by Steven Lang
When Andy emerged he was once again his affable self, coming over to chat.
‘Whatcha up to?’ he said, taking out his tobacco.
‘Thought I’d give Jess a call, see how she’s going. How ’bout you?’
‘It’s my mum,’Andy said,‘her sister, my auntie, she’s real sick, see, cancer. I might have to go up there, Canberra.’
‘Sorry to hear that, I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘S’all right.’As if nothing at all had happened, as if he hadn’t just told Kelvin to fuck off. ‘How’re you holding up? You seen Jim-boy?’
‘Have you? He’s a fucking mess.’
Andy raised his eyes. ‘How come?’
The strange thing was that Kelvin, being skilled in mendacity himself, could tell Andy was lying. He might well have an aunt who was dying of cancer but Kelvin knew, as sure as shit, that wasn’t the issue this afternoon. He told him what he’d seen at Jim’s, but Andy was unconcerned.
‘He’s no loss,’ was all he said, lighting his smoke. ‘But you, Kelvin, you’ve not lost your nerve, have you? You’re not calling up your girl to tell her what you’ve done, are you?’
This, in the midday sun, on the hill overlooking the valley with the Coalwater meandering across its sandy bed. Kelvin just looked at him. Andy was under the impression that he still held him in some sway. He was not aware that there had been a shift in the order, and indeed, now he thought about it, Kelvin was not keen for Andy to know about that, not yet, any alteration in status that might have taken place being too small, too subtle for analysis.
‘Right,’ Andy said, ‘that’s good,’ though Kelvin hadn’t spoken. ‘The waiting’s the problem, see, the waiting’s what gets everyone at a time like this.’
Kelvin thought to say, ‘And you’d know about that,’ but didn’t.
Andy was still talking. ‘I guess we’ll be seeing you tonight then.’
‘How come?’
‘Where you been? It’s Martin’s thirtieth. He’s an old man now,’ laughing. ‘He’s having a party at the main house, you need to be there.’
‘I’ll try to make it, I’ve got to go over and see Carl. About work.’ Still explaining himself, though.
‘How’s that going?’ Andy was suddenly solicitous, asking about Carl as if he were an old friend. There was nothing of interest to say, though, or anything there might have been, like the way Carl had reacted when the Telecom man came, he wasn’t about to tell Andy.
That was the thing about secrets.They bred. Someone keeps one, someone else keeps another, and suddenly there’s no end to the things.
It was Jessica who picked up the phone. Just like that. Her voice so immediate and present while he was in the phone box, watching the panel van make the tight turn onto the bridge at the bottom of the hill below him, feeding coins into the machine so he could tell her he missed her.
She was full of questions: How was Suzy? What was he doing in Coalwater at this time of day? Why wasn’t he working? Had he watered the pot plants? Had he told Carl he wasn’t working?
‘I can’t believe you just didn’t turn up this morning. You don’t think that might be a tiny bit inconvenient? That Carl might have had some plans? You don’t think it might be a bit irresponsible?’ Going on about it.
‘How’s Sydney?’ he asked, not knowing quite what it was he’d wanted from this phone call, only that it hadn’t been this.
She told him.The conference was due to start the next day. She was staying with Claire and her new man, a solicitor, it was great to see them, they’d been out to dinner both nights, and to a film, the Art Gallery. ‘They eat out all the time, it’s my sister’s kind of thing, she always hated cooking, she’s the only person I know who could burn a boiled egg. They have this amazing house right under the Bridge …’ Talking, talking, filling in the electronic space between them with words.
He thought she sounded like the woman in the photographs on the fridge.
She said everything except, ‘I miss you too, I think about you every minute.’
She didn’t say anything like that. And desperate though he was, Kelvin wasn’t going to beg. He watched the money go into the machine until all the change was gone and then said goodbye over the top of the beeps.
The day had started well but it wasn’t getting any better. At least he still had the dog.
twenty-one
Andy drove back to the Farm in a cold fury, slewing the panel van out on the corners, lurching over the culverts and the ruts, driving as if there were no possibility of meeting anyone coming the other way. He’d only called McMahon because it was essential that he had at least mentioned the possible existence of a radical environmental cell before any news broke. Just to let him know he was on the case.
And then the bastard picks up the phone and says in his oh-so-precious accent, ‘Hello Milo, I was hoping you would call,’ as if he was some refined Brit sitting in a high-backed chair smoking a pipe instead of a tight-arsehole ex-cop in a crappy office in Canberra. He wasn’t the least bit interested in anything Andy had to say. He listened, but that was all. McMahon had his own bit of news.
Andy had lived in places where a single wrong word, a glance in the wrong direction, could have killed him. And not only for an hour or a day, for weeks on end. The job in Sydney had been like that. It had taken six months to work his way in, sitting in shitty home units in Punchbowl watching daytime TV, smoking dope and drinking rum and coke with a mob of psychopaths. It could take that long to build up something like the trust needed in order to do the cunts in. Not for the faint-hearted.
It wasn’t his fault that particular job went wrong. He’d done his bit. He was the one who had put himself on the line. He was the one living right there with them. No room for sloppiness in his role. All they’d had to do was turn up at the right time and they couldn’t even manage that. So what happens? There’s an enquiry and he gets the blame, he gets sent to a place where no one even asks your name, where they don’t give a shit what your story is. A place where you only have to have long hair and smoke dope and play a bit of guitar to be treated like a long-lost brother. The sort of thing he could do standing on his head.The sort of place where nothing is going to happen in a million years. Which is not to say he hadn’t been taken in himself for a while, all the talk about New Societies, all those books, the music, the pretty women with their refreshing ideas about sex. As if there really was something extraordinary happening down on the Farm. It took even him a bit of time to figure out it was just a mob of middle-class kids smoking dope.
He pulled over at the top of the hill, took out his little tin and laid a bed of tobacco on a cigarette paper, then sprinkled some powdered heads along the top. That was the thing about dope, most people used it to get out of it, they had a smoke and they were gone. Andy used it to see clearly; when he took a smoke the fog dissolved and what was important was revealed. Which was what he required right then. He sat behind the wheel looking out over Rosehill, the land all carved up for pines.
Several weeks ago, in a routine call, he’d given McMahon a list of names of everyone and anyone who could possibly be of interest. As you do. Then settled back to see out the summer with the hippies, watching, listening, playing a bit of music. Not with any hope but because it was his job. And this wasn’t to say they were all wankers. Some of them were all right. Martin, for example, was okay, as was his wife. His wife was definitely all right. But they had no idea what was going on, Martin was too involved in his own little power games. A couple of times Andy had even hinted at the truth, because he liked the man, he’d as near as told him that there were larger forces at work, powerful energies that were not interested in the fate of individuals or how they might want to live their lives. But he wasn’t listening. No one was. They had their own little dream and nothing was going to interfere with it. Well things were about to change. All this talk of love. Martin couldn’t even see how much the locals despised them. All Andy had done was arrange for the hippie
s to do what they’d been talking about themselves, that was the beauty of his plan. If there was a comeback then that was the price you paid for saying things you didn’t mean, for living in a dream world.
So he drove into town and called McMahon and told him he thought he was onto something, that he’d heard a rumour about a group of eco-terrorists planning something out in the forests, he didn’t know what. But the bastard wasn’t interested.
‘Now, Milo,’ he said. ‘This is all very well, but we want you to keep your head down for a while. The thing is we went through that list you gave us and it looks like something might have come up. You might recall you mentioned a Vietnam veteran who lives nearby, an American?’
Andy had to think for a moment before he figured out who McMahon was talking about.
‘We ran some checks on him.There was a Tadeuzs who fought in Vietnam. But he’s dead, or at least we think he is; missing anyway. Now your American could be him. But he also could be someone else.We sent a man in to visit, take some photos – ’
‘You sent a man in without talking to me?’
‘I know, I know, but then we couldn’t really, could we? You weren’t in contact, and you weren’t calling us very often either …’
And right then, when he’s just about exploding with this news, that they sent some bastard into his ground without letting him know, against all their own protocols, Kelvin comes tapping on the window of the phone box. He was barely able to contain himself.When he was able to get back to the phone McMahon said they’d sent the photos to the US by wire and now the Americans were interested too. What McMahon said was they were ‘wetting themselves’.
‘So you see,’ he said, ‘we might just have a little coupe on our hands.What we want you to do is sit tight. Stay in contact. At least once a day, doesn’t matter what time of day or night. For heaven’s sake keep low. Don’t worry about the hippies right now. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.’
‘But who is he?’
‘We don’t know. They’re not telling us, of course, but we think he might be something to do with the underground from the sixties.The thing is we’d like to sort this out ourselves, we don’t want a bunch of Yanks running around, do we?’
The thing is. That’s what McMahon always says. The thing is, Andy thought, drawing the smoke into his lungs and holding it there, looking out over the rough-ploughed hills of Rosehill, The thing is he’s just been party to the destruction of a million dollars worth of equipment on four different logging sites and he isn’t ready for a whole lot of operatives running around the joint. He’d been sitting down in his dark little tent worrying about his prospects and there’d been this fucking American just over the hill the whole time.
And then there was Kelvin.
Andy was talking to McMahon and looking out the window at him leaning on the car and he thought, Can I use him? He put the phone down and went over to talk to him and he was still thinking it. But he kept quiet. Now, as he clamped the roach into the little clip he had hanging around his neck on a leather thong, feeling the smoke work in his brain, he was glad he had because another thought was coming to him.What if the bastard’s already involved? What if he knows who Carl is? He’s out there staying with him. What if Jessica knows too? Wasn’t she involved with Carl before? Now she’s involved with Kelvin.
What did he know about Kelvin? What if it was him, Andy, that’d been set up? Best to do what he was told for the moment, best to sit tight.
twenty-two
The difficulty for Carl was that he had nowhere else to go. He had come to this country and made of himself another person, again; not as easy as it sounds, not just in a practical sense – the practical details were perhaps the easiest to achieve – but also in a deeply emotional way. In this place he had allowed himself to do something different. He’d bought land, bred cows, built fences, fixed up a dam, a pump, an old house, cleared a bit of forest.All the time keeping an eye on the way out. There was an abandoned fire trail in the north-west corner and he’d made it his business to see it was always passable in the Toyota. And if he had reason to believe they were watching that route then he always had the horse, which had no necessity for trails at all. It was surprising how little a man needed in order to survive when put to it, or when the will was there. Although, equally, he had, on a number of occasions, observed how surprisingly little was required to defeat most people: a couple of days of hardship, of rain and cold without adequate food, and ninety percent of the human race is ready to roll over and die. At least in the west. And while he couldn’t be counted in that number, neither, now the time had come, was he prepared to leave. He had made attachments. He had gained possessions and, in the way possessions do, they’d come to own him.
It was also quite possible there was no danger, but that wasn’t the way it felt. According to everything he knew he should be gone.Yet he stayed.
He drove to Bega like any normal man and bought three galvanised steel gates, hinges and chains, a couple of blocks of salt-lick and tags for the calves, supplies for the house, coffee, sugar, flour, beer. It was the cattle, as much as anything, that held him. As a boy, learning to ride, to herd, to nut out a steer, to use a rope, they’d been no more than beasts, difficult ugly obstacles resistant to his will. Here, on his own farm, he’d found something out. The cattle were it. When the cattle did well, so did everything else. The whole business revolved around them, not him. That they were the ones going to end up on the table did not in any way alter this central fact: from the moment of conception until the moment of exchange in a sale yard in Bega his role was to anticipate their every need. It wasn’t about money, or if it was, then only marginally; money was of the least importance in the process. It was about earth and water and sunlight, about the animals themselves, who were not stupid, were simply engaged in a different process to humans, but one which touched intimately with their lives. It was about being a man who could, given enough land, work it so that it provided for his needs. The most ancient of arrangements. He’d gone around the world running from his family, as much as from anything he’d ever done, and in the end he’d come back to where he came from. It was something he’d hoped Kelvin might come to understand.
The first time he had had to run was in 1967. It had begun with guiding draft dodgers into Canada, through the Glacier-Waterton National Park; hiking the high trails with young farm boys from Iowa.
No, it had begun with Cody.
Cody was working in a coffee shop in the rough part of Missoula, a venue favoured by students. He worked behind the counter, making the coffee, but he was really the star attraction. A former arts student who had dropped out because he claimed that literature was too important a thing to be left in the hands of academics. ‘A book,’ he said, and this was the way he spoke, ‘a book is a sacred thing.You can’t be told when to read one, they come to you when you need them. By tearing them apart, what they call analysis, you kill the magic in them as surely as you would a man.’
Cody had been organising poetry nights once a week throughout that long winter and Carl, the shy one, with his French novels under his arm, had taken to attending, sitting in the corner by himself. Cody singled him out. He came over to wipe the table and took the book out of Carl’s hand, holding it up like it was a scroll from the Upanishads. ‘Now this,’ he announced. ‘This is special.’ Saying the name in French so that Carl didn’t even know what it was, La Nausée. ‘Have you read his other work? What’s your name? I’ve seen you sitting here.’ All his secret desires fulfilled in one embarrassing moment. ‘What are you studying? Engineering! You’re kidding, you sure you’re in the right faculty?’ Cody, the son of East Coast professionals who’d been obliged to move to Montana because his father was something in mining, it was never specified what, something high up. His mother educated at Wellesley; Cody, the sickly child, the bookish boy, grown tall and skinny and handsome, magnetic, managing to make of his difference an attribute.
He took Carl back to his apartment, a fr
eezing loft in a building near the rail yards that had once been some sort of bond store, only half converted to a living space, talking all the way along the street and up the open wooden stairs, always talking. ‘Have you read Yeats? You have to read Yeats, and Eliot, of course. People say he’s passé but he’s not, he’s talking about what can’t be spoken of and poetry is the only language which is available to us to do that.’
Barbara coming with them, curling up on the bed silently, the standard lamp next to it throwing down its pool of light and giving the impression, from a distance, that she occupied a room by herself.
Barbara.
She, as much as anything, had attracted him to the cafe. The student fashion was for clothes of no particular style, a jumble, a mixture, a distrust of fashion itself. Amongst this Barbara was always immaculate, favouring white boots and short skirts, her straight blonde hair framing a doll-like face. But more individual than her physical appearance had been an aura of self-containment, some aspect of untouchability that drew him to her as directly as the opposite pole of a magnet. Cody’s girl.
‘I should go,’ he said.
Cody following his eyes.
‘Because of her? Don’t worry about her. You’re all right aren’t you?’ Raising his voice. Even the simplest act of speech was, for him, a performance, ‘She likes literary talk. Hey! Isn’t Carl a find? Who knows what lurks in the hearts of engineers.’ Switching back and forth between them. ‘You’ve found a home here. Barb likes you already. I can tell. You’re her type,’ pulling down books from his makeshift shelves, only in his early twenties but already having shelves and shelves of them. ‘Just don’t get any ideas, don’t be confused by those long legs, by her being in my bed.’ Pinning Carl with his eyes. ‘I’ve seen the way you look at her, but don’t be mistaken, whatever else Barb believes in it isn’t free love. She won’t even come across for me. Look at her, sweet as honey, lying there.’
