Drylands

by Thea Astley

  ‘Now look at this.’ He puts out a finger and smears the paint. ‘Don’t think you got it right, Joss. Don’t think you really got the talent. Well, not this sorta talent.’ He turns to look back at me and his grin isn’t a grin. It’s a flesh stretch without mirth, it’s a slit in a cavern. ‘Think we’d better improve it some.’ I watch while he unzips his fly and drags out his dick and pisses on the painting. He turns around when he’s finished, waggles his penis before tucking it away and smiles with the fake pride of some gallery director. ‘Looks better already!’ Clutch can hardly stand for his belching cackles.

  Forget the easel, the paints, the camp stool.

  I dart into the car, fast, slippery, lock the door and switch on the motor, revving savagely before swinging round to belt off, bumping and bouncing, along the track to the main road. Clutch gives me the finger. In the rear-vision mirror I see them, still stupid with guffaws, saunter back to their four-wheel and start after me.

  It’s thirty kilometres to town and only a few homesteads between here and Drylands. I drive in dry panic, the car skidding on loose gravel and kicking up such quantities of bulldust I’m hoping it wrecks their vision, chokes their venom.

  At the turn-off they’re behind me, horn blasting, heads stuck out the windows, choking on horse-laughs. They nudge my car with their bull-bar as I change down for the turn, once, twice, before I can get ahead out on the main road. Whooping and yowling they overtake and I can hear the screech of their tapedeck as their van blasts past, swings in front and deliberately slows.

  My hands shake on the wheel. I’m sick. I want to vomit. I jerk the steering hard right in an attempt to get past and hear the hideous grind and scrape of car bodies before I manage to pull out past them. Nightmare. Nightmare in broad daylight. I drive almost blindly with their four-wheel chasing, overtaking then slowing, forcing me again and again to dodge the menacing rump of their van. They could stop me in moments if they wanted, but it’s greater fun for them this way – bastards! scrots! – the constant harassing and skimming inches apart, their cartoon faces twisted with their own brand of hilarity and triumph as they howl at me through the windows while I struggle to keep control of my car on the loose surface.

  Eleven kilometres. Thirteen.

  They won’t let up. Their spite has no end.

  I’m nearing the outer fringes of Drylands and soon there’ll be the sight of houses set back on their runs. I wonder if I should swing into one of those long driveways and risk someone being at home. Too late! Already I’ve swept past the open white stock gates of Briceland’s, past the entrance to the abandoned farm of old Jim Randler, and then those brief grabs of haven are gone. For the last few minutes Clutch and Ray have let me pull ahead. A spurious safety gap. I watch in the mirror as their van accelerates and comes rushing towards me, not to pass but to press me in and in towards the shoulder and the gutter of a dried-out creek. Their horn is blasting non-stop. Closer now, and they slam the side of the car, swing out, slam again. The impact knocks my hands from the wheel. I sense the car skid on gravel, grab, screech and lose it. Their van slams into me once more and vanishes down the road in dust as my car pauses on the bank edge like a dancer, trembles, pirouettes, then topples sideways.

  ‘This is it!’ I sobbed on Clem’s shoulder that night. ‘This is absolutely it!’

  Win Briceland driving into Red Plains for a hair appointment had seen the wrecked car, stopped for a quick inspection, and a kilometre or so further on had overtaken me as I limped my bruises towards town. ‘God!’ she had cried, observing my blood-smeared face. ‘What on earth?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I told her. ‘Please. Just get me back to the Lizard.’

  I went in the back way and up the yard stairs, ran a bath and soaked for an hour.

  Clem came tapping on the door and poked his head round. His smoky eyes were full of concern. He had aged in that time.

  ‘Go away,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘I mean it.’ I turned the taps on full.

  Clem backed away in gusts of steam and closed the door. I imagine he handled the bar on his own that afternoon. At night Franzi took over and Clem left the handling to him.

  Clem sat on the edge of the bed, patted my hand then hugged me. He had heard the whole story. He talked about police, prosecution, taking over retribution himself, a sole vigilante.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It would only make it worse. Those bastards won’t let it rest. They’re bullies and bullying’s their kick. I think I should go away for a while. I don’t want to stay in a town where I have to keep looking over my shoulder.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘There’s Mother. But really there’s no room for me in that microscopic flat. Look, Clem, I’ll head to the coast and hunt for a job and maybe find some place more suitable than this.’ My gesturing hands took in not only the pub but the whole of Drylands, its four shops, post office, school and eighty houses. ‘This.’ The repeated word hissed from my lips and Clem looked doubtful because of his strange attachment.

  ‘Another year, honey. If you could stick it out another year. We’ll sell up and go south, north, wherever. Find something different. A small motel, café. That’s all I know, Joss.’

  Clem does the books each night. Sometimes he brings them up to our room and gives me a rundown on profit and loss and I’m reminded of a couple I saw last month in the Red Plains coffee shop. They were at the next table and he spent all coffee-time verbally working through the parts of his car with concentration on the function of the battery. He produced a pamphlet and read that to her. Endlessly. His girlfriend smoked and examined space with the look of someone dead. I have never seen such boredom. He was boring me. In the end, jealous of her ability to close off and my inability to do anything except be hammered by differentials and torque and gear failures, to say nothing of that refrain about the battery like a litanic ora pro nobis, I got up and took my coffee to the far end of the room and hid behind a potted plant.

  I was sniggering with nerves.

  Did she leave him? Will I leave Clem?

  Truce time.

  We reach an understanding.

  I love Clem. I think he loves me in between pauses.

  Six more months, he has said. Then he’ll put the Lizard up for sale. Hey! Violins in the wings! Forget it, Clem, I tell him. There’ll be other places just as… as… what’s the word? Meaningful? Who knows? We might, I suggest slyly, even try a run back to Saint Augustine to catch our breath.

  I’m gone within the week.

  I find work behind the reception desk of another hotel. I wave certificates of suitability before my employers and announce firmly that I will not work in the bar. I can do amusing things in the kitchen, I can clean, make beds, do anything on a computer. But I will not work in a bar. Okay, the manager says soothingly, we won’t ask for that. I can tell by the tinsel smile on his face he’s planning a housekeeper-useful who’ll be able to be flung into any staff emergency. For a cut off my salary they arrange a room at the back of the building. It’s an old place, heritage stuff, favoured by regulars. Its two storeys are laced with verandahs and have a view of the river.

  Clem sits outside my nine-by-ten sleeping nook and holds my hand. He’s trembling and suddenly I want to cry.

  ‘Oh Clem,’ I plead. ‘Hurry up and sell the damn place. Or lease it. Or something.’

  ‘Will do, honey,’ he says, suddenly chipper. Is he glad I’m gone? ‘Will do. I’ll be out to see you when I can. And you know, you just hop in that old car of yours when it’s patched up – I’ll get Franzi to run it over – and come back any time.’

  Even on the verandah upstairs we can hear the roar of the television from the front bar. Clem nods towards the untranslatable whump.

  ‘Nothing’s much changed, has it?’

  ‘This is temporary. This is desperation stuff.’

  ‘Ah well, baby.’ He grins. ‘Look around. Let me know.’


  He’s right, of course. Nothing much has changed. I’m gone from here, too, within the month and working at a plant nursery on the Emu Park road.

  I like the work. I learn to graft, to marcotte. The mosquitoes are killers. I’m living in a dying beach shack with sea-sound nosing at the louvres. Because the place is only just standing, the rent is low. At night I sweat under a sheet and miss the comfort of Clem’s body. I’m lonely lonely lonely.

  Although there are six others employed at the nursery the days are too crammed with work for meaningful – huh! – friendships to develop. Once or twice I catch the bus into Rockhampton and treat myself to the local amateur dramatic society’s offerings. I ponder joining as a backstage runabout. I think of it and think of it and chuck the notion aside with my failed aspirations as backlands artist, and late one Sunday as I oil my aching limbs from a week of lugging compost and topsoil, Franzi Massig turns up with my car.

  I don’t know about Franzi. All sorts of stories were circulating in Drylands over the last couple of months before I left. He’s a phoney. He’s on the run. He’s wanted for a scam down south. I don’t believe these yarns. I do believe them.

  We stand outside the sagging picket fence held up by westringia bushes and stare at the sea.

  ‘How are you making out?’ he asks.

  Okay, I tell him.

  The car looks even more battered than I feel.

  ‘It drives okay,’ Franzi says, interpreting my glance. His blond hair is thinning. He keeps rubbing one side of his nose with a twitchy finger.

  ‘Come on in,’ I say. ‘I’ll make you a cuppa.’

  I look at the car once more, peer in at its split upholstery, its grimy dashboard, the stuffed ashtray. There’s a bag on the back seat. I don’t mention the bag.

  I’m lonely, I think I’ve mentioned. Achingly bone-lonely. It’s really something to have someone sitting across from me in this daggy kitchen, swapping gossip, good- and bad-mouthing Drylands.

  Later we go to bed.

  ‘It’s just sex,’ Franzi says, halfway through, as it were.

  ‘It’s loneliness,’ I say.

  Afterwards we walk outside and watch the sea grow black.

  ‘How are you getting back?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not going back. I’ve left. I’m going to vanish somewhere else.’

  ‘Vanish?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘Take the car. I hate the damn thing, anyway, ever since. I’ve been managing with bus and bicycle. There’ll be another car one of these days even more beat-up.’

  Franzi turns to look at me. I can’t pick out the blue of those disillusioned eyes.

  ‘Go on!’ I urge. ‘It reminds me too much of what happened. Anyway, it’s a giveaway. If those two bastards ever come to the coast it’s like an announcement of my whereabouts. I’ve got this feeling they’re not finished with me.’

  ‘Nothing’s ever finished. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, take it from me. Nothing. It goes on and on.’

  He walks over to the car and pats its roof in a kindly way.

  ‘What have you done with your van?’ I ask, tentatively. I don’t want to seem inquisitorial, don’t want to sound as if I’m back-tracking on my offer.

  ‘Left it. Left everything. Have you noticed, Joss, how the whole little town is emptying, pouring itself out like water into sand. Soon…’

  He doesn’t finish his sentence but opens the door of the car and slides in behind the wheel.

  ‘Thanks.’ He looks up as I stand there, dark against the dark sea. ‘I’ll remember this.’

  There’s no way to express the crushing of emptiness. Emptiness puts its arms about you and gives a Judas embrace and when you move to return the pressure, to lay your head against warmth, there’s nothing there. You fall sideways.

  For a month or two, I was so busy and so exhausted from working at the nursery, I would drop asleep instantly to the steady sea-snore and wake with limbs protesting against further abuse. I worked like an automaton, quick, accurate, unslacking. My boss, an elderly elf with a remarkable fluffiness of hair, noted approvingly. I received a salary rise. I bought a secondhand car.

  ‘Where’s the old one?’ Clem asked on one of his monthly duty visits.

  ‘I gave it away.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It was too much of a reminder.’

  Clem nodded. He was a wise man. He probed no deeper.

  Clem visits when he can. Usually he starts driving at five on Sunday morning and reaches here about nine to fall red-eyed and exhausted on my bed and sleep till noon. Recovery takes us out for walks along the beach, tea and pikelets in a rundown caff and wolfings of talk.

  Drylands is dying in its bootstraps, he tells me, merely underscoring what Franzi said. Paddy Locke has put her house up for sale and is thinking of going north. The schoolhouse was burnt down the week before and the kids are being bussed into Red Plains. There’s talk that it won’t be rebuilt. But we are circling the centre of my fear, my discontent, simply sifting words.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They?’ As if Clem doesn’t know. I look at him and am conscious of an ache and an absence. His sandy hair is streaked with grey. The lines running from the wings of his nose towards his jawline have deepened. The insistent bone of his body makes a voiceless cry for my concern and there’s a hesitancy about him that was never there before.

  ‘Those two.’

  Clem’s mouth tightens into a line like twine. ‘I’ve banned them from the pub. I won’t serve them. If they want a drink they have to go into Red Plains.’

  Ray works out of town a good thirty kilometres on a sheep run owned by the local member. There’s lots of clout in that, lots of protection. He fences, handles the feed truck in the dry, checks the pumps at the clogging dams and is a general handyman. His boss likes him, thinks he’s a fine upstanding young man. Any day now, he could be standing for preselection, I suggest sourly. Clem laughs.

  Clutch, he assures me, is still working late shifts at the railway station. (That cretinous cackle!) ‘I don’t think,’ Clem decides, ‘that he’s the full quid, as you guys say.’

  ‘They’re dangerous.’

  ‘I guess so. I guess so. But what to do, huh? What the hell to do? Okay, Joss, I’ll tell you. Since they’ve been barred, the pub’s been broken into twice. The front windows have been smashed. The upstairs rooms trashed – what there is to trash – while I’ve been downstairs working. I’ve talked to the real estate man in Red Plains but he reckons the market is so slow I’ll have to give the place away. Pay someone to take it, he advises with his fat real estate agent’s laugh.’

  ‘Then give it! Pay them!’

  Clem pats my hand in a there-there manner. ‘We’ll see.’

  Hatred is an energiser. It must be what sends Clutch and Ray sniffing me out.

  A week after Clem’s latest visit Mr McPhee, the kindly elf, tells me someone has rung and asked if there is a Joss working at the place. My complacency is ruptured.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He didn’t give a name.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ Mr McPhee says, stroking a croton. ‘But he hung up at that point.’ He shifts his attention from the croton and fusses round the base of a fatsia. ‘Is something the matter?’ He moves on to a bank of Brazilian pepper trees and makes tutting sounds. ‘Aphids. I think we need a little white oil.’

  Yes, I tell him. Something is the matter. I give a sketch. The sketch reminds me of my last artistic endeavours and I stop mid-sentence.

  ‘Go on, dear,’ he prods gently. He’s discovered sooty mould as well.

  I go on. He’s shocked in his elfish way.

  That afternoon, as I am about to head out the gates, I see Clutch’s four-wheel parked across the road. I run back through the nursery nudging pots aside, tripping on bags of fertiliser, on hose lines, and up to the McPhees’ house which adjo
ins the nursery. While Mrs McPhee wrestles with a batch of biscuits, I pant out my fears.

  ‘Give me your car keys, dear,’ says motherly Mrs McPhee who is a clone of her husband. ‘I’ll bring your car round and park it here. I take it you don’t want them to know which car is yours. It’s like a thriller, isn’t it, love?’ She continues calmly dusting biscuits with icing-sugar.

  I know I should say it’s too much bother. I know I shouldn’t involve such kindly old people, but I hand her the keys and a few minutes later she has parked my car in a shed behind the house, calmed me with tea and shown me how to drive off via a side gate on the property.

  That night I cower in a darkened house in the clamour of silence. My antennae tell me something is wrong. My skin crawls. The houses on either side are weekenders rarely used. Their unlighted windows stare blankly at the sea, as do mine. I’m afraid to sleep, and shuffle round in the dark wondering if I should risk going out to the car and driving off. I’ve parked its giveaway presence one street back where a laneway leads down between the houses to the ocean-front.

  Barricaded. I know they know. I know. Any of the other workers could have told them where I live.

  The flimsy door-bolts back and front don’t reassure.

  I have no phone. The poverty trap!

  I’m afraid to leave, afraid to stay. I even smile in the dark, as my body freezes with indecision.

  But what I’m waiting for comes. Ten o’clock. Eleven. Rat scratchings at the front stir me from half-doze to catch an erratic arc of torch-flash switched suddenly off, and, louder than the sea, louder than its high-tide wallowings, the breathing of bodies on the other side of the hollow wood.

  ‘Joss!’ comes behind the whisper. ‘Hey, Joss! Open up. We know you’re there!’

  I step back, softly, softly, moving towards the narrow hallway and the kitchen. One foot at a time through the purple air. I knock a pan from the kitchen table and the clangour anchors me, pins me in the kitchen as wacky laughter breaks out beyond my walls, and there’s a cousin crash of glass when the first rock shatters the louvres. Sea air rushes down the hallway. My feet seem stuck on linoleum. I can hear a hand reached round fumbling for the front door-bolt. Move!