by Thea Astley
A dousing. A baptism.
He wanted to yell aloud ‘I name thee Firebird’ as he lit the matches here and here and here, wanted to stay for the orgasm of blaze but watched only the first whoop of flame before running out into the still night and heading for the far paddock where he stood to watch the fire tango across the windows of the shed, standing entranced, his sneakers soaked by early dew. ‘Cop that, old man,’ he whispered, stepping back and back, hugging his inward scream of pleasure, his eyes reflecting fire, stepping back until he was absorbed by trees, while the flames mounted and fattened and played with old Randler’s boat and rolled it on its moorings and hissed like waves.
Randler was woken by his fretter of a heeler whimpering and pawing at the bedclothes. He grumbled a little and tossed about before sitting up. ‘What is it, boy?’ he muttered sleepily, wanting to roll over. The dog persisted, snuffling and barking in sharp isolated yelps. Beyond his bedroom window Randler glimpsed through sleep-heavy eyes a fearful orange glow. Oh God! he thought. God! He stumbled to the verandah and could see through the side windows of the shed the wild surf of light breaking and surging in a rising tide. As he watched, a window blew out.
He raced from the house in his pyjamas, down the paddock, feet catching on grass tufts, heart jumping and battering his ribcage. His throat tightened so that he could hardly breathe, gulping for air across his dried tongue. A fearsome screech began in the pit of his bowels and rose, gathering despair and rage, up through his throat to emerge in a wolf howl that bawled its frightful grief across the landscape.
It was hopeless. He knew it was hopeless. It was too late. The side walls of the shed were beginning to catch. Yet despite that, almost automatically he grabbed a hose that was hooked to the pump from the creek and began soaking the doorway and the walls around before moving in. He was sobbing and hating at the one time.
The heat was appalling. But even then, even with the stink of singeing he could now smell from his thinning hair, he moved forward and kicked open the door in some kind of idiot optimism.
There, cradled in light, festooned with glittering streamers of fire, the boat, a glowing hulk like a phoenix that would never rise from its ashes, shuddered and rocked. Stupidity and desperation directed the hose at it, and slabs of ruined planking crumbled from the impact of water and fell to the floor.
For a while he kept the hose playing on his dream, futilely – the tears he couldn’t shed – and after a time, beyond even the possibility of preserving a minimum of it, he went out into the pre-dawn grey, turned off the tap and walked back to the house. There was nothing that could be done. The three-year serial was over.
‘The hell with it!’ he said aloud.
He began to toss clothes into a bag. The anger would come later in a surge that would take all will away. He must leave before then. ‘Finished,’ he kept muttering, and heard his voice like a stranger’s. ‘Finished.’
He picked up his bag and with the dog trotting after went out to the truck.
Eclipse.
Beyond thought.
Beyond anything but the physical moment.
He got up behind the wheel, whistled the dog into the seat beside him, started the motor and swung off down the lane ruts that would take him to the road, to the east, to the inevitable sea.
MEANWHILE…
‘There are people called Murphy moving in,’ Paddy Locke had said to her as she paid for her morning paper. ‘Now at last I will be able to discuss Teilhard de Chardin.’
Janet had hidden an unbelieving smile. ‘Fossils or the Omega point?’ she asked blandly as she slipped the paper into a plastic bag. Was she actually hearing these words in Drylands?
‘Well!’ miffed Paddy Locke said. ‘Well! How about you!’
Paddy Locke lived on the outskirts of town in an abandoned weatherboard she had bought more than eight years ago. ‘Driven here,’ she confessed at various meetings of inquisitive country women’s groups and show association strategy assemblies, ‘by city prices.’ Everyone had nodded wisely but could prise no further information from her.
Her age hovered between fifty and sixty. There had been a Mr Locke, it was deduced from throwaway oblique references she made when her guard was down. She was a slight woman with glasses and wispy tawny hair worn in an untidy bun. Apart from a horticultural frenzy in her front garden which she had turned by some inner magic into a denseness of shrub and flower that caused surprised neighbourly comment, she had been a shadowy figure in the township, one of those characters who enter stage left and almost immediately exit stage right after some trifling announcement about dinner or a possible World War III. But in the last four years she had suddenly come forward as a force agitating for a branch of the Red Plains library to be established in town. No one was interested.
What’s great about these godforsaken holes, Janet decided next morning, leaning over her small balcony and watching the place rub its eyes and start to wake up, are the oddballs. They stand out. You meet them. They enrich. No. More. They furbish the day.
Was she one herself?
She recalled her mother’s frequently repeated warning about the inability to read. Mother had added riders from time to time: ‘It’s like foot-binding in China. Of course,’ she had gone on, stuffed with political zeal and irritation, ‘the more illiterates the easier for governments to supply slave labour to the wealthy. Think of that.’
She had had a bad night in her small flat above the newsagency. The close tin roof had creaked and groaned as the night air cooled it, and at one stage she could have sworn she heard movement at the back door of the shop. Fumbling her way downstairs in the dark, not wanting to switch lights on and warn intruders off, she had twisted an ankle when she missed the bottom step and crashed into a chair. While she stood there wincing, biting back cries, she heard the quick flip-flop of running feet across her yard, then the scramble as a body hoisted itself over the paling fence.
Imagination, she wanted to assure herself. Briefly she wondered how Paddy Locke coped alone. She should ask her in for tea. She should call. She should do something about the proposed library committee which, she admitted, could destroy her small business. But then – cynical laugh – she had no business. Not for books. Those were the moments when she wanted to pack up and leave. But the same reason that had driven Paddy Locke here kept her entrapped. That and ultimately a peculiar sense of belonging.
She looked back at the table where she worked in the evenings, a mess of paper breaking like surf against her typer. The mechanics of storytelling bothered her. It didn’t rush from her fingers. Should it? She reserved a certain contempt for the lavishing of detail. It was better for readers to frolic with their own assumptions from the words spoken, the deeds done. Exercise those minds, she thought, citing Mother who had managed to align mathematical conclusions with character assessment. ‘Darling,’ she had advised her teenage daughter, ‘always watch mouths. The angles. They’re the giveaway.’
Should she try for a little Nabokov rococo? Sentences as long and meandering with tributary clauses as Faulkner’s Mississippi? A touch of Hemingway minimalism?
She could persist only. Tap, tap, and tap.
She thought of Ted in those months before he died. He’d been too weak to hold up the paper, balance a book in his wobbling hands. ‘Can’t manage it, love,’ he’d said. ‘Give us the local gossip.’ So she’d read him the more interesting bits from the Gazette and watched with pride and pleasure when he asked, ‘Give me a look. I want to see that last bit again.’ She’d always left the room then on some thin excuse like putting the kettle on, but would come back to find him bent over the flattened paper, smiling at a paragraph that described local disaster: the tea marquee collapsing at the picnic races and blotting two members of parliament, a Japanese land developer and the shire clerk for half an hour. Or front-page town outrage over Benny Shoforth’s housing struggle with the local council. Bit of a boong, they all said contemptuously in pub bars, in shops. Touch of the old
tarbrush! Bloody fuss over nothing.
Did these things matter? Did they not?
‘Ted,’ she said aloud. ‘I want to stop, but it’s a diary of my days. In a way. In a way.’
TRUMPED
The bicycle. The stiff wire masts fore and aft with a small triangular flag as a warning to cars. The light trailer cart hitched behind into which Benny Shoforth could pack his weekly shopping.
‘Here comes the crazy old geezer!’ they’d said for the first few months of Benny’s odd-looking transport. Laughs in the pub. Schoolkid whistles and chiacks and later a terrorising by skateboards doing wheelies and figures of eight around him as he pedalled past. By the end of the year, though, they took it as normal. ‘Pity more of us don’t do it,’ Clem said to a group of drinkers at the Lizard. ‘Think of what we’d save in petrol.’
Benny Shoforth had lived for the last ten years in a broken-down shack on a five-acre patch outside town. A spare fellow given to silence. Sixty-five? Seventy? Somewhere way back there’d been a cross-cultural fornication. One of the white pastoralists had spent the lonely weeks of his wife’s annual holiday in Brisbane establishing friendly relations with the half-caste housegirl whom he sacked before his wife returned. When Benny was born his father was active in getting the fringe dwellers moved on and Benny, under the protection of the Act, was carried off to a reserve outside Brisbane where he grew up without knowing any parentage at all.
You’d have to peer closely to spot that touch of tarbrush. Was it the deep-set quality of his eyes? The bony angles of his profile? The merest – the very merest – driftwood tint to the skin?
No one was ever certain. And because of that, no one was ever certain how to treat him. Was he one of them, the skin-privileged, or did he deserve dismissive contempt? The very unsureness gave offence. In the narrow social circle of the town the men were frightened of putting a foot wrong. It didn’t worry the women nearly as much. The men formed a tighter blokeship club whose unwritten codes were more fiercely adhered to than those of their wives. All the town women who had had dealings with Benny Shoforth were impressed by his good manners, his assistance with shopping bags when they were overloaded, his quietly tipped hat on passing. Sometimes he did a spot of gardening to help out when husbands were away and his polite declining of offered cups of tea later with ‘I’ve got to be getting back’ had them flummoxed and impressed. He seemed to pocket the payments they made with reluctance. Often he refused payment. ‘Glad to help out,’ he’d say.
How the hell do you deal with that?
Disaster hit Benny when the town council at Red Plains warned him they’d have to sell up his property for unpaid rates. He was on the old-age pension now, and the payments were beyond him. He’d always managed with odd jobs after he became too old to work on the sheep properties as general dogsbody and shed hand. Years before, after he’d run away from the reserve in the south, he’d got a job as a fettler on the railways and worked the length of the coastal line, putting money by for a guessed at future. This meant marriage in his late twenties to another part-white, a young woman with a dash of island blood who’d been at Yarrabah and was working as cook on a cane farm near Eungella. He craved a base, a sense of permanency. He wanted children of his own. The government was still snatching children, but not with the same merciless intensity of twenty years before. If he managed to get a little house, he thought, and prove his independence and his ability to look after his family, they might leave him alone.
But they had had no children and when Mellie died ten years ago, Benny decided he would go back to the place he knew as his origins. It was easier to discover now.
He was thirteen before he found out where his mother had come from. While he was still at the reserve he became friendly with one of the older men who had been rounded up from the same place. ‘Your mum’s still around,’ the old man told him. ‘Gone to work down Ipswich way for a bit. Then she gone out Charleville, house cook on one of them big stations.’
The knowledge ate at him.
At fifteen he’d run off from the fencing job he’d been given on a property near Gatton and walked and walked and hitched rides out to the end of the south-western line, walking mostly, because no one wanted to pick up a stranger with that faint sepia blush about the skin even if he did look no more than a kid. The old man back at the reserve had told him his mother’s name. ‘Called Jilly,’ he said. ‘Not her tribal name, eh. One them mission blokes call her.’
Benny wandered along the near-empty wide dusty streets of that town at the end of the line. He felt noticed, noticeable, until he ran into three black men drinking on the footpath outside a run-down pub. It was late afternoon, the sun slanting bright diagonals across parked trucks, pepper trees, the tin roofs of houses. The men were still sober enough to listen. They offered him a drink. He shook his head. ‘Where you stayin?’ they asked. He didn’t know. And even as he didn’t know he saw the big copper car pulling in and the man getting out and strolling towards the group, casual over the inner threat.
‘Who’s this then, eh?’ the copper asked.
‘Cousin,’ one of the men said quickly. ‘Benny’s down from Augathella, see his uncle.’
‘Bullshit,’ the copper said amiably. ‘You blokes get along now. You’ve had enough of the old piss. Time you were getting back to camp before the wives get shitty.’
They laughed. They were supposed to laugh and the copper was appeased by this appreciation of his wit. ‘Okay, now. On your way.’ He stood there, a burly giant with a not quite smile on his sun-brick face, until they had turned and begun to walk along the back streets out of town.
At the camp down on the riverbank they gave Benny tucker and let him pitch his swag on the edge of the campfire. He told them that he was looking for his mother, that he’d heard she worked on one of the stations up along the Warrego. Jilly, he said. Jilly.
‘She still there,’ they told him. ‘Bin there long time, eh, but still workin. Out long that big place near Warrego Crossin. She get big surprise, when you turn up.’
That night he slept at the camp and in the morning washed himself down in one of the waterholes along the river. One of the women had some damper going when he got back and a tin mug of treacle-black tea to wash it down. There were only seven of them in the camp, the three men he had met, their wives, and a small girl of two who hid behind her mother and watched him with one dark eye peeping round.
‘She’s a pretty kid,’ Benny couldn’t help saying.
‘Your mum still pretty,’ the woman said.
‘Is she?’
‘Don’t talk much, but. She bin all quiet since we know. Won’t talk when she see us. Jus work, eh?’
Benny rubbed damper crumbs from the front of his shirt, gulped the last of his tea and picked up his swag.
‘Better be goin,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
They looked at him in silence and then one of the men said to let them know when he was on the way back through, let them know how he was doing. He nodded and raised one hand and set off along the track they pointed out.
Benny Shoforth lay awake on his camp stretcher in the old house he would have to leave and remembered that meeting.
He didn’t want to remember. It hurt too much.
There he’d been, a gangly fifteen-year-old, walking up to the gates of the big property, heading along the home track wondering when the buildings would appear. They must have been a mile in, hidden by coolabah and gidgee. A pair of blue heelers started barking as he came up the last stretch, racing around him as if they were going to pen him in, and then he was aware of a man approaching from a paddock on his right, a slim young fellow riding a handsome bay and whistling the dogs off.
‘Looking for someone?’ the man had asked. Not friendly. Not unfriendly. A warning-off sound. A boss voice. Benny hesitated before answering. He had learned early never to tell too much. ‘Have to see Jilly,’ he said. ‘Got a message.’
‘I can give her that.’
‘It�
��s personal,’ Benny told him.
‘Well, now.’ The young fellow’s eyebrows lifted. His horse was beginning to fidget and dance about. ‘Not too personal, I hope.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Straight ahead, then turn right round the side of the homestead. She should be in the kitchen out the back.’
‘Thanks, mister.’ Benny set off walking again, swag hitched over his shoulder. He could sense the man’s eyes following him as he trudged up the last hundred yards towards the low-verandahed building that was tucked back behind dried-out lawn and grevillea. He forced himself not to look around, kept his head down, watching his feet, and then he heard the horse trotting up behind and the man drew alongside and waited while he turned right and went round the side of the house, stepping carefully along the gravel paths till he came to the extension built out from the main building. As he walked up the steps onto the verandah he did turn, and saw the man on his horse reined in and still watching.
The kitchen screen doors let him see right into the big room where two women were working over a sink with piles of dishes. One of them. His mum.
He tapped on the frame of the screen and the older one looked over. She was a big black woman with a wide face and bright eyes. ‘What you want?’ she asked.
‘Want to speak to Jilly.’
‘Well, here she is. Right here.’
The other woman put down her dishmop and walked across to the door. She was young. Well, younger than he thought she’d be. He stared at her through the mesh of fly-wire. Light-skinned, small. Yeah, pretty, he could see that. Suddenly he didn’t know what to say. There weren’t the words. All those words he’d learnt at the reserve school. He could read, write. He knew bits of history, geography that had been drummed into him in that hot primitive classroom. If he shut his eyes he could still see the slates, the inkwells, the big map on the wall and a fly-specked picture of a man and woman from England somewhere. The teacher had said they were the king and queen. That hadn’t meant anything. He could figure out sums. He could smell that room and the kids wriggling at the desks around him, their feet shifting and scraping along the floorboards. Now everything was gone.
