The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  An hour later, when she emerged from the sliding doors, he squinted through the dazzle of the windscreen, trying to read what had happened through her body. Too far away to see her face and she had on those big black sunglasses that made her look like a junior owl. Maybe just the autumn light, maybe wishful thinking, but it seemed some grace had returned to her, flowing through those narrow hips in their faded denim, the silver stubble softening the bird shape of her skull. The jut of her collarbone appeased now by a tan.

  He got out of the car, arms already making a circle toward her, but she stopped short, and he was left executing a strange step in brittle mid-air. Wondering why his body felt so disjointed, so not his own.

  ‘Lil? Everything good?’

  Her black, blank sunglasses. He wished Mick was here, rattling around on his skateboard, or even the dog.

  ‘What happened? What did they say?’

  She stepped forward, taking off her glasses, her little crow’s-feet crinkling up. ‘All clear. Nothing. And there’s something else.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At dawn, blue, calm, shining soft yellow through the canvas of the tent, a bell-like cry. The noise of something small and simple making itself known. As she unzipped the fly, a quick tremble of ears, fur, a liquid black eye. And it was gone. Just one print, as if whatever it was had touched down once, lightly, then blown away. Quoll, Max thought. But he wasn’t sure.

  By the time they were in the truck, heading back, through that dry wash of grass, she knew what she had to do. As soon as they were in range again, she’d call Harry, tell him to move out. She’d borrow some more money, somehow, finish the renovations, or maybe just sell the house the way it was. There’d still be enough to buy herself something smaller, more modern, with a little courtyard and an electric oven, a place out of the city and well away from cliffs and the sea. Enough left over to find a place where Tilda could get some proper care. Ursula would visit, twice a week. She’d try and listen this time, try to hear whatever truth Tilda had been trying to tell her for all these years, in all those mad, sideways stories of hers.

  Or perhaps she wouldn’t buy a house at all. Just put the money in the bank, buy a big black smooth-sounding car all her own. Go travelling, and when she was sick of it, end up somewhere like this, teaching English and manners to children like Freda’s wild little girls. Make sausages on Tuesdays. Go camping with Max. Find the owner of the hairy-winged heel.

  By the time they got back to Ruby Downs, the sky had turned black. Smoke on the horizon, thick and choking, and the clearing was crowded with trucks and tractors. Their owners, exhausted and dirty, sat slumped on the verandah. Wind like an oven when she got out of the car. That unmistakeable bushfire smell.

  Max melted away, stripping off his shirt as he went. As Ursula mounted the steps, Freda rushed past, her hands and hair stark with flour against the black faces and soot-streaked clothes of the men. Dry lightning, she barked. Fire to the east and south and behind as well. Ursula followed her gaze to a wall of smoke on two horizons, far away, but in this wind, not far enough. A hundred acres gone, two hundred maybe. How many sheep, nobody knew. The flyscreen banged behind Freda, and as if it was a signal, all the men got up, slinging overall straps back over their shoulders, putting on hats and goggles, heading out toward the trucks.

  The afternoon passed in a flurry of cake and sandwich making, big smoky male bodies angling through the female flurry of the kitchen. Endless cups of tea. Freda was everywhere, flipping meat patties and carving lamb from a bloody-looking shoulder while barking orders into her brick of a satellite phone. Even the little girls were cooking, making scones and Anzac biscuits, until there was enough cake and salads and ham sandwiches to feed an army. If you could fight fires with food, Freda would have won.

  Ursula, deemed too slow and helpless by Ronnie to do anything else, was assigned to buttering bread and refilling urns. The girl sat cross-legged on a bench, bossing her younger sisters in the art of scone-making while keeping a beady eye on Ursula. They set up a rhythm, Ursula cutting, filling, spreading, the little girls arranging the food on plates and whisking them off, the smallest one eating icing as fast as she could make it. Freda stirred a pork and pineapple curry to sludge. And still they came, men and other women now as well, black-faced and wild-haired. At one point, Freda, running past with a bucket, a length of hose and another huge bottle of tomato sauce, thrust her chin at one of the men, a man almost as wide as he was tall. He was coated in smoke layers, circles of white on his face where his goggles had been.

  ‘Sam. That’s Ursula. Lady with the car.’ Ursula stuck her hand out, covered as it was in flour. The big man regarded it stolidly. Then the phone in his hand went off and he rushed out the door.

  Early evening, when she stepped outside to catch her breath, she could hardly breathe or see. Thick yellow smoke pressed in, tumbleweeds racing past in hot bright wind. As the sun set, she heard the thunder of hooves. A white horse arrived at full pelt on the ridge above the dam. Tail high, eye wild, a ring of fire springing from the darkness up there, before the horse galloped off and the sun went down.

  At midnight, Ursula sat with the girls on the trampoline, feeding them stale trail mix from her car, until even Ronnie went to sleep. A while later, a red pinpoint bobbed toward her through the darkness. The trampoline rubber heaved, there was a deep sigh, a big bounce, and Ursula only just managed to grab the ankle of the smallest girl before she fell sideways into the night.

  ‘Wind’s changed. Thank fuck. Oops. Sorry. Didn’t know the girls were here.’

  ‘They’re fast asleep.’

  The red tip glided toward her and Ursula accepted it, along with a mug of sherry so sweet it made her molars ache.

  ‘Thanks for your help today. You worked like a dog.’

  ‘I didn’t do much.’

  ‘Still. You didn’t have to.’ She clicked her fingers and Ursula handed back the cigarette.

  ‘I’ll head off tomorrow, Freda. If the car’s OK.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t think Sam had time to get to it, love. And the roads will be closed, with these fires. They’re not out, you know.’

  Silence from Freda, just her coarse black knuckles illuminated as she lit another cigarette.

  ‘Listen. I have to tell you something. Would have said it earlier but with everything else going on.’ A long silence as she sucked, the ember of the cigarette glowing and dulling again. ‘About your brother. Ray, I mean.’

  Ursula felt her face start to burn, and she turned away, looking for landmarks, something to anchor herself with, even though it was pitch black out there.

  ‘Though I’m pretty sure Ray doesn’t have a sister. Not as far as I know.’

  Nothing to see, not even the moon, which had been so full and white last night.

  ‘Get the feeling you’re his mum. The way you are. What confused me, see. Why you’d lie. And Ray told me his mum was dead.’

  High above the roof, threads and scuds, an orange glimmer. Just the tip of the moon, swollen and painful, balanced on steep tin, before smoke or clouds streamed across, obscuring it again.

  ‘Listen, none of my business. And I understand. Not why you lied, not really. But you must have your reasons. And I’d do anything for my kids.’ Freda pinched her cigarette out and threw it away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ursula managed to get out.

  ‘Yeah. That’s your lookout, as I said. Why I didn’t tell you, yesterday or whenever, is the last time I heard from Ray, he asked me not to ring him, and not to tell anyone where he was. God knows why. He’s an odd fish, your son.’ Freda hoiked in her throat, spat into the dark. ‘Bloody smoke.’ When she stood up, Ursula felt a great weight lifting, their rubber raft floating free in the dark.

  ‘Freda? You know where he is?’

  ‘Well, I did, a while back. Last time I heard, he was living with a cousin of Sam’s. Not a cousin exactly, cousin-in-law. Second cousin? I dunno. Anyway, her name’s Lily. She worked here for a while. W
asn’t much chop as a governess, but nice enough. She was married to Sam’s cousin, Gary. Before he ran off. Good bloody riddance too. Real ratbag, he was.’

  Ursula fought the urge to get up, grab Freda’s round soft black shape in the darkness, shake it out of her, before they got lost in some unravelling family connection or the fires roared back.

  ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘Outside Bourke. Little run they got out there. On its last legs, according to Sam.’

  Not very far. Not after all the distances and years she’d travelled. Ursula tried to remember where she’d left her handbag, in the kitchen or in the cottage, the location of her keys. Then she remembered the fires, the roads, the darkness. The wrecked wheel of her car.

  ‘I’ll leave tomorrow, if you could lend me a car. I’ll bring it back. Soon as I can.’ She got up, feeling the need to do something quickly, even if it was just to go to bed and make the morning appear.

  ‘Men’ll be back soon. I better go put some more beer in the fridge.’

  Freda started moving in her fast little trundle toward the house, Ursula hurrying behind.

  ‘I won’t even mention you. OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Look. I dunno. Ray said …’

  ‘Freda? Please?’

  Freda paused, hands on hips.

  ‘Yeah. Well. Getting a bit sick of Ray and his bloody secrets by now, tell the truth. Thing is though, he might not even be there any more. When I spoke to him last, he was heading off. Wouldn’t say where.’ She sighed, scuffing at dust with the toe of her boot. ‘Don’t blame him really, after what happened. They were going to get married, see.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong? Is he sick?’

  Ellie murmured something in the darkness, crying out, and Freda turned, headed back to the trampoline. A twang of springs as she picked the little girl up.

  ‘Not him love. Lily. She died, you see.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In May he embarked on one of his long, looping, once almost rudderless journeys, up to Queensland, across and down to South Australia, working his way from sheep to cattle, cotton to grain, back again. Crossing borders, time zones and seasons, he worked on roads and fences, dug ditches and ground tanks. Went anywhere, did anything, as long as it paid cash in hand. Once, he travelled three thousand kilometres in two days. Nights were for driving, days for grafting, an old rhythm with new purpose. Watching the white line unravel by the glow of the dashboard, he thought about how his compass had always been work taking him closer to money and further from home. But everything was different, now there was Lily and home was somewhere else.

  A week before his father’s birthday, he headed for Bourke, stopping at Sam’s on the way for the autumn shear. He’d rung Freda, looking for Charlie. No news but that English cook had taken off again and Sam was in hospital after a fall from his bike. Just a fracture, but they needed help. Sam would come round eventually, Freda reckoned. Now Ray was part of the family, or almost.

  After a day cooking in the shed, Ray would come to rest at Freda’s big scratched kitchen table, cradling one of Lolly’s never-ending puppies, playing jacks with the girls, eating Freda’s rubbery scones. Listening to her grand plans for spit roasts and marquees and napkins folded in the shape of swans, he wondered who would eat all those pavlovas and trifles she intended to make. Lily had only one relative in the country, some sister from Perth he’d never met. No friends to speak of, unless you counted Cheryl or that woman from the clinic she met for coffee sometimes. As for him, there was only Freda. And Ursula, who had never returned his message and he’d been too angry, then too frightened to call again. And Dad of course.

  On his way back, the ute tray stuffed with Freda’s old baby clothes, aching to drive through, get home after his long absence, he forced himself on one last detour. He kept thinking of Dad in that awful little house, cremating slowly by the fire. He’d get him out of that chair and into some clean trousers, take him out for a birthday meal. He’d listen to his stories, he’d smile and nod. He’d be Eddie. Be anyone Dad wanted him to be. He’d tell him about Lily and not care if Dad forgot about her the moment Ray left the room, laying out his sleeping bag in the looming shadow of all that old furniture from Twenty Bends. For just a moment, as he said her name, she would exist. He would exist. A man, not an unwanted boy. A man with a future, a wife and child. Two, if he counted Mick.

  But when he got to Frederick Street in the late afternoon, he saw the creeping disease in the rest of the street had reached the little stone house. Rubbish on the verge, beer bottles scattered across the front yard. The old Holden was still in the driveway but someone had nicked the wing mirrors and two of the wheels. The place was stony-faced with blinds. Even as he rattled the front flyscreen, he knew from the sound that the house was empty, and not just of furniture. A house left for an hour had a different silence than one abandoned and no longer home.

  Walking around the side, steeling himself to find a body spread-eagled on concrete or wedged between a pile of fallen logs, he found more broken glass, more overflowing rubbish bags. The back door was locked. He was turning to go, wondering what to do with the card he’d bought, whether to leave it in the letterbox in the hope that someone, some new tenant or real estate agent, might pass it on, when a grey head popped above the back fence, then bobbed quickly back down.

  ‘Hello?’

  Stepping on the rung of the fence and peering over, he saw a wiry old lady glaring at him from her own neat backyard.

  ‘Oh. Thought you were them kids again. You see what they done? Bloody disgrace.’ She gestured, and he turned to look again at the piles of empty longnecks and flapping pizza boxes, the scorched earth behind the shed where a fire had been set. In the middle, a bit of Dad’s garden hose and one of his dog-defying Coke bottles, fashioned into a home-made bong.

  ‘You from the council? ’Bout bloody time. Little mongrels nearly burnt down my fence.’

  ‘No, I’m not from the council. Sorry. I’m just looking for the man who lives here. Or he used to. Mr McCullough?’

  ‘Jim? Oh, he’s gone. A while ago. He’d never let those louts get away with that.’

  Ray braced his body against the fence. ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yeah. Moved out.’ Ray’s heart settled down. ‘Don’t blame him. If this keeps up, I won’t be far behind.’ Still muttering, the old lady started taking dry clothes off her line. ‘Told the council. We’ll get rats next, if someone doesn’t clean that lot up.’

  ‘Do you know where he went? Jim?’

  She pointed up toward the town tip hill. ‘That flash new nursing home.’ She turned to squint at him. ‘You that Eddie he was always on about? One with the car?’

  Ray nodded, then launched himself back off the fence.

  At the nursing home front desk, a crisp woman in a pink uniform told him visiting hours were two to three, that his father was resting, that he’d been found wandering out toward the highway the night before. That he’d been sedated and wasn’t to be disturbed.

  ‘Family only at the moment, I’m afraid. Are you a relative?’

  Ray nodded. She waited, fingering an earring, looking doubtful. So he showed her his licence and then the phone started ringing and she pointed up a corridor, saying he should sign in first and leave his details for the doctor, who would like to speak to him if he was a relative, but Ray was already halfway up the hall.

  ‘Just for a few minutes,’ she called after him. ‘And don’t wake him please. He needs the rest.’

  He sat beside his father’s bed, watching him sleep. Remembering everything, but as if from far away. His mind spare and calm as the little off-white room.

  Nothing much there. A vase of flowers, a pair of plastic clogs. A birthday card on the windowsill. But it was clean and large-windowed at least, after the fusty darkness of the house on Frederick Street. On the bedside table, a pair of glasses, a copy of the Herald opened to the crossword, clues half filled out in shaky writing. Spit stringing the hollow of his fath
er’s open mouth. His dentures sat in a glass of water beside the bed.

  Ray sat vigil in the half-light, watching the shrunken figure breathing slowly under the tight white sheet. The sound of his own breathing tuned itself to that of his father, a whistle then a wheeze. The room darkened from pink to oyster to the blue glow of the night-light. And still Ray waited, his own birthday card clasped in his hand.

  Past midnight, there was a knock on the door. When the nurse popped her head in, she gasped, shocked he was still there. He checked his watch. The highway would be quiet but the roos would be out. He’d risk it. Lily waiting. He needed to get home.

  As he left, he thought about touching his father’s hand, lying with its familiar dinosaur skin on the sheet. Instead, harangued by the nurse’s sharp whispers, he put his birthday card next to the other one on the windowsill, and closed the door.

  He saw the lamb as he reached the last bend before the front gate. It was sitting folded in the middle of the track. At a distance and except for the crow bobbing up and down on top of it, it looked snowy, compact, untouched. When he got out, he saw the missing head, the heart neatly beside it, as if bedded out on parsley. A tiny kidney, jewelled with dew. At the sound of his horn, the crow lumbered off, jelly trailing from its beak.

  Something wrong. Not just the lamb. The front gate was hanging open, one side listing, the other torn off completely, lying buckled in the dust. Wind could have done that though. Mick was always forgetting to shut it. But there was no wind. Dust sullen and listless. The dark eye of the dam.

  He drove on, pushing faster up the furrows. Even the air felt heavy, not verging but dwindling, more like dusk than dawn. A muffle to it, like a small child with a hand clapped across its face. And it did look childish, this place, after his long absence. The crooked chook shed, the stillborn vegetable patch. The house lopsided, windows fuddled with sun. The roof tin was licking up again, like stubborn hair.