by Peter Carey
Doctor Battery’s songs did not bring me peace. Each time
I thought he had retired, he started again, only pausing during those periods of intense vibration that felt like an out of balance wheel but were caused by the tracks of someone else’s ‘bar tread’ tyres. After a final fierce eruption he leaned forward to rest his scarred forearms along the top of my seat.
He wished to know, were we going to Quamby Downs.
Quamby Downs was a pastoral lease thirty miles from Mardowarra. It was on my map, but off our route. I passed him the strip map which he seemed to read.
‘My country.’
We had left the bitumen and now the track bifurcated constantly. Here the map was useless and I found my way by trial and error, through an eruption of low rocky hills. I thought, we will slice our tyres to ribbons.
‘Maybe you go to Quamby Downs,’ he said.
We should never have had him in the car.
In the rear view mirror, I glimpsed that half closed eye, that brooding brow. I slammed the sump against the armour plate and the ‘Ardmona Pears’ rose and landed on the floor. Immediately Irene’s eyes were open, Doctor Battery was at her. We go to my place, Quamby Downs. And so on until she shouted, ‘Christ.’
In the rear view mirror I saw Battery’s eyes, unrelenting. ‘By and by,’ he said.
No bloody way, I thought.
2
Fifty-four vehicles were bogged to their axles in a creek bed twelve miles before Katherine, but it was weariness, not mud, that would leave my children orphaned, I thought, as I waited in the Katherine post office for my trunkline call to Bacchus Marsh. I had just learned that a driver (E. Roberts) and the navigator (R. Gibson) in a Morris Minor (New South Wales) had been injured when their car crashed into a tree. Gibson was found unconscious by a Ford crew, who took him to Wave Hill station, where he was treated by Sister Kettle, of the Northern Territory Medical Service. Roberts received broken ribs. Might have been me (I. Bobs). Nearly was. In my case, I had been jolted awake by a stalling motor and found myself behind the wheel in the middle of a blacks’ camp, dogs everywhere and dark faces squinting into the headlights from all directions. Irene, you are a danger to yourself and others.
‘Go ahead Bacchus Marsh,’ the operator said.
‘Ronnie?’ I asked, and I heard his voice, the huge hurt choking. ‘What happened lovey?’
His response was like water in a twisted garden hose. ‘Give back.’
Then Edith snatched the receiver. She said the cousins had stolen something from him. It might be his best marble.
‘It was the TOMBOWLER,’ he cried, first from a distance, then weeping loudly in my ear. ‘They bust it with a bloody hammer.’
‘Don’t swear darling.’
‘Mum, they bust it on purpose.’
‘What does Aunt Beverly say?’
‘She’s seeing Uncle Kevin.’
‘Who is Uncle Kevin?’
‘An uncle. How would he know?’ said Edith, not sounding like herself. ‘Mum, you’ve got to come home. Please come home. You’ve got to be nice to Daddy. Poor Daddy. He was crying.’
‘Oh darling, what did he tell you?’
‘I’m not an idiot, Mum. You know what happened. Grandpa died.’
‘Yes, it’s very sad.’
‘You don’t like Grandpa.’
I thought, I will kill that little bugger Titch. ‘Darling, we’ll be home soon. It’s only eight more days.’
She did not hang up on me. She never would. ‘Eight days,’ she cried, and something crashed and then I lost the connection, and my bladder was already bursting and I kept the Peugeot crew waiting while the operator tried to reconnect but I think I offended her when – all that water, a gallon every day – after all her efforts, I had to go. When I returned, the Peugeot boys had taken over and I was told our petrol tank was full again (although it wasn’t, as we would later know).
There was a good gravel road out of Katherine and Willie drove and I should have slept but I could not stop thinking about what Titch had told the kids and we were then two hundred miles from Broome and the so-called Doctor Battery was attacking the emergency cans of Edgell’s product with our can opener. I was hungry too but would not tolerate a sticky steering wheel. Then Bachhuber ran over a length of ⅜" wire rope. It was then I learned that Doctor Battery was a motor mechanic at Quamby Downs. I lay down on the hot ground and fell asleep while the men untangled the rope from the back axle and springs.
I woke to the news that the brakes and springs were undamaged. I took off at speed, careless of the likelihood that I would crash and die and my children would hate me for my selfishness and would grow up believing I had abandoned their father in his hour of grief.
We passed the turn-off to Quamby Downs. No-one asked to leave the car. Soon after that I nodded off, just for a second, and woke with a fright. I ordered Bachhuber behind the wheel.
When I woke next time, Doctor Battery was driving. I was too weary for surprise.
Next time: the motor silent, crows cawing. I was told we had run out of petrol but that Doctor Battery had just begged a gallon from a passing car.
Bachhuber was wide awake, calculating that we would be at the airport early for the plane. I thought, I have to drive, but I woke still in the navigator’s seat. This time we were stopped in the scraggly outskirts of Broome.
Doctor Battery had finished off the Edgell pack and opened the box of Ardmona canned pears. There he discovered the skull of a poor dead baby boy. Who knew this was personal to him? But I had broken laws. I had been wrong way. I was crazy kartiya. The car was stopped at his demand. Now he stepped outside. I slipped behind the wheel and saw him fleeing evil spirits in my rear view, carrying his elastic sided boots, walking through the dust back the way we came.
My problem was not evil spirits. I almost missed the airstrip, not surprising given that the biggest sign said TOILETS. Behind this was a Nissen hut and a strip of bitumen where a solitary creature (with his gut bulging in his too tight shorts) marched up and down. God knows how he got there before us, but it was Dunstan.
‘Back in a mo,’ said Willie and headed for the toilet sign. Dunstan chased him inside, with what intent I did not care. I would fix Dunstan in more ways than he could imagine. For the moment it was the car that took priority. I would not be criticised for its filthy state and as there was a tap and garden hose outside the toilet wall, I got to work. There is a definite satisfaction to be got from blasting off the clogged-up dust and dirt, the filthy skin of dead creatures, moths, wasps, bees, seeing the crapulous waste pouring out from beneath the mudguards. Was Broome short of water? Perhaps it was, but nothing could have made me leave the vehicle unwashed except, of course, an aircraft engine, and the sight of a galvanised iron box, labouring through the onshore breeze. Dunstan bumped his way past me, carrying his self-important bum out onto the edge of the strip and he was still standing there, waiting like a faithful dog, as the aircraft came in over a barbed wire fence, hovered in the air, and then dropped onto the bitumen so hard its undercarriage bent. It was about as lovely as a dunny colliding with the earth.
Taxiing, the single radial engine aimed straight at us, forcing us to retreat towards the shed. The door opened before the propeller stopped. There were as yet no steps or ladder and the passenger was not inclined to wait. Suitcase in his hand, he jumped, stumbled, and – intending to run – limped violently towards us.
It was Titch.
I had not known what I would feel to see him. I had forgotten he was beautiful, with a grace that could not be destroyed by pain or injury. As he came towards me I thought, oh Titch, dear Titchy. I was tired and dirty and I stank, but I had no doubt we would now, in spite of everything, be gentle with each other. And then he ran straight past me, and Dunstan too, and flew at Willie Bachhuber who was emerging from the Nissen hut, with nothing on his mind but how to dry his hands.
Titch flies at him, through the air it seems. Soon they are rolling on the ground t
ogether. Titch is trying to punch Willie’s head and Willie has caught him by the wrists. Dunstan intervenes, then leaps back, sucking on his hand. It is left to the filthy sweat-stink woman to hose them down like dogs.
Do not say thank you for being saved from your own childishness. No, of course not.
Bachhuber was sodden with his white shirt revealing physical details that were normally hidden. Then, addressing me as if I were an umpire he held out his arms, like a boy protesting blatant injustice. It was in this state of holy injury he disappeared inside the Nissen hut. I waited. A taxi, a bright green FJ Holden, left an orange plume of dust across the dreary half used paddocks. As it turned onto the highway it did not occur to me that my one true friend, the navigator, might be inside and that I would now be left alone, with no support, to confront my marriage to Titch Bobs.
3
I had liked Titch Bobs but I was not going to be locked in a car with a pugnacious little ferret who blamed me for doing what I had not done. The taxi driver left me in a hot street of one-and two-storey timber shanties, all hiding their real business in the deep brims of their verandahs. Broome was a foreign land to me. The pavement was red earth, the buildings silver, worn down by a century of salt and sand. Shops and warehouses and general stores perched anxiously on three-foot pylons, awaiting the king tides, tied down against cyclonic winds. This was where I left the Redex map.
The taxi disappeared around a distant corner and I heard a blasting truck horn – no, it was a peacock, strutting down the street, screeching until, before the Roebuck Bay Hotel, it displayed its feathers in a wild priapic shudder.
This hotel – long and low with a deep verandah, the sort of romantic outback pub you might see in a Drysdale canvas – recalled that unpleasantness in the Larapinta bar. I felt the eyes of the hidden drinkers heavy on me. No, I thought, you will not ask to see my dog licence. I became an actor with urgent business in a lane, and I fled into Sheba Alley without knowing what it was. I could not read the Asiatic signs or those particular mixed race faces which withdrew as I approached.
CHENG LOONG DEP BOARDING HOUSE. PAY FIRST.
Had he not been settled in his Rangoon rocker, the proprietor might have retreated from me too, but he was a desiccated old man and his chair was slung very low, and he remained where gravity demanded.
I pointed at his sign.
‘Roebuck better,’ he said.
That surprised me, but I could not trust his word.
‘Better you go there,’ said Mr Cheng Loong Dep.
But I would not be put off, not even by the smell of drying prawns. I climbed the verandah steps to Mr Cheng whose face had more creases than a walnut shell.
‘What your work?’ His eyes were small and dark and very lively.
‘No work. I want a room.’
‘OK, plenty room.’
He was a little man with strange appendages, fleshy ears as large as abalone.
‘What work?’ he asked as I followed his huge feet. ‘Meatworks?’
‘No.’
‘No pearling,’ he said. ‘Pearling all gone to hell.’
By now we had entered the polished shadow of a hallway and I understood him to be saying that his normal customers had been pearl divers of all nationalities, deckhands and cooks. ‘Prastic brutton,’ he said. The plastic button had killed the pearl shell business. He now had vacant rooms, no worries.
‘You pay now,’ he said and his hands were like his ears and feet and I paid him plenty, but then he wanted another two bob to rent a mosquito net and I would not be taken advantage of.
‘No net,’ I said.
‘OK. No knocking in the night.’
I thought he meant no nookey. I agreed.
He gave me a heavy iron key and allowed me to discover that my ‘clean room’ reeked of cigarettes and grog. From the open window I could see the vertiginous jetty and inhale not only drying prawns but sweet wood smoke and ginger. My God, I thought, what have I done to myself this time?
There was no furniture except a single cot and there I lay, reading my savings bank passbook, wondering what would happen to me next, thinking of lovely Irene Bobbsey on the road south towards Port Hedland. The Lord knows what she would say to her husband when they were all alone behind their headlights.
I slept for hours. So then it was night and I could see yellow hurricane lamps on decks and cabin tops, the sand dunes, blue and black as night.
I drifted back to sleep and woke to confront the great mess I was making of my life. I would soon be twenty-seven and I had fallen off the edge again. I was unmoored, with nothing to cling to, to say ‘this is who I am’ with this job, this business, this belief, this wife, child, future. I was not one thing or the other. I had no driving passion, for God, for instance. When I imagined my life with Adelina I had seen a suburban house and a life somehow spent with books. The library, in this way, had been perfect and in the time I worked with Sebastian I had imagined that this would be it, and he and I, together, would establish a sensible system of classification – why not us? No-one in England had done it properly – and we would finally build, with our own hands if need be, a map room where our cartographic holdings would not fit the accommodation offered to the dominant culture of the book. I heard the soft clatter of mah-jongg tiles and the music from a gramophone and a concertina and beery singing. This is what I see when I hear ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. I was so lonely I could die.
I had once been a quiz show king. I had been the master of a book-filled house. Now that was lost to me. I tossed and turned wondering how I could retrieve my poor treasures from Bacchus Marsh – my grandmother’s atlas, a painful letter from Adelina – before the Bobbseys both returned.
Someone was burning joss sticks. The mosquitoes bit right through the sheet. My mind would not leave the list of my disasters. There was one thing I would not think about.
By midnight I was prepared to pay anything for a mosquito net, and I knocked up old Cheng. But he would not open.
‘You no nookey,’ he said. ‘I sleep.’
I returned to the mosquitoes mano a mano. They were fat with blood. I murdered them. I would fly to Perth first thing tomorrow. Why would I stay here where they would argue with me about who I really was? Who gave a damn about expense or the pain it took to rip through space? A thousand miles down the coast to Perth. Then slice like a razor across the bottom of the continent, across the Nullarbor. Would it take a day or two days? In any case I would arrive back in green and normal Bacchus Marsh where I would be understood to be a white man once again.
I wrote churning, looping letters in my sleep.
Next morning Mr Cheng pronounced there was no airline office in Broome. I fancied he enjoyed himself, to see my astonishment. But no, he said, of course I could buy my tickets from his friend the German pearl dealer.
He led me to the pearl dealers where the proprietors had not yet arrived. Instead I met the clerk, a young Englishman, a boy in fact, whose every word made perfect sense to me. How I cherished his clarity. When he said it was within his power to sell me as many tickets as I should require, I reached to shake his hand. He was Toby. He was tall and blue eyed with a long top lip and curly smile. How sweet and familial he seemed. He had a veritable bible of airfares to study and he went through them with a ruler and wrote numbers on an envelope which (although he was shortly to go up to Oxford University) involved a great deal of crossing out and starting once again.
Poor handsome chap, I thought, he is a dunce.
I did the numbers in my head and Toby was relieved to hear the total was too much. He crumpled up his envelope and dropped it in the bin.
‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘it’s highway robbery. I don’t know how anybody pays.’ He suggested I simply cross the road to the Shell petrol station where I would find plenty of chaps filling their tanks for the trip south. ‘Anybody will be pleased to take a white man,’ he said. (Ah, I thought.) ‘Someone to talk to. That’s how I got across the Nullarbor myself.’
‘Good luck,’ he said. I liked him. I did not know him. I never would. Toby was a flipper in an existential pinball machine, a god who sent me pinging towards my fate. It will be OK, I thought.
I walked across Carnarvon Street to the Shell petrol station where I did not have a happy start. That is, I presented myself to men pumping petrol, to men filling radiators, to the open windows of men about to leave. I made my request. I found myself inspected and rejected. Granted, I had not shaved. Granted, my eyes were red, but it is a hard thing for a shy man to offer himself up for this type of judgement. I felt myself a relation of that Redex Ford which a tow truck had clearly dragged in overnight. There it lay against the wall, windows broken, blood smeared grill attesting to a kangaroo or bullock in the night.
I was approached by an older type of gent, a tall khaki chap with a big nose and large red lips.
‘I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘I can take you as far as the Roebuck Roadhouse. It ’s a start.’ Later he claimed it was my business to remind him. It was not his job to stop, to remember what he said.
