The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

Such things cannot be done secretly. Soon the parlours of Adelaide were buzzing with outrage.

  “These ghans.”

  “Those blackfellahs.”

  “I was at Kabul and I can tell you…”

  “They simply do not think like us.”

  “Not civilized.”

  “UnChristian.”

  “And warlike. Very bloodthirsty.”

  “If they only wore more clothes!”

  “I tell you, when I was stationed in Kabul during the Afghan Wars…”

  “We fetch these people here…”

  “Well, not the jackies. We did not fetch them.”

  “Well no, not the jackies, obviously, but…”

  “Need to be taught a lesson, and sharply too.”

  “If they dressed like us, they might think more like us.”

  During the Dreamtime, spiteful Marmoo invented insects and stuffed them into every crevice in the world. He must have invented rumours too: rumours breed just as fast as insects; they can infest an entire continent in no time.

  Comity could never have guessed ten small words would multiply into three hundred troopers, three thousand bullets and a train trundling northwards.

  Aunt Berenice sniffed her smelling salts and asked her children to be very brave: “Your aunt and uncle and little cousin Comity may be in serious danger. …But I cannot imagine why my sister thought we were planning to visit her. What sane person would travel needlessly to that dreadful, flyblown nowhere?”

  Anne Bligh scowled at her brothers, warning them not to say a word, then bent her head over her embroidery. She understood very well the reference to travel in the telegram, but nothing was going to make her confess. With any luck, Comity would get murdered by natives now, and no one need ever know about the letter Anne had sent her as a joke. Serve her right, the little liar.

  If only nice Mr. Boyce had been at his desk at Station Three when Comity sent the fatal telegram, all might have been well. But nice Mr. Boyce had startled everyone by going on a sudden trip. And why?

  For months he had been growing increasingly troubled by the transmissions from Station Four. There were errors – nothing important: the numbers for instance were never wrong, not after that one official reprimand. But single letters were missed out, spelling errors regularly slipped in: BEAYUTIFUL and BECUASE, for instance.

  Nice Mr. Boyce had three ears: two for train whistles, birdsong, his wife, etcetera, and one for Morse. This third ear was so finely tuned that he heard Morse like a human voice. Though they had not met for years, he knew Herbert Pinny’s “voice” like that of a next-door neighbour. He knew when Herbert’s assistant Leonard arrived – slow, methodical, a beginner. He knew when the assistant stopped transmitting and a lighter hand took over – a female hand perhaps? Sometimes the key was too lightly struck to register. Herbert’s wife Mary, he assumed. Naturally Mr. Boyce had corrected any mistakes.

  Boyce knew when a second assistant arrived a good while later: someone with a sending style as crisp as fresh lettuce. But over the weeks, this new hand sent fewer and fewer of the daily messages. The newcomer was clearly not pulling his weight.

  Nice Mr. Boyce wished he could have corrected Herbert’s 454/545 mistake, but of course there was no way of spotting it. Knowing Herbert from college days, he realized just what a blow the reprimand must have been to his friend.

  It was shortly after this that Jack Boyce sensed a strange, light hand on the key at Station Four. Not Mary. No, not piano-playing Mary, who had transmitted Morse in delicate cadences, like music. (He had been worrying about Mary ever since she’d failed to thank him for the plants he’d sent her.) Could Herbert really be allowing his daughter to assist him? That was a disaster in the making!

  “I think I may ride up to Number Four and check on Pinny,” he told his wife, only half meaning it. He was not much of a travelling man.

  “Ride all that way? At your age?” said his wife – which decided him then and there to go.

  Mr. Boyce put in for leave, changed out of his dapper waistcoat and flannels and set off on the two-hundred-mile trip to Kinkindele with a horse, a pack horse and a tent. He followed the Wire, in the company of his own wiremen. When they reached the end of their section and turned back, he continued on his own, bivouacking beside a campfire every night with a horse breathing down his ear. He found it uplifting, eating supper under a canopy of stars and wearing baggy trousers for a change. The impossible vastness of the country impressed itself afresh on him as, day after day, he met no one. Why, it could swallow up a man, just as a man could swallow a gnat without noticing!

  From a distance, Station Four looked very like Station Three transported into a different landscape. Twigs and leaves swish-rattled towards him in the rising wind and gave the impression of movement, but there was barely any. A pair of goats and four horses had turned their backs to the wind. A tablecloth caught in the branches of a tree flapped like a flag of surrender. The windmill that drove the generator was spinning at full tilt. Crates stood about in the yard, unopened. Five mangy chickens had pecked each other bald. Their droppings were alive with maggots.

  And there were seven worrying mounds of dug earth, arranged in an orderly row.

  “Holy angels,” said Mr. Boyce to himself. “What happened here?”

  Mary Pinny’s pretty window boxes had been dragged into a double row in front of the mounds, and planks ripped out of the verandah had been stood on end, pinned upright by the window boxes. There were crudely daubed paintings on the planks: animals and stick people and birds. Nice Mr. Boyce drew the pistol he had brought along for rabbiting.

  He negotiated the verandah, taking care not to step on any of the metal spikes or into gaps where the planks were missing.

  “Herbert? Herbert Pinny?” he called, pushing open the door.

  A girl holding a spanner came out of the machine room – a girl so sunburned, so unwashed and unbrushed, that he could not tell at first if she was European or Aboriginal, so thin and starved of sleep that her eyes were dark hollows. Greasy hair was screwed into a knot on top of her head and stuck through with two knitting needles. Her licked lips were like crumpled tissue paper, gummed at the corner with sores. Mr. Boyce put the pistol behind his back.

  “Hello. I am Jack. I was at your parents’ wedding. You must be Comity.”

  Meanwhile, the Army train set out for Oodnadatta, so crowded with troops that the brisk breeze blowing in at the window was a mercy. Beyond the Flinders Mountains, though, the windows had to be closed to keep out the gusting dust. The train driver and stoker wrapped their heads in cloths to keep the grit out of their ears.

  “I am sorry. Papa is not available,” said the little girl. “You could come back another day.”

  “Never mind,” said Mr. Boyce. He nodded at the spanner in her hand. “Is this something you need help with?”

  “The battery is dead.”

  “Oh dear. And the spares?”

  “Dead too.”

  “Batteries are a trial, are they not? I am forever rebuilding mine. So…that means…the Wire is down, then?” (It was a blow to discover he could not dash off a message to Head Office or even share with his wife what he was seeing.) He tried to keep his voice light and calm, but the child’s eyes swerved with panic.

  “It will be mended soon. Papa will mend it.”

  “Well, I did see those big crates in the yard. I think they may be of use.” And he tugged out the walking cane that was holding two cupboard doors shut, and went outside to break open the crate of battery cells.

  Together, they began rebuilding one of the batteries. That is to say, Boyce rebuilt it while the child stood to one side, tapping with skinny little fingers on the desktop and trembling like a whippet. He did not try to take the spanner from her: he had a feeling it was as much weapon as tool. While he worked, he talked – as people do on the most normal of days. The girl’s eyes drifted continuously to the window, the machine, the stopped clock.

  “Those
painted boards in the yard…” began Mr. Boyce.

  “They keep the ghosts away from the house.”

  “The ghosts? Ah yes. I suppose they must… These batteries are something your wiremen could help you with. They out on patrol?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Oh dear. What about your blacksmith?”

  “Dead.”

  Boyce waited to regain full control of his voice. “And Herbert? Your pa? We went to college together, you know. He was quite the finest Morse man of our year.” The girl did not answer. “And that lovely mother of yours?”

  “There was a tiger snake in the wash basket,” said the girl, winding a strand of greasy hair round her finger over and over and over again.

  Mr. Boyce felt a sudden need to blow his nose, and turned aside. “What happened here, Comity?”

  But the child only shrugged.

  The bad-tempered wind blustered round the house, bringing down wisps of thatch. As each reed floated past the window, Comity Pinny would flinch and tighten her grip on the spanner.

  “Who are you expecting, Comity? Aboriginals? Blackfellahs, I mean? With spears?”

  “Oh no!” said Comity. “The Kinkindele mob went walkabout.”

  “Because…?”

  She shrugged again. “Because they do.”

  Boyce was running out of calm. “You must have seen something, my dear?”

  “I was in tintown with Fred.” She straightened the torn-off pages on their metal spike until they lined up neatly.

  “What, you were kidnapped by the ghans?”

  “No! Of course not! I went there with Fred.”

  “Ah. And where is this Fred now?” enquired the telegrapher gently.

  “Dead. Mr. Hogg called him a dingo and shot him.”

  Boyce almost laughed with relief. “Fred was your pet dog!”

  She scowled ferociously at him. “No. Fred was my best friend.”

  Generally there are two acid batteries in use and one in the repair shop. Boyce deduced that for all three to be dead, some time must have passed since routines went to pot at Station Four.

  “Your pa’s deputy not up to snuff, then? Did he walk out?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “I do not know which grave is him. There was an aitch, but it might have been H for Hart or H for Hogg.”

  “Indeed it might.”

  “Or I would burn him in the ground with kerosene.”

  To hide his tears and terror from the child, and to stop himself tormenting her with more questions, Jack Boyce went to look around the house. And just when he had begun to think everyone but Comity was dead, he came across someone else who was not.

  “Pinny? Pinny, are you all right? What happened here? Are you wounded? Poor, dear Mary! I am so sorry, man, so very sorry!”

  Slumped on his bed, Herbert Pinny did not so much as open his eyes. Perhaps, after all, he too was dead.

  Even when Herbert did stir, his lips were slack and his eyes sunken and unfocussed. There were glasses and cups all over the room. Boyce snatched the blanket off the man and bundled it out of the window, nervous of fleas or lice. It was a blessed relief to find his friend alive, but Boyce’s compassion was hampered by anger. “Are you drunk, man? Are you so drunk that your daughter must run the whole station? For pity’s sake, are there any Regulations in the book that you have not broken?” He tried to raise Herbert to his feet, but the man was limp as treacle.

  “Papa does not drink,” said the child, who had followed him and stood now in the bedroom doorway. “He is a telegrapher. And an abstainer. He does not drink.”

  Boyce snorted, no longer able to master his disgust. His gesture took in the litter of glasses and cups. “What are these, then?”

  Comity scratched at her hair with the spanner and dislodged one of the knitting needles. “Pituri. You use it to catch emus. But I did not use so much, because Papa is smaller than an emu.”

  “For the love of God! Why would you do such a thing? Why would you drug your own father, you unnatural child?”

  Comity frowned, startled by his sudden noise and puzzled that she needed to explain. “In case he wanted to kill me too, of course,” she said.

  Slowly, painfully, Herbert Pinny emerged from his stupor like a hatching turtle surfacing from under sand. He thought he might die of it. His head felt as cracked and fragile as an egg.

  “There was a party,” he said, and Boyce threw a cup to the floor in disgust. Alcohol was behind this, after all. That drink should have corrupted a man like Herbert, once so clean-living!

  And indeed, alcohol had been behind it, as Herbert went on to explain.

  Behind the locked doors of the stationery store, deputy telegrapher Quartz Hogg had secretly built a still – a distillery – for the illegal manufacture of liquor. He intended to sell it to the local Aboriginals and generally use it to liven up “this dust bowl of boredom”, as he put it. He organized some of the stockmen to bring him the ingredients, promising hooch whisky in exchange. When there were supplies enough of whisky, Quartz Hogg announced his intention to have a party.

  “I got Comity away, fearing this party would be an uncouth affair. I knew nothing of the alcohol brewing in the yard, but there was something devilish in that man – something dangerous. I wanted Comity away from here.”

  Barricaded in the back room, Herbert Pinny had soon heard the clink of glasses, and smelled alcohol. He had shouted his objections through the door – forbidden his staff to drink, citing Company Regulations. He was ignored. Quite quickly, men who were meant to take their every command from the Stationmaster were roaring drunk and beyond hearing anything he said. Somehow – Pinny did not know how – Hogg had offended the Aboriginal guests, who left. (Not being witness to it, Pinny could not say quite what had happened, but there had been shouting out in the yard.) The permanent residents of Repeater Station Four were left to revel on their own: Hogg, Smith, Amos, Hart, Cage, Sankey…

  The party had lasted all night.

  At some point, Hogg and Smith had disappeared and were gone for a couple of hours. Coming back to find the punchbowl empty, Smith went to the stationery store to replenish it. It was pitch-dark in the one-time chapel, but Smith added liberal flavouring to the hooch from the various ingredients lined up on the shelves: fruit juices, berry compote, home-made cider brewed in a bucket… Drunk and fumbling, unfamiliar with Hogg’s still, and in inky darkness, it was an easy mistake to make. Battery acid in place of cider? Kerosene or sheep drench in place of fruit compote? Who could say?

  No one who swallowed the whisky-punch that night would ever say anything again.

  The only person not to drink the poisonous concoction, of course, was teetotal Herbert Pinny, imprisoned in his office. So the next morning he was not, like the others, lying dead in the living room, the barn or the yard.

  “Hogg was the last to die. I heard him cursing and crying out for many hours. He demanded I help him, but I could not open the door of the machine room, of course, and neither could he, not once the pains were upon him. He wanted to reach the machine, and telegraph for help. But he had gone to such pains to ensure the door was very thoroughly barred.”

  “You might have telegraphed yourself?” whispered Jack Boyce, but Herbert must not have heard the question.

  “I could hear Hogg moving about the house, looking for relief, looking for Comity, calling on Comity. He seemed to think that something was chewing on him – some animal – devouring him, and that she could maybe loosen its jaws… I am glad I got her away. It was not a thing for a child to hear…”

  Forcing the office window out of its frame, Herbert Pinny finally clambered out of the machine room and began to make sense of what had happened to the staff of his station.

  “Hogg was in the dunny – half in, half out of the dunny. He seemed delirious – begging me to ‘get the dogs off’ him – ‘drag the dogs off’ him. The moon was full and I believe he mistook it for a face. Kept poi
nting up at it, saying that there he was: ‘the man who set his dogs on me to chew up my guts’. I tried to go to his aid – of course I did! To move him out of the dunny, at least: no one should die in a dunny. But of a sudden, he took it into his head that it was I who had poisoned him. ‘You wanted rid of me, Pinny, but I’ll outlive you yet!’ And he took me by the throat, and his strength did indeed seem restored for I quite believed, in that moment, that he and not I would live to see daylight.

  “The snake must have been drinking from the bucket. There is always water kept in a bucket by the toilet – I am sure you do the same. Our struggles overturned the bucket and the snake (I suppose) struck out in fear… Hogg was bitten in the throat… Soon after that, he was spared his suffering. Dead. It was a tiger snake, I believe.”

  Herbert Pinny had then set about burying the bodies. The labour had half killed him, especially with the glaring immensity of land and sky watching him as he dug. Watching him, watching him, watching him, watching him, watching him dig.

  “And you thought to tell no one all this? To signal no one?” said nice Mr. Boyce.

  Herbert looked at him in disbelief. He cupped his hand, as if round a Morse key. “How could I hold the words in my hands, Jack?” he said. “How could anyone?”

  The machine rattled an acknowledgement from Station Three:

  WELCOME BACK ON LINE FOUR STOP

  GOD BE PRAISED

  There was more besides. An urgent message from the Superintendent’s Office in Adelaide regarding the war.

  “WAR?” Jack Boyce read and reread the letters he had just taken down on the notepad. “There is a WAR?”

  “Oh. No.” Comity giggled, embarrassed. “There is not a war, really and truly.”

  “But the Army has been sent to quash it! They are coming north aboard a train now!”

  The two men stared at Comity, but she was beyond regret, beyond apologizing. She had just found out that her father had not killed six people. He had not killed anyone, and the relief was so huge that she thought the wind around the house must be the sound of cheering. What was one little lie in a good cause?