The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  ‘What’s that?’ She nodded at the stuff in his pan.

  ‘Gravy.’ He added more cream.

  ‘Harry won’t eat that. He doesn’t eat dairy.’ She sounded like a kid parroting the teacher.

  ‘Yeah, well. What Harry doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’ She giggled. And there, just for a moment, was that little girl with the cheeky grin.

  ‘What it needs is a bit of wine. Or some of that.’ He pointed at the mug she’d been drinking from. ‘Reckon you should lay off it for a bit though. On top of those pills.’

  That did it. She closed up, drifted off, to the step by the open back door. Sat drinking, staring out to the backyard. He could have kicked himself. Plating up some food and pouring himself some of her McWilliams, he went and sat beside her. Together they watched Gerald kicking at chickens, doing violence to the fence with a bit of wood. Dot was sitting cross-legged inside the coop, keening high and wild. Harry was attempting to wrest the wood off Gerald while glancing back at the house and dialling numbers one-handed on his phone.

  ‘Here. Try some. Just a little bit.’ He held out a forkful but she shook her head. Didn’t blame her. It tasted like roasted surfboard. Ray took a swig of sherry to wash his mouthful down and the sweetness mixing with the cream made him want to gag.

  Harry seemed to have got through to someone now. He was talking fast, looking frantically between Gerald, who was attacking the Otto bin, and Ray sitting on the step.

  ‘I better go, Till. I think John Lennon’s calling the cops.’ No smile. ‘Before I forget.’ He fumbled behind his ear for his pen again. ‘Will you do something for me? Get Urs to ring me when she gets back? I gave him the number.’ He jerked his head at Harry. ‘But I don’t trust him.’ When he reached for her arm, it was flaccid, skin on bone. He rolled up her jumper, wrote his number on her as gently and clearly as he could.

  ‘Like a tattoo.’ She turned her arm this way and that.’ Like Gerald’s.’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of. But it’ll wash off. So write it down somewhere else as well, OK? And don’t tell old four eyes. Our secret, right?’

  She nodded obediently. He left her there, on the step, with her warm sherry and her inedible meal, with a mad bikie in the backyard, and that fat woman screaming on and on. All he could do. Too little, too late. Like the day with the big blue dog.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The luxury health retreat near the creek was for sale. Reining in her monster of a four-wheel drive, she lumbered to a stop outside the top gate.

  Willow Waters, they were calling it now. Could you do that, change the name of a creek? No, on her map it still said Twenty Bends. Just the property then, but there was precious little of that left, if the diagram on the sign was correct. A bit of that poor pasture backing onto Tangello’s, a wedge-shaped paddock down near the old stockyards. The denuded orchard, now an organic vegetable patch. The rest had been sold to the owners of the new golf course, those sausage-casing tycoons.

  The historic homestead was still there, nestled in the bends of the creek. Things always nestled in the country, didn’t they, when city people were involved. Weren’t just plonked there, close enough to water, high enough for flood. Good enough, near enough, working or buggered, those were your choices. When something stopped working, bits were picked off the carcass, absorbed slowly to something else. When that died too, it was left to moulder, at random sunlit angles. Her whole childhood littered with them. Ex-sheds, ex-tractors. Ex-sheep.

  Now, though, even the worst old outbuildings had been slapped with a thick coat of nostalgia, the word rustic liberally applied. The old shearing shed had been gutted, painted, hauled off its piers, plonked in the middle of the front garden. Reborn as a summer house slash yoga retreat. All part of the relaxing country lifestyle, according to the real estate sign. As if that was an option, like a sandwich filling, instead of something you were corralled into, ground down by, until you fitted the great sprawling fly-blown shape of it, not the other way round.

  And it hadn’t done much good, all this relaxing and retreating, not as far as she could see. Things had got so relaxed around her, weeds were crop tall along the driveway. The gate listing halfway off its hinge.

  Not her problem. Chop it up, sell it off, burn it down. Graze bloody camels on it for all she cared. Yet even as she told herself this, she was giving the gate a tentative shove. Third go and the padlock fell off. Wind could have done that. The hinge was broken, the chain rusty. Everything in such tawdry disrepair.

  She walked on, curving right then left, on long slow bends she could have navigated in her sleep. Up the ridge, down the dip, through the gully where the creek crossed the road at flood time, the causeway crumbled and potholed now, the old flood marker counting backwards to itself in the ditch. Not twenty bends, never had been, on either creek or road, she wasn’t sure who’d come up with that. Seven on the drive, eight at a pinch if you counted that weird dogleg Dad had put in to avoid driving over the top of the septic tank. Up again and round again, the avenue of silver birch Mam had planted now just an honour guard of stumps. A pair of spindly Japanese maples there instead, trying tremulously to turn. They’d planted willows all along the water line too, to justify the name. Romantic weeds, Mam used to called them. Thirsty bloodsuckers, according to Dad.

  At the driveway gate, she could hear the creek but not see it, a black burbling over rock. Her view of the water was blocked by the transplanted shearing shed. It looked silly and, yes, sheepish, hulking there in the front garden, with all its walls gone and what was left of it painted pink. Like a burly farmhand had been forced to come to Sunday dinner wearing lipstick and minus his shirt.

  Rounding the last bend, she feared the worst. But there was the house, spreading low and ungainly in honey-coloured stone. Leaves scudding on gravel, a pear tree sat flattened into its own shadow along the orchard fence. The day leaching and silvering already, like something from a mournful Swedish film.

  Climbing the front steps, inventing stories about dead mobiles and car breakdowns in case she met some woman in a hat, she saw that the blinds were drawn. A drift of leaves and real estate brochures littered the front mat. So she kept walking, past white crossed doors and weathered lintels, eyes half-closed, hand trailing. Telling rooms like a rosary, front parlour to back bedroom, sewing room to dining room, gold stone to silver shadow. Remembering everything, in her skin at least.

  Halfway round, her hand met air. She almost fell down a set of steps that shouldn’t have been there. The whole back of the house had been lopped off. That great mash of wooden extensions and tin lean-tos Dad had kept adding on out there like a never-ending sentence—Mam’s pantry, Ray’s sleep-out, the old laundry—all gone. Instead of the Hills hoist, the chicken coop, the old incinerator, a square of bright orange cobbles and some empty flowerbeds. The ‘French-style kitchen garden’ promised on the sign. Nothing growing but weeds and moss. Only the old pepper tree clung on, its roots already knobbling up the new pavers. Beyond that, the remains of the orchard, just stubble and stump. From this angle, without the generous skirt of its wraparound and the front verandah jutting out like a fake bosom, the house looked bald. Pimple on a pumpkin, Mam would have said.

  And what on earth would she have made of her kitchen? All those windows, all those skylights. My giddy aunt. They’ll fry like fish.

  She leaned against the back French doors, funnelling shadow with her hands. A tundra of tile in there, waves of stone and chrome. No colour, no clutter, no handles on the cupboards. No bowls of eggs or faded farm calendars, no blackened, cranky, flap-sided toaster only Ray could fix. No appliances at all that she could see, just a black vase of poppies on a white swerve of bench. The ceiling raked so high now, the room looked taller than it was wide, a sort of coffin meets art gallery effect. You’d need to be scarily tall to inhabit it, like one of Harry’s African art statues on stilts.

  This was the sort of thing the architect had wanted to do to her place, before the money ran out. He’d stood in
her back garden, sketching downlights and marble countertops, so excited, she’d thought his gelled hair was about to rocket off his head. To save money and while they waited for the loan to come through, she and Simon had made a start, ripping out some of the old cupboards, tearing up the lino, finding dead rats, old newspapers, ancient puppy bones. In lieu of the island they couldn’t yet afford, Simon had rigged up an old door as a makeshift bench. Sanded it, but not painted it. Never got around to fixing it to the wall. And then he left and the bank reneged on the loan. The house had stayed that way, half-raw, half-old. Half-haunted, like this place, by what was, what might have been.

  It was getting late. The pepper tree was casting knuckled shadows on the cobblestones. Couldn’t tell the time by the clock in that kitchen. No numbers on it, just two silver hands measuring a desert of days and nights. The poppies dull smears of reflection in the stainless-steel fridge. Another flower had opened even since she’d arrived, that’s how warm it was in there. Harry would find it symbolic, the mute clock and the frantic blooming. Found symbols in everything, Harry. Wealth in the arrangement of windows, spirituality in a bowl of fruit. When he’d switched from still life to pottery, it was God, inevitably, lurking in greasy chunks of clay. God made all things and all stories, according to Harry, and she’d wanted to ask him why bother then, when all your coffee mugs look like ashtrays and all your bananas turn out without a hint of bend?

  Why things couldn’t just be what they were. A house. A vase of flowers. A woman, waiting for her son to come home.

  Heels on gravel, round the side. A tinkling laugh.

  Diving down her old rat run, under the fence and along the creek paddock and through the orchard that wasn’t there any more, she spotted a woman with a clipboard rounding the corner of the house, followed by a young couple dressed in black. Maybe they were going to buy the place. They would suit it. Taller, thinner, more modern people than she was, amid all those skimming, swooping angles, they’d be to scale. That kitchen would give them back to themselves, snug in their black geometry. They wouldn’t feel like she did. Extinguished. Rubbed out.

  After a night spent with Winston in the back of the car, she woke stiff, covered in dog hair, yet unaccountably refreshed.

  At the last town before the big haul, she bought bottled water, sandwiches, a guidebook, a folding shovel, toilet paper and a box of muesli bars. For some unknown reason, a kilo bag of flour.

  Plugging her mobile into the handy slot on the dash, she headed northwest on dead straight, brand new road. The phone blinked steadily, the map sat crisply folded on the passenger seat. The road she was following neat and black, as if cut with dressmaker’s scissors, eating its way steadily toward the border, before joining that other, fainter road, looping up toward the left-hand corner of the state. It gave her pleasure, all that land cut from a pattern and staying where it should. It was the little roads you had to watch out for, the spidery, pinkish faint ones, hiccupping their way across empty slabs of green.

  That was wishful thinking, for a start. Two hours out from the town where she’d done her shopping, all brown, as far as she could see. The guidebook called one section black soil, but she couldn’t see that either. Just various shades of dun. A hundred k in, a switch from bitumen to white dust, then abrupt red floodplain, flattening to long stretches of channel country, grey earth speckled with lignum, cane grass, mulga, gidgee. Leopardwood, beefwood, bimble box and supplejack, the guidebook intoned. Such delicious names for things so uniformly grey. From some neglected corner of her brain, she retrieved the facts that mulgas were edible by stock, dams were called ground tanks, and a dry sheep was a ewe without a lamb at foot. If she were a sheep, that’s who she would be.

  For two hours, nothing but grass, bleach yellow and bottle blonde. Silver cassia lined the lime-wash track. Dead roos, black goats, glossy as sin. An emu lay in the middle of the road, split and spread-eagled like something from a cartoon. Wedgetails lifted ponderously on her approach, barely clearing the bonnet, guts filled with guts. A lake, once, bobbing sea green and chimeric as she topped a rise. Emu on the shore, serene and legless in the shimmer. Then the land fell, the road turned, the lake disappeared. On the horizon, like a sideways thought, a kestrel hovered, wings spinning, as if to conjure something. Water perhaps.

  Somewhere to the left of the track she was travelling, the famous old river. Now and again she crossed one of its smaller tributaries, called an anabranch out here. Below vast iron-laced bridges, a deep-gouged history, hoary with roots. On the banks, silver gums infested with mistletoe, herons stalking oily water. More goats, scrambling, hoofs clattering, to perch nonchalantly in the forks of drowned trees.

  A patch of grass down there, tiny green for the eye to drink up. And then she was over, in a rattle of rust and dust.

  After a while she forced herself to relax, stop gripping the wheel like she was about to fall off a cliff. Instead of checking the fuel gauge and the temperature dial all the time, she fixed herself on the horizon, navigating static until she found a local station on the radio. She warbled along, her tuneless hum underscored by Winston’s snoring, the caramel thrum of tyres. Winding down the window, she stuck her elbow out, sculpting her face into the stare of the men she’d seen in passing utes. By late afternoon, she’d adopted the official salute. A nod that could be road judder or fly avoidance. A single finger lifted from the wheel.

  When the radio died, somewhere in the middle of a vast dry floodplain, called, impenetrably, Dick’s Dam, she punched recklessly at buttons on the console, as if in managing to steer this big black beast in a straight line for a few hours, she’d somehow assumed its armour, drunk its blood. Like the naming of trees and tributaries, a spell of sorts. She had no idea what most of those dials and levers accomplished, and for the first hour she’d driven in four-wheel drive on bitumen, wondering why the car felt so sluggish. But they calmed her, these shining ranks of winks and clicks. Floated her, cool and invincible, above a dry old world.

  At dusk, fearing wildlife, as if roos crouched, commando-style, under every bush, she pulled into a roadhouse, the last one before the turn-off to that cobweb of tiny tracks on the map. It had a motel attached to it, steel cabins made from shipping containers, stained pink from the dust of passing trucks. Steel-toe boots sat lined up beside each door. But there was a restaurant and there was airconditioning and, according to the manager, dressed for safari behind his desk, dogs were allowed, just not inside.

  She sat on her doorstep with Winston, eating bright pink Chinese, watching other travellers come to roost in their trucks and caravans. Feeling sun swept, sanguine, in control. When the manager passed by, well camouflaged for his trip to clean the toilets, she tipped her hat. Like her, it had acquired a satisfying patina of dust.

  The illusion lasted until sunset, when yet another ute pulled into the cabin next door. It was drawing a trailer of barking, snarling dogs, packed so tight, their tongues and ears poked through the mesh. Towering above all of them, an unearthly black mastiff, its massive chest covered by a studded leather vest. Winston tried to melt between her legs, his blond bulk stuck there like a cork.

  The driver, a rabbity little man in tiny shorts, came over and asked her for a cigarette. She offered him the packet, mesmerised by his teeth. He was on his way to Hungerford, to meet a mate of a mate, to go roo hunting, but he’d done his ball joint and then his battery went and then he’d hit a pig. Big fucker. Size of a horse. Woulda shot it, if he’d had a gun.

  As soon as she could, she escaped inside, dragging Winston behind. Bugger the rules. Like her shiny pink bedspread covering a mattress vicious with springs, this place held only the thinnest veneer of civilisation. Lying there, wrapped in her pink polyester sheets, she thought about the owners of all those big steel-toe boots, the little pig man with the big dogs. Wondered what sort of man Ray might have become.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Next morning, at the turn-off from the highway, marked only by a boiled-looking lantern jaw of
rock, she sat staring at the route drawn by the motel manager on her map. His biro line meandered uncertainly, coinciding only now and then with the dotted line of the track. Beyond her window, the track itself, thin, rutted, curling up through starved-looking hills. On the map, her path was overlain with a series of faint wiggles and squiggles, like the moth tunnels on a scribbly gum. Contour lines, according to the motel man. Or dry creeks. Or both. He wasn’t sure. Sprinkled here and there, small dots with italicised names. Not places or towns, just properties. Some historic, mostly abandoned, even the homesteads gone.

  Ruby Downs was there, in italics, but the motel manager had never heard of it. Near the border, where the line he’d drawn finished at a junction with another track, he’d put an uncertain-looking X and a question mark. Beyond that point, just desert, dingoes, the famous fence. Between the junction and the border, scoured yellow space. Even the mapmaker had stopped pretending anything lived out there.

  She took a swig of thermos coffee, racked up the aircon, struck right.

  For the first forty ks, the road was grooved and sandy, but firm enough. After keying herself up for battle, it seemed the place might defeat her with gates. Every ten minutes she had to stop, get out, wrestle with some new and elaborate variation on a wire loop, drive through, get out to close the gate, get back in again. Beyond the car, a watchful ticking silence, an odd bright singing when she touched the wire. Her journey travelling out before and behind her, sounding too loud, too foolish. By the eighth gate, she was wishing for a companion. Even Harry would do.

  At the last gate, a goanna sat draped like yellow and white paint on the post. Remembering Dad’s stories, how they’d run up any available leg in lieu of a tree, she hovered uncertainly, swatting flies. No trees out here. Just defeated-looking bushes and a little mailbox like a little house marking some house that was no longer there. A goat skull had been nailed, voodoo-like, to the other post.