself?’
&nbs
p; ‘I couldn’t go away there.’
‘Go behind the tank.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘Well, I will.’
‘No . . . don’t go . . . don’t go out of sight.’
He walked a little way along the trough.
She pulled her pants down, squatted, gave the parched earth a drink such as it never had before. She called Jeremy back while she was still buttoning up, standing boldly over the damp erosion, and smirked at his evident embarrassment. As they got back into the car she kissed his cheek, to his further embarrassment, and this time laughed at him.
They went on, to come at length to what he called Black Soil country, but which was really grey, and differed in carrying tufted bleached white grass and less antbeds. A gate. Stock now staring at them. He said they were on Ilfracombe, one of the Vaisey properties. She laughed at the name, asking had he seen the English beauty spot beside the sea it was named after. He said he hadn’t, but added, ‘The whole country’s full of names like that, stations and towns . . . Stratfords, Avons, Northamptons, Southamptons, Ilfords, Guilfords, all so different from the originals you’d think those who named them were making a deliberate joke of the contrariness of it. But apparently it was nostalgia, prompted by fear of losing identity if they’d called it what the blacks did.’ He said they wouldn’t be stopping here, because the manager and his wife were still back at Beatrice, and the humbler white members of the staff had been in the Charlotte pub last night: ‘There’ll be only the Chinese cook there and the blacks.’
As they sped by the village of whitewashed buildings comprising the homestead a few blacks stood out to stare at them and wave back when they waved.
At the end of the Black Soil was York Waters Telegraph Station. The two telegraphists were out waiting, proving Jeremy’s prediction that the land would be electrically buzzing with the news. They were two middle-aged men, much embarrassed by the call. Jeremy produced a bottle of O.P. rum, but only made things worse by increasing Lydia’s attempting to be matey and hence the simpletons’ fear of her. They were solemnly conducted over the station, shown the relay system. As they drove off again Jeremy directed the girl’s attention to the blacks’ camp of hovels of scraps of iron and flattened cans and the several yellow children amongst the naked youngsters: ‘They neglected to introduce us to their families.’
They climbed what Jeremy called the Jump Up, a steep incline he described as being the beginning of the vast Inland Plateau. They stopped on top to alight and look back at the smoky blue infinity that stretched away hundreds of miles to the northern sea, and for Lydia to pee again while squatting smirking at the broad back in grey poplin turned to her.
They stopped for lunch beside a tree-lined waterhole white as milk. Lydia wanted to bathe in it, and would have, but for Jeremy’s showing her that she would bog to the knees in mud and declaring quite definitely that he would do nothing to help her get the mud off. After lunch they rested a while under a shady coolibah. Somehow she got into his arms, to lie with her back against his breast, and eventually to pull his hands onto her own breasts and try to get him to kiss her. He kissed her hair, then heaved her off, saying they must be going, and went to the utility. She followed. She sat sulking as they went their way, then probably through boredom and too much brandy with lunch, curled up to him and fell asleep.
She woke when he stopped to open a gate. They were at Mount Prince Albert, he told her, an independent station where they would spend the night. She declared that she wanted to spend the night in the open like a real Overlander, even if she had to roll up in a bit of canvas. He said, ‘No fear . . . not with your name on every lip along the route!’
She cried, ‘What sort of bloody country is it where a woman’s watched even out in the middle of the wilderness?’
‘Did you know you were locked in your room last night, so none of us could get at you?’
‘What? Oh, the narrow-minded Colonial bastards!’ Then she added, ‘All of you!’
He only shrugged, and drove her up to the little whitewashed bungalow standing amidst a tumble of red rock grown with spiky spinifex and reeking of goats. A wire ran up to it from the OTL. Awaiting them on the stone steps leading up to the front verandah were a couple who might have been taken for halfcastes, so age-withered and weatherbeaten were they, but for the glint of faded blue peeping out of squinting eyelids and false teeth gleaming in fixed sycophantic grins and their rigouts of squatter’s finery and the fact that no Aborigines of any breed had as yet stood out before any sort of homestead as obvious lords of it.
Jeremy drew up so that the steps were on his side. He merely nodded to the dolled-up ancients, and leaving the engine running, alighted quickly and went round to help Lydia out. As he brought her round, the pair, now at the bottom step, ducked and chuckled like a couple of English yokels. He addressed them shortly: ‘’Day, Ned . . . ’Day, Missus . . . Well, here she is, Lady Lindbrooke-Esk, Lord Vaisey’s intended. Your Ladyship, Mr and Mrs Knowles.’
Rather red and with her smile rather thin, Lydia gave the white hand, saying, ‘How’d’y’do?’ The Knowleses bobbed and babbled.
Jeremy made no attempt to join in the handshaking, but turned and got Lydia’s case from the back and placed it on the steps, saying, ‘Well, she’ll be all right with you for the night. I’ll go and camp on the waterhole. See you in the morning, M’Lady.’
Lydia turned on him with face aflame and eyes blazing. But he was already in the car and not looking, and in a moment was moving off.
Jeremy had told her that Ned Knowles was a son of Nat Knowles, destroyer of Lu-lalla-goon and father to the lout who’d won the Golden Horseshoe Prize at the Races. However, he hadn’t confided what was more important, namely that he was himself the declared enemy of all Knowleses, considered by them to have robbed them of that Tantalite their ancestor had so conveniently dug and thrown away, on account of which they’d had him to court and, failing to get a verdict against him legally, had sworn to settle matters someday with the gun. Nor had he told her that old Ned had been trying to sell his wretched property to Vaiseys ever since the great take-over of 1917, and certainly would try to involve her in the matter, as well as try to interest her in the million or so pounds’ worth of gold he reckoned were in them there red rocks of which his holding largely consisted, but which had been so niggard in yield to himself, even with his sons’ help, that he’d been unable to keep the louts at home.
All this she learnt for herself, as with acerbity she made known to Jeremy when, after being bowed down the steps next morning, she was driving away with him and he asked her how she had got along. She said to him, ‘You must really hate me to play a trick on me like that.’
‘It wasn’t a trick, my dear. I told you how it was going to be.’
‘Do you hate me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Do you like me?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘Then kiss me!’
His face darkened in a flush: ‘What . . . and wreck the car amongst these goats and rocks!’
‘Then stop the car.’
‘And remember our first kiss whenever I run into the reek of goats?’
She laughed, snuggled up to him, saying, ‘I do love you, don’t y’know! I’d’ve come looking for you last night if I’d known where to find you.’
‘I counted on that. Did you hear the dingoes howling?’
‘Is that what the awful noise was?’
They ran on out of the barren ranges, down to a plain where the dust lay on the road in heaps like yellowed flour. They stopped at a bore for her to piddle within sight of him. When he came back with eyes averted, she laughed again, grabbed him and kissed him on the mouth, clinging till he was kissing her back. When they broke away panting, she was glowing, he burning. ‘That’s better,’ she said, ‘Let’s do it again.’
But he broke away, looked round, muttering, ‘What a hell of a place to make love in!’ Some skinny cattle were staring from beyond the windmil
l.
Evidently annoyed, she cried, ‘Where else is there in this God-forsaken country?’
‘I told you before. This road only follows the OT Line, straight as a die wherever possible. When God . . . or Koonapippi . . . laid things out, it wasn’t to suit the convenience of the like of us. Of course there’re lovely places . . . even away in the deserts.’
‘Take me to one.’
‘All in good time. We have another call to make.’
‘I don’t want to make any more calls . . . I want to make love to you.’
He flamed and swallowed, said huskily, ‘You heard old Finnucane ask me to take a letter to his son-in-law, Con Cullity.’
‘Another pub?’
‘Yes. We should get there about midday.’
‘And then?’
‘We’ll have a few drinks. You might strike some more characters. They serve a gold-mining community back in the ranges.’
‘And get locked in my room again?’
‘Bridie Cullity wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
They went on. It was near enough to noon when the narrow lane of road and telegraph line suddenly expanded into a patch of waste, in which stood a small whitewashed bungalow, with detached kitchen behind and the line of tin cabins and isolated privies that declared it for what it must be in those parts, a hotel. To Lydia’s surprised inquiry as they approached — ‘How came a hotel to stand so isolated?’ — Jeremy replied that old Shame-on-us, the owner, had declared that whereas the thirst of the miners of the goldfield some twenty miles to westward would drive them to the place in any case and the distance keep them longer at the bar than had it been closer, passers by, of whom there could be many during the droving season, were far more likely to quench theirs at the bore beside which the place stood than travel forty miles out of their way. The only signs of life, if indeed these could be called such when they showed no hint of movement, were a huddle of blacks under a bough shelter by the bore tank, a line of kites perched on the trough, a small flock of staring goats.
Poor Fellow My Country Page 28
