The Claimant

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The Claimant Page 47

by Janette Turner Hospital


  ‘It goes to Mount Mee, surprise surprise. Mount Samson Road turns into the Mount Mee Road right there,’ Brendan said.

  ‘That long low building at the turn? The billboard says Dayboro Butchery. Does my friend work there?’

  ‘Used to. For a couple of years. That’s when we decided he was okay. That’s why we let him buy land. It’s our regional abattoir, that place, but he never did like the slaughtering and skinning and hanging part. Can’t kill a fly, that bloke. Butchering, though? After his steers have been hung, he still does the halving and quartering and cutting there but he’s planning on building his own cold storage place on his farm. He’s working on it. I tell ya, he’s the Beethoven of butchers, not that we’re into Beethoven round here, but he is. Into Beethoven, I mean. He has pretty strange tastes for a butcher. I sent Sean for him, by the way, after you flashed the holy beads. He doesn’t have a phone. He’ll be on his way but it’ll be a bit of a wait.’

  The main street of Dayboro was not very long and not very busy. From the veranda railing where she sat sipping her ale, Cap watched several battered cars pass. She saw a small truck laden with crates marked Pineapples and Bananas head down the mountain road towards the city. She watched a milk truck pass. Looking uphill towards the blue and purple mountains, up the Mount Mee Road, she saw the sky filling up with low dark cloud. She thought she could actually see rain falling like sheer veils on Mount Mee. If Monet had ever been in Australia, that is what he would paint, she thought.

  ‘Looks as though it’s going to rain any minute,’ Cap said.

  ‘Nah. Mount Mee, yes, but not here. Not before January. We’re not high enough. And not before four o’clock, ever.’

  ‘Why not before four?’

  Brendan O’Sullivan blinked at her as though she had asked: Will the sun set this evening? ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘that’s the way summer thunderstorms are.’

  Cap watched an extremely battered pick-up truck chug down the main street and park in front of the pub. It was approximately blood-red in colour, but large sections had been blow-torched and panel-beaten and were of no determinate colour at all. Two Australian cattle dogs leaped out of the back of the pick-up and bounded up the wooden steps to the veranda.

  ‘Here he is,’ Brendan O’Sullivan said. ‘And here come Bluey and Bligh. Never in my lifetime known a dog drink rum the way Bligh does. Hey, fellas! Now you stop jumping all over this lady here, she’s a friend of Ty-Lew’s.’

  ‘Ti-Loup?’ Cap repeated, startled.

  ‘Yeah. That’s what we call him. What do you call him?’

  ‘Ah … I call him the Man from Nowhere.’

  ‘Yeah. So do we. Don’t you know his real name?’

  ‘I’ve never been sure what his real name is.’

  ‘His real name’s Christy McLew but we Aussies shorten every word we can. You know, brekkie for breakfast, cuppa for a cup of tea. First Christy McLew became Ty McLew, then he became Ty-Lew because it’s quicker to say. Hey, Ty-Lew! Your sheila’s waiting.’

  6.

  Perhaps because two boisterous dogs were jumping all over her, perhaps because of the shimmering humid haze, perhaps because of the dark shadow of the Moreton Bay fig tree, Cap could see nothing but a column of light mounting the steps of the pub and moving towards her. She was blinded. She saw only a shape with bright edges.

  ‘Obviously my dogs love you,’ said the voice from out of the glare. ‘You haven’t changed, Cap.’ The voice sounded exactly like that of Brendan O’Sullivan. ‘The first time I ever saw you, I threatened I’d sic the chateau dogs onto you and you laughed at me and said, The dogs love me. You haven’t changed.’

  ‘You have,’ Cap said. Her eyes began to adjust. She saw the dark outline of a man and then, gradually, his features and his body shape, which was that of a tanned and muscled athlete. She saw the long welt that ran down one side of his face and his neck. ‘I hardly recognise you.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ He shrugged. ‘The limp. Bad leg break. Never mended right. Changes my walk. And this thing.’ He touched the scar on his face. ‘Plus it’s been twenty-six years. Mais quand même je m’appelle encore Ti-Loup. Comment tu vas, Cap?’

  For some time, she could not speak. It was like being caught at a four-way crossing in a wind tunnel, with gale-force squalls blowing from all corners of the earth and from every point in between: joy, anger, fury, resentment, gratitude, sobbing relief. At last she was able to say, very civilly, very politely, though not without a catch in her voice, ‘Je vais bien, merci. Comme vous êtes gentil.’

  ‘Tu sais bien que je ne suis pas du tout gentil.’

  ‘C’est vrai. Vous n’êtes pas du tout gentil.’ She gulped at her ale and looked out into the street. In French, she recognised him, and he was not a kind person, not at all. ‘You don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself.’

  ‘C’est ça que tu crois?’

  ‘Yes, I do believe that.’

  ‘If you knew how much you don’t know,’ he said. ‘Comme tu es impitoyable et brutale.’

  ‘You’re asking for pity?’

  ‘No. Not asking for anything. Not expecting. Just commenting.’ They studied their beer. They studied the scarred wooden top of the table with its gouges and stains. ‘You haven’t forgiven me,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘On the other hand, you came. You’re here.’

  On the tabletop, with her index finger, Cap traced a jagged roadmap that had probably been carved by a knife-wielding drunk. ‘Your eyes are the same,’ she said. ‘Nothing else is the same.’

  ‘My dogs seem to love you even more than they love me. That’s the same.’

  ‘Bluey and Bligh, Brendan said.’

  ‘Ah. Well. Those are their public names. Their private names, their real names – and they do know their real names – are Ti-Christophe and Grand Loup.’ He reached across the table and lifted her left hand. ‘No wedding ring? I’ve been imagining you as Mrs Simon Cabot with two children in college. No?’

  ‘No. But Simon and I are together. We don’t have children. And you?’

  ‘There was a woman who kept me alive in Vietnam. We had a son. They both drowned in the South China Sea. Our boats sailed into a typhoon.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ti-Loup. We knew about the shipwreck. Your mother got a letter from someone who was in your platoon.’

  ‘No one who was in my platoon has the faintest idea of what happened.’

  ‘One of them does,’ Cap said. ‘How many people were picked up by that passing ship when your boat sank?’

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t remember anything about that except black water and my son’s arms around my neck letting go. I hung onto a piece of the boat, that’s what saved me. Or so I was told. They said I was hypothermic for twelve hours.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘It means I was shivering violently, very agitated, very confused. Only thing I can remember is trying to hold on to my son and not being able to. I’m told they had to strap me into the bed because I kept lunging for him. The ship’s doctor warned me that the amnesia might be permanent.’

  ‘And was it? Is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? I don’t know what I don’t remember,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘Some gaps I can fill in for you,’ Cap said. ‘From the letter that was written to your mother.’

  ‘When was this letter written?’

  ‘Twenty years ago, well almost, in 1976. The ship that picked you up took you to Manila. At least one survivor was flown back to the States and met someone from your platoon in Walter Reed. The name of the guy in your platoon was Ben Wheeler, from Decatur, Georgia.’

  Ti-Loup frowned and shook his head. ‘I don’t remember him. Wait … it’s fuzzy … maybe I do. If I saw a photograph of my platoon, I think, bit by bit, maybe I could remember each one. But all that … you know. It’s just darkness. I can’t look there.’

  ‘I made a photocopy of the letter Ben Wheeler sent to your mother. Her lawyer has one cop
y but I made another one for you.’ She reached into her shoulder bag for an envelope. It was sealed. ‘In case you ever feel ready to read it,’ she said.

  ‘My mother’s lawyer? So I’m being hunted. That’s how you tracked me down.’

  ‘I didn’t track you down. I came here because you wrote to me.’

  ‘I wrote because I’ve been tracked down. People have shown up asking Brendan about a Vietnam vet.’

  ‘Brendan thinks you’re a genuine Aussie.’

  ‘I am,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘The reporters are barking up the wrong tree. Only time I’ve been out of the country was Vietnam, and I’ve made sure everyone knows that.’

  ‘Does everyone believe you? Does anyone guess who you are?’

  ‘Round here no one cares who I am. What counts is what kind of farmer you are.’

  ‘Your father died.’

  ‘So I was informed in front of a camera crew. They duped me.’

  ‘You’ve inherited everything.’

  ‘So they told me. I’m not interested. I crossed paths with Vanderbilt in Vietnam, but he was killed.’

  ‘Your mother thought you should know. She placed notices in some Australian papers.’

  ‘So that’s what brought the bloodsuckers out. Brendan says serious money’s being thrown around. He was offered one thousand in cash just to tell where I lived. Anyway, I was tricked, but not by Brendan, and not by anyone I know in this town. I’m out there somewhere, though, on some con man’s video, and who knows how it’s going to be used?’

  ‘Who snitched?’

  ‘No one knows, and everyone has closed ranks to protect me. The thing is, no one can come up the road from Brisbane without Brendan seeing and he knows every car that belongs and the ones that don’t.’

  ‘So how did that camera crew get past him?’

  ‘That’s the worry. They told him I was expecting them. They said they were doing a documentary on humanely raised beef and Brendan knows they can’t shut me up on that subject in the pub. So he believed them. People trust one another round here. Which is why I now require some secret sign. Like the rosary.’

  Cap reached into her pocket and let the cobalt beads trail across her fingers.

  ‘They always made me feel I could touch you,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘But they also make me think of my son. His name was Thanh. It’s the word for the colour of the sky, which is the bluest of blues in Vietnam – not quite the colour of those beads, but close.’

  ‘Let me give them back to you. Or should I keep them and give you back your mother’s pearls and jade?’

  ‘No. You keep the pearls. It was your beads that kept me safe. I admit I would like them back.’

  ‘How did you manage to keep them? I mean, in combat? And when your boat went under?’

  ‘They were always around my neck, like my dog tags. Always. You’d be surprised how many guys wear good-luck charms under their combat gear. I never let go of your rosary. Working in the paddy, in the tunnels when we had to hide, on the boat and in the water. It was always around my neck. My son’s arms were around my neck too but he let go and I couldn’t hang on to him. I have no photograph. I have nothing.’ For a long time he stared up the Mount Mee Road and studied the blue and purple range. He avoided Cap’s eyes. Then he thumped his heart with one fist. ‘I have him in here, that’s all. I have both of them in here.’

  ‘What was your wife’s name?’

  ‘My son’s mother. Her name was Lan. It’s the name of a flower. An orchid. Une capucine.’

  ‘The ship that picked you up …’

  ‘They were looking for shot-down pilots and we got lucky. So you and Simon Cabot live together?’

  ‘Yes. Well, more or less. I keep my apartment in Manhattan and he keeps his in Cambridge, but we’re together as often as … Yes. We do. We’ve been together a long time.’

  ‘So does that mean you won’t stay overnight in my farmhouse?’

  Cap turned her beer glass in very precise circles within a large arc.

  ‘When I say my farmhouse,’ Ti-Loup added nervously, ‘I mean the new one. I built it myself. When I first bought the property there was just a shack, no bigger than Grand Loup’s cottage. It was an abandoned dairy farm with the roof falling in and I picked it up for a song. Well, actually, for no cash at all. Bartered cutting up a steer with the manager of the bank in Samford Village.’

  Cap kept her eyes on the surface of the table. There were two pock marks, two indentations, and they were the grave eyes of Mrs Cabot. Lilla Cabot married Henry James’s best friend, her eyes said, and she was happy.

  Ti-Loup rushed the silence with talk. ‘My address is Old Cream Truck Road. Don’t you love it? It’s a dead end, sadly, in all senses. The dairy farmers are going bankrupt because of mergers and mass-produced milk. Multinationals own the land and the herds. So now it’s pineapples and bananas and avocados around here, and very small-scale beef amateurs like me. Subsistence farming is what it is. I’m bounded on three sides by the North Pine River and I have forty hectares, two horses, two dogs, ten steers, two calves, three cows, and I rent a bull when I need one. I’ve built my own house beside the original shack. My house has a deep shaded veranda on all sides.’

  ‘Does it have a loft?’

  ‘Would you stay if it did?’

  ‘What do you think, Ti-Loup?’

  ‘It has a loft.’

  7.

  Cap was awakened by bird calls. She was on a mattress on the wooden floor of a loft and the other side of the mattress was empty. She could smell coffee. There were steep wooden stairs leading down to the kitchen. In the kitchen she was overwhelmed with nostalgia. There was a heavy cast-iron wood-fired stove built into an alcove, and a pot of coffee simmered on top. There were several ceramic mugs on a shelf so she chose one and poured herself a very thick dark drink, almost tar. Both the kitchen and the living room had walls of French windows, floor to ceiling, all flung wide open to the veranda, which meant that the house appeared to be a minor extension of the great outdoors, a sheltered cove between trees. There were two old and slightly worn wicker chairs on the veranda and she sat in one, the hot mug in her hands, and felt the seat give a little and then settle around her, cradling and conforming to her thighs.

  There was no sign of Ti-Loup.

  The steamy heat of the previous afternoon had given way to benign morning air, not exactly cool – she was certainly comfortable being naked – but pleasantly damp on her skin. The sun was rising and the dew-wet grass was steaming with cottony ribbons that stretched for the sky but wavered as they rose and then faltered and vanished into nothing. The air was noisy with bird calls, some melodic, some raucous, not one of them remotely familiar. A flock of strident parrots, their bodies gaudily red and emerald green, their heads cobalt, their beaks orange, took off from the creek like a clamour of flapping canvases by Poussin. The light, the sounds, the colours, the fragrances: none of it seemed possible to Cap outside of the imagination of a painter.

  She could smell wet cow, she could hear bellowing (cows or calves?), she could smell the thick rich muck of manure and mud.

  From the veranda she had a view of lush pasture sloping down to the creek flats. She could see the snake of the river looping the house on three sides, glinting silver and gold where the sun touched it. She could see mist rising like gauze through the trees which clustered at the edges of the pasture and along the curve of water. She could smell eucalyptus. Part of the sky – the part directly over the river – was so low with cloud that the trees on the bank were shrouded with scarves of chiffon. Everywhere else the sky was clear and intensely blue.

  In a corner between one of the veranda posts and the ceiling, she saw an enormous cobweb and at its hub a dark spider, the largest she had ever seen. The morning sun lit up every filament of hair on its eight menacing legs. She could see its eyes and they were watching her. She edged her chair further from the post.

  First she heard the dogs and then she saw Ti-Loup emerging from the clump of
eucalypts to her right. He walked awkwardly, partly because of his limp, partly because of the large floppy rubber boots he was wearing. The dogs reached her first and slobbered all over her. Ti-Loup grinned. ‘Now that is a beautiful sight,’ he said.

  ‘It’s incredible. It’s even more beautiful than St Gilles and the vineyards along the Vienne and I thought I’d never see anything more beautiful than that.’

  ‘I meant you sitting naked on my veranda,’ he said, ‘with my dogs licking your feet. I see you got coffee.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you leave.’

  ‘Didn’t want to wake you. You were fast asleep but my day starts at five a.m. Animals are a lot more demanding than vines and beans.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Had to check one of my pumps. I’ve rigged up my own irrigation system from the river, very amateur needless to say, but the bloody pump keeps seizing and breaking down.’

  ‘You know how to build and fix pumps now?’

  ‘Oh, you have no idea how many things I’ve learned since I last saw you. But now that I’m seeing you, why don’t we go back to the loft?’

  ‘So,’ Ti-Loup said, when they were both sitting – not entirely naked – on the veranda. ‘Think you could live here?’

  ‘Oh, Ti-Loup, you know I was born to be a gardener. I was never happier than helping Papa in the vineyard or tending vegetables with Ti-Christophe.’

  ‘So is that a yes?’

  ‘Don’t rush me, Ti-Loup. And can I ask you about the spider up there?’

  ‘That’s a huntsman. Completely harmless. In Australia, the smaller the spider, the more deadly. Besides, an eight-foot carpet snake lives under the veranda. He looks after the spiders. Also the rats and the mice.’

  ‘An eight-foot carpet snake? Underneath us?’

  ‘Harmless. There’s another one in the bedroom closet. Sleeps on top of the sheets. I think Ti-Christophe would be proud of me, don’t you?’

  ‘Ti-Christophe never met a snake.’

  ‘I mean the farm. I call it Christopher Farm. It’s self-sufficient, which is a fancy term for subsistence living. I fish my own river, I eat my own beef, I have one dairy cow for my milk, and I grow my own vegetables and fruit. For the rest, I make enough money by bartering my skills, cutting up my own steers, selling my meat cuts, and working for the Dayboro butcher. You think Ti-Christophe would approve?’

 

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