Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

by Miller, Alex

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be Yepoon after all, does it?’ he went on, quite as if she had said nothing, but sounding extremely reasonable. ‘I daresay we’re all a bit sick of the place. Go somewhere interesting. Go out to one of the islands. With me not having a holiday we could just about afford that. And it would give Janet something to talk about at school. Anyway,’ he said airily, intending to leave, his business finished, ‘you decide.’

  There had not been one important occasion during their life together over the past fourteen years when she had not given way in order to accommodate either his or the children’s interests. She had always seen to it that his plans went ahead despite any clash of interests, not because she was inherently weak, but as a consequence of her original role on the Rankin place, before they were married, when his mother was still alive and dependent on people giving things up, while she herself was here just to help out for a while before going on to university in Brisbane—where she would begin her real life. There had never been any cause since then for her to make the huge effort that she knew would be needed to reclaim her freedom. Her solitary excursions into the bush had been her only demonstration to her family that she might be capable of wrenching herself away from them. But if these walks were a silent warning, it had gone totally unheeded. Neither Ward Rankin nor her children had ever noticed that she had given anything up. She had always been, as far as they could tell, just her normal self. They had known no other.

  Between her lungs and her stomach Ida felt a painful muscular contraction: at that moment she was determined to take what rightfully belonged to her, no matter what the consequences. She felt the reasonableness of this determination as if it were a response to the ‘impossible’ intruding thought that Rankin might somehow be got rid of. She would have no part of that, she was saying to herself, but she would do this. In this fashion her mind presented the case to her. It frightened her, for she could see no alternative, and she was not clear about the consequences—but she went ahead despite these misgivings.

  ‘I have decided,’ she said, and the unsteadiness in her voice made him pause in the doorway and turn and look at her. He was a little less engrossed with himself and began to consider what she was saying. ‘I just told you, Ward. I’m not going anywhere this year.’

  There was a moment of silence followed by the sound of his cigarette lighter flicking, and a deep indrawn breath. Then, in a tone of voice that was surprisingly even, he said, ‘One of us has to. Someone’s got to see Janet settled. We can’t send her off on her own to a strange school. I don’t care how keen she is to get away from us.’

  ‘You do it then,’ she said. Her heart was thumping and she felt herself tightening up inside to an almost unbearable degree. She was cautioning herself to stay calm, to just be strong and not get emotional; to be cold and hard and to out-face him.

  But it wasn’t working. Her feelings were barely contained on the edge of fierce expression and she feared that if he opposed her she would scream at him and lose control. She waited, gripping the huge half-pumpkin in one hand and the knife in the other, her back set squarely against him. His cigarette smoke wafted past her and out the window. She saw it drawn away by the draught, curling under the eaves.

  ‘Why this year?’ he asked. ‘Any other year and it wouldn’t matter one way or the other if neither of us went.’

  ‘You go,’ she said tightly. And then she had an idea; she would take it a step further. ‘And put Alistair in school too,’ she said. ‘There are a hundred good reasons for it. He’ll hate it here without Janet, and anyway I can’t teach him properly any more. He needs the company of other boys his own age.’

  The rightness of her proposal suddenly seemed overwhelming to her. She turned round and faced him, still clutching the half-pumpkin and the knife as if she meant to demonstrate the proof of her argument with them. ‘I know we can afford it.’ In her mind was an image in which all her problems were solved: the children gone, in school, home briefly now and then for holidays, and Ward shut up in his room, avoiding the work and the heat and being difficult only with himself—all he had ever seemed to want from life. ‘Don’t tell me we can’t afford it,’ she warned him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked sharply, puzzled, prepared to wait, but concerned too that something he did not quite understand was affecting Ida.

  Her mind went blank when he asked the question. Completely blank. She just stood there staring at him. The answer was too obvious. His pale grey eyes, she noticed, were narrowed, suspicious of her, mistrusting and mean. There was something about his mouth that was weak, like a spoilt child’s when it thinks it might not get its way at once—it wasn’t exactly a pout, but was a drawing up of his lips to one side, an uncontrollable show of how miserably selfish his real motives were.

  She felt disgusted by him. The nervous cramping of her diaphragm was beginning to produce nausea. She swallowed painfully, seeing in Ward’s expression that his anger was building quickly towards a violent outburst. She felt pressured and panicky and said quickly, ‘I’m taking up walking again.’ Her voice was distorted by the cramping pain and she realised her words must sound particularly odd. It was the only thing she could think to say that had anything to do with the subject, and it was, in part, the truth. And oddly she felt some relief at once for having said it. She saw, immediately, that it worried Ward rather more than she might have expected.

  She replaced the pumpkin and the knife carefully on the board. And with her back to him once again she waited for his reaction. The silence went on for so long that she suddenly had the creepy feeling that he had either slipped up close behind her, was only inches from her back intending some unpleasant action, or that he had gone from the room altogether.

  She whipped round. He hadn’t moved. He was still standing by the door holding his papers and his glasses. He was looking at her in a very peculiar way. He didn’t say anything, just turned round abruptly and left the kitchen. She leaned against the sink and waited while the cramping in her diaphragm was replaced by the delicious relief of her muscles slowly relaxing. She knew she had won. She didn’t know why, but she was certain he would not insist now on her going to the coast with the children. She could scarcely believe it. She felt quite light-headed and wanted to laugh loudly and share her good news with Robert. She had to get out of the house. She couldn’t stand the idea of going on with the preparation for dinner.

  She went down the back steps and along the path without having any particular destination in mind. ‘I won!’ she confided to them as she passed the two cattle dogs chained to their kennels. They followed her longingly with their eyes, dreaming of freedom. There was only one small worry: why had she won so easily? Her victory lacked something conclusive. Not everything had been said. There was something that she had not understood.

  She didn’t care. She had won, that was all that mattered. For the first time she had overcome one of his threatening violent outbursts. She remembered his mother warning her never to confront him when he was in such a mood, but to wait and humour him until she could get her way later by more guileful means—but she had never been very good at guile. She congratulated herself; she had got out and could do as she pleased. For some reason it was he who had been afraid to confront her. Whether by a fluke or not, her words had taken the fire out of him. There was a feeling of power in knowing this.

  She stopped on the path opposite the stockman’s quarters and looked towards the open door. Making up her mind she quickly crossed the open space and ducked under the shelter of the black bean tree. She stood just inside the doorway and looked around with an excited feeling of being both a trespasser and yet an intimate who would be welcomed. She was surprised it was so bare and dirty, with an unpleasant smell of stale clothes and sweat. The beds both looked like something for a cat to sleep on. It was impossible to tell which of them was actually in use as the blankets and mattresses of both were screwed up and stained and shabby. A pa
ir of his jeans was lying in the dirt on the floor as if they had fallen from the bed-end and, as she bent to pick them up, she saw under the bed a book lying open on its face, beside it a broken stockwhip. She pulled the book out, straightening the badly folded pages and cleaning the dust off it. She started when she recognised it as one of Ward’s—there was even a dedication on the front endpaper in brown ink, which she didn’t read. She opened the top drawer of the little chest of drawers and looked in. It was stuffed with more rumpled working clothes, and again there was the stale smell. She closed the drawer and hesitated before sitting on the bed.

  ‘What an utterly barren, squalid little cell it is,’ she thought, looking around at the grey fibro walls, perplexed that he should be content to live in such a fashion. The contrast with the care of his work around the homestead struck her as very strange. It was almost as if there were two different people. She had expected to find a personal and orderly place here, with perhaps even some reminders of that gentle home in England, a photograph of his mother, something! But there was nothing. No hint of anything beyond the drabness of his work. She refused to think about her husband’s book; it simply did not fit anywhere.

  She sat uncomfortably on the edge of the bed for another minute or two, feeling increasingly subdued, then decided to stay no longer, for the place was starting to depress her. She got up. She would go for a swim and leave him a note. She looked around for a pen or a pencil. She found the .303 rifle propped behind the door and, under the other bed, pushed hard against the wall, a bundle of old pink Bulletin magazines tied with a piece of string, which must have been there for twenty years! Rats or mice had been chewing them. The gun, the discarded book, the broken stockwhip, the accumulation of star grass and dried mud, the pile of out-of-date magazines and the grey dust: there was something about it all that reminded her of Ward!

  The tin on the roof gave a sudden bang as it expanded and she jumped, her heart racing. She backed towards the door. There was no way of communicating with him, no means of leaving a message that he would understand to be from her. She heard the dogs making odd little sounds then, as if someone were approaching, signalling to them or cautioning them to stay quiet. Perhaps her husband, or Alistair, was coming down the path from the house, was hanging around outside, or had even noticed her go in and would confront her when she came out? She felt trapped and regretted intensely her impulsive decision to examine the stockman’s quarters. She could not look out the door without revealing herself to whoever might be outside. She crept over to the little window and carefully examined the area over towards the shed. There was no one about. The night-horse was standing with its head in the shade of the hedge, apparently asleep on its feet, but certain to be watching alertly if anyone had been moving about the place.

  She listened—there was only the continuous distant thunder and the snuffling of the dogs. Were they merely dreaming? She told herself to relax; she must not start imagining things. She glanced out the door. No one there. Quickly she left and went straight across the open stretch of grass and down the bank of the creek, out of sight at once of the buildings and the house. She would not swim just here, she decided, but would make her way upstream towards the hole where they had swum on Christmas Day.

  As she walked along through patches of sunlight and shade beside the clear water, treading silently on the springy green mat of couch grass that grew thickly between the creamy paperbarks on the lowest terrace of the bank, Ida’s spirits began to lift. She began to consider how her life had changed for ever now. She felt as though she had penetrated a wall of silence within herself this last twenty-four hours and had emerged into her own landscape, a place where she would be able to make events suit her. She took off her shoes, tucked up her skirt and walked energetically through the fragrant tea-trees. She knew just what she wanted from life—the stockman was inseparably a part of her desires, but it was of herself that she was chiefly thinking at this moment, not of Robert Crofts.

  •

  When Ida said, ‘I’m going to take up walking again,’ for Ward Rankin it was as if an almost forgotten time-bomb had exploded without the slightest warning. At once he had understood everything perfectly—or so he thought. Ida’s excursions into the bush—her habit of unpredictably ‘going walkabout like a black’—had been tolerated by Rankin as a lesser evil, an acceptable if incomprehensible eccentricity, a lingering symptom, as it were, of the major life-threatening childhood illness that her fabled ascent of Mt Mooloolong had symbolised. In fact he had never been convinced that she had climbed the mountain; in his opinion the story was probably a highly imaginative account of a far less spectacular exploit. They had never spoken about it to each other. The only time he had heard the matter referred to directly was many years ago, before he had met her, when he had overheard her eldest brother, Gary, skiting about his sister’s amazing claim to a group of men in the hotel in town.

  But whether she had really climbed to the summit of the mountain or not, for Rankin there was something crazy about it, something extreme and unbalanced. Knowing about it had always made him feel safe with her from the kind of reproaches he might have expected from a conventionally minded woman—that he was inefficient, that he was not ‘getting on’ and improving the property, that he was neglecting things, and so on. So he had been ‘understanding’ whenever she disappeared into the scrub on her own for the day and did not return until after nightfall. He had said nothing. Behaved as if everything were normal. Cooked the dinner himself and explained to the children, ‘She’s looking for a heifer’ or ‘She’s searching for rare orchids’.

  He felt safe with her because of this touch of unusualness. It was better than having a woman around the place who would demand that he ‘Be a man!’ He was not a ‘man’. He had not even been ‘one of the boys’, and had felt a great many misgivings in his role as ‘the boss’. Why anyone would want to walk around outside in the sun through the burrs and prickles and insects when they could have stayed comfortably indoors he could not begin to imagine, but he did not mind that Ida had done so from time to time.

  Then she had stopped doing it, more than two years ago. For a time he had been uncomfortably conscious of her not doing it. He’d waited, watched her, wondering what to expect in its place. Would he be required to normalise himself in return for it? But when nothing had happened he had eventually stopped worrying about it and concluded that giving it up without explanation was probably as clear evidence of oddity in his wife as doing it had been in the first place. It had gone out of his mind. Now this! A relapse! A clear signal not just of unusualness but of dangerous instability.

  He tore the pieces of paper with his careful plans into small squares and dropped them one by one into the wastepaper basket and he thought about Ida saying, ‘I’m taking up walking again,’ as if she had been issuing him with a threat. He had never seen her so agitated. For a second or two he had thought she might be about to attack him with the knife or the pumpkin, or both, and smash them into his face if he said one further word to provoke her. But what had he said to provoke her in the first place? She was mad! He felt quite shaken by the scene. It had been so utterly unexpected. Irrational. Difficult to think about.

  He poured himself another generous helping of Corio and sat at his desk. He had always taken it for granted that he was devious and cunning and that Ida, apart from her tendency to go walkabout, was straightforward and rational. It flashed across his mind now that maybe she was even more devious than he and that she was working on some complicated plan of her own. The expression on his face revealed just how deeply this possibility perplexed him. Why had it never occurred to him before? Reflecting on their life together, however, Rankin found the suspicion difficult to sustain.

  •

  Crofts parked the truck in the shed and went straight over to his hut. He had still done no work on the fence. He had been feeling anxious all day about what might have happened at the homestead after he had left this morning and was very uncertain
of his reception now.

  He saw the book lying on his bed the moment he walked through the door and went cold with shock. As if it were a message to him. A threat. Everything else appeared to be as he had left it this morning. But for the book. Its blue cloth covers bore fresh fingermarks where Rankin must have wiped it. Crofts felt afraid suddenly. He stood by the bed holding the book unopened and looking at it, wishing he had returned it long ago. He was struck by the thought that there was now no way for him to make amends for his misuse of it. He had often been on the point of retrieving it from under the bed—where it had landed after Janet had thrown it at him one day—taking it with him when he went over to the house for dinner. But he had never quite got around to it. It had always been an embarrassment to him. Now it had turned into a kind of weapon against him. He wondered, with an increasing sense of his own powerlessness, what Rankin intended to do.

  How had Rankin found out? Had Ida told him? That seemed unlikely. Had they had a fierce row? His imagination threw up several violent possibilities and it was not of Ida’s welfare that he thought but of his own.

  It suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet to Crofts. Had something dreadful happened? His mouth went dry. He realised he scarcely knew his boss or what Rankin and Ida’s relationship was really like.

  It wasn’t the message implied by the book, however, that made Crofts feel afraid so much as the thought of Rankin coming in and searching his room while he was out. It made him feel vulnerable, as if he had been somehow physically violated by Rankin. The thought of the station owner’s hands on his things was intensely distasteful. What else had he done while he was in here? He would, after all, have had to kneel down to even discover the book in the first place. Suddenly the stockman was afraid.

  Just then he heard Rankin’s voice calling him from along the path. Slowly he went out onto the verandah. Rankin was about halfway from the back gate, just the far side of the dog kennels. He seemed to waver, as if uncertain whether to come on down the path or to stay where he was. ‘I thought I heard you come back,’ he called.