Drylands

by Thea Astley

  She had driven south to Sydney from Brisbane that Christmas into a world of bookshops ripe for harvest and spent five of her seven days’ leave stocking up and making orders. On the sixth she took a ferry across the harbour to her fate. ‘Drive back with me,’ she suggested kindly to Ted over the fish and chips. He turned in his bus ticket the next day and together they set off along the highway, stunned by their impulsiveness. ‘The novel,’ Lawrence had written – and he had sometimes written a lot of twaddle, she thought sourly, pouring herself a second cup – ‘is a great discovery.’ Well, yes. He was on target there. She travelled those miles all those years away along the coast road from Sydney to Brisbane. It was when they had stopped for a coffee at a gas station and she was thumbing through a copy of Phoenix and grinning in a pleased way at D. H.’s comments on the ‘serious’ novel while the pump boy filled up the tank that some unknown lout from nowhere sprang into the driver’s seat where she had maudlinly left the car keys and driven off leaving a haemorrhage of petrol and a sniggering garage hand.

  The police found her car abandoned in the next town, thirty miles north, saved by the weight of reading matter on the back seat. Their suitcases had been opened, scrabbled through and left. The car radio had been neatly extracted but not a book removed.

  Now she got up from her seat at the table and hunted along the shelves until she found A Selection from Phoenix and prowled through its pages until she came to those terrifying words: ‘… the death bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages.’ There was more. He named writers who tore themselves to pieces and stripped their emotions, as he said, to the finest threads until ‘you feel you are sewed up inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.’

  Now there was a warning! Avoid what the miner’s boy called senile precocity!

  She typed a title. She typed up an opening sentence.

  She stopped, went over to the stove and made herself a fresh pot of tea. Along the main street in the clamorous dark the pub was yowling towards its climactic closing time. After that, she told herself, after the drunks and the trucks have sorted themselves out, you’ll think more clearly, won’t you? Two cigarettes till closing and then the drop-cloth of night on Drylands, with only the far-off barking of a farm dog ripping the fabric. This was a town to escape to, rot in, vanish in – cut off from other towns by gravel roads and sorghum acres and sheep paddocks.

  Or run from!

  Why, this was not quite hell and she was in it.

  ‘Use it,’ she said aloud, pouring boiling water onto tea leaves. ‘Use the place!’

  Here could be the sludge of non-event, she feared. Surely the world’s last reader would crave narrative, but how seduce an eye and a brain that had fed for the last two decades on the half-second grab of television, the constant flicker-change of colour and shape against a background of formless noise? A story should fester, should spread its attractive bacteria until it absorbed the whole body. Maybe she could fall back on those old standbys the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth. She translated: hubris, criminal desire, debauchery, rage, greed, malice, torpor. She dumped the idea. She wanted to make each word sufficient in itself – rivers of words or mountains of them or whatever you could call the geography they created.

  But she had stopped often enough in towns this size and the short-lived encounters had reminded her of stirring soup – a sluggish mix bubbling briefly, subsiding briefly. She wished suddenly with all her heart that Ted were sitting with his pipe in the next room and that she could ask him what he wanted.

  Ted would know. She was certain he would know. She hadn’t discovered until the very day they married and he scrawled something indecipherable on a legal document that Ted couldn’t read.

  A LONG RUN, A GOOD SEASON

  My name is not Franzi Massig.

  But I go by that name.

  Massig: moderate. Fair enough. But is it verb or adjective? Either fits the bill. Forget the umlaut!

  Everyone here – and I have been here four years – believes I am Franzi Massig; and in fact, having discovered a small ancestral shrub of unmet relatives whose wheelings and dealings involve me in more than mental fantasy, with the aid of some judicious pruning I am beginning to believe it myself.

  This change of nomenclature was thrust upon me, as they say, more or less. Maybe less. Circumstances that will gradually unpeel forced me to assume another identity. Well, not this particular one. That was a jovial brushstroke on my life’s little canvas. But a false identity? I had no choice.

  Everyone has a choice, you suggest.

  Yes. I agree. But there are circumstances, circumstances. There’s bigamy, for a start. Criminality. Boredom. Running for one’s life. In fact there are any number of reasons for a name change. The trouble is my change is not now spurious, not superficial. It is in the bone. Or rather, the heart’s bone. Yes. Don’t nag! I know there’s no such thing. I pluck a metaphor, a late-blooming sprig of figurative wankery from that ancestral shrub. A persona alteration.

  I am or have become Franzi Massig in fact.

  Should I now say ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘There was once’ or ‘Long ago it happened that’?

  I can say that years before the change I happened to read an interesting book called Another Man’s Island. In French. Perhaps that’s where it all began. Perhaps I rationalised my need for a change. Anyway, see me, a computer-wise law firm accountant who stumbled on conspiracy, bribes, pay-offs, drug deals, vast launderings of trust funds in Pacific and Caribbean isles (Ah, the sheer romance of it!) in the most respectable of establishments.

  Let’s pick that last circumstance I mentioned: running for one’s life. Facts and melodrama are commonplace enough. But why me? Me? Me at bay? A dogsbody hacker who was idiotic enough to mention suspicion and unbalanceable ledgers to a senior partner; a hacker who explained how he had tracked pay-offs to police and customs officers and off-shore deposits of corrupt splendour, following a rambler vine of poisonous greenery through leafy acreages of North Shore Sydney to vanishing points in Hong Kong.

  Naïvely I had suspected staff corruption at a lower level. Or misplay with the computer.

  ‘You’re less than nothing here,’ the senior partner told me. ‘Keep to what you know.’

  I was retrenched that afternoon and returned to my rented post-divorce flat to find it trashed and a threatening note on toilet paper left for me beside the phone.

  I’d never been one to argue, not even with my dimming blonde wife who could win any argument with her tongue tied behind her back. I checked into a suburban motel that night and the next day cleaned out my bank account and took a cab to the airport. (This has all the fast-breath trivia of a thriller! You wanted explanation. I shall not refer to these matters again.)

  A flight north under an assumed name; the purchase of a second-hand campervan in a south Brisbane car yard known for shady dealings. I stacked the van with food, a small gas cooker, threw out its dubiously stained mattress and substituted a cheap foam lilo. In a bright Brisbane winter afternoon I took it north and then west.

  It’s big out here, big and pocked with little towns hundreds of yearnings apart, house-clusters that become their own heartland. That’s what I sought – anonymity in anonymity.

  There was this peak on the western plains, the Virgin Rock, signalling me like a hitcher’s thumb after miles of road through sorghum paddocks, the tumbleweed bowling challenges at my fender as I wheeled through dust. But despite the paddocks of fodder, this was no man’s land, it would appear, the cultivated terra nullius of our founding fathers, a desolation of low hills, and in the last township where I stopped for a sandwich at a greasy spoon the dim hymns of blowflies and the slow decay of the little shops filled me with unspeakable gloom.

  Not there.
Not there.

  I drove on towards a humble lavender range on back roads with the second evening coming down, a glassy tension in the breast, and unexpectedly I found it. A funk-hole! Entrenched! Gone to earth!

  There was a piece of land trash, a humpy falling apart in a gidgee clump of forest fringe that kept testing the waters of a creek that ran beside the road. The knockabout town itself was three cooees away. I pulled the van onto the shoulder and went down to the creek that ambled sandily along to lose itself, I discovered later, in the central plains. But now, having filled my water bottles and splashed back through the shallows, I looked up to the far bank to see the late afternoon sun sketch part of a tin roof crouching in the trees and light a diamond sliver of window. I slopped my way to the van and thought about this. I smoked a cigarette. No traffic came along the road. There wasn’t even the sound of voices or dog protest.

  Something decided me. I backed the van down the road to the log bridge I had only half noticed as I drove, rumbled across and nosed the van up a track no more than a suggestion until I came to the screen of gidgee.

  It was here I had detected the giveaway shine on tin, the star flash of glass.

  A roof, a floor, studs still in position and timber siding gapped on one wall only. Three rooms – a palace of a place! A listing water tank loud with frog life and a tap connected to shove its snout inside the shack where it dripped over a brimming tin dish that had watered the floorboards for years. Cobwebs spun probabilities across rafters, knitted themselves into corner maps of places where I might like to hide and barricaded with sticky silk an open back door that revealed a track leading to the dunny. I investigated – a plank slung across a cesspit.

  Everything! My God, the place had everything!

  Here’s an aphorism – or is it a paradox? I have always believed not in chance but in the uncanny certainty of coincidence. Let me illustrate:

  Tucked away from sight with my van, cloistered in scrub and not even the distant clink of a cowbell or the excited yap of a nosey dog, I inspected my new funk-hole with eagerness. Apart from a crippled table, two chairs (bushman style) and, in the second room (the boudoir), a box bed with wire mattress, a leprous mirror hanging from a nail and a chest of drawers preserving the detritus of washed-up settlers, there were a couple of kerosene lamps, a rusting primus and an assortment of empty canisters. The paucity of what was left behind had the melancholic harmonics of wistful music.

  Someone had poured this concrete floor in a hurry. Whoever it was had used too much sand, insufficient cement. Large areas were crumbling and the dank pieces of matting that hid the rougher spots had the sadness of house-proud optimism. Wherever I looked – through open door, window – there was nothing but a green camouflage that suited me. Had it suited whoever was here before? Behind the back door a stiffened tea-towel hung. I pulled its cardboard pleats apart and found a greeting in German, ‘guten Morgen, guten Abend’, spelled out below; above, an impossible Rhine castle, and in the right-hand corner the shadowy words Heidelberg, a view of the Neckar. Sad. Sad.

  A rural slum. A camp-site. A dream of a hideaway.

  Pushing my way back to the van through swags of scrub, gorging on invisibility, I fetched my thermos and took it over to the shack for a baptismal session, libation, whatever. Distantly, a cow lowed, a dog barked, and then the silence of leaves and insects.

  In the bedroom I began an unchivalrous rootling through the chest of drawers, poking about in a jetsam of hair pins, bills, letters, bits of ribbon, a bible, a hairbrush still clinging to long red hairs, and dust. Always dust. Above, in the muddied mirror, the previous owner, glimpsed through swirls of cloud and fog, watched me finger these wretched leavings, smiling forgivingly as I stretched a fine auburn hair to its gleaming twenty-inch length.

  Despite exhaustion and a niggling fear of uncovery both here and back there, always the curious opportunist, I took the letters and postcards to the van, heated more coffee on the primus and settled down to track fragments of a life other than mine.

  The letters were few and had been stuffed back in envelopes that bore, I observed, a faded Deutschland postmark. I felt guilty opening them. I stuffed the guilt back in my envelope self.

  Dearest Gerda (began the first I pulled out, dated October ’78, Heidelberg), I wish I was with you in the sensual zones! It’s very cold here – both climate and hospitality are freezing me out. I don’t think my long-lost just-met uncle and aunt really want to have a rough-hewn colonial stranger thrust on them, despite the blood connection. And my German isn’t really up to it. I’ve forgotten almost everything I learnt as a kid. My father’s brother looks at me – suspiciously might be the word – as if he doubts my claims to being family. I dangle all my father’s intimate keepsakes as proof: snapshots showing both of them, for heaven’s sake, birth certificate, and so on, but even then Uncle Gustave’s eyes flicker. As I say, I have little German and his and Aunt Liese’s English is basic. I think he thinks I’m a fraud.

  So all being well I won’t be staying long. After all, it was only an exercise in nostalgia, which is a shortlived fever at the best. (I must say I like his writing style.) I gave him the letter Father wrote before he died and the watch he wanted him to have – apparently it was a watch Uncle treasured as a kid – and the old beggar hrumped and ha’d over them both, not telling me what the letter said. But I heard him and Aunt Liese talking long into the night, arguing, it sounded like. Huh! So I’ll be home by Christmas, perhaps earlier. That’s just a few weeks away. All my love.

  Carl

  I drank my coffee, my mouth burning on the cup rim, and put the letter carefully back into its envelope. If I were Carl, I tried to imagine, and not this refugee from corporate revenge, a whistle-blower on the run, what then?

  The next letter I opened was dated a week later. Why had Gerda kept them? More to the point, why had she left them behind?

  My cousin Franzi is a nice fellow, only about twenty-five but as he is completely fluent in English he acts as interpreter between me and my dear relatives. He’s some kind of tutor or research fellow at the university, is completing a doctorate and is the apple of Uncle Gustave’s bleak eye – a narrow and doubting one of the lightest blue.

  (Had Carl returned as promised?

  There wasn’t a shred of plastic holly, mistletoe, fir-tree glitter. In the corners of each drawer were fluff balls and dead insects. That was all that was left of a relationship, was it? Poor Gerda! Or am I wrong? Hairs on a brush, forgotten letters, small mounds of clutter.)

  Uncle Gustave has a puckered scar running from the corner of his left eyebrow to the southern beach of his mouth. ‘La guerre,’ he explains – we get by occasionally in schoolroom French – and for the moment I am horrified at how the righteous (that’s us!) inflicted pain as well on pawns who possibly cared nothing at all for the political lusts of their leaders. ‘I had eighteen years,’ he tells me, resorting to his rotten English and translating direct from his rotten French. ‘Only eighteen years. And then this.’ Fifty-six years, Uncle has, and the bitterness of all scars remains. Especially that of my father’s escape across the borders to evade the coming war. He can’t forgive Dad’s desertion on the eve of Armageddon. Traitor to the Fatherland, he calls him. So Franzi tells me.

  Franzi is a cheerful fellow, not like his father. We have fun together. Some days we walk up to the university to meet his friends, over a big sort of bridge to the marvellous old buildings, or we go down to the Hauptstrasse for a meal. Meals are so huge there is something gross about them, and even the cleanliness, the cleanliness, the cleanliness. We sit in the summer-house in the gardens above the Neckar where Speer is supposed to have met Hitler and none of all that horror seems believable. None of it.

  ‘One day,’ Franzi tells me, ‘I’ll visit your country. Stay maybe.’ ‘We’ll welcome you,’ I tell him. And we will, won’t we, Gerda?

  I’m writing this in that very summer-house where Albert Speer planned tactics. So will I. In this cold air I
cannot feel the ghostly footprints.

  I’ve made a decision. I’m leaving in three days. Blessings and

  The next page was missing.

  I suspect he never did leave Germany and I imagine, in my fevered excitement at having discovered my own fastness isolated enough to conceal, that Gerda – his wife? partner? – fed up with his absence and the burden of solitary child care (there was a broken plastic rattle under the bed) in such a primitive place, finally gathered up her possessions and left, baby clutched to the breast as a talisman of a lost relationship.

  But I could be wrong.

  The tank water stinks.

  I spit again and again the vestiges of my testing sip and go down to the creek with my water bottle and ponder the set-up while the primus heats up the kettle. Just for the moment I’m prepared to camp illegally. Maybe tomorrow I can talk business with the owner of that farm whose roof I saw beyond the scrub. In the meantime the primus pants busily and I spoon more generous measures of coffee into my pot and sit back on my bunk assessing.

  Here I am in a natural cavern created by gidgee and eucalypt, the van backed up against a cluster of tough-trunked stringybarks, its nose poised for flight. But will there be need? I’m over-dramatising. Now there’s the distant yelping of a dog, and later, in an after-dark sortie, I get a look at the farm and shed whose roof, a mile up the slope, had warned me with its sunset blaze of possible trespass.

  This is no man’s land as well, I hope, or that of an obliging farmer. A few days before, I had almost settled for the desolation of hills and abandoned mullock heaps and poppet heads in an old mining town north of here. Cages and tanks had long been dismantled and left to rust on abandoned leases treacherous with barbwire slung around the shaft openings and wrecks of machinery at which grass licked with stringy yellow tongues.