by Derek Hansen
The faraway look crept into Billy’s eyes.
‘Sometimes it’s hard to think of anything.’
Lousy jacks woke Linda on the first morning in her new home, but she stayed in bed until the light flooding into her bedroom made dozing impossible. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d slept right through a night or enjoyed a sleep as deep and restful. The day before had been long and eventful and she’d gone to bed worn out, but, for her, that was a normal state of affairs. What wasn’t normal was the silence of the night and she credited that and the cool night air with the soundness of her sleep. There’d been no noise at all. No traffic, no sirens, no aeroplanes, no boats, no voices, no barking dogs, no possums on the roof, no wind ruffling trees, no arguing neighbours. When she looked out through the window she could see an unbroken blue sky above the ridge line and decided to make hanging her prefabricated cedar blinds a priority. But then she looked at the pale lemon and lilac floral wallpaper and realised there was no point in hanging blinds until the walls had been stripped and all the painting had been done. When she’d planned her escape from Sydney it had been with the clear intention of getting back into her painting, but painting walls wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind.
Hey, she thought, slow down. She had to get used to the idea that there were no longer any deadlines and no time pressures. The day was hers to use however she wished and, furthermore, so were all the tomorrows. She decided to make a cup of tea and go for a walk before breakfast so she could get a feel for the land surrounding her.
The gully peaked on a ridge about thirty metres behind the house and the grey gidgee scrub thinned out the higher she went. Their twisted trunks suggested that life was not easy in her gully, but Linda was in no mood for anything negative. Billy had told her there was nothing on the other side except another ocean of treetops stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a few sand ridges that obscured the one feature of any interest, Narran Lake. All the same, she wanted to see for herself. To avoid ripping her sneakers on the hard stony ground, she wore her boots and took the advice Billy had given her about walking in the scrub.
‘Keep your eye on the track in front of you at all times while you’re moving,’ he’d said. ‘If you want to look around, stop first. That way you won’t go stepping on something you shouldn’t. Oh,’ he’d added as an afterthought, ‘make a lot of noise so if there is something up ahead of you, it’s got time to get out of the way.’
Linda made a point of stepping on twigs and crunching up leaves. A pair of hares startled her when they broke cover and took flight. She smiled. Hares, she could deal with. Although she knew what to expect, when she reached the top of the ridge she was still stunned and in awe of the view. As far as she could see to the south there were no signs of human habitation: no roads, no houses and no electricity poles or pylons. Somewhere in the distance were the Macquarie Marshes and, when she looked hard, she could see the darker green lines that marked the courses of the Barwon River and the Big Warrambool. The disappointed ahh-ahh-ahhhhh of a solitary raven only served to underscore the loneliness of the vast expanse. The view to the west was blocked by the sand ridge a kilometre away where Rodney lived. It was little different to her own, except that it had no upthrust of rock on top of it and, wherever gaps in the cypress pine and coolibahs allowed, she could see mounds of off-white soil among the red gravel that were quite clearly man-made. She guessed they were Rodney’s diggings, but distance made detail elusive. Movement caught her eye and she stood motionless while a pair of pale-headed parrots, like small sun-bleached lorikeets, flitted among the branches of a nearby tree.
She slowly picked her way back along the western ridge line, looking down on her bedroom window as she passed her house, before pausing on a ledge that gave her a commanding view north and northeast where the rolling hill of Lightning Ridge eased above the plains. Although she knew where the road should be, she couldn’t find a trace of it, nor could she see any sign of Billy’s house. Only the track leading to her home and the power poles gave any indication that her world was inhabited. An argument broke out among galahs far away on the undulating plains and the sun put a shine on her perspiring forehead. A grim smile crept over her face. People always claimed that the best place to hide was in a crowd, but they’d obviously never stood where she was.
Neil pushed himself back in his chair to let his friends know it was time for a break. When he glanced over to the bar he saw that Gancio had already begun to make their coffees: long black for Ramon, macchiato for Milos and Lucio, cappuccino for Neil. But what Neil was really looking forward to was the mid-afternoon shot of grappa. He still had a long way to go before he was finished for the day.
‘I didn’t realise you were a country boy,’ said Ramon.
‘Well, now you know.’
Lucio and Milos exchanged glances. Neil’s earlier hostility seemed to have carried through his storytelling.
‘I can see it is also going to be a romance,’ said Lucio, trying to lighten the mood. ‘I see the first signs of the grand amore.’
‘Any love will be more than matched by hate,’ said Neil. ‘Count on it.’
‘It’s clear you weren’t your brother’s favourite person,’ said Ramon. ‘Yet in your introduction you made it sound as though the two of you were close.’
‘That was also my impression,’ said Lucio.
‘So what?’ said Neil. ‘My story has hardly begun. You don’t know anything yet. You don’t know my brother, you don’t know Linda and, God knows, you don’t know me.’
Chapter Five
Two things were anathema to Billy and both were hard to avoid. Debt was something the northwest lived with, as much a fact of life as the red dirt and as common. A few years of good rains and good beef, lamb and wool prices could easily deceive as graziers began to feel indestructible. They paid back loans to the banks, built up their breeding stock and looked forward to a life easier than the one they’d known. But it didn’t take much to bring them crashing down to earth and for the debt to start piling up again. Too little rain brought drought, and too much rain brought floods, and each brought its own set of hardships.
Billy could remember the magic days as a lad when the wool cheque had arrived. For those brief moments they’d felt like millionaires and, in a relative way, even acted like millionaires. His dad would eye up a good second-hand car or tractor, while his mother shopped for new clothes and shoes for everyone. He and his brother liked new clothes, but his sisters were like butterflies emerging from their chrysalises. They adored their new clothes and could hardly wait to show them off. But for Billy, the temporary affluence expressed itself in much more overt and immediate ways. The family drove down to Dubbo for a couple of days so they could go to the pictures. They bought ice-creams and chocolate bars and, for a brief time, enjoyed the kind of luxuries city kids took for granted. Those were the days when dynamite couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces, but they never lasted. The cheques might have borne his father’s name but there were others with stronger claims to the amounts written on them. There were banks to placate, the stock and station, the service station and everyone else who’d given them goods on tick. Throughout all his childhood there’d never been a time when his parents didn’t owe more than they had.
Billy had turned things around and it was a source of pride to him that the station now operated debt-free. Of course, his brother had helped initially, by paying off the debt he’d inherited, and was always there as a backstop when things got desperate, but Billy did his best to keep him out of the equation. As far as he was concerned, it was the least his brother could do, but, all the same, the less he had to do with him the better.
Billy had always listened when Neil and their dad discussed farm business. It had sounded so easy back then, but it had taken him years to understand the signs and variables that made the difference between operating at a profit or a loss. His brother had explained how maximising profitability lay in anticipating the market, in
doing what everyone else planned to do but doing it first. Billy did his best but he still made misjudgements. He hadn’t adjusted the balance of his stock to favour cattle at the expense of his labour- and cost-intensive sheep to the extent that he’d like, and he hadn’t hedged his bets by sowing crops. But he’d managed through the droughts of the early eighties that had destroyed four crops out of five and brought his neighbours to their knees, somehow getting his starving stock through with minimal losses.
He’d watched the southern oscillation index for indications of rain in the early days of the droughts and talked to the local Aborigines, who had their own ways of forecasting which were as accurate as anyone’s. The sight of rainbirds, the grey-coloured cuckoos, never failed to encourage him although they frequently let him down. The black cockies tended to be more reliable. People were often surprised when he began to stock up on cattle nuts and hay while there was still feed on the ground, but that was also when feed was at its cheapest. Once the droughts bit, he hand-fed his beasts and lopped the middle out of fodder trees to make his supplies and cash last longer. He’d managed to hold onto his cattle and sheep while his neighbours had sold, and cleaned up selling breeding heifers once the rains had come. True, on a couple of occasions he’d had to turn to his brother for a handout, but he dismissed them as irrelevant because the amounts were small and he would probably have got through anyway. Billy wasn’t prepared to give his brother any credit for the fact that the station traded in the black. He wasn’t prepared to give his brother credit for much at all.
The other thing Billy hated was handling and spraying herbicides, but that was a legacy of Vietnam and another fact of life he had to deal with. He often sprayed after the summer rains, particularly when the rivers had come up and there’d been a bit of a flood to spread seeds. The burrs and thorns were the worst of his problems. Along with the Hudson pear there were African boxthorn, Bathurst burr, Noogoora burr and roly-poly. The burrs played havoc with the wool, hooking onto sheep as they passed by. The matting they caused knocked dollars off the value of the fleece. The business of wool-growing was marginal enough without working for half-price. Thorns, like the six-centimetre-long thorns from the Hudson pear, could cripple sheep and cattle, and Billy had lost count of the times he’d had to get a pair of pliers to pull them out of his beasts and even out of his own hide. The pain was something you never forgot.
Billy was happy to contract out the spraying where extensive areas were involved, although he resented the cost and the threat to his liquidity. He did his best to maintain a reasonable grass cover so the roly-poly couldn’t take over, and kept a sharp eye out for any infestation by introduced weeds which poisoned stock: the pigweed, cat head, blue heliotrope, mother-of-millions, mintweed and liverseed which occasionally snuck into the fertile eastern end of his spread. He attacked the weeds almost on sight.
To keep his costs down he’d cobbled together his own spray rig, a 600-litre tank, pump and spraying arm which he could mount on the back of his ute. He’d used it at the beginning of winter to kill a couple of outbreaks of mother-of-millions before it had the chance to seed and spread. Still, it was a job he hated even though he knew he was doing the right thing. The whole idea of spraying herbicides made him so uncomfortable he wore gloves, full-length overalls, a hood made from an old sheet that covered his head and neck, and an industrial mask to filter out the chemicals. None of his skin was exposed. Neighbours who’d seen him in his full attire laughed, but also felt some sympathy for him. While he tried to do his spraying when it was cold and still, some days grew a lot hotter than expected and then Billy really suffered.
His desire to always keep ahead of the game got him into his ute and on the road to Walgett to replenish his stocks of Roundup. On trips off his station he let the kelpie ride in the cabin alongside him with its head out the passenger window, licking the breeze. On really hot days that called for air-conditioning, the kelpie just curled up on the seat and slept off its boredom. Either way, Billy enjoyed the silent companionship. Given that Walgett was sixty k’s from Jindalee Downs and a hundred and twenty k round trip, Billy never went there for just one reason. There was Rodney’s pension cheque to cash, a bit of shopping for both of them and beer and chocolate to buy. His only concern was whether or not he should be buying for three.
He had no idea how Linda planned on getting her supplies. He hadn’t asked and the subject had never come up. Obviously she couldn’t go into Cumborah, Walgett or even Coonamble without setting tongues wagging. Maybe she could get away with a few trips to Lightning Ridge posing as a tourist. The Ridge was never short of tourists blowing through and she could pass herself off as one, for a while at least. But the Ridge offered no long-term solution to her problem and, when Billy thought about it, neither did he. There were just some things he couldn’t buy without raising suspicion and revealing Linda’s presence. But surely he could’ve bought her staples like potatoes, tea, coffee, sugar, flour, bread and tomato sauce. If he could split a sack of spuds with Rodney, he could easily do the same for her.
The issue stayed with him all the way into Walgett, but the fact remained that she had his phone number and hadn’t rung once in the two weeks since she’d moved in. If she’d needed him to get her something she would’ve rung. Then the thought occurred that maybe she was waiting for him to ring and offer. But why would he ring her when she’d made it as plain as day that what she wanted was solitude? Did a phone call breach her idea of solitude? Probably. Would his good intentions be interpreted as interfering? Possibly. Was his silence indicative that he didn’t care about her? Did he care about her? This was the toughest question to answer. Did he care? Why was she always creeping into his thoughts? Why was she always waiting for him unbidden when he emerged from his white-outs? By the time he pulled up outside the stock and station the issue had begun to bother him.
When he walked into the stock and station he hoped he’d find Peter serving but saw Jimmy holding court with a couple of graziers from down Carinda way. Jimmy ran the business but everyone Billy knew preferred dealing with Peter, or Elders down the road. The difference between the men was chalk and cheese. Peter knew his stuff, was straight as a die and always tried to do the best by you. He was the kind of bloke who looked you in the eye, was good company over a beer and didn’t go sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. The same could not be said for Jimmy.
‘G’day, Billy,’ called Jimmy, as though they were inseparable mates. Jimmy liked to give the impression that he was best mates with everyone, when nothing could be further from the truth. He waited until Billy came close. ‘How’d you go with that good-looking city sheila I sent you?’ He winked at the graziers from Carinda. ‘The one that wanted to rent your parents’ house. Did you get to throw a leg over?’
Billy suppressed the sudden fury that threatened to engulf him. His first instinct was to defend his integrity and Linda’s honour, but just as quickly he realised the pitfalls. Jimmy’s customers were smiling expectantly so he took his cue from them.
‘Hell are you going on about, Jimmy?’ he asked affably. ‘You didn’t send me anyone, good-looking or otherwise.’
‘Bloody did.’
‘Well, I never saw her. Maybe she couldn’t find my place, or called in when I was out in the paddocks. Be just my luck.’ Billy nodded greetings to the graziers. They looked embarrassed but he also knew they were more than a little interested in the exchange.
‘Way I hear things, she’s already moved in,’ said Jimmy smugly.
‘Moved in where?’
‘Your parents’ place.’
‘When?’
‘About two weeks ago.’
‘If only. Someone’s winding you up, mate. I dossed down in the old place a couple of nights ago when I was moving some sheep around. There was no city sheila living there.’ He turned to the two graziers. ‘I think I would’ve noticed.’
The graziers laughed. They liked that bit. It was a line they could use later in the pub.
>
‘Now, Jimmy, how about you finish serving these gentlemen while I find what I need?’
‘We’re about done,’ said one of the graziers.
‘Don’t hurry on my account,’ said Billy. He sauntered slowly and deliberately back to the front of the store and the open doorway, but all the while he was quietly seething. He knew Jimmy was just fishing but how many people had the bastard been talking to? How many people had he told about Linda? It was another reality of country life that people were so hungry for interesting local news that gossip became fact once it had been repeated often enough. But what could he do? If he tried to kill the gossip he would only succeed in arousing suspicions. The graziers said their goodbyes as they headed out the door.
‘Last time I do you any favours,’ said Jimmy as he caught up with him.
‘Does that mean you won’t help me load up my ute?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Roundup.’
‘I’ll get the trolley.’
Jimmy helped load the three drums of herbicide onto the ute but Billy could see he still wasn’t finished with him.
‘What about the yellow ribbons then? How do you explain them?’
‘What ribbons?’
‘I heard there were yellow ribbons tied to poles leading from Walgett through Cumborah up to your parents’ place.’
Billy just shrugged. Cumborah was the last town before the turn-off. If you sneezed driving through it you missed it. Even so, people lived there and someone might have seen ribbons, but he couldn’t imagine anyone following them to see where they led. No one would have any reason to. Jimmy was just speculating.
‘When was this?’
‘Told you. Two weeks ago.’
‘Two weeks ago? No, I didn’t see any ribbons.’
‘Would you tell me if you did?’
‘Of course.’ Billy pulled on the ropes to make sure the drums were secure. ‘We’re mates, aren’t we?’
