Drylands

by Thea Astley

  ‘How about a motel next time?’ she suggested after a third vacation in a rundown timber shack with sagging stretchers, broken flyscreens, and a kitchen with not quite enough crockery.

  ‘Are you nuts?’ Fred had replied, still jovial from a session at the beach pub where he had run into a mate from Red Plains. ‘Couldn’t possibly afford it. Not with this mob. How’s the roast going? I could eat a horse!’

  ‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ Lannie said. ‘That’s what I’m serving.’

  He missed it.

  She settled in at work. She was efficient. People thanked her. She enjoyed a day spent in the company of adults, even those as spurious as radio personalities. She could take that with a laugh! They raised her wages.

  Three months, four, five, six.

  Johnnie had left school after a disastrous final examination and was apprenticed to a garage mechanic. The second eldest now had his driving licence and was actively encouraged by Fred to take the rest of them over to the coast every clear weekend. It gave him a break. Changes had gradually taken place. The boys helped minimally round the house to avoid their father’s snapped impatience. They ate a lot of takeaway food. Fred grew to love those emptied weekends and spent more time in Red Plains where he took solace from one of the young women working in accounts. She appeared undemanding and pliant and believed Fred to be wrongfully used. How could she? she would ask his injured receptive eyes. How could she do that to you?

  And how could he?

  If he thought about it, and he didn’t think about it too much, he might have wondered if gossip-embroidered stories of his newly acquired comfort had filtered through to his wife and kids. There were occasional nudges at pub bars, hearty male tacit wink/approval, oblique innuendoes from councillors at coffee breaks. ‘How’s the wife’s job going, eh?’ Briceland would ask with bogus concern. ‘Coping, is she? Are you?’

  Once when he had taken Norma (he called her Cuddles) home for a weekend away from the observant bright eyes of Red Plains – and anyway, it was cheaper than driving miles to some out-of-the-way motel – he had been surprised by the early return of his kids from the coast.

  ‘Who’s she?’ Chappie demanded, watching Cuddles cope with a week’s washing up. He was nearly thirteen now and worried by hormones and acne.

  ‘A workmate. We’re catching up on council business.’

  ‘Er er!’ Chappie said, unbelieving.

  Fred installed a dishwasher.

  In September Cuddles announced to Fred that she was pregnant. Even though Fred was blind to these matters – his couplings with Lannie had been more in the nature of quick relief, what he jokingly called among his buddies ‘the marital piss’ – other council staff had been eyeing Cuddles’ thickening waistline with interest. ‘Putting on a bit of weight, love.’ And, ‘You’ll have to go on a diet, Norma.’ Kidding her in the staff canteen. She repeated her news again over a dreadful meal in a Red Plains steak-house. He didn’t seem to have heard the first time.

  ‘Well!’ he said unsatisfactorily. ‘Well!’ He clicked a finger at the waitress for the bill and bustled Cuddles out halfway through the mince.

  He had her dismissed that afternoon with a small lump of severance pay to sweeten the departure. He didn’t see her again. When she went up tearfully to his office he was unavoidably away on shire business. Cuddles drove her misery out to Tannum Sands where her elderly parents, both crippled by arthritis, had retired to a nursing home.

  ‘I wish we could help, dear,’ her mother said. ‘But as you can see we can hardly help ourselves. You really should have had more sense.’

  Cuddles found sanctuary in a church refuge.

  Seven months. Eight.

  Almost every weekend now Fred went out to the coast, driven by guilt and the necessity to obliterate thinking; but Lannie, eager to avoid a surfeit of his presence, organised overtime at the radio station and left Fred sitting bleakly in her rented house, somehow sad, somehow comic in his efforts at renewing a lost cause. Once he took her and the boys to dinner, but at another low-rent steak-house that so vividly recalled his last meeting with Norma – he thought of her as that now – he could hardly eat a thing.

  ‘You don’t seem well, Fred,’ Lannie suggested as she poked dead vegetables about.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You don’t seem okay.’

  ‘Lannie, come back home. Give up this stupid job. Your place is with me and the boys.’

  The boys were all practically men, she told him, beyond cuddles – he winced at the word – and being tucked in.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m being paid for working for the first time in twenty years.’

  ‘Marriage isn’t about being paid.’

  ‘No. It isn’t.’

  Rumours had reached her through the boys and the occasional refugee from Red Plains she ran into in Rockhampton. She refused to speak of these rumours to Fred. She kept tabs, but indifferently.

  Fred would drive back to Drylands each weekend poised on the edge of an emotional cliff. Norma was gone yet after-yarns lingered.

  Two months later Johnnie Cunneen rose early to begin his bike ride in to work at the Red Plains garage. As he went out the front door, the house slumbering behind him, he saw a neat bassinet on the verandah and in it, tucked warmly under rugs, a sleeping baby. In a carrier bag alongside was a supply of feeding bottles and napkins. The baby whimpered once or twice and went back to sleep. There was a note pinned to its bunny rug. Dear Fred, the note said, this is yours. It was signed Norma.

  ‘Hey Dad!’ Johnnie cried, sprinting inside. ‘Hey Dad! There’s something here for you!’

  Fred stumbled from his bed through the intricacies of bedding and bad dreams to find the nightmare complete on the verandah. A hundred metres away he could see his eldest son opening the first of the paddock gates.

  ‘Oh God!’ he cried aloud. ‘God!’

  He crumpled Norma’s note, picked up the bassinet and carrier bag and took them out to his car. He could not fight the impulse to look into the bassinet, and found the crumpled rose-leaf face of the baby shuttered in sleep. His child. His. ‘Oh God,’ he whispered again.

  Then he went back into the house and ruffled the dreams of his kids by yelling that they’d have to get their own breakfasts. Something urgent had come up at work. He’d be back as soon as he could to get them to school.

  Before the first sleepy acknowledgement he was gone and in his car, savaging the miles between him and the Red Plains hospital, mentally running through a series of plausible lies, of explanations while he drove. He wondered about the sex of the baby but rammed the wonderings back. He had always wanted a daughter, a biddable property, a hostage to old age. He groaned aloud as he drove.

  A nurse at reception seemed bewildered when he handed the bassinet across.

  ‘I saw this car pull out from the shoulder,’ he tried to explain. Words seemed incomplete. ‘As I was driving in and when I reached the spot… well… here this was.’

  The nurse was looking at him in a disbelieving way, as if she were trying to construe the situation. She asked if he had managed to get the car’s number. No, he told her. It was all so sudden. The baby howled between them. ‘Was there no message?’ the nurse persisted. ‘Nothing?’

  Another, older, woman had come along the corridor and joined them and was making clucking noises over the bassinet. Fred felt his mind breaking apart. He thought longingly of the gloom and the comfort of the confessional.

  ‘Nothing,’ Fred said. ‘There was nothing. Look, I really have to get going. I’m sorry I can’t give you any more information.’ His hands were shaking and he kept them in his pockets. He listened to his heart speed up.

  He was going to add further words, platitudes like ‘You’ll handle this?’ or ‘I can leave this safely with you?’ but thought better of it, nodded in a business-like manner and turned away to his car.

  ‘Just one moment, Mr Cunneen,’ called the nurse, who knew him at least by sight. But h
e ignored her and drove off, hands unsteady on the wheel.

  In his office later that morning he found himself unable to concentrate on anything. He was ill from strong coffee. The hospital had rung asking for more details. He couldn’t bear the curious timbre in his secretary’s voice as she switched him through. He had been glossily abrupt. The police sergeant rang, trying a man-to-man approach, and had his head snapped off.

  He went to a small café in the Red Plains mall for lunch and found himself throwing up after the first bite at a sandwich. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he almost prayed as he mopped messily at tabletop and clothes. Torn every which way he tried to calm himself with a righteous condemnation of Norma. How could she abandon…? Leave me holding the…? A mother’s duty… Who else? She must be suffering post-natal… He couldn’t cope with the granite of facts. The child was his. His. He tried blinking moral responsibility away. It was hers. Hers. It was always the woman’s.

  He went to the post office and found a pay phone and dialled Lannie’s work number.

  ‘Look, Fred,’ she said. ‘I’m really busy now. Can’t it wait?’

  ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ He yearned for confession and absolution. He was being eaten up.

  ‘Tell me later,’ Lannie said. ‘I really must go.’

  The line was bad and he could only catch every second word. He thought it was his wife speaking but she had already hung up and he realised it was himself stammering and dribbling his guilt into a dead line. He kept clinging to the phone like a drowner, leaning giddily against the wall of the phone box.

  Meanwhile Norma was blindly driving her own desperation away, sustained by the aggrievement of the misused and the rancour of revenge. She had no money, no job, no friends. Out to the coast she drove, unthinkingly, down past Gladstone, Gin Gin, Childers. Past Bauple, Gunalda, Gympie. Not noticing the scenery, the cars, caravans, tour buses, hauler trucks, unaware even of the weather, to lose herself in Brisbane.

  And then?

  MEANWHILE…

  Yes, stories were formed with words, spoken or written – even pictures, she argued inwardly, presuppose words. The oral tale-teller had an extra form of punctuation: mime, the smile, the raised hand, the frown, the tantalising pause.

  But she noticed new trends on the flat page. The simple sentence (forget the old compound and complex) was slathered everywhere with its subject/verb/object, until the sensuous seeking mind reeled back from the dum dum dum of the rhythm – if it were that! – and the trendy immediacy of present tense. A reader recovered after doses of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, even (Lawd a mercy!) Scott, followed by a brandy chaser of Nabokov or Cheever.

  She’d been reading Marshall McLuhan and his theories on the printed word leading to the separation of the senses, and how radio and television, in fact all the electronic interplay of image and sound, would return man’s sensory reactions to the pre-print era of tactile and auditory response. It was difficult to tell whether he was for or against this development. Development or regression? Which? Reply! Reply! Or was he merely a sardonic observer of doom? That. It had to be that.

  She reread the accusation that print led to ‘the separation of the senses, of function, of operations, of states emotional and political…’ Hold it, Marshall baby! You know you’re wrong.

  Out there, yes, out there all over the wide brown land, was a new generation of kids with telly niblets shoved into their mental gobs from the moment they could sit up in a playpen and gawk at a screen, starved of those tactile experiences with paper, the smell of printer’s ink, the magic discovery that black symbols on white spelled out pleasures of other distances.

  It… was… frightening.

  Even now, ten minutes before closing time, the percussive clangour from the pub’s television rocked her flat, made the air shudder with a fogged disturbance that seemed to have the walls in a bear-hug and be shaking them from side to side. A sour trumpet serenading a commercial rose above the endless repetitive bass thump, like a cry from her own throat.

  It was hopeless trying to squeeze ideas out during that racket. She made herself more tea and jammed the window tight against noise that still seeped in like conscience.

  There was a sameness about country folk and a different sameness about those in the city. She thought about that, about the group-herding that led to a kind of social monotony, those claptrap patterns in which everyone believed, articles of faith abnegating the right to individual difference: city folk were fast movers and talkers, their eyes beady for the main chance, their palms itching for quick profit. It was the done thing to denigrate them as go-getters, insensitive to others. Similar stereotyped myths attached out back: country people were supposed to be slow-moving, open-hearted, slow-thinking, maybe, but hey, salt of the earth! And looking the same, those old bushies, under their akubras, eyes narrowed from squinting against sun and peering uselessly for rain. Laconic. Using disaster for punch-lines. Given to the tall yarn – an oblique humour. Country folk were all, all the same people.

  Townies. Bushies. For a long time they’d been like different races but now, as the world shrank, they were being driven uneasily together by the dominating culture of the screen.

  Perhaps that talk about the global village was doom-fully right.

  The racket from the pub stopped. Janet opened the verandah window. There were voices out in the street now, the banging of car and truck doors and the hacking coughs of old engines revving up. She watched the lights go out downstairs and another sad single light come on in one of the upstairs rooms. Clem was coping without Joss. But was he liking it here any better than she was? The grind of the expected. The din pulverised each day.

  If only those drinkers would pick up a damn book and savour the stretch of simile, the rock-shock of metaphor.

  ‘The hell with the tactile and auditory!’ she said aloud, listening to a pub late-leaver break wind and begin retching in the street below. What about an intellectual response, Marshall, huh? What about a stretch of the imagination? Those old brain cells forming their own pictures?

  Janet went back to her bedroom and tucked herself in with her small radio plugged to her ears, twiddling the dial until she found the faintest echo of an FM wavelength working its way through a programme of Borodin. The main street and raucousness of the Lizard’s patrons became part of an uneasy slumber that was ruptured by the sound of a body tripping and falling on her back stairs.

  She got up and opened the landing door cautiously, squinting blindly into the dark well that led to the yard behind the newsagency. Then she flashed her torch on steps, walls, and the moving shadow created by the ground-floor door swinging uneasily on its hinges. She flicked on the outside light to the yard and went down into the hot night and found the lock had been damaged, the doorknob itself hanging limp like a broken fist. The yard yawned empty.

  She went through to the shop. The books she never sold were mute on their racks, the pawed-over magazines lay in the piles she had neatened before closing time, the unsold papers were bundled ready to go back on the morning truck to Red Plains. Nothing had been disturbed. Cards, toys, stationery – untouched. She went over to the cash register. Its bland face ignored her. She opened drawers. Petty cash lay unwanted.

  Is it me they’re after?

  Why?

  Did they suspect she was slandering the town?

  There had been those continuing offhand questions over the last couple of months: What you do up there all the time, love? Must get you down. Hear you tapping away. Writing a book, eh?

  Friends, she would reply. Writing to friends. Rellies. The tax. And grin amiably.

  But she wasn’t writing a book about them. She was writing about what could be about them. The possibilities of them. Fiction, she guessed, amplified the ‘what ifs?’ of everything. She could look out her window at the main street and think, What if this should happen, or that? She was making the players act beyond the boundaries of what she knew and what could be, moving them centre stage or back
into the wings, urging them to preposterous solos in empty halls, the audience gone, the orchestra packed up, discarded tickets chattering in the small dust-winds along the footpath. She was the constant among variables.

  She went to the back door and slipped the bolt she had forgotten before going to bed. The lock could be fixed – today, she realised, looking at her three o’clock watch. But that wasn’t enough, she told herself with an admonishing ‘Was it?’ Time to go, she decided, boiling up water for a quick fix of caffeine. After all this time.

  A five-year bite. Five years of not quite making it. Add on those years spent with Ted on the farm not quite making it. It was time to go.

  But where? That was the problem. She could sell at a loss, lose the few friends she had made during that decade and vanish to some undisturbed hamlet by the sea. If there were any left.

  The town was changing. Groups of teenagers hung around till nearly midnight skateboarding along the brief strip of bitumen. Last month a brick had been put through her window and that of the sad haberdashery store run by Lily Barnes. Two elderly pensioners had been mugged in their own homes. The nearest police station at Red Plains took its time sending someone out to investigate complaints. What a town! she thought. And once I loved it. The council had moved Benny Shoforth on and, every now and again, Sergeant Dorgan came out and harried the fringers from farther west who camped down by the creek when their own fishing-holes vanished in the dry. The fringers moved and returned with the persistence of yoyos until Dorgan threatened them with a quick run to the lock-up.

  Farmers were selling up, distraught by lack of water, dying stock and impossible debts. One couple had been forcibly removed by the bailiff, the bank hovering ogre-faced behind the whole procedure while kids howled and the mother wept and the cheap furniture on time-payment was dumped outside. They had got into their beat-up car and rattled away along the gravel roads until their petrol ran out. Where were they now? Janet couldn’t bear to think, remembering the cruel television coverage that stripped them naked.