The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  Tucking the letter into an inside pocket of his coat, he touched Mick on the shoulder, pointing toward the back door. The old man didn’t stir, even when Mick let the flyscreen bang.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The jeweller had moved. Still this side of the river, the cabbie had told her. Before the post office, past the cathedral, behind the Scottish restaurant, in that brand-new arcade. When she confessed she didn’t know it, he showed a country person’s astonishment that she wasn’t familiar with every kink and wrinkle of his home town.

  Ten minutes drive. But she didn’t have a car. The rented Toyota had died on the outskirts, the new one wouldn’t be ready for hours yet, the jeweller closed at one o’clock, and out here, at midday, in the back blocks, not another cab in sight.

  Picking her dress out of her armpits, she let Winston tow her along the gutter, avoiding mirrors, windows, the up and down motion of kerbs. She’d almost forgotten it, the strict rules, the curt sun and bluff shadow of a country town on a Saturday afternoon.

  Not many people about, thank God. Outside the Lutheran, a gaggle of what Mam used to call splitters, fresh from a wedding or a christening, all shaking hands and nodding hats. Pushing past them to spit blood in a bin, she scattered women and children like fish. Only the men’s frank disapproval let her know she was home.

  She seemed to have lost her bearings here, in a place she’d lived for a quarter of her life. There were landmarks of course. The lolly pink police station, the town oval, blond with drought. Some of the old shops struggled on, under sun-struck facades. Minnie’s Haberdasher, the Town and Country Auctioneer. The Imperial Coffee Lounge, still unable to spell cappuccino, still having a bet both ways.

  But these were nouns without a sentence, arriving in facets, skittering away. The rest was fast food, frothy coffee, lurid discount stores. There’d been an outbreak of nail salons. In front of the Council building, in a town known for sheep and bushrangers, a day’s drive from any sea, palm trees and beach umbrellas. A lot of lumpy public art.

  The place felt dizzy, skittish. Like her, on the verge of something but whether terminal progress or slow decline, it was hard to tell. Either way, an incomplete disease. Between the bright scabs of modernity, shuttered pubs and browned-out awnings, murky shades of her childhood bleeding through. Outdated even when she was young, those dirty reds and distempered yellows. Faded now to pale butterscotch, ute-rust brown.

  The Royal Hotel was still there, peeling grandly on its hill. Along with a grain silo, nearly every town around here had one but theirs was the oldest and biggest, according to Dad. Fastest, tallest, biggest. These were his yardsticks, the way he sliced up the world. At ten, she was small and slow and plump. At twelve, tall and strong. While Dad weaved the main street looking for her, his temper rising, her name cracking dangerously against yellow sandstone and moribund heat, she’d be scuttling across that top verandah, hearing snores and cries and worse from the rooms upstairs. A quick shin-up the posts, a flying leap via railings and drainpipe to the hot, hidden world behind the parapet, where shadows on a tar-paper roof announced, in scrolling reverse, that the Royal was built in 1836. And there it was, the whole town laid out, just for her. Suddenly the tallest girl in town.

  To her left, the long green sigh of the Memorial Park, unlikely in all that dun and terracotta. To the right, the cathedral, looking like just another outcropping, complete with belltower, of the granite that pushed like grey molars through the earth round here. And running through everything, the town writhing along it, streets shooting off at panicky angles as if eager to get away, the river. Thick, brown, muscled looking, yellow and murderous at flood time, breaking lives and levees. In bad years, sulking deep inside its own history. A secret world down there, the bed fine-grey and furrowed as the moon.

  In the distance, past the racetrack and the feed barn and the grain silo, where the river veered sharply round the twin boulders known locally as the Bushranger’s Balls, the scoured paddocks and tannic coils of Twenty Bends Creek. Her far horizon at the age of twelve.

  That road in had been familiar at least. Plump hills, flabby corners, old mile posts whited out now but still mouthing their ghostly distance, the leisurely proportions of simpler days. Spotting the twenty-mile mark, she’d realised the rented Toyota must have broken down not far from their old driveway, thinking she was home. Whipping round to stare out the back window of the cab, she’d caught a glimpse of faded red roof. The old water tank, a chunk of rust on stilts. But the cab was going way too fast round those sick-making corners, the tow truck in front was kicking up too much dust.

  For an old-fashioned mile along the road, the remains of the old orchard, all but one of the apple trees cut down. Frost on those branches so thick sometimes, it resembled snow. How Ray used to long for it but, like rain, mostly it passed them by. Just once, when he was little, a scatter like icing sugar on the river paddock slope. They’d gone down it on a piece of roof tin, Ray’s solid little body clamped between her legs. They’d leapt off just before they hit the water, black under its skin of ice. Urs, Urs, can we do it again?

  Her leaping and shinning days were long over. Climbing the stairs of the Royal at old dog pace, she stepped under the curly iron awning, into complicated shade. Counting blocks back toward the river, she tried to unravel in memory that tangle of alleys, side streets, and old dunny lanes, all tending by ragged degrees toward the bridge and the highway out. Here and there, between buildings, a slice of river, tamed here to sullen lakes and khaki wetlands, home to cycle paths, fitness circuits, overfed ducks. On the far side, the barbed wire and broken bottles of the waste ground under the feed barn bridge.

  That was all she could see without actually getting on the roof. A new housing estate had colonised the town tip hill. A rash of raw-looking villas blocked her view of the silo and the boulders, even jostling out the cathedral spire, always a compass for the corrugated backside of town.

  It would be dark in there. Cool, at least. She could light a candle, just for the old yellow glow of it after all this glare. Behind dusty red velvet, someone would be kneeling, posting three sins exactly through the mesh. In return, the droning penance of a curtained priest. I’ll give you something to cry about, like Dad used to say. If she still believed in any of it, she’d kneel there herself. She’d cut her left breast off for the offertory plate, crawl naked up the aisle. Do anything, say anything, if it meant finding Ray.

  Who was she kidding? She’d never make it up that hill. And anyway, the last time she’d gone to mass, one Easter over twenty years ago, she hadn’t recognised anything. The church looked like a Scandinavian office block. It was all peace signs and floaty dancing by then, nuns with ambitions and out-of-tune guitars. She’d spent the whole hour in a sort of sniper’s crouch, unsure whether to sit or kneel, even which direction to face. Had no idea where this shinier, smilier, more streamlined version of God was supposed to be. No real altar, just a stripped pine table. No proper cross, not that she could see. Just Jesus rising from the dead on a bedsheet, drawn by preschoolers. Simpering, crayon-coloured. Harmless as an egg.

  She’d reached the end of the street now and still no arcade. Something called a Homemaker’s Centre now took up the whole two blocks before the highway and she couldn’t for the life of her remember what was there before. A whole chunk missing from memory, like the ragged hole in her gum.

  All this must have been here last time. The place couldn’t have changed that much in six months. But last time she was here, to clean out the property and arrange the sale, she hadn’t been paying attention. After all the sorting through and throwing out, she’d gone straight to the bank and the solicitors, then to the real estate, to sign the papers, then out to Frederick Street, to tell Dad about the account she’d opened in his name. The proceeds from the sale would pay all his bills at this new retirement place he’d been so keen on, the one they were building on top of the tip.

  But in the two months since his last letter, she’d found he’d
rewritten history yet again. Dad in his recliner, glaring, rocking, spitting biscuits and bile. What bloody retirement place? Never heard of it. Never catch him in one of those places, no fear. Full of conmen, chancers. Thieves like her. This time she’d stolen fifty dollars from his bedside table, Mam’s dentures from the bathroom cupboard. His house out from under him. The teeth from her own mother’s head.

  After that she’d taken the bypass straight out of town. Blind with grief and rage.

  She felt dizzy suddenly. Almost fell down the steps into the path of the main road’s only car. Crossing to the Memorial Park, she headed for a bench in the shade. Sat down to catch her breath.

  Perhaps just the anaesthetic, the way everything, the band rotunda, the wintry stubble of the floral clock, had gone hollow and glassy. The edges of her slipping and folding between flat slices of autumn light. As if she’d been cut out of some blurrier, dirtier history than this, then badly superimposed.

  The cabbie had warned her, when he’d found out she’d been born here. Won’t know yourself. New golf club, new abattoir, new civic centre. World class this, state of the art that. A new B&B, out at that old place near the creek. A luxury health retreat. Boom times apparently, despite the drought and falling wool prices, something to do with sausage casings and the Japanese. Winding the window down to escape his provincial boasting, she’d stuck her head out, let cold wind drill across the nerve in her bad tooth.

  A smell of horse as the taxi idled at the rail crossing. A float waited between her cab and the tow truck, a shiny, muscled, racehorse bum. How Ray had loved horses. How he’d nagged and nagged her about getting one, but they had motorbikes for the sheep. Waste of time, waste of money. Waste of feed. To defy Dad and please Ray, she’d worked extra Thursday nights and Saturday mornings at Dymphna’s the chemist, doling out hernia trusses and enema kits and other things made of queasy brown rubber, just so she could buy that big black gelding Mr Tangello had for sale. She knew nothing about horses. Didn’t realise the brute was unmanageable, that’s why it was so cheap. Knew only that Ray had a way with animals. When he’d climbed into the saddle, his little legs stuck out like flags.

  The second time Ray rode that horse, it threw him straight at a fence. Where the star post got him, a three-inch gash in his stomach, barbed wire embedded in the muscle of his thigh. She’d had to cut the trousers off him, blood and skin peeling away with the denim while Ray tried not to cry. So brave, so full of the need to be, as if it was a test and of course it was. No hospital, not on a Sunday, not for a McCullough, not unless it was snakebite or heart attack. Too dark, too late, too many roos and the truck headlights were playing up.

  And of course Dad had seen worse. Dad always had. Mud, blood, bitten bullets. The man from Snowy River, Uncle Len and the shotgun, Grandad’s war medals. The Battle of the Bulge, the fucking Kokoda Trail. Ray so full of Dad’s stories that he didn’t realise the man who was telling them, no matter how strong and tall, was just a shadow puffed up with retailed heroism, second-hand dreams. His image no more real than the monsters Ursula used to make with torch and fingers on Ray’s bedroom wall. And she’d had to stand and watch while this big man, with heated needle and impatient fingers, stitched up her little boy like he was so much tent canvas. Swearing and grunting, like Ray was some bit of farm machinery that had failed to work.

  That was why when they’d first hit town and she’d seen the arid patchy gloss of it, she’d asked the cabbie to strike right then left, burrowing deep along one of those old narrow winding side streets, home to a tyre repair place and the backside of a Chinese restaurant and yet another nail salon. This was the town she remembered: dead tyres, overflowing rubbish, squalling cats. The unpicked seam of things.

  Above the Chinese restaurant that used to be a milk bar, a familiar rickety wooden staircase. A cracked red lamp. When the cabbie realised where she was headed, he’d offered to take her to the new medical centre out on the highway. State of the art. But she’d waved him off. Tying Winston to a railing, she climbed the stairs and rang the bell.

  Even as she saw the tray of dirty-looking instruments, the big polyester belly looming over her, felt the man’s rampant chest hair tickling her arm through the missing buttons on his shirt, guilt kept her in the chair. An old fault this, the lineaments of it familiar yet distant, like looking at a photo of some long-dead relative you’d never met, under glass. It felt right somehow, this grubby intimacy. It was where she belonged, what she deserved.

  While he jabbed her mouth three times with the needle until everything but the nerve in question was numb, she’d examined that guilt from all angles, worrying at the small, stubborn outline of it, like it was a communion wafer stuck to the roof of her mouth. Trying for the shape of it, the moment behind the habit. Finding only the fact, hollowed out. So old by now, the rest of her had grown around it, like a foot in an ill-fitting shoe.

  When her molar had shattered under his pliers, the dentist stopped pretending. Climbing on the chair, he braced a knee against her shoulder. Went at her as if wielding a crowbar. She’d closed her eyes, feeling boneless, riding tides of pain. They rang her clear as cathedral bells.

  This was familiar. He was a man and she was a problem to be solved.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  By the time she found the jeweller, in a little alley behind the McDonald’s car park, it was shut. Scottish restaurant indeed. One of those country jokes. If you didn’t get it, you weren’t from here.

  Without much hope, she wrote her name and number on the back of one of the dead man’s receipts, slipped it under the door.

  At the nursing home, the receptionist looked startled when she walked in. In the mirror behind the counter, Ursula saw why. Lip huge, jaw swollen, a knee-shaped bruise blooming on her chest. She looked like a beaten wife. An old beaten wife. A beaten-up spinster, in fact.

  The woman’s nervous smile disappeared as soon as she heard the name.

  ‘Oh. Right. Jim’s daughter. We’ve spoken on the phone.’ Brandy, Mandy or something. The one who kept telling her Dad was shopping, swimming, bowling. Couldn’t come to the phone.

  ‘I tried down at the unit but there was no one there.’

  ‘No. Your father has been moved to managed care. Quite some time ago. He’s had some problems. His doctor thought it was best. We tried to contact you, many times, but the number you gave us didn’t exist.’

  They’d had to change the phone number at home. Harry had insisted on a silent one, because of all the calls. All the men, young, old, mad, bad, drunk and greedy, ringing up, pretending to be Ray.

  ‘You know we do rely on relatives to keep their contact details up to date. We thought you would get in touch. Earlier than this.’ The woman frowned, shuffling papers crisply, not meeting Ursula’s eye.

  ‘Problems? What problems?’

  ‘A fire in his kitchen, for a start. There was quite a lot of damage to the unit above. And he started wandering. We found him out on the highway once, in the middle of the night. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. If you’ve got time, of course.’

  Ursula stood tall, gathering her cardigan across the bruise on her chest.

  ‘Which room is he in?’

  ‘It’s Saturday. He’ll be down at the pool.’ Dad. At a pool. ‘I’ll take you through.’

  In silence, she followed the woman’s stiff pink back down a maze of pink hallways, emerging in a glassed-in courtyard tropical with heat. A spa pool steamed luxuriantly in the corner, empty except for a pair of yellow floaties. Beyond the picture windows, a rock garden, a Japanese bridge, a circle of raked white sand. No plants. They were all in here. Palms and vines and fleshy-looking flowers, sprouting and furling, in almost indecent abundance, and among them, parked at random angles, people in walkers or wheelchairs, staring at the pool, the windows, the wall. A water feature dribbled somewhere. Must be murder on the bladder. Hers ached in sympathy.

  She’d walked right past him before she realised the woman in pink had stopped. Was le
aning down, patting someone gently on the arm.

  ‘Jim? It’s Shandy.’ Shandy. That was it.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor. See? It’s your daughter. How about that? After all this time.’ She shot Ursula another thin-lipped look before turning back, all smiles.

  ‘How about I get you both a hot chocolate? Then you can have a chat. OK? Back in a tick.’

  Ursula didn’t recognise the man in the chair. He’d shrunk a little, which was to be expected. A bit paunchier round the middle, paler too, his seemingly permanent outdoor tan receding, although his cheeks were hectic. No wonder, it was like an oven in here. Balder on top, although he’d more than made up for it with what was going on below the ears. Snowy hair snaked down from his bald spot, curling luxuriantly on his collar. White tufts peeked through the mismatched buttons on his pyjama shirt.

  It was all of this and none of it. Mostly it was the smile he turned on her. Big, beaming, blue eyes all crinkled up. The way he leaned forward, almost falling out of his chair in his eagerness to take her hand.

  ‘I knew you’d come. I told them you would.’

  Her father wanted to hold her hand. Never one for touching or hugging, even when she was little and, when he did, there was usually something—gloves, wood, leather—between his skin and your own. She touched his fingers quickly, drew back. Sat down opposite him, wiping her own hand on her dress. His palm so moist and soft.

  ‘Hi Dad. How you doing?’

  ‘Lovely. Long trip? Come far? By train?’

  ‘Yes. No. I mean, I came by car.’

  ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Here we are. Careful, it’s hot.’ Shandy settled two mugs of hot chocolate on the little table between them along with a plate of biscuits.

  Ursula wanted to ask what had happened, why she almost didn’t recognise him, but all she could come up with was, ‘His hair.’