Stilled by the bubble of the creek. Its insistent coolness. You shut your eyes as the talking water soothes you down; you’ll get your book back, you’ll find it, she’s not so smart.
You jerk up.
Smoke. On the breeze.
Fire.
With a pounding heart you rush back.
She has stoked up the incinerator in its rusty metal drum, is ripping apart your diary’s spine and feeding great chunks of it to the flames as methodically as she feeds clothes to the washing machine.
Noooooooooooo!
Too late. She flings the last chunk of your words into the furnace and turns, and looks at you, saying nothing but everything in her face. She has won. She is burning them because she never wants your father to find the meticulous chronicle of her unkindness. And you know that if you tell him about her cruelty, she will tell him about Central Station.
So. Caught.
Magnificently.
You leap on Peddly, barefoot, the sharp ridges on the pedals press hard into your bare feet but you need that, need the pain to blot everything else out and you spin and ride away from her, faster and faster, away from the claustrophobia; the enormous swamping of hate.
You won’t be hurrying back. Teaching them, teaching her.
Forcing them to care. To notice. Finally, please.
By absence. Your withholding.
Lesson 49
Does ever any man or woman remember the feeling of being ‘whipped’ – as a child – the fierce anger, the insupportable ignominy, the longing for revenge?
Gulping your shock, pushing your bike down dirt roads, further and further away from her, down fire trails scarcely used and barely noticing what you’re doing, where you’re going. Wiping away furious tears as you pedal by a tall wire fence you’ve barely noticed in the past, an anonymous, official-looking barrier hiding away some old mine you’ve never given a second thought to; but stopping, this time, skidding in the dirt.
Its double gate is open. The sturdy chain always locking it hangs limp.
‘B.M.C.’ declares a sign on the gate: the Something Mining Company. Of course. So what.
‘No Trespassers. No Shooters.’
Right. But you’re not a trespasser, you’re an observer; you’re not going to steal or destroy anything. It’s just that in all your life this gate has never been ajar and you can’t not do this. You feel the old sizzle of curiosity revving up. A mine of your own, an enormous playground to colonise, hide away in, to fall down a shaft and be rescued by your father, after several days in an agony of unknowing; his arms in a furious embrace of relief and love and torment.
Imagine her face at that.
Maybe there’s a rusty tower you can climb, a queen surveying the roof of her world; maybe a metal cage that sinks to the hot, drippy bowels of the earth; an abandoned office with a typewriter and forgotten safe. Mine records in meticulous ink, faded photographs, mysterious pulleys and rail tracks. Who knows what’s in there. A washroom containing lockers with forgotten treasures – penknives and hard hats, tin cribs and cap lamps. You once snuck near the washroom of your father’s mine and caught the men with their shirts hanging off their waists as they prepared to slough away the black dust from the bowels of the earth; the torsos and taut flesh, so different to the men of the city, so different to Mr Cooper with his softness, round shoulders, paleness, city sweat. You are addicted to the unknown, love not knowing what to expect.
No Trespassers. No Shooters.
You are neither. You are a lookaholic.
You push your bike through the gate.
Lesson 50
The wicked world without
A narrow dirt road. Forbidding trees. Trunks leaning from high banks. Not a mine road, you know that almost instantly, and not a welcome place. You do not turn back. Glints of light flash through the trees. You feel your back prickling up: go away it all seems to be saying as you climb higher, higher, and start to pant, standing up on the pedals of your bike and pushing hard as the spikes dig spitefully into your feet. The twisted bark of the trees spirals as if a furious wind has whipped it but then at the top it all clears, magically, into an exhilarating table top and you smile in wonder: a cap of cleared land awaits.
But not a mine at all.
A house.
A colonial mansion. Honey sandstone. You never knew it existed; that your dusty, blackened valley could conceal something so beautiful. Two storeyed, a verandah like a collar around it. Tall windows are blank or shut off by corrugated iron like a blindfold over a face, daylight floods from the front door to the back.
You fling your bike down a ditch. Creep forward on high alert; someone might be in it, might react. No shooters, but they could have a gun themselves, you never know in these parts. As you approach, the thick shrill of cicadas – their deafening chorus – abruptly stops, as crisp as an orchestra. It’s as if the whole world is watching, listening, waiting. A trickle of sweat rolls down your stomach. The tin roof cracks in the heat, from somewhere a door bangs shut, you jump; the breeze, just that. By the front door is a brass nameplate mottled by age and neglect. Woondala.
The far left corner, ground level: a shadow of movement through shredded lace curtains.
Someone inside. Right. You lick your lips. Catch sight of an old car parked to the side of the house. A Volvo, playful and low and nothing like the boxy ones now, corroding with rust and as faded as the building. You can’t go back. You have to investigate. You hope the old wooden floorboards on the verandah won’t creak and with a pounding heart inch to the window as silently as an Aboriginal tracker. The lace of the curtains is fragile, feminine, blackened and hanging in strips.
A man.
His back to you.
He seems to be working but you can’t make it out. Leaning over a bench that runs almost the length of the room, an industrial high table. On it, resting against the wall, is a line of objects with the precision of a museum arrangement: shells as big as fans, plaster cornices, photos in tarnished silver frames, dried seed pods, teapot fragments, old plates as wide as clocks. You look and look. You have blundered into a secret place. A magpie’s lair of loveliness.
You cannot move, transfixed.
The man is bending over his bench with the concentration of a monk at an illuminated manuscript. He is left-handed. You always notice this and trust it; you also are left-handed, close friends always seem to be. His hand curves awkwardly around a pen with such complete absorption that to disturb it would feel like violence; it curves just as yours does, as if you’ve never properly learnt how to do it. He is dressed like no man you have ever seen, there is something English about it, careful, a traveller perhaps, a collector of some sort. You have no idea what he is doing except that it is something completely consuming and a great warmth spreads through you, a dipping in your belly: you want all of it, all – his desk, house, stillness, car, work, this entire secret place. So close! A world utterly alien in terms of everything in your life. And you were expecting corrugated sheds and conveyor belts; coarse language, heavy work boots.
There is a great silence – the silence of creativity, of being lost in a world that’s not physically around you. He never looks up. He wiggles his finger in his ear, runs his hand through a flop of fringe, hitches up his belt; trying to make something work and frustrated with it but not giving up. He never looks around, trusts this place. No one will disturb it. You bet he has no idea his gate is open, it’s an oversight that won’t be repeated, you’ll never get inside here again and don’t know what to do with the gift of it. All you can see is his back, the grace in it, and all you can feel is something unfurling within you as you look, and look.
You have fallen for a flop of hair and the curve of a back.
How can that be? So fast, just a back, a hand through a fringe, irrational and senseless but you’re always doing this; with boys on a bus or behind the counter of a milk bar or in a school art room. All it takes is the nape of a neck, the shyness in a glance, a curve
in a lip and you’re gone, instantly. The mere idea of them.
And now this.
You turn away, your back against the wall, the man inside oblivious. So, one of the ones you’ve fallen for and they’re always the men you can never talk smoothly to, of course. You could never approach him now; your voice would be stopped up and your face held hostage by a furious blush and a tongue like felt in your mouth. You should go. You should leave this place and never come back.
Can’t.
Lesson 51
It is the women who poke about with undefended farthing candles in the choke-damp passages of this dangerous world
He walks to the window – you flick away. Fingers curl around the sill; he’s gazing out. Clean nails, blunt, not the hands of this land.
His difference.
Your back pressing into the sandstone next to him, your roaring heart.
You glance down in panic at your dirt-laden overalls and grubby shirt; you look like a gypsy child, a bush scamp. His footsteps walk away, returning to his bench. You exhale. You must go now, quick, but there’s too much to absorb, work out. And there’s stubbornness here too, a need to stay out until the worry’s well and truly festering back home. Something dangerous and wilful is colouring this: the desire to alarm. You run across the yard and climb a tree that shelters you in its crook like a great, curving hand, and wait.
For goodness knows what.
Reading his land. The fallen branches bleached to the colour of bone in the paddocks. The barely there circular driveway – a past pretension. Fences drooping like a Dali painting, keeping nothing out. Or in. The scrub winning as it encroaches; the greedy lantana, the bush tomatoes. This place hasn’t hosted humans for a very long time. He doesn’t understand it, what will happen soon, the triumphant erasure of all of it. He’s not a bushy, it’s in everything about him – the curve of his hand around his pen and the sound of his footsteps and his clothes – he wouldn’t be able to read this place and protect it. Like you can.
He comes out. Walking differently to any man you’ve ever known, not quite right, as if his hips are too swivelly and his feet are compensating, especially the right. It doesn’t detract, it intrigues; you want to help him. God knows what’s next. This afternoon already feels tattooed upon your life.
He holds a mug of something hot. Runs his hand through his hair; he’s buggered, deserves this break. He sits on the top verandah step cradling his mug in both hands, squinting at … what? The stretch of sky, a kookaburra staring straight at him, the land. He’s completely relaxed in it; the chuff of ownership. A dog pads out and shakes its head as if it has just emerged from sleep. A golden retriever but the colour of amber. It settles close. The man’s hand reaches out without looking and plays with its ear with the absent-minded fondness your dad used to have with your own earlobe, long ago, as he was driving. The dog shuffles closer and rests its nose on his thigh in perfect peace. The man leans his head against the verandah post and shuts his eyes, basking in the repairing light.
Then glances at his watch. Stands abruptly. Flings away the remains of his tea in a whip of gold. Strides inside.
You start. He might be driving off, locking the gate. You can’t be trapped overnight – can’t get over that fence and God knows how many days, weeks, months he’ll be gone from this place. Before you’re out of the suddenly difficult tree he’s slamming down his study window and hurrying from the house with his dog at his heels and jumping in the car and driving off, fast.
You slice your leg as you slither down the bark, feel the hot wet of blood, barely notice. You have to get out of here. You grab your bike and streak after him, pedalling furiously, stumbling over rocks. Damn. A puncture. Fling Peddly aside, and sprint.
He’s gone by the time you get to the entrance. The thick chain is now padlocking the double gate. A gap of just ten centimetres. You can’t, can’t squeeze through. And mean little triangles of wire are too tiny to get your bare feet into, they slice into your soles, it’s impossible. The fence is three times your height.
You’re stuck.
The only one here.
No one knows where you are.
Trapped with a broken bike and a house full of ghosts.
For goodness knows how long.
You dive into the fence in frustration with your hands clenched, it catches your weight and mocks you with its bounce. It’s new wire, it’s not letting you out.
Lesson 52
We must help ourselves
The late-afternoon air is keen with coming rain. Lost people die in this valley. You will have to find shelter, water, warmth.
You return to Woondala, your best bet. A huge, spreading pine grows to the side of it and the wind whistles strangely through its needles as if it is telling you to be gone, this place is not for humans, the rest have been pushed out in the dropping light. The house is neglected except for the corner you found him in: he’s obviously working his way through the rooms, waking it up, but it’s an enormous task.
The kitchen has been fixed to a serviceable level. Just. A kettle on a portable gas hob rests by a wide, whitewashed, colonial hearth. A bathroom has rusty-coloured water from its tap – water, thank God – and a toilet that flushes when a broken chain is yanked. A box of tissues is beside it. A bedroom has a mattress on the floor and a single pillow with the indent of a head in it and not much else. His workroom is locked, the battered iron knob of its door won’t budge.
The only thing locked in this place.
You thread through other rooms, the thick stone outer walls like a blanket around you. The house has the feeling of being abandoned in great haste, as if news of a coming pestilence has forced everyone to flee in a single afternoon. There are scatterings of past lives, generations of them – convicts, fragrant mistresses, Edwardian children, Aboriginal cooks, ghosts.
Various walls are covered with newspapers from the last century and pages from the Bulletin magazine, and in one room sheets of old bush poetry, at head height by a bed: Percy Russell, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Dora Wilcox. Thick wide plates crazed with age from some grandness long ago line the pantry, spotted silver spoons and forks in rusty old billy cans are collected on a bench along with encrusted black cooking pots. A tarnished silver candelabra is lonely in the grate of a fireplace. A grand piano awaits in what looks like the remains of a drawing room; keys are missing and possum droppings are scattered on its lid and a stool is drawn and quartered with its horsehair matting tumbling out. A line of five attached theatre chairs watch – God knows what – in an incongruous row. A hessian chaise longue broods in a corner, pining for another chance. Leather-bound books are stacked upstairs by the frames of iron bed heads. Dropped cigars, whisky bottles, stirrups, buttons, empty cotton reels, mustard jars, coins – they all litter rooms gloomed down by corrugated-iron sheets over windows, the insistent light of afternoon straining through in precise pinpoints.
That light feels like it will eventually triumph in this house, it will one day reach into every window and corner and through the roof until only the strong outer walls will be left. Some rooms, on the top floor, already ring with air and emptiness.
And waiting.
You could do so much with this place. With all your bush knowledge, all the watching over the years, everything your father has taught. You spin – a smile filling you up – imagining where you’d start.
Lesson 53
A solid, useful, available happiness
Now you’re standing tall in the attic with its windows punched out to the sky, surveying the vastness around you. This is big sky land. What a find, what a jewel, secure in its corporate disguise as a disused mine. Clever, that. Beside the house is a small, muddy dam the colour of milky tea that looks perfect for a dip on a stinker of a day and rocks like sentinels litter the hills and you stare at the stately migration of clouds across this tall ceiling of blue and the hum of the wind crawls into your skin and always, somewhere, are birds, their sound cramming the air – bellbirds, wh
ip birds, currawongs, kookaburras.
Kookaburras!
Which means that somewhere, soon, is rain. You look to the south, a chill is already staining the sky. A southerly buster is hurrying upon you, ready to crack the back of the heat. You wrap your arms around your thinness and retreat, alone and not welcome in this place.
Need distraction. Something that eats up the wait. You return to a room upstairs of stacked books, flick through them. Old farming manuals, geology guides, a book of sheep breeding, a volume of Shakespeare, For the Term of His Natural Life and some type of manual for women, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women.
The thick card cover falls away in your hand and you yelp – you’ve broken it. 1858, London, it says on the brittle first page that is spotted with the circular droppings of insects. Hurst and Blackett, Great Marlborough Street, London.
Great. Impossible to replace, and probably worth buckets.
You begin to read. The reassuring voice hooks you like a hand around your neck, drawing you in. You smile and settle on your belly, caught.
Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.
Yes of course. It’s the only power you’ve got, the only way to be noticed in this life.
In this book many women will find simply the expression of what they have themselves, consciously or unconsciously, often times thought; and the more deeply, perhaps, because it has never come to the surface in words or writing.
Who was this woman? You flick through the book, the front, the back. It doesn’t say. Anywhere. All you’ve got to go on is the warm, knowing tone of her voice. It feels like she’s been married for decades and had a dozen kids; there’s a richness of living in her words; a certainty you’ve rarely known.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 28
