Drylands

by Thea Astley

  Perhaps Clem is watching. He has no reason. Joss and I had a working relationship of chiack and cheer. I’d tarted up the ladies’ lounge with potted plants and once a week on Friday evenings, our busiest time, had tossed up a counter meal in the kitchen. Simple stuff: chops and veg, steak and veg. The customers ate with eyes glued to the sports channel, hands moving forks automatically to gaping mouths.

  I watched the eaters. There was Howie Briceland wolfing sausage and mash with Fred Cunneen. In the ladies’ lounge Mrs Locke picked delicately, as she did each Friday evening, at a singed cutlet with Janet Deakin from the newsagency. I’m the watcher.

  Yet take yesterday.

  I drove home after the evening shift at the Lizard to find the shack tingling with the aftermath of intrusion. No one locks up here. My few possessions had been slightly moved around, books replaced out of order on shelves, underwear tossed about, some microscopic realignments to the geometry of crockery placements.

  Yes, it’s years since I worried about reprisals from my old firm in some lurid fiction scenario – and yes, I’ve grown a beard, a neat torpedo with clipped moustache, the whole affair grey-streaked by now and making me another man altogether from the idiot runner of four years ago. I fit into this place. I’m part of its smallness even if the whole town thinks of me as a blow-in.

  But beside the shiftings, the fumblings, the sortings, there was a hand-printed note left on my pillow: Who the hell do you think you are?

  Now, that’s a philosophic question.

  Clem, absent-minded but addicted to customer pleasings, has the bar television tuned to the idiot screeches and howlings of an in-your-face teen programme, The Groin Busters. For God’s sake!

  ‘Only till the sport comes on.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I can stand it. It’s withering my mind.’

  ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. That’s why the country’s full of mindless shits. Only five more minutes, Frank. The old hands don’t notice. They’re brain-drained by the young. It’s the same in the States. Haven’t a protest left between them. If I don’t leave it on I’ll forget to tune in and they’ll miss the start of the game.’

  Yes. That’s the way it is out here. Even if the underage cannot drink at the pub, they hang about outside swigging cola and smoke defiantly, letting their great lugs linger at open doorways so as not to miss one nuance (there’s no nuance) of the din ripping the street wide open.

  The open door exposes a newcomer, well, hardly new – a tall, middle-aged, jeans-clad loiterer who is watching as I wipe down tables, change drink coasters, swab counters. Clem switches off the sound. Before I can approach he’s gone, but Clem, pausing between solo passages at the cash register, looks across.

  ‘Do you know that guy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was asking about you?’

  ‘Me? When?’

  ‘Oh, couple of weeks back. Asked your name. Said he thought he knew you. Seemed harmless enough. You weren’t about at the time and I forgot to let you know. Sure you haven’t seen him before?’

  ‘Quite sure. But lately, I’ve got to admit, I get this crazy feeling I’m being watched. Creepy.’

  ‘Some dark secret in your past, buddy?’ Clem says slyly, making me think he’s thinking of Joss, knowing I liked her and hoping for payback, vicariously of course. Three years back a contract killer moved into town for a couple of months. Well, that was the story. The local copper from Red Plains kept his head down. You’d have liked him, everyone said. Good with kids. Loved animals. He holed up in the Lizard for all that time, only appearing for meals, and was gone as unobtrusively as he’d come. I didn’t like to remember that. ‘Maybe this feller’ll look you up and let you know what it’s all about.’

  ‘It can’t be about anything,’ I say more defensively than is warranted. I slam two chairs back into position and switch on the cleaner. Any further questions from Clem don’t have a hope. He responds by switching on the sound system again, so loudly I can feel the vibrations from every wall.

  ‘Jesus, man,’ old Jim Randler says, coming in for his one morning beer. ‘Can you turn that fuckin thing down!’

  Now, Jim Randler knows who he thinks he is. But do I? So many years with the wrong name but the under-me has not changed a whit. I’m still the unaggressive mid-performer from way back, saturated with all those Protestant ethics Ma and Pa drummed in from dummy-time. The cause of my downfall, of course, and the reason I’m here. If I weren’t, I ponder, back behind the bar and polishing glasses automatically, would I be any happier in the city sprawl of nine-to-five, moving up the accountancy ladder to some grand age of fifty and the sack because a cleaner-cut youth whose daddy drank with the boss was in need of a leg-in?

  No. I like it here. Proof of my humdrummery. My shack is in order, my fruit garden battling the seasonal droughts, my income from the Lizard enough to keep me in steaks and a monthly trip away on the coast. Face it, there isn’t much else.

  The bar begins to fill up, the sports programme roars and I’m busy pulling pints when Clem digs me in the ribs and nods across the room. Shock!

  He’s come in, that snooper. He’s taken a seat by the street window and when he catches my eye lifts one finger in a summoning way I resent. So I take my time going over and he eyeballs me in a quizzical, amused fashion. His order? A schnapps. No schnapps. Well, a schooner then. He has an accent I can’t quite place, thick, furry, but the syntax is impeccable. ‘New around here?’ I ask. ‘Just looking around,’ he says, but looking at me hard. Inspecting – head to shoes and back again.

  Clem says later, during a break in the morning session when the old hands wander off for lunch with kitchen-aggrieved wives, ‘Find out anything?’ I shake my head and help myself to a handful of free peanuts from a bar bowl. ‘You know, he was asking one of the shearers last week where you lived.’

  Well, I can’t say I like the sound of that. My imposture, which at times I totally forget as a pardonable venial offence, occasionally hits me as more than a romantic fabrication, as more than the disguise I decided was necessary four years back. The whole set-up shivers with legal retribution in all senses. I eat a gloomy lunch in the kitchen, recalling those sharp and challenging blue eyes whose stare has disrupted my equanimity.

  That night I bolted my doors but still slept fitfully, waking at every animal crash or thud in the darkness of the scrub by the creek. Once, I saw the flash of a torch beyond the treeline – it was after two – and although I waited for the crackle of twig, the pad of footsteps to follow, there was nothing.

  I lay awake till dawn.

  ‘I’d like a weekend off,’ I told Clem the next morning. ‘I’d like to head down the coast for a few days. Can you get someone to fill in?’

  ‘Sure,’ Clem agreed easily. ‘Enjoy.’

  Why do people come to places like this?

  Is it the loneliness in themselves seeking an outer evidence of the solitary? Is it the belief that in such a small town they will find the corrosive for their solipsist attitudes, that they’ll be taken in all warm-kissy-huggy? Drinking mates? The best of old buggers?

  No way.

  Back in the shack I pack a bag, take my fishing lines and head out to the campervan. We’re old mates now and I sink into the driving seat with a second sense of escape, to drive without knowing I’m driving, going over the past weeks, recalling Clem eyeing me oddly only two days ago and saying, ‘You know, Franzi, that feller looking for you could be a brother. Haven’t you noticed? Same colouring, same features. He’s even got the beard.’

  I’d gone back to the washroom and examined myself in the mirror. Blue-eyed, greying blond with a high complexion now heading for effacement behind the side-tags of my torpedo. No. I hadn’t noticed. There’d been no start of mirror-image shock when he walked straight towards me once in the main street or when he’d asked for a schnapps. Look, Clem, I mutter as I drive east, even when I see my goddam face unexpectedly in a shop window I don’t recognise myself. Why shou
ld I? All of us see ourselves as others – the other we wish to be, and sometimes the other we hope not to be. The true, agonising reality is shoved further and further back.

  And afterwards? After the three score and ten is done with, the last human smells of sweat, faeces, urine fading, then is the ultimate loneliness, the confrontation with the god figure for eternity. Or maybe it won’t be confrontation. Instead of welcoming arms, the eyes will turn away for all time.

  The hell with this, I think, and prepare to fish myself stupid at a small beach I’ve checked out before, a curve of sand and river lagoon where red brick hasn’t yet arrived. There’s still the old convenience store with its milk and bread and ancient tins of baked beans and tuna and boxes of dying vegetables. The same old bloke is running it. We exchange mundanities on the margins of non-knowing.

  Two good days. I don’t think of Drylands until halfway on the drive back, a heap of gutted fish packed in ice in the esky. I’m longing for a leisurely late meal.

  It’s night by the time I reach town, the main street freckled with lights and the doors of the pub wide open to the hot summer evening. I slow as I drive past and see Clem behind the bar, dour, as he works the beer pump. And just over the heads of the drinkers I see his part-time help, my weekend replacement.

  God! It’s the snooper, the fair-haired busybody who’s been in and out of town for the last fortnight. I pull up and sit in the cabin of my van, watching as he takes orders and handles the drinkers with all the panache of an old hand. Is this how I look? Is it? Am I favoured with a deadpan glance at the me of me?

  Rage or misgiving? I can’t analyse what makes me drive off with a screech of tyres like any lout on wheels and shove the van back down the main strip. I need company. A sympathetic voice.

  I park outside the newsagency and sit for a moment until the transparency of my offended vision becomes opaque, then I take the esky and go round the back to the yard stairs.

  There’s a wait while I hear Janet patter across her living-room to turn down the tapedeck where Bunny Berrigan’s trumpet is straining towards the empyrean. He can’t get started! What about me?

  Silence.

  ‘Hello,’ she says, opening the door wide on a room littered with books and paper, and I thrust the esky forward as a sweetener.

  I’m calmer already watching her welcome face break into a smile, her eyes amused as she peers into the esky.

  ‘Splendid!’ she says. ‘Splendid!’

  So I go to her kitchenette and help prepare the fillets while she gets a pan going with oil, and the splatter of heated crisping fish brings me back to normal mental temperature and the two of us sit to a late dinner and empty a bottle of white.

  Back. Integrated. I feel part of the place again, one of its essential ingredients. I’m on the verge of admission but although Janet is safe and discreet I prefer her to believe I’ve dropped by from friendship, not need. It’s only surface knowledge I have of her. She has less of me. Yet from my first days in this town she has been a steadying warmth at the back of my mind.

  It’s nearly midnight when I rise to go. The pub has been quiet for over an hour. The main street is glazed with moonlight washing into the yards of shops and houses. Lights are out in the Legless Lizard. The drinkers’ cars have gone. There’s a simple and terrible honesty about the place that makes it a town with nothing to hide. I drive slowly now, calmly, heading down the road to the turn-off that will take me up the gravel past Randler’s house and onto the track that leads down to the creek and my shack.

  Even as I swing the van around the last stand of wattle, I see a light from my windows and my heart becomes clamorous in the dark, thudding hard against the walls of my chest. I park the van, giving the door an aggressive slam, and stride angrily up to the shack.

  The door is ajar but I fling it wide open and there he is, sitting back insolently at home in my one easychair, sipping from a mug of tea, his eyes inspecting me over an unreadable smile as I crash the door to in rage.

  No words, nothing. Beside him on the table I see the opened packet, that wretchedly small packet of letters I had found four years ago and kept out of sentiment.

  He taps the packet with one finger but does not take his eyes from my face.

  ‘I am Franzi Massig,’ he says.

  What will happen now?

  MEANWHILE…

  She opened up the newsagency at seven-thirty and watched Drylands come to life, the early risers driving in for papers, the yardman at the Lizard sweeping down then hosing the pub verandah. There was something about him, she felt, had always felt, that didn’t quite fit, but she waved and he waved back.

  Behind the counter in the shop she sat waiting for customers as thoughts slipped back and forth – yardman to Ted. She’d hoped for a while that the bar-useful, as he called himself, might be a reader but he seemed interested only in the southern papers, of which the few copies she ordered always came several days late.

  ‘Ted,’ she said aloud to the empty shop. Ted could have been a reader, Ted with spectacles slipping down his nose in the after-dinner quiet.

  It had had to be done with tact.

  Ted was a man who could handle tractor engines with aplomb, was so mechanically literate, with his clever intuitive fingers and quick mind assessing the nub of problems, that she hesitated to put it crudely to him that she could teach him to read.

  She began by leaving small notes on the kitchen table when she had to drive over to the shopping mall at Red Plains, simple messages that told him lunch was in the fridge or the time she would be back. He could handle numbers and the very simplest words. She wanted more for him.

  ‘How did it happen, Ted?’ she asked one night when they sat comfortable on the back verandah after tea. ‘That you missed out on reading?’

  She hated herself when she saw the faint pink stain move up his cheeks.

  He thought about her question for a long while and then he said, ‘I guess it was those first years, really. When I just started. They say they’re the most important, don’t they? Mum was sick a lot after I was born, my dad told me, and she got worse. We had a place north of Red Plains then and it was Mum’s job to drive me in to school, but some mornings she was too sick so I stayed home. Then after she died, I was seven, eight, maybe, it all fell onto the old man and I missed out again, staying home to help in the busy seasons and never catching up.’

  ‘I can help if you like.’

  ‘It’s too late, Janet love,’ he said.

  ‘It’s never too late. Give me a month.’

  Ted stirred his tea, embarrassed. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it. All that trouble, eh? Couldn’t put you through that.’

  ‘Give me a month,’ she insisted. ‘It’s worth all the trouble in the world.’

  It took more than a month.

  For a start there was difficulty obtaining those preparatory school readers that were used in Ted’s early years. Finally an old school friend in Brisbane hunted her down a thumbed set and she began, mindful all the time of that male myth that women were more stupid, less acute, had no brains in fact, and that it diminished a man to be shown how to do anything at all by a female.

  ‘You’ve got to want to do it, Ted,’ she warned him. ‘Otherwise it’s no good.’

  ‘I’ll give it a try,’ he said, ‘just for you.’

  She taught him the sounds of the letters. By the end of a fortnight Ted had read his way through the first primer.

  ‘Practise aloud in the lav, Ted,’ she advised. ‘Then you won’t feel silly about it.’

  One morning at the start of the third week, she trudged up past the dunny to feed the chooks in the top yard and could hear Ted’s voice in the spider gloom of the lavatory reading aloud. ‘“Sam has a tan hat. Bess has a red cap.” That bloody Bess! Just like Janet!’ She grinned and half cried as she fed the squawking hens. ‘Oh Ted,’ she whispered to herself, ‘you’re on the way.’

  She encouraged him to copy the words onto an old pad. She made sure she
was out at those times. One day she returned from shopping at Red Plains to find the house empty and the sound of the tractor racketing over the far ten acres. On the refrigerator door Ted had stuck a note: Your lunch is on the table.

  Victory! Janet ate the sandwich he had cut into neat triangles and cried and cried.

  He covered the second reader in another fortnight and she found his old writing pad filled, page after page, with the first shaky letters of his printing and then the more confident lists as he grew used to the symbols. He would sit at the kitchen table, the radio humming behind from the mantelshelf as he worked after tea. ‘Half an hour I’ll give it, love. Just that much, then I’m going to watch the telly.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Fair enough. You’re excused from the dishes.’

  She was hugging to herself the triumph of a few days back when Ted had roared into the house frustrated by one of the pumps at the dam. ‘Where’s that bloody spanner, love, the small one?’

  She looked at him for a moment, smiled and pulled a writing pad over. On it she printed: It is on the bloody top shelf near the sugar. And handed the pad across and waited.

  Ted picked up the pad, glared, made reading movements with his lips and burst out laughing.

  ‘So that’s how you spell it! There’s other words you can be writing down for me,’ he said. ‘Not that I’d use them in front of a lady.’

  He went over to the shelves, grabbed the spanner, gave a thumbs-up sign and headed out to the paddock.

  Things picked up speed after that. He got through the final preparatory readers in another week and Janet found him one morning working his way painfully down the front page of the local weekly. ‘Don’t keep me out of the scandal,’ she said. ‘What’s the council up to now?’