Drylands

by Thea Astley

  Suddenly she found herself aching for the sea.

  ALMOST THERE, ALMOST HOME

  ‘What do you really think of Alban Berg?’ the woman in the ladies’ lounge asks as she sips her brandy and dry.

  Listen, sweetie, I want to say but don’t, I’ve had it up to here with cricket scores, lousy wickets, groin injuries, suss referees’ decisions, and I don’t give a shit about anything except wishing the sporting blah would stop stop stop. I’m not unreasonable – remember this is a female point of view – but I do think this country is round the bend over jumping and kicking and running and swimming and smashing into people all in the name of winning. It isn’t about sport any more. It’s about power. And money. And politics. And it’s boring. My God, it’s boring.

  And there’s those bimbo shows that come with it, the antipasto, the cheer squads looking as if they’re on leave from some strip joint in the seedier part of the Valley. I mean, well, they don’t seem to be able to run any games at all without a dash of sex and a lashing of grog. All those hunks in the change-room after matches squirting each other with champers, a kind of dick substitute. God! How it must excite the barflies envious of a 750ml bladder.

  Christ!

  I stop wiping over the plastic surface of the next table and look at her. ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind, dear. The composer.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  I’m at snapping point, what with the bloody cricket going on and on and on in the main bar and the men reaching the nasty-drunk stage and Clem refusing to lower the sound.

  ‘They like it. They don’t want to miss an over. Only another hour to go, Joss. Be a love and bear with it.’

  Suddenly I find myself sagging down at a table and staring at Paddy Locke enjoying her solitary glass, and I give her a smile so fragile it has a further dampening effect on the whole gloomy room with its green wall-paint, deep brown varnish trim and pictures of forgotten show bullocks.

  Above the cane planter and its plastic ferns is a blown-up sepia photograph of the Rock, taken circa 1910, before the town was fully formed. (You can see the silverfish lunching behind glass.) There was an economic boom for a while. Now the town’s returning to its foetal stage and Clem refuses to see it.

  There are no other customers in the ladies’ lounge. The few women who drink at the Lizard stay in the outer bar with husbands or boyfriends. I can’t blame Paddy Locke for requiring me to walk those extra metres to serve her. She’s sheltering from sports fallout.

  ‘It’s im-bloody-possible in there,’ I say. The old tmesis. I wonder if Paddy Locke knows the term. I bet she does, if she knows the name of some composer no one has ever heard of.

  Paddy Locke is another dimension in this town. A kind of failed intellectual. She’s tried for years to interest the ladies – I have to use that word – in culture. (Forget the blokes.) Music groups, drama groups, reading groups. Brief flutters of interest till every venture died its natural death. Why bother? Why try?

  That’s what I’m afraid of – apathy. I tell Clem I must get out before it takes over and I’m in there with the rest, glued to a screen, tossing back liquor anodynes and roaring with the punters as some bullneck from the Broncos makes it for a try.

  Why am I here?

  I did all the usual things for a Brisbane city girl: private school (Mother: ‘You meet a nicer type of person.’ I didn’t), and then the old humanities degree that was ultimately useless as far as putting a meal on the table. At least I could read those unemployment charts.

  In a bold sideways move I enrolled in a hospitality course and learned the elements of conning visitors to our shores, followed by an additional semester in a Tafe cooking class. Exhausted by all this but armed, I felt, as well, I did the next orthodox thing and went overseas to backpack my way through the kitchens of Europe. A mistake. It was hard to get a job, even of the most menial kind, and before the money ran out I decided to come back via the States and bus my way from New York to the West Coast.

  Clem, my husband, Clem of the Legless Lizard, is a Yank. Actually, that’s a misnomer for a Deep South gentleman like Clem whose daddy owned a café just off Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

  Fatigue made me decide to stop for a while in that schmoozy town. I found a cheap room in a back street, kept counting the last of my travellers cheques, and wandered about watching the pavement artists in front of the cathedral trying to con all the visitors from Nebraska and Michigan who were down south hunting for dat ole watermelon banjo-pluckin darkie stuff and finding they were watching blue rinsers and retirement paunches from Iowa and Montana who’d come south for dat ole watermelon banjo-pluckin…

  Every day I went round to Vermillion’s to eat because the food was good. I went for the cheapest dishes. I ate chicken gumbo till it came out my ears and breakfasted each day on corn on the cob. After four days they got to know me. I felt they were waiting for me to turn up. They had a lot of regulars. ‘You’re late, folks,’ Clem would chide an elderly couple who always arrived about the same time as I did. ‘Why don’t y’all find some other place, huh?’ And the husband would grin and snap back, ‘We caint! We promised ourselves we’d eat bad,’ and Clem would laugh and give them the best table in the room and speed back to the kitchen.

  Clem was helping his daddy – I have to say daddy, they all do – run the place. Clem was a Vietnam vet, a tall handsome fellow with what I can only describe as the mellowest of manners.

  ‘Brisbane,’ he said when I outlined my origins. ‘Hey, I know Brisbane. Spent my last leave there. It’s a great little town!’

  That’s one nice thing about Americans. They’re so polite they’ll lie about almost anything. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. So we swapped stories, became friendly, and the next time I went in Clem tore up my check and said, ‘On the house.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I told him after three weeks. ‘I’m missing home. And I’m broke.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘why don’t we get married?’

  That gave me pause. Clem was aeons older. Mid-forties. He’d done it once and his wife had vanished with a boatie working the Florida Keys. He was what one might call a happily divorced man.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Let’s both go home, huh? Daddy’s pulling out of here at the end of the year. He’s nearly seventy-five and I guess you could say he’s had it.’

  ‘But doesn’t he want you to keep the place going?’

  ‘I think he’s kinda lost heart since Mumma died. You know how it is.’

  We stared at each other for one of those long buzzing silences.

  ‘Listen,’ Clem said again. ‘We get on fine. I’d like to see that wide brown land of yours, down under, like you folks say. If it doesn’t work out, why, honey, we’ll have a great parting, two cars with ribbons going in opposite directions as fast as they damn well can from each other, with cards on the back saying “Just Divorced” and a zillion people cheering and throwing confetti. How about it?’

  He made me laugh. That’s what I liked, like, about Clem. He can always make me laugh.

  Well!

  I rang Mother in her Gold Coast hideout.

  ‘I’m getting married,’ I said.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said, and hung up. She’d had a bad time with Father.

  Elderly Mr Vermillion was sweetness itself, grey drooping moustaches like a replay of William Faulkner. He threw a wild wedding party for us that included every regular who’d been going to the café for years. There were a few petty crims as well, a couple of girls working from a house off Canal Street and who, I guess, had comforted Clem with freebies over the years. Who was I to object?

  The café was sold within a month and Clem and I set off to Saint Augustine to help move his daddy in with his younger widowed sister who lived in one of those pretty white clapboard houses near the sea. I liked it there too. I could have stayed. But Clem was adamant in his madness to get away, as obsessed as I had been to get there.

  Travelli
ng is a delusion.

  ‘We can buy a little hotel. Make it into really something.’

  I kept my counsel. He didn’t know about our back-country pubs. Now in the aridity of dust and dying sheep I comfort myself with small sea-winds coming off the Gulf Coast and colder winds from the Atlantic and tree-lined streets in that old Spanish settlement, drowsy in spring with magnolia and live oaks and green lawns and timber decorations on the dormers and the turret icing-sugar of the houses. Two places mixed up in my heart, New Orleans and Saint Augustine.

  Clem was as drunk with newness in my country as I had been in his. Outback, he kept saying. I want to see the outback.

  Properties were cheaper there than in the glitz of Brisbane or any of the coastal towns. We drove west and west and north and south of western points to settle finally on this rundown six-bedroom wreck in Drylands.

  ‘No lease, honey.’ Clem was jubilant. ‘I can buy the thing outright and do it up. Could need to borrow for that.’

  We met locals. We dealt with councillors and a slippery lawyer from Red Plains. The laconic quality of language and business dealings drew only cries of pleasure from Clem.

  ‘I can’t believe this stuff!’ he would say. ‘Too much!’

  There followed weeks of scraping, painting, scouring. Later Clem had a satellite dish erected on the pub roof to trap every nuance of every game played in the whole goddam country. We employed casual help for the bar until Clem found a newcomer, Franzi Massig, who had a small acreage out of town. He was willing to act as yardman, bar-help and general dogsbody.

  No one used the guest-rooms except a teacher at the local primary school who stayed for a month because he couldn’t find cheap enough accommodation in Red Plains, and a few reps travelling through when the Red Plains motel was full.

  ‘This isn’t a paying proposition,’ I suggested to Clem after eight months.

  ‘The bar is.’ Clem ran slender fingers through his hair. ‘You Aussies are certainly great drinkers.’

  I wouldn’t argue that one. But the town! It wasn’t really a town. It was more a hesitation in the road. There was a post office with a petrol pump outside that Mrs Friske manned in between sorting mail and handling dole cheques. There was a tiny café, a haberdashery store that sold next to nothing but was there, I guess, for the look of it and to give Lily Barnes an identity. Every now and again I’d pop in to buy a scarf or hanky or maybe a card of buttons, not because I needed them but to offer Lily a sense of purpose along with a yap about the weather.

  Across the road from the pub was a newsagency and another fifty metres east was a hardware store with a convenience section of groceries and vegetables run by Mrs Councillor Briceland. Everything appeared to be running at a loss. Weekly a line of semi-utes, vans, beat-up trucks and dodgy cars exploded dust on the road to Red Plains to stock the larder. Only the properties south of here seemed to use our townlet with regularity, as if the extra thirty kilometres into Red Plains was too much after bumping in along unsurfaced tracks.

  ‘Counter dinners?’ Clem suggested in a moment of madness. His fingers did a little blues riff on the table. ‘Friday night buffet?’

  The dining-room was just off the ladies’ lounge and separated from the kitchen by swinging doors. Love those swinging doors! Clem had updated the kitchen but mainly for our own convenience and it was hardly equipped for commercial cooking.

  We tried dinners and failed all within a fortnight and the table covers were put away again, leaving only one corner set up for Clem and me who ate, it must be said, in a catch as catch can fashion.

  ‘Anyway,’ – I was looking for excuses – ‘we’d be taking custom from the caff. Can’t tread on commercial toes in a town this size.’

  But did we tread on each other’s?

  The spotted mirror in the upstairs bathroom we have not yet got round to refurbishing gives me back my morning face. A five-years-on face. My usually eager features are acquiring a look of dissatisfaction. I have begun blonding my hair. It doesn’t help! Clem’s optimism and strange exuberance in exile – I call it that – are beginning to wear me down. These days I feel I live in the basement of his interest.

  There’s a routine to the running of the Lizard. Clem and I both work the bar, Franzi cleans and helps out. I manage a counter lunch of sorts – after trying a few exotics like tapas and antipasto (total failure: ‘Hey, what’s this wog food, love?’), we’ve settled for sausage and mash, chops and mash, curry and mash. They go down a treat.

  Each day has its predictable contours.

  I have a once-a-year week with Mother at the Gold Coast. ‘I told you so,’ she says.

  I try making friends in the town. This is hard work. Paddy Locke looks at my desperation in an amused and friendly way. ‘I’ll think of something,’ she says and runs me off to a concert at the coast, a discussion group on the politics of persuasion (I ask you!), a pottery class, a painting class, a film discussion group with clips.

  Maybe I’ll think of something.

  And I have stopped working the bar at night.

  I have stopped because of the drunken overtures of two local hoons who made their move on me before they realised Clem was my husband. He blacked Ray Friske’s eye and bent Clutch Dallow’s nose when he observed them, one sottish evening, testing my resisting neckline. They still come to the Lizard but there’s a lingering resentment of both of us. ‘We was drunk, mate,’ Clutch said in a half-apology a week later. ‘Didn’t know she was your missus.’

  There’s a twenty-three-year gap between Clem’s age and mine, though I decide, as I gaze at my evening face, it narrows, it narrows.

  Five years of this town. Will there ever be a break? I ask myself, I ask Clem. Hang in there, honey-chile, he says abstractedly over breakfast, over snatched late coffee in our room before lights out. He does a Deep South drawl with elongated vowels. Hang in.

  Why?

  ‘Just a couple more years and we’ll break even and get the hell out, huh? Maybe take in some place up north along the Whitsundays. It’s crawling with tourists.’

  ‘But you actually like it here,’ I insist, I nag. ‘Admit it! You like the damn place. And you hate tourists.’

  There’s a masochistic streak to Clem that defies explanation.

  Clem waggles his gentlemanly skull, unwilling to confess that the whole idea of the flat western landscape has become his skin, his carapace, and that the people who move through his day are totally necessary to his own landscape with figures.

  My landscape with figures is penitential.

  Paddy Locke has talked me into watercolours as a soother. Clem smiles benignly. I insist on a mid-week day off to catch those shifting purples and blues of landscape that change even as you watch.

  So each Wednesday morning for the last month I’ve been driving out miles towards the Rock, my painting gear and a large flagon of water on the passenger seat with a packet of sandwiches. There’s an easel in the boot. I sing as I drive. These sun-struck days are a benediction.

  This last morning: the sun is at full tide, washing in swathes of hot bitter lemon air above the hill-lines and swinging the greys to deceptive, transparent varieties of lavender. The gidgee scrub has its own independence and blankets the foothills in an almost woolly grey. I sing as I drive and am still singing when I park the car in my usual spot, set up the easel, haul out my paints and camp stool and get to work. I’m no good at it and I don’t care. I try. But there is an – is alembic the word? – alembic quality about mixing colour and washing it over the surface of my paper, in seeing some crude shadow of what I’m attempting to capture float out eventually.

  The Rock has a minatory quality, juts its threat skywards, probing, investigating, and ignores me as I claw about its base, sing, mix paint and fail to get the essence. I ignore its threat, work for an hour or so, then nibble a sandwich and lean back against the side of the car, looking at my crude art and feeling good. And it’s then that a four-wheel drive roars into the clearing, does a dust-spra
wling wheelie and brakes a few metres away. Ray Friske and Clutch Dallow look out their respective windows and grin. They get out, slam the car doors and saunter over in their obscenely tight jeans.

  They don’t say anything. They stand, legs apart, and watch me. A small fear, like a warning wind, ripples in my chest. I put the half-eaten sandwich back in the bag and start to get up.

  ‘Don’t get up, Joss,’ Ray Friske says. ‘Not for us, love. We’re nothin. We just come to see how you’re gettin on. She’s a bit lonely out here.’

  Clutch grins. His wide mouth spreads open over almost perfect teeth. He’s only twenty-five or so but already has the beginnings of a drinker’s paunch.

  ‘Wotcher come all this way out for?’ Ray asks. ‘Tryin to get away from us, eh? Bit choosey, eh? You think she’s choosey, Clutch?’

  Clutch nods. ‘She don’t say much.’

  ‘Nah.’ Ray rubs a slow finger up and down the side of his nose. ‘Guess she don’t like us. Her old man don’t like us. You like us, Joss?’

  I can’t speak. The words that come are chewed up in my throat. The two of them move closer.

  ‘C’mon!’ Ray urges. ‘You tell us. Don’t you like us?’

  I force myself up, legs trembling, watery, limp, and make towards the paints, the easel. I’m going to shove everything in the car and leave. But an arm shoots out and Clutch has me by the wrist.

  ‘What’s the hurry, love? Not good enough for you? Not even for a bit of a yarn?’

  ‘Yair!’ Ray winks and nods. ‘You ain’t answered us. I don’t like people who don’t answer a civil question. Don’t you like us?’

  Clutch begins shaking my arm and I wrench it away.

  ‘She’s a stuck-up bit, all right! Thinks she’s something else. Why,’ he says, looking down, ‘I think she’s a bit scared. You scared of us, Joss, way out here, no husband around? Kinda asking for it, aren’t you?’

  They look at me. They grin. Ray shoves his hands in his pockets and saunters over to the easel.