This Excellent Machine

by Stephen Orr

  Peter was determined to help with modern history. The Russian Revolution, although nothing could be further from my thoughts. ‘Three reasons why the Bolsheviks won?’

  ‘Lenin?’

  He waited. In some places people had put up fences, but they’d rusted through, fallen, tangled with phalaris and rotten posts. ‘Why’d they bother?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ Pop.

  ‘Farming. You can see it wouldn’t work. What’s to drink?’

  Troughs, overturned and broken, waiting for stock that had wandered off years ago. Loading ramps along deserted roads. Signs of optimism.

  ‘Keep going,’ Peter said.

  ‘The peasants were starving. They’d had enough. Lenin says, Blah blah, they say, Righto, let’s have a go at that. Then (reason number three) along comes the war, and the Tsar can find plenty of money for that, but as for feeding them …’ I didn’t care. School, exams, a future sitting in a small room writing numbers in a large book seemed distant and depressing.

  ‘Of course, Marx’s ideas had already spread through Russia,’ Ernie said.

  Here we go, I thought.

  ‘The Bolsheviks had educated people.’

  ‘That’s something you could say,’ Peter added.

  Bessie just kept going. The temperature gauge behaved, she fired on all four, and as we approached Port Augusta the radio returned. More stock prices and country music, but at least we were nearing civilisation. Electricity towers dominated the landscape, weighing it down, pushing coal power towards town. We, of course, were overtaken by pretty much everything.

  ‘Problem with Russia,’ Ernie said, ‘is it makes people think it’s in the past. But it’s not. Everything Marx said is just as relevant today.’

  ‘How?’ Peter asked.

  But he’d lost interest. Silence, again, as we turned onto a narrowing road, past half-houses, chicken shops and more Rotary signs (Port Augusta: Top o’ the gulf to you!). Into the town centre, a small patch of watered civilisation in the desert. Stone buildings beside glass-fronted shops beside vacant lots. An old canon beside a granite Anzac. There was a hotel with a four-lane bottle shop, and several men watching a forklift load pallets of beer onto a flat-top. On, past cathedral-sized sheds with skylights, broken-down trains awaiting reassembly, greasy faces strolling yards in search of sandwiches. And on, to the Desert Stars Motel. Surrounded by more barbed wire, and an electric fence.

  We parked, paid and unloaded. A single room, but it was big enough for our swags. As the men unpacked I explored: a jungle gym and an empty pool full of deflated toys breeding with wire, leaves, a dead dog, perhaps. There was an attempt at a barbecue area, but the vintage cooker hadn’t seen meat for years. Apart from that, it was quite nice. If you looked out the bathroom window you could see the main rail line (you could hear it every few minutes). There was a dining room, but we decided it was probably best to go into town for tea.

  It was almost dark when we went into the Lady Grey Hotel. The men (since I was still the boy) had showered, shaved and combed with poppy oil. Like a pack of wolves in search of schnitzel. Which we got. Miraculously, over- and under-cooked, burnt on the outside and raw in the middle.

  The dining room was almost full. Surprising, but at least we hadn’t picked the worst pub in town. There was a band. ‘The Impersonators’ ranged from Nat King Cole to Elvis, and back again. Between songs the singer, Norm, tried to lighten the evening. ‘Someone get us a beer, eh? I’m as dry as a nun’s nasty.’

  ‘Blue Moon’ got the punters going. An old fella in a flannelette shirt and jeans, and his girlfriend in a frock, with a sort of tiara arrangement. The room was mostly men, which seemed difficult, but country people solved every problem. Soon there were blokes dancing together. Not too close, but close enough. ‘After the ball’. They moved gracefully in three-quarter time. Ernie, who’d had a few schooners by now, said, ‘I reckon that looks okay.’

  ‘Not me,’ Pop said.

  Peter gathered his beard in his hand and smiled.

  ‘Carn, Ern,’ I said.

  We stood, I put a hand on his shoulder, and he on mine, and we danced. No idea what we were doing, of course, but that didn’t matter. Up and down, round and round, giggling to ourselves, then laughing out loud. I noticed Pop. He was itching, but with Peter?

  ‘Hold on,’ I said to Ernie. I approached Pop, asked him, but he refused, so I dragged him up, and we began. He just stood there, but then loosened, moved his feet a few steps either way, swayed with the music. ‘Havin’ fun?’ I managed.

  ‘Heard worse.’

  Another hour, another few schooners, before Pop said, ‘I reckon that’ll do for the grog.’

  ‘Y’ only live once,’ Ern replied, taking out a twenty. ‘Sleep it off,’ and he was gone. To the bar, five, ten, twenty minutes, as Pop leaned forward and said, ‘I dida bita research at the library.’

  We waited.

  ‘I didn’t want to say anything before now, but I stumbled across this in an old book.’ He took out a hand-scrawled note. ‘Two messages. One was an open message, but that was fake, to fool people.’

  And he read: ‘This is the position of the reef in question …’

  It seemed strange. More information. When he was finished I said, ‘And that’s the same position as your map?’

  He took a moment. ‘No.’

  Peter looked at me, then Pop. ‘So, where we goin’?’

  ‘Ssh!’ Pop said. ‘That’s the open message. But there was another one, under it, and I don’t reckon no one’s ever seen it.’ He turned the sheet over and read: ‘The estimated position of this reef is Lat._S., Long._E. Group of three hills, looking like group of Dickens’s women in ‘Dombey and Son’, one looks like a maternity case, bearing_, dist. 17 miles. Single hill looking like QUAKER, bearing_by_, dist. 20 miles. See, that’s the one he was hiding.’

  ‘But it’s different.’

  He took a moment. ‘Could be.’

  Peter sat forward. ‘But we’ve come all this way because—’

  ‘Could be.’

  It was the first time I’d heard doubt in his voice. ‘But these directions are close to what your map says?’

  ‘Sorta.’

  ‘Sorta?’

  ‘Day or two’s drive. All I’m sayin’s, if it’s not where I thought, maybe it’s here.’ He waved the paper under our noses.

  This wasn’t good, at all. Our odyssey had been predicated on one destination, one latitude and longitude, one cross on the map: the reef. Now, it seemed, he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Ernie.’

  Who was still at the bar, drinking, saying loudly, ‘You lot were sold down the river.’ Six or seven men were listening, others quietening, interested.

  ‘He’s more convinced than me,’ Pop said.

  ‘But you always reckoned you knew,’ I said.

  ‘I do!’ He studied the words. ‘But you’d be stupid to come all this way without a plan B.’

  Ernie was getting louder. ‘Marx made it clear: profit comes from unpaid labour. Your mob let them bastards get away with it for far too long.’ As he emptied another schooner. ‘Now it’s cheaper to close the sheds, send the work away, somewhere cheaper.’

  Cries of Rubbish, You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Who the hell are you, anyway?

  ‘So we just keep going?’ I asked Pop.

  ‘Exactly. I thought I might mention it, just in case.’

  ‘In case?’

  ‘You know, I’m wrong.’

  Ernie said, ‘You lot deserve what you get.’

  Now there were thirty or so, jeering, a few at the front pushing and shoving, the publican telling them to settle down.

  ‘The value or price of the labouring power takes the semblance …’

  Then it was on: Ern disappearing into a scrum, feet, arms and fists flying around the front bar, the publican clearing the crowd, saying, ‘Go on, out of it, the lot of yers.’

  We reclaimed Ern and
left. He hadn’t been too badly injured. A small cut on his cheek and a few bruises that ripened on our walk back to the motel.

  Pop said, ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘Buncha idiots. Not the slightest clue.’

  None of us knew what he meant. No one cared. But, to Ernie, it was his best speech yet. What he’d been missing, as Ida told him to stop cutting his toenails on the carpet.

  At eleven, we were all settled. Pop and Ernie were snoring. Peter lay on his bed, thinking, and said, ‘Now he’s starting to doubt.’

  There were long gaps. As the trains rolled past; as a couple argued and threw bottles next door.

  ‘He’s scared of what we might find,’ I said. ‘Cos we’re getting closer. Like, for the first time, he’ll actually know.’

  Silence.

  ‘Perhaps he already does,’ Peter said.

  Port Augusta hadn’t woken when we pulled out of town. ‘Fella tellin’ me about the ghost truck,’ Pop said, sitting in the passenger seat as I drove.

  ‘What’s that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Said be careful if yer out at night. No driver. Up and down the highway, twenty-four hours a day.’

  It only took a few minutes for town to become desert. More red sand, low shrubs dipping their feet in waterless creeks, a couple of small trees. More troughs, with their own pumping stations, and stock roaming the fenceless landscape. Like no man, or animal, or truck, needed geography. Pop took the new directions from his pocket and studied them. I didn’t say a word. It seemed like a little bit of gold in a very big country.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ I said to him.

  ‘Don’t reckon nothin’.’ But he was lost, caught up, confused. With a couple of numbers that didn’t add up to what they ought to.

  ‘Good to have a plan B,’ I said.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

  Which revealed a hill with its top sliced off.

  Peter said, ‘How d’you reckon that happened?’

  ‘Erosion,’ Ernie replied.

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘The wind, over centuries.’

  ‘I reckon someone did it.’

  ‘Who’d do it? Who’d want the top of a hill?’

  Niggles, minor arguments, silence. Even this morning, as we woke to a chorus of suffocated farts, Pop saying, ‘Come on you lot, we gotta get going.’

  ‘What’s the time?’ Ernie had asked.

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Why so early?’

  ‘I told you, six hundred kilometres before lunch.’

  ‘Nother half-hour?’

  ‘No, up.’

  ‘Seig fuckin’ heil.’

  Pop had thrown a pillow at him. ‘If you want we can put you on a bus home. It’s not too late.’

  Showers, rolled swags, me and Pop packing the trailer, and Pop saying, ‘Some bastard’s stolen the camp oven.’ We’d searched, but it had gone. Pop: ‘Miserable fuckin’ dump of a town. One night and they’ve gone through our stuff.’ But there’d been more. Some of the food, including the dry goods. So, we’d had to stop at Coles on the way out of town, all of the time Pop saying, ‘Dump like this. You’d think they’d just dynamite it, and plough it inta the ground.’

  Pop was still studying directions, occasionally surveying the flatness, and returning to latitude and longitude.

  ‘Nice to have the Rosies back,’ Peter said.

  Ern didn’t respond. He was working on a crossword, licking his pencil, writing and scribbling out.

  ‘Long time,’ I said.

  ‘Guess they thought it was time to face the music.’

  Pop looked up, like we’d said it about him. Then returned.

  ‘Musta had bad memories,’ Peter said.

  ‘Vicky told me Tina didn’t want to come home, but she made her. She couldn’t stand the place they lived in.’

  ‘Good-lookin’ kid,’ Ernie said. ‘If I was fifty years younger … You should try yer luck, Clem.’

  ‘Too busy with study.’

  ‘Bullshit. I seen yers, goin’ round the shop together.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I’m tryin’ my luck.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean yer not. You could do a lot worse.’

  ‘We’re just friends.’

  They laughed. Ernie said, ‘Friends, eh?’

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘That’s how me and Ida started, friends. Her parents had a shop and I’d go in twice a day, spend all me money on smokes. Then when I worked out I couldn’t afford to keep doin’ it I said, Well, Ida, you probably noticed I smoke too much. The fact is, I never touched fags before I met you, and I can’t afford to keep it up. So how’s about we go see a movie together?’

  ‘That’s how it started?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Yep. We went to see this Clark Gable film, which was horrible, last one I ever saw, and halfway through she’s snoring.’

  Peter, doubting. ‘Snoring?’

  ‘And I’m thinkin’, Should I just get up and go?’

  ‘You didn’t?’ I asked.

  ‘Oath, I’d paid. Went inta her shop the next day and she wouldn’t talk to me. Another five years before I went in again, and she’s still there, and I said, You forgiven me yet? And she said, Just about, and it was all on again.’

  What’s that got to do with Vicky? I thought. Every story led back to Ernie.

  Peter said, ‘I reckon you could do worse than Vicky.’

  ‘She’s okay, but I got a few more things to do before I worry about that stuff.’

  ‘It’s never too early.’

  As he said this, and as I saw the nape of her peach-coloured neck, I had to agree: it was never too early.

  ‘Just don’t appear to keen,’ Ernie said.

  ‘How’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘If they think you’re interested … that was my mistake. Draw ’em out, Clem. Make ’em work for it. What d’you reckon, Pete?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Ernie nudged him. ‘Go on, you can tell us.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Second-year law. But she found someone who’d earn more than me. Lucky she did, or she’d be livin’ with Davo and Mum.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Mandy.’

  I guess none of us thought it decent to ask. Anyway, I knew—we all knew—that Peter had made promises to his family.

  Pop screwed the sheet of paper into a tight ball.

  ‘Not so sure?’ I asked.

  Then he flattened it on his knee, refolded it and put it in his pocket. ‘No point worrying about women.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They come along soon enough. Your nan came in with her dad to get their car done, and she’s watchin’ me change a tyre, and she says, That’s okay, and I said, You like cars, and she said, What’s to like? And that was it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got her address from the office, went around that night, said to her dad, Car runnin’ okay? And he said, Not bad. And I said, Righto, I reckon me and Trish should go for a ride. And he said, You drive a Vauxhall? I said, Easy. And that was it.’

  ‘A Vauxhall?’ I asked.

  ‘Easy. Like everything in those days. Goin’ round, gettin’ married … like buyin’ a box of Persil.’ He felt for the new directions; smoothed them again, in his pocket. ‘Problem these days, everything’s too complicated. Keep it simple, Clemmy.’

  We thundered north, following the pipeline. Pop opened his map and described Hesso and Monument Hill, Bookaloo, Birthday and the crossed pick and shovel that was Ernie’s hammer and sickle. To our west, Lake Dutton; east, the sulphur and porpoise-shaped rot of Lake Torrens (Pop claimed he could smell it). Then, Spud’s Roadhouse for early lunch: walls papered with number plates from around the world, pubobilia, snake skins and dunny seats signed by Burke and his missus. We sat down with our hot dogs and Chiko rolls.

  ‘We’re makin’ good time,’ Pop said.

  Ernie rolled up his cr
ossword book and put it in his pocket. ‘No turnin’ back now, eh?’

  ‘I got a sore arse,’ Peter said, and Pop told him it would get sorer.

  You could pin your business card to the wall, add your photo to a gallery, hang your bra, even, in an underwear jungle hanging from the roof. There was a set of stoplights, operational, and a bowling alley beside the men’s chunderama. Pop’s finger traced the red line from Pimba to Coober. ‘Lotta bloody nothing.’

  Back in the shed, the gaps had seemed smaller, but now each had to be worked for. Neville Bluff and Glendambo, thousands of strokes of a mapmaker’s pen that didn’t show the endless boredom or pointless conversations needed to fill the hours, and miles.

  ‘All that today?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Today.’ He stretched his hand, finger to pinkie, one-and-a-half times, to show us. ‘Still up to it, Ern?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Doug. How you feelin’?’

  ‘Never better.’ He glowed, but then dimmed. Dropped his shoulders and said, ‘I’ll go fill up.’

  Peter drove, Pop beside him, me and Ern in the back. Pete was efficiency, upright, ten-to-two. Pop saw it all: ‘That one must be Rocky Hill.’ Indicating.

  I chose Lawrence; Ernie, level four Superword; Pop, the promise of progress towards gold. There were a few outcrops, granite perhaps, but the thought of a seven-mile reef? ‘This is the way Lasseter must’ve come,’ I said to Pop.

  He looked back. ‘I reckon.’

  ‘Musta felt like this, eh?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like it was getting closer?’

  This didn’t seem to excite him.

  ‘Phar Lap outstation … abandoned. Mount Brady.’ But then he took out the new directions, laid the crumpled sheet on his map, and descended, again, into doubt.

  We arrived in Coober Pedy early afternoon. Firstly, through a moonscape of tailings and shafts. We stopped, examined a few, and Pop said, ‘Best place to dump a body.’

  A million shafts, according to the information bay on the way in. Then, low, growling fish shops and explosives stores. Another school, with even fewer promises of Byron on his pony.

  ‘Lotta black fellas,’ Pop said, as he studied them.

  ‘Don’t know if I’d like to live here,’ Peter said.

  Karl and Paddy, Slobodan, Giovanni and Giuseppe, loading their utes, driving towards imagined fortunes. Ruptures in the earth where underground homes and shops dared to test the temperature, although it wasn’t so bad today. Making a fruitcup-coloured town of up-and-downs, sinking gyms and submerged love nests, brave government offices sitting stiff-shouldered in the sun.