by Kate Lyons
Name was Bandy. Wife was Gail. They’d been travelling together, all over. South Australia, West Australia, the Strzelecki, the Stony. Walking out of the front yard, Bandy ticked deserts off on the four remaining fingers of one stubby, mangled-looking hand. Ray let the stream of talk tip him off the steps, down the path and, through the gate, into bright and ordinary air. A top-heavy camper sat at a slewed angle to Ray’s fallen ute. Bandy walked round and round it, shaking his head.
‘Gotta hand it to you. You don’t do things by halves.’ He squinted thoughtfully at Ray through rollie smoke. ‘You were going like the clappers when I saw ya. Where’s the fire?’
When Ray didn’t answer, he shrugged, sighed, stubbed his butt and flipped off his thongs. ‘You’ll have sucked water for sure. Plugs’ll be fucked. Lucky for you, I got a winch. Chuck us that rope from the front.’ Ray went over to the camper. The cabin was empty and he wondered dully about Gail, the wife.
‘Mate. You’d better be right behind me. I’m working up a thirst.’ Holding up the hem of his little shorts daintily, Bandy was already wading in.
For half an hour there was just the meaty smell of the other man’s singlet as they dug, heaved, grunted, dumb flesh against rock, metal, mud. Something to do. The old animal thing. The dog splashed between them, throwing up glints of water. The sun shining, harsh and ordinary. The dense power of the place draining away.
Afterwards, he sat in Bandy’s camping chair, drinking Bandy’s beer. Watching as the man worked some jerry-built lever on his home-made camper, showing how the tent popped out, his own invention. How the little cupboards were built above and behind, with a dinky sink below. A fridge, a stove, an ironing board. The whole thing tinny and compact as a home-made aeroplane.
‘See? Place for everything. Even Gail.’
Ray looked around. Just the empty camper, the old blackness of desert, the fire Bandy had built.
‘Where is she?’
Bandy’s face looked suddenly old in the fire glow.
‘She’s good. She’s ready. Sitting tight.’ He clapped his hands together, started clattering frypans, moths gathering around his lamp and his little pull-out stove. ‘Right. We got snags, steak. Chicken. That lot’s been marinading since Bourke.’
While Bandy cooked, Ray sat and drank, listening to stories about the man’s time in the army, his stints as an oil driller, a mining engineer. Bandits, black snakes, blood diamonds. Closing his eyes, tipping his head back, Ray let the stories swim him up and out, to where the moon was rising. Stars popping, sharp as bone.
A cry from the back of the camper made him open his eyes. A little noise, like a bereft-sounding owl. Gail perhaps. But when Ray got there, it was just Bandy, swearing, shaking his head, sweeping at some grey stuff that was all over the stove and the sink. Looked like spilled spice.
‘Forgot to bloody tie her down.’
Ray saw the loose ocky strap on the shelf above, the overturned urn.
‘She’d kill me. Hates a mess, does Gail.’ Bandy continued scraping her up, returning her to the urn along with a hoard of toast crumbs, piles of dust, old burnt food from the top of the stove. She’d gone everywhere, all through his labelled cups and plates, sifting in a fine screen through the cracked lid of the water tank. After a while, Ray found a dustpan and helped, thinking as he did so of Bandy, travelling alone across deserts, partaking of his wife in small communion, in endless cups of tea. Love entering him, over and over. A slow grit in heart and bone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
He walked toward her out of land brown and creased as an old photograph. The old lilt to the knees, that easy grammar between hip and thigh. Her father’s walk, she realised now. Grace translated, the body remembering, despite it all.
She got out of the car, clutching Freda’s mud map. Stood listening to the creak of the sign, the wind singing in the fence.
Before she’d seen that sign—on old roof tin, neatly hand-painted, Twenty Bends Farm, Organic Fruit, Pick Your Own, pointing up a track red as blood and straight as pin—she’d been about to give up. Nothing on her map, those tiny hieroglyphs scrawled by Freda on a serviette, showing a forked road, a dead tree, a spindled blob which could have been cow or rock or house, accorded to anything outside the car.
As he reached the gate she saw he was just a boy. Red hair, not blond hair. Tall, too thin. Not grown into his shoulders yet, his body all joint, knuckle, Adam’s apple. On his freckled cheek, a receding tide mark from a black eye.
‘No fruit today. It’s Sunday. We’re shut.’
When she didn’t answer, he walked closer, a dog wending between his feet.
‘You deaf? Come back next week.’
Trying for gruffness, his voice ended in a squawk. Face crimson, he aimed a kick at the kelpie twining between his feet but it danced away. She remembered it, that age. The body rebelling, the body betraying, all the flushed, musky yearning of it. All those long hot afternoons she’d spent in classrooms, wrangling bristled, blushing, gangly bundles of fear and anger like this. Her only defence some boring photocopied poem.
She’d never seen Ray at that age. He’d stayed small, gold, shining, an agile brown boy emerging from brown water, the coin she’d tossed into the shallows of the creek clutched in his teeth. Afterwards, riding on her shoulders at dusk toward bath and bed, his neat ankles anchoring her hands, he’d told their path home in Egyptian Pharaohs, Latin names for fish. His voice a bell in the dark.
‘Sorry. I’m not after fruit.’ Her voice sounded dry and high as the boy’s. ‘I’m looking for someone. But I got lost. This map …’ She fluttered her silly napkin at him. ‘I’m Ursula. You must be Mick.’
He frowned suspiciously, the bruise on his eye crinkling up. ‘You from the school?’
‘No. Why? Should I be?’
Idiot. Not the time for spit and vinegar now. He’d rammed his hat back on, turned on his heel, was halfway across the paddock before she called out again.
‘Wait. Please. I’m sorry. I’m looking for Ray. Ray McCullough? He lives here, doesn’t he? You know Freda. She gave me this address.’ The boy had stopped. The dog dropped a stone at his feet, looked expectant. ‘I’m Ray’s mother.’ So easy after all this time.
The boy turned to stare, his face burnt brick red under that shock of curly red hair. A fly explored the faded terrain of his bruise, crawling toward the edge of his mouth. She wondered who or what might have made that mark.
‘He’s not here. He’s out.’
Not again.
‘But he lives here?’
He shrugged.
‘He’s fencing. All day. Won’t be back till later on.’
‘I don’t mind. I can wait.’
He stared on for a bit. Then he walked back, with bad grace, slipped the chain off the gate and whistled up the dog.
‘You’ll have to walk. Front gate’s locked and I don’t have the key.’
He was gone so fast, on those long legs of his, that he’d almost disappeared over the ridge before she had time to ask what she should do about her car. As she hurried behind, stumbling along in her plastic sandals, she saw it wasn’t memory or distance that had conjured it, that familiar articulation of his body, his puppety lope. Like the hat pulled low, the rollie held between thumb and forefinger, it had been borrowed, badly translated, his raw lankiness trying to contain some coiled menace it hadn’t earned, didn’t own.
‘This is your mother’s farm, is that right?’ she asked, panting, when she’d managed to catch up. She was about to correct her tense, to say sorry about what had happened when he whipped around, face bright with rage or embarrassment. He seemed constantly on the verge of both.
‘Not a farm.’
‘Oh. The sign …’
‘That’s just for the tourists. For the fruit. It’s a property. See? All that land over there, past the dam? And down there, right along the creek?’ She followed the proud wave of his hand, nodding, taking in the sparse rows of trees, the dark still water. Something g
razing far away, blobs that might have been sheep or very small cows.
‘All ours. We got goats, and pigs as well. And that new pasture across the creek, when Ray gets it fenced, we’re gonna get some sheep in again. If the water pans out.’
The words sounded borrowed as well. He turned his back, smoking furiously as he strode. Over the ridge, a shed, some skinny chickens, the dog herding them with little skill and great enthusiasm, turning mindless circles in the dust. At the bottom, in a bowl of earth, a little house, grey and famished looking. She saw the skew-whiff verandah, the cracked windows, the eaves scoured back to lime. Saw too the scrubbed, swept boards, the tidy woodpile, the neatly paired work boots outside the door. The boy was levering his off already, heel to toe.
‘No shoes inside.’ She heard her own voice, echoing back at her down the years. He slammed in, the screen door almost catching her in the face.
Inside, she had time for a quick impression of a small room, bare floorboards, a little bookcase made of bricks, before he pulled out a kitchen chair. Stood over it, glowering stonily, until she sat down. She wondered what Ray had told him about her, if he’d said anything at all.
She waited for Mick to turn the kettle on, ask about tea, but he was getting down canisters from the cupboards. Flour, sugar, bowls, a rolling pin, all lined up neatly on the table, so she had only a small corner to call her own. As he took a pink frilly apron from the back of a chair and tied it around his waist, he stared at her hard, as if daring her to laugh.
‘What are you making?’
He gave this the silence it deserved. Shook yeast from a packet, measured flour, added water from a jug, his tongue poking out from the side of his mouth.
She sat in silence as the boy mixed and kneaded and grunted, his big red knuckles vicious against the defenceless dough. Closing her mind to thirst and a thousand questions, aware of the barely controlled rage the boy was giving off, she tried to take in, from what she could see, the little bits and pieces of the place Ray called home. A rusty fridge, a dent in the freezer door. A pot bubbling on the stove. Torn laminex, a cream-coloured clock, some monastic-looking shelves. The little brick and ply bookcase, the scanty spines on it old and worn. Too far to read what they were without getting up, and the boy was thumping the table so hard with the dough, she didn’t dare. The only other door in the place was firmly closed. No pictures, no photographs. No sign of a woman here except the boy’s pink-frilled hips.
She turned back, to the only reading matter she could find, a copy of the local newspaper on the table, two weeks old. As she pulled it toward her, the edge of it contacted the boy’s hand and he threw the dough down harder, puffing flour all over her arm. She just wet a finger coolly and turned a page. Read intently about local elections, the death of a town worthy, the grand opening of a new hospital oncology wing.
After what seemed like hours but was only fifteen minutes by the clock, she felt rather than saw the tension leave the boy’s body, poured out into the now-sleek dough.
‘That’s coming along.’ He said nothing but threw the dough down with a milder thump. ‘Mick? Would you mind if I made myself some tea?’
He shrugged. The little pink frills going up and down on his big shoulders made her want to laugh. Instead she got up, filled the kettle. The room silent except for the water drumming, the clock ticking, the boy grunting, but differently now, more companionably. A cooking silence, clouds of flour floating in late rays of sun. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she lifted the lid on the pot. The smell was rich with fat and meat, earthy with turnip and swede. So redolent of childhood, so intensely and privately familiar, it almost made her blush.
‘This smells good. What is it?’
‘Soup.’ From the corner of her eye, she saw he was creaming butter and sugar now, folding flour with airy curves of a wooden spoon.
‘What sort?’
Oxtail of course, with the bone left in. Secret was to make it the day before. While she listened to her own wisdom retailed back at her—long slow brown of the onions, skim the fat, only beef stock, home-made—she drank her tea and looked out the window, at earth the colour and texture of string. Sun was lower now, glinting off the dark hole of the dam.
‘That’s a lot of food you’re making. Just for two.’
He was tucking dough in a tin, placing the tin on a tray.
‘Might as well. The oven’s on.’
Her rule. Her mother’s rule. An old country rule, from the days of cantankerous woodfired ovens and no money for shop-bought biscuits and cake.
‘What happened to your eye?’
The dog barked then, a single yelp. She heard the screen door go as the boy slammed out and she looked out the kitchen window again. The sun was twinging sharp on the ridge, slicing up past the curtains, forcing her to shade her eyes. Someone moving out there, amid the glitter of dust and stones. A tall man walking toward her, unfolding from some tender crease in her mind.
At this distance, through glare and shimmer, curtailed, foreshortened. A boy again, after all this time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Annette Barlow, Christa Munns and Julia Stiles, and as always to Andre van Schaik, for all his support.
