Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  ‘How’s it going, Sheila? Good on you. Say, this is a view-and-a-half you’ve got here.’ He moved back from the window and ripped open one of the cans. ‘Where do you keep the glasses?’ He cleared a space on the bedside table. ‘That was a real bombshell the other day, eh? What do you reckon? Who would have thought we were’—pressing his stomach with his hand he gave a belch—‘related? That’s what I call a real bloody coincidence.’

  Blinking, bumping into the edges of things, Sheila didn’t know where to sit, let alone where to look or what to say. Now he leaned back on both elbows, daks bulging at the balls. The first four buttons of his shirt were undone: a canyon, Simpson Desert in colour. She could only balance at the other end near the pillow. These rooms were small. She wore no shoes.

  He raised his glass.

  ‘Yep, I got the shock of my life.’

  ‘I was surprised,’ Sheila admitted, distant. ‘It is an interesting little snippet, isn’t it?’

  He slapped his chest.

  ‘The odds must have been a thousand to one. It’s something to write home about.’

  ‘Oh, I have,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m a sucker for postcards,’ Garry said. He sat up to pour another two drinks. ‘Jesus, Sheila! Hang on a sec. You’ve got thousands of the buggers here. You’re not intending to send all them?’

  For added effect he held his mouth open and bulged his eyes. Sheila couldn’t help smiling. Here she could tell someone about herself.

  ‘People have come to expect it of me. I’m always travelling. When there’s no postcard I think they must begin to worry. And there are their little ones: the children like them.’

  ‘Always on the go? Come off it.’

  ‘No, I like to be moving. When I get back from this I’ll join another tour. I have my eye on Persia next.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘I don’t stay home much, not any more. My uncle calls me Perpetual Motion.’

  Garry slapped his knee.

  ‘Ha, ha. That’s a good one. He sounds a card.’

  ‘Uncle Milton,’ Sheila frowned. ‘He is a card.’

  Garry sat up. ‘How many times, frinstance, have you been here?’

  ‘England?’

  Sheila shrugged.

  It began to worry Garry. ‘But listen, you haven’t told me why. I mean why are you always on the go?’

  Days were brown and dry in the wooden house; the tin roof and windmill creaked together in the heat; floating kah-kah of the crows, close and far off; and in the distance, low hills, paddocks and shimmer,

  ‘I don’t know, I must be used to it now; I prefer it. I like a group and mixing. There’s the sights and the interesting people you meet. I like being with people.’

  Her glass leaned as she looked at her ankles. Sheila had smooth straight legs.

  ‘That’s right, your family are on the land.’

  She nodded.

  Suddenly Garry laughed. He shook his head. ‘I’ve known some funny sheilas in my time.’

  ‘Oh my uncle always says that.’

  ‘Ah we’re related all right. No worries. Sheila. You’re as nutty as a bloody fruitcake.’

  Her shoulders gave a jump.

  ‘I don’t know why I should tell you this.’

  Moving beside her he slowly filled her glass.

  ‘We’re celebrating. Drink up.’

  And leaning across to casually stub out his cigarette his arm brushed against her. He kissed her cheek.

  ‘There,’ he said kindly. He patted her knee. ‘Give us a look at you. Show me with the specs off. I’ll see how related we look. Jeepers! That’s incredible. Listen, I’m not kidding. Have you ever considered contact lenses? What’s up?’

  She seemed to be trembling.

  But Atlas took her glasses. He looked round the room. ‘Jesus, these are like milk bottles.’

  Sheila remained looking at the floor.

  ‘Get a load of this. They don’t suit me, that’s for sure.’ Groping his way back, he called out: ‘Sheila?’ (Silly bugger.) ‘Sheila, don’t leave me. Sheila! You’re hiding,’ he whined. ‘Where are you?’

  As he advanced like Leon Kaddok she looked up ready to smile. She had decided. He deliberately bumped into a chair and tripped over the bed.

  True: without the twin reflecting discs she was fresh-faced, long, a dish.

  Now less than a yard away and squinting, hands outstretched and fluttering, a conductor asking for quiet, he whined again, ‘Sheila? You’re hiding. Where are you?’

  Her specs balanced on his nose: all for her. Crossing her legs she leaned back laughing.

  Then he touched her, ‘Ahhhhhh!’ and she let out a cry as his hands searched her shoulders, her arched throat, and as she fell back and squirmed, ran over her breasts, one at a time, slowing down, suddenly breaking a button.

  ‘Ah-haaaa! Got you…’

  He sat down and took off the glasses.

  Sheila returned to her embarrassed self, fidgeting next to him. She smoothed her skirt.

  ‘Hey, don’t put ‘em back. You look all right like that. I told you you did. Anyway, that’s what I think.’

  ‘I never know what,’ Sheila confessed.

  She went to the mirror and tried with glasses and without, turning her head left and right, and frowned. ‘It could be these frames…’ But she suddenly turned: ‘Ugly face!’

  But after studying the Tantric miniature above the bed Garry had reclined and picked up some of her postcards. At least a certain familiarity had grown between them.

  Sheila had her glasses back on.

  ‘All the grog’s gone?’ he asked, though he already knew. He looked at his watch. ‘Christ, I should go.’

  She was blinking so much Atlas almost missed the smile. He was moving fast anyway. ‘Eggs and bacon, gin and tonic—thick and thin. That’s us, Sheil. What do you reckon?’ At the door he gave her the brotherly slap: whack! Small out-of-the-way museums often contain a wealth of bits and pieces, bric-a-brac, well worth the detour. An amateur has happened upon some object, or the broad subject, and before long his nose develops into a classifying mania (that pale Dane with the catalogue raisonné of sardine tin labels; what’s his name?). And sheds are tacked onto garages; annexes onto houses; disused warehouses, odeons and empty churches are seized and converted. The overwhelming desire is to be definitive, and to corner the subject. Even without achieving this, results can be impressive: a lifetime’s work, one man’s preoccupation, arrayed. It cannot be ignored. And what had seemed like junk in the early days in turn becomes valuable, sought after by others. Almost inevitably these collectors acquire an inflated idea of their collection’s worth, a kind of blindness. A small town, a city, or the collector’s distraught widow is ‘left’ the entire collection and the attendant problems of housing, preservation, lighting, insurance and security, for these donors invariably insert the clause, ‘said items to remain intact, under the one roof, for the benefit of one and all’ (the Patrick Hill collection, in New Orleans, of shovels and spades. There is a moustache museum in Prague). More often than not a poorly painted sign on the edge of a town points to these museums, and the custodian is a man without a tie, interrupted from his lunch or sleep.

  In the guidebook, the Corrugated Iron Museum seemed like a colloquialism for the building itself, its shape, colour and size; and who could tell what interesting things were arranged inside? In fact, when at last they found it in the hinterland of east Yorkshire, it had the appearance of a familiar shed, low and long, traditionally unpainted, its roof and walls of galvanised iron. It stood astride a moor, both in silhouette: the moor like a grey sandhill a half mile back, and the single sick snow gum, Eucalyptus pauciflora, near the front doors, which were also of corrugated iron, seemed to have been planted there for shade; CLICK! Kaddok took that picture. Built appropriately from corrugated iron the one-and-a-half-million-dollar (dollars?) museum housed a superb collection of corrugated iron: history of, uses, abuses. Many items
were steeped in unusual history or possessed special significance. Admission was by silver coin.

  ‘Mr Cecil Lang,’ the spokesman explained, a young man in an open-necked shirt and straight-combed hair. ‘Mr Cecil Lang spent his early years in the goldfields of hum, Western Australia. Made his fortune; where, incidentally he became good friends with Herbert Hoover, there as an engineer.’

  ‘What, the American president?’ Hofmann asked.

  Kaddok of course knew. ‘He was in Kalgoorlie in the early 1900s.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Ken Hofmann told his wife. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  But Louisa, her arms folded, was glancing at Borelli.

  ‘Hoover was there twice,’ Kaddok added, ‘for long periods.’

  They stood at the end of a long room as functional and as atmospheric as a shearing shed. It had plain iron walls. On rough tables, scattered, as if waiting to be classified, various objects were illuminated by beams of natural light, and from a distance most of the things also appeared to be grey. A few other people were sauntering around the end tables.

  The conductor waved his hand.

  ‘Cecil Lang was rather influenced by the hum, pioneering landscape down there. Out on the Nullarbor Plain, and so forth. Are you Australians? Then you would understand. He always said—you’ll excuse me—it put muscles in his shit. Ha, ha. Yes, he said that.’

  Glancing at Mrs Cathcart he reddened. He’d sunburn easily.

  ‘He was another Rhodes, a plain man but a dynamo personality. He created this Trust, a kind of monument, hum. The site he chose personally. It is slightly out of the way, perhaps inconvenient, but that is part of the point. It’s like Australia. I’m his grandson.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Wayne.’

  ‘Go on, Wayne,’ said Mrs Cathcart.

  ‘So, I say, what impressed Cecil Lang was the rough-and-ready, the getting of things done. Such a practical, plain life purged him. He was extremely impressed, terribly impressed. The museum is a memorial to that, ah hum, quality of life.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Doug.

  So they moved forward.

  A Plaster of Paris globe identified the most heavily concentrated areas of corrugated iron in the world. Clusters of the tin-like substance protruded here and there, miniature cities, almost entirely in the Southern Hemisphere. It had been employed widely along the coast of China and throughout East Africa as well as isolated regions of South America. New Zealand had an extremely high ratio too. But Australia, New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land: that white continent had become grey with bits of the metal, even the so-called ‘Dead Centre’ (spotted all over with corrugated iron, ultimately a sign of life), further significant concentrations along the northern towns and cities, with heavy deposits in Lang’s western goldfields.

  At the first table on which lay a piece of galvanised iron the guide pirouetted, Oxbridge-modulated:

  ‘He paid a fortune for some of these rare pieces; and of course when they knew it was Cecil Lang buying they held out and quadrupled the prices, the sods. It is almost impossible to acquire fine examples these days. The Australian Government, like so many other countries, won’t allow its heritage to be removed. We understand that. In any case, we now have most of what we want. Do you wish to buy your catalogues or shall we get them later?’

  They were all staring at the table. Sheila stood close to Garry but he had his arm around Violet’s waist.

  ‘I have it on the garage and side-fence at our place,’ said Doug. ‘It does a good job. But it’s heavier than this.’

  ‘Fourteen-gauge,’ Kaddok told him.

  ‘But what is this?’ Gerald Whitehead asked.

  Yes! An irregularly shaped sheet painted silver, it had small striations and a row of rivet holes along three edges: an unusual example of the material.

  Wayne gave a chuckle.

  ‘It makes you wonder, eh? I should say, even here we tend to forget its uses were not restricted to elementary shelter—roofing and such. In fact, what we have here is a section of the fuselage of the first Qantas aircraft—’

  ‘The Avro 504K, 1920,’ Kaddok told them, and quickly shot off two pictures (but only caught the guide’s neck and combed head).

  ‘A ruddy good airline,’ Doug put in.

  ‘So this illustrates very effectively what struck Mr Lang: the way corrugated iron is adapted, yes adapted is the word, down there for a whole variety of hum, tasks. There’s a self-help quality about the stuff.’ Garry Atlas shrugged and the young guide gave a cough. ‘Sadly missing, one feels, in our present day and age.’

  A sepia photograph showed nine workmen in shorts, navy singlets and boots standing on a sheet placed between two beer barrels. The single sheet had a slight dip—only about four inches.

  ‘The importance of the corrugations,’ Wayne pointed unnecessarily. ‘When any flat surface is hammered into a bulge, like the monocoque construction of racing cars and aeroplanes, and the ordinary egg, its strength, its rigidity, is multiplied something like five-fold. How much would all these working men weigh? God knows. Certainly its durability must be a factor which has contributed to corrugated iron’s popularity.’

  ‘I love these old photographs,’ Louisa whispered to Borelli, ‘don’t you?’

  Alongside, Kaddok misunderstood. ‘The early photographers are our archaeologists.’

  ‘A galvanised iron aeroplane…’ Borelli still seemed to be turning the idea over in his mind. To Louisa he said, ‘It’s machismo, isn’t it? It’s too strong and plain. Corrugated iron must be boring to you.’

  He watched her closely, poker-faced. He raised his eyebrows. Slowly smiling she turned her head: provided a profile.

  ‘And observe the picture frame,’ the guide was saying. ‘See the soldered corners? It was bought at an auction in Brisbane in the 1950s. Again it illustrates the practical, no-nonsense nature of the people who lived with corrugated iron. A grazier’s wife wanted a picture framed, perhaps an old calendar, and they used the most familiar material at hand.’

  Garry Atlas lit a cigarette and as he shut the Zippo winked at Sheila. Others too had noticed: either she had a new lipstick or more of the old, much more. It didn’t suit her.

  As they went towards the next long table, Violet and others looked up at the roof and frowned,

  ‘It’s not raining, is it?’ asked Mrs Cathcart (who hadn’t looked up). ‘It never lets up. It was lovely this morning.’

  And glancing at them all, beaming, the young man unable to contain himself began slapping himself and laughing. A thin load of gravel seemed to be pouring onto the roof, soothing them.

  ‘It’s a tape,’ he explained. ‘Pretty good, eh? Quite the most marvellous sound.’

  The ‘rain’ turned heavy and he had to raise his voice, almost shouting. He soldiered on.

  ‘I must say I have never slept under a tin roof—to my shame—but I believe it is absolutely first-rate. Am I right?’

  Some of them nodded, watching him.

  ‘When Cecil Lang returned to England, he replaced a perfectly sound thatch with corrugated iron so he could lie in bed when it rained. “Antipodean drumming”, he called it. For him, it undoubtedly produced a flood of memories!’

  ‘Mmmmm…’ one or two nodded, imagining.

  ‘Where is that?’ asked Gerald.

  ‘Oh, a marvellous little cottage in the Lake District. All hell broke loose. The National Trust ordered the thatch to be replaced.’

  ‘The bastards,’ said Garry.

  ‘Some of our finest homes have—’

  The guide held up a lily-white hand.

  ‘Look, I couldn’t agree with you more. Our museum illustrates the point. The Roofing Section is one of the very best endowed.’

  Against the wall, a row of evenly spaced vertical sheets demonstrated the power of rust and/or the fighting qualities of galvanised iron: beginning with glittering argentine (brand new sheet); turning to dull grey after twelve months; one showing orang
e freckles; the next slaked with beer-coloured streaks; and so on to overall russet, darkness spreading; until the last was a scaly brown, crusted with disease, with a hidden powerful lamp showing it riddled with pinholes of light.

  ‘Mechanical. Dreary,’ Gerald turned.

  ‘Rustic charm,’ North murmured to Borelli.

  ‘The Hindus say everything has a life of its own. That must include corrugated iron.’

  Only Hofmann had gone up close to the sheets, touching one with a finger. ‘These are like modern American paintings. Louisa, isn’t this one like that Olitski we missed?’

  The guide cleared his throat.

  ‘In the Oxford dictionary, you’ll find “corrosive” is the word before “corrugated”. Is that a coincidence? We think not. The association is true to life.’

  Samples here taken from city and country; seaside and snow; the rainforest and below sea-level; and in pride of place, sand-blasted and pale outback. Neatly labelled, dated.

  Sasha asked a question.

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been yet. It certainly is hum, one of my ambitions to go after Austria and, oddly enough, Yugoslavia.’ Pointing for the benefit of the others he smiled, ‘Still on roofing.’

  A roughly cut rectangle of faded red stood on the table at 45 degrees, ‘PLEASE TOUCH’ neatly lettered beside it.

  ‘Youch!’ Sasha squealed.

  The guide looked around at them all, smiling.

  Garry and the others who had laughed crowded forward.

  TAKEN FROM KALGOORLIE, SUMMER 1932, the documentation explained:

  A TYPICAL IRON ROOF. THE TEMPERATURE HAS BEEN PRESERVED FROM THE MOMENT OF REMOVAL AND MAINTAINED TO THIS DAY (DAY AND NIGHT) BY MEANS OF ELECTRICITY AND A THERMOSTAT; A GLIMPSE OF THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH OTHER PEOPLE EXIST.

  ‘Well, you should touch,’ cried Sasha, sucking her little finger. ‘It’s like an iron.’ Looking hurt at Phillip North, who was gently amused, she grabbed his hand.

  ‘Cecil Lang worked under such conditions,’ the young man commented. ‘Very rough indeed.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And they told him, several talking at once.

  ‘When I had Glenys,’ said Mrs Cathcart, ‘it was a hundred-and-seven. Remember, Doug?’