This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  ‘Gordon? Gordon, are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. No: I am quilted. Flattened. Steamrolled into the granite beneath us. ‘I’m sorry, I …’

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’ Glyn squeezes my hand. ‘You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?’ She whistles out across the ranges. ‘I can hardly blame you.’

  I can blame me. And her. She can write a novel, but she never wrote to me? Bernie Cooper: she’s a flip. She always has been. Unpredictable. Unreadable. Chaotic. This is just like her. I tell Glyn: ‘No, I’m not in love with her. Not any more.’

  Glyn gives me the eyebrow arch. ‘I think you’d better read the book then, my sweet G – because it sounds like she’s in love with you.’

  She picks the book up from where it’s sitting between us on her swag and holds it in front of my face. It’s small and white. It’s got a flower in the middle, between the title and her name. Something about the flower seems familiar, and Glyn is telling me: ‘This is too wild a coincidence. You know, I only picked this up because one of my girlfriends in Sydney dragged me along to one of her book club things in a cafe at the Cross. This new author, Bernie Cooper, this fearless wordsmith of a girl, rah rah rah, was supposed to be there, but had to send her apologies because of some Land Army commitment. I thought, well, a girl who can’t come to her own party because she’s driving a tractor, that’s a girl whose story I’ll bother to read. But there aren’t any tractors in it. Her descriptions of the land, her longing for you … It’s beautiful, Gordon. That’s not a word I overuse, and I don’t believe in coincidences. Read it.’

  That’s what I’m doing when Tim comes back, to find me and Glyn with our backs to each other on our separate swags. I’m reading and she’s writing in her notebook. ‘Weird mob, you whitefellas,’ he says. ‘You drink that Akurra water?’

  I can’t answer him. I can’t put this book down. But I don’t know if it’s about me. I don’t know what it’s about. These trees she keeps talking about, the love trees: vanilla-limbs entwined, as our roots cling to the banks, as the river falls and falls away. Leaving us, thirsty, hungry. The corellas stripping our branching bare as crows feeding on a corpse. I shout them away! No! Go away! Leave us be. Is this us? Where is she? I don’t know, but then she’s describing Coogee, the house in Arcadia Street, and she is describing us, in her bedroom. I recognise the wallpaper and the curtains – and me, kissing her. My words: Only in my dreams. I only ever dream of you. I only ever will.

  The house is strange, though. Every time she goes back there, she flies there and she’s always alone, dreaming and kissing G inside a blanket box that’s full of little glass pearls and yards of silk that becomes a road. That all makes me wish I’d paid attention in English at school. Everything is confusing. Why’s she alone? I flick back to the beginning, to page five, where she says: My father died in the war and my mother after him of the heart she dropped on the kitchen tiles at the news. That can’t be true. This is fiction. She says so: I was made by them of a fine, strong blarney thread, any finer and you wouldn’t see me. And the war she’s talking about isn’t this war in particular. It seems like any war, any time, this blood-sucking creature that drags men away. Go back to where I was at page seventy-four and: You haven’t been taken by the creature, have you, my darling G. That bunyip didn’t catch you. You will come back to me. If I stay in this dream, you will come back to me.

  Turn the page: Hughie, you wouldn’t take Mum and Dad, and G too, would you?

  Jesus. She starts smashing Mrs Cooper’s good china against the laundry steps. Another fifty pages of this and I’d like to do that too.

  They stole all my words, all my letters to you, and they think they’re so clever, that they’ve stolen you too, but they didn’t count on what dreams can do. I steal you back from the Department of Cruelty. I take you back. If I scream across the water loud enough and long enough, you will hear me.

  Come home, G. Tea’s ready. Your Ricky Triumph is waiting for you round the side path. She’ll rust to death if you don’t come home soon. There’ll be nothing left but a dirty red smudge on the bricks to say she was ever here at all. What’s the red stuff made of? Iron something ending in -ite or -ide, I can’t remember what you told me now. You have to come home to tell me again, G. Come home and lean me against the wall and tell me again and again.

  But still you don’t come. And still the tap of my steps up Heartbreak quickens with the pulse of the sea upon the cliffs, as I decide just for us, just for once or just forever, not to doubt, not to slip or fall away, just in case, beyond my dreams, the breeze decides that you will come home today.

  THE END.

  The end?

  No.

  My pulse is fairly quick.

  No. This is not the end.

  I am coming home, wherever that might be. I have to find her. What happened to her letters? What’s happened to the Coopers? I have to know. What happened to us, Bernie?

  I say: ‘I have to get back to Adelaide.’ As if I might run there today.

  I almost do. I get to Leigh Creek in two days, do the drive in under seven hours. Flying. Please, I want to be on a plane today, to wherever she is. That might be a bit unlikely but that’s what I’m after anyway. I go round to the dark side of the Chemistry Department first. A quarter to one Friday afternoon, I just catch Major Gibbons before he leaves the office for lunch. ‘Please, could I use the phone? I’ve got to make an urgent call. To Sydney. It’s a – family emergency.’

  He gives me an eyebrow, as if that’s anything for him to be bothered about. He says: ‘Are the excavations underway?’

  No, they’re all sitting on their arses waiting for the pits to deliver themselves. I say: ‘Yes. The blasting is underway. Can I please use the phone?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be overseeing the quality of the ore?’

  ‘Yes. I should. I will. When there’s enough of it turned out for me to look at. In a few days. Not long. It’s all good. Can I please use the phone? It’s an emergency.’

  ‘All right. But you’ll have to pay for the call.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I point to the phone. ‘Please?’

  He lifts it around on his desk to face me, but makes no attempt to leave. I lift the receiver and ask for the Coopers’ number in Coogee. And then it rings. And rings.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, there is no answer at that number.’

  I’m about to ask her to try again but then I think, no, try Mrs Zoc. She must be home. Please. And on the third ring, she is. ‘Hello Zoccoli?’

  ‘Mrs Zoc? It’s Gordon.’

  She screams: ‘GORDON?’

  Gibbons gives me another eyebrow, glances at his watch.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’ I can hardly hear over the blasting underway in my head, and over Mrs Zoc’s crying: ‘You nearly kill me! My boy! Where have you been? What are you doing to me? You are worse than my sons!’

  ‘I need to speak with Bernie – urgently.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mrs Zoc makes a sound like she’s about to start slamming pots. ‘Gordon! Bernadetta! She wants to marry another boy!’

  ‘She what? Who?’

  ‘This boy Mitchell Lockhart. He is a sheep farmer. She must not marry him. He is a good boy, but they are not good for a marriage. He loves his horse more than a woman. She telephones me only the morning before yesterday to say she wants to marry him. She wants a family, he is a good man, she is going to talk to his mother. I say you will not! But she won’t listen to me. Gordon, she must not marry this Mitchell Lockhart. This is the worst mistake of her life.’

  I don’t know how to begin to respond to this. Mitchell Lockhart? I know the name well enough. I went to school with him. His mother is friends with Mrs Wells. Bernie wants to marry him? He’s a grazier. For all that I’ve been convinced she’s with someone else, this doesn’t make any sense at all.

  ‘Where is Bernie?’

  ‘She telephones me from a place called One Tree, near the sheep farm. This farm is called Hell! She buys the gro
ceries at the public house! Mama mia!’

  Mama mia, all right. She’s living with him? At Hell. I’ve never stopped there, but I know it: it’s the Lockharts’ run.

  ‘You have to go and stop her, Gordon, stop her from this mistake. She says she will talk to Mrs Lockhart on the weekend when she goes back to Hay – this is tomorrow, Gordon. Please.’

  Somehow I manage to say: ‘But she’s living with the bloke … ?’

  ‘No! It is not like this, she keeps the house for him, don’t you listen to anything else from anyone. She is a good girl. My girl! Gordon, you must go. Please!’

  Go and do what? Tell Mitchell Lockhart I want my girl back off him? The last time I saw him he was at least a foot taller than me. School prefect, rugby captain, throwing a second-former up against the dormitory lockers for looking sideways at me. And who am I to step in on him anyway? He was here and I wasn’t. But he’s a grazier. Bernie can’t marry a grazier. Flaming hell. Who am I to say what bloke she can marry? I’m not Gordon to her any more. I’m G. I’m a character in a novel.

  I don’t know what to do.

  Yes I do. Have the guts. Life can be too short.

  Tell Mrs Zoc: ‘I’ll do my best. I’m leaving now.’

  Get back in the ute. I can’t hang around here to wait for a plane. Start driving. What’s it to Hay from here, three-fifty, four hundred miles? Straight along the Sturt Highway.

  If I don’t break an axle, I’ll be there tonight.

  I break more than an axle. I break approximately a hundred percent of the essential end of the ute. I don’t think I’ve even made it out of the State. I don’t actually know where I am, apart from somewhere near the Victorian border. I’ve just passed a one-pub, about five miles back along a battling stretch of irrigation fields. I didn’t take note of the name. I’ve hit my head on the wheel.

  I’ve hit a bull.

  It’s standing there looking at me, saying: Go on, do that again and I’ll be unhappy.

  Bastard. Big one.

  Can’t credit how I didn’t see it sooner. I veered to the left when I did. It veered left too. I veered right. I even slowed down. So did it. Giving me a choice: it or the only three trees in its territory. I’ve hit both.

  I’ve punched the dash when I did. This is not good. I look at my hand. This is a bit worse than the last time I punched something. This is not good at all. I have to get to Hay and back and I’ve only got the weekend to do it. I have to stop Bernie from marrying Mitchell Lockhart. I have to be back picking through pitchblende by Wednesday: I told Errol I would. I’m going to hold up delivery of uranium to California. This is not good at all.

  I get out of the car. I’ve got my wallet and my compass. I’ve got my water bottle. I look up the highway. At least five miles to the one-pub. I’ll get there by sunset.

  I have to get the vehicle off the road first, not that it’s much of a road. It’s a stock track with a bit of gravel on it. But I should get the ute past the trees so no one hits it travelling after dark. I buggerise around with the brake but the vehicle won’t move. I can’t push it. I can’t take in a full breath. This is not good at all. Look at the wreck. It’s fortunate that this is not a government vehicle. Sorry, Dad.

  I look at the bull: fucking shit, go on, have a go.

  He ignores me, dumps a load and walks away.

  I start walking too. Sort of. A wagtail hops up the track ahead of me, then flies off. Yeah, good on you. I watch a cloud forming on the horizon to the south. It’s green-bellied, carrying a storm. Probably hail. From Antarctica. It fills up the sky. It starts to rain.

  Now, it starts to rain.

  It starts to hail.

  A lot.

  PART SIX

  FEBRUARY 1944–AUGUST 1945

  BERNIE

  ‘Well, look who’s come down the Paddock with the rain.’ Mrs Lockhart sweeps down the hall, arms outstretched to receive her guests. Mrs Verity Fitzgerald and her daughter Jenny, from Yarranbulla Station via Coolabah. Getting out of Hay’s taxicab, from the airstrip.

  Mitch and I haven’t been here half an hour, and Mrs Lockhart has been in some kind of a fluster since we arrived, as if the King might be coming. Mrs Lockhart doesn’t fluster: the King would get yesterday’s cake if he dared set foot. But these Fitzgeralds are obviously important to her. She’s never mentioned them before, though, I don’t think; nor has she said why they’re here today. Mitch asked her just now and she told him, with a warning in her voice, to be especially kind to Jenny: the boy she was waiting for, Lindsay Someone, was killed in the Kokoda fighting last year, and soon afterwards she had a fall off her horse that put her in bed for several months, only just back on her feet.

  She doesn’t look too delicate to me stepping up onto the verandah: wholesome AWLA peachy poster-girl smile, even if she’s gone a wee bit over with her peroxide and pluck.

  ‘Look at you,’ Mrs Lockhart coos over her. ‘Haven’t you grown since I last saw you, and haven’t you grown prettily. Of course you have.’

  Next second I’m shaking hands with this Jenny girl and saying: ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Be especially kind, make chat: ‘Isn’t the rain wonderful?’

  ‘If it lasts,’ the mother says, marking me down as irrelevant. ‘Terribly dry at home,’ she tisks to Mrs Lockhart. ‘Nyngan’s shocking.’

  That was pointed; as if I’m deliberately being shut out of the conversation. Or perhaps I’m only a bit flustery myself. That storm last night; welcome, but fierce. It frightened me, brief as it was, and gave me a bad dream of being lost out on the plain, in the black mud. Remember that this Mrs Fitzgerald has had her own troubles lately too: possibly frightened that she might lose her only child to a bad fall, and whatever else the drought might have brought her.

  Continue to be kind to Jenny; I ask her: ‘Good trip? I’ve never been in a plane.’

  ‘Oh, it was all right,’ she smiles; quite a lovely smile really. ‘It was my first time and I’m not in too much of a hurry to do it again.’ Then she presses my hand and lowers her voice as we head inside: ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. Our Gordon’s Bernadette.’

  Our Gordon’s Bernadette? What an awful thing to say. Surely she knows that things didn’t work out there. Would you like me to ask you how irrelevant your fiancé is these days? I say: ‘Oh? Have you seen him lately?’

  But Jenny Fitzgerald’s platinum smile dims. ‘No. We’re all a bit worried about him. I thought you might have heard–’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’s all right.’ I let out a little hideosity of a laugh, tinny, hollow, surprising me with its bitterness. My bitterness.

  Mrs Fitzgerald and Mrs Lockhart disappear into the chintz tea roses as Jenny leans in to me and whispers: ‘I loved your book – don’t let on to Mum I’ve read it.’

  Right. ‘Thanks.’ That’s how it is on the bush telegraph, I see. I’m not a nice girl: I’ve written a dirty little book, with kissing in it. Kissing your Gordon.

  ‘Mitch!’ Jenny suddenly calls over my shoulder down the hall as she sees him.

  And his face lights up with a bright and generous smile. ‘Jen.’

  Not a smile for a distant acquaintance. They know each other? Of course they do.

  ‘How you going, Jen?’ He is positively radiating goldness all over at the sight of her. ‘You’re not a kid any more, are you? Last time I saw you you were flying off the back of a horse at that gymkhana at Wagga.’ They have history. Jenny flies off her horse regularly.

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ she laughs. ‘Please.’

  ‘What did you do to yourself this time?’ Mitch asks her.

  ‘Will you be a darling, Bernadette, and bring in the tea?’ Mrs Lockhart calls from the teal velveteen, and a bolt of resentment shoots up my spine: don’t you Cinderella me. What’s going on here? But I go and get the tea tray.

  Come back to see Jenny has Mitch captivated with her story: ‘… so Dad says, I told you so, no place for a woman. You’re not coming mustering again. I said: Not with you, I’m not
.’

  Mitch’s laughter is the warmest sound; sharing it with her. I might as well not be in the room. And nothing could make me feel dirtier than I feel right now. All the things I’ve lately written about my want of Mitch. Smouldering in the bottom of my suitcase.

  I hear Mrs Lockhart say: ‘So you’ve still got five thousand on the run at Yarranbulla?

  ‘Oh yes, Phil’s confident we’ll see it through,’ Mrs Fitzgerald nods, sucking in her cheeks, arch and wry. ‘But as you know, he’s always had his eye out for a Riverina run. Waiting for a bargain.’

  ‘Might have found yourself one, Verity dear, you just never know,’ Mrs Lockhart chinkles.

  And I see. How absolutely irrelevant I am. This is a squattocratic business transaction I’m witnessing. No such thing as romance when the farm is on the line. Mrs Lockhart is not going to sell one teacup’s worth of assets. She’s going to expand. Sell her son to finance it.

  He doesn’t mind. Stretches his legs out, making himself comfortable, in spotless moleskins I laundered and pressed. ‘Yeah, they’re still up at Yass, going all right. I’ll head over that way in a week or two. Hey, you don’t want come and have a look, do you? The ewes are …’

  Ow. Ow. Ow.

  You mean, rotten, selfish user. You bas–

  Saved by the bell. The telephone rings. ‘I’ll get it,’ and I leap out of the room to take it from the hall extension, down towards the kitchen.

  ‘Ah Bernadetta?’

  ‘Mrs Zoc?’ No: go away. Had enough of an earbashing from you Wednesday morning. Ringing up now to tell me I told you so, because she is in fact a fortune teller.

  She says: ‘Is Gordon there yet?’

  ‘What?’ Isn’t there a pill you can take against this?