‘Of course they are, and rednecks too.’
‘Australia is our place now! You can’t make us give it back!’
And he noted with satisfaction that she was finally struck silent. But he felt so dizzy and hot, and Ruth was studying him now with distaste.
‘Jesus,’ she breathed, ‘just listen to what my father’s got you saying. You’re all caught up in this idea that the station will be yours one day. And then he tells you, look out, the evil Aborigines are coming to steal it away, so you better start hating them.’
But William was ready for that. ‘He doesn’t hate them.’
‘No, of course not. I’m sure he respects their culture. That’s the way he likes to put it, isn’t it?’
‘He doesn’t even care about them. He knows they can’t claim this property anyway.’
For a moment Ruth seemed on the verge of disputing this. Then she sank back bitterly.‘No, they probably can’t. But Christ, it would serve him right if they could.’
Relief ran through William. He felt that he’d won something. And he had made it clear that he was siding with his uncle, not with her. ‘This is the wrong sort of land,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the stations out west. It’s perpetual.’
Her eyebrows lifted. ‘Perpetual?’ And to William’s alarm she sat forward again. ‘You mean a perpetual lease? Is that what your uncle said?’
William blinked. He could barely remember.‘It’s safe,that’s all…’
‘A lease,’ she wondered. ‘I always thought it was freehold.’
William didn’t understand. Had he said something wrong?
But his cousin had forgotten him. She was looking up at the House. ‘Well, well. That changes a few things, doesn’t it?’ And suddenly she was standing. ‘Thanks for the tour, Will. But you should get out of this sun. You look a little flushed.’
And with that — as if they had been discussing nothing of importance — she hurried up the steps and disappeared into the darkness of the House.
William slumped against the fountain, his thoughts a wretched quagmire. Everything he’d said had been wrong. He only knew that he’d needed to defend himself. But some of the words that came out of his mouth had sounded horrible, and the way she had looked at him…
His ear throbbed and the sun hurt his eyes. He lifted his gaze and stared out over the plains. Everywhere he looked there was haze and smoke, vague shifting shapes that could have been anything. Towns that became farms that became empty grassland set on fire. Nothing was solid, not the land, and even less so its history. He had been told so many stories — but which ones was he to believe? He had seen none of these events with his own eyes, walked none of the world with his own feet.
He retreated to the safety of the House. Just inside the doors he found his mother. She was standing at the bottom of the central staircase, staring up. William could hear raised voices from somewhere above, distant and unintelligible.
‘They’re fighting up there,’ she told him, hushed. ‘Ruth and your uncle.’
Her eyes were still red and swollen from the morning’s tears, but now her face was lit with hopeful expectation, and William could not stand to be near her. He found his way to his bedroom and cast himself upon the bed. He shut his eyes and saw swirling patterns, felt nausea roiling in his stomach. The foul smell was with him again, and he knew that something was profoundly wrong.
He woke much later in the afternoon. Someone was entering his room.
‘William?’
He dug his face deeper into the pillow. It was his cousin again.
Her voice sounded hoarse. ‘You uncle has asked me to leave.’
He opened his eyes, but did not roll over to face her.
‘I’ve just come to say goodbye.’
But she didn’t go. Instead, he felt her sit down on the edge of the bed.
‘Is it just me,’ she asked, after a time, ‘or is something dead in here?’
William said nothing, his eyes wide.
‘What is that smell?’ she repeated.
‘You can smell something?’ William asked.
‘I’m not sure … I thought there was something … or is it just this thing?’
William rolled over. His cousin was holding his captain’s hat, and sniffing it curiously.
‘Is it? No…’
She sniffed the air again, and then her shoulders sagged. William studied her in amazement. She looked so old. And had she been crying?
She handed the cap to him.‘Why do you wear this anyway?’
‘I like it,’ said William.
But he examined the hat closely. Had this been the source all along? And indeed, the material was pungent with age … but it wasn’t the rotten smell. That was something much stronger, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
‘Where on earth did you get it?’ his cousin asked, watching him.
‘I found it,’ William said. ‘I thought it was from the army. But Uncle John said it’s only an old police hat.’
‘It’s old all right.’
‘He said it was his father’s.’
That caught her attention. She peered at the cap again. ‘I didn’t know my grandfather was ever a policeman.’ She touched the brim. ‘So that’s a police badge?’
‘I guess so.’
‘QMP,’ she read. ‘Queensland something Police? Queensland Mounted Police?’ She shook her head and pushed back her grey hair. Her eyes were dry now. ‘Maybe I’ll ask my father about it, next time I see him.’
‘You said you were leaving.’
‘For now. But he’s not rid of me yet. Once I’ve checked into some things, I’ll be back.’
And William couldn’t decide any more if that was good or bad. He had been so angry at her that morning … but she had smelled the rotten thing, when no one else had.
She smiled at him.‘I’m sorry if I upset you before. I know it can’t be any fun, caught between two old people like me and my father.’
And her concern only confused William more.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she asked. ‘You really don’t look very well.’
‘I felt dizzy before.’
She slapped her forehead. ‘Oh … of course, I’m sorry, your glandular fever, I forgot all about it. You’re sick and I’ve had you tramping all over the hills.’
There was nothing he could say to that.
‘Well, you just rest. I’ll be off.’ She stood up, looked down at him one last time. ‘Listen, Will. Whatever happens, my father won’t give you this place for free. He’ll make you pay a price. So be careful of what he tells you to do.’
And she was gone.
There it was — another attack, just when William was changing his mind about her. And yet he knew that the old man really was strange sometimes, and frightening. But what was he supposed to do? He could never turn against his uncle. The old man needed him.
He rose finally, and went out to the front porch, standing alone on the steps. The afternoon was fading into a lurid orange haze. His cousin’s car was gone, and only the dead world of the drought remained. He imagined Ruth rolling away towards Powell, conditioned air wafting from the dashboard, cool and delicious. And suddenly he wanted to be anywhere but where he was, to be escaping to somewhere green and wet and far away. A place where there were people, and schools, and back yards with grass to play on, and other children … not these deserted hills all around, and the loneliness of the House at his back.
A movement caught his eye as he turned towards the front door. Mrs Griffith hovered there, peering out from the interior darkness. The housekeeper grinned her toothless, mirthless smile at him, victorious. Then she slipped away.
Chapter Thirty-six
FOR WILLIAM, RUTH’S DEPARTURE MARKED A POINT WHERE somehow the real world began to slip away, and where his illness began to consume him. It was the same malaise that had overwhelmed him at the rally — the dizziness, the ache in his ear, the sense of creeping dislocation — only this time there was no remissi
on. Over the next four days it grew steadily worse, until a furnace seemed to burn in his head, and his surroundings shrank away, pale and detached. And with every breath he took, the evil smell that clung to him became more sweet, and more sickening.
Yet no one took any notice of him. The House had more pressing concerns, for on the night that his daughter left, John McIvor suffered a second heart attack. An ambulance raced out from Powell, but as gravely ill as he was, the old man refused to go to hospital. Dr Moffat was called in to attend him daily, and William’s mother, miraculously revived by the disaster, returned to her nursing duty upstairs. In all the tumult, William’s condition was dismissed as nothing worse than a late bout of flu. He spent the days alone, in bed or curled up on the couch, watching television. Sometimes his mother would bring him meals,but she never stayed long enough to see that he threw away most of the food.
Her firm belief was that Ruth had caused the second heart attack. ‘This could be the end of him. His own daughter!’
But William, watching from far inside himself, saw that the outrage was only a pretence. Instead, his mother was happy — Ruth was gone and could do no more harm. He didn’t have the energy to tell her that, in fact, his cousin had already done all the damage necessary. She had tainted the prize, and ruined every certainty. Even the House didn’t seem the same to William. Once, he had been able to see through the thin walls to discover the grand building of long ago. But now, with his sickly thoughts full of Ruth and her stories, he felt that he was being suffocated by decay. He saw on television that the school year was over, that in another world entirely children were heading off with their families for Christmas holidays. But not William. He was trapped here.
They all were. The House still drifted in a zone of murderous calm. At times William would sit hunched in a chair on the front porch, his arms wrapped about himself. There was nothing to see but glare and haze. The smoke had grown thicker every day, an immense pall that was blotting out the world. There was not a breath of wind to disturb it, and yet to William’s eyes it moved and revolved — with infinitesimal slowness, but with a sinister purpose all the same. Gathering, and thickening, and bearing down upon the plains, the pressure of it mounting and mounting until William, sitting rigidly, had to fight not to scream. But the nights were the worst, when the darkness closed in, and the light in his bedroom appeared to burn too dimly, as if through a fog. He couldn’t sleep, but nor was he quite awake, and the House was unquiet around him, full of subtle creaks and groans, as if sharing the agonies of its master.
On the fifth night William slept finally, from sheer exhaustion, but he dreamt of a voice calling his name, louder and louder, until he awoke with a violent trembling. Bewildered, he realised he was not in his bed. Looming shadows surrounded him in a bizarre, alien space. Then, to his dismay, he recognised the hallway of the upper floor. He must have climbed there, walking in his sleep. Through a doorway, jagged moonlight grinned at him from the tiles of a bathroom, but even worse was the memory of the voice that still rang in his ears, as if someone had bellowed at him in a last extremity of rage and pain. And then, turning reluctantly, he saw that far away, at the end of the gallery, there was a dim glow. It came from the doorway of his uncle’s bedroom.
William made a hopeless sound, but his feet were moving, drawn forward. His ear pounded painfully in the silence, and the hallway seemed to lean and veer about him. What was he going to see when he reached the room? Why had he been called? A few feet from the door, the answer came to him. His uncle must be dead. The old man must have died this very minute, and through some link that existed between them, William had been summoned to witness his end. The thought almost stopped him short. Should he run and fetch his mother? Wake the household? But then he was at the door.
The bedroom was a dim cavern. In a small pool of light cast by a lamp, his uncle lay unmoving upon the bed. Was this what death looked like? An old man propped up against a pillow, wrapped in the shroud of a single sheet? William crept towards the bed. His uncle’s head hung forward, sightless white slivers under his eyelids. There was no rise and fall of his chest, and William was at the bedside now. He reached out a hand to touch his uncle’s cheek, to feel the lifeless flesh, to know for sure.
‘Ah,’ the old man whispered,‘William.’ Strangely calm, neither relieved nor disappointed, William drew back. His uncle’s eyes fluttered open, blinked slowly. ‘I was dreaming of you.’
And fleetingly, William saw himself in his uncle’s dream, climbing unaware through the darkness of the House, to this bedside. One dreamer calling to another.
The invalid did not speak again for some time. Then his throat worked, and gave a rattling laugh. ‘Come up to watch me die, have you?’
William shook his head.
‘It’s all right. I don’t mind. We’ll watch together, and see if it comes.’
They waited in silence. The room, for all its gaunt size, felt as confined as a closet. The windows were closed and the curtains were drawn. The clock at the bedside told that it was four in the morning. It ticked the seconds away, pulsing in time to the pain in William’s ear.
The old man licked his lips.‘I can smell burning. All the time.’
William swallowed.‘There’s a fire in the mountains.’
A faint frown.‘You know that’s not what I mean. We’ve both seen him.’
William said not a word.
‘And now you’ve met my daughter.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well? What did you think of her?’
But he couldn’t speak about his cousin. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t?’ A tremor of anger ran through his uncle’s voice. ‘She had plenty to say about you.’
William closed his eyes, forced the words out. ‘She told me things.’
‘About me?’
‘About you. About the station, too. I don’t know if they were true.’
‘She tells lies, Will. And they’re clever lies. I warned you.’
William opened his eyes again. The old man was gazing dreamily at the ceiling, his head sunk deep in the pillow. It wasn’t enough, William thought. It wasn’t enough just to say that she lied. The doubts were embedded in his mind now. They were one and the same as his illness, and could only be driven out by something certain and clear.
William spoke. ‘She said the League was stupid.’
A flicker of pain crossed his uncle’s face.
‘She said you were wrong about the new laws.’
But the old man shook his head, slowly, fighting against the stiffness in him. ‘None of that matters any more. Not to you and me, Will. It’s out of our hands.’ He seemed to be looking far beyond the walls of his room.‘I listen to parliament on the radio. They’re sitting late, night after night, trying to get the legislation through before the end of the year.’
An image came to William, as if transmitted from his uncle’s mind, of the parliamentary building in Canberra, and of hundreds of men in suits, gathered deep underground within the hill, as the night and the moon rode silent above them.
‘It’s bad a thing, isn’t it,’ William asked, not knowing what he hoped for.
‘It’s bad,’ his uncle agreed, ‘but it hasn’t passed yet. The vote will be close.’
‘Ruth said…’
‘I don’t want to hear her name.’ The old man breathed fitfully for a moment. Then his head tilted towards William, oddly gentle. ‘You talked to her, didn’t you? You told her about this property being perpetual lease-hold. She got that idea from you, didn’t she?’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘You gave her a weapon, Will. She’s a lawyer, remember. That perpetual lease has got her thinking. She’s gone to stir up trouble.’ And to William’s bafflement the old man sounded almost fond. ‘She wants to frighten me with Native Title. But you don’t have to worry.’
‘The lease is okay?’
‘Forget about the lease. There can never be a claim on Kuran Station regardless. T
here’s nobody who can lodge one.’
A vision of the plains joined the tumble in William’s thoughts, of grassland afire from horizon to horizon.‘Nobody?’
‘Only traditional owners can lodge a claim, Will. And none of them are left, not from this part of the world. They’re all dead, or they were taken away long ago.’ The old man might have been recalling a pleasant story. Then his teeth were bared.‘There’s only me left. I’ve been here all along. So I claim Native Title. I claim it for both of us.’
A chill ran through William. This wasn’t the solution. Something crucial was being warped here, bent into a shape it wasn’t meant to be. It was too heavy, and out of balance. And it would be crushing when it fell.
His uncle was turning his head from side to side, drawing in ragged breaths. ‘Are you sure you don’t smell burning?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t smell anything?’
William whispered his deepest truth.‘I smell something dead.’
The old man’s gaze locked onto him, intent suddenly.‘Yes.’ His body shuddered, and a hand crept across the sheets to clutch William’s arm.‘Yes, I smell it too.’
‘You do?’
‘Something rotten. Something rotten and burned.’
‘What is it?’ William pleaded.
Madness ignited in the old man’s eyes. ‘A sign, boy, it’s a sign. It’s my death you can smell.’
‘No…’ William moaned, trying to tug his hand away.
His uncle wouldn’t let go.‘We’re blood, remember, you and I. I can feel it in you. You’re an open door. The world talks to you. You see things.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You mustn’t say that. It’s a good thing. It’s why I chose you.’
‘Chose me?’
‘When I die, Will, all this will be yours.’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘It’s the only way. You can’t own this House until I’m dead.’
‘I don’t even want it!’
‘What?’ The old man withdrew his hand, aghast. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I don’t know!’ William cried miserably. And then, more softly. ‘I thought I did … But everyone keeps telling me different things.’
The White Earth Page 27
