The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  This was not what they had planned. Perhaps this was better, though. Perhaps the concoction of pituri and wood ash would tip Hogg out of the trap onto his head and leave him helpless as a drugged emu, for the crows and dingoes to eat. Perhaps he would drive into a ravine or, hallucinating, imagine he saw castle turrets and set off to find them, and disappear into the red desert, never to be seen again. Perhaps he would think himself an eagle and climb to the top of a tree and hurl himself off it, arms outstretched.

  “That would be like us killing him!” said Comity.

  Warrior Fred could not see a problem with that.

  …There again, at any moment Hogg might come bowling back through the gate, fit as a flea – and then what?

  After a while, Comity began to think about the pony and trap. She thought how the trap was the property of the British-Australian Telegraph Company – and found she could not care what became of it. But the horse? Starbuck was a nice horse. Her mother had named him after some horse in Moby Dick, and Starbuck had done nothing to deserve death between the shafts of a wrecked trap or lying at the bottom of a ravine with his legs twitching.

  And suppose Hogg did disappear into the red desert? Would she not spend every waking minute waiting for him to crawl, living, through the kitchen door or walk, dead and ghostly, through her bedroom wall? She mentioned her fears to Fred.

  “We find him. We finish him,” said Fred doubtfully.

  “We find him anyway,” said Comity.

  He was not hard to find. Quartz Hogg had not got far at all before the effects of the pituri juice had filled him with the seven colours of the rainbow, deep spiritual bliss, a violent need to pee, then the craving to sleep. Starbuck, feeling the reins go slack, had come to a stop and then, as the day’s heat grew, headed back towards the station. Thirst and a patch of sweet grass had sidetracked him by the stream, and this is where Comity and Fred spotted him, from the top of Goat Ridge.

  Quartz Hogg was slumped over the side of the trap, his hat gone and his head puce from hanging upside down. In the time it took them to run from Goat Ridge to the river, he had not stirred a muscle, but his choked snores were a strong hint he was not dead.

  “Now what?” said Comity.

  Seeing the man play pitch-and-toss with painted stones from the grave, Fred had wanted to heave rocks at him. Seeing him bully her father, seeing the splinters in Fred’s elbow, Comity had wanted to strangle Hogg with piano wire from the Hapsburg Beale. But this grunting, helpless, upside-down snorer looked more emu than villain, and emus are not hateful.

  Then Fred looked around him and gave one of his sharp, decisive nods. “Tree can choose,” he said, and toppled Hogg out of the cart.

  Comity was sure Hogg would wake long before they reached the widow-maker. Each holding a wrist, they were dragging him over spinifex clumps, stones and brittle twigs, filling up the seat of his trousers and loosening his boots. A crystal button popped off the yellow waistcoat. Fred put it in his dillybag for a trophy.

  The tree on the nearby hillock was majestically tall. Its bare branches cast shadows like rheumatic fingers.

  Come closer, children, whispered the shadows. Rest here, out of the sun.

  Wherever a branch sprouted sparse, blue leaves, it cast furry patches of shade that looked inviting in the great heat of noon. The last few yards rose steeply upwards and Comity wanted to stop short, but Fred insisted on dragging Hogg as far as the tree trunk itself – right in under the canopy of withered branches – despite his lifelong fear of the widow-maker.

  All that remained was to run, leaving the tree to pass sentence on Quartz Hogg and to carry it out on their behalf.

  They paused at the bottom of the hillock. Should they leave without knowing the outcome, or stay and watch?

  Fred said they should dance. Comity tried to copy the tilt of his body, the lopsided shifting of weight. Their shadows lapped and overlapped as they danced their invented ritual dance and chanted their invented magic chant and watched for the widow-maker to pronounce sentence.

  An old blue gum tree drops its branches without warning or pity – branches so heavy and huge that a man foolish enough to sleep away noon in their shade can wake up as flat as unleavened bread and deader than the Ancient Egyptians.

  “Come here and help us, Tuckonies,

  We beg you on our bended knees.

  Lo, a man beneath you lies.

  Shall he live or shall he die?”

  Fred was tireless in his dancing. It absorbed him completely. Comity, too, should have emptied her head, but instead she watched the widow-maker. She watched it so intently that her eyeballs got dry, and the brightness of the sky made her head pound. At any moment – at any moment – any second now a branch would break with enough noise to rouse every bird for miles around into the sky in a panic of wings. Any second – at any moment – any second now, the noise would make her jump out of her skin. Other thoughts must have crept into her head too, because suddenly she heard herself ask:

  “What shall we do about the Kadimakara? After.” Fred kept on dancing. He did not appear to have heard. “If we let it out of Jesus’ gunyah, it will eat everybody.”

  “We burn Jesus’ gunyah,” said Fred with a resolute nod of his head.

  “But it’s the property of the British-Australian Telegraph Company! And Mama’s Bible is in there!”

  “We give poison meat,” said Fred.

  The sun was hot on the top of Comity’s head. She had been in such a hurry leaving the station that she had not put on her hat, and dancing had wrung so much sweat out of her that the very bones of her arms felt dessicated: at any moment they might snap and fall away from her like the branches off a tree. Fred had said that the Tuckonies were invisible, and yet now, when Comity looked up at the crown of the widow-maker, she thought she could see them – splodges of yellow light, jumping along the boughs, dancing in time to the thump of her heart. Even Starbuck the pony, bitten by flies, was dancing between the shafts of the trap: an unhappy, sweaty, fly-blown dance.

  The thready ticking of her pulse sent a Morse message to the distant machine room of her brain:

  RISE ABOVE THIS COMITY STOP

  THOU SHALT NOT KILL

  “Mama does not want us to do this,” she said.

  Fred had his eyes shut. He was dancing as he would at a corroboree, under a heatless moon, his ribcage working like the bellows in the forge, his bare feet and legs grey with dust. He had learned Comity’s chant and made it his own, splicing the words together until they sounded like a foreign language, a magic language. He could not hear her. In any case, thought Comity, she could not make him go in under the tree again when at any moment… No. She would have to do it herself.

  She ran at full tilt, jumping the gnarled shadows and grabbing Hogg’s feet. His shoes came off, and she sat down hard. His socks dangled off the ends of his feet. “Get up. Get up, Mr. Hogg. Got to get up now.” She picked up one of his hands, and felt the pudgy softness of his palm, the prickle of the hair at the wrist. Fred appeared at her shoulder. Now, when the branch fell, he too would be killed, and it would all be her fault. Her eyes filled with liquid. Now even her eyeballs were sweating!

  “We doing what?” asked Fred, grabbing Hogg’s other hand and pulling. Hogg rose into a sitting position between them. With his head hanging backwards and his eyelids slightly open, he appeared to be looking at them.

  “Mama says not to,” said Comity.

  And, miraculously, that was enough. Fred had danced himself into a trance under the sun, and still the branches had not dropped. The widow-maker had ignored him. But this marvellous girl, who could chant in rhyme, had been visited by the spirit of Mrs. Pinny, and Mrs. Pinny had called a halt. Instantly Fred joined Comity in dragging Hogg clear of the blue gum tree. Arms at full stretch above his head, Hogg’s shirt came untucked; his trouser belt broke. He weighed as much as a camel.

  BANG. A noise like the sky breaking its back. An avenging angel had surely struck his wing against t
he ground, because suddenly Fred and Comity were enveloped in feathery blue leaves. The widow-maker had let drop a branch. They stopped stock-still, waiting for the pain of death to seize them… But all that came was a stinging soreness like dozens of paper cuts up and down their arms and shoulders. Hanging between them like a dead sheep, Quartz Hogg was unscathed: their own bodies had protected him from the splash of leaves. Where, a moment before, he had lain on the ground, half a ton of dry timber lay part-sunk into the hard earth, shedding bark and insects and invisible Tuckonies. Comity and Fred could still feel the vibration through the soles of their feet.

  All the short drive home they were silent. Fred took the cartridges out of Hogg’s shotgun and put them in his dillybag, but nothing was said, except by Quartz Hogg, who had begun to mumble and groan and cough, choking on his own snores. Now and then, an arm twitched involuntarily and caught them a blow or landed between them on the buckboard, the fingers opening and closing, opening and closing.

  Amos and Hart took charge of Hogg, glancing furtively towards Telegraph House as they lifted him down from the trap. Clearly they thought Hogg was drunk, which suited Comity very well (though she could not imagine how they thought he had come by alcohol, way out here in the Bush). They did not want the Stationmaster to see him drunk and dismiss him, so they put him to bed in their own quarters. Smith the smith, finding Hogg’s shoes in the trap, polished them up himself, using saddle soap.

  Quartz Hogg woke with a headache, a pain in his neck and a taste in his mouth like boiled goanna, but with no recollection at all of the outing. It was as if a tree had fallen across his memory and obliterated one whole day.

  “You are lucky the children found you,” said Sankey. “I knew a wireman fell from a pole one time. Broke a leg. Lay out in the sun. Dead by sunset. Sun can do that.”

  Quartz Hogg contemplated his good luck. He contemplated the little empire of Kinkindele and how easily it had fallen into his hands. He contemplated where he might stow Herbert Pinny after he took over Telegraph House, and how he could guarantee the man went on working away in the machine room. After all, Kinkindele Repeater Station must continue to run smoothly.

  The Stationmaster had a great many weaknesses – a fear of the outdoors, grief, goody-goodness and, of course, the girl. Yes. The girl was the key. Comity was the key, and the thought brought a smile to his sun-cracked lips. A brush with death gives a man a greater appreciation of life. Everything was coming along nicely in the stationery store. His lucky escape called for a celebration.

  He summoned Herbert Pinny to his bedside and declared, “Time for a party, old peach.”

  “Go? What do you mean, go?” said Comity.

  Her father peeled the spine off Poems: Jean Ingelow. He extracted a double strip of ribbon hidden there long before. “Go and stay with Fred’s people. He can take you. The pony and trap are ready. It is for two days only.” He gave her the ribbon. Sewn into it were six dollar coins.

  “Why? Why must I go? Fred does not have people, Papa. Fred is just Fred.”

  “Two, three days only, Comity. Oblige me in this. Ghantown, then. Go to the ghantown at Calgo Crossing. The Afghans are a hospitable people, I believe.”

  “But Mr. Hogg says they chopped everybody up in the war and burned their babies and cut their insides up and put out their eyes and—”

  “What nonsense. Mr. Hogg intends a party, and I do not think it fitting for you to be here.” Then his face shut down, fretful and angry, though his eyes continued to plead with her: Go, Comity. Go. Two days is little enough to ask.

  He could not mean it. What was so dangerous about a party? Comity dimly recalled parties back in Adelaide – singing and cake, odd-smelling relations, borrowed dinner services and a clutter of extra chairs; her mother doling out sandwiches and questions and jokes. Parties were happy things, surely, not grounds for running away? Yes, she could see that parties involved more than two people together in the same room. But why did Comity have to go away, just because Herbert Pinny had a horror of crowds? And if parties were dangerous, how much more dangerous was sleeping on the ground among spiders and snakes and ants and dingoes and perentie lizards?

  Perhaps her father was planning to confront Hogg about his uppish, lazy ways and give him notice to leave, and expected to be shot dead by the bestial Hogg and did not want his daughter to see it! Or perhaps he had found out about the Kadimakara in the stationery store and meant to do battle with it, like Saint George with the dragon.

  “Come with us if you are…” (She must choose her words carefully.) “…worried.”

  “Nonsense. How can I leave my post? You should know better than to ask it…”

  “It will be dark soon, Papa! It is almost night! What if Fred and me get lost? What if we get eaten by wild dogs!” She followed her father around the house, tugging on his jacket, trying to tell him what a bad idea it was. Mr. Pinny meanwhile, picked up a blanket from the bed, a loaf, a water bottle, a dinner knife, the maimed copy of Poems: Jean Ingelow.

  Fred hovered by the door, standing sideways on because he was not part of the conversation, wondering how to say no to the bossman. He had never been to a ghantown and he did not mean to start now. Did the Stationmaster not realise how much the ghans hated the Aboriginals, and vice versa? He tried to be clever and perspicacious – to read the heart of Mr. Pinny and find out just what he was afraid of. But Mr. Pinny was curlew-cursed and who can read the heart of a creature that spends its life cowering at the back of a cave?

  Comity took the badly-packed bundle of things from her father and threw them on the ground. She actually stamped her foot. “I will not go to the ghantown! I hate ghans.” It was a terrible thing to say. She half expected her father to stagger backwards clutching his heart. “Also, Fred does not know the way!”

  Herbert Pinny bit his lip and made it bleed. “Is that so, Frederick?”

  “Verily, yes sir,” said Fred, quick as a snake’s whistle.

  A rictus of confusion and pain twisted the Stationmaster’s face. He put on his jacket. “Very well. It seems I must take you.” He looked around the room as if for objections to him leaving. The room was silent but for the sound of his own fingers clicking – a nervous habit he had developed without noticing.

  “It is the Kadimakara, isn’t it?” said Comity, gently taking hold of her father’s hand.

  Fred gasped and lifted his bare feet as though the secret spilled was hot liquid.

  Pinny turned on his daughter a pair of uncomprehending eyes.

  The girl was forever picking up Aboriginal words. She brought them home as other children brought home beetles or dead birds. How pleased Mary would have been. How intensely irritating he found it.

  “If you say so,” he said sharply. “We shall go to Calgo Crossing. Tomorrow I shall return here alone and assess the…damage.” And shouldering the blanket bundle, gritting his teeth, he opened the door.

  The whole of Australia unfurled in front of Herbert Pinny. The evening sun cast prodigious shadows – black tongues lolling. A tidal wave of insect-sound broke over his head, left him gasping, unable to breathe. It was all he could do to climb into the buggy. He sat on the buckboard, picked up the reins, then sat staring at his hands, which were shaking uncontrollably. The tremors reached the pony’s mouth, and Starbuck shuffled uncertainly: was that the signal to go or stop? The flies had heard the remarkable news – Herbert Pinny has stepped out of doors! – and their curiosity settled on him in black clouds, trying to see up his nose, inside his ears, behind his lashes, to map every fold of his landscape and drink the blood off his bitten lip.

  Herbert did not want the gardening boy in the cart with them – sitting behind him, within a hand’s reach of Hogg’s weapons. Minutes before he had been willing to entrust his daughter to Fred’s safekeeping. Now he was afraid of being stabbed in the back with a porcelain-headed spear. After all, what did he really know about Fred?

  There again, Fred probably knew the terrain better. What if they strayed
off the track and got lost? Herbert could not navigate by the stars. How would he ever have learned? Fearing them as he did.

  Even as Pinny steered Starbuck through the gate, evening congealed into dusk. An hour later, the temperature plummeted. In place of the flies came stars. A thousand thousand burned their way into sight, like white-hot needlepoints threatening his eyes. Millions of maggot stars squirmed out of the dung-dark sky and clung there wriggling. Not for long.

  “Are you all right, Papa?”

  The whole sky began to revolve: a dizzying maelstrom of fathomless water and nothing holding it in place, nothing to keep it from falling on him.

  “What’s the matter, Father?”

  Now it began to fall. The stars began to plummet towards him; a hailstorm of stars. He was being pelted with stars. They would pulverize him, sink deep into his flesh, pin him to the ground and bury him. Lower and lower his head sank. He let go the reins and cupped his hands over his eyes to shut out the cataract of stars, the avalanche of stars, the edgeless Everywhere that so horrified and terrified him. “Mary. Mary. Help me, Mary,” he said.

  Comity leaned over to take the reins and encountered clenched hands as cold as liver. When she looked across, her father’s face was so white that it gleamed in the dark. As she swung the pony and trap around, he reeled sideways and his cheek brushed hers, clammy cold. “We should go back, Papa.”

  “Yes! I have changed my mind. I cannot desert my station. What was I thinking of? You are quite old enough to go on your own. Are you? I don’t know!”

  And he did not. All power of decision, all resolve, all common sense had been pelted out of him by the hail of stars. They started back in silence the way they had come, Comity driving, Pinny with his head almost between his knees. They had travelled one hour away from a party. They travelled another hour back home, to save Pinny from the dark.