The Shiralee

by D'Arcy Niland

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Poor little thing – she doesn’t look well at all, does she? So frail, so skinny’

  ‘You should have seen her before I brought her out in the bush,’ Macauley found himself saying in bridling defence. ‘Had a cough even. A bad cough. That’s gone now.’ Then he wondered why he had bothered to speak at all.

  ‘I would suspect her of malnutrition, poor little dear. Do you keep the milk up to her?’

  Macauley looked into the bravely inquiring eyes.

  ‘She’s got her own Jersey,’ he said, not without some truth.

  ‘Oh, that’s splendid. Milk is so nourishing. So much the child’s food. And a little cod-liver oil emulsion with it, too, is a good thing. An excellent body-builder. Calcium and malt, too, for good teeth and strong bones. A child must get off to a good start in life. Now we have some very fine patent — ’

  ‘Never mind,’ Macauley interrupted. ‘Just wrap that up.’

  The chemist bent to his task. He hesitated. He looked up with his head cocked to one side. ‘I could give you something very much better than this, you know. To be candid, sir, I would put it right at the bottom of the list. It has practically no medicinal value. Its reputation is a leftover from the old horse-and-buggy days when — ’

  ‘Listen,’ Macauley said, a little heatedly. ‘I’ve seen that stuff do things for a man that no chemist or doctor could do. All they could do was take his money and string him a line of heifer dust as long as your arm. You’re talking to the wrong man. Wrap it up.’

  The chemist acquiesced agreeably but looked a little hurt. He recovered his equanimity when Macauley asked for a packet of aspirin. As he handed over the change he exhorted considerately, ‘She has a very nasty cold, and you must watch it. You must keep her in bed, keep her warm. You must see that she doesn’t get a chill. You must ply her with lemon drinks and liquid nourishment. Don’t forget now. Goodbye. Goodbye, little girl.’

  ‘Hooroo,’ Macauley said. ‘Keep up the milk.’

  He bought chops, potatoes, beans and lemons and they went back to Kelly’s house. He gave Buster a few drops of eucalyptus in a spoonful of sugar, and had to carry out the pretence of giving Gooby the same. He made up a bed on the floor, gave her an aspirin and a warm lemon drink, and tucked her in. The quicker he lightened the burden the better. He pulled out a dog-eared pad and envelopes and while he drank a mug of tea wrote a note to the Worker office. He asked for the letter in their possession to be readdressed to him care of the post office, Collarenebri. He addressed the envelope in pencil, sealed it and put it in his coat pocket on the wall.

  Then he set about getting tea ready – beans, potatoes and chops. He found flour and baking powder, but no sultanas, and made a plain brownie. It rose in a hump at one end, typical of the stove. He laid newspapers on the table and set it for two. He expected Kelly home between five-thirty and six.

  He had the food in the oven, keeping it hot, when six o’clock came and went. At six-thirty he went to the door and looked out. It was dark and a light rain was falling. A wind was rising. There was no wavering bulb of light on the road. He shut the door. At seven he put a feed on his plate and started to eat. He ate slowly and thoughtfully, listening for sounds, wondering what had happened to his mate, and whether he oughtn’t to go down the town looking for him. He finished his tea and rolled a cigarette. He washed his dishes and pannikin. He made a fresh cigarette. He sat smoking. It was eight o’clock.

  The wind strengthened, beating the rain against the windows, soughing in the trees. At fifteen minutes past eight he heard a sound like the jangle of a falling bicycle. He looked towards the door expectantly, feeling an unaccustomed tension. Five minutes went by and nothing happened. Then he heard the sound of a man’s voice, half strangled.

  He strode to the door and pulled it open. A triangle of light hit the ground. The rain hung in it like a misty curtain. Macauley peered into the wet outer darkness. He saw nothing. He stepped out onto the edge of the verandah. He heard the voice before he saw the man. The voice was calling, ‘Ruby.’ And after a pause, ‘Rube, where are you?’

  The man came round the side of the house, and it was Beauty Kelly. He kept on going. His walk was half between a lope and a shamble. He was bent forward, his shoulders drooping if such shoulders could ever droop. He was twining his hands in front of him. He kept calling the woman’s name. Macauley saw him disappear like a phantom into the darkness and like a phantom come back from another point in the circle, the shirtfront a smear of white, the face paler and the bare head a wet glistening darkness.

  ‘Hey!’ Macauley shouted.

  Kelly stopped for a moment, then quickened his gait, walking directly towards Macauley. He had a wild appearance. His eyes were staring, fixed like marbles. Rain ran down his face. His mouth was half open. He was panting. He gazed at Macauley like a stranger.

  ‘What’s the matter, old-timer?’ Macauley said softly.

  ‘Where’s Ruby?’ Kelly cried harshly.

  Macauley took his arm and Kelly submitted with a stunned docility. But at the door he wrenched himself free and flung himself inside, lurching down the hall gasping and croaking the woman’s name in a way that gave Macauley the jitters to hear it.

  He stumbled back, one hand raised, dragging along the wall. His head wobbled. His jaw hung slackly. His face was a distorted fury of dejection and incomprehension. The bottle swinging in his coat pocket made the pocket look like a pannier. He’d had so many drinks, Macauley thought, if he bent over he’d tip one out. He must have been in the pub for hours; God alone knew how long. Macauley braced himself.

  He stood back as Kelly swaggered towards the table, pulling out the bottle of gin. He tore the cork from it with his teeth, and put the bottle to his lips. He saw Macauley looking at him. He slammed the bottle down on the table, and in the same movement reached out and grabbed Macauley’s shirt and dragged himself up close.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Where’d you come from?’

  Macauley put his left hand out against Kelly’s neck, applying no pressure, just leaving it there. ‘I’m your mate.’

  Kelly shook him, his face twisting berserkly. A hard light came into Macauley’s eyes. ‘Beauty, it’s me, Mac.’

  He edged himself in, thrusting his face close to Kelly’s, and he repeated the words, but realised the futility of doing so. They made no impact. They fell against a shut brain and died before they could penetrate it. There was no recognition in Kelly’s face. His eyes were flaring, unfocused, unseeing.

  ‘Where is she?’

  He grabbed Macauley by the throat, shrieking the invective of a madman, and tried to force him back against the wall. Above the unnerving violence Macauley heard the terrifying screams of Buster. He twisted round, walked backwards a few steps, and joining his hands brought up the arms like a hoop of iron breaking the grip on his throat.

  Kelly lunged forward, throwing a vicious straight left. Macauley easily evaded it, and as the big man swung into him he clipped him hard on the chin and caught him under the armpits and lowered him to the floor. Buster’s thin, hoarse, reedy wailing came up loud in the sudden uncanny silence. Macauley’s chest was rising and falling as though he had just run a long way. He looked over at her propped up on one elbow in the corner.

  ‘Quit it,’ he said.

  ‘Ol’ bugger man,’ he heard her snuffle to herself. ‘Killing my father.’

  She got up and looked down at the prostrate figure; there was a mingled expression of curiosity and pleasure on her face. She looked up at Macauley. ‘Will he go to the boneyard now?’

  ‘Get back to bed,’ Macauley said. ‘You shouldn’t be out of it. Go on, do what I tell you, and cover yourself up.’

  ‘All right.’

  Macauley dragged Kelly to the bed, pulled off his shoes and coat, and rubbed his head with a towel. He covered him up. He walked about the room for ten minutes, letting the tension ease down in him. The warrigal wind shouldered the door in,
swooped under the papers on the table, and upset the gin bottle. The fluid ran out with a sound of a big dog lapping against his thirst. Macauley was slow in setting it upright again. He shut the door first. He blew out the light, kicked off his boots and got under the blanket.

  He lay on his back, hands cradling his head. He wasn’t tired. He could feel Buster’s warm backside against his hip. She was passing off again into a snuffling sleep.

  In a little while he heard Kelly stir, saw the figure twist over and lie still again.

  Macauley had only darkness to look into. He had only the wind and the rain to listen to. He had the future to think about and the past to remember. And he remembered the past.

  In the city, before he went to the rivers, before Lily Harper, before sweet Lily – right back to the beginning of memory.

  The city, it had a hold of him from the time he was born. It pounced on him in darkness, gripping his feet. It smacked his arse and said, Wake up. Look around. See what you’ve got for a present. It said to him at the age of five, Run away with me. Get going. And he ran away, and they didn’t find him for hours. He sat on a policeman’s knee, and the city spun past and around him like a slow hurdy-gurdy. His mother flung him against the wall with her hand to his throat and fumed viciously at him. His father beat him and he bawled to himself up in the smelly bed, and in the darkness he pitied his hunger and loneliness and the city winked at him in a medley of colours through the dirty window.

  It pushed him round, the city, and brought him up. It fed him in cheap restaurants. It rushed him down the grimy stairs of the residential and belted his heart in his ribs as he rushed for the tram stop. It jogged him into work. It put him at a machine in a factory full of windows, petty spites and intrigues. It had a use for him.

  Get tough, it told him. I’m doing this for my own good. I’ll make you and you’ll make me. Millions work for me. They set me up and I have a name. You start a crusade and I cop the credit. Develop an art, a science, and the fame is mine. The big wheels and the little wheels, they work for me.

  ‘Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom,’ Kelly bawled.

  But he saw it for what it was worth and he had the answer. He saw the world ended as the world must end for each man. He saw the city slacken its hold of him at last. It threw him aside, discarded him as useless to its welfare and a drain on its economics. And he knew, he saw he had been working for a dictator. But he had the answer.

  No, he said, I won’t truckle to you. Upya for the rent. I’m as tough as the next one and I’ll go out where the world is wide. There the world has something to give me. And I don’t need a penny for the slot and a key for the door. I can get a bed on the earth. I can get fire from the forests. I can get a drink from the rivers and a feed out of a hat. I can get freedom. I won’t be stood over by you or anyone else because nobody stands over me. And you can shove that up your chuff and take another swipe: I’ll put you on your back before you’ll put me, big and all as you bloody well are.

  ‘Who’ll take a glove now? Who’ll take a glove?’

  And yet after a spell he went back to the city and it was just as though the city had it in for him; it hit him like a novelty, licked him all over with smarm and gave him a good time. He dropped his guard, and he didn’t see the punch coming until it was too late. It caught him with its treachery. It blinded him. It left him with half of his brain working. He saw her at Callahan’s party, the same Tubby Callahan they put away in the black sod of the plains at Millie: he saw her and met her there.

  ‘You’ll have a go, will you, friend? What, you’ll take the lad in the green trunks? You’ll take Macauley. Haha, you must be the town joker.’

  And he saw her all the time when he was away from her and he met her again and again. All about him was persuasion. The persuasion of wanting to give her love and pleasure and do all that was right for her. The persuasion of her talk and the talk of her parents: the good a man could do for himself, the future he could carve out for himself in a big city full of opportunities.

  ‘Why, this boy’s only a middle. By the look of you you’re sixteen stone if you’re a day. You want it easy, don’t you son! I’ll give you Kelly here. How’ll that do you?’

  And it made the years before him seem like an abyss, like the waste of a stony desert. What had he been doing? Where had he been running? Nowhere but round in a treadmill, squandering those years that were gone for ever; tipping out those precious years like water. It put a panic in him, and he rushed desperately after jobs and he found one and seized it with joy and relief as though it were a lifesaver.

  ‘Listen, junket-brain, it’s either Kelly or nothing. Stop wasting my time.’

  A sawyer in a timberyard. Good money. Good conditions. All of this, all in a little time, all in a month – his brain still groggy from the punch. Only Callahan said it wouldn’t work out. Only Callahan told him to call it off before it was too late. And he said to Callahan it was like his hide, and he told him to go to hell and mind his own business and keep his insulting tongue where it belonged, inside his big gob. Fancy saying that to Callahan. Fancy not taking any notice and seeing the light when Callahan talked. A man like Callahan.

  ‘So you’ll take Kelly, will you? You’ve got the pricker properly, eh? You’ll knock him into next week, willya? All right, we’ll see about that.’

  And he woke up in the morning, in the filtering dawn, and she was beside him; she was well branded and there was no question of whom she belonged to; but he still didn’t come to his senses. He didn’t come to his senses till three weeks later; the effects of the blow wore off and left him alone and discontented. He wanted the woman, but he didn’t want the life. He paced up and down the captivity of the job. The city roared in his ears with a terrible pandemonious laughter. He couldn’t get away from its grimy fingers jabbing him in the chest. He walked over its great belly, rolling and rumbling with noise, and the jar went through him and stayed in him like quivering chords. It blew its smoke and grit and soot in his eyes with a nonchalant contempt.

  ‘You hear that, friends. The local boy here says he’ll massacre my boy. See it on the inside. Get your tickets on the right.’

  He walked a hill to his room, but it was a wooden hill. The smell of the city was in his nostrils, and in his mouth. He opened the door and the flavour changed. He shut the door, and shut it in and shut it out. It was all round him. He lay on the bed, and the sky was a stride away pressing down, pressing the polluted air into his lungs, and it was a wooden sky that never knew a star. He looked to the compass points, and he saw no trees and no horizons. He saw dank walls of stone. On the wooden earth nothing grew, no flowers, not a blade of grass.

  Some men can live in a box; some men are like a wheel.

  And he knew which one he was. But it wasn’t a matter of knowing that he couldn’t stand it any more. It was a matter of stripping off and putting up his fists and fighting back. He gave in to nothing and nobody. He might get beaten in the end, but he wouldn’t give in. So he split his life two ways – one for her and him and one for him, and he was happy enough. Now there was none for her and him. Only the one for him.

  ‘Roll up! Roll up! Boom-boom-boom-boom! Step inside and see the boys in action. The best money’s worth on the showground today.’

  Macauley sat up, found the makings and rolled a cigarette. In the flare of the match he peered across at Kelly, tossing and turning, flinging out his arms, babbling away in his drunken nightmare. The windows rattled. Rain drummed on the iron roof. The wind hoyed in the chimney. He lay back again, the cigarette end glowing and dying and glowing in the intervals of thought.

  He remembered the night, the last big laugh of the city, the sign of the big thumb erect, and the sickness was in his guts. He usually let her know when he was coming home. But he didn’t this time. It was just an accident of circumstances, not an oversight, not a deliberate omission. Where was the reason for that? It wasn’t an intended surprise but it would be accepted as that.

  There was
no light under the door. He turned the knob. He pulled the switch and walked into the bedroom and switched on the light there. All he remembered was his wife jerking up and blinking in a stupor of startled sleep, her hair mussy, her breasts hanging out of the nightgown. And the man beside her lifting a face of sudden fright and flinging the bedclothes back and tumbling out of the bed all in the one action and sitting there staring.

  In a cot in the corner the child lay asleep.

  The woman covered herself. Her face was white. Her lips moved; she gulped and swallowed. But she couldn’t say anything. Then the fright went out of her face, and the guilty confusion, and she looked at him with defiance and something of the waiting viciousness of the taipan. And he looked at the man, and the man was calm and inquiring with a smirk of bravado on his surly face.

  He could remember the man shrugging and then speaking; telling him, well, now he knew how it was what was he going to do about it – the cheeky koala-headed bastard.

  And the slut, in a savage mood now, ready to start in on the roasting; telling him it was no use backing and filling; they were finished; it was all over between them.

  But he didn’t go out on the tail of that. There was no lock to the door, so he jammed a tilted chair under the knob. He pulled down the kitchen window. He took off his coat. He looked at them. The woman held a hand to her face in a gesture of alarm. Her eyes were wide with fear. The man stood with the slinking look of a cur dog.

  Macauley told him he was going to take him apart.

  The man put his hands out and his head down and rushed. He stopped in his tracks and arched back with a groan of agony as though his stomach had struck a ramrod. He was fat and jelly. He bullocked his way in, head down. He flung his arms like a swimmer. Then he fell back against the wall. He put out his hands, placating, squealing harshly. He wanted to be left alone. He had enough. There was no need for two sane men to go on like savages. Couldn’t they talk it over like civilised people?

  Fists thudded into ribs.