The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Herbert Pinny seized the chance to flee indoors, tripping up the steps in his clumsy haste.

  That night, Hogg played the piano. The vibrations stirred up a colony of white ants infesting the woodwork. They swarmed out onto the glossy lid, and danced. Tossed up and down on Hogg’s lap, her knees painfully cracking the underside of the keyboard, Comity fixed her eyes steadfastly on that strange constellation of ants. They formed themselves into loops and curves, knots and spirals – almost as if they were sending an SOS, a signal, a message. As the pencil through her topknot was shaken out and her hair collapsed, and splashed Quartz Hogg’s exultant face, Comity knew very well what the ants were trying to tell her. She was a telegrapher’s daughter, after all. She knew a code when she saw one.

  “We have to get rid of Mr. Hogg,” she told Fred next morning.

  Fred put his head on one side and pretended to give this his measured consideration.

  “Certainly indeed byallmean,” he said, just a little too quickly.

  Comity wrote down a list of Hogg’s crimes.

  Mr. Hogg is bilding a monster in the chapel.

  Mr. Hogg keeps poynting his gun at Fred.

  Mr. Hogg has stopped working.

  Mr. Hogg plays the piano and it does not belong to him.

  Mr. Hogg makes people bring him things.

  Mr. Hogg steels mail.

  Herbert Pinny took out his blue pencil – the one he had used in Adelaide to correct the messages scrawled by ignorant members of the public. He began crossing through the crimes on Comity’s charge sheet: one, two, three.

  “Unlikely,” he said.

  “Not covered by Regulations,” he said.

  “Silliness.” He even corrected her spelling – could not help himself. Once upon a time (it seemed to Herbert) he would have smiled at Comity’s imaginings. Now it caused him nothing but anguish. That his little girl should be losing her grasp on the real world and straying into a maze of fantasies! How sad! How unutterably… His pencil came to a sudden stop.

  “What do you mean, he steals the mail?”

  “He took my letter I was writing to the Noxious Blighs!”

  “Oh.” The blue pencil crossed through the small matter of Comity’s mail being stolen. She was not a member of the public: it did not matter.

  Herbert would have liked to add to the list of crimes, as well as edit it. But it was not against Regulations for one man to humiliate another. It was not a sackable offence to be a loud and boorish oaf. And Herbert held himself partly to blame: a stationmaster’s task is to instruct his staff in their duties…and Herbert had never instructed Quartz Hogg to do anything other than leave him in peace.

  Which left only the matter of Fred.

  Mr. Hogg keeps poynting his gun at Fred.

  “Ask Mr. Hogg to come here, please, Comity,” he said, and brushed the shoulders of his jacket and smoothed both palms over his raggedy hair.

  “We here at Kinkindele believe in the comity of nations, Mr. Hogg,” said the Stationmaster, a rivulet of sweat trickling down his temple.

  Quartz Hogg twirled his cane. “That, Mr. Pinny, is because you do not know savages as I know savages. If you had fought in the Afghan War, you would know there are only two breeds of humankind in this world – the civilized and the murdering savage… Some of us are planning a dawn hunt tomorrow. Shall you join us?”

  “On a working day? I forbid it. And, Mr. Hogg—”

  “Oh, but then you do not care for the wide open spaces, do you, Mr. Pinny?”

  Herbert Pinny writhed with rage and indignation. “Mr. Hogg! I did not summon you to talk of hunting. Your display of violence towards the yard boy was reckless and unChristian. It makes me doubt your suitability for this post. I shall be writing to the Company and instructing them—”

  Hogg’s smile showed more and more of his small, white, regular teeth. “And shall you tell them also that you allowed your dear late wife to operate the telegraph machine? Unqualified and without their permission?”

  The mention of Mary landed among Pinny’s thoughts like a stone, and scattered them.

  Quartz Hogg had taken the measure of Herbert Pinny and the rest of the staff: he knew he was on safe ground. By pure luck, he had strayed into a kingdom ripe for the taking, so he had taken it, and though it might be a desert kingdom in the Middle of Nowhere, still that brought its own advantages. He patted the Stationmaster’s cheek with more spite than affection and went back to the mysteries of the stationery store.

  The making of monsters should rightly be left to those who live in the sky. But the Devil-Devil was built by a mere man. The man gave it quills and fists, eyes and teeth, claws and scales and lungs like bellows. He stuffed it with rage…then found he had too little magic to bring the thing to life. There it lay, stretched out along the ground like a dead camel but twelve times as big. In his frustration, he kicked it – kicked it again, over and over, until fur and fingers and feathers were scattered all around.

  Then the Devil-Devil stirred. It pulled itself onto its hands and haunches and stood up. The man could run – but the Devil-Devil could bound, sprint, run without tiring. It quickly caught up with the man who had built it. It tore him to pieces.

  That used up no more than a pinch of the Devil-Devil’s fury, and so it lifted up all of its four noses and snuffed the wind. From every direction, the wind brought it the stench of human wickedness.

  Ever since that day, the Devil-Devil has chased anyone wicked. Villains have tried hiding, building traps, arming themselves with weapons or magic… But nothing can stop the Devil-Devil once it has picked up the scent of a wrong-doer.

  “Please don’t let’s summon the Devil-Devil! It might eat us!” said Comity, round-eyed with fright. “It might eat everybody here!”

  “Nah. Devil-Devil chase only the bad people,” Fred assured her. “Eat Hogg alonely. Maybe Smith.”

  “But if we call up the Devil-Devil and it tears Mr. Hogg to pieces, then we’re wicked too! It will eat us too!” Comity could picture the Devil-Devil sprinting across the landscape towards Kinkindele, teeth bared. The ghost-gum trees seemed to have pictured it too, for they had sweated their pale sweat and their barks were stripy with white rivulets of gum. Fred scraped up a fistful, and began grinding it in an earthenware bowl last used by Mrs. Pinny to make bread-and-butter pudding. “You said get rid.”

  “Frighten him, I meant! Frighten him so much he won’t dare stay! Tuckonies would do, I’m sure!” So they settled for summoning impish Tuckonies instead, and Fred showed Comity how to apply the magical body paint he had made from ghost-gum resin.

  Comity watched, mesmerized by the antlike procession of tiny white dots edge-to-edge on black skin. The dots marched, single-file, over Fred’s ribs and collarbones. It took infinite patience, and he was left-handed so could not decorate his left arm; nor could he reach his back. So Comity carried the magical symbols over his shoulder and down the vertebrae of Fred’s spine. She tried to remember the patterns formed by those white ants on the lid of the piano. Across Fred’s forehead she wrote the Morse for HELP. Then she stripped to her spencer and drawers, and Fred decorated her body too.

  Clad in the sacred dance-patterns of the ant-people, they danced now, to summon up magic. Comity copied Fred’s every invented step, every guttural, grunted word. But his Aboriginal chanting did not rhyme, and Comity – heir to a great many fairy tales – was convinced it should. So she asked Fred what the words meant that he was chanting, and then made up her own version.

  “Bird and bear and sun and breeze,

  Rock and water, fire and trees,

  Whistle up the Tuckonies.”

  Fred was enchanted by the idea of Aboriginal magic being spoken in English, not to mention rhyming.

  “Rock and water, fire and trees,

  Whistle up the Tuckonies!”

  They could not quite agree what favour they should ask of the dwarfish little trickster-spirits. A snake in Hogg’s bed? A scorpion among his beans? Should
he be mobbed by bats, carried off by an eagle, or kept awake forever by invisible kookaburras?

  A vortex of dust about as tall as Fred and shaped like a spinning top spun its way across the desert, scattering dust and dry grass. Comity clung to Fred’s arm. “Is that one there?”

  It had never occurred to Fred before that these familiar dust eddies might be stirred up by Tuckonies. He was more than happy to believe it.

  “Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Frighten horrid Mr. Hogg,” chanted Comity. She was improvising now.

  “Make him want to go back home.

  Make him leave us quite alone.”

  For two hours Fred and Comity, apparelled in magic patterns, danced under the ghost-gums, and watched for eddies of dust that might mark an army of Tuckonies mustering. For two hours they danced, then they returned to the station. Were the animals in the paddock twitching more than usual? Surely, they were. Surely they could sense magical mischief close by? The children watched for Hogg to burst from his gunyah, sobbing and wailing, ooching and ouching as invisible imps tormented him.

  Nothing.

  They waited till night stole the colour out of the flowers, and bats took the place of birds, and the light of Smith’s forge went out and lamps were lit in Telegraph House.

  Nothing.

  “What now?” asked Comity, disappointed and weary from an afternoon spent dancing in the sun. Her skin was as itchy as if white ants were swarming all over her.

  But Fred had melted out of sight, too afraid of Hogg to be seen anywhere near Comity.

  “Where is Lulu?” Comity asked at dinner.

  The laundress was not exactly reliable. Sometimes she would do the laundry three times a week, swooping into the house and stripping the beds, like a vulture stripping carrion. Then for three weeks she might declare everything too clean to wash. She might demand the shirt from a man busily at work and, if he refused to give it up, stand at a distance shrieking, “Man smell! Dirty boy!” until he relented. Or she might return his long johns to him with the leg ends sewn up. She was an oddity as laundresses go, but a familiar sight around and about the station, talking to herself or smoking her pipe.

  Now Lulu seemed to have disappeared. Had the Tuckonies kidnapped the wrong person? Or had she been snatched inside the stationery store and eaten by the Kadimakara? “Where’s Lulu?” she asked again.

  Her father shifted his cup on its saucer. “Mr. Smith felt he had to dismiss her.”

  Comity was stunned. “Can he do that? What did she do?”

  Herbert Pinny busied himself with his boiled egg, but Quartz Hogg winked at Comity across the table, raised an invisible glass to his lips and rolled his eyes. Comity hated the gesture, but she understood it. She did not quite know why alcohol was wicked, but then she had never seen anyone drunk. Hard liquor was forbidden on the station. Hard liquor was an abomination to her father. If Loud Lulu had partaken of strong drink, she had forfeited her place at Kinkindele for ever.

  “Where did Lulu get strong drink?” Comity asked. “How would she?” Questions danced through Comity’s head, along with the knowledge that now she would have to launder her own bedsheets to get out the stains of body paint.

  “Never fear, Miss Comity,” said Hogg. “We shall find another woman to wash the laundry. We cannot have your pretty hands made red by washing soda. Soon enough you will make some man a wife, and though a man out here may want many things of a wife, a washerwoman don’t come high on the list.”

  A trapdoor opened in the bottom of Comity’s stomach. She knew Hogg was teasing – making fun of her. Marriage might be years away – years and years. But suppose Mr. Hogg never went away, just stayed and stayed until she really was a grown woman and he had made Kinkindele his own private kingdom?

  Her father’s teaspoon, scraping the shell of his empty egg, went through it with a crunch.

  “My term of duty will finish long before Comity reaches womanhood, Mr. Hogg,” he said, between clenched teeth. “She shall be married among family and friends in Adelaide, and, please God, to some man of a hard-working and honest disposition. Do you suppose I would cast her adrift in this appalling wasteland?”

  It was an outburst wrung from him like juice from a lemon and twice as bitter. He picked up his breadknife and it seemed, for a moment, as if he might actually throw it at Hogg. His colour had changed alarmingly and he tugged his celluloid collar away from its studs, choking on anger. Then he went to the machine room and Comity went to her bed. She heard Quartz Hogg leave the house, whistling to himself – a jaunty little tune intended to prove that Pinny had not startled him in the least. She heard the door of the stationery store open and close.

  Tears trickled from the corner of her eyes into her ears, and Comity had no idea if they were tears of sorrow or happiness. She hated quarrels, shouting, unpleasantness – but at least her father had stood up for her! He meant to keep her safe and to take her home to Adelaide one day! About that, too, Comity did not know whether to laugh or cry. Adelaide had faded to somewhere only half real: somewhere she might have read about in a storybook.

  The door of the stationery store opened and shut again: Hogg was back in the yard. “You there, jacky! You lurking, are you, boy? You a-skulking? Thought I told you: no abo’s in the yard after sundown. Skip.”

  A pistol shot rang out so loudly that the horses in the barn shrieked and clattered their hoofs against the barn wall.

  Comity mixed the pituri juice into the lemonade using a fork, and watched it swirl around the glass, opaque and grey. She fished out two lemon pips.

  “What if it changes the colour of the lemonade?” she asked.

  “He think it some another juice,” said Fred, mashing more leaves between two rusty spoons. The few drops of liquor he got from the leaves did not look enough to discolour a sheet of paper. A fly plunged into the lemonade, obstinately determined to drown. Comity fished it out with the fork. It spun round and round on its back on the kitchen table, rattling its wings and wriggling its legs. She imagined it was Quartz Hogg and swatted it with a letter from Aunt Berenice.

  Of course, it would take more than a letter to swat Hogg. Her nervousness of the deputy telegrapher had turned to loathing the moment he had loosed off a pistol at Fred. The bullet had sunk into the stable wall so close to Fred’s arm that splinters of wood had embedded themselves in his elbow. It was plain Hogg no longer cared whether he missed or hit Fred. Anyone who would do that deserved to come to a bad end, and as soon as possible.

  By the look of him, Fred had spent all night grinding pituri leaves. The spoons came from his railcar, where he had run in terror from Hogg’s pistol. Lying within the railcar, Fred had thought he could never go back to the Repeater Station – never give Hogg another chance to kill him. The Law offered no protection to an Aboriginal yard boy, and besides the Law was a hundred miles away. The Stationmaster would not leap to Fred’s aid. What? Mr. Pinny tell Hogg to surrender his gun? No. Quartz Hogg had made himself king of Kinkindele.

  But towards dawn Fred had realized he could not stay up at Miser’s Gorge. He was chained to Repeater Station Number Four: by memories of Mrs. Pinny, by Comity’s friendship, and by having all his ancestors buried on Kinkindele land. No, he must go on tending the garden, working the forge bellows and sweeping the verandah, while Hogg watched and grinned and pointed his big old pistol…

  Unless he could be got rid of.

  So while Hogg went for his regular morning expedition, shooting things “to keep his aim sharp”, Fred raked out the wood ash from the stove and mixed it with the juice of ground-up pituri leaves, the way Aboriginals drugged emus before killing and roasting them. Not that roast Hogg was on the menu. He would return from his hunting trip with a raging thirst and drink the doped lemonade, then fall asleep in his bedroom, slipping gently into unconsciousness. Then they would take all his guns away and bury them and drop the Army pistol down the dunny and tell everyone Hogg was drunk, so he would be sacked like Loud Lulu and instantly
sent away.

  Comity added the final trickle of leaf juice to the speckled lemonade and Fred returned the rusty spoons to his dillybag. Comity swept the mess of leaves out-of-doors and over the edge of the verandah…

  …onto the very toes of Hogg’s boots.

  “I thought you were out in the buggy, Mr. Hogg,” said the criminal, caught red-handed.

  “Forgot my hat, sweetheart.”

  His rather large and sticky-out ears were catching the sun, and with his crystal-topped cane, Hogg looked like an affable wizard about to do magic. The thought went through Comity: We cannot do this.

  Then Hogg looked over her head, caught sight of Fred, and his top lip curled. “That dog come sniffing again?”

  “Come for the laundry, Mr. Hogg,” said Comity, her heart hardening to ice. “His mama is going to do it in place of Lulu. There is lemonade fresh made.” And she poured it for him, smiling her best smile, and watched him drink it down. (She knew she must make a show of liking Hogg, even though inwardly she wanted to swat him like a blowfly.) She poured him another glass.

  He smacked his lips, trying to identify the strange but not unpleasant taste.

  “You adding chasers now for my delectation, beautiful?” And he arched an eyebrow at her, as he might at a barmaid in Darwin.

  Fred meanwhile scurried about, back bent, head down, snatching up anything that was, could be, might be washable. He left with such a load of sheets, cloths and clothing that he had to charge the door three times over to squeeze through it.

  Not the smallest change was visible in Hogg. He fetched his hat and headed out again to the pony and trap. It had grown to look like some Roman chariot, bristling now with rifles, spears, woomeras and the umbrella Hogg used for a parasol. The sun glinted on the crystal buttons of his waistcoat as he bowled out of the yard.

  Fred and Comity sat on the pile of “washing” in among the eucalyptus trees and wondered what they had done. They could not bring themselves to speak. Besides, their thoughts were running free across the surrounding countryside, following the man in the yellow waistcoat.