The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  She was off then, on a rampage of remembering, hats and boots and blue kittens all knitted up with bikes and horses and heatwave Christmas dinners, the only thread holding it all together was Tilda’s voracious appetite for near disaster. Fire, flood, snakes, axes. Wild pigs, rogue tractors, other lethal bits of farm machinery. A steady motif of gouged eyes, severed limbs, cracked skulls.

  Most of this was pilfered from Tilda’s memory of other people’s memories. From stories told by Ursula, to distract her sister from voices, doctors, approaching needles. From stories told by Mam at the end of things, riding high, ranging deep, fetching up now and again against hard little toeholds of grief. Travelling memories so old and dark, they were passing with her, out of time. Hour after hour she kept dredging them up, thickly, painfully, all those old bad-days tales about the things that went wrong when people turned their back on fate and rivers, dogs and God. Stories meant to frighten, shame or chasten, which Tilda lapped up and made her own. It was Mam, not Tilda, who had viral meningitis at the age of two. Mam’s brother who shot himself in the middle of a drought. Mam who walked barefoot to school in country winters, heels blue with frost.

  Some of these stories came straight from Dad. Never a reliable source at the best of times, less and less so after Ray left, and now, with Mam gone, sunk in his monstrous nostalgia, not at all. To hear Dad tell it, the farm never failed, he and Mam never fought, his long-lost brother Len had come to lunch one day and Ursula was just some busybody from the government, out to steal his pension. If Ray’s name was mentioned, Dad just gazed out an available window. As if by sheer force of will, he could cut Ray out of the family history, leave a convenient hole.

  Ursula had the photographs though. The proof. The family photo album was one of the few things she’d managed to salvage from the sale of the homestead, along with Grandad’s war medals, Ray’s Brittanicas, a few of Mam’s old clothes. Wasn’t even an album, not really, just a cardboard box into which Dad had stuffed random handfuls of dog-eared time. Whiskers and whalebones, boob tubes and bee hives, all mixed up with hand-tinted portraits of milk-faced soldiers off to war. On the verandah of some dreadful bush shack in the middle of nowhere, a Victorian woman looking noosed by her collar of lace. Great-Great-Grandmother Someone or Other, from the grim-eyed, big-chinned Irish side of things. And running through everything, the land itself, giving off its dreary wheat-coloured hum. The land being bought, land being sold, land being harvested or grazed upon or built over, land drowned in a flood or burnt to a crisp. Always summer back then, in that dirty orange Polaroid glow. Sometimes, in an empty corner, like an afterthought, a woman sweeping, a woman leaving. A woman waiting. Right at the bottom of the box, floating up like a heart stammer, Mam’s wedding photo, her stolid face carved to elegant planes by the artist’s brush. Impossibly creamy. Impossibly young.

  There were lots of Ray, taken by Ursula. Ray in the family christening gown, although he’d never actually made it as far as the church. Ray cooking with Mam, barely high enough to reach the table, his blond hair pale with flour. Ray on a quarter horse, at the Agricultural. Ray digging the trench for the new homestead sewerage, circa 1971. Ray winning the eight hundred metres at the local pool. Ray as a four year old, growing backwards, learning how to swim. Those hands under his shoulders, distracted, disembodied. Too loose, too careless. Too young.

  There was only one photo of Ursula, thanks to Dad and his scissors. She was sixteen, standing in front of Uncle Len’s old Holden, brand new back then. The dress she was wearing also new, run up from Mam’s old dining room curtains in time for the school dance. Even now, despite the glaring overexposure, her face a hectic blob in Polaroid drought, she could still feel the shame of that lush red velvet against hot bare skin.

  She’d worn that dress just once before she’d grown too stout for it and Mam had put it in the suitcase along with all the other clothes Ursula had made for her doomed trip to Sydney. Dad had locked the suitcase up in the shed, which was probably what he would have liked to have done with her. As if those clothes, with their modest hems and sweetheart necklines, were somehow to blame.

  Sometimes, between Mam’s absence, Tilda’s lies, Dad’s rapacious forgetting, those photographs were all she had. Now she didn’t even have these to call her own. A week ago she’d come home to find the box of photos upended on the living room floor. Tilda crouched over them, scavenging what she could.

  ‘Urs! Remember this? This was my favourite. It was all floaty and stuck out like a ballerina’s when I turned around.’ Tilda waltzing down the hallway, the photo of Ursula clutched to her chest.

  Ursula could have stood for fantasies of ponies and rabbits and coming-out balls. It was the way Tilda flooded those modest little memories with such lurid detail, inserting herself into every eye line, bursting history at the seams. Nothing was safe from it, that insatiable remembering. The past ravaged, dismembered, tacked back together, waxed moustache to diseased cleavage, toothless crone to newborn baby. Ursula’s life turned inside out like a sock.

  Now she found herself listening to an account of the time Mr Finlay from the garage had to cut Tilda out of the milk urn she’d climbed into one Christmas, to get away from Dad. With perfect pitch her sister recalled the embarrassed swelling of her five-year-old body, the cheesy feel of old milk on sunburnt shoulders, the whine of Finlay’s saw. Every detail vivid, febrile, accurate, except that all this had happened to Ursula before Tilda was born.

  ‘Yes. You were very brave. Come on. Let’s get some sleep.’

  Their room was vast and chilly, a sort of bunkhouse for itinerant shearers. Five beds, same torn lino, a row of tall windows overlooking the verandah. No curtains at all this time. Ray’s crate sat under yet another dripping sink. Only thing available, according to the landlord, and Ursula had wanted to say, if you’re so short on space, why put us here? But she was too tired.

  It was one o’clock by the time Tilda had chosen a bed according to the position of windows and the moon. Two-thirty before footballers stopped retching in toilets and stampeding up and down the stairs. Nearly four before Tilda began to wind down like a watch.

  When all seemed quiet, Ursula gathered the crate, her hip flask, a rough horse blanket from one of the beds. The window screeched as she forced it and she froze, one leg hooked awkwardly over the sill. But her sister snored on, breath condensing like a thought bubble above her head.

  The cocky was huddled in a corner of his cage. No one had thought to cover him up. As she went to throw her blanket over, she got a whiff of sweat, dust, old lanolin. A country smell, childhood smell, the layered grease and dumb terror of the shearing shed back home. And when the bird’s beak snapped inches from her finger, what she heard was the sound of a dog’s teeth deciding against her, a work dog chained and cowering in a pool of shade. She saw her father’s steel toe stepping on that dog’s paw, over and over, teaching it to heel. The same dog had taken the tip of Ursula’s little finger off together with the sausage she’d been holding out to it, and even now she was flooded with the hot shame of it. Watching as Dad’s belt descended, over and over, on that brindled map of skin and bone.

  She found a fold-up chair in a corner of the verandah. The moon cast faint gloss on the floorboards, making stark sculpture of ordinary things. A leaning broom, the iron railing. The thin marble of her own hands. When clouds scudded over, there was just the pollen glow of streetlights, the stuttering neon of the Chinese takeaway. Beyond that, a darkness more absolute than any city night. She knew it well, how you had to draw thick curtains against it before settling down to sew or pray. How in that action, arms wide to a depthless eye of country, you both opened yourself up and made yourself small. Devil eyes at a window, possum claws on an old iron roof. Just the cocky shuffling along the bars of his cage.

  Not enough light to see by now but she had her torch. Always travelled with it, her bladder being what it was. She unpacked the crate. The coat, the trousers, the boots. The glasses were cheap plastic ones fr
om a chemist, mended at the bridge with electrician’s tape. They felt too modest in her palm, too intimate, as if she’d walked up to a stranger and stroked his skin. She steeled herself with a swig of whiskey. There should be some ceremony to this. Something to echo the staunch refusals of that room.

  The wallet was a disappointment. Three TAB receipts, a tattered Lotto entry and an old bus ticket, date and destination worn away. No money. Someone would have seen to that, the landlord or that screechy little nurse. No driver’s licence, not even a library card to account for the book of poems. Everything looked like it had been underwater, even Ray’s name on the Medicare card with a drowned and distant look to it, the embossing scoured to white. The initials on it, R.A.A McCullough, looked too formal, too alien. Sounded like a banker, a whiskery endower of monuments. Raymond for a roguish great-great-grandfather. A for Alfred, after Mam’s father, proud bearer of the family chin. Bookish, toothless, always smiling, always gentle, Alfred Flanagan, even after two World Wars. The other A was for Aloysius, Mam’s favourite saint. Patron of teenagers or pestilence, Ursula couldn’t remember which. She and Mam had fought like alley cats over that. But in the end, after what Ursula had done, what could she possibly say?

  While Mam knelt on the bathroom tiles, cupping water and muttering strings of Latin, Ray blinking up at her through globs of shampoo, Ursula had just stood there, helpless with rage and love. Between them, they’d somehow cast a spell. Doomed a little boy to ricochet forever between the repelling poles of their desire.

  Taking a deep breath, she went through the book of poems more carefully this time. Her father used to quote reams of this stuff, the dusty doggerel taking on the rhythm of fence stringing or wood chopping, all flying sweat and chesty grunts. As a girl she’d hated it. Dad in declaiming pose on the front verandah, gaze fixed on some heroic distance, vowels all swollen with hubris. Even his accent changed when he did poetry, went all BBC. No one but Ursula seemed to notice. No one seemed surprised by the fact that the men in Dad’s poems didn’t resemble her father in the slightest. Where they were stoic, brave and resourceful, Dad was irritable and sly; where they did things, rode things, made things, suffering in silence, Dad lost things and broke things, farms, horses, promises. When things went wrong, he lashed out, at whatever animal, child or cupboard was within reach.

  Seemingly harmless, those poems of Dad’s, all pantomime glitter, like Grandad donning a Hitler moustache at Christmas and popping his teeth to scare the kids. But underneath, alchemical. Denying something, changing something. A greasy sleight of hand.

  Riffling through the Paterson, looking for a letter or a postcard acting as a bookmark, the volume fell open at Ray’s favourite. Someone had dog-eared the page. Someone else had scored urgent furrows under the famous lines. Anyone could have done that though, a bored student, a nostalgic pensioner. There was marginalia as well, but so tiny and spidery, she couldn’t tell whether the writing resembled the numbers on the coaster. The words too small, the torch too faint.

  Even before she’d realised it was a library book, she should have known it wasn’t Dad’s. Too new for a start, and Dad’s had a red cover not a blue one, and the spine was cracked in a way Dad would never have allowed. Books were precious, frightening, singular, retrieved from a locked cupboard as if from a tabernacle, doled out in that wafer of time between Sunday tea and early bed.

  That reminded her of the Bible, still at the bottom of the crate. Like everything else, it was scurfy with water damage. Pickled in port, by the smell. The printing so ant-like, the paper so thin, the words were as indecipherable as the beer coaster or the graffiti Tilda used to scrawl on railway tunnel walls. At the back, more underlining, more of that feverish annotation. Whole verses had been filleted, just like the newspapers. Couldn’t tell what was missing. Despite the nuns’ best efforts, her knowledge of the Old Testament was sparse. But she trained her torch on it anyway, because it was all she had to go on, the random leavings of someone who might have been drunk or mad or both. She was among strangers, either way. The man who’d lived his last hours in that room and the man she’d been searching for, both lost. And what she yearned for anyway, uselessly and always, was the boy.

  He was a tough little boy, wiry and sun-speckled, with upstanding blond hair. Tireless with axe or hammer, he could swim any river, sit almost any horse. Had a way with dogs and words. By fourteen he’d developed a passion for boxing, ancient history, learning Chinese. A quiet boy, a taker apart of radios, toasters, family history, always putting them back together in unexpected ways. A boy who liked poetry, who loved that colt from old Regret and who could recite the whole thing, along with scores of others, who could just as effortlessly recall the taxonomy of ancient Mesopotamian languages and the death dates of famous Celtic warriors and the Roman numerals attached to momentously forded rivers, as if he had swallowed every volume of his Brittanicas, as if all those tiny certainties were printed on his skin. If this boy became a man who in last extremis had turned to the Bible, something she’d tried to banish from his life along with other forms of barbarism, what else might have been possible, in such a room, at such a time?

  Her little circle of light shivered with her as wind raked the verandah. The torch was just a glimmer now and the spare batteries were back in the room. Seeing herself there, crouched in cold and dark, scrambling after mouse tracks in ink and time, she threw the Bible down in disgust. The binding gave way and thin yellow pages fluttered under the railing, down to the street.

  A line of grey on the horizon. A deep breath. The boots.

  These were R.M. Williams, badly resoled and unevenly worn. If she was Sherlock Holmes, Ray’s hero at the age of twelve, when he’d read the whole of Dad’s Conan Doyle compendium in a single weekend, she might, with the help of the magnifying glass she now needed to do the cryptic, deduce that the man who’d owned them was poor, of short stature, had one leg shorter than the other and smoked roll-your-owns. This last wasn’t a feat of deduction. She’d found three wizened roll-ups hidden in the toe.

  Tilda was right about one thing. Ray was tall, nearly six foot by the age of fourteen. Then again, he had small feet for a boy that size. The Flanagans were known for small feet, Mam always boasted, as if to separate herself from the galumphing Highland rabble on the other side. Instead of being proud of how all those indestructible little Irish women had dealt with drunk husbands and no money and far too many children, what Mam remembered was their feet. Except for Ursula, of course, who had feet like canoe paddles at the age of twelve. When she’d found out at school that her name meant she-bear, she wasn’t surprised, although Mam had always insisted she was named for the saint. Predictably, a virgin, martyred by Huns.

  Picking up the coat again, she held it up against the scant light from the street. Even allowing for wear and stretch on such cheap fabric, the shoulders were broad. Yet the trousers were short and the shoes were small. What an oddly proportioned man he must have been. When exactly did feet stop growing? She wasn’t sure.

  Her eyes were scratchy with tiredness now and she was so cold she could barely feel her toes. In desperation she went through the coat pockets again, sticking the feeble torchlight into each and every fold. Nothing except the drycleaning docket, three greenish coins, a packet of Lifesavers and a load of lint. When she opened the lollies, they crumbled to multicoloured dust. Then the torch flickered and went out.

  She took a slug of whiskey. With expert hands, she retraced every inch of the coat lining. Always a secretive little boy.

  Even in the dark, with fingers stiff with cold, the old knowledge flowed seamlessly, the language of hems and facing and working to bias, the patience needed to tame a devious bolt of silk. She could tell, down to the last seam and buttonhole, exactly how that jacket had been made. Not very well, by all accounts. Shoddy seams, shoulders baggy, back panels all seated, lapels out of whack. Unpicking it in her mind, spreading the raw makings out on a remembered dining-room table, she read it all in smooth reverse. Im
agining how crisp paper wedges, careful tacking and a decent pair of scissors might have overcome this poor fabric and corrupted nap. Trimming and turning, pinning and sorting, she fitted it back together in her mind. Shoulder to collar, underarm sleeve to sleeve opening, wrong side of facing to wrong side of jacket, feeling again a tidy pleasure at how something so discarded and unpromising—curtain remnants, bits of old ball gown, the bolt ends from the makings of richer people’s clothes—could be transformed. How with enough skill you could hide the ugly truth of things. Make something into which love and hope could be poured.

  There. Along the bottom of the pocket. A hole. Inside the lining, a lump of sorts. She shivered again, perhaps from cold, perhaps from finding a lump like that in the lining of her own skin, years ago. Could just be careless sewing, a bit of fabric doubled up when they did the seam. But it was too solid, too separate, the bulge sliding around between her fingers, and there were smaller lumps inside the bigger one. What she really needed was some proper light and her nail scissors, but they were back in the room along with the spare torch batteries and she couldn’t risk waking Tilda, who, before she’d finally dropped off, had started in again about the man on the train.

  ‘I’m telling you! Why don’t you believe me? It was him!’