by Thea Astley
All the way up the home-track to the house, the desolation of the place appals. A truck carcass rusts beneath pepper trees and under the shadows of sprawling figs the homestead crouches shabbily on the brow of the rise, smoke lazing up from a kitchen lean-to. My progress is attended by barking as a snapping blue heeler heads like a ferret from a side shed and races toward me, ripping at air. Somewhere behind, a man moves center stage to stand watching as I cope with yelps and teeth, watching just that back-country shade too long as the dog corners me, before he decides to call cut with a whistle. The heeler retreats, loathing me, and props, panting and dribbling. Self-consciously, the dog working closely at my heels, I jerk up the track between cowpats to the ancient shape on the veranda.
It is not so aged. Sun, wind, dry seasons have plowed the landscape of his face into infertile furrows. His features emerge from the shadow of his hat and he waits, head back, for me to speak first. Out of exhaustion. My exhaustion. The bastard, I think. Where’s that vaunted bush friendliness? I’m sweaty and dust-streaked. I make apologetic sounds. I tell him about the car. He lets me tell him. I ask if there’s a telephone and he nods eastward. “Another few miles,” he replies, without malice, but without much interest. “The people at Eurombah have one of them things.”
I start to cry and his face goes awkward.
“Want a cuppa?” he asks and answers himself directly. “Stupid question, eh? The missus is just boiling up.”
The kitchen is painted with the smoke-stains of decades through which the wood stove glints in the dusk while the missus, a chunky incurious woman, nods shortly in my direction and planks an extra mug down. We sit and regard each other. Under the table I edge off my joggers and rub stinging feet together. I try to mop up my face with a tissue. I don’t like to mention the car again. It seems to have passed from the farmer’s mind. His wife pushes a plate of brownies across and unexpectedly answers my anxiety. “Car stuck, eh? We get quite a bit of that. You’re the seventh this fortnight.” She munches happily.
Her husband drinks his first mug rapidly and tops it up.
“We’ll take a look at it when you’ve had your tea,” he says. “Drink up.”
I tell them my name and they ask where I’m headed and when I tell them back of Drenchings the word engages the woman’s interest.
“Got family that way,” she says. “Still up there.”
I tell her that once I had too and by the time I have established my identity and we’ve swapped a few local names, she checks my own name again and I realize I’ve given her my father’s. When I re-identify with my grandparents, her whole face lights up with lost girlhood and in seconds she is babbling about mother and Aunt Marie as if they were the coziest of old mates. I can’t believe my luck. It’s a big country but there aren’t many people, not here, not out in the sticks. In black-stump landscape, coincidence is the name of the game, country where farmers travel a hundred miles for provisions or lunch or even a beer and never give it a thought.
My feet have stopped throbbing and oversweetened tea is propping me up. I hesitate then decide to take a dive into candor. “I’m not going back to the old place,” I admit. “Grandmother sold Perjury Plains some years back. Maybe for a look. I don’t know. It all depends on the time I’ve got. I’m after something else. Research.” Is that vague enough? The portmanteau qualities of the word dazzle me. I hope they dazzle others. “I’m heading for a place outside Drenchings. I don’t even know if it’s still there. A little town called Jericho Flats.”
The missus utters a small squeal of recognition.
Jackpot!
She nudges her tea-swilling husband. “You hear that? The Flats? That was Lockyers’ old farm,” she says, swinging back to me. “Well, waddya know? That was my mother’s name, love. Lockyer.” (Are we proxily related?) “She came from over the hills a piece, out past Cockatoo. Moved out to the coast a few years back, just before she died. Said she needed a breath of salt air after all the bulldust. We all do.”
I have passed beyond disbelief in happenchance and am immersed in the spangled irrationality of predoomed occasions. My car stopped for a reason. There’s no incredible coincidence in this, not in this country with figures scattered over thousands of square miles, figures who have hung in there fighting landscape through heroic and dying generations. My body forgets fatigue as I press, delicately, for information. There was a brother, she tells me, her uncle, still living at the old place. She’d ring if only they had a phone. “What is it you’re after exactly?”
I tell her I work for a newspaper library which has asked me to unearth material for a series of articles they plan on the earliest settlers in these parts. Her face has resumed a doubting, faintly suspicious look. I keep stressing the word research. It has an impersonal tone, an academic flavor. It has weight. I assure her that I am not a reporter. “Researcher,” I repeat, smoothing the long vowels over her. Her husband had long since lost interest in his wife’s crackpot relatives and is brewing more tea.
“Fresh lot,” he offers as if the excitement of nascent acquaintance wasn’t taking place.
“Mind you,” the missus warns, “uncle’s getting on a bit. Must be well over seventy by now. We only get to see him a couple of times a year, specially round Christmas when we have a bit of a get-together, see? Stuck out there on his own outside the Flats. We always drop over with a chook, just to cheer the old bugger up. A chook and a bottle of brandy. That’s what he likes. Not that he needs that much cheering, mind. He’s not short of a dollar. He’s sold off most of the place and rolls in and out between the Flats and the pub at Drenchings. He can tell you a mint about the old days. If you miss him out at the house, he’ll be in at the pub. That’s where he’ll be.”
Let us skip one hour. Two. My car is towed back to the farm by this slow-moving husband who, head under the hood, a flashlight propped by the side of the car, performs a minor miracle to the fuel line by sucking on it and spitting out gobfuls of clotted seed and dust. They wave me off in the dark filled with tea and messages for the old bugger, and I drive and drive until I find Drenchings snoozing beside its river junction, unchanged in my absence, its pub languid with evening.
It’s late and the town is still, not even the fading raucousness of closing-time drinkers spilling into the night. From one of the old houses across the road from the pub, a house I still remember, floats a fragment of Victoriana as someone behind that shrunken timber plays an Albéniz tango on guitar, a hesitant searching plucking of molten notes that drift moonwards. I wait, parked, unwilling to enter the hotel until the moment is over, trapped in the rending antithesis of this scrubber township with its deserted main street, closed shops and silent pub and the air vibrating with haunting perfection as notes like tears throb, melt and fade into dust and white air.
Hello, old town. Hello. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.
*
In the penulimate year of wedlock breakdown—I hesitate to call it “marriage”—Seb had taken to jogging and wore that cliché of a T-shirt inscribed New York Paris London Dirranbandi. It was still a novelty then and he met a lot of people that way. “Hey!” they’d yell passing him on River Road or the Botanic Gardens or on the track round the university campus. “Hey! That’s great!”
“It’s a social comment,” he would explain modestly flaunting his chest at late-night barbecues, “on the great Australian loneliness. It’s anti-cringe. It’s a people-meeter.”
(Seb, you were a people-eater. I’m the one. Maybe I should have a shirt printed up. San Diego New York Drenchings. Fazer!)
Why, I ask myself, opening the door of my overnight room, are country pubs so lonely, their rooms such gasping prototypes for dreariness. Stale air wafts in gasps from each self-stuck cupboard drawer. The bed has been made and unused for months. The transom into the hall is jammed. The veranda door opens onto a twelve-foot width of un-painted planking with outcast loungers whose plastic skin is peeling. There’s no joy. There is joy. Believe this. Tw
o opposites combine in my spirit and even as I am oppressed by a decade of such rooms heaving on my shoulders, I am uplifted by the notion of Mr. Gaden Lockyer booking in here when he came into town by buggy on business. Did the old house across the road once rattle to “The Rustle of Spring?”
I lie on my lumpy bed and wish the wall facing me were obliterated by my friendly blow-up.
As I trudge the nextday streets of this township, enter and leave shops, I realize that I am being assessed as an intruder, that I cannot force myself back in time through the blink of a camera shutter in split-second exposure, but I can make use of that elasticity of time. Rubber time.
Why would any seeming stranger come here is the unspoken question paramount on faces that deal with my breakfast eggs, my purchase of film, my tentative requests for directions. The town is contained, is its own center and resents outsiders. But my feet are making time-prints on those of Mr. Lockyer and eventually, eventually, I drive out beyond the sad storefronts and follow one, two, three sets of muddled directions until a twenty-mile branch road of stubborn gravel leads me to the broken gate and worn truckruts of Lockyers’ farm. The little township has long gone.
Uncle, the poor old bugger, is out by the trash heap in a nimbus of flies, a stringy-bark ancient in flannel shirt, old army issue trousers and a stained felt bush hat pulled low against the sun. The moment my feet crunch round the side of the house he looks up and glares.
“Thought it’d be you.”
My heart stops.
“Why?” Smiles won’t work here.
“They were talking at the pub last night. Said you were coming.”
Who said? Who? Bush telegraph is its own miracle.
I nod. He grumbles, “They said you were digging into the family background.” His dimming eyes challenge mine for a moment.
I decide to counter his challenge with skilled lies.
With the pre-programmed approach of an encyclopaedia salesman I side-step his opener by giving my family name. “And not quite,” I say. “‘Digging’ is not the right word. Not family background, local history.” I repeat the phrase. “Your grandfather was a man of importance in these parts. More than that.”
The lies fly easily past my teeth while the old man grunts and pokes at his rubbish fire with a bit of stick. Finally he concedes a fragment of grin.
“You’ve got a cheek,” he says. “What’s it all for, eh? Some paper they said. Bloody nosers. Don’t want no reporters nosing around.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I tell him patiently. “I’m a library assistant who just happens to be working in a newspaper library. There is a difference.” I wait for him to absorb this. As I wait his eyes wander back down the track to my parked car, an unfortunate flashy red. I follow his eyes and bumble on with words that jazz around him with the flies: “… preparing a series of articles … folk who opened up this part of the country … pioneers … Lockyer family’s contribution.” His eyes flicker with something close to disbelief. “And not only your grandfather. He was chosen because he was also a state Member. I’ve several other families to interview round Rockhampton and Mackay. People on cane farms. It’s all aboveboard. No family skeletons. The paper wants to pay them tribute, that’s all. Unsung heroes.”
He grunts, non-committal. “Who you want to know about?”
“Your grandfather, mainly.”
He looks up at me slyly. “Can’t remember much about him,” he says. “Only when I was a nipper. He gave me a bike one Christmas. That’s mainly what I recall. Not much, eh?”
His lack of memory gives him a sense of triumph. The flies from the outback privy are going crazy about us, despite the smoke from the trash heap. I wonder how to suggest going indoors but he solves it for me.
“Better come on up. Get outa this damn sun.”
Flies are busy in the house as well. His mind is still worrying around, still suspicious I can tell, as he sets the tea things down.
“You not writing a book, are you?”
“No. I told you. I’m a research librarian.”
Maybe he’s deaf. Maybe he’s just old. Maybe he’s a picker.
“A what?”
I explain as simply as I can. I repeat my name. I go back to the car, braving the flies, and fetch up a boiled fruitcake his niece has sent which seems to placate him and establish my identity finally, for a note falls out from the tea-cloth the cake is wrapped in and I watch him read it and then put the bit of paper up on a shelf. I decide not to mention the word newspaper again. I hope he’s forgotten it.
“It’s a big project,” I say vaguely. “We’re looking for old photographs, old letters and diaries, shopping lists, anything that might give information about life-styles in those days. We want to store it so that, well, so that historians can make use of it.”
I have decided to omit further reference to the printed word.
“Can’t see the point of it, eh.”
I try looking sweet. I smile a lot. “We’re after the really important things like the time your grandfather was elected to Parliament. The time of that mining boom outside Drenchings. The two big floods late last century. We want to know what your grandfather did for the people of his electorate. That sort of thing.”
“Sugar?” He shoves over a lumpy bowl. “He never did much for us out here that I know about. Them politician fellers are all the same, in it for what they can get out of it. Milk?”
“Thank you,” I say. “This is very kind.”
He despises me for that. “Not kind. You must have forgot. Bush practice, eh.”
“I know,” I say humbly. “I do know. My own folk came from farther out.”
“Heard that,” he says. “Someone said something at the pub. Anyway, me niece wrote, like you saw.”
He regards me with his head on one side like an old rooster.
“So you’re Bonnie’s girl, eh? I knew your mum when she was knee-high to a grasshopper. And later. God, that old Bonnie! Well, she wasn’t that old last I saw her. Could she tickle a pianner! Bon’s girl, turned detective like.” (He expects a laugh for that one. I give it.) “And there was a sister, too, wasn’t there? Bon’s that is. Your grandpa never had no boys. No, don’t tell me. Let me nut it out. She was the older one, wasn’t she? Marcia. No, wait a mo. That’s not it. Marie. It was Marie, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” I say. “My aunt.” He gives me a doggy grin and I build up his goodwill by telling him about the family while he chips in with a question here and there and says, “Jesus Christ, it’s all coming back. It’s all coming back.”
As we tail each other crossing the barriers, things become repetitious. How much is reality, how much fantasy?
“Went courtin your mum,” he confesses with a sideways look, “when she was grown up a bit. But I was too old for her. Guess she never even noticed and then she went off and got herself tied up with some Yank. I lost touch after that. Only saw her folks once in a while. Lovely girl though. And could she play that pianner!”
“Marie was the real pianist,” I insist. “Bonnie took up drums. They started a band. I suppose you know.”
“Course I know,” the old man says testily. “Danced to ’em, haven’t I? Course she played drums but I remember her playing proper stuff, you know, when we had evenings at the hall in Drenchings. “Rustle of Spring.” Funny how I can remember that. But I do. Just like yesterday. I can still see her up on that stage, all the streamers, playing away and looking a real treat in a white dress. Fancy remembering that.”
There’s a tear in that dimming eye.
Other tributaries begin flowing.
Judiciously I steer him towards my grandparents and it isn’t long before I persuade a family album out of him and endure half a rambling hour of strangers with blurred faces while his commentary takes side and backwards turns until, nosing through a loose pile of snapshots, shutter memories, he pushes a yellowed rectangle of cardboard mounting under my nose and says, “Is that what you’re after?”
&
nbsp; Spring and Fall.
“Who’s the little boy?”
“Me. Course it’s me. Unmistakable mug. Grandpa Lockyer and me—oh, taken maybe sixty years back. How’s that, eh?”
“Marvelous!” I tell him, hoping my hungry eyes will not reveal my mania. “Marvelous.”
Mr. Gaden Lockyer is looking very elderly indeed in his double-breasted suit and stiff white collar. The youthful sideways tilt of his mouth has taken a deeper groove but the eyes stare back at me with interest. My pictured host, now mumbling a wedge of his niece’s boiled fruitcake, is in a sailor suit and cap. His legs are encased in the long socks fashionable then. He looks as if he is terrified of the photographer.
“Oh this is wonderful! Really wonderful!” I have ceased to notice the small boy in the sailor suit. “This must have been taken only a few years before he died. Your grandfather, that is. One of the last, I suppose. You don’t have any others, do you?”
The old man makes creaky noises and says something about a box of stuff in the horse shed. “Waste of time keeping all this old stuff.” He tells me he was married not long after my mother went away but his wife and the baby died the next year. “Never bothered after that,” he says. “Didn’t seem worth it, somehow. I was gettin too old.”
I think of another old man in a trailer park who kept nothing. Is this the ultimate acceptance of the dying process, this divesting of all mortal reminders, the momentary futility of our moth-cycle noted?
It is a delicate moment. The box. I hate to press an advantage at the wrong time. I have finished my own wedge of cake and a second cup of tea. I’m fulsome in my thanks but I don’t want to overdo it. The box. He’s still wily. I start to rise in the middle of my gratitude and ask cautiously would he care to join me for dinner in town. I will be there for one more night, I tell him. He doesn’t appear to understand my invitation. Eating out? It’s a city concept beyond his backwoods life-span. I try again, suggesting he join me in the hotel dining room for tea and his eyes blink their understanding and he begins a frightful aged snigger of embarrassment.
