The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  Trick was to do, not think. He went through his usual routine when he was in a town. Post office for banking, bills, forwarded mail. Supermarket, essentials only, a surgical strike. But it was Christmas and the place was clogged with shoppers, angle parkers, herds of prams. In the post office, seeing the long queue of people, he dodged through the crush to the table of directories, collecting one from every State. At his side, a fat woman was wrapping a doll, her flesh rubbing clammily against his arm.

  Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide. Urs had never really talked about going there. As a child, he remembered her pointing them out on a map but like all the other places beyond Twenty Bends to which he’d never been, they’d seemed theoretical, improbable, big black dots holding down the great swathes of space.

  Melbourne. Theatre. Books. Racing week, in the Women’s Weekly. Lots of McCulloughs there, but none with the initial U. She could be using her middle name but then she’d always claimed she didn’t have one, that having a name like Ursula was quite enough. And she’d always had a thing for Melbourne—the fashion, the floaty dresses and silly race-day hats. Always reckoned she could make dresses twice as good for half the price.

  As for Sydney, he wouldn’t know where to start. McCulloughs everywhere, a sea of possibilities. But Urs had always wanted to see the sea. Mam and Dad had gone once, on their honeymoon, and Mam had said the Opera House looked a bit yellow. The idea had made Urs giggle. Mam up there with her sponge and Ajax, giving the sails a scrub. Dad had lots of stories, scalloped bays and slippery oysters, fine white sand and sailing boats, telling Ray about them out there on the hot verandah, in the middle of a drought. The briny smell of the harbour, jellyfish trailing the ferry wake like plastic bags. Fist-sized bridge rivets, hailstones big as grapefruit, that white pointer at Curl Curl which swam straight between a man’s legs. A shark in the aquarium that spat a man’s arm out, complete with watch. Old stories, borrowed stories, tall tales, urban myths, pub furphies, wild rumours gleaned from tabloid newspapers, all weaved seamlessly into the family history, spawning new and exotic forms of truth.

  As a little boy sitting by Dad’s knee, he’d waited for those repetitions and elaborations. Even the lies were part of the magic, a coda to the rough dry rhythm of a voice bearing waves of salt, vinegar, seaweed. Memory. Shark, rivets, jellyfish. Grapefruit hail. Beneath the dry sigh of an iron roof and the sound of Dad’s voice, he could almost smell it, almost taste it. The dusty rhythm of Dad’s voice swelling them both to salty tides and wave-tipped horizons, somewhere beyond the verandah eaves.

  Problem was, all these things had already happened, or they’d never happened, or if they had, it was a long time before Ray came along. And if he asked about them, wanting to hear about singing whales and river dinosaurs, and if his father realised who was asking, who was listening, Dad would clam up, start folding those stories back inside himself. Sentences shed words, words shook off flesh. Silences growing longer, until all that remained was a starved line of facts. Sea, boat, sand. If you kept asking, that fist in Dad’s lap, big as a bridge rivet, might come your way.

  After a while, you stopped asking and he stopped telling, and it was as if he’d never been to Sydney. As if those stories and the stories you’d told yourself about those stories had never happened. And when you tried to remember, not even the words, just the feel, the old rhythm of telling and untelling, trying with a boy’s poor stock of experience to embroider Dad’s angry silence with blue and gold blandishments, a city by the sea, everything receded to strangled jump cut and wan sepia, like those old black and white newsreels in the cinema. Puffs of smoke rising snappily from troop trains, a man dancing like a jerky puppet, kissing a woman and doffing his hat. Until even the idea of it, I once went to Sydney, had been eaten away.

  Ray shut the directory with a bang, startling the doll woman, who gave a fat person’s wheezy huff. Useless. Urs could be anywhere. Could be married, or divorced, for all he knew. Women were always disappearing under a silent wake of fathers and husbands, when all you wanted was for them to stay where you’d left them. Standing on a verandah, hand cocked to a forehead. Waiting for you to come home.

  In the supermarket, it was a smell that did it, like so many times before. Whiff of horse leather, rain on hot tin. Scent of a flowering plant that grew near the baths at home, what he always thought of as swimming pool bush. One sniff and he’d be lost, buried deep in some wood-smoke scented version of the past.

  Turning a corner from frozen goods, it hit him. Spice, soused fruit, boiled booze. At first he thought they must be pumping it in with the music, but a woman was peddling bits of warm pudding from a tray. Cinnamon, nutmeg, the plump smell of her deodorant, and he could almost hear the cricket on the radio, smell chemical steam wafting off a raspberry jelly, Mam’s face gone the same colour as she stirred and sifted, the turkey sizzling in an oven which had been on since dawn.

  In an aisle where he’d intended to get bicarb and batteries, he found himself loading up on dried fruit, almonds, custard powder. A family packet of Swiss rolls. Trifle. He’d make it, if Mam was ill. Baking paper. He wondered if they sold muslin. Brown paper would do. He could help with lining the cake tins and wrapping the pudding, if he got there in time. Before the check-out, curry powder, coconut milk. He could tell Urs how to make the curry that Thai bloke had shown him once, in a logging camp long ago. Of course she’d be there, if Mam was sick. How could she not be, that brown tall sister of his, solid and cranky as the old Kooka stove. Mam would be dubious, curry at Christmas time, and Dad wouldn’t eat it, but Urs would be game. She was always making things up from old mutton and tinned pineapple, conjuring spaghetti bolognaise from soft tomatoes, a pound of mince and a bottle of chemist-bought olive oil.

  On the way back to the car, he spotted a table of last minute gifts outside a charity shop. Tatt, most of it, soap shaped like rosebuds, coat hangers embalmed in crochet, but in the middle, a bright red food processor, still in its box. Just the thing. He could chop the onions and turnips for pasties, Mam could mix the cake and pudding without dislocating a shoulder or having to call in Dad.

  It wasn’t until he had it in the ute, all wrapped up in reindeers and with a stupid bow on top, Mick asking over and over, what’s that, is that a present, is that for me, that he realised it was way too late. Mam would have made the cake and pudding months ago, if she’d made them at all. If they existed, these imaginary flummeries, they would have had a dozen doses of brandy by now. The pudding would be hanging in the linen cupboard, biffing Dad on the head every time he went for a tea towel, the muslin deep brown, pebbled with fruit and coins. As for Urs, what with all those planes and hats and sports cars, she probably didn’t have time to cook, if she was there at all. And if she was, if she’d never escaped the place, never got to London or Paris or Melbourne, she’d probably married some great lump of a farmer like Sam. Become someone like Freda, so ground down by drought and sheep and children, she’d resorted to buying roast dinners at the supermarket, as a treat. Beef and gravy and spuds each in their own little compartment, just like on an aeroplane. Freda had never been on an aeroplane. The frozen aisle at Coles was as close she’d ever got.

  Still, he rushed toward it, this concocted future of his, negotiating a slew of red lights and stop signs while Mick worried at the present, upending it, shaking it, picking roughly at the ribbon. Hearing the lonely rattle of cheap plastic attachments, Ray thought of the fragility of what he was offering against all those things for which he had to make amends. Desertion, years and years of silence, years of running away. When Mick dropped the present on the floor, crushing it with his boot, Ray lashed out, meaning only to cuff him on the shoulder but Mick had dived down to pick the box up again and Ray’s hand connected hard with the boy’s cheek. An angry mark. Mick’s freckles standing out in bright relief.

  They spent the rest of the day in silence. The hum of tyres, fuzz on the radio, until Ray turned it off. The sun descended, hovered behind in the rear view, was extinguished l
ike a wick. Now and then Mick snorted back tears. Ray stared ahead, popping No-Doz, drinking thermos-tainted tea. He stopped once or twice, the kid getting out wordlessly, squatting miserably with the dog under a tree. Ray stayed where he was, engine humming, eyes on the waiting white line. Running on pure adrenalin by then.

  When it grew too dark for the game of patience Mick was laying out on the glove-box lid, Mick slammed it shut, spinning the wheel of his skateboard in the dashboard glow. A dull, angry, grating sound. In the dark, Ray felt his mouth try and fail to find the shape of sorry. Before he could manage it, Mick huddled down into his hoodie, as far from Ray as he could get. Went to sleep.

  Ray drove all night, dodging roos and thoughts and road trains. The dark soothed him, a long blind curve into nothing, the moon thin and yellow, keeping pace. If he could just keep moving, keep going through the motions, keep following blind rules and grim proportions, like a man beating egg whites or kneading bread dough, if he could resist the urge to turn left or right at random, veering like quarry on one of those wild detours of his, maybe he could make this right.

  Dawn came up, sharp and red. Slamming down the visor, he punched the accelerator, amoeba shapes pulsing at the edges of his eyes. No time to stop. Sunday today, Christmas Eve. Mam would be awake already, wondering about how many potatoes, how much pumpkin to peel. Dad would be swearing as he tried to find the one bung bulb in a tangled nest of fairy lights. In an hour or so, Mam would be at early mass, in that little stone building already harvesting the day’s heat. Fanning herself with the hymn sheet, turning slow and heavy on some old priest’s dry words.

  That’s where he was, behind the veiny stained glass of his eyelids, when he hit the roo. He braked too hard, too fast, wrenching the wheel away from what was already a mound of fur and blood. A tyre went out and the ute skidded into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck horn sounding both loud and somehow far away.

  After what felt like a lifetime of spinning, the ute hit the ditch, coming to rest tipped sideways, vaguely balanced on two wheels. The semi roared past, shaking them with slipstream. Didn’t even bother to stop.

  He tried to breathe. The seatbelt banded like iron across his neck. A dripping noise and he sniffed. Not petrol. But when he turned, he saw blood on Mick’s forehead. The glove box had popped open, pinning him at the stomach. The boy’s eyes wide but blank. No seatbelt. He must have taken it off while he slept. A black stain was spreading across his jeans. Reaching over, Ray dabbed at it with his hand. Not blood.

  ‘Mick? You OK?’ The boy’s eyelids fluttered. ‘Stay awake. Don’t move.’

  Ray’s buckle was jammed. Manoeuvring out of the noose of his belt, he cracked his door and squeezed out, staggering around on hands and knees for a while before finding his feet. Walking round to Mick’s side, trying to leverage the door open against the roadside bank, he saw how lucky they’d been. If they’d tipped the other way, Ray would have gone out his open window. If they’d tipped further to Mick’s side, if the bank hadn’t caught the roof, they might have gone right over, and the kid would have been crushed by the car. If they’d hit the verge just a few metres over, they would have hit that tree. And if they’d been going any faster the kid could have been sliced open by the glove box which had left a blossom of dark red below his ribs.

  Ray felt gingerly around Mick’s belly, the boy flinching a bit. Just a graze, just bruised, as far as Ray could tell, but he couldn’t be sure. Shouldn’t move him, not really. Should call an ambulance, but then he thought about the paramedics and the police and the fact that he wasn’t the boy’s father. The gun he didn’t own still hidden in the tray.

  ‘Can you move? Your neck all right?’

  Mick shook his head. His neck worked at least. A dripping sound again. Nothing else for it. Ray carried him out carefully and propped him against the tree. The scratch on his forehead wasn’t deep but it was bleeding a lot. A whimpering noise. He’d forgotten all about the dog, still hanging by its rope from the tilting tray. He got it free, put the rope in Mick’s hand, but it flopped out of the boy’s open palm. At a loss, he gave them both some water in his hands, the dog lapping it up, Ray murmuring it’s okay. But it wasn’t. A few inches left or right.

  Keep going. Keep doing. He got the jack from the back, found the tyre lever, propped stones under the wheel, leveraging the weight with a branch. With four grunting rocks, he got the car upright. Miraculously, no real damage that he could see except a dent to the passenger door and the shredded tyre. After he’d changed it and he was back on the bitumen, creeping along and hugging the verge, he swore he’d take the boy straight to hospital, if the car got him as far as town. Swore that he’d be a better man than this.

  At the next roadhouse, he pulled in, paid the sleepy attendant double and a half to check the fuel line and hammer out the wheel. Going inside to buy the boy a Coke, he was the only customer. The lass at the counter wished him Merry Christmas in a frightened sort of way. When he got to the toilet, he saw why. Blood on his shirt. Blood on his face. That look in his eyes. He thought of that woman in the hospital bed. Of her boy, grey as mould under his freckles. What sort of man did these sort of things? A man like him. A man doing this thing and then that thing and the next thing, piling them up and calling it a life.

  He changed into his only clean set of clothes, the old suit he’d bought at a charity shop years ago, for a mate’s funeral in Sydney and which he’d not worn since. While the boy was waiting in emergency, he stood in the hospital car park, sweating, trying the number written on his forearm again. Thinking, please. Mam’s voice, and all this might be a bad dream.

  It rang and rang. He started freewheeling then, trying all the possible number combinations on Charlie’s coaster, swapping digits furiously, as if this was the key to all else. On his sixth attempt, it rang through. Random luck, like Charlie’s Lotto balls.

  ‘Good morning. Riley and Sons.’

  ‘Sorry? Who?’

  ‘Thomas Riley. Riley and Sons Funerals. How can I help?’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the dark before dawn, something cold and damp stroked her cheek. Whiff of lavender, old vase water, mildewed silk. Scent of the grave.

  She reared up, clawing away the bedspread, then had a sneezing fit. Like everything else in the room—the swarming tartan cushions, the bowls of potpourri, the commemorative royal teaspoons marching round the picture rail—the bed wore a pelmet of dust.

  Ordinarily she would have run a mile from a place called the Heather Brae B&B. Would have preferred some anonymous red brick motel along the highway, but after what happened yesterday, on a lonely stretch of road, she no longer trusted herself behind the wheel.

  The hitchhiker had been a mistake. She’d known it even as she pulled over, in a gully steep with white gum, the road etched with leaf shadow. Dusk had arrived early there. The day gone sepia with cold.

  But when she’d seen that figure on the verge—tall, blond, thin, canted fanatically against altitude, his hat demented with corks—the car seemed to lose speed of its own accord. He seemed to have arrived for her alone, totemic in a claustrophobia of trees.

  ‘Thank you, my dear. Much obliged.’

  He brought that greasy courtesy and the smell of old shoes into her car. Up close, she saw his hair wasn’t blond at all but the colour of ash. When he grinned at her through her window, his teeth were yellow and curved as the dog’s. But it was too late by then. He was already opening the back door, climbing in, settling his suitcase across his knees. A little brown suitcase, like kids used to take to their first day at school.

  ‘God bless. On my last legs back there. Where you headed? Off to Coona myself.’

  Winding down her window despite the cold, she glanced at her map. Told him she was only going as far as the next place, which was half an hour away. Decided she wouldn’t be able to stand the smell any longer than that.

  ‘I’m visiting family,’ she told him, in case he had any ideas. ‘They’re waiting for me.
I’m running late.’

  This was true and untrue, in various ways. But according to Harry, lying by omission was the same as lying itself. For Harry, there was the broad easy path, paved with good intentions, and the narrow, dull-shining way. Trying to sneak between them, you stepped a treacherous tightrope, like the single floorboard traversing the cat-pee dirt of her half-renovated front hall. No room in Harry’s universe for the twisting dead ends she kept finding herself on, the trackless wastes where Tilda weaved her elaborate make-believe.

  ‘Nice day for it.’ She nodded, though the sky was the colour of iron, and with the sun on the wane, it was cold as sin.

  He leaned forward, stuck his head between the front seats. So close, his big beard bristled against her neck. Beside her, the dog growled. Putting a hand on its collar, she felt a tremble in the fur.

  ‘We should give thanks. Another day God gave.’

  Just her luck. A bloody holy roller, what Dad would call a creeping Jesus, like the tambourine Christians who used to haunt the riverbank back home.

  According to a sign, there was an intersection coming up. No name on it, just a farm track or fire trail, but it would do. She’d drive a little way up, wait for a while, until someone else with even less wit and no sense of smell had picked him up. While she waited, she’d eat that box of Milk Tray she’d bought at the service station for no good reason. She wasn’t visiting someone in hospital. And she’d been on a diet for the last thirty years.

  She shouted above the wind rush that she needed to go a different way, needed to turn off. No answer. In the rear view, she saw he was fossicking around inside the suitcase, his face hidden by the lid.

  ‘Did you hear? I said I’ll have to let you out. Just up here.’