The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  Six o’clock. Still too hot to light the fire. Even the kelpie had given up, lying spatchcocked in the shade of the tarp. He lay down beside it, comforted by the yeasty smell of warm dog. Watched the sun begin its long slow slide to where he’d come from, plumping ridges, softening old creek bones, gibbers glowing like round pale flesh. Night would arrive in a lash of shadow beneath that rib of sand.

  He closed his eyes to wait it out. Was twelve years old again, Christmas morning, sun just up, sky through sailing ship curtains already brassy with heat. At the end of his bed, the second-hand Brittanicas Urs had smuggled in at midnight, as if she was Father Christmas and he wasn’t awake and still believed. Stacked so high, they threatened to topple if he moved. Kill him with love and words.

  He wet an imaginary finger, opened the very first volume for the very first time. Could almost taste it, the dense and serious joy of those old pages, and while he dozed, he dreamed, in a place still holding fiercely to the day’s heat, of frozen tundra, avalanching mountains, husky liver stew.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JUNE 2007

  There wasn’t much. What there was could have fitted into the fruit crate provided by the landlord. If they’d arrived half an hour later, if Ursula hadn’t insisted on a taxi not a bus from the station after what had happened with Tilda on the train, the crate would have been packed and waiting for them outside room 22.

  What little they found would have been reduced to what they saw when it was all over. A narrow hallway, bent and bright. A raw pine box bearing the stamp Sunraysia Oranges, his name picked out by a shaft of light from the upstairs verandah, where a lonely cocky spent his days in a too-small cage.

  ‘No one said nothing,’ the landlord complained as he led them up a staircase smelling of cat. ‘Far as I knew he was still in hospital. Who’d you say you were again?’

  Ursula’s face swam up in a wall of mirror tiles, bloated with fluorescent, shifty with dust.

  ‘Friends of his.’

  The cocky squawked in dull outrage. Tilda gasped, baulked, blocking the way like a bulky cork.

  ‘Close friends. We’ve come for his things.’ Ursula prodded her sister in the vicinity of her ribs until she turned, continued up the stairs.

  ‘How long you gonna be? Big footy comp on tomorrow. I need the room.’

  There was something unreliable about the man, with his sketchy mullet and little red elbows. When they first arrived, he’d been halfway up the stairs, crate in hand. Jumped a foot when they rang the bell in his front bar.

  ‘But I told them. When they rang, the second time. Urs? I did.’

  ‘We’re here, that’s what matters. Mind your step.’

  The stairs seemed to go on forever, precipitous and gloomy, performing awkward corkscrews where the old stone pub had been spliced with a jerry-built extension, spawning errant landings, stray hallways, a warren of oddly shaped rooms. In the corners, shapes blacker than ordinary darkness, and Ursula was reminded of that rhyme Dad had taught her, in some rare soft moment, one which she’d taught Ray and he’d taught Tilda, all of them passing it on like some form of congenital weakness. That little riddle which was supposed to be funny but which contained at its heart something darker, tangling and seeding. Surfacing later, at night, when you were alone. It knotted sheets, sculpted monsters from school clothes hanging on a chair. That man who wasn’t and wasn’t and was never there. His terrible, thirsty yearning, like staring at a sky full of country stars, trying to believe the universe had no end.

  As they reached the top, stood blinking in sudden glare, something brushed past their ankles and Tilda screamed.

  ‘Till. Settle down. Just a moggy. See? Like Harry’s cat, back home.’

  It wasn’t. This thing was feral, cock-eyed, with a weeping stub for a tail. Ursula stamped her foot until it fled down the hall. Taking her sister by the elbow, she steered her over rolling humps of lino to where the landlord was fiddling with the door to room 22.

  ‘Did you know him? Had he been here long?’

  ‘Eh?’ The landlord was bent over the lock, swearing softly as he tried key after key. ‘Who?’

  Ursula braced herself against giddy waves of floor.

  ‘Your guest. Mr McCullough. The man in this room.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Nuh. Month or so. Wife does all that. Travelling sales, fertiliser or some such. Or so she said.’ The door swung open and the landlord peered in, wrinkling his nose. ‘On the turps, I’d say. We get a bit of that round here.’

  Dazzled by the sun in the hallway, Ursula could see nothing at first. Dust motes, curtains, in a pink and breathing rhythm. The windowpane was cracked. The rest was darkness, cradling denser outlines, like something seen on the inside of a squeezed eyelid, glowing, pulsing, sidling quickly out of sight.

  She tried the switch. Of course the light didn’t work.

  ‘Listen, there’s not much to worry about. Just a few old clothes. And all them papers. Ambos took the rest.’

  The curtains shifted. Objects gathered shape and heft. An iron bedstead, a hoop-backed chair. A single boot, fallen sideways under the bed. In one corner, a skew-whiff shadow, like a tall man with a broken neck. A skittering somewhere, so faint it could be leaves on the roof, curtains blowing across the broken floor.

  ‘Bus’ll be here soon. I need to clean.’

  Ursula stared. Dust was so thick in here, they’d left footprints up the hall.

  ‘Papers? What papers?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s how we found him. Or the wife did. Musta knocked them over when he went down. Bloke next door reckoned we had rats.’ He looked back at the room, shaking his head. ‘Good thing it’s no smoking up here.’

  She put out her hand. ‘Thank you. We’ll take it from here. I’ll lock up when we’re done.’

  He was about to protest but when he saw the look on her face, one which had struck the fear of God into countless classrooms without Ursula having to say a single word, he handed the key over, shuffled off down the hall.

  ‘Urs? Why’d you say that?’

  She was grateful at least that it was the wife and not that bloodshot mess of a man who’d been the one to find him. To see the place the way Ray had left it, not that there was much to see. Same buckled red lino as the hallway, squares missing, floorboards showing through. Rust-coloured curtains, worn thin as tracing paper, hemmed with safety pins. A narrow bed of chipped white iron, covered in orange chenille. Next to it, on the bedside table, a folded newspaper, a pair of reading glasses, a Bible, two books. Under the window, a sink streaked red from years of dripping taps. Beside and beneath it, along every available patch of wall, newspapers, in teetering piles. The tallest one in the corner, the shadow with the lopsided neck. In the middle of the floor, a dead cockroach, folded gently in upon itself. It was the same colour as the rust stains and the orange curtains, echoing in its husky sheen the cheap varnish of the tallboy in the opposite corner, the door of which creaked open even as they stood there, from the weight of their bodies on the uneven floor.

  She put on her glasses. Waited for her eyes to adjust, her heart to slow.

  ‘Urs? Why’d you tell him that? Why’d you lie?’

  Nothing, nothing. A coat, some empty hangers, the mate of the boot under the bed. An oblong of tarnished mirror which gave them back to themselves, silvered with dust motes, as if they were the ghosts here, not Ray.

  ‘I don’t know. Didn’t like the look of him. And we don’t need to tell everyone our business, Tilda. Not every minute of the day.’

  They stood for a long time on the threshold. Even Tilda seemed unwilling to disturb the scant order of that room. It had the mute rebellion of museum tableaux, something set up to show how kings or miners once lived. The narrow bed, the clot-coloured curtains, the plastic crucifix above the sink. Ordinary objects labouring under the weight of history, giving off great thrums of loneliness, all intersecting in the burnished light from the window, and she was reminded of a toy she’d once made for Ray, four nails hammered
into the end of a cotton reel, around which he’d looped wool unpicked from one of her old jumpers, producing the endless finger of a non-existent glove. Something missing though, some useful purpose or final conclusion. Leaving this. A room humming on its bones like the skin of a drum.

  The bulb in the ceiling came on, flickered, went out again.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get this over with. It’ll be dark soon and this light’s on the blink.’

  There wasn’t much. The coat, the shoes, the books. The glasses she didn’t know Ray had worn. The coat was old, black, faded, a cheap polyester blend. The shoes, buffed to a shine on the uppers, were ingrained with years of red dirt at the sole. In a drawer, two pairs of underpants, a greying singlet. No trousers. He must have been wearing them. Must have only had the single pair. The wardrobe smelled musty, the creaky leathery scent of things hollowed out by too much ownership, not enough love. The taint of St Vincent de Paul.

  Something rose up but she swallowed it down. Put the glasses in her handbag, the shoes at the bottom of the crate.

  ‘Hey, Urs. There’s a dog out there. It’s lying right in the middle of the road.’

  While Tilda stuck her head through the curtains, peering out at the last things Ray might have seen, Ursula went through the pockets of the coat. Didn’t need to see it, that wide country street framed by curly iron and dust haze. It was just a street in a town like the ones he had grown up in, empty of incident, crowded with hours.

  The pockets were empty except for a drycleaning receipt. The hospital had taken his wallet, for identification. A nurse had shown it to Ursula, sealed up in a bag like a murder clue. The details from his Medicare card had been recited to her, laboriously, adenoidally, every digit, every initial in that ridiculous string of names. Is this your brother, the nurse had asked? Ursula just demanded they hand it over, in her most imperious voice. But there were rules, procedures, forms the doctor had to sign. The nurse was young, keen, none too bright. Ursula knew the type, from years of teaching. A plodder, a mouth-breather. At school, she would have been a decorator of pencil cases. An inveterate raiser of the hand.

  ‘It’s exactly like that one Ray used to have, except not white and blue. Urs? Can we take it home?’

  ‘No.’

  Old, the wallet, cracked and creased, the calfskin worn thin. Oily dents on the billfold, where his fingers must have returned to emptiness, again and again. But decent quality, at one time, so at some point he must have had the money to buy it, if not to put in it. She held hard to that fact, a talisman of sorts.

  Over this, she’d surprised even herself. When the nurse had been distracted by a ringing phone, she’d just reached across, slipped the plastic bag in her pocket, strolled off toward the waiting room as casually as her arthritis would allow. She hadn’t had time to go through it yet. Didn’t want to do it in front of strangers, or in front of Tilda. And at the time she’d thought there’d be more important things to see, beyond the green rubber doors. But when she’d gone to walk through, another nurse had blocked her way. Older, this one, no nonsense, with the bandy legs and bumptious strut of a bantam. There’d been a bus accident, out on the highway. The body wasn’t ready for viewing yet. The body, she’d called it, in her squashed Adelaide vowels.

  ‘This is boring. I’m hungry. And I need the toilet.’ A familiar rising note in Tilda’s voice. Something was about to tip loose, whatever had been building since the train.

  ‘In a minute. Check under the bed. He might have left something. Lost something. Money maybe. You know what men are like.’

  This wasn’t strictly true. Tilda claimed to know all sorts of people, some of whom were men and some of whom were real. But the sort Tilda made a habit of collecting, on railway platforms and in dank alleyways behind early opener pubs, weren’t the type to own a bed, let alone anything to leave under it, and they certainly weren’t the sort of men Ursula would care to know. At least her sister was distracted again, head under the bed, vast bum in the air.

  The sun was dipping low through the curtains now, shadows crawling from the corners of the room. Ursula worked faster, rummaging through the bedclothes, flicking through the books beside the bed. The first was a gilded pot boiler, spine uncracked. Could have belonged to anyone except the boy she’d known. The other one, thin-papered and bound in blue leather, looked more promising, a collection of Paterson’s poems. But when she turned to the flyleaf, looking for Dad’s rampant copperplate, she found instead a page of date stamps and a little cardboard sleeve.

  ‘Yuk.’ Backing out from the under the bed, Tilda dislodged a stash of empty port bottles, sent them rattling across the floor.

  ‘Jesus, Till, be careful. Don’t break anything. I’d never hear the end of it.’

  ‘It stinks down here.’

  ‘Nearly done. Check those drawers.’

  ‘You did it already.’

  ‘I might have missed something. Go on. Never know. You might find a clue.’

  While Tilda swore and sighed, wrenching tallboy drawers in and out, Ursula hesitated over the Bible. Must belong to the pub, although it didn’t seem the sort of place to run to such luxuries. Then again, Ray had never been religious, she’d made sure of that. But as coat hangers clattered to the bottom of the wardrobe, a thin and final sound, she realised she didn’t know that, did she, any more than she knew whether he’d conquered his fourteen-year-old aversion to custard and peas. All she had to go on was that little pile of possessions in the crate. Full of meaning but resisting any grammar. She might as well try and make sense of the hoarded contents of one of Tilda’s plastic bags.

  The newspaper was local, almost three weeks old. When she picked it up, paper fluttered out like confetti. That’s when she noticed them, little drifts and trails of paper, littering the floor, lining the windowsill. Thick as mice droppings underneath the bed. Oddly tidy though, the mounds in rows, each mound bearing the imprint of cupped hands. As if Ray had left a giant puzzle for her to solve.

  That rustling noise again. She spun toward it, jarring her hip. Horrors breeding in her mind. But what sort of rat could survive the cat she’d seen on the stairs?

  ‘Got it!’

  Taking a sandal off, holding it high above her head, Ursula advanced toward the pile of papers in the corner of the room.

  ‘Urs? I found it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The clue.’

  ‘Oh. Good. Rightio.’

  Lunging forward, she kicked the pile until it toppled, jumped back. The stink of mice and desperation was overwhelming now, even above the abiding smell of port.

  ‘It’s all numbers, but really small and all mixed up. Reckon it’s a code.’

  Edging forward again, Ursula saw the newspapers were all ancient, the ones from the bottom a urinous yellow, the most recent she could see at least two years old. All different, all local, from tiny, far-flung places, bearing grand mastheads like The Truth or The Tribune, front pages no doubt breathless with council squabbles and school fetes. Couldn’t tell. Each one was folded open to the funeral notices. Every page had been cut to lace.

  She backed off, sat down on the bed. Trying to see him here, crouched on this dirty floor. Swigging his rotgut, wielding his scissors. Making tiny order from random bits of death.

  ‘Is it? Urs? Do you reckon? A code?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Tilda. What?’

  Tilda let go of her sleeve. Sat down next to her, far too close, her breath sour on Ursula’s cheek. Dropped something in Ursula’s lap.

  ‘See? Why are they all pointy? I don’t understand.’

  It was an old beer coaster, advertising the doubtful joys of a country pub like this. Turning it over, Ursula saw line upon line of numbers, arranged in a sort of pyramid, dribbles of something brown down either side. Looking closer, she saw they were actually the same numbers, repeated over and over, in sets of two and four and eight, like a square dance performed by ants. With each new line, a fresh number had been added or another subtracted,
the lines forming blurred steps to the base of the triangle, like a bird trying out a tune, in descending trill. Or maybe it was the other way around, the song becoming half-hearted as the climb proceeded, a thing working itself toward memory, before resolve faltered, hope failed, sense tattered away. Precise only in its meaninglessness, like Tilda finding Jesus in the stock results, writing Bible verses all over the living-room wall. Ursula threw it down on the floor.

  ‘It’s nothing. Just rubbish. Leave it there.’

  But Tilda had snatched it up again. Was staring urgently, lips moving, as if trying to burrow beneath the lines. The landlord chose that moment to stick his head round the door, mutter something about a bus.

  ‘We know! You told us. Just fuck off!’ The man almost fell backwards into the hall.

  ‘Matilda McCullough! That’s enough.’ Yanking her sister upright with one hand, she smuggled the coaster into her pocket with the other, then pointed at the crate. ‘Right. Take that outside while I do a final check. And don’t forget your coat.’

  As Ursula turned to take a last look at that room, the smell of which, old sweat, old clothes, old booze, would stay with her for days and days, she noticed a drawer in the bedside table, hidden beneath the drape of a doily someone had placed there in a failed attempt to cheer things up. Inside the drawer, a little velvet pouch, clinking tinnily in her palm. A child’s trinket probably, some rubbish from Woolworths. Nothing to do with Ray. But she slid it into her pocket. Didn’t want to add to the coiling silence of this room with another lost and broken thing.

  ‘Remember these? We had ones like these, didn’t we? When we were small.’ Crate forgotten, Tilda was back on the bed. Lying down on it, legs sprawled, eyes dreamy, idly fingering nubs of chenille. ‘Yours was blue. Mine was pink. I don’t remember Ray’s.’