The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Comity made a tour of inspection. The door of the stationery store stood open. There was nothing inside but a clutter of pots and pans, the fly screen off her bedroom window and two giant bedsprings.

  The forge in the barn was not quite cold. She climbed to the lofts, found the wiremen’s possessions; no sign of them, only their few belongings and the smell of their boots. Down below, Horse was snickering her adventures to her fellow wire-horses, but there was no one for Comity to tell…unless it was Quartz Hogg, king of Kinkindele, waiting at the table for his dinner.

  What if he was out and about? She might just be able to creep in as far as the machine room and get off a message in Morse – STATION FOUR SOS SEND HELP – before Hogg returned and grabbed her or shot her dead.

  Creeping along the verandah on hands and knees, her injured thigh screaming with pain, she peered in at the window. No one sat waiting at the table or dozing in the armchair. The piano was silent, the room almost tidy but for three cans of beans saluting her with raised lids.

  She realized that she had crawled through a pool of whitewash spilled from a paint can, and remembered, in a rush, the luminous white cross dodging through the paddock as Fred ran for his life. The paint did not show on her white muslin, but it did leave a palm-print on the door handle as she opened the door.

  A rattle of Morse, sharp as gunfire. Her body froze, but not her brain; it translated the signal.

  …BORE PIPES FOR TEN WHIRLS PLUS…

  It was almost as if, somewhere in the world, life was going on as normal.

  The machine-room door was ajar. She could see a coil of cable, the heel of a shoe, heard the tap of the Morse key resending the message:

  …PIPES FOR TEN WHIRLS…

  He did not stop sending, even after she pushed open the door, because Regulations stated that a message must be sent whole, at a regular speed, and without pauses.

  “Papa?”

  “Home so soon, Comity? What is this you are wearing? I surmise that you went to the ghantown after all.”

  “Everybody is…” Comity gestured feebly towards the yard. “Everybody. Did the fellahs…?”

  “The stockmen would appear to have gone walkabout. It would be a kindness to the cows and goats if you would milk them, please. Remind me to thank Fred for escorting you.”

  She continued to point back the way she had come. “Fred is dead,” she said.

  Herbert Pinny frowned and blinked several times. “Him too?” He seemed surprised, and rather disappointed in Fred. On the notepad by his hand, he had written the number 40 a dozen times over. He always fretted about numbers in a telegram. His eyes were bruised black for lack of sleep; his hands (blistered from digging) were ineffectually bandaged round with knotted handkerchiefs, and some new nervous habit had plucked out a large patch of hair from his temple. But his shoulders seemed less hunched than before, his lips less chewed. In fact, he seemed almost calm.

  “Have you told anyone? Is anyone coming?” she asked.

  Herbert turned back to his work. “Oh, I think we may manage on our own, may we not, Comity? We did before.”

  Amos, Hart, Cage, Sankey, Smith, Hogg… Comity could not blame her father for Hogg; hadn’t she and Fred wished him dead? Hogg and Smith had both been bad servants of the British-Australian Telegraph Company. But Amos? And Hart? And Cage, with his seven distant sisters? Maybe Hogg had worked the others up to mutiny and violence, and Papa had had to fight for his life? Comity was desperate for some explanation that would make things be all right.

  But Herbert Pinny was not available for comment. He had withdrawn not only to the machine room, but to somewhere deep underground, and Comity had no energy left to dig him out. You can try and try and try, but you won’t get a burdi out of the ground – not once it has dug itself in. Fred had said that. A burdi has massive claws and clings on grimly to the dark and, in the end, the work is not worth it. You might as well leave the burdi alone in its burrow.

  Besides, Comity dared not ask her father what had happened. He was all she had left in the world. What was she going to do? Send a telegraph to Head Office?

  PAPA HAS KILLED EVERYBODY

  Then state troopers would come and take him away, and he would go quiet and say nothing, like now, and forget to tell them how Aboriginal tribesmen had attacked with spears and done everybody to death. Or Afghans, like after the siege of Kabul. Or spiteful Tuckonies. Or the Devil-Devil.

  So Comity fell in with her father’s wishes, and kept house and milked the cows and the goats, and oiled the trap harness, and loosed the horses into the paddock and fetched them in again at night, and fed the chickens, and washed clothes and cooked and read…yes, even read, because Ivanhoe and Little Women filled up all those dangerous spaces in her head where thoughts might stow away.

  And sure enough, a kind of peace settled.

  At night, a tiredness took hold of her – a crocodile tiredness that seized her in its jaws and spun her downwards into a deep dark nothingness from which it was really difficult to swim up next morning. That was all to the good: sleep was a kindness.

  Every night she locked the doors. Then she took to locking them after every trip into the yard for vegetables or washing or to feed the chooks. It seemed wise to lock up. In case the Aboriginals came back. Or the ghans.

  Or the Devil-Devil.

  Of course there had been no Kadimakara in the stationery store: Fred had seen inside and said so, and ever since then Comity had seen what a ridiculous idea they had cooked up between them. A man-made Kadimakara indeed! Silly nonsense!

  But the Devil-Devil, who roams the world hunting down people who have done bad things, and tearing them limb from limb? Best to lock the door against the Devil-Devil. There were seven graves in the yard, and only one could be blamed on a tiger snake.

  Now Herbert Pinny even allowed Comity to share the work in the machine room.

  “Not numerals, of course. Never numerals,” he said with a flicker of the old panic, because when people are telegraphing sums of money or head of sheep or times of trains, it is vital the numbers are transmitted accurately. Comity knew the rules as well as the Ten Commandments.

  After dinner each night, she read to her father from The Diary of a Nobody. He appeared to listen, but it was hard to tell.

  She thought about Fred every single day. Each night she looked at the moon and wondered if his soul really had made the leap up there – from the roof of the tin mosque, perhaps? As the days passed, and the full moon was pared down thinner and thinner, she felt a blind panic, in case Fred was left clinging to the last remnant of moon before dropping down screaming…

  The screaming that came from the machine room was so terrible that Comity was sure her father had electrocuted himself.

  Or the Devil-Devil had come.

  She ran to her father’s aid.

  He was sobbing – head down and sobbing – a curled sheet from the notepad clutched in one hand, old notes from the metal spike strewn across the desk. His pencil jottings were gouged into the notepad, each number written and overwritten twenty times.

  “Papa! What’s the matter? Tell me! What?”

  Herbert Pinny had been reprimanded by the Company for transmitting an incorrect numeral: 454 instead of 545. For the first time in his career, he had made an error. Just a slip, just a tiny mistake.

  “Was it you, Comity? Was it your fault? Did you do it?” He grasped her wrists, terrifyingly hard, lips drawn back off his teeth, eyes searching her face for signs of guilt.

  “But I do not do numbers,” she said, feeling the small bones of her wrist crackle in his grasp. “I am not allowed.”

  The grip relented, and the face repented, and anger was replaced with abject horror. The fault was all his own. It was as if the whole world had collapsed – sky upon spire upon chimney upon roof upon man.

  She persuaded him into his bed and left him there, wide-eyed, groaning with horror and whispering, “Five four five, five four five four five…”

&nbs
p; The Morse machine stirred into life, like some Kadimakara built of metal and cabling. Comity fastened up her hair and went to take dictation from its rattling jaws.

  It was numbers or nothing after Herbert Pinny took to his bed. The laundry had to go hang. The chicken shed did not get cleaned out. When Starbuck cast shoes, Comity told him he would have to go barefoot. A possum got into the water butt and died there and she had to clear the blockage. Copying down numbers is easy in comparison with things like that.

  And it was fine. It was all perfectly, absolutely, completely all right. Another Comity Pinny was living at Kinkindele and she was having a lovely time.

  Dear Cousins,

  Mama is very busy with the Sports Day. What a jolly time we are having! There are running races and high jump and long jump and handstanding and tite-rope walking and lassooing. (Cows are easier than horses becuase horses reer up.) There is a beayutiful golden cup for the winner. Frederick will win it naturelly. But he says I may have it if I want becuase he has gold crockery at home and things taist odd when you eat off it. Count Frederick is a very lively fella and can perform backward summersalts but not in his best uniform.

  Unable to leave Telegraph House and roam the countryside, Comity loosed her imagination instead. Like an eagle, it soared over the places she had once gone with Fred, and reported back to her on the world’s wonders.

  Count Frederick did battle last week with a perentie lizard and felled it with a sling and five stones.

  Mama says I must tell you: you have to be careful of wild camels. I got kicked in the thy and the scar is horrible even after weeks. Moosa said I was very brave.

  Life is very quite here. The stockmen have gone walkabout. They do that. I do not know why.

  When the camel train called at Kinkindele Repeater Station, Comity did not meet the eyes of the cameleers. She did not offer them refreshment, for fear they catch sight of the untidy kitchen, the unlit forge, the filthy chickens. If she could, she would have thrown a cloth over the seven graves, to hide them. Like a piano. If Moosa Rasul was among the cameleers, she did not see him, because she did not look.

  She could manage to carry the bread, flour and the rice indoors. The crates of insulators and battery cells had to stay where they were in the yard: they were too heavy for her to shift on her own.

  But back inside the house, everything was fine – absolutely and completely and totally and marvellously all right.

  Dear Cousins,

  Today I went to the Sea with Frederick. It is our favourite place, high up at the top of a hill. There are shells all over and perfect fish so you can count every singel bone.

  Her pencil hung in the air. A drop of saltwater fell from her lashes onto the word shell, so that a scallop tasted saltwater again after aeons lying in the sun. It was such a long time since she had been to the Sea with Fred, and pored over the fossils and litter left high and dry by an ancient evaporated ocean. So strange: even Fred did not know a story big enough to explain it. Comity had described a real, wet ocean to him – what she remembered of one, anyway. And he had stared at her, marvelling at the immensity of her lies. In the end, two master storytellers had fallen silent, sitting, eyes shut, on the bed of an ocean, under shifting fathoms of imagined water, while whales swam by and the keel of Noah’s ark left its white wake overhead.

  If rememberings had not taken over from letter writing, Comity might have gone on to explain to the Blighs that she was talking fossils, archaeology… As it was, the Sea proved her undoing. For at last the noxious Blighs cried “Enough!” Sports days and fountains, dams and Russian counts, tightrope walkers and monstrous lizards had made them suspicious (sometimes a little envious) but one mention of the Sea, and Alexander, Anne and Albert all agreed: Comity Pinny was a liar.

  Alexander wanted to sneak into his father’s machine room and send the single word LIAR rattling from repeater station to repeater station to slap their cousin’s silly face. But Anne said no.

  Cousin Anne had a better idea…

  Life continued splendid – oh, better than splendid! – at Kinkindele. Really it did! There Comity sat in the machine room, her hair fastened up in a bun by two knitting needles, for all the world like her grandmother at the heart of her web of wool, strands of words stretching out on all sides, as she knitted together far distant lives. Good things were happening everywhere: weddings and business deals, babies and journeys and changes of address… Bad things were also happening everywhere – to everyone! – prison sentences, death and debt and temper and worry… And Comity was the one holding the reins. She was in control. It was almost as if she could allow or forbid the joys and tragedies to happen, because her hand was on the key.

  All right, yes, the Devil-Devil was prowling the boundary fence, sitting on Goat Ridge in the moonlight and gluing emu feathers into vengeance shoes using gallons of blood. But Comity had a plan to deal with that too.

  She was saving up tragedies on the metal spike by the Morse machine – all those messages about jilted sweethearts, children dead from measles, unpaid debts, sons in prison… She kept the spike by her bed. If, one night, the Devil-Devil leaped the fence and climbed through the window without a fly screen to tear her father to pieces, she would jump up and drive the spike into its chest. Not to kill it, of course – the Devil-Devil cannot be killed – but to confuse it with sadnesses. Sadnesses clog up the brain. Verily they do.

  “Camels in the yard, Comity,” she told herself, as the stately swaying ships-of-the-desert came into view. They emerged from their own dust cloud, scarred and overladen. Camels frightened her these days.

  Going outside, she accidentally looked at the faces and recognized Moosa among the ghans, even though their heads were wrapped against a rising wind. They had all noticed their previous cargo still standing where it had been offloaded a month before. She felt ashamed – found out in her bad housekeeping.

  “The wiremen are out on tour,” she said. “Our fellahs have gone walkabout.”

  “I can help you, perhaps?” said Moosa, though the older men scowled at him.

  “No! No. No, thank you. Father will see to it.” And she took the mail and signed for the battery acid, flour, salt, paint, nails, copper wire and solder. When she reached for the mail, Moosa kept hold of it for a second or two.

  “The gift of sweets prevailed.” He leaned his head close to whisper it, and flashed her a smile as if she was expected to be glad too. “Allah is good.”

  “I expect so,” said Comity.

  “Is the hog-man still here?”

  “No. No, he is gone. I cannot talk: I am very busy.” And she snatched the letters and fled back into the house. For a long time the carriers stood about, discussing her – she could see them through the window, casting looks towards the house, faceless and frightening.

  Among the deliveries were her twelve new message spikes. She had ordered them herself, using an official requisition form and forging her father’s signature. That was good. Now she could booby-trap the verandah and maybe keep the monsters and ghosts from getting into the house.

  There was also a letter from the noxious Blighs, addressed to Comity herself.

  Charming cousin Comity,

  Your letters have filled us with longing to see the wonders of Kinkingdeely. We have won round our parents with much pleading, and they have agreed to a trip. So we are setting off soon and hope to arrive before Aunt Mary’s birthday day.

  Yours in exitement…

  They had all signed it, artistic Albert adding a face beside his name. The face wore a big, smug smirk.

  It was unthinkable, of course. They must not come. They had to be stopped. What could Comity say to put them off? That her father was ill? No! Then Superintendent Bligh would ask all sorts of questions. That typhus fever had carried off everyone? No! Superintendent Bligh would send a doctor. That the Devil-Devil had laid siege to Telegraph House? That there were seven graves in the yard? No. Whatever she did say must not fetch anyone to Kinkindele. And whateve
r the excuse, she would have to send it by telegram. There was no time for a letter to make the return journey: the Blighs were probably packing their bags at this very minute.

  It had to be a vague and simple lie, but big enough to hide Kinkindele’s secrets, like a cloth thrown over a piano. She worked out the Morse on the notepad and, when it was sent, burned the evidence.

  DO NOT COME STOP

  REGRET NATIVES AND CALGO GANS AT WAR

  If only nice Mr. Boyce had been at his desk at Station Three. He would not have panicked. But for the first time in years, nice Mr. Boyce had gone on a sudden trip. His deputy telegrapher sent the message on to Station Two, with a slightly shaking hand. A war up near Station Four?

  The news sped south across the empty Outback, onwards into Port Augusta, Adelaide and the Central Telegraph Office. It was delivered to the Bligh household, of course, but by then many other eyes had seen it, and the contents were so shocking that they quickly reached the Company President himself.

  DO NOT COME STOP

  REGRET NATIVES AND CALGO GANS AT WAR

  South Australian Railways were told. The Government was informed. A war, however remote, must be snuffed out quickly, before it spread. Government property could be damaged! Innocent white Australians could suffer! The Wire could be severed! Order must be restored.

  The Army was turned out.

  Naturally telegrams were sent up the Wire asking for more details – for more information about this war. But a fault had developed somewhere between Stations Three and Five. All that came back was an anxious telegram from Mr. Boyce’s wife at Three, saying that her husband was riding north to visit friends, and asking if he was “heading into danger”. The failure of the Wire seemed like proof something was wrong.

  General Gostard knew what he had to do. He and three hundred troopers of the South Australian Army boarded a train north out of Adelaide, heading for Oodnadatta. From there he would march north-west to Calgo.