Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  ‘Interior decoration — hated it.’

  ‘And you like this work?’

  ‘It’s great.’ She gazed happily around the bare walls of the dining mess. Then she frowned slightly. ‘It’s good having a van, though.’

  ‘Yeah,’ nodded Davo. ‘If you’re a light sleeper the racket in the quarters will give you the shits.’

  By ten that night he had learned almost as much as he was ever going to know about shearers’ cooking — short of what he would discover through his own practical experience. Davo and Barbara had given him their pointers. Breakfast: plenty of chops. Morning smoko: heaps of sandwiches, some of them toasted. Lunch: a choice of two dishes, one of them hot. Tea: the roast. They made it sound simple. Davo did. It was basically what Davo liked — what everyone liked, he said.

  ‘Those are your basics, work up from there,’ Davo said, ashing his cigarette at arm’s length across the table, twirling the tip carefully into an ashtray he’d made by buckling the edge of an empty pineapple tin. ‘Never ask people what they want, just give it to them. If they don’t like it they’ll let you know. Sort of, surprise me, but give me what I’m used to — or else. At one level a cook is never going to get it right. There is no such person as a good cook. Not that that should worry you, Cookie.’

  He had served Davo and Barbara their tea three and a half hours before, at six-thirty, exactly on time. They would have been happy to wait. But he wanted to rule the beginning line cleanly off. His first meal: Braidwood sausages done crisply, a mixed fry of onions, zucchini, tomato and capsicum, with potato salad, lettuce, beetroot, pickles, bread and butter on the side. He couldn’t eat anything himself — he was too hot, too wrought up, too exhilarated by strangeness. He drank strong black tea instead. Barbara picked at her plate. Davo ate everything, and went back for more, washing it down with extra VB.

  At ten there were still only the three of them. Nobody else had turned up except for Maurie Holgate arriving with a sheep’s carcase, which he hung in the meat house while his cook shone a torch.

  He’d heard of owners passing off on shearers the smallest, doggiest animals they could find, especially on the first day. But this Leopardwood Downs animal was a big meaty wether, its legs quadruple the size of any town butcher’s offering. There was a meal for nine in the shoulders alone. ‘Cut him up soon after daylight,’ warned Maurie Holgate. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a stinker.’ He came into the mess for a yarn, apologetically cadged himself a smoke from Davo’s tobacco — didn’t have any on him, having recently given up — and worried about the lack of shearers. ‘Where are they? Alastair said they’d be here. Harold swore black and blue we’d have ’em. Where’s Bertram Junior got to? He should have been here well before this.’

  ‘He’ll be here,’ said Davo.

  It was hot that night. In the kitchen and mess the gas mantles hissed steadily, throwing out a jaundiced, muzzy radiation. He had done the washing-up, stringing damp tea-towels on a line across the front of the old fuel stove. They were already dry. He swigged tea, and surveyed the stacks of boxes and sacks. Dumping things haphazardly, it seemed, was more or less the style of most shearers’ kitchens.

  ‘You get in,’ said Davo, uncapping another VB, ‘you unload, you never stop chasing your tail.’

  Between answering his questions, and giving him advice, Davo and Barbara played Scrabble and chess. A White Wings packet-mix chocolate cake was rising in the oven. He planned to serve it at tomorrow’s smokos. He was tired, but wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would be waiting for people to arrive, strangers in the house he had started to make his own in these few hours that seemed like weeks, months, years.

  ‘Christ knows where Bertram Junior is,’ muttered Davo, looking at his watch.

  ‘I thought you weren’t worried.’

  ‘Not in front of the owner, I wasn’t.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Bertram Junior? You’ll see.’

  ‘Maybe they’re back at the Fords Bridge pub.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Davo. ‘But Bertram Junior doesn’t drink. Nor does Harold. And Willie-boy, Bertram Junior’s mate, is off the grog.’

  ‘I had this picture of them swigging Coopers when I rang.’

  Davo drained his VB. ‘No way.’

  Barbara yawned over the Scrabble board. After a few minutes they packed up their games, tidied the table, and said goodnight. He felt as if he had known them for a long time. What they knew together was easy friendship and casual getting along, proximity without pressure in a place where there seemed no room for complications.

  COUNTED IN

  The lights soon went out in the caravan. He stood at the door of the mess-room, looking out into the night. The sky was ablaze with stars. He climbed down the steps and away from the quarters, onto the baking earth. Out from the galvanised iron there was a drop in air temperature. He stretched his arms behind his neck, loosened his shoulders and uncramped fingers already stiffening from the lifting, loading, hefting and bending.

  The night sky was astonishing. Diamonds crunched into powdery scatters, nailed into brilliant constellations. No lights of distant cities or country towns intruded below the skyline. Leopardwood Downs was far out on the ocean of land. Here was where Australia reclaimed itself and breathed. The Southern Cross hung midway down the southern sky, its pointers dangling like a clock-hand at twenty or twenty-five past the hour. Lightning flickered to the west, too distant for thunder.

  Back past the shed a light appeared and flounced across the top of the scrub. There it came again — a hard spotlight beam that changed, in an instant, to the full glare of powerful car headlights. A human figure eyeblinked across the lights and opened a gate. A car door slammed. The burbling roar of a broken muffler came at him over the winding sandy tracks of the holding paddock. Surely this was Bertram Junior at last. He returned to the kitchen.

  The car nosed up to Davo and Barbara’s caravan and sat there for ten minutes with the engine running, radio at full volume, taillamps glowing red, snatches of loud laughter and conversation drifting his way, and then it headed across to the quarters, and he saw it was a low-clearance Valiant Charger sedan.

  The engine died, a door slammed. A pale-skinned Maori came in. He was in his mid to late twenties, and seemed to be made from concentric circles of body parts. He must have weighed around a hundred kilos. He wore a striped tennis shirt, white shorts, and blue canvas loafers. His dark, moist, rounded eyes conveyed an air of surprised innocence. ‘You must be Cookie,’ he blinked. ‘Bertram Junior,’ and held out his hand. As he spoke, his upper lip curled inquisitively, and his head jutted forward slightly. Bertram Junior lowered himself to the bench and gave out a worried, almost pained glance. ‘Geez, Cookie, have we got trouble,’ he muttered. ‘It don’t look good for tomorrow.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, it don’t.’

  He liked the way Bertram Junior cut through the small-talk, didn’t waste time making him feel like a newcomer, in fact made him feel — when who was he to him? — completely part of a situation.

  ‘What, the rest running late — is that what it is?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t thunk so,’ said Bertram Junior softly, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Not just late. Y’see, Cookie, they was having car trouble, and I got sick of following them, so I come on ahead.’

  He sat at the mess table and agonised over what to do, his chin in his hand. There was a feeling, talking to this man, that you could really help him out of a spot if only you tried hard enough. He raised a couple of fingers and spoke through them. ‘I should’ve waited.’ Then he dropped his head again and worried some more. ‘I better go look for them,’ he decided, getting to his feet.

  ‘Have something to eat first. It’s all ready. My first meal as a shearers’ cook.’

  ‘S’pose I better,’ Bertram Junior nodded, raising an eyebrow. He sat down again. ‘Test you out, eh?’

  He served Bertram Junior a meal of sausages, potatoes
and salad. ‘Any cordial?’ Bertram Junior asked. He drank several large mugs of orange-mango while he ate. ‘That was good,’ he announced as he scraped his plate and dropped it into the sink, ‘but I ain’t real hungry in this heat.’ He climbed back into his car and set off in the dark.

  The lights dwindled over the endless scrub, and the stars reasserted themselves. He did a last tidy-up of the kitchen, mentally checked through breakfast items, turned off the gas lamps and made his way to his bedroom (down one set of steps, up the next).

  His room. Even with the window and door wide open it was like lying inside a dusty tea chest. He tugged his mattress to the floor, dragged it across to the door, and arranged his pillow so that his head jutted outside. At least he could breathe. He couldn’t stop looking at the sky. The Southern Cross had angled itself round in the last hour. He set his calculator-alarm for five-thirty, but what was the point, he couldn’t sleep. It seemed there might not be any shearing tomorrow. His ears strained for the sound of car engines. None came. Foxes barked and rabbits screamed in the back dunes.

  Maybe he slept. At five in the morning it was still absolutely dark, the Cross had turned over, almost tilted horizontal. He understood the meaning of the old droving phrase — D’Arcy Niland used it as the title for a novel — ‘Call me when the Cross turns over’. He got up. He sat on the top step of his room in the dark and picked burrs from his socks. In the kitchen he made a pot of tea by torchlight. Minute by minute the light changed, a grim faint greyness dispersing the timelessness at his disposal. First day on the job, and no team to cook for. He fried bacon and egg, and ate it by himself in the almost cool pre-dawn light.

  When it was light enough he went into the meat house and started grappling with the sloppy, sweet-smelling sheep’s carcase. He tried to cut it down systematically, but every time he stood back, dealing saw-blows, the gambrel stubbornly swivelled. Quivering lengths of belly-flap clung to his shirt. The meat wasn’t properly set. The night had been too hot. The morning was getting hotter. The meat was wet like Clag glue. He gave up trying to saw down the spine. Improvising, he came at the carcase sideways, cutting out legs, loin, ribs and shoulders in slippery hunks. Meat ants raced for scraps as they fell around his boots.

  In the kitchen he worked slowly, painstakingly, with a badly sharpened knife, creating piles of chaotic, flimsy chops that he bagged in plastic and stowed away in the fridge. The time for breakfast passed while he worked. Nobody disturbed him. The time for smoko loomed. He had taken too much time with the meat. He resolved that when Bertram Junior came back he’d ask him to butcher-up the next one. Hang his pride — overseers did it for women cooks, they’d do it for him — until the day came when they’d see him streaming down from the kitchen to the meat house, chef’s knife flashing, perfect cuts of meat falling to the tray like a publicity exercise.

  Half the night, all that day, Bertram Junior drove a thousand-kilometre round trip looking for the missing shearers. Backtracking through Wanaaring, Cobar and Wilcannia, he shepherded them in around nightfall. One lot had broken down; the others had stayed with them; a girl rouseabout fresh from Kiwi, named Pam, had collapsed in the heat from a stomach infection, and spent the night in Bourke Hospital.

  Bertram Junior had beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, and he spoke in short, puffy gasps as he staggered into the kitchen around dark, grabbed the handiest tea-towel and mopped his chest.

  ‘Good start for you, Cookie. You’re the only one making money.’

  NO SUCH PERSON AS A GOOD COOK

  Every day Bertram Junior looked at him in a sidelong fashion. He seemed to be wondering what his secret was. He had to have one. Everybody in the sheds had a reason for being there, relating to where they were from and where they were going, what hadn’t worked out for them in what they did before. With some people it was harder to tell what it was. Almost impossible.

  With this bloke it was good the way he got on with the job, and didn’t whinge or ask for extra help. He was good at what he did considering he was new to the work.

  ‘Ah, Cookie. You sure you ain’t done this work before?’

  ‘Never.’

  Bertram Junior reacted best to him when he let go, chewed the fat, bullshitted a little back at him. Not that he let go much. Not that he answered back all that much.

  ‘How old’s that eldest daughter of yours, Cookie? Sixteen? Drop me outside of the high school.’

  ‘On your head.’

  He seemed okay. But experience showed that anyone could become a problem at any time. Bertram Junior was ready for trouble from whatever direction it came. He didn’t think it would be Cookie this shed — it was more likely to be the wool classer, but it wouldn’t do to be too sure. You had to watch out for cliques. Cookie was friendly with Davo, and Davo was married to Barb, the classer, and Barb was on the warpath from day one, intending to do her job so perfectly there was bound to be trouble given the prevailing conditions, with workers who kept getting lost or breaking down, the shed starting a day late, and some who weren’t happy about having a lady classer at all, specially not a strict one like Barb.

  Bertram Junior had to think about all this while thinking about everything else.

  It was strange where Cookie put his bed after the first night of heat — down from his room, away from the huts, twenty or thirty metres out in the middle of a circle of wheel-tracks. He said that was where it started to get cool. He said he drank in the stars like a thirsty man drank water. When extra shearers arrived they had to drive around him. Everyone except Christian T — who was afraid of snakes and centipedes, and locked himself in his room with the windows shut — put their beds on the dirt at the bottom of the steps. But the cook went that much further. He stripped off out there under the stars, smeared himself with Rid, stood on his boots so he wouldn’t get burrs on his feet, and threw himself back on his sleeping bag cover.

  He imagined a conversation:

  ‘We haven’t had a cook like him before,’ says the owner, confiding to Bertram Junior. ‘I almost collected his bedroll on my bullbar.’

  ‘If you like I’ll have a word to him about it,’ says Bertram Junior.

  ‘He might go dark on you,’ warns the owner. ‘Do you know him that well?’

  Owners wanted everything smooth and easy. It was never what they got.

  Bertram Junior had seen all the cooks he needed to see in a lifetime: filthy, screeching, meticulous, argumentative, old, sick, pains in the arse, plotting, horny, hot for it, too smart by half, homos. He’d seen fellas running from their missuses, and women running from their men, and ones hiding from the law. The cook they’d had at their last shed had had a stroke, and kept reordering stores that were on the shelves already, and asking Bertram Junior to repeat what he’d just told her because she’d forgotten it while he said the next thing.

  ‘And I know this other shearers’ cook, she’s a skinny little thing, she’s always got a fag hanging out of her mouth and snot hanging from her nose. A rousie went over early for a smoko and caught her pissing in the scrap bucket. She said, “Oh, the toilet’s full”. So the next shed he walked into the kitchen and they had a flip-top bucket. He walked up and he pressed it, and said, “Maggie’s got a flush toilet”.’ And then there was the one whose roasts were too dry, and when they asked him to put oil on them he used motor oil. And the one who used to terrorise the fellas for sex, real ugly, she was. There were a few good ones in amongst the pack, excellent people, although they all had their faults — even the gourmet cooks and chef-style ones, who seemed to want to make it party food every night of the week, when good plain tucker was the requirement, especially for Kiwis. If cooks didn’t appear to have a fault, then that could reveal a fault for sure, and if you couldn’t put your finger on it you had to become inventive, not just for the interest of putting it up them, but in order to exercise authority and show who was the boss as you would with any member of the team.

  ‘So what’s your secret, Cookie? Pork someone else’s mi
ssus? Yours do a bunk on you? Tickle the till somewhere? You ain’t queer? Did you have a mental breakdown? I don’t think you ever done time. Were you no good at what they reckon you were — a writer?’

  Bertram Junior didn’t ask these questions out loud. But he stroked his chin, eyed him sideways, and he wondered the queries to life.

  Maybe Bertram Junior thought he was a connection of Alastair’s. A boss’s favourite. At first he trod carefully on that point, which meant that the time they talked on the phone they had talked about nothing except melons, trying to get each other to say what they really wanted, but being overpolite about it. Later when he said Alastair had given him the job because he had his own transport it made sense to Bertram Junior and anyone else who’d ever worked in the industry. ‘Hang on to the fella with the car.’ A contractor would give a job to a blind man if he had wheels.

  He was more like a grower than a worker — clean workworn clothes and a different accent, and he owned a farm, he said, that his wife worked. They had seven hundred merino wethers. ‘Yeah?’ Bertram Junior was interested. ‘Me and Willie-boy could knock them over in two days for you.’

  ‘We’ve already got a local bloke. He’s excellent,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ said Bertram Junior.